url stringlengths 19 730 | title stringlengths 3 700 | text stringlengths 0 130k |
|---|---|---|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ysaires_Restituyo | Ysaires Restituyo | Ysaires Restituyo is a female beach volleyball player from Dominican Republic, who played in the NORCECA Beach Volleyball Circuit 2007 with Cinthia Piñeiro, 2008, with Ingrid Carmona and 2009 with Ana Ligia Fabian; at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace | David Foster Wallace | David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and professor who published novels, short stories, and essays. He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time magazine named one of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. In 2008, David Ulin wrote for the Los Angeles Times that Wallace was "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Wallace grew up in Illinois. He graduated from Amherst College and the University of Arizona. His honors thesis at Amherst was adapted into his debut novel The Broom of the System (1987). In his writing, Wallace intentionally avoided tropes of postmodern art such as irony or forms of metafiction, saying in 1990 that they were "agents of a great despair and stasis" in contemporary American culture. Infinite Jest, his second novel, is known for its unconventional narrative structure and extensive use of endnotes.
Wallace published three short story collections: Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion: Stories (2004). His short stories and essays were published in outlets like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone magazines, and three collections of his essays were published as books: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005) and Both Flesh and Not (2012). Wallace also taught English and creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College.
In 2008, after struggling with depression for many years, Wallace died by suicide at age 46. His unfinished novel The Pale King was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
== Early life and education ==
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to Sally Jean Wallace (née Foster) and James Donald Wallace. The family moved to Champaign–Urbana, Illinois, where he was raised along with his younger sister, Amy Wallace-Havens. His father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His mother was an English professor at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, which recognized her work with a "Professor of the Year" award in 1996. From fourth grade, Wallace lived with his family in Urbana, where he attended Yankee Ridge Elementary School, Brookens Junior High School and Urbana High School.
As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He wrote about this period in the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", originally published in Harper's Magazine as "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes". Although his parents were atheists, Wallace twice attempted to join the Catholic Church, but "flunk[ed] the period of inquiry". He later attended a Mennonite church.
Wallace attended Amherst College, his father's alma mater, where he majored in English and philosophy and graduated summa cum laude in 1985. Among other extracurricular activities, he participated in glee club; his sister recalls that he "had a lovely singing voice". In studying philosophy, Wallace pursued modal logic and mathematics, and presented in 1985 a senior thesis in philosophy and modal logic that was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize and posthumously published as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (2010).
Wallace adapted his honors thesis in English as the manuscript of his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and committed to being a writer. He told David Lipsky: "Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent." Wallace completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona in 1987. He moved back to Massachusetts to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but soon left the program.
== Work ==
=== Career ===
The Broom of the System (1987) garnered national attention and critical praise. In The New York Times, Caryn James called it a "manic, human, flawed extravaganza ... emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V., [and] John Irving's World According to Garp".
In 1991, Wallace began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston. The next year, at the suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996.
In 1997, Wallace received a MacArthur Fellowship. He also received the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, awarded by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which had been published in the magazine.
In 2002, Wallace moved to Claremont, California, to become the first Roy E. Disney-endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He taught one or two undergraduate courses per semester and focused on writing.
Wallace delivered the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. The speech was published as a book, This Is Water, in 2009. In May 2013, parts of the speech were used in a popular online video, also titled "This Is Water".
Bonnie Nadell was Wallace's literary agent during his entire career. Michael Pietsch was his editor on Infinite Jest.
Wallace died in 2008. In March 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced that it would publish the manuscript of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, that Wallace had been working on before his death. Pietsch pieced the novel together from pages and notes Wallace left behind. Several excerpts were published in The New Yorker and other magazines. The Pale King was published on April 15, 2011, and received generally positive reviews. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that The Pale King "showcases [Wallace's] embrace of discontinuity; his fascination with both the meta and the microscopic, postmodern pyrotechnics and old-fashioned storytelling; and his ongoing interest in contemporary America's obsession with self-gratification and entertainment." The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Throughout his career, Wallace published short fiction in periodicals such as The New Yorker, GQ, Harper's Magazine, Playboy, The Paris Review, Mid-American Review, Conjunctions, Esquire, Open City, Puerto del Sol, and Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.
=== Themes and styles ===
Wallace wanted to progress beyond the irony and metafiction associated with postmodernism and explore a post-postmodern or metamodern style. In the essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (written 1990, published 1993), he proposed that television has an ironic influence on fiction, and urged literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness:
I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems.
Wallace used many forms of irony, but tended to focus on individual persons' continued longing for earnest, unself-conscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society.
Wallace's fiction combines narrative modes and authorial voices that incorporate jargon and invented vocabulary, such as self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long, multi-clause sentences, and an extensive use of explanatory endnotes and footnotes, as in Infinite Jest and the story "Octet" (collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), and most of his non-fiction after 1996. In a 1997 interview on Charlie Rose, Wallace said that the notes were to disrupt the linear narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the narrative structure, and that he could have jumbled the sentences "but then no one would read it". Much of Wallace's writing contains philosophical and mathematical ideas and references.
D. T. Max has described Wallace's work as an "unusual mixture of the cerebral and the hot-blooded", often featuring multiple protagonists and spanning different locations in a single work. His writing comments on the fragmentation of thought, the relationship between happiness and boredom, and the psychological tension between the beauty and hideousness of the human body. According to Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being", and he said he wanted to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help the reader "become less alone inside". In his Kenyon College commencement address (later published as This Is Water), Wallace described the human condition as daily crises and chronic disillusionment and warned against succumbing to solipsism, invoking the existential values of compassion and mindfulness:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. ... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. ... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.
=== Nonfiction ===
Wallace covered Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign and the September 11 attacks for Rolling Stone; cruise ships (in what became the title essay of his first nonfiction book), state fairs, and tornadoes for Harper's Magazine; the US Open tournament for Tennis magazine; Roger Federer for The New York Times; the director David Lynch and the pornography industry for Première magazine; the tennis player Michael Joyce for Esquire; the movie-special-effects industry for Waterstone's magazine; conservative talk radio host John Ziegler for The Atlantic; and a Maine lobster festival for Gourmet magazine. He also reviewed books in several genres for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, which commemorated the magazine's 150th anniversary, Wallace was among the authors, artists, politicians and others who wrote short pieces on "the future of the American idea".
These and other essays appear in three collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster and the posthumous Both Flesh and Not, the last of which contains some of Wallace's earliest work, including his first published essay, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young". Wallace's tennis writing was compiled into a volume titled String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis, published in 2016.
Some writers have found parts of Wallace's nonfiction implausible. Jonathan Franzen has said that he believes Wallace made up dialogue and incidents: "those things didn't actually happen". Of the essays "Shipping Out" and "Ticket to the Fair", John Cook has remarked that in Wallace's nonfiction: Wallace encounters pitch-perfect characters who speak comedically crystalline lines and place him in hilariously absurd situations...I used both stories [when teaching journalism] as examples of the inescapable temptation to shave, embellish, and invent narratives.
== Personal life ==
Wallace struggled with depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicidal ideation, and was repeatedly hospitalized for psychiatric care. In 2008, his father said that Wallace had suffered from major depressive disorder for more than 20 years, and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. In 1989, Wallace spent four weeks at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institute in Belmont, Massachusetts, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, where he completed a drug and alcohol detoxification program; he later said his time there changed his life.
In the early 1990s, Wallace dated writer Mary Karr. In 2012, Karr described his earlier behavior toward her as obsessive and volatile, alleging that he once threw a coffee table at her and once physically forced her out of a car, leaving her to walk home. In 2018, Karr said that the account of Wallace's alleged abuse in D.T. Max's biography of him was "about 2% of what happened"; she claimed that Wallace had kicked her, climbed up the side of her house at night, followed her five-year-old son home from school, and attempted to buy a gun to kill her ex-husband. In 2015, Karr said that Wallace was violent toward other women he dated, and in 2018, she said that several women, including former students of Wallace, contacted her to share their alleged physical and emotional abuse by Wallace.
In 2002, Wallace met painter Karen L. Green. They married on December 27, 2004. At the time of Wallace's death, they lived in a house in Claremont, California.
Dogs were important to Wallace, and he spoke of opening a shelter for stray canines. According to his friend Jonathan Franzen, Wallace "had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and [were] unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them".
In June 2007, Wallace suffered a physical illness involving severe stomach pains. His doctors believed it was caused by an interaction of one of his medications with food he had eaten at a restaurant. On his doctor's advice, and out of concern that the drug might be interfering with his writing, Wallace stopped taking Nardil (phenelzine), his primary antidepressant. His depression recurred, and he tried other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy. He eventually went back on phenelzine, but found it ineffective, leaving him with major depressive symptoms.
== Death ==
On September 12, 2008, at age 46, Wallace wrote a suicide note to his wife, arranged part of the manuscript for The Pale King, and hanged himself on the back porch of his house. Memorial gatherings were held at Pomona College, Amherst College, the University of Arizona, Illinois State University, and, on October 23, 2008, at New York University (NYU). The eulogists at NYU included his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens; his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell; Gerry Howard, editor of his first two books; Colin Harrison, an editor at Harper's Magazine; Michael Pietsch, editor of Infinite Jest and later works; Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine; and the writers Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Mark Costello, Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen.
== Legacy ==
In March 2010, it was announced that Wallace's personal papers and archives—drafts of books, stories, essays, poems, letters, and research, including the handwritten notes for Infinite Jest—had been purchased by the University of Texas at Austin. They are held at that university's Harry Ransom Center.
Since 2011, Loyola University New Orleans has offered English seminar courses on Wallace. Similar courses have also been taught at Harvard University. The first David Foster Wallace Conference was hosted by the Illinois State University Department of English in May 2014; the second was held in May 2015.
In January 2017, the International David Foster Wallace Society and the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies were launched.
Among the writers who have cited Wallace as an influence are Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Rivka Galchen, Matthew Gallaway, David Gordon, John Green, Porochista Khakpour, George Saunders, Michael Schur, Zadie Smith, Darin Strauss, Deb Olin Unferth, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Charles Yu.
=== Adaptations ===
==== Film and television ====
A feature-length film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, directed by John Krasinski with an ensemble cast, was released in 2009 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
The 19th episode of the 23rd season of The Simpsons, "A Totally Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again" (2012), is loosely based on Wallace's essay "Shipping Out" from his 1997 collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The Simpson family takes a cruise, and Wallace appears in the background of a scene, wearing a tuxedo T-shirt while eating in the ship's dining room.
The 2015 film The End of the Tour is based on conversations David Lipsky had with Wallace, transcribed in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010). Jason Segel played Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg played Lipsky. The film won an Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Sarasota Film Festival, and Segel was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
"Partridge", a Season 5 episode of NBC's Parks and Recreation, repeatedly references Infinite Jest, of which the show's co-creator, Michael Schur, is a noted fan. Schur also directed the music video for The Decemberists' "Calamity Song", which depicts the Eschaton game from Infinite Jest.
==== Stage and music adaptations ====
Twelve of the interviews from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men were adapted as a stage play in 2000 by Dylan McCullough. This was the first theatrical adaptation of Wallace's work. The play, Hideous Men, was also directed by McCullough, and premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2000.
Brief Interviews was also adapted by director Marc Caellas as a play, Brief Interviews with Hideous Writers, which premiered at Fundación Tomás Eloy Martinez in Buenos Aires on November 4, 2011. In 2012 it was adapted as a play by artist Andy Holden for a two-night run at the ICA in London.
The short story "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko", from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, was adapted by composer Eric Moe into a 50-minute operatic piece, to be performed with accompanying video projections. The piece was described as having "subversively inscribed classical music into pop culture".
Infinite Jest was performed once as a stage play by Germany's experimental theater Hebbel am Ufer. The play was staged in various locations throughout Berlin, and the action took place over a 24-hour period.
"Good Old Neon", from Oblivion: Stories, was adapted and performed by Ian Forester at the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Festival, produced by the Los Angeles independent theater company Needtheater.
The song "Surrounded by Heads and Bodies", from the album A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships by The 1975, borrows its title from the opening line of Infinite Jest. Matty Healy, The 1975's lead singer, said in an interview with Pitchfork that he was inspired by the novel after reading it during a stint in rehabilitation:
I was reading [Infinite Jest] when I was in rehab. There was no one there. It was me and my nurses, who'd come in and check on me, and then Angela [the protagonist of the song], miles away. I was surrounded by no one, and the book was just open on the front page, as most copies of Infinite Jest are ... nobody reads [Infinite Jest] all the way! Everyone our age has got a battered, quarter-read copy of Infinite Jest. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_to_Me_(TV_series) | Dead to Me (TV series) | Dead to Me is an American black comedy-crime thriller television series that stars Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as two grieving women who bond during therapy. It was created by Liz Feldman and executive produced by Feldman, Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, and Jessica Elbaum. The series premiered on May 3, 2019, on Netflix and received positive reviews. In June 2019, Netflix renewed the series for a second season which was released on May 8, 2020. At the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards, Applegate received a nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
In July 2020, the series was renewed for a third and final season. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, production of the third season was delayed until mid-2021, and was then further delayed by Applegate's multiple sclerosis diagnosis. The third and final season was released on November 17, 2022. At the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, the show received four nominations including Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series and two Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Applegate and Cardellini. At the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards, Applegate received her third Outstanding Lead Actress nomination on the series for its final season.
== Premise ==
Dead to Me is about a friendship that blossoms between Jen (Applegate) and Judy (Cardellini). Jen is a recently widowed real estate agent based in Laguna Beach, California, trying to come to terms with her loss through therapy, exercise, and other methods. She uses anger and resentment as an outlet for her grief. She meets Judy in a grief support group. Jen mourns her husband, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver, while Judy claims that she is grieving for her fiancé who died of a heart attack. In actuality, Judy is the hit-and-run driver, and her fiancé simply broke up with her. The two characters face their struggles differently, as Jen finds herself in a dark place while Judy maintains a positive disposition. This difference quickly leads to a deep bond between the two. Jen becomes more unhinged as she unravels the mystery of her husband's death and Judy's secrets.
== Cast and characters ==
=== Main ===
Christina Applegate as Jen Harding, a realtor whose husband Ted was killed by a hit-and-run driver shortly before the start of the series
Linda Cardellini as Judy Hale, a woman Jen meets at a grief support group who befriends her.
James Marsden as
Steve Wood (season 1), Judy's emotionally abusive ex-fiancé, an attorney involved with the Greek Mafia
Ben Wood (seasons 2–3), Steve's semi-identical twin brother, a chiropractor, and Jen's new love interest
Max Jenkins as Christopher Doyle (seasons 1–2, recurring season 3), Jen's real estate business partner and friend
Sam McCarthy as Charlie Harding, Jen's older son
Luke Roessler as Henry Harding, Jen's younger son
=== Recurring ===
Diana-Maria Riva as Ana Perez, the police detective in charge of the hit-and-run case
Brandon Scott as Nick Prager, a police detective on administrative leave whom Judy meets at the grieving retreat
Valerie Mahaffey as Lorna Harding, Jen's mother-in-law and Ted's mother
Natalie Morales as Michelle (seasons 2–3), Judy's love interest and Ana's ex-girlfriend
Ed Asner as Abe Rifkin (season 1), Judy's friend from the retirement home where she works
Keong Sim as Pastor Wayne, Jen and Judy's grief support group leader
Telma Hopkins as Yolanda, a member of the grief support group
Sadie Stanley as Parker (season 2), Charlie's brief love interest and self-proclaimed social media micro-influencer
Haley Sims as Kayley, Steve's assistant
Blair Beeken as Wendy, a member of the grief support group
Edward Fordham Jr. as Kyle, a member of the grief support group
Frances Conroy as Eileen Wood (seasons 2–3), Steve and Ben's mother
Suzy Nakamura as Karen, Jen's neighbor, who is obsessed with protecting her house and preparing for the apocalypse.
Jere Burns as Howard Hastings (season 2), a corrupt police chief who is working with the Greek Mafia
Garret Dillahunt as Glenn Moranis (season 3), an FBI agent who is investigating Steve's death and ties to the Greek Mafia
=== Guest ===
Olivia Macklin as Bambi (season 1), a waitress and Ted's mistress
Steve Howey as Jason (season 1), a widower Jen meets at a grief retreat
Tara Karsian as Erica Brewer (season 1), Charlie's principal
Lily Knight as Linda, a member of the grief support group
Tom Virtue as Doug (season 1), a potential client of Jen's
Beth Littleford as Doug's wife (season 1)
Adora Soleil Bricher as Shandy Adams, a girl in Henry's class who finds Ted's body
Chelsea Spack as Heidi (seasons 1-2), Steve's new girlfriend, and employee at TKG Arts
Rick Holmes as Andrew Peters (seasons 1-2), a man Jen suspects of killing her husband
Marc Evan Jackson as Jeff (seasons 2–3), Karen's husband who is gay and having an affair
Katey Sagal as Eleanor Hale (seasons 2–3), Judy's drug-addicted and emotionally abusive mother
Nicolas Coster as Jim Wood (season 3), Steve and Ben's father
== Episodes ==
=== Season 1 (2019) ===
=== Season 2 (2020) ===
=== Season 3 (2022) ===
== Production ==
=== Development ===
On April 5, 2018, it was announced that Netflix had given the production a series order for a first season consisting of ten episodes. The series was created by Liz Feldman who was also expected to write for the series and executive produce alongside Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, and Jessica Elbaum. Production companies involved with the series were slated to consist of Gloria Sanchez Productions and CBS Television Studios. On November 2, 2018, it was reported that Amy York Rubin would direct the first and second episodes of the series.
On April 1, 2019, it was announced that the series was set to be released on May 3, 2019. On June 3, 2019, the series was renewed for a second season, set to be released in 2020. On April 10, 2020, Netflix announced that the second season would be released on May 8, 2020. On July 6, 2020, Netflix renewed the series for a third and final season. Filming for the third and final season began on May 7, 2021; however, in August, 2021, production was paused temporarily due to Applegate’s health. On December 21, 2021, it was reported that there were positive COVID-19 cases on the set, but filming was not impacted or shut down. There were three weeks of filming left to conclude in early 2022, but filming did not wrap until April 25, 2022. The third and final season premiered on November 17, 2022.
=== Casting ===
On July 11, 2018, it was announced that Christina Applegate had been cast in one of the series' two lead roles. On August 3, 2018, it was reported that Linda Cardellini had been cast in the series' other lead role. A week later, it was announced that Max Jenkins and Luke Roessler had been cast in series regular roles. On September 12, 2018, it was reported that James Marsden and Ed Asner had been cast in starring roles. In October 2018, it was announced that Sam McCarthy had joined the cast in a series regular capacity and that Diana-Maria Riva had been cast in a recurring role. In October 2019, Natalie Morales was cast in the recurring role of Michelle on the second season.
== Reception ==
=== Critical response ===
==== Season 1 ====
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the first season has an approval rating of 86% based on 51 reviews, with an average rating of 6.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Dead to Me doesn't always deliver on the gallows humor that it promises, but the sterling duo of Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini elevates the series above its pulpier aspects—offering a deeply moving relationship shaped by mutual grief." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 67 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
==== Season 2 ====
On Rotten Tomatoes, the second season has an approval rating of 96% based on 47 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Dead to Me doubles down on the twists and turns out an exciting second season that makes excellent use of its well-matched leads." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
==== Season 3 ====
On Rotten Tomatoes, the third season holds an approval rating of 85% based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 6.1/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Dead to Me's final season has some diminishing returns as the twists begin to feel overplayed, but Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini remain a compelling duo who viewers will want to stick with to the bitter end." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
=== Viewership ===
On July 17, 2019, Netflix announced that the series was on track to be streamed by over 30 million viewers within its first month of release on the streaming platform.
=== Accolades === |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudhoney_(film) | Mudhoney (film) | Mudhoney (sometimes Mud Honey) is a 1965 Southern Gothic film directed by Russ Meyer. It is based on the novel Streets Paved With Gold (1958) by Raymond Friday Locke. The film is a period drama set during the Great Depression. "I got in a little bit over my head," Meyer said about the film. "That's when I thought I was Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck and George Stevens all in one."
The film became the inspiration for the name of pioneering Seattle grunge band Mudhoney, formed in 1988. American singer-songwriter Norah Jones' album cover for Little Broken Hearts was based upon a poster for the film.
== Plot ==
In this Depression-era tale, Calef McKinney is traveling from Michigan to California and stops in Spooner, Missouri, where Lute Wade hires him for odd jobs.
McKinney gets involved with Wade's niece, Hannah Brenshaw. But she is married to Sidney, a wife-beating drunk who hopes to inherit his uncle-in-law's money.
Sidney and an eccentric preacher named Brother Hanson plot against McKinney, who finds it difficult to conceal his mysterious past and his growing affection for Sidney's wife.
Sidney winds up burning his farm and attempting to frame McKinney. He rapes and murders the preacher's wife and is killed by the lynch mob.
== Cast ==
Hal Hopper as Sidney Brenshaw
Antoinette Cristiani as Hannah Brenshaw
John Furlong as Calif McKinney
Stuart Lancaster as Lute Wade
Rena Horten as Eula
Princess Livingston as Maggie Marie
Lorna Maitland as Clara Belle
Sam Hanna as Injoys
Nick Wolcuff as Sheriff Abel
Frank Bolger as Brother Hanson
Lee Ballard as Sister Hanson
Mickey Foxx as Thurmond Pate
F. Rufus Owens as Milton
== Production ==
The film was based on a novel, Streets Paved with Gold by Friday Locke.
== Reception ==
=== Box office ===
The film was a financial failure. Meyer later said, "I made a gamble with Mudhoney and I failed. The only reason I made Mudhoney was I was in love with a girl named Rena. I should have not made the film."
=== Critical ===
The Los Angeles Times called it "the perfect dirty picture. Unspoiled by either undue sadism or outright nudity... a flawless piece of unintentional camp."
Roger Ebert called the film "Meyer's neglected masterpiece: his most interesting, most ambitious, most complex and longest independent production. He describes it as a case of over-achievement; it was not necessary, or perhaps even wise, he believes, to expend so much energy on a movie that had so little directly exploitable elements." Ebert said "Meyer's visual invention, always dramatic and energetic, has never been better than in this one. From the Hitchcockian opening (bare feet seen in a closeup on intersecting passages) to such Grand Guignol shots as a body falling into a grave from the grave's P. O. V., this is a melodrama taken to obsessed extremes." |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Houston_Astros_season | 2021 Houston Astros season | The 2021 Houston Astros season was the 60th season for the Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise located in Houston, Texas, their 57th as the Astros, ninth in both the American League (AL) and AL West division, and 22nd at Minute Maid Park. They entered the season as a wild card qualifier through a second-place finish in the AL West for a fourth consecutive postseason appearance. Having ultimately progressed to the American League Championship Series (ALCS)—also their fifth consecutive—the Astros defeated the Boston Red Sox in six games to advance to the 2021 World Series, where they would be defeated by the Atlanta Braves in six games.
Four Astros players gained selection to the 2021 All-Star Game: second baseman Jose Altuve, shortstop Carlos Correa, outfielder Michael Brantley, and pitcher Ryan Pressly. First baseman Yuli Gurriel won the AL batting title, his first, with a .319 batting average, becoming the second Cuban-born player and second Astro after Altuve to do so. Correa led AL position players with 7.2 Wins Above Replacement (WAR).
The Astros concluded the regular season with a 95–67 record, while clinching an AL West title for the fourth time in the last five seasons. It was also the 11th division title in franchise history, sixth playoff berth over the previous seven years, and 15th playoff appearance overall. By winning the AL West, Dusty Baker became the first manager in major league history to guide five different clubs to a division title, giving him eight division titles overall.
In the playoffs, the Astros defeated the Chicago White Sox in the American League Division Series (ALDS) in four games to advance to their fifth straight ALCS. They faced the Boston Red Sox in a rematch of the 2018 ALCS. The Astros won the ALCS in six games for the fourth pennant in franchise history and third as an AL team. They advanced to the World Series for the third time in five years, but lost to the Atlanta Braves in six games.
Following the season, designated hitter Yordan Alvarez (second selection) and right fielder Kyle Tucker (first) were both selected for 2021's All-MLB Second Team. Gurriel and Correa each won their first Gold Glove Awards, while the Astros were named the AL Gold Glove Team. Correa also won the Platinum Glove and Fielding Bible Awards both for the first time.
An American League (and franchise) record five Astros were named Gold Glove finalists, along with another five as finalists for the Silver Slugger Award. Baker and pitcher Luis García were named finalists for the AL Manager of the Year and AL Rookie of the Year awards, respectively. Baker finished third in voting, and García finished second. This marked the third consecutive season that an Astros player was named a finalist for the AL Rookie of the Year Award, following Yordan Alvarez, who won it unanimously in 2019, and Cristian Javier, who finished in third in 2020.
== Offseason ==
=== Summary ===
The Astros entered the 2021 Major League Baseball (MLB) season as having been defeated by the Tampa Bay Rays in seven games in the American League Championship Series (ALCS) and runner-up for the 2020 AL pennant. The Astros played to a 3–0 deficit to begin the ALCS, won the next three, and were defeated 4–2 in Game 7. The Rays thus avoided joining the 2004 New York Yankees as the only MLB clubs to lose a League Championship Series after mounting a 3–0 lead.
Ace starting pitcher Justin Verlander missed the entire 2021 season recuperating from ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction surgery, also known as Tommy John surgery, which was performed on October 1, 2020. He was in the final year of his contract. On February 27, 2021, the Astros placed the right-hander on the 60-day injured list as he continued to recover from the surgery.
=== Offseason transactions ===
==== Free agent signings ====
Signed right-handed pitcher (RHP) Ryne Stanek to a 1-year contract on January 7, 2021
Signed RHP Pedro Báez to a 2-year contract on January 13, 2021
Signed catcher (C) Jason Castro to a 2-year contract on January 22, 2021
Signed RHP Jake Odorizzi to a 2-year contract on March 8, 2021
==== Free agent departures ====
Outfielder (OF) George Springer signed a six-year contract with the Toronto Blue Jays on January 23, 2021.
OF Josh Reddick signed a minor league contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks on April 12, 2021.
Pitchers that elected for free agency included Joe Biagini, Chase De Jong, Roberto Osuna, Brad Peacock, Chris Devenski, and Dustin Garneau
==== Trades and waiver claims ====
Players that were traded or claimed in the offseason by a different team included Brandon Bailey, Humberto Castellanos, Cionel Pérez, Carlos Sanabria, Cy Sneed, and Jack Mayfield.
==== Contract extensions ====
Signed RHP Lance McCullers Jr. to a five-year contract extension on March 24, 2021
== Regular season ==
=== Summary ===
==== April ====
On April 1, starting pitcher Zack Greinke earned his first career Opening Day win, and 209th win overall, as the Astros defeated the Oakland Athletics, 8–1, at the Oakland Coliseum. He pitched six scoreless innings, the 65th time his career he has produced at least six scoreless innings. Yordan Alvarez, returning from dual knee surgery that cost him nearly all of the 2020 season, drove in three runners, and Michael Brantley and Alex Bregman hit back-to-back home runs in the eighth inning. Outfielder Chas McCormick made his MLB debut as a defensive replacement for Brantley. It was the Astros' ninth consecutive Opening Day win, a club record, and equalled the modern era (since 1900) major league record for the longest streak, with the Seattle Mariners (2007–15), Cincinnati Reds (1983–91), New York Mets (1975–83) and St. Louis Browns (1937–45).
Ryan Pressly first became Houston's full-time closer in 2021.
Brantley batted .345 in April and .410 in June, remaining at or near the top of the AL batting leaders for much of the season.
Manager Dusty Baker earned his 1,900th career win in the major leagues on April 22 by an 8–2 score versus the Los Angeles Angels. In that game, Cristian Javier became the first Astros pitcher to record the first eight outs of a game by strikeout since Jim Deshaies on September 23, 1986, versus the Los Angeles Dodgers. Over five innings, Javier set a new personal high with nine strikeouts and one walk and no earned runs.
In their first rematch since the 2020 American League Championship Series (ALCS), the Astros defeated the Tampa Bay Rays, 9–2, on April 30. Lance McCullers Jr. hurled seven shutout innings, striking out nine. Brantley and Carlos Correa both had four hits and Bregman hit a two-run home run. Four RBI came via Aledmys Díaz' two hits. Brantley, Bregman, Alvarez and Correa produced consecutive hits in the third inning, leading to three of the runs. With this win, Baker reached 1,906 to pass Casey Stengel for 12th all-time.
==== May ====
Outfielder Kyle Tucker recorded a breakout season in 2021: from May 1 through the end of the season, he batted .320 and led the AL in on-base percentage, slugging and OPS.
During the May 7 game versus the Toronto Blue Jays, designated hitter Yordan Alvarez drove in the 100th run of his career, doing so in 114 game as part of a 10–4 victory. He was the seventh-fastest player to reach 100 RBI in league history and the fastest to do so since the expansion era started in 1961. The next game, he homered and drove in three more in an 8–4 loss to the Blue Jays for 103 RBI in 115 games.
In the May 25 contest versus the Los Angeles Dodgers, Greinke became the 135th pitcher in major league history to reach 3,000 career innings. Jose Altuve was hitless in four at bats to end a 17-game hitting streak, the longest in the major leagues to that point in the season.
==== June ====
On June 4, Zack Greinke threw his first complete game since April 19, 2017, and first as a member of the Astros. He allowed six hits with one run and one walk and three strikeouts in a 13–1 win over the Toronto Blue Jays at Sahlen Field in Buffalo, New York. Martín Maldonado hit a grand slam, and Carlos Correa homered twice to lead the Astros' 16-hit attack.
In the June 6 contest versus the Blue Jays, infielder Aledmys Díaz suffered a fracture in his left hand on a hit by pitch delivered from Ross Stripling. Díaz was expected to miss six to eight weeks.
Down to the Astros' final strike in the ninth inning on June 15, Carlos Correa belted a solo home run to take the contest against the Texas Rangers into extra innings. The Rangers took another lead in the tenth inning, 3–2. In the bottom of tenth, Jose Altuve belted a walk-off grand slam for a 6–2 Astros' win.
The following day, June 16, Altuve connected for a lead-off home run against Texas; Altuve became the first player in major league history to record a walk-off grand slam and then a lead-off home run in the following game. The Astros won that game, 8–4, to sweep their in-state rivals and realize their 12th win in their past 16th games. Third baseman Alex Bregman injured his left quadriceps in the first inning of the June 16 game as he attempted to avoid hitting into a double play. Catcher Garrett Stubbs was recalled from Triple-A Sugar Land to take his place on the 25-man roster.
Altuve hit his 150th career home run on June 23, served up by Thomas Eshelman of the Baltimore Orioles.
==== All-Star Game selections ====
The following Astros players were selected as reserves to play at the 91st All-Star Game, hosted by the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field on July 13, 2021:
Jose Altuve, second baseman: seventh selection, tied Craig Biggio for most appearances by an Astro
Michael Brantley, outfielder: had batted .402 with nine doubles, one triple and 16 RBI in a one-month span since returning from injury
Carlos Correa: shortstop: ranked fifth in AL in OPS (.926) at time of selection
Ryan Pressly, relief pitcher: second selection. Pressly had not allowed an earned run in 12 consecutive appearances, leading to a 1.54 ERA over 35 innings and a 4–1 record. He was tied for first in save percentage (93.3%), and among relief pitchers in the AL, was third in ERA, fourth in WHIP (0.83) and hed tied for fifth in with 14 saves.
With the four total selections, the Astros tied for second-most selections for 2021.
==== July ====
A lingering knee injury dampened Brantley's second-half performance. As of late July, he maintained a batting average of .336.
In an attempt to revamp their bullpen by adding higher-velocity pitchers, the Astros acquired Yimi García from the Miami Marlins on July 28. Up until that trade, García saved 15 games with a 3.47 ERA over 39 total relief appearances in 2021. He struck out 35 in 36+1⁄3 innings. The Astros sent outfielder Bryan De La Cruz and pitcher Austin Pruitt in return.
On July 30, the Astros traded Myles Straw to the Cleveland Indians for reliever Phil Maton and minor league catcher Yainer Díaz. Trading Straw allowed for the Astros to give rookie outfielders Chas McCormick and Jake Meyers more opportunities to play. On July 31, the club selected Meyers' contract from Sugar Land and promoted him to the major league roster.
==== August ====
Jake Meyers made his Major League debut on August 1 as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning of a 5–3 loss to the San Francisco Giants.
Jake Meyers hit his first career home run on August 14 versus pitcher Jaime Barría of the Los Angeles Angels, and added a grand slam later in the same game as the Astros won, 8–2.
Third baseman Alex Bregman returned from left quadriceps strain on August 25 after missing over two months. He scoring the winning run versus the Kansas City Royals on the day of his return, capping a 6–5, 10-inning score.
==== September and October ====
José Siri made his major league debut on September 3 as a pinch runner in the ninth inning versus the San Diego Padres. Jake Meyers promptly hit a single that scored Siri from second base to give Siri his first run as a major leaguer.
Siri made his first start in the majors on September 13, playing left field and facing the Texas Rangers. He went 4-for-5 with two home runs and five runs batted in to power a 15–1 rout at Globe Life Field. He is the first player since the RBI statistic became official in 1920 to have that many RBI along with multiple home runs in their first major league start. Yordan Alvarez added two home runs, including his 30th of the season; at the age of 24, he is the second Astro to hit 30 home runs in a season at that age after Alex Bregman, who hit 31 in 2018.
In the September 17 contest versus the Arizona Diamondbacks, Jose Altuve homered off Madison Bumgarner at Minute Maid Park to collect his 849th career hit in the stadium. The hit tied him with Lance Berkman for most by an Astro in the venue. He then passed Berkman the next night with a double.
On September 21, Carlos Correa scored his 100th run on the season to become the first Astros shortstop to score 100 runs in a season.
During the final road trip of the season, twenty-seven members of the team paid homage to veteran pitcher Zack Greinke, known for his leisurely dress style. They wore fishing shirts, short shorts, and bucket hats. Lance McCullers Jr. also brought in a bag of groceries from Whole Foods – as is Greinke's habit to fill his locker – as replenishment for their upcoming flight. Greinke, who is from Florida, wore a bright orange Tampa Bay Buccaneers hat, an oversized fishing shirt, and shorts. Martín Maldonado donned his own bright orange hat. With Greinke posing with his new cadre of imitators, the team posted photos of their amusement on Instagram. The team had chosen to honor the pitcher, in the final year of his contract, after a 7–6 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks in which had allowed five runs over four innings, raising his ERA on the season to 4.11.
On September 23, Alvarez drove in two runs on a home run in the first inning against Los Angeles Angels to score his 100th RBI of the season. He was the second-youngest Astro to reach 100 RBI in one season, trailing César Cedeño, who did so at the age of 23 in 1974. It was a 9–5 win. Ryan Pressly completed a scoreless ninth in his 60th appearance of the season in this game, concluding the final condition for his contract for 2022 to fully vest. He would earn a guaranteed $10 million. Since being acquired by Houston at the 2018 trade deadline, Pressly had produced a 2.19 ERA, 0.924 WHIP, and saved 42 games in 160+1⁄3 innings. He had converted 25 of 27 save chances on the season.
On September 28, the Astros won 4–3 against the Tampa Bay Rays on consecutive walks with the bases loaded, which was the first time they had done so in team history and only the eighth time in Major League Baseball history since 1931. The Astros clinched the AL West on September 30 with a win over Tampa Bay at Minute Maid Park for their fourth division title in five seasons. It was Houston's tenth division title and 15th postseason entrance. For the first time in franchise history, the Astros gained a postseason berth for the fifth consecutive season. With a combined record of 432–272 (.614) since 2017, Houston had attained the most wins in the major leagues in that span. Manager Dusty Baker secured his eighth division title while becoming the first manager to guide five different clubs to a division title. It was Baker's 11th career postseason appearance.
In the final game of the 2021 regular season, Yuli Gurriel hit a walk-off single to score Jason Castro and defeat the Oakland Athletics. With that hit, his batting average stood at .319 to lead teammate Michael Brantley and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays (both hit .311) for the AL batting championship. At age 37, Gurriel was the sixth-oldest player to win a batting title, the oldest to win their first batting title since Barry Bonds in 2002, and the first Cuban-born player since Tony Oliva in 1971. Brantley, continuing to produce through lingering knee pain, saw 39 at bats in September. It was the sixth time in his career he had finished in the top 10 in the AL in batting.
Over the final month of the season, right fielder Kyle Tucker batted .346 with eight home runs, 20 runs scored, 19 RBI, .438 on-base percentage, and .692 slugging percentage for a 1.130 OPS. He was awarded AL Player of the Month for September, his first career monthly award.
=== Season standings ===
=== American League West ===
=== Record against opponents ===
Updated with the results of all games through October 3, 2021.
=== Game log ===
== Postseason ==
=== Game log ===
=== Postseason rosters ===
=== Awards notes ===
For recognition of their defensive prowess, Rawlings Sporting Goods announced that the Houston Astros were the winners of the 2021 American League (AL) Gold Glove Team Award, the second iteration of the team-wide award, and Houston's first. The Astros led the American League with +78 Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), second in MLB to only the St. Louis Cardinals with +86, the winners of the National League Gold Glove Team Award. The Astros also led the AL with +45 outs above average (OAA), second in the major leagues to the Cardinals (+50). Shortstop Carlos Correa won his first career of both the Platinum Glove and Gold Glove Awards, marking the first time an Astros player has won a Platinum Glove. Correa led the AL with +21 DRS in 2021.
Five Astros players were announced on October 25, 2021, as finalists for the Silver Slugger Award, including Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez, Correa, Yuli Gurriel, and Kyle Tucker. However, all of the five were claimed by players on other teams, including Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of Toronto at first base, Marcus Semien of Toronto at second base, Xander Bogaerts of Boston at shortstop, Teoscar Hernández, Aaron Judge and Cedric Mullins in the outfield, and Shohei Ohtani at designated hitter.
Starting pitcher Luis García finished second to Randy Arozarena of Tampa Bay in the American League Rooke of the Year balloting, receiving two first-place votes
Manager Dusty Baker was named as a finalist for AL Manager of the Year Award. He finished third, garnering two first-place votes, five for second place, and eight for third place. Kevin Cash of Tampa Bay was the winner.
== Statistics ==
Note: Yellow background is team leader in specific category.
=== Batting ===
==== Regular season ====
=== Pitching ===
Note: Pos = Position; W = Wins; L = Losses; ERA = Earned run average; G = Games pitched; GS = Games started; SV = Saves; IP = Innings pitched; H = Hits allowed; R = Runs allowed; ER = Earned runs allowed; BB = Walks allowed; SO = Strikeouts; HBP = Hit by pitch; WHIP = Walks + hits per inning pitched
Source:[1]
== Awards and achievements ==
Career hnnors
Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum inductee: Bobby Abreu • OF • In HOU: 1996—1997
Annual awards
=== AL batting leaders ===
=== AL pitching leaders ===
=== AL fielding leaders ===
== Roster ==
== Minor league system and first-year player draft ==
=== Teams ===
In advance of the 2021 season, Major League Baseball took direct control of, and restructured, Minor League Baseball in part with the intent of cost efficiency, and enhancing the experience and compensation for its players and directly managing their development plans. The legacy league names were replaced with generic names depicting their level of play. One significant change for Astros included aligning the Sugar Land Skeeters as their AAA club; the Skeeters were previously members of the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball and unaffiliated with any major league clubs. Sugar Land replaced the Round Rock Express.
=== Major League Baseball draft === |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Clark | Helen Clark | Helen Elizabeth Clark (born 26 February 1950) is a New Zealand politician who served as the 37th prime minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008 and was the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme from 2009 to 2017. She was New Zealand's fifth-longest-serving prime minister, and the second woman to hold that office.
Clark was brought up on a farm outside Hamilton. She entered the University of Auckland in 1968 to study politics and became active in the New Zealand Labour Party. After graduating she lectured in political studies at the university. Clark entered local politics in 1974 in Auckland but was not elected to any position. Following one unsuccessful attempt, she was elected to Parliament in 1981 as the member for Mount Albert, an electorate she represented until 2009.
Clark held numerous Cabinet positions in the Fourth Labour Government, including minister of housing, minister of health and minister of conservation. She was the 11th deputy prime minister of New Zealand from 1989 to 1990 serving under prime ministers Geoffrey Palmer and Mike Moore. After Labour's narrow defeat in the 1993 election, Clark challenged Moore for leadership of the party and won, becoming the leader of the Opposition. Following the 1999 election, Labour formed a governing coalition, and Clark was sworn in as prime minister on 10 December 1999.
Clark led the Fifth Labour Government, which implemented several major economic initiatives including Kiwibank, the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme and KiwiSaver. Her government also introduced the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004, which caused major controversy. In foreign affairs, Clark sent troops to the Afghanistan War, but did not contribute combat troops to the Iraq War, and ordered deployment to the 2006 East Timorese crisis. She was ranked by Forbes as the 20th-most powerful woman in the world in 2006. She advocated a number of free-trade agreements with major trading partners, including becoming the first developed nation to sign such an agreement with China. After three successive electoral victories, her government was defeated in the 2008 election; Clark resigned as prime minister and party leader on 19 November 2008. She was succeeded as prime minister by John Key of the National Party, and as leader of the Labour Party by Phil Goff.
Clark resigned from Parliament in April 2009 to become the first female head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In 2016, she stood for the position of secretary-general of the United Nations, but was unsuccessful. She left her UNDP administrator post on 19 April 2017 at the end of her second four-year term and was succeeded by Achim Steiner. In 2019, Clark became the patron of the Helen Clark Foundation.
== Early life ==
Clark was the eldest of four daughters of a farming family at Te Pahu, west of Hamilton, in the Waikato. Her mother, Margaret McMurray, of Irish birth, was a primary school teacher. Her father, Frederick George Clark, who went by the name George, was born in Frankton in 1922 and ran the Clarks' farm from his early adulthood to retirement in 1987, when the elder Clarks retired to Waihi Beach. Margaret Clark died in 2017 at the age of 87. George Clark died in 2025 at the age of 103.
Clark studied at Te Pahu Primary School, at Epsom Girls' Grammar School in Auckland and at the University of Auckland, where she majored in politics and graduated with an MA (Honours) in 1974. Her thesis focused on rural political behaviour and representation. As a teenager Clark became politically active, protesting against the Vietnam War and campaigning against foreign military bases in New Zealand.
Clark has worked actively in the New Zealand Labour Party for most of her life. In 1971 she assisted Labour candidates to the Auckland City Council, three of whom were elected. Following this, she stood for the Auckland City Council herself in 1974 and 1977. While generally polling well, she never won a seat, missing out by only 105 votes in the latter.
Clark was a junior lecturer in political studies at the University of Auckland from 1973 to 1975. In 1974 she sought the nomination for the Auckland Central electorate, but lost to Richard Prebble. She instead stood for Piako, a National safe seat. Clark studied abroad on a University Grants Committee post-graduate scholarship in 1976, and then lectured in political studies at Auckland again while undertaking her PhD (which she never completed) from 1977 until her election to Parliament in 1981. Her father supported the National Party in that election.
Clark served as a member of Labour's national executive committee from 1978 until September 1988, and again from April 1989. She chaired the University of Auckland Princes Street branch of the Labour Party during her studies, becoming active alongside future Labour politicians including Richard Prebble, David Caygill, Margaret Wilson and Richard Northey. Clark held the positions of president of the Labour Youth Council, executive member of the party's Auckland Regional Council, secretary of the Labour Women's Council and member of the Policy Council. In 1980 she stood as a candidate for the position of junior vice-president. However, on the second day of the party conference, she withdrew her candidacy, allowing union secretary Dan Duggan to be elected unopposed.
Clark represented the New Zealand Labour Party at the congresses of the Socialist International and of the Socialist International Women in 1976, 1978, 1983 and 1986, at an Asia-Pacific Socialist Organisation Conference held in Sydney in 1981, and at the Socialist International Party Leaders' Meeting in Sydney in 1991.
== Member of Parliament ==
Clark did not contest the 1978 election, but in 1980 she put her name forward to replace long serving MP Warren Freer in the safe Labour seat of Mount Albert. She beat six other contenders including electorate chairman Keith Elliot, former MP Malcolm Douglas and future MP Jack Elder for the nomination.
Clark was duly elected to the New Zealand House of Representatives in the 1981 general election, as one of eight female members in the 40th Parliament. In winning the Mount Albert electorate in Auckland, she became the second woman elected to represent an Auckland electorate, and the seventeenth woman elected to the New Zealand Parliament. Her first parliamentary intervention, on taking her seat was on 12 April 1982 to give notice, she would move a motion condemning the US Navy's deployment of nuclear cruise missiles in the Pacific. Two weeks later in her maiden speech, with unusual emphasis on defence policy and the arms race, Clark again condemned the deployment of cruise, Pershing and SS20 missiles and the global ambitions of both superpowers' navies, but claimed the Soviet admirals did not plough New Zealand's waters and expressed particular concern about the expansion of the 1965 memo of ANZUS understanding for the resupply of weapons to New Zealand to include nuclear weapon resupply.
During her first term in the House (1981–1984), Clark became a member of the Statutes Revision Committee. In her second term (1984–1987), she chaired the Select committee on Foreign Affairs and the Select Committee on Disarmament and Arms Control, both of which combined with the Defence Select Committee in 1985 to form a single committee. In 1983 she was appointed as Labour's spokesperson for Overseas Aid and Disarmament.
=== Cabinet minister ===
In 1987, Clark became a Cabinet minister in the Fourth Labour Government, led by David Lange (1984–1989), Geoffrey Palmer (1989–1990) and Mike Moore (1990). She served as Minister of Conservation from August 1987 until January 1989 and as Minister of Housing from August 1987 until August 1989. She became minister of health in January 1989 and took on additional portfolios as minister of labour and deputy prime minister in August 1989. As health minister, Clark introduced a series of legislative changes that allowed midwives to practice autonomously. She also introduced the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990, a law which restricted smoking in places such as workplaces and schools.
As deputy prime minister, Clark chaired the Cabinet Social Equity Committee and was a member of several other important Cabinet committees, such as the Policy Committee, Economic Development and Employment Committee, and Domestic and External Security Committee.
=== Leader of the Opposition ===
From October 1990 until December 1993 Clark held the posts of Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Shadow spokesperson for Health and Labour, and member of the Social Services Select Committee and of the Labour Select Committee. After the National Party won the 1993 general election with a majority of one seat, Clark successfully challenged Mike Moore for the leadership of the parliamentary party. She was particularly critical of Moore for delivering blurred messages during the 1993 election campaign, and accused him of failing to re-brand Labour as a centre-left party which had jettisoned Rogernomics.
Clark became the Leader of the Opposition on 1 December 1993. She led the Labour Party in opposition to the National-led government of Jim Bolger (1990–1997) and Jenny Shipley (1997–1999). Clark announced her first shadow cabinet on 13 December 1993, but the ousted Moore refused any portfolios. There were frequent changes after several party defections took place during the parliamentary term in the lead up to the new MMP voting system. At one reshuffle, in June 1995, Clark herself took the shadow foreign affairs portfolio.
The Labour Party rated poorly in opinion polls in the run-up to the 1996 general election, and Clark suffered from a low personal approval rating. At one point polls suggested that New Zealand First of Winston Peters would even poll 30% and Labour would be beaten into third place. However, she survived an attempted leadership coup by senior members who favoured Phil Goff. Labour lost the election in October 1996, but Clark remained as Opposition leader. Clark was seen as having convincingly won the election debates which led to Labour doing better than predicted. Shortly before the election she also achieved a rapprochement with Moore (who was previously thinking of setting up his own party) who accepted the foreign affairs and overseas trade portfolios, calming internal tensions.
During the 1998 Waitangi Day celebrations, Clark was prevented from speaking on the marae by activist Titewhai Harawira in protest over Clark's being allowed to speak in direct contradiction of traditional Māori protocol. The ensuing argument saw Clark being reduced to tears on national television.
In 1999, Clark was involved in a defamation case in the High Court of New Zealand with Auckland orthopaedic surgeon Joe Brownlee, resulting in Clark's making an unreserved apology. The case centred on a press statement issued by Clark criticising Brownlee, triggered by a constituent's complaint over the outcome of a hip replacement. Clark admitted the criticism was unjustified in that the complication suffered by her constituent was rare, unforeseen and unavoidable.
== Prime Minister (1999–2008) ==
Under Clark's leadership, Labour became the largest party in parliament from 1999 to 2008. Clark became the second woman to serve as Prime Minister of New Zealand, and the first to have won office at an election. She also served as the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage throughout her premiership. She had additional ministerial responsibility for the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) and for Ministerial Services. During her period in office, women held a number of prominent elected and appointed offices in New Zealand, such as the Governor-General, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Chief Justice—these major offices of state were simultaneously occupied by women between March 2005 and August 2006. As a female head of government, Clark was a member of the Council of Women World Leaders.
Clark entered office just three years after the adoption of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting system, which had produced an unstable National-led government under Bolger and Shipley. Clark negotiated the formation of successive coalition governments. Political scientist Bryce Edwards identified Clark's ability to lead stable governments as her most significant achievement, arguing that her ability to work with a variety of coalition partners—including the Alliance, Jim Anderton's Progressive Party, Green, United Future and New Zealand First—consolidated public support for MMP.
Clark's particular interests included social policy and international affairs. A strong supporter of nuclear disarmament, Clark pursued a policy of peace-making within the Pacific region. She set herself the task of making New Zealand the first ecologically sustainable nation, describing this as "central to New Zealand's unique national identity". Her government's major policy achievements include the Working for Families package, increasing the minimum wage 5% a year, interest-free student loans, creation of District Health Boards, the introduction of a number of tax credits, overhauling the secondary school qualifications by introducing NCEA, and the introduction of fourteen weeks’ parental leave. Commentators praised Clark (along with Michael Cullen, the Minister of Finance) for overseeing a period of sustained and stable economic growth, with an increase in employment that saw a gradual lowering of the unemployment rate to a record low of 3.6% (in 2005).
Clark made every attempt to make sure that gender was not an issue in politics. However, Bryce Edwards states that others did. Clark was portrayed as bloodsucking, cold, and humourless. Clark says herself that when her male counterparts spoke in the media, they looked strong and determined, whereas when she portrayed the same characteristics, the media made it to look like she was "tough" and "nagging."
In 2006 Clark was 20th in Forbes magazine's ranking of the world's 100 most powerful women. By the time she left office in 2008 this had fallen to 56th.
=== First term: 1999–2002 ===
The 1999 general election produced a historic moment for New Zealand; for the first time, two women, Clark and Shipley, campaigned against each other as leaders of the country's two major parties. Clark repeatedly stated her desire to "govern alone" rather than as part of a coalition. However, in the lead up to the election, Labour made overtures to the left-wing Alliance. Clark addressed the Alliance's annual conference in August 1998. On polling day Labour returned 49 seats, an increase of 12, ahead of National's 39 seats. The first Clark-led Cabinet linked Labour with the Alliance and supported by the Green Party. Alliance leader Jim Anderton served as Deputy Prime Minister under Clark until 2002. The full ministerial team, and portfolios, was announced on 9 December—12 days after the election—and the new government was sworn in the following day. The coalition partners pioneered "agree to disagree" procedures to manage policy differences. Such procedures lessened the chances of Cabinet becoming publicly divided and running the risk of losing the confidence of the House of Representatives.
In January 2000, the then Police Commissioner, Peter Doone, resigned after The Sunday Star-Times alleged he had prevented the breath testing of his partner Robyn, who had driven the car they occupied, by telling the officer "that won't be necessary". Both Doone and the officer involved denied this happened. Doone sued the Sunday Star-Times for defamation in 2005, but the paper revealed they had checked the story with Clark. She confirmed this, but denied that she had made attempts to get Doone to resign and defended being the source as "by definition I cannot leak". Clark also responded by saying that National supporters had funded Doone's defamation-suit. Opinion on the significance of this incident varied.
In 2000, Labour MP Chris Carter investigated the background of one of Clark's Cabinet colleagues, Māori Affairs Minister Dover Samuels, regarding allegations of historic statutory rape. Ex-convict John Yelash claimed that Carter had approached him to help with the investigation; a claim that Carter denied. Clark backed her MP, referring to Yelash as a "murderer" when he had in fact been convicted of manslaughter, a less serious offence. Yelash sued Clark for defamation, resulting in an out-of-court settlement.
In April 2001, Clark met with Chinese president Jiang Zemin during an official visit to Beijing. Jiang referred to the Prime Minister as an "old friend". He stated that China hoped to "establish bilateral long-term and stable overall cooperative relations [with New Zealand]". Clark strongly supported China's entry into the World Trade Organization.
In March 2002, Clark made her first visit to the United States as prime minister. She visited "Ground Zero", the former site of the World Trade Center, where the New York City Police Department presented her with a New Zealand flag that had been recovered from the rubble after the September 11 attacks. On 26 March, Clark visited the Pentagon and Washington, D.C., where she met with American officials, including a private meeting with President George W. Bush. Most of the agenda for Clark's visit focused on the joint counter-terrorism campaign (dubbed the "war on terror").
As Opposition Leader in 1998, Clark signed her name to a canvas that had been painted on by another artist. The painting was subsequently auctioned to charity. After the act came to light in April 2002, the opposition National Party referred the matter to the Police. A police report found evidence for a prima facie case of forgery, but determined that it was not in the public interest to prosecute Clark.
In June 2002, Clark apologised on behalf of New Zealand for aspects of the country's treatment of Samoa during the colonial era. Clark's apology was made in Apia during the 40th anniversary of Samoa's independence and televised live to New Zealand where Samoans applauded the Prime Minister's gesture.
The Alliance split in 2002 over the Government's commitment of New Zealand troops to the War in Afghanistan, leading to the imminent dissolution of Labour's coalition with that party. Consequently, Clark called for an early election to be held on 27 July. Political opponents claimed that Clark could have continued to govern, and that a snap election was called to take advantage of Labour's strong position in opinion polls. In opinion surveys conducted during the election campaign, Clark scored high approval ratings and was far ahead of other party leaders as "preferred Prime Minister".
A major issue during the 2002 election campaign was the end of a moratorium on genetic engineering, strongly opposed by the rival Green Party. The debate was reignited when investigative journalist Nicky Hager published a book, Seeds of Distrust, in which he alleged that Clark's government had covered up a contamination of genetically modified corn plants in 2000. A television interview with John Campbell was terminated by Clark when she was taken by surprise by the allegations, which she claimed to have known nothing about prior to the interview. The affair was dubbed "Corngate" by the media.
=== Second term: 2002–2005 ===
Clark won a second term in the 2002 general election—her party increased both its share of the vote and number of seats. Labour subsequently entered into a coalition with Jim Anderton's Progressive Party (a spin-off of the Alliance), with parliamentary confidence and supply coming from United Future, and a good-faith agreement with the Green Party. Michael Cullen, who served as minister of finance, was appointed deputy prime minister by Clark, replacing Anderton.
A republican, Clark stated in 2002 that she thought it was "inevitable" that New Zealand would become a republic in the near future. Her term in office saw a number of alleged moves in this direction, under her government's policy of building national identity. Examples include the abolition of appeals to the Privy Council in London and the foundation of the Supreme Court of New Zealand; the abolition of titular knighthood and damehood honours (restored in 2009); and the abolition of the title "Queen's Counsel" (replaced by "Senior Counsel", restored in 2012).
In 2003, Clark criticised the Invasion of Iraq without an explicit United Nations mandate, and her government opposed New Zealand military action in the Iraq War. Her government did not send combat troops to Iraq, although some medical and engineering units were sent. Clark's foreign policy reflected the priorities of liberal internationalism, especially the promotion of democracy and human rights; the strengthening of the role of the United Nations; the advancement of antimilitarism and disarmament; and the encouragement of free-trade. In March 2003, referring to the US-led coalition's actions in Iraq, Clark told the newspaper The Sunday Star-Times that, "I don't think that 11 September under a Gore presidency would have had this consequence for Iraq." She later sent a letter to Washington apologising for any offence that her comment may have caused.
On 17 July 2004, a motorcade involving police, Diplomatic Protection Squad, and Ministerial Services staff reached speeds of up to 172 km/h when taking Clark and Cabinet Minister Jim Sutton from Waimate to Christchurch Airport so she could attend a rugby union match in Wellington. The courts subsequently convicted the drivers involved for driving offences, but appeals resulted in the quashing of these convictions in December 2005 and August 2006.
Clark said that she was busy working in the back seat and had no influence or role in the decision to speed and did not realise the speed of her vehicle.
In November 2004, Clark announced that negotiations with China had commenced for a free-trade agreement, eventually signing a comprehensive agreement in July 2008. It was New Zealand's largest trade deal since the 1983 Closer Economic Relations agreement with Australia.
=== Third term: 2005–2008 ===
In 2005, following that year's general election, Labour and the Progressive Party renewed their coalition, with confidence and supply arrangements with both New Zealand First and United Future in exchange for giving the leaders of those parties ministerial positions outside Cabinet. Greens were excluded from the resulting coalition, due to a refusal by United Future and NZ First to work with the Greens in cabinet. They were, however, able to negotiate a cooperation agreement which saw limited input into the budget and broad consultation on policy. Both co-leaders were appointed as government spokespeople outside cabinet, responsible for Energy Efficiency and for the Buy Kiwi Made campaign. Clark became the first Labour leader to win three consecutive elections. Clark won 66% of her electorate's votes, or 20,918 votes with a 14,749 majority.
On Armistice Day, 11 November 2006, Clark attended a service in Hyde Park, London, where a monument commemorating New Zealand's war dead was unveiled. During her visit she met Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and British prime minister Tony Blair.
On 26 May 2006, Clark ordered a military deployment to the 2006 East Timorese crisis alongside international partners.
Clark's major overseas visit of her third term was a trip to the United States in March 2007, where she met with George W. Bush in Washington. Despite her strained relationship with the President, they agreed on many issues, including working cooperatively in foreign affairs, commerce and the need for both nations to work toward energy security.
On 8 February 2008, Clark was recognised as the longest-serving leader of the Labour Party in its history (although some uncertainty exists over the exact date when Harry Holland became party leader), having served for 14 years, 69 days. By 26 October 2008 she had passed Holland's longest possible term and her position as longest-serving Labour leader was put beyond doubt.
By the end of her tenure in office, Clark had come to be seen as a divisive figure, going from a Herald-DigiPoll popularity rating of nearly 60% in 2005 to 42% at the time of the 2008 general election. Portrayals of Clark as controlling and manipulative after the 2005 election increased when she abandoned her consensus-managerial approach, such as during the New Zealand foreshore and seabed controversy, and her support of the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Act 2007 (the so-called anti-smacking law). She was accused of having a "nanny state" approach to social issues, a perception captured by the pejorative term 'Helengrad'.
Labour had been consistently behind the National Party in opinion polls since 2006, and the gap widened significantly in early 2007. On 5 August 2008 the Treasury announced that the New Zealand economy had entered a recession.
Clark's personal popularity was eclipsed by John Key soon after the latter's election as National Party Leader in November 2006. In the final media polls prior to the 2008 election Key was ahead of Clark in preferred prime minister polls by eight points in the Fairfax Media Nielsen poll and four points in the One News Colmar Brunton poll. In the 2008 election campaign, Clark attacked the National Party as "insincere" in its promise to maintain many of her government's flagship projects, such as KiwiSaver and Kiwibank.
National overtook Labour as the largest party following the 2008 election. Labour did not have the numbers to ally with smaller parties and no viable path to government; Clark conceded defeat to Key and announced that she was standing down as party leader. On 11 November 2008 Clark was succeeded by Phil Goff as Leader of the Labour Party. In the first Labour Party conference after its defeat Phil Goff acknowledged that Clark's government had become identified with "nanny-state" policies in the public mind, and said that the party wanted to "draw a line under the past and say, yes, we made mistakes, we didn't listen."
== Reputation and legacy ==
Early in her career, Clark gained a reputation as a capable advocate of nuclear disarmament and public health policy. As party leader, Clark denounced Rogernomics as "a ghastly period" and won the 1999 election by abandoning its legacy. However, biographer Denis Welch has argued that she did not do enough to repudiate the paradigm created by Rogernomics, instead allowing Labour and National to become "increasingly hard to tell apart" on many issues.
Clark's government was pragmatic, managerial, concerned with stability, and focused on incremental changes over grand projects. Political scientist Bryce Edwards argues that Clark was never a "conviction politician" and set out to be a "successful" rather than "great" politician, leaving behind a legacy of incremental reforms of New Zealand and good management of the status quo, but no bold ambitions. Likewise, commentator John Armstrong, while praising Clark, describes her as a "technocratic" prime minister "who will be remembered more for her management abilities than a capacity to inspire".
In January 2009, two months after losing office, Clark was voted 'Greatest Living New Zealander' in an opt-in website poll run by The New Zealand Herald. In a close race she received 25 per cent of the vote, ahead of Victoria Cross recipient Willie Apiata at 21 per cent. Then Prime Minister John Key said he was not surprised by the poll, saying "she is well thought of as a New Zealand Prime Minister."
Forbes magazine ranked Clark the 22nd most powerful woman in the world in 2016, down from 20th in 2006.
== Post-prime ministerial career ==
Clark was the first defeated Labour prime minister to immediately resign the party leadership rather than lead it in Opposition. She served as the shadow foreign affairs spokesperson in the Shadow Cabinet of Phil Goff for several months before retiring from Parliament in April 2009 to accept a position with the United Nations (UN).
=== United Nations Development Programme ===
Clark became the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on 17 April 2009, and was the first woman to lead the organisation. She was also the Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the heads of all UN funds, programmes and departments working on development issues. The New Zealand Government strongly supported her nomination, along with Australia, the Pacific Island nations and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown. She also received the support of the five countries on the bureau of the UNDP board (Iran, Haiti, Serbia, The Netherlands and Tanzania) and was unanimously confirmed by the General Assembly on 31 March. She was sworn in by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 27 April 2009. In this position, Forbes deemed her the 23rd most powerful woman in the world.
In 2013, Forbes upgraded her position to 21st most powerful woman in the world after she was appointed to administer UNDP for a second term and for her potential future as UN Secretary General. She was the only New Zealander to make the list.
Clark was recognised for her managerial style of leadership. During her tenure, she was an advocate of China's Belt and Road Initiative. She worked to reform the administration and bureaucracy of UNDP, with an emphasis on greater transparency in the organisation. The Publish What You Fund campaign ranked UNDP as the most transparent aid organisation in the world in 2015 and 2016, under Clark's administration.
In February 2015, Clark visited Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to express solidarity with those working to prevent the spread of Ebola.
During her tenure, the ratio of women to men at UNDP reached 50%, including at the most senior level of the organisation.
On 24 May 2016, a Foreign Policy article alleged that Clark's tenure as Administrator had "left a trail of embittered peers and subordinates", and accused her of "undercutting the UN's promotion of human rights". The article centred on an allegation that her senior staff retaliated against a critical report of the UNDP by forcing out an official who had participated in the investigation. Both the UNDP and Clark have denied the claims.
On 26 January 2017, Clark announced that she would not seek re-election as UNDP Administrator after the completion of her four-year term. She said it had been an "honour and privilege" to have served in the role. She left UNDP on 19 April 2017.
=== United Nations Secretary-General selection ===
In January 2014, a Guardian interview with Clark raised the possibility that she could take over as UN Secretary-General after Ban Ki-moon's retirement in 2016. She did not confirm her interest, but commented: "There will be interest in whether the UN will have a first woman because they're looking like the last bastions, as it were." She also said in the same interview that: "If there's enough support for the style of leadership that I have, it will be interesting." In response, Prime Minister John Key said the New Zealand Government would support a bid, but cautioned that it would be a tough task to get the job.
On 4 April 2016, Helen Clark officially submitted her nomination as New Zealand's candidate for the 2016 UN Secretary-General selection. In an interview on the same day, Clark stressed that she was running as the gender-neutral best candidate and not "on the basis of being a woman."
The UN's role in the Haiti cholera outbreak has been widely discussed and criticised. There has been indisputable evidence that the UN is the proximate cause for bringing cholera to Haiti. Peacekeepers sent to Haiti from Nepal were carrying asymptomatic cholera and they did not treat their waste properly before dumping it into Haiti's water stream. When asked about compensation for victims, Clark has declined to take a position, calling it "legal issues."
Another issue that received attention during Clark's candidacy was allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers. This gross problem was brought to light after Anders Kompass exposed the sexual assault of children by peacekeepers in the Central African Republic. During the United Nations Secretary General Candidate informal dialogues, Clark said that the UN needed to deal quickly with sexual exploitation and abuse, and gender-based violence by peacekeepers.
Straw polls were taken by secret ballot in October 2016. Clark finished fifth place in the sixth poll; her candidacy was effectively vetoed when three of the permanent Security Council members voted against her.
Clark's bid for Secretary-General is the topic of a documentary film, My Year With Helen, directed by Gaylene Preston, which premiered in February 2018.
=== World Health Organization ===
On 9 July 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) appointed Clark as co-chair of a panel reviewing the WHO's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the response of governments to the outbreak. The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPR) examined how the outbreak occurred and how future pandemics can be prevented. She served in the role alongside former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and of her appointment Clark said she hesitated before accepting because she felt the panel's task was "mission impossible". Clark's appointment to this panel drew criticism from UN Watch's Executive Director Hillel Neuer, who criticised her close ties with the pro-Beijing UN Goodwill Ambassador James Chau and her previous endorsement of Cuba for sending medical personnel abroad. On 11 November, Neuer called on Clark to resign, claiming that her alleged favouritism towards China and the WHO, would affect the investigation into China's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Clark responded that she had no ties with China.
On 19 January, the independent panel concluded that Chinese officials could have moved faster in January 2020 to curb the initial COVID-19 outbreak, and criticised the WHO for not declaring an international emergency until 30 January 2020. In the final report published in May 2021, the panel concluded that the pandemic could have been prevented if countries had taken a more proactive approach in February 2020; Clark said "so many countries chose to wait and see".
=== 2025 China Victory Day Parade ===
Clark along with fellow former prime minister John Key attended the 2025 China Victory Day Parade held in Beijing's Forbidden City on 3 September 2025 to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender at the end of World War II. The two former heads of governments also met with General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Clark and Key were among 70 special international guests invited by Xi to attend the military parade. Clark later told Stuff that she avoided speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, who also attended the military parade. Chinese Ambassador Wang Xiaolong praised the two prime ministers for attending the commemorative events, stating that China and New Zealand had fought side by side during World War II.
== Personal life ==
Clark was brought up as a Presbyterian, attending Sunday school weekly. When she was prime minister she described herself as an agnostic.
She married sociologist Peter Davis in 1981, shortly before she was elected to Parliament. Davis had been Clark’s partner for 5 years but she had come under pressure from some Labour members to marry for political purposes, despite her personal reservations about marriage. Davis is currently a professor in medical sociology and was director of COMPASS (Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences) at the University of Auckland.
After the 1981 elections Clark said: "It was a difficult campaign". In an essay for the book Head and Shoulders in 1984 she said: "As a single woman I was really hammered. I was accused of being a lesbian, of living in a commune, having friends who were Trotskyites and gays...".
In March 2001, Clark referred to National MP Wyatt Creech as a "scumbag" and a "sleazeball" for having raised the issue of a potential conflict of interest involving Davis, who was leading an academic research team studying government health reforms.
Clark is a keen hiker and mountaineer. In August 2008, an expedition group that included Clark and her husband became stranded on the Two Thumb Range, a spur of the Southern Alps, when their guide (and Clark's friend), Gottlieb Braun-Elwert, collapsed and died from a suspected heart attack.
== Views and positions ==
=== Social media ===
During her tenure as UNDP administrator and afterwards, Clark's presence on social media and avid use of Twitter has attracted positive attention in news media. She has called for greater regulation of social media platforms, and supports the Christchurch Call.
=== Cannabis reform ===
During the 2020 New Zealand cannabis referendum, Clark publicly supported the "Yes" vote campaign to decriminalise recreational cannabis, arguing that prohibition did not work. She also featured in the "We Do" campaign supporting the proposed "Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill."
=== Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Iran ===
During the Gaza war, Clark criticised the decision by New Zealand and several other Western governments to halt their aid contributions to UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East) following allegations that several UNRWA workers had participated in the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. She said it was "most regrettable that countries have acted in this precipitous way to defund the organisation on the basis of allegations". While Clark acknowledged that the allegations against UNRWA were serious, she said that "defunding the agency without knowing the outcome of the investigation was not the right decision."
In early March 2026, Clark described the US and Israeli airstrikes during the 2026 Iran war as a "clear breach" of the United Nations Charter, comparing it to the Iraq war and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She criticised Prime Minister Christopher Luxon's unwillingness to condemn US and Israeli actions in Iran as inconsistent with New Zealand's traditional support for international law and the "international rules-based order."
=== AUKUS ===
In April 2024, Clark criticised the National-led coalition government's interest in associate membership of AUKUS, stating that New Zealand foreign policy towards its Western allies was lurching away from "hitherto bipartisan settings." She described this shift as "profoundly undemocratic". Clark also said "that New Zealand has worked on a bipartisan basis for decades to balance its economic interests, democratic values, and nuclear-free and independent foreign policy." She expressed concerns about the country getting drawn into geopolitical games.
In July 2024, Clark joined former National and ACT leader Don Brash in criticising the Government's perceived pro-US shift in New Zealand foreign policy. This came in response to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon's remarks that the Government would be more willing to disclose cases of Chinese espionage in New Zealand and participating in AUKUS Pillar 2.
=== Cook Islands ===
In mid-February 2025, Clark criticised Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown for signing a strategic partnership agreement with China without consulting New Zealand. She said that Brown "seems to have signed behind the backs of his own people as well as of New Zealand."
=== Five Eyes ===
During an interview on TVNZ's Q+A current affairs programme, Clark questioned New Zealand's continued involvement in the Five Eyes intelligence network, saying that it had strayed from its original purpose of being merely a coordinating group for US, British, Canadian, Australian and NZ intelligence agencies into a basis for policy positioning on various issues including joint ministers and finance minister meetings. She said: There's been some talk in the media that Trump might want to evict Canada from it… Please could we follow?
== Awards and honours ==
In 1986, Clark was awarded the annual Peace Prize of the Danish Peace Foundation for her work in promoting peace and nuclear disarmament.
In 1990, Clark received the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal.
In 1993, Clark was awarded the New Zealand Suffrage Centennial Medal.
In 2002, she was presented with the Nuclear-Free Future Award, for "installing New Zealand at the forefront of the world political movement to rid the earth of nuclear weapons".
In 2005, the government of the Solomon Islands awarded Clark (with John Howard) the Star of the Solomon Islands in recognition of New Zealand's role in restoring law and order in the Solomon Islands. This award allows her to use the post-nominal letters "SSI".
In January 2008, Clark won the United Nations Environment Programme Champions of the Earth award in recognition of the government's promotion of sustainability initiatives.
In April 2009, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Auckland, her alma mater.
In the 2010 New Year Honours, Clark was appointed a Member of the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest honour, for services to New Zealand.
She was recognised as one of the BBC's 100 women of 2013.
In September 2017, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the New Zealand Women of Influence Awards
In December 2017, she was awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun.
In 2018, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from Carleton University.
In June 2024, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of St Andrews, exactly half a century since her graduation.
Patronage
Clark is the patron for The Helen Clark Foundation.
Clark is an Honorary Member of The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.
She was the patron of the New Zealand Rugby League between 2002 and 2011, and has served as the patron of the Mount Albert Lions rugby league club for over 20 years.
Clark is an International Honorary Member of Zonta International Zonta International [1]
== In popular culture ==
In 1996, Clark guest starred as herself in the popular New Zealand soap opera Shortland Street. A satirical book, later adapted as a play, titled On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover, by Richard Meros, was published by Lawrence and Gibson in 2005. Clark has also guest-starred on bro'Town, the New Zealand animated television series.
In 2020, the Eden Park Trust Board requested the right to stage six concerts a year, without having to seek individual planning permission – a process that had forced it to drop past concert plans. Clark said concerts at Eden Park stadium would "represent a home invasion of noise" and told a planning hearing the bid for six gigs a year should be rejected. Clark lives four streets from the stadium and told the independent planning commission "one's home is one's sanctuary". The former prime minister moved into her home in 1981 when Eden Park was a venue for daytime cricket and rugby. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Kentucky | University of Kentucky | The University of Kentucky (UK, UKY, or U of K) is a public land-grant research university in Lexington, Kentucky, United States. Founded in 1865 by John Bryan Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, the university is one of the state's two land-grant universities (the other being Kentucky State University). It is the institution with the highest enrollment in the state, with 35,952 students in the fall of 2024.
The institution comprises 16 colleges and offers undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs across a wide range of disciplines.It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research spending and doctorate production". According to the National Science Foundation, Kentucky spent $476.5 million on research and development in 2022, ranking it 61st in the nation.
The University of Kentucky has seven libraries on campus.
The largest is the William T. Young Library, a federal depository that hosts subjects related to social sciences, humanities, and life sciences collections. The university also hosts the Linguistic Atlas Project, an archive of American English dialect survey materials housed in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Since 1997, the university has focused expenditures increasingly on research, following a compact formed by the Kentucky General Assembly. The directive mandated that the university become a "Top 20" public research institution, in terms of an overall ranking to be determined by the university itself, by 2020. Two alumni from the university have won Nobel Prizes.
== History ==
=== University origins ===
In the early commonwealth of Kentucky, higher education was limited to children from prominent families, disciplined apprentices, and young men seeking entry into clerical, legal, and medical professions. As the first university in the territory that would become Kentucky, Transylvania University was the primary center for education. After a merger it became "Kentucky University".
John Bryan Bowman was appointed head of the new "Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky" (called "A&M"), a department of Kentucky University. It received federal support through the Morrill Land-Grant Act in 1865. In 1866 it opened with 190 students and 10 professors, on the campus at Ashland, The Henry Clay Estate. In 1869 James Kennedy Patterson replaced Bowman and the first degree was awarded. In 1876, the university began to offer master's degree programs. In 1878 A&M separated from Kentucky University, which reverted to its original name Transylvania University. For the new school, Lexington donated a 52-acre (210,000 m2) park and fair ground, which became the core of UK's present campus. A&M was initially a male-only institution, but began to admit women in 1880.
In 1892, the official colors of the university, royal blue and white, were adopted. An earlier color set, blue and light yellow, was adopted earlier at a Kentucky-Centre College football game on December 19, 1891. The particular hue of blue was determined from a necktie, which was used to demonstrate the color of royal blue.
On February 15, 1882, Administration Building was the first building of three to be completed on the present campus. Three years later, the college formed the Agricultural Experiment Station, which researches issues relating to agribusiness, food processing, nutrition, water and soil resources and the environment. This was followed up by the creation of the university's Agricultural Extension Service in 1910, which was one of the first in the United States. The extension service became a model of the federally mandated programs that were required beginning in 1914.
=== Coeducational school: modern period ===
Patterson Hall, the school's first women's dormitory, was constructed in 1904. Residents had to cross a swampy depression, where the now demolished Student Center later stood, to reach central campus. Four years later, the school's name was changed to the "State University, Lexington, Kentucky" upon reaching university status, and then to the "University of Kentucky" in 1916. The university led to the creation of the College of Home Economics in 1916, and Mary E. Sweeney was promoted from chair of the Department of Home Economics to dean of the college. (Later renamed the College of Human Environmental Sciences, this educational unit was folded into the College of Agriculture in 2003 as the School of Human Environmental Sciences). The College of Commerce was established in 1925, known today as the Gatton College of Business and Economics.
In 1929, Memorial Hall was completed, dedicated to the 2,756 Kentuckians who died in World War I. This was followed up by the new King Library, which opened in 1931 and was named for a long-time library director, Margaret I. King.
On March 15, 1948, Lyman T. Johnson applied to the University of Kentucky Graduate School for a doctorate degree in the Philosophy of History. Johnson was subsequently denied admission, with the registrar citing the previously passed Day Law. Johnson, citing Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 filed suit against the university for wrongful discrimination and failure to maintain equal learning intuitions. On April 27, 1949, Hiram Church Ford presided over the court case. After one day of testimony, Ford determined that the Commonwealth had failed to establish a graduate school with equal opportunity and educational quality as the graduate students offered to whites. Citing the Fourteenth amendment, Ford ruled that all qualified individuals, regardless of race, be allowed to attend the university's graduate program until an equally academically acceptable institution is established for the use of African Americans. The university's graduate and professional programs became racially integrated in 1949 when Lyman T. Johnson, an African American, won a lawsuit to be admitted to the graduate program. Blacks were not allowed to attend as undergraduates until 1954, following the US Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision.
In 1939, Governor Happy Chandler appointed the first woman trustee on the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees, Georgia M. Blazer of Ashland. She served from 1939 to 1960. In 1962, Blazer Hall was opened as the Georgia M Blazer Hall for Women in tribute to her.
Ground was broken for the Albert B. Chandler Hospital in 1955, when Kentucky Governor Happy Chandler recommended that the Kentucky General Assembly appropriate $5 million for the creation of the University of Kentucky College of Medicine and a medical center at the university. This was completed after a series of studies were conducted that highlighted the health needs of the citizens, as well as the need to train more physicians. Five years later, the College of Medicine and College of Nursing opened, followed by the College of Dentistry in 1962.
Nine years after the founding of The Northern Extension Center in Covington, representing the Ashland Independent School Board of Education, Ashland attorney Henderson Dysard and Ashland Oil & Refining Company founder and CEO Paul G. Blazer presented a proposal to President Dickey and the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees for the university to take over the day-to-day operations and curriculum of the Ashland [municipal] Junior College, creating the Ashland Center of the University of Kentucky in 1957. University of Kentucky Extension Centers in Fort Knox (1958), Cumberland (1960), and Henderson (1960) followed.
In 1959, the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce opened and began training professionals at the master's and doctoral level for careers in international affairs.
Authorized by the Kentucky General Assembly and signed by Governor Bert Combs on March 6, 1962, a mandate was placed upon the University of Kentucky to form a community college system. Two years later, the board of trustees implemented the legislation and established the Community College System, creating centers in Covington, Ashland, Fort Knox, Cumberland, Henderson and Elizabethtown. In 1969, the Patterson Office Tower was completed, currently the tallest building on campus.
In May 1970, students at the university began protesting the shootings at Kent State University. In response, Governor Louie Nunn deferred to the National Guard in an attempt to disperse the protesters. A ROTC building was destroyed by fire. The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries has 13 oral history interviews with participants in the protests, university officials as well as former governor Nunn. Nine years later, the Singletary Center for the Arts opened, named in honor of former university president Otis Singletary.
=== Contemporary history ===
In 1997, the Kentucky General Assembly reorganized the community college system, withdrawing the university's jurisdiction from all but the Lexington Community College. The other colleges were merged with the Kentucky Technical College system and were placed under a separate board of control.
On April 3, 1998, work began on the William T. Young Library, which was the largest university project at the time of completion. The six-level William T. Young Library was constructed on south campus and the largest book endowment among all public university libraries in the country. William T. Young got his fortune from selling his peanut butter company to Procter & Gamble in 1955. Nine years after the completion of the William T. Young Library, on April 13, 2007, an entire city block of neighborhood homes were demolished and ground was broken for the Biological Pharmaceutical Complex Building, the largest academic building in the state of Kentucky, and one of the largest in the United States.
The Biological Pharmaceutical Complex Building complements the adjacent Biomedical Biological Science Research Building, and is expected to be part of the new university research campus. Other recent announcements include the construction of the new $450 million Albert B. Chandler Hospital, which will was one of the largest projects in the state's history in terms of size and economic impact.
In 1997, the Kentucky General Assembly formed a compact with the university. The Top 20 Plan mandated that the University of Kentucky would become a "Top 20" public research university by 2020. According to the compact, states with "Top 20" universities feature higher average household incomes, higher education attainments, healthier lives and more financial security. The plan would also spur technological advancements due to university-based research and increase the marketability of the state to investors.
University leader claimed that the plan produced some results, including:
Enrollment increased.
The six-year graduation rate increased from 59.5 percent in 1998 to 61.2 percent in 2007.
Research expenditures increased from $124.8 million in 1996 to $297.6 million in 2003. It dipped slightly to $274 million for 2005. It is currently ranked 28th among public universities in sponsored research.
Endowment increased from $195.1 million in 1997 to $538.4 million in 2005.
In 2000, the university launched "The Campaign for the University of Kentucky", a $600 million fundraising effort that was used to "enhance facilities, academic programs, public service, and scholarships." It passed that goal and the effort was raised to $1 billion. In March 2007, $1.022 billion was raised, months before the fundraising effort was set to end.
As of 2019, The University of Kentucky had an endowment of $1.407 billion. Prior endowments were $831.8 million in 2007, $538.4 million in 2005, and $195.1 million in 1997; the rapid increases were partially attributed to the Top 20 Plan. The William T. Young Library book endowment is the largest among public universities in the United States.
In 2018, the new Gatton Student Center was opened on North Campus. The 378,000-square-foot facility contains a cinema, several dining facilities, ballrooms, a bookstore, bank, offices, and more.
== Academics ==
=== Departments ===
Students are divided into 16 colleges, and the university offers undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs across a wide range of disciplines. The University of Kentucky has fifteen libraries on campus. The largest is William T. Young Library, a federal depository, hosting subjects related to social sciences, humanities and life sciences collections. In recent years, the university has focused expenditures increasingly on research, following a compact formed by the Kentucky General Assembly in 1997. The directive mandated that the university become a Top 20 public research institution, in terms of an overall ranking to be determined by the university itself, by 2020. The university is ranked 152 in National Universities and 81 among public universities in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report rankings. According to the U.S. News & World Report 2023 ranking table, UK Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences is ranked 6th in the nation whereas the Graduate School of Medicine (Research) is ranked 64th (tie).
Students are divided into several colleges based on their interests and specializations:
College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, founded 1908
College of Arts and Sciences, founded 1908
Gatton College of Business and Economics, founded 1925 (originally as the College of Commerce)
College of Communication & Information, founded 1976
College of Dentistry, founded 1962
College of Design, founded 1964 (originally as the College of Architecture)
College of Education, founded 1923
Pigman College of Engineering, founded 1918 (through a merger of the original Colleges of Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Mines and Metals)
College of Fine Arts, founded 1976
College of Health Sciences, founded 1966 (originally as the College of Allied Health Personnel)
J. David Rosenberg College of Law, founded 1908
College of Medicine, founded 1954
College of Nursing, founded 1956
College of Pharmacy, founded 1947 (originally established in 1870 in Louisville)
College of Public Health, founded 2004
College of Social Work, founded 1968
University of Kentucky Graduate School, founded 1912
Martin School of Public Policy and Administration
Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce
Other colleges no longer in existence at the University of Kentucky include the College of Library Science (separating out of the College of Arts & Sciences in 1968 and incorporated in 2003 into what is now the College of Communication and Information) and the College of Home Economics (created in 1916 and whose founding dean was Mary E. Sweeney) now a School of Human Environmental Sciences located within the College of Agriculture.
=== Lewis Honors College ===
The Honors Program at the University of Kentucky began in 1958. It offers interdisciplinary, seminar-style classes of 15–20 students each as well as "H-section" classes that accelerate common course offerings such as chemistry, biology, and physics.
In October 2015, the University of Kentucky received the largest single gift in its history, $23.5 million from alumnus, longtime donor and successful entrepreneur Thomas W. Lewis and his wife Jan to create the Lewis Honors College. Subsequently, the Honors Program at UK became the Lewis Honors College. In 2017, the Honors Program became the Lewis Honors College. Its headquarters are in Lewis Hall, which also serves as one of several residence halls for Honors College students.
== Student life ==
=== Students ===
The University of Kentucky strives for a diverse and international student population, with a selective admissions process.
In fall 2014, there were 30,000 students enrolled for the first time. This is due in part by the high number of out-of-state students. The percentage mix of students at this time were 62% in state and 38% out-of-state. During this time, the freshman class was recorded at 5,000 students.
=== Student government ===
The University of Kentucky Student Government Association (UKSGA) represents all undergraduate, graduate and professional students enrolled at the university in several critical ways. UKSGA exists to increase student influence over academic policy and to provide many helpful, creative and necessary student services. UKSGA also exists to protect and expand student substantive and procedural rights with the university and surrounding municipalities. Finally, UKSGA exists to better represent the student body in relations with faculty, administration, Board of Trustees and the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
UKSGA includes an Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branch.
Executive Branch: oversees day-to-day operations, manages budget, and facilitates major programs.
Legislative Branch: includes the Student Senate. There are 46 legislators in this branch. Their goal is to allocate funds, approve presidential appointments, facilitate legislative changes, and represent the larger student voice.
Judicial: composed of one chief justice and six Supreme Court justices. The Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of legislation, handles claims levied against SGA officials, hears any election rules violation complaints and validates election results.
Several of their current programs include:
Kentucky Wildcab: a late night transportation service designed to enhance the safety efforts of the university and surrounding community in partnership with UK Transportation.
Wildcat Wardrobe: provides UK students with free professional dress clothing for interviews and jobs
Safe CATS: provides UK students with a safer way to travel around campus by having SafeCats team members escort students to their destinations on-foot or by golf cart
Student Legal Services: free on-site consultation for any legal issue by a local attorney
Childcare Grants: available for part-time and full-time UK students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, who need financial assistance for day-care service for their children.
Scholarships
Student Organization Funding: General Funding Grants, Club Sports Grants, Service Grants, Academic/Professional Conferences, and Senate Special Projects
Several distinguished student body presidents include Governor Steve Beshear.
=== Theater ===
In the early twentieth century, a group called The Strollers consisted of performers either studying or employed at the university or nearby. They performed regularly at the Lexington Opera House. In 1910, their first production there was the 1839 historical play Richelieu. At the end of the spring semester in 1918, as World War I was nearing its end, they performed several skits about war life and then projected large photographic images "showing actual battle scenes" and the humanitarian work of the Red Cross. University girls dressed as nurses served as ushers.
The first theater on UK grounds was the Campus Theater. In 1922, the university bought the Consolidated Baptist Church, a historically black congregation. The church's pastor had been Peter Vinegar. A group of performers and their benefactors, led by Carol M. Sax, raised more money to make the church into a theater, calling it Romany. They performed The Miracle of Sister Beatrice by Maurice Maeterlinck in 1927. In 1928, it was renamed Guignol Theater, after Théâtre du Grand Guignol in Paris, a theater on the Rue Chaptal from 1897 to 1962, housed in a former chapel and with seats for 293. After leaving Lexington, Sax staged Arthur Wilmurt's The Guest Room on Broadway in 1931; it ran for a respectable 67 shows. Eleanor Roosevelt attended opening night of his production of I.J. Golden's Re-Echo in New York in 1934; it ran for only 5 shows.
Frank C. Fowler was the second director of the Kentucky Guignol; he had received his master's degree from Brown University in 1928 and was hired by UK that same year. He was followed by Wallace Briggs. The fire that gutted UK's Guignol in 1947 is captured on film. In the 1930s and 1940s, one-act plays written by students were performed annually. A new Guignol Theater was opened in the Fine Arts Building in February, 1950 with a production of Medea. Two Blind Mice, a political satire by Samuel and Bella Spewack, followed after Medea.
During the 1950s, plays performed at the Guignol would often go on tour throughout Kentucky in the summer months.
=== Student media ===
The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department was the home of one of the earliest college amateur radio stations in the United States, beginning with W4JP that began continuous operation prior to World War I. In 1927, the station was relicensed as 9JL (later W9JL).
Students currently run two independent FM stations. The first, 91.3 FM WUKY, is a Triple-A station and was the first university-owned FM radio station in the United States and Kentucky's first public radio station. The operations started on October 17, 1940, as WBKY out of Beattyville, although the station moved five years later to Lexington.
In 1971, WBKY was one of the first to carry NPR's "All Things Considered" and helped debut National Public Radio, changing its call letters to WUKY in 1989 to better reflect its affiliation with the university. In 2007, it became the first Lexington radio station to broadcast in high-definition digital radio. The second is 88.1 FM WRFL-"Radio Free Lexington" which has been in operation since 1988. WRFL is operated by students and broadcasts live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and features music that is spread across most genres.
The campus is also served by the Kentucky Kernel, a student-run, financially independent daily newspaper, with the first issue published in 1915. The official yearbook of the University of Kentucky is the Kentuckian, first published in 1906. The Kentuckian was preceded by at least one previous book, the Echo.
=== Black Student Union ===
The University of Kentucky Black Student Union (BSU) was established on February 17, 1968. They were the first organization on campus that was created to support and protect students of color. Their goal was to fight for change on campus for diverse students. They work closely with other organizations on campus such as the Student Activities Board, Student Government Association and various fraternities. Their main mission is to educate the campus community on Black American students and to assist incoming minority students.
Jim Embry, born in Richmond, Kentucky, was the founding member of the organization, as well as, the first elected president. 51 years later, Embry is still fighting for progress in the social injustices and systemic racism on campus.
=== Greek life ===
Nineteen sororities and twenty-three fraternities representing over 3,000 students. There are also non-Greek organizations on campus, like Alpha Kappa Psi, a business fraternity and Tau Beta Sigma, a band fraternity. In 2007, the UK paper The Kentucky Kernel unleashed criticism and gained national attention for an editorial cartoon that depicted an African American pledge being auctioned; it was a comment on racial segregation in UK's Greek system. FarmHouse's chapter was suspended in 2021 for four years by the university, after a pledge died while attending a party in the fraternity's house. In 2023, Phi Tau was suspended for misuse of alcohol and other violations of law.
=== Athletics ===
University of Kentucky student-athletes compete as the Wildcats under colors Kentucky blue and white.
Beginning in the 1890s, students at the A&M scheduled football games with neighboring colleges. In 1902, the women's basketball program began on campus, and the men's team was added one year later. The "Wildcats" became associated with the university shortly after a football victory over Illinois on October 9, 1909. The then-chief of the military department, Commandant Carbuiser, stated that the team had "fought like wildcats." The slogan was later adopted by the university, and a costumed mascot debuted in 1976.
In 1930, then-high school coach Adolph Rupp was hired as a basketball coach and worked in that capacity for 42 years, retiring 1972. During his tenure, he led the men's basketball team to four NCAA championships in 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1958. The Wildcats later won a fifth championship under Joe B. Hall in 1978, another in 1996 under Rick Pitino and the next under Orlando "Tubby" Smith in 1998. In 2007, the University of Kentucky named Billy Gillispie as the head coach of the men's basketball team and on March 30, 2009, the university named John Calipari as the head coach of the Wildcats. Calipari coached the team to its eighth national title in 2012.
The university boasts of numerous national championships, with its latest coming in spring 2021 in women's volleyball for the fall 2020 season. UK also boasts of a cross country national team championship (women's, 1988), eight individual championships in gymnastics, an Olympic medalist in track and field, and 24 national championships in cheerleading. (Not an NCAA recognized championship) After defeating number-one ranked Oklahoma 13–7 in the Sugar Bowl under legendary coach Bear Bryant, Kentucky was also a co-national champion for the 1950 season.
The University of Kentucky Dance team was ranked fifth in the nation in Hip Hop and seventh in Pom in 2015.
Other athletic programs sponsored at the varsity level include baseball, men's and women's basketball, men's and women's cross country running, football, men's and women's golf, women's gymnastics, the coeducational sport of rifle, men's and women's soccer, women's softball, men's and women's swimming and diving, men's and women's tennis, men's and women's track and field and women's volleyball. The school also has a popular club-level men's ice hockey team and a rugby program that competes at the Division 1 level.
The University of Kentucky football coach is Mark Stoops, named the successor to Joker Phillips, who was the first African American football coach in Kentucky's history.
Notable among a number of songs commonly played and sung at various events such as commencement, convocation and athletic games is the University of Kentucky fight song: On, On, U of K. Additionally, the song Kentucky Fight is played before games.
In April 2024, a Title IX sexual violence lawsuit was filed against the University of Kentucky which alleged that there was a "toxic, sexually hostile environment" within the university swim program during the time Lars Jorgensen was swim coach between 2013 and 2023. The lawsuit further accused the university of "complicity" with Jorgensen and allowed him "to prey on, sexually harass, and commit horrific sexual assaults and violent rapes against young female coaches and collegiate athletes who were reliant on him."
=== Esports ===
University of Kentucky partnered up with South Korean Esport Organization Gen.G Esports and International Studies Abroad (ISA) to launch an international esports exchange programme in Seoul, South Korea.
== Traditions ==
== Campus ==
The University of Kentucky offers seven main dining facilities, 23 residence halls, and numerous recreation facilities spread between three distinct campuses: north, south, and central. It is also home to more than 250 student-run organizations.
The university campus is home to numerous notable structures, such as Main Building, a four-story administration building dating to 1882, which was gutted by fire on May 15, 2001. The Patterson Office Tower is the tallest building on campus.
The University of Kentucky once operated 14 community colleges with more than 100 extended sites, centers and campuses under the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, but relinquished control under the Postsecondary Education Improvement Act of 1997. The network of community colleges is now known as the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS). Adjoining Lexington Community College, despite the reorganization of the community colleges, remained integrated with the university, but separated from the University of Kentucky in 2004 and became a part of KCTCS; it is now known as Bluegrass Community and Technical College.
The College of Engineering currently operates a satellite campus in Paducah, located on the campus of West Kentucky Community and Technical College.
=== Campus libraries ===
The University of Kentucky is home to seven campus libraries. Among them is the William T. Young Library, which houses a general undergraduate collection and social sciences, humanities, business, biology, and agricultural materials. The library is also a Federal Depository Library and a public library for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
=== Campus landmarks ===
The University of Kentucky has several noteworthy landmarks:
Kroger Field
Memorial Coliseum
Memorial Hall
Singletary Center for the Arts
University of Kentucky Art Museum
University of Kentucky/Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government Arboretum
University of Kentucky Research and Education Center Botanical Garden
William T. Young Library
== Notable faculty ==
Kimberly W. Anderson, Chemist, Gill Eminent Professor of Chemical Engineering and Associate Dean for Administration and Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering
John Clubbe, expert on Byron, Guggenheim Fellow
Gary Ferland, Astrophysicist
Lori Stewart Gonzalez, speech pathologist and 23rd president of Ohio University
Arthur G. Hunt, American plant and soils scientist
Milena Minkova, Latinist specializing in Neo-Latin studies and spoken Latin
Melynda Price, Professor of Law, Director of African American and Africana Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences
Juan Trigos, composer and conductor
Terence Tunberg, Latinist specialising in Neo-Latin studies and spoken Latin
Ronald Werner-Wilson (born 1962), Chair of the Family Studies Department and Kathryn Louise Chellgren Endowed Professor for Research in Family Studies
== Notable alumni ==
The university has more than 140,246 alumni in the state of Kentucky, 216,737 in the United States, and 1,119 internationally. The University of Kentucky Alumni Association is the primary affiliation for former students and faculty, and is located at the corner of Rose Street and Euclid Avenue. The building, dedicated in 1963, is named for Helen G. King, the first permanent director of the association and a former "Miss University of Kentucky". The association also meets at Spindletop Hall, a large mansion along Iron Works Pike, which serves as a central alumni gathering point.
The University of Kentucky boasts seven governors, including four former Governors of Kentucky: Steve Beshear, Ernie Fletcher, Paul E. Patton, and Albert "Happy" Chandler; Chandler was also a former U.S. Senator, and was the Commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1945 to 1951. Rounding out the other seven are the former Governor of Ohio Ted Strickland, former Governor of North Carolina Beverly Perdue, and former Governor of Arkansas Tom Jefferson Terral. Former U.S. Representative Ken Lucas from the commonwealth's fourth congressional district, and current U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell are other government officials that called the university home. Kelly Craft (née Guilfoil), former United States Ambassador to the United Nations and United States Ambassador to Canada, attended the university.
The United Methodist Bishop Alfred W. Gwinn also attended the university.
Carol Martin "Bill" Gatton, an automobile dealer executive, was the donor of the largest gift ever to the university, and is the namesake for the Gatton College of Business and Economics and the Gatton Student Center. Paul Chellgren, Chairman and CEO of Ashland Inc., also attended the university, and is the namesake for Chellgren Hall, formerly known as Woodland Glen I.
The university was also the home of Thomas Hunt Morgan, a scientist and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and William Lipscomb, 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doris Yvonne Wilkinson was the first African American to graduate from the university as an undergraduate student in 1958, and Joyce Hamilton Berry, a former clinical psychologist, was the first female African American to earn a Ph.D. from UK in 1970. Journalist and Miss USA 2021 Elle Smith, an African American, also attended the university.
Actresses such as Miss Elizabeth, Ashley Judd, and Adunni Ade also attended the university. Randall Cobb, a wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers; Josh Hines-Allen, a defensive end for the Jacksonville Jaguars; Anthony Davis, a power forward and center for the Dallas Mavericks; and Derek Bryant, a former outfielder for the Oakland Athletics from 1973 to 1981, are a few sports alumni from the university. Tyrese Maxey is a point guard for the 76ers. |
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_in_music | 1928 in music | This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1928.
== Specific locations ==
1928 in British music
1928 in Norwegian music
== Specific genres ==
1928 in country music
1928 in jazz
== Events ==
April 27 – Igor Stravinsky's ballet Apollon musagète receives its première in Washington.
May 5 – Composers Alban Berg and George Gershwin meet for the first time, in Vienna.
June – 1928 International Columbia Graphophone Competition, sponsored by the Columbia Graphophone Company to mark Schubert's death centenary, is judged in Vienna. Kurt Atterberg's Sixth Symphony is the winner and becomes probably the first major piece to be premiered on disc.
August 31 – The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), adapted by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and composer Kurt Weill (with set designer Caspar Neher) from The Beggar's Opera, receives its première in Berlin at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm with Harald Paulsen and Lotte Lenya (Weill's wife) in the principal rôles.
September 11 – Leoš Janáček's String Quartet No. 2, Intimate Letters, receives its première in Brno.
September 12 – Anton Webern's String Trio receives its première in Siena.
September 14 – Carl Nielsen's Clarinet Concerto is given its first performance.
September 21 – Al Jolson marries Ruby Keeler.
November 22 – Maurice Ravel's Bolero receives its première in Paris at the Palais Garnier.
November 27 – Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Baiser de la fée receives its première in Paris.
December 2 – Arnold Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra receives its première in Berlin
December 29 – Pinetop Smith records "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" in Chicago; released in 1929 (the year of Smith's death) it becomes the first hit boogie-woogie recording.
Edward German is knighted for services to music.
Eric Fenby begins work as amanuensis for Frederick Delius.
Maurice Ravel embarks on a concert tour of the United States, where he meets George Gershwin.
Tampa Red's recording career begins.
Scrapper Blackwell makes his first recordings for Vocalion Records.
Leroy Carr's recording career begins with the release of "How Long, How Long Blues".
The first commercial recordings of Cajun music are released.
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra makes its Carnegie Hall début.
== Published popular music ==
"Alabama Song" w. Bertolt Brecht m. Kurt Weill
"Anything You Say" w.m. Walter Donaldson
"Baby" w. Dorothy Fields m. Jimmy McHugh. Recorded and sung by Adelaide Hall
"Back in Your Own Backyard" w.m. Dave Dreyer, Al Jolson & Billy Rose
"Basin Street Blues" w.m. Spencer Williams
"Because My Baby Don't Mean Maybe Now" w.m. Walter Donaldson
"The Big Rock Candy Mountains" Harry McClintock
"Bill" w. P.G. Wodehouse & Oscar Hammerstein II m. Jerome Kern. Introduced by Helen Morgan in the musical Showboat and performed by Miss Morgan in the 1929 and 1936 film versions.
"Blue Yodel" w. Jimmie Rodgers
"Bolero" m. Maurice Ravel
"Button Up Your Overcoat" w. B.G. DeSylva & Lew Brown m. Ray Henderson. Introduced by Ruth Etting.
"Calling To You" by Jack Lumsdaine
"Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Jerome Kern
"Carolina Moon" w. Benny Davis m. Joe Burke
"Cherry" w.m. Don Redman
"Chiquita" w. L. Wolfe Gilbert m. Mabel Wayne
"C-O-N-S-T-A-N-T-I-N-O-P-L-E" w.m. Harry Carlton
"Coquette" w. Gus Kahn m. Carmen Lombardo & John Green
"Cow Cow Blues" m. Cow Cow Davenport
"Crazy Rhythm" w. Irving Caesar m. Joseph Meyer & Roger Wolfe Kahn. Introduced by Ben Bernie, Peggy Chamberlain and June O'Dea in the musical Here's Howe.
"Dance, Little Lady" w.m Noël Coward. Introduced by Sonnie Hale in the revue This Year of Grace
"Diga Diga Doo" w. Dorothy Fields m. Jimmy McHugh. Introduced by Adelaide Hall in the revue Blackbirds of 1928
"Do I Hear You Saying?" w. Lorenz Hart m. Richard Rodgers. Introduced by Charles King and Flora Le Breton in the musical Present Arms.
"Doin' The New Low-Down" w. Dorothy Fields m. Jimmy McHugh. Introduced by Bill Robinson in the revue Blackbirds of 1928.
"Don't Look At Me That Way" w.m. Cole Porter. Introduced by Irène Bordoni in the musical Paris.
"Dusky Stevedore" w. Andy Razaf m. J. C. Johnson
"Empty Bed Blues" w.m. J. C. Johnson
"Fancy Our Meeting" w. Douglas Furber m. Joseph Meyer & Philip Charig. Introduced by Jack Buchanan and Elsie Randolph in the musical That's a Good Girl.
"Forgetting You" w. B.G. DeSylva & Lew Brown m. Ray Henderson
"From Monday On" w. Bing Crosby m. Harry Barris
"A Garden In The Rain" w. James Dyrenforth m. Carroll Gibbons
"A Gay Caballero" w.m. Frank Crumit & Lou Klein
"Get Out And Get Under The Moon" w. Charles Tobias & William Jerome m. Larry Shay
"Glad Rag Doll" w.m. Dan Dougherty and Milton Ager
"De Glory Road" w. Clement Wood m. Jacques Wolfe
"Golden Gate" by Billy Rose & Dave Dreyer
"Honey" w. Seymour Simons & Haven Gillespie m. Richard A. Whiting
"Hooray for Captain Spaulding" w. Bert Kalmar m. Harry Ruby. Introduced by Zeppo Marx, Robert Greig, Margaret Dumont and Groucho Marx in the musical Animal Crackers and also performed by them in the 1930 film version.
"How About Me?" w.m. Irving Berlin
"How Long Has This Been Going On?" w. Ira Gershwin m. George Gershwin. Introduced by Bobbe Arnst in the musical Rosalie. Performed by Audrey Hepburn in the 1957 film Funny Face
"I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby" w. Dorothy Fields m. Jimmy McHugh. Introduced by Adelaide Hall at Les Ambassedeurs Club, Broadway, January 1928 in the revue Lew Leslie's Blackbird Revue and in May at the Liberty Theatre, Broadway in Blackbirds of 1928.
"I Must Have That Man" w. Dorothy Fields m. Jimmy McHugh. Introduced by Adelaide Hall in the revue Blackbirds of 1928
"I Wanna Be Loved by You" w. Bert Kalmar m. Harry Ruby & Herbert Stothart. Introduced by Helen Kane and Dan Healy in the musical Good Boy. Performed by Miss Kane dubbing for Debbie Reynolds in the 1950 film Three Little Words.
"I'd Rather Be Blue Over You" w. Billy Rose m. Fred Fisher. Introduced by Fanny Brice in the film My Man.
"If I Had You" w.m. Ted Shapiro, Jimmy Campbell & Reg Connelly
"I'll Get By" w. Roy Turk m. Fred E. Ahlert
"I'm a Ding Dong Daddy From Dumas" w.m. Phil Baxter
"I'm Bringing A Red, Red Rose" w. Gus Kahn m. Walter Donaldson. Introduced by Paul Gregory and Frances Upton in the musical Whoopee!
"I'm On The Crest Of A Wave" w. B.G. DeSylva & Lew Brown m. Ray Henderson. Introduced by Harry Richman in the revue George White's Scandals of 1928
"I've Got a Crush on You" w. Ira Gershwin m. George Gershwin. Introduced by Clifton Webb and Mary Hay in the musical Treasure Girl.
"Is There Anything Wrong In That?" w.m. Michael H. Cleary & Herb Magidson
"It's Tight Like That" Georgia Tom, Hudson "Tampa Red" Whittaker
"Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time" w. L. Wolfe Gilbert m. Nathaniel Shilkret
"Jimmy, the Well-Dressed Man" w.m. Jimmy Durante
"Let's Do It" w.m. Cole Porter. Introduced by Irene Bordoni and Arthur Margetson in the musical Paris.
"Let's Misbehave" w.m. Cole Porter
"Life Upon The Wicked Stage" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Jerome Kern
"Louisiana" w. Andy Razaf & Bob Schafer m. J. C. Johnson
"Love Me or Leave Me" w. Gus Kahn m. Walter Donaldson
"Lover, Come Back to Me" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Sigmund Romberg
"Ma Belle" w. Clifford Grey m. Rudolf Friml
"Mack The Knife" w. (Eng) Marc Blitzstein (Ger) Bertolt Brecht m. Kurt Weill
"Make Believe" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Jerome Kern
"Makin' Whoopee" w. Gus Kahn m. Walter Donaldson
"Malagueña" m. Ernesto Lecuona
"March Of The Musketeers" w. P. G. Wodehouse & Clifford Grey m. Rudolf Friml. Introduced by Dennis King, Douglass Dumbrille, Detmar Poppen, Joseph Macauley and chorus in the theatre musical The Three Musketeers
"Marie" w.m. Irving Berlin
"Memories of France" by Al Dubin
"My Blackbirds Are Bluebirds Now" w. Irving Caesar m. Cliff Friend
"My Baby Just Cares for Me" w. Gus Kahn m. Walter Donaldson
"My Lucky Star" w. B.G. DeSylva & Lew Brown m. Ray Henderson
"My Mammy" w. Walter Donaldson, Joe Young & Sam M. Lewis. Sung by Al Jolson.
"Nagasaki" w. Mort Dixon m. Harry Warren
"Oh, So Nice!" w. Ira Gershwin m. George Gershwin from Treasure Girl
"One Kiss" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Sigmund Romberg
"Pirate Jenny" w. Bertolt Brecht m. Kurt Weill
"Room 1411" m. Glenn Miller & Benny Goodman
"'Round Evening" w. Herb Steiner & J. Fred Coots m. George Whiting
"She's Funny That Way" w. Richard A. Whiting m. Neil Moret
"Short'nin' Bread" adapt. w.m. Jacques Wolfe
"Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Sigmund Romberg. Introduced by William O'Neal in the operetta The New Moon. Performed in the 1940 film New Moon by Nelson Eddy.
"The Song Of The Prune" Frank Crumit, De Costa
"Sonny Boy" w.m. Al Jolson, B.G. DeSylva, Lew Brown & Ray Henderson
"St James Infirmary" w.m. Joe Primrose
"Stack O'Lee" trad arr. Cliff Edwards
"Stouthearted Men" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Sigmund Romberg
"Sugar (That Sugar Baby of Mine)" w.m. Maceo Pinkard & Sidney D. Mitchell
"Sweet Lorraine" w. Mitchell Parish m. Cliff Burwell
"Sweet Sue" w. Will J. Harris m. Victor Young
"Sweetheart Of All My Dreams" w.m. Art Fitch, Kay Fitch & Bert Lowe
"Sweethearts On Parade" w. Charles Newman m. Carmen Lombardo
"'Tain't So, Honey, 'Tain't So" w.m. Willard Robison
"That's My Weakness Now" w.m. Bud Green & Sam H. Stept
"There Ain't No Sweet Man (That's Worth The Salt Of My Tears)" w.m. Fred Fisher
"There's a Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder" w.m. Dave Dreyer, Billy Rose & Al Jolson
"Together" w. B.G. DeSylva & Lew Brown m. Ray Henderson
"Wanting You" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Sigmund Romberg. Introduced by Evelyn Herbert and Robert Halliday in the operetta The New Moon. Performed in the 1930 film version by Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbett.
"West End Blues" w.m. Joseph Oliver & Clarence Williams
"When You're Smiling" w.m. Mark Fisher, Joe Goodwin & Larry Shay
"Willow Tree" w. Andy Razaf m. Thomas Waller from the musical Keep Shufflin'
"World Weary" w.m. Noël Coward. Introduced by Beatrice Lillie in the revue This Year of Grace
"You Are Love" w. Oscar Hammerstein II m. Jerome Kern
"You Took Advantage of Me" w. Lorenz Hart m. Richard Rodgers
"You Wouldn't Fool Me" w. B. G. De Sylva & Lew Brown m. Ray Henderson
"You're The Cream In My Coffee" w. B.G. DeSylva & Lew Brown m. Ray Henderson
== Top popular recordings ==
The following songs achieved the highest positions in Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories 1890-1954 and record sales reported on the "Discography of American Historical Recordings" website during 1928: Numerical rankings are approximate, they are only used as a frame of reference.
=== 1928 Harlem Hit Parade (non-official) ===
(created with Popular Music Chart Entries)
=== Other important recordings ===
"The Mooche" by Duke Ellington
"Muggles" by Louis Armstrong
"Big Bill Blues" by Big Bill Broonzy
"Prison Cell Blues" by Blind Lemon Jefferson
"Statesboro Blues" by Blind Willie McTell (released 1929)
"Playing With the Strings" by Lonnie Johnson
"How Long, How Long Blues" by Leroy Carr
"It's Tight Like That" by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom
"I Used To Be Your Sweet Mama" by Bessie Smith
"Son de la Loma" by Trio Matamoros
== Classical music ==
Aaron Avshalomov – Four Biblical Tableaux
Granville Bantock – Pagan Symphony
Samuel Barber – Serenade, Op. 1, for string quartet (or string orchestra)
Béla Bartók – String Quartet No. 4
Werner Egk – Concerto for Violin and Chamber Orchestra
John Fernström – Symphony No. 2, Op. 15
Gerald Finzi – Grand Fantasia and Toccata
Roberto Gerhard – Wind Quintet
Karl Amadeus Hartmann – Jazz Toccata and Fugue
Gordon Jacob – String Quartet
Dmitri Kabalevsky
String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, Op. 8
Piano Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 9
Wilhelm Kienzl – String Quartet No. 3 in E major
Uuno Klami – Karelian Rhapsody
George Gershwin – An American in Paris (jazz-influenced symphonic poem)
Ernst Krenek
Little Symphony
Piano Sonata No. 2
Maurice Ravel – Bolero
Sergei Prokofiev
Symphony No. 3
The Prodigal Son (ballet)
Albert Roussel – Psalm 80
Dmitri Shostakovich – Tahiti Trot, Op. 16
Roger Sessions – The Black Maskers Suite for Orchestra
Leo Sowerby – Symphony No. 2
Richard Strauss
Die Tageszeiten, Op.76
Gesänge des Orients, Op.77
Ernst Toch – Piano Sonata, Op. 47
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Chôros No. 11
Chôros No. 14
Quinteto (em forma de chôros)
Pancho Vladigerov – Bulgarische Rhapsodie "Vardar"
Felix Weingartner – Symphony No. 6, Op. 74
== Opera ==
Cyril Scott – The Alchemist
Dmitri Shostakovich – The Nose (1927–28)
Richard Strauss – Die ägyptische Helena premiered at the Dresden Semperoper on 6 June 1928.
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht – Die Dreigroschenoper premiered on 31 August 1928, at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.
Stefan Wolpe – Zeus und Elida, premiered in Berlin
== Film ==
Irving Berlin – The Awakening
Werner Richard Heymann – Alraune
Willy Schmidt-Gentner – Heimkehr
Louis Silvers, Alois Reiser – Noah's Ark
== Jazz ==
== Musical theater ==
Angela Broadway production
Blackbirds of 1928 Broadway production opened at the Liberty Theatre on May 9 and ran for 518 performances
Blue Eyes London production opened at the Piccadilly Theatre on April 27 and ran for 278 performances
Casanova Berlin production
Hello, Daddy (Music: Jimmy McHugh, Lyrics: Dorothy Fields, Book: Herbert Fields) Broadway production opened at Lew Fields' Mansfield Theatre on December 26, transferred to George M. Cohan's Theatre on January 21, 1929, and transferred to Erlanger's Theatre on May 6, 1929, for a total run of 198 performances
Here's Howe Broadway production opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on May 1 and ran for 71 performances.
Hold Everything! Broadway production opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on October 10 and ran for 409 performances.
Keep Shufflin' Broadway production opened at Daly's Theatre on February 27 and ran for 104 performances
The New Moon (Sigmund Romberg) – Broadway production opened at the Imperial Theatre on September 19, transferred to the Casino Theatre on November 18 and ran for a total of 509 performances.
Paris (Cole Porter) Broadway production opened at the Music Box Theatre on October 8 and ran for 195 performances.
Present Arms (Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers) Broadway production opened at Lew Fields' Mansfield Theatre on April 26 and ran for 155 performances.
Rain or Shine Broadway production opened at George M. Cohan's Theatre on February 9 and ran for 356 performances
Rainbow Broadway production opened at the Gallo Opera House on November 21 and ran for 29 performances
Show Boat (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II) – London production
So This Is Love London production opened on April 25 at the Winter Garden Theatre and ran for 321 performances
Sunny Days Broadway production opened at the Imperial Theatre on February 8 and ran for 101 performances. It re-opened at the Century Theatre on October 1 for a further run of 32 performances.
This Year of Grace by Noël Coward opens on 22 March 1928 at the London Pavilion and ran for nearly 10 months
The Three Musketeers Broadway production opened at the Lyric Theatre on March 13 and ran for 319 performances.
Treasure Girl Broadway production opened at the Alvin Theatre on November 8 and ran for 68 performances
Ups-a-Daisy Broadway production opened at the Shubert Theatre on October 8 and ran for 64 performances. Starring Marie Saxon, Luella Gear, William Kent, Bob Hope and Roy Royston.
Virginia London production opened at the Palace Theatre on October 24.
London revue opened at the Pavilion on March 22 and ran for 316 performances.
Broadway production opened at the Selwyn Theatre on November 7 and ran for 158 performances.
White Lilacs opened at the Shubert Theatre on September 10 and transferred to Jolson's 59th Street Theatre on October 8 for a total run of 136 performances
Whoopee! Broadway production opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on December 4 and ran for 407 performances
== Births ==
January 2 – Alberto Zedda, Italian conductor and musicologist (died 2017)
January 7 – Emilio Pericoli, Italian singer (died 2013)
January 9 – Domenico Modugno, Italian singer and songwriter (died 1994)
January 11 – Andréa Guiot, French operatic soprano (died 2021)
January 15 – François Pantillon, Swiss composer and conductor (died 2025)
January 16 – Pilar Lorengar, Spanish soprano (died 1996)
January 17 – Jean Barraqué, composer (died 1973)
January 29 – Bengt Hambraeus, composer (died 2000)
January 30 – Ruth Brown, R&B singer (died 2006)
January 31
Miltinho, Brazilian singer (died 2014)
Chuck Willis, singer and songwriter (died 1958)
February 3
Saulius Sondeckis, Lithuanian violinist and conductor (died 2016)
Frankie Vaughan, British singer (died 1999)
February 8 – Osian Ellis, Welsh harpist (died 2021)
February 10 – Anthony Prospect, conductor from Trinidad and Tobago (died 2000)
February 12 – Vincent Montana, Jr., American drummer and composer (MFSB and Salsoul Orchestra) (died 2013)
February 16 – Porfi Jiménez, Dominican-Venezuelan musician (died 2010)
February 17 – Tom Jones, American lyricist (died 2023)
February 23 – Isabel Bigley, singer and actress (died 2006)
February 26 – Fats Domino, pianist and singer-songwriter (died 2017)
February 27 – René Clemencic, Austrian composer, recorder player, harpsichordist, conductor and clavichord player (died 2022)
March 4 – Samuel Adler, American composer and conductor
March 6 – Ronald Stevenson, Scottish composer and pianist (died 2015)
March 9 – Keely Smith, American singer (died 2017)
March 10 – Sara Montiel, Spanish singer, actress (died 2013)
March 12 – Aldemaro Romero, Venezuelan composer and pianist (died 2007)
March 13 – Ronnie Hazlehurst, English conductor and composer (died 2007)
March 21 – Valentin Gheorghiu, Romanian pianist and composer (died 2023)
March 24 – Byron Janis, American pianist
March 31 – Lefty Frizzell, American country singer and songwriter (died 1975)
April 2 – Serge Gainsbourg, singer-songwriter (died 1991)
April 3 – Don Gibson, country singer and songwriter (died 2003)
April 4 – Monty Norman, singer and composer of the James Bond signature tune (died 2022)
April 5 – Tony Williams, vocalist (The Platters) (died 1992)
April 8 – Fred Ebb, lyricist (died 2004)
April 9 – Tom Lehrer, satirical singer-songwriter and mathematician (died 2025)
April 12 – Jean-François Paillard, French conductor (died 2013)
April 14 – Egil Monn-Iversen, Norwegian composer and pianist (died 2017)
April 19 – Alexis Korner, blues musician and historian (died 1984)
April 21 – Hillous Butrum, country musician (died 2002)
April 23
Sergio Tedesco, Italian actor, voice actor and tenor (died 2012)
Shirley Temple, actress, dancer and singer (died 2014)
April 29 – Carl Gardner, vocalist (The Coasters) (died 2011)
May 1 – Sonny James, American country singer (died 2016)
May 3 – Dave Dudley, country singer (died 2003)
May 4 – Maynard Ferguson, jazz trumpeter (died 2006)
May 12 – Burt Bacharach, songwriter (died 2023)
May 19
Klara Berkovich, Soviet-American violinist
Bak Sheut-sin, Cantonese opera singer
May 23 – Rosemary Clooney, singer and actress (died 2002)
May 27 – Thea Musgrave, composer
June 7 – Charles Strouse, lyricist and composer
June 8 – Mimi Mariani, Indonesian actress, model, and singer (died 1971)
June 10 – Carl Dahlhaus, musicologist and editor (died 1989)
June 12
Vic Damone, singer (died 2018)
Richard M. Sherman, songwriter (died 2024)
June 19 – Tommy DeVito (The Four Seasons) (died 2020)
June 26 – Jacob Druckman, composer (died 1996)
July 1 – Bobby Day, singer, songwriter (died 1990)
July 3 – Edward Greenfield, critic (died 2015)
July 12 – S. R. Janakiraman, Indian Carnatic vocalist and musicologist
July 13 – Leroy Vinnegar, American bassist (died 1999)
July 16
Concha Valdés Miranda, Cuban songwriter (died 2017)
Bella Davidovich, pianist
July 22 – Keter Betts, American bassist (died 2005)
July 23 – Leon Fleisher, American classical pianist and teacher (died 2020)
July 26
Tadeusz Baird, Polish composer (died 1981)
Joe Jackson, African-American manager, father of Michael Jackson (died 2018)
August 9
Camilla Wicks, American violinist (died 2020)
Dolores Wilson, American coloratura soprano (died 2010)
August 10
Jimmy Dean, singer (died 2010)
Eddie Fisher, singer (died 2010)
August 16 – Ann Blyth, actress and singer
August 18 – Sonny Til, doo-wop singer (died 1981)
August 21 – Art Farmer, American jazz trumpeter, flugelhorn player (died 1999)
August 22 – Karlheinz Stockhausen, German composer (died 2007)
August 25 – Karl Korte, American composer (died 2022)
August 28 – Vilayat Khan, sitar player (died 2004)
September 1 – Ed Summerlin, composer, arranger, jazz saxophonist and music educator (died 2006)
September 2 – Horace Silver, hard bop jazz pianist (died 2014)
September 5
Damayanti Joshi, Indian classical dancer of Kathak (died 2004)
Albert Mangelsdorff, German jazz musician (died 2005)
September 6 – Yevgeny Svetlanov, conductor, pianist and composer (died 2002)
September 15 – Cannonball Adderley, jazz musician (died 1975)
September 24 – John Carter, jazz musician (died 1991)
October 3 – Erik Bruhn, dancer and choreographer (died 1986)
October 7 – José Messias, Brazilian musician, composer, and writer (died 2015)
October 9 – Einojuhani Rautavaara, Finnish composer (died 2016)
October 22 – Clare Fischer, keyboardist, composer, arranger and bandleader (died 2012)
October 27
Waldo Holmes, American musician and songwriter
Gilles Vigneault, Canadian singer-songwriter and poet
November 10
Marilyn Keith Bergman, composer (died 2022)
Ennio Morricone, film composer (died 2020)
November 13 – Hampton Hawes, jazz pianist (died 1977)
November 14 – Bernabé Martí, Spanish operatic tenor
November 18
Otar Gordeli, Georgian composer (died 1994)
Sheila Jordan, American jazz singer and pianist (died 2025)
November 23 – Jerry Bock, composer of Fiddler on the Roof (died 2010)
November 27 – Walter Klien, pianist (died 1991)
December 7
Zdeněk Mahler, Czech writer, musicologist, pedagogue and screenwriter (died 2018)
Orlando Peña, Cuban bassist and songwriter (died 1994)
December 15 – Ida Haendel, violinist (died 2020)
December 18 – Galt MacDermot, Canadian-American composer and pianist (died 2018)
December 28 – Moe Koffman, jazz musician (died 2001)
December 29 – Bernard Cribbins, English actor, comedian and singer (died 2022)
December 30 – Bo Diddley, singer, songwriter and guitarist (died 2008)
December 31 – Tatyana Shmyga, Soviet-Russian operetta/musical theatre performer (died 2011)
== Deaths ==
January 1 – Loie Fuller, dancer (born 1862)
January 11 – Valborg Aulin, pianist and composer (born 1860)
February 16 – Eddie Foy, vaudeville star (born 1856)
March 1 – Sir Herbert Brewer, organist and composer (born 1865)
March 19 – Nora Bayes, singer, comedian and actress (born 1880)
March 27 – Leslie Stuart, musical theatre composer (born 1863)
April 24 – Ferdinand Hummel, harpist, pianist, conductor and composer (born 1855)
April 27 – Ernst Seifert, organ builder (born 1855)
May 6 – Juliusz Wertheim, pianist, conductor and composer (born 1880) (heart attack)
May 13 – David Thomas, composer (born 1881)
May 19 – Henry F. Gilbert, American composer and collector of folk music (born 1868)
May 28 – Emma Howson, operatic soprano (born 1844)
June 21 – Marie Novello, pianist (born 1898)
July 7 – Jón Laxdal, composer (born 1865)
August 12 – Leoš Janáček, composer (born 1854)
September 12 – Howard Talbot, conductor and composer (born 1865)
September 13 – Olena Falkman, concert vocalist (born 1849)
October 9 – Frank Ellsworth Olds, brass instrument manufacturer (born 1861)
October 30
Percy Anderson, D'Oyly Carte stage designer (born 1851)
Oscar Sonneck, musicologist (born 1873)
November 7 – Mattia Battistini, operatic baritone (born 1856)
November 10 – Anita Berber, dancer (born 1899)
November 13 – Enrico Cecchetti, dancer (born 1850)
November 26 – Herbert Sullivan, nephew and biographer of Sir Arthur Sullivan (born 1868)
December 3 – Theodor von Frimmel, musicologist (born 1853)
December 24 – Nicolae Leonard, operatic tenor (born 1886)
date unknown
Celeste Farotti, violin-maker (born 1864)
Lillie de Hegermann-Lindencrone, singer (born 1844) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_(1983_film) | Christine (1983 film) | Christine (titled onscreen as John Carpenter's Christine) is a 1983 American supernatural horror film co-scored and directed by John Carpenter, and adapted from Stephen King's 1983 novel. The film stars Keith Gordon as Arnie Cunningham, a bullied teenager who buys a sentient 1958 Plymouth Fury, named "Christine", that exhibits a toxic personality and becomes a bad influence on him. John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, Robert Prosky and Harry Dean Stanton also star.
It was released in the United States on December 9, 1983, by Columbia Pictures. Christine received generally positive reviews from critics, and grossed $21 million at the box office.
== Plot ==
In 1957, at an automobile factory in Detroit, a red 1958 Plymouth Fury slams its hood shut by itself on a worker's hand, while another worker is found dead inside the car after dropping cigar ash on its seats.
In 1978 Rockbridge, California, nerdy high school senior Arnold "Arnie" Cunningham is bullied on the first day of school by classmate Buddy Repperton and his gang. Arnie's only friend, Dennis Guilder, intervenes with help from a teacher, who sends Buddy and his gang to the principal's office. Buddy is expelled for possession of a switchblade.
After school, Arnie and Dennis see the same 1958 Plymouth Fury—now in a dilapidated state—for sale at the home of George LeBay, the brother of the recently deceased original owner, who tells them the car's name is Christine. Despite Dennis' objections, Arnie purchases the car. Since Arnie's strict parents refuse to let him keep the car at their driveway, he begins to restore Christine at a local garage owned by the gruff Will Darnell, who offers Arnie a part-time job and access to parts he needs to repair Christine. Soon, Arnie develops a rebellious, arrogant personality, worrying his parents and Dennis.
Dennis confronts LeBay, who discloses that his late brother was also obsessed with Christine, his five-year-old niece choked to death in the car, and his sister-in-law and later his brother both committed suicide in it. At night, Dennis breaks into the garage to inspect Christine, but when Christine's radio begins playing 1950s rock and roll music, he flees.
Arnie begins a relationship with a new student, Leigh Cabot, who has rejected all her other admirers at school. While playing a football game, Dennis is stunned by the sight of Arnie and Leigh kissing in front of the now fully restored Christine, causing him to sustain a severe injury that permanently ends his football career.
One night, when Arnie and Leigh are attending a drive-in theater, Leigh expresses jealousy over Christine. While alone in the car, Leigh nearly chokes to death on a hamburger, as Christine briefly locks her doors to keep Arnie from coming to her rescue. A nearby theater-goer performs the Heimlich maneuver on Leigh, saving her. Arnie drives Leigh home and she vows to never get into Christine again. Later that night, Buddy and his gang sneak into Darnell's garage and vandalize Christine. Arnie, enraged by the destruction, breaks up with Leigh and physically attacks his father following an argument about Christine's vandalization.
The next day, Arnie returns to the garage alone and witnesses Christine repairing herself. Over two evenings, the car kills Buddy and all his gang members, blowing up a gas station in the process. Christine drives away in flames and returns to Darnell's garage, where she crushes him to death against the steering wheel. By morning, Christine is fully repaired when the police find Darnell's body. State Police detective Rudy Junkins questions Arnie about the death of Darnell, Buddy, and his gang members. However, the car's pristine condition and Arnie's alibi convince the detective he was not involved.
Leigh and Dennis conclude that Christine is responsible for Arnie's downward spiral. They plan to lure Christine to Darnell's garage and smash her with a bulldozer, but Christine surprises them by emerging from a pile of scrap metal. Leigh flees on foot while Dennis battles Christine with the bulldozer. Arnie is now driving Christine, and in an attempt to run Leigh down, Christine crashes into Darnell's office. Arnie is thrown through the windshield and impaled on a shard of glass. He reaches out to touch Christine's grille one last time, and Christine responds by playing "Pledging My Love" on her radio as Arnie dies.
Christine resumes her attack, until Dennis and Leigh corner her and flatten her with the bulldozer. The following day, Dennis, Leigh, and Junkins watch as the remains of Christine are crushed into a cube at a junkyard. Junkins congratulates the pair for stopping Christine, but they regret being unable to save Arnie. The sound of a 1950s rock and roll song spooks them briefly, but it proves to be coming from a boombox carried by a junkyard worker. Unbeknownst to them, Christine's grille twitches slightly.
== Cast ==
== Production ==
=== Conception ===
Producer Richard Kobritz had previously produced the 1979 miniseries Salem's Lot, also based on a Stephen King novel. Through producing the miniseries, Kobritz became acquainted with King, who sent him manuscripts of two of his novels, Cujo, and Christine. Kobritz purchased the rights to Christine after finding himself attracted to the novel's "celebration of America's obsession with the motorcar."
Kobritz's first choice for director was John Carpenter, who was initially unavailable owing to two projects: an adaptation of another King novel, Firestarter, and an adaptation of the 1980 Eric Van Lustbader novel The Ninja. However, production delays on these projects allowed Carpenter to accept the director position for Christine. Kobritz and Carpenter had previously collaborated in the 1978 television film Someone's Watching Me!. Bill Phillips was Carpenter's choice for writer and was brought on shortly after Carpenter arrived. Carpenter was also joined by special effects supervisor Roy Arbogast, who had previously worked with Carpenter in The Thing (1982). According to Carpenter, Christine was not a film he had planned on directing, saying that he directed the film as "a job" as opposed to a "personal project." He had previously directed The Thing, which had done poorly at the box office and led to critical backlash. In retrospect, Carpenter stated that upon reading Christine, he felt that "It just wasn't very frightening. But it was something I needed to do at that time for my career."
King's novel, the source material for Carpenter's film, made it clear that the car was possessed by the evil spirit of its previous owner, Roland D. LeBay, whereas the film version of the story shows that the evil spirit of the car manifested itself on the day it was built. Other elements from the novel were altered for the film, particularly the execution of the death scenes, which the filmmakers opted for a more "cinematic approach."
=== Casting ===
Initially, Columbia Pictures had wanted to cast Brooke Shields in the role of Leigh because of her publicity after the release of The Blue Lagoon (1981), and Scott Baio as Arnie. The filmmakers declined the suggestion, opting to cast young actors who were still fairly unknown. Kevin Bacon auditioned for the role, but opted out when offered the lead in Footloose (1984). Carpenter cast Keith Gordon in the role of Arnie after an audition in New York City; Gordon had some experience in film, notably in Jaws 2, and was also working in theater at the time; John Stockwell was cast at an audition in Los Angeles.
Nineteen-year-old Alexandra Paul was cast in the film after an audition in New York City; according to Carpenter, Paul was an "untrained, young actress" at the time, but brought a "great quality" about the character of Leigh. According to Paul, she had not read any of King's books or seen Carpenter's films, and read the novel in preparation.
=== Filming ===
Christine was shot largely in Los Angeles, California, while the location for Darnell's garage was located in Santa Clarita. Filming began in April 1983, mere days after the King novel had been published. An abandoned furniture factory in Irwindale was used for the opening scene. The film's stunts were primarily completed by stunt coordinator Terry Leonard, who was behind the wheel of the car during the high-speed chase scenes, as well as the scene in which the car drives down a highway engulfed in flames. During that scene, Leonard wore a Nomex firefighter's suit complete with breathing apparatus.
Alexandra Paul's identical twin sister Caroline Paul wrote that she and her sister pulled a prank during filming, sending Caroline on set in place of Alexandra without telling Carpenter that they had made the switch until after he had shot a scene. She wrote, "My highly skilled clutch-pushing actually made it into the movie."
In 2023, John Carpenter said Christine "was a fun movie to make and easy — nothing tough about it."
=== The car ===
Although the car in the film is identified as a 1958 Plymouth Fury – and in 1983 radio ads promoting the film, voiceover artists announced, "she's a '57 Fury" – two other Plymouth models, the Belvedere and the Savoy, were also used to portray the malevolent automobile onscreen. John Carpenter placed ads throughout Southern California searching for models of the car, and was able to purchase twenty-four of them in various states of disrepair, which were used to build a total of seventeen copies of the film car. All cars were two door hardtops.
Total production for the 1958 Plymouth Fury was only 5,303, and they were difficult to find and expensive to buy at the time. In addition, the real-life Furys only came in one color, "Sandstone White" with a "Buckskin Beige" interior, seen on the other Furys on the assembly line during the initial scenes of the film, though the car in King's novel was ordered with a red-and-white custom paint job.
Originally, Carpenter had not planned to film the car's regeneration scenes, but gave special effects supervisor Roy Arbogast three weeks to devise a way for the car to rebuild itself. Arbogast and his team made rubber molds from one of the cars, including a whole front end. One of the cars was stripped of its engine to accommodate internally-mounted hydraulics that pulled the framework inward, crumpling the car, with the shot then run backwards in the final film. Twenty-three cars were used in the film. Initially sold as scrap metal after filming ended, one of the best known surviving vehicles was eventually rescued from the junkyard and restored. It was subsequently bought by collector Bill Gibson of Pensacola, Florida. One of the Christines was auctioned off at an auto-auction in Florida in January 2020.
== Release ==
=== Box office ===
Christine was released in North America on December 9, 1983, to 1,045 theaters. In its opening weekend Christine brought in $3,408,904 landing at #4. The film dropped 39.6% in its second weekend, grossing $2,058,517 slipping from fourth to eighth place. In its third weekend, it grossed $1,851,909 dropping to #9. The film remained at #9 its fourth weekend, grossing $2,736,782. In its fifth weekend, it returned to #8, grossing $2,015,922. Bringing in $1,316,835 in its sixth weekend, the film dropped out of the box office top ten to twelfth place. In its seventh and final weekend, the film brought in $819,972 landing at #14, bringing the total gross for Christine to $21,017,849.
=== Critical response ===
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Christine holds an approval rating of 72% based on 113 reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "John Carpenter revs up Christine into a brisk thrill ride whose sharp direction, lively performances, and stylish flourishes make its absurd premise easy to forgive." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 57 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, saying: "By the end of the movie, Christine has developed such a formidable personality that we are actually taking sides during its duel with a bulldozer. This is the kind of movie where you walk out with a silly grin, get in your car, and lay rubber halfway down the Eisenhower." Janet Maslin of The New York Times gave the film a middling review, saying: "The early parts of the film are engaging and well acted, creating a believable high-school atmosphere. Unfortunately, the later part of the film is slow in developing, and it unfolds in predictable ways." Variety gave the film a negative review, stating: "Christine seems like a retread. This time it's a fire-engine red, 1958 Plymouth Fury that's possessed by the Devil, and this deja-vu premise [from the novel by Stephen King] combined with the crazed-vehicle format, makes Christine appear pretty shop worn." Time Out said of the film: "Carpenter and novelist Stephen King share not merely a taste for genre horror but a love of '50's teenage culture; and although set in the present, Christine reflects the second taste far more effectively than the first." The reviewer judged that only King's skillful writing could make the titular car scary, and that when translated to the screen it no longer had any presence.
=== King's reaction ===
While he was promoting the film Dreamcatcher in 2003, Stephen King mentioned Christine as one of two film adaptations of his work that had "bored" him (the other being The Shining).
=== Home media ===
The film was released on VHS by Columbia Pictures, and on DVD on August 4, 1998, and re-released on DVD in 2004. On March 12, 2013, Twilight Time video released the film on Blu-ray for the first time in a limited edition run numbered at 3,000 copies. On September 29, 2015, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment re-released the film on Blu-ray. The film was released on 4K UHD Blu-ray on September 11, 2018.
== Soundtrack ==
Two soundtracks were released, one consisting purely of the music written and composed by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth, the other consisting of the contemporary pop songs used in the film.
=== Score ===
=== Songs appearing in film ===
The soundtrack album containing songs used in the film was entitled Christine: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and was released on LP and cassette on Motown Records. It contained 10 (of the 15) songs listed in the film's credits, plus one track from John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's own score. The track listing was as follows:
George Thorogood and the Destroyers – "Bad to the Bone"
Buddy Holly & the Crickets – "Not Fade Away"
Johnny Ace – "Pledging My Love"
Robert & Johnny – "We Belong Together"
Little Richard – "Keep A-Knockin'"
Dion and The Belmonts – "I Wonder Why"
The Viscounts – "Harlem Nocturne"
Thurston Harris – "Little Bitty Pretty One"
Danny & The Juniors – "Rock 'n' Roll is Here to Stay"
John Carpenter & Alan Howarth – "Christine Attacks (Plymouth Fury)"
Larry Williams – "Bony Moronie"
The following tracks were not included on this LP release, but were used in the film and listed in the film's credits:
ABBA – "The Name of the Game"
Bonnie Raitt – "Runaway"
Ritchie Valens – "Come on, Let's Go"
Tanya Tucker – "Not Fade Away"
The Rolling Stones – "Beast of Burden"
== Proposed remake ==
In June 2021, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Blumhouse Productions announced the development of a remake of the film with Bryan Fuller set to write and direct the film and Jason Blum, Vincenzo Natali and Steve Hoban producing. As of September 2023, no aspect of the project has moved forward.
== Cultural references ==
The 2004 film Taarzan: The Wonder Car by Bollywood filmmaking duo Abbas–Mustan is loosely based on Christine.
Taxiwaala, a 2018 Indian Telugu-language film, has a similar premise.
The film is referred to in the 2022 song "Autopilot" by August Ponthier.
David Gordon Green said his 2022 film Halloween Ends is a love letter to Christine and John Carpenter's body of work in general, though after watching the film, Carpenter said he did not notice any similarity to Christine. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_Ledger | Heath Ledger | Heath Andrew Ledger (4 April 1979 – 22 January 2008) was an Australian actor. Known for his versatility across independent and major studio films, his work consisted of 20 films in a variety of genres. He received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, an Actor Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
After playing roles in Australian television and film productions during the 1990s, he moved to the United States in 1998 to further develop his film career. His film breakthrough came as the lead in the romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). He gained further recognition for his roles in films such as The Patriot (2000), A Knight's Tale, Monster's Ball (both 2001), Lords of Dogtown, and Casanova (both 2005). For his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005), he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He followed this by starring in Candy (2006) and as a composite of Bob Dylan's life and persona in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There (2007).
In January 2008, Ledger died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. A few months before his death, he had finished filming his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008); the film became his first posthumous release, while his performance garnered widespread media attention and universal acclaim, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His final film performance in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was released posthumously in 2009.
== Early life ==
Heath Andrew Ledger was born on 4 April 1979 in Perth, Western Australia, to Sally Ramshaw, a French teacher, and Kim Ledger, a racing car driver and mining engineer whose family established and owned the Ledger Engineering Foundry. The Sir Frank Ledger Charitable Trust is named after his great-grandfather Frank Ledger. He had English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. Ledger attended Mary's Mount Primary School in Gooseberry Hill, and later Guildford Grammar School, where he had his first acting experiences, starring in a school production as Peter Pan at age ten. His parents separated when he was ten and divorced when he was eleven. Ledger's older sister Kate, an actress and later a publicist, with whom he was very close, inspired his acting on stage; and his love of Gene Kelly inspired his successful choreography, leading to Guildford Grammar's 60-member team's "first all-boy victory" at the Rock Eisteddfod Challenge. Ledger's two half-sisters are Ashleigh Bell (born 1990), his mother's daughter with her second husband Roger Bell; and Olivia Ledger (born 1996), his father's daughter with his second wife Emma Brown.
== Career ==
=== 1990s ===
After sitting for early graduation exams at age 16 to get his diploma, Ledger left school to pursue an acting career. With Trevor DiCarlo, his best friend since the age of three, Ledger drove across Australia from Perth to Sydney, returning to Perth to take a small role in Clowning Around (1991), the first part of a two-part television series, and to work on the TV series Sweat (1996), in which he played a cyclist. From 1993 to 1997, Ledger also had parts in the Perth television series Ship to Shore (1993); Ledger also had parts in the short-lived Fox Broadcasting Company fantasy-drama Roar (1997); in Home and Away (1997), one of Australia's most successful television shows; and in the Australian film Blackrock (1997), his feature film debut. In 1999, he starred in the teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You and in the acclaimed Australian crime film Two Hands, directed by Gregor Jordan.
=== 2000s ===
In the early 2000s, he starred in supporting roles as Gabriel Martin, the eldest son of Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), in The Patriot (2000), and as Sonny Grotowski, the son of Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton), in Monster's Ball (2001); as well as leading or title roles in A Knight's Tale (2001), The Four Feathers (2002), The Order (2003), Ned Kelly (2003), Casanova (2005), The Brothers Grimm (2005), and Lords of Dogtown (2005). In 2001, he won a ShoWest Award as "Male Star of Tomorrow".
Ledger received "Best Actor of 2005" awards from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle for his performance in Brokeback Mountain, in which he plays Wyoming ranch hand Ennis Del Mar, who has a love affair with aspiring rodeo rider Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. He also received the nominations for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor — Motion Picture Drama, a Actor Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and an Academy Award for Best Actor for this performance, making him, at age 26, the eighth-youngest nominee in the category. In The New York Times review of the film, critic Stephen Holden writes: "Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn." In a review in Rolling Stone, Peter Travers states: "Ledger's magnificent performance is an acting miracle. He seems to tear it from his insides. Ledger doesn't just know how Ennis moves, speaks and listens; he knows how he breathes. To see him inhale the scent of a shirt hanging in Jack's closet is to take measure of the pain of love lost."
After Brokeback Mountain, Ledger costarred with fellow Australian Abbie Cornish in the 2006 Australian film Candy, an adaptation of the 1998 novel Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction, as young heroin addicts in love attempting to break free of their addiction, whose mentor is played by Geoffrey Rush; for his performance as sometime poet Dan, Ledger was nominated for three "Best Actor" awards, including one of the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards, which both Cornish and Rush won in their categories. Shortly after the release of Candy, Ledger was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As one of six actors embodying different aspects of the life of Bob Dylan in the 2007 film I'm Not There, directed by Todd Haynes, Ledger "won praise for his portrayal of 'Robbie [Clark],' a moody, counter-culture actor who represents the romanticist side of Dylan, but says accolades are never his motivation". Posthumously, on 23 February 2008, he shared the 2007 Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award with the rest of the film's ensemble cast, its director, and its casting director.
In his penultimate film role, Ledger played the Joker in Christopher Nolan's 2008 film The Dark Knight, which was released nearly six months after his death. While working on the film in London, Ledger told Sarah Lyall in their New York Times interview that he viewed The Dark Knight's Joker as a "psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy". For his performance in The Dark Knight, Ledger posthumously won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (becoming the fourth-youngest winner of the award) which his family accepted on his behalf, as well as numerous other posthumous awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor, which Nolan accepted for him. At the time of his death on 22 January 2008, Ledger had completed about half of the work for his final film role as Tony in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Gilliam chose to adapt the film after his death by having fellow actors (and friends of Ledger) Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell play "fantasy transformations" of his character so that Ledger's final performance could be seen in theatres.
=== Directorial work ===
Ledger had aspirations to become a film director and had made some music videos with his production company The Masses, which director Todd Haynes praised highly in his tribute to Ledger upon accepting the ISP Robert Altman Award, which Ledger posthumously shared, on 23 February 2008. In 2006, Ledger directed music videos for the title track on Australian hip hop artist N'fa's CD debut solo album Cause An Effect and for the single "Seduction Is Evil (She's Hot)". Later that year, Ledger inaugurated a new record label, The Masses Music, with singer Ben Harper and also directed a music video for Harper's song "Morning Yearning".
At a news conference at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, Ledger spoke of his desire to make a documentary film about the British singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who died in 1974, at the age of 26, from an overdose of an antidepressant. Ledger created and acted in a music video set to Drake's recording of the singer's 1974 song about depression, "Black Eyed Dog" — a title "inspired by Winston Churchill's descriptive term for depression" (black dog); it was shown publicly only twice, first at the Bumbershoot Festival, in Seattle, held from 1 to 3 September 2007; and secondly as part of "A Place To Be: A Celebration of Nick Drake", with its screening of Their Place: Reflections On Nick Drake, "a series of short filmed homages to Nick Drake" (including Ledger's), sponsored by American Cinematheque, at the Grauman's Egyptian Theatre, in Hollywood, on 5 October 2007. After Ledger's death, his music video for "Black Eyed Dog" was shown on the Internet and excerpted in news clips distributed via YouTube.
He was working with Scottish screenwriter and producer Allan Scott on an adaptation of the 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis, which would have been his first feature film as a director. He also intended to act in the film, with Canadian actor Elliot Page proposed in the lead role. Ledger's final directorial work, in which he shot two music videos before his death, premiered in 2009. The music videos, completed for Modest Mouse and Grace Woodroofe, include an animated feature for Modest Mouse's song "King Rat", and the Woodroofe video for her cover of David Bowie's "Quicksand". The "King Rat" video premiered on 4 August 2009.
== Press controversies ==
Ledger's relationship with the Australian press was sometimes turbulent, and it led to his abandonment of plans for his family to reside part-time in Sydney. In 2004, he strongly denied press reports alleging that "he spat at journalists on the Sydney set of the film Candy", or that one of his relatives had done so later, outside Ledger's Sydney home. On 13 January 2006, "Several members of the paparazzi retaliated ... squirting Ledger and Williams with water pistols on the red carpet at the Sydney premiere of Brokeback Mountain".
After his performance on stage at the 2005 Screen Actors Guild Awards, when he had giggled in presenting Brokeback Mountain as a nominee for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, the Los Angeles Times referred to his presentation as an "apparent gay spoof". Ledger called the Times later and explained that his levity resulted from stage fright, saying that he had been told that he would be presenting the award only minutes earlier; he stated: "I am so sorry and I apologise for my nervousness. I would be absolutely horrified if my stage fright was misinterpreted as a lack of respect for the film, the topic and for the amazing filmmakers."
After learning that two cinemas in Utah refused to show Brokeback Mountain, Ledger said: "I don't think the movie is [controversial] but I think maybe the Mormons in Utah do. I think it's hilarious and very immature of a society". In the same interview with the Herald Sun newspaper, Ledger mistakenly claimed that lynchings had occurred in West Virginia as recently as the 1980s; state scholars disputed his statement, asserting that no documented lynchings had occurred in West Virginia since 1931.
== Personal life ==
Ledger was an avid chess player, and had participated in tournaments when he was young. As an adult, he often played with other chess enthusiasts at Washington Square Park in Manhattan. He was a fan of West Coast Eagles, an Australian rules football team that competes in the Australian Football League (AFL) and is based in his hometown of Perth.
Ledger was an "obsessive" photographer who loved taking stills, then drawing over them with paint, markers or nail polish.
=== Relationships ===
Ledger dated Lisa Zane, Christina Cauchi, Heather Graham, and Naomi Watts.
In 2004, Ledger began a relationship with actress Michelle Williams after meeting her on the set of Brokeback Mountain. Their daughter, Matilda Rose Ledger, was born on 28 October 2005 in New York City. Matilda's godparents are Brokeback Mountain co-star Jake Gyllenhaal and Williams's Dawson's Creek co-star Busy Philipps. In January 2006, Ledger listed his residence in Bronte, Sydney, for sale and returned to the US, where he shared a house with Williams in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn from 2005 to 2007. In September 2007, Williams's father confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that Ledger and Williams had broken up.
After Ledger's breakup with Williams, the press linked him romantically with supermodel Helena Christensen, actress Kate Hudson, and model Gemma Ward. Ward later stated that she had begun dating Ledger in November 2007 and that they and their families had spent that year's Christmas together in their hometown of Perth.
=== Health problems and drug use ===
In an interview with Sarah Lyall, published in The New York Times on 4 November 2007, Ledger stated that he often could not sleep when taking on roles, and that the role of the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) was causing his usual insomnia: "Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. ... I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going." At that time, he told Lyall that he had taken two Ambien pills, after taking just one had not sufficed, and those left him in "a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing".
Prior to his return to New York City from his last film assignment in London, in January 2008, while he was apparently suffering from some kind of respiratory illness, he reportedly complained to his The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus co-star Christopher Plummer that he was continuing to have difficulty sleeping and taking pills to help with that problem: "Confirming earlier reports that Ledger hadn't been feeling well on set, Plummer said: 'we all caught colds because we were shooting outside on horrible, damp nights. But Heath's went on and I don't think he dealt with it immediately with the antibiotics.... I think what he did have was the walking pneumonia.' [...] On top of that, 'He was saying all the time, 'dammit, I can't sleep'... and he was taking all these pills to help him'".
Speaking to Interview magazine after Ledger's death, Michelle Williams confirmed reports that the actor had experienced trouble sleeping: "For as long as I'd known him, he had bouts with insomnia. He had too much energy. His mind was turning, turning, turning – always turning".
Ledger was "widely reported to have struggled with substance abuse". Following Ledger's death, Entertainment Tonight aired video footage from 2006 in which Ledger stated that he "used to smoke five joints a day for 20 years" and news outlets reported that his drug abuse had prompted Williams to request that he move out of their apartment in Brooklyn. Ledger's publicist asserted that reports of Ledger's alleged drug use had been inaccurate.
== Death ==
At around 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, 22 January 2008, Ledger was found naked and lying face down unresponsive in his bed by his housekeeper, Teresa Solomon, and his massage therapist, Diana Wolozin, in his loft at 421 Broome Street in the SoHo neighbourhood of Manhattan.
According to police, Wolozin, who had arrived early for a 3 p.m. appointment with Ledger, telephoned his friend Mary-Kate Olsen for help. Olsen, who was in Los Angeles at the time, directed her New York City private security guard to go to the scene. At 3:26 p.m., "less than 15 minutes after she first saw him in bed and only a few moments after the first call to Ms. Olsen", Wolozin dialed 911 "to say that Mr. Ledger was not breathing". At the urging of the 911 operator, Wolozin administered CPR, which was unsuccessful in reviving him.
Paramedics and emergency medical technicians arrived seven minutes later, at 3:33 p.m. but were also unable to revive him. At 3:36 p.m., Ledger was pronounced dead, and his body was removed from the apartment. He was 28 years old.
=== Autopsy and toxicology report ===
On 6 February 2008, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York released its conclusions. Those conclusions were based on an initial autopsy that occurred 23 January 2008, and a subsequent complete toxicological analysis. The report concluded that Ledger died "as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine". It added: "We have concluded that the manner of death is accident[al], resulting from the abuse of prescribed medications."
Although the Associated Press and other outlets reported that police estimated Ledger's death occurred between 1 p.m. and 2:45 p.m. on 22 January 2008, the Medical Examiner's Office announced that it would not publicly disclose the official estimated time of death. The official announcement of the cause and manner of Ledger's death heightened concerns about the growing problems of prescription drug abuse or misuse and combined drug intoxication (CDI).
In 2017, Jason Payne-James, a forensic pathologist, asserted that Ledger might have survived if hydrocodone and oxycodone had been left out of the combination of drugs that the actor took just prior to his death. He furthermore stated that the mixture of drugs, combined with a possible chest infection, caused Ledger to stop breathing.
=== Federal investigation ===
Late in February 2008, a DEA investigation of medical professionals relating to Ledger's death exonerated two American physicians, who practice in Los Angeles and Houston, of any wrongdoing, determining that "the doctors in question had prescribed Ledger other medications – not the pills that killed him."
On 4 August 2008, Mary-Kate Olsen's attorney Michael Miller issued a statement denying that Olsen supplied Ledger with the drugs causing his death and asserting that she did not know their source. In his statement, Miller said specifically, "Despite tabloid speculation, Mary-Kate Olsen had nothing whatsoever to do with the drugs found in Heath Ledger's home or his body, and she does not know where he obtained them."
After a flurry of further media speculation, on 6 August 2008, the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan closed its investigation into Ledger's death without filing any charges and rendering moot its subpoena of Olsen. With the clearing of the two doctors and Olsen, and the closing of the investigation because the prosecutors in the Manhattan US Attorney's Office "don't believe there's a viable target," it is still not known how Ledger obtained the oxycodone and hydrocodone in the lethal drug combination that killed him.
=== Estate ===
Ledger's will was filed in New York City on 28 February 2008. His father, Kim Ledger, said that he considered the financial well-being of Heath's daughter Matilda Rose an "absolute priority," whilst also stating that her mother, Michelle Williams, was "an integral part of our family". He added, "They will be taken care of and that's how Heath would want it to be". Ledger's will was signed in 2003, prior to his involvement with Williams and the birth of their daughter; the will divided half of his estate between his parents and half between his siblings.
A 31 March 2008 report asserted that Ledger may have fathered another child. The mother and stepfather of the child in question dismissed the claim.
On 27 September 2008, Kim Ledger stated that the family had agreed to leave Ledger's US$16.3 million estate to Matilda Rose Ledger.
== Legacy ==
=== Memorial tributes and services ===
As the news of Ledger's death became public, throughout the night of 22 January 2008, and the following day, media crews, mourners, fans, and other onlookers began gathering outside his apartment building, with some leaving flowers or other memorial tributes.
The following day, at 10:50 am AWST, Ledger's parents and sister appeared outside his mother's house in Applecross, a riverside suburb of Perth, and read a short statement to the media expressing their grief and desire for privacy. Within the next few days, memorial tributes were communicated by family members, Kevin Rudd (then-Prime Minister of Australia), Eric Ripper (then-Deputy Premier of Western Australia), Warner Bros. (distributor of The Dark Knight) and thousands of Ledger's fans around the world.
Several actors made statements expressing their sorrow at Ledger's death, including Daniel Day-Lewis, who dedicated his Screen Actors Guild Award to him, saying that he was inspired by Ledger's acting; Day-Lewis praised Ledger's performances in Monster's Ball and Brokeback Mountain, describing the latter as "unique, perfect". Verne Troyer, who was working with Ledger on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at the time of his death, had a heart shape, an exact duplicate of a symbol that Ledger scrawled on a piece of paper with his email address, tattooed on his hand in remembrance of Ledger because Ledger "had made such an impression on [him]". On 1 February, in her first public statement after Ledger's death, Michelle Williams expressed her heartbreak and described Ledger's spirit as surviving in their daughter.
After attending private memorial ceremonies in Los Angeles, Ledger's family members returned with his body to Perth. On 9 February, a memorial service attended by several hundred invited guests was held at Penrhos College, attracting considerable press attention; afterward Ledger's body was cremated at Fremantle Cemetery, followed by a private service attended by only 10 of his closest family members, The ashes were taken from Fremantle for interment at an unspecified location. Later that night, his family and friends gathered for a wake on Cottesloe Beach.
The Eskimo Joe song "Foreign Land" was written as a tribute to Ledger. The band were in New York at the time of his death.
In January 2011, the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia in Ledger's home town of Perth named a 575-seat theatre the Heath Ledger Theatre after him. For the opening of the theatre, Ledger's Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor was on display in the theatre's foyer along with his Joker costume.
Bon Iver's "Perth" was inspired by Heath Ledger. Justin Vernon, the lead singer and songwriter of the American indie folk band, revealed in 2011 that he had begun working on the song in 2008 and was scheduled to meet with a music video director who was good friends with Ledger, Matt Amato. "The first thing I worked on, the riff and the beginning melodies, was the first song on the record, 'Perth,'" Vernon told Exclaim!. Amato was directing the band's "The Wolves (Act I & II)" music video the day that Ledger died. "It was no longer about just making a Bon Iver music video anymore," Vernon says. "This was now our chance to be there with Matt as he grieved. It was a three-day wake." Amato told Vernon stories about Ledger that eventually became the inspiration for "Perth," the opening track to the band's second studio album Bon Iver, Bon Iver (2011).
=== Method and style ===
Portraying a variety of roles, from romantic heroes to tragic characters, Ledger created a hodgepodge of characters that are deliberately unlike one another, stating: "I feel like I am wasting my time if I repeat myself". He also reflected on his inability to be happy with his work, "I feel the same thing about everything I do. The day I say, 'It's good' is the day I should start doing something else." Ledger liked to wait between jobs so that he would start creatively hungry on new projects. In his own words, acting was about harnessing "the infinite power of belief," thus using belief as a tool for creating.
Directors who have worked with the actor praised him for his creativity, seriousness, and intuition. "I've never felt as old as I did watching Heath explore his talents," The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan has written, expressing amazement over the actor's working process, genuine curiosity and charisma. Marc Forster, who directed Ledger in Monster's Ball, complimented him as taking the job "very seriously", being disciplined, observant, understanding, and intuitive. In 2007, director Todd Haynes compared Ledger's presence to actor James Dean, casting Ledger as Robbie Clarke, a fictive personification of Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. Drawing on the similar characteristics between the actors, Haynes further highlighted Ledger's "precocious seriousness" and intuition. He also felt that Ledger had a rare maturity beyond his years." Ledger, however, disconnected himself and acting from perfectionism. "I'm always gonna pull myself apart and dissect [the work]. I mean, there's no such thing as perfection in what [actors] do. Pornos are more perfect than we are, because they're actually fucking."
"Some people find their shtick," Ledger reflected on the categorisation of style. "I never figured out who 'Heath Ledger' is on film: 'This is what you expect when you hire me, and it will be recognisable'... People always feel compelled to sum you up, to presume that they have you and can describe you. That's fine. But there are so many stories inside of me and a lot I want to achieve outside of one flat note."
=== Posthumous films and awards ===
Ledger's death affected the marketing campaign for Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008) and also both the production and marketing of Terry Gilliam's film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, with both directors intending to celebrate and pay tribute to his work in these films. Although Gilliam temporarily suspended production on the latter film, he expressed determination to "salvage" it, perhaps using computer-generated imagery (CGI), and dedicated it to Ledger. In February 2008, as a "memorial tribute to the man many have called one of the best actors of his generation," Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell signed on to take over Ledger's role, becoming multiple incarnations of his character, Tony, transformed in this "magical re-telling of the Faust story". The three actors donated their fees for the film to Ledger's and Williams's daughter.
Speaking of editing The Dark Knight, on which Ledger had completed his work in October 2007, Nolan recalled, "It was tremendously emotional, right when he passed, having to go back in and look at him every day. ... But the truth is, I feel very lucky to have something productive to do, to have a performance that he was very, very proud of, and that he had entrusted to me to finish." All of Ledger's scenes appear as he completed them in the filming; in editing the film, Nolan added no "digital effects" to alter Ledger's actual performance posthumously. Nolan dedicated the film in part to Ledger's memory, as well as to the memory of technician Conway Wickliffe, who was killed during a car accident while preparing one of the film's stunts.
Released in July 2008, The Dark Knight broke several box office records and received both popular and critical accolades, especially with regard to Ledger's performance as the Joker. Even film critic David Denby, who does not praise the film overall in his pre-release review in The New Yorker, evaluates Ledger's work highly, describing his performance as both "sinister and frightening" and Ledger as "mesmerising in every scene", concluding: "His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss." Attempting to dispel widespread speculations that Ledger's performance as the Joker had in any way led to his death (as Denby and others suggest), Ledger's co-star and friend Christian Bale, who played opposite him as Batman, has stressed that, as an actor, Ledger greatly enjoyed meeting the challenges of creating that role, an experience that Ledger himself described as "the most fun I've ever had, or probably ever will have, playing a character". Terry Gilliam also refuted the claims that playing the Joker made him crazy, calling it "absolute nonsense" and going on to say, "Heath was so solid. His feet were on the ground and he was the least neurotic person I've ever met."
Ledger received numerous awards for his Joker role in The Dark Knight. On 10 November 2008, he was nominated for two People's Choice Awards related to his work on the film, "Best Ensemble Cast" and "Best Onscreen Match-Up" (shared with Christian Bale), and Ledger won an award for "Match-Up" in the ceremony aired live on CBS in January 2009.
On 11 December 2008, it was announced that Ledger had been nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight; he subsequently won the award at the 66th Golden Globe Awards ceremony telecast on NBC on 11 January 2009, with Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan accepting on his behalf.
Film critics, co-stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and Michael Caine and many of Ledger's peers in the film community joined Bale in calling for and predicting a nomination for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in recognition of Ledger's achievement in The Dark Knight. Ledger's subsequent nomination was announced on 22 January 2009, the anniversary of his death.
Ledger went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the second person to win a posthumous Academy Award for acting (after fellow Australian actor Peter Finch, who won for 1976's Network), as well as the first comic-book movie actor to win an Oscar for their acting. Ledger's family attended the ceremony on 22 February 2009, with his parents and sister accepting the award onstage on his behalf. Following talks with the Ledger family in Australia, the academy determined that Ledger's daughter, Matilda Rose, would own the award. However, due to Matilda's age, she would not gain full ownership of the statuette until her eighteenth birthday in 2023. Her mother, Michelle Williams, would hold the statuette in trust for Matilda until that time.
On 4 April 2017, a trailer was released for the documentary I Am Heath Ledger, which was released on 3 May 2017. It features archival footage of Ledger and interviews.
== Filmography ==
=== Film ===
=== Television ===
=== Music videos ===
== Accolades == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valorant_Champions_Tour | Valorant Champions Tour | The Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) is a global competitive esports tournament series for the video game Valorant organised by Riot Games, the game's developers. The series runs multiple events throughout each season, culminating in Valorant Champions, the top-level event of the tour. The VCT was announced in 2020, with its inaugural season taking place in 2021.
== History ==
=== 2021–2022: Open-qualifiers era ===
In November 2020, Riot Games announced the first Valorant Champions Tour, a tournament series divided into three tiers: Challengers, Masters, and Champions. Challengers would act as the lowest tier, split into seven regions: North America, Brazil, Latin America (Hispanic America), EMEA, Southeast Asia (which later included South Asia and Oceania, becoming the Asia-Pacific region), Korea, Japan. Teams that advance past Challengers would move on to Masters, where teams would not be divided by regions anymore, and the top 16 teams from Masters would move on to Champions, the final tournament of VCT. In February 2021, they announced the VCT Game Changers, a supplementary tournament initiative for women and marginalized genders.
Riot hired esports infrastructure company Nerd Street Gamers as operators and producers for all North American Challengers and Masters events. They also hired several third-party companies to broadcast their events, such as Liga de Videojuegos Profesional (LVP) for their Spanish-language broadcasts and LetsPlay.Live for their Oceania broadcasts. The 2021 Champions tournament took place on December 1–12 at the Verti Music Hall in Berlin, Germany, concluding with team Acend defeating Gambit Esports in the grand finals by a score of 3–2.
Over 10,000 teams competed in the VCT in 2021. Outside of Champions, VCT saw its highest viewership at the Reykjavík Masters tournament in May, with a peak viewership of 1,085,850. The Champions grand finals match in December reached a peak viewership of 1,089,068, making it the VCT's highest peak viewership.
Riot made several changes to the format of VCT for its second iteration. While the overall structure of Challengers, Masters, and Champions remained unchanged, it reduced the number of stages of Challengers and Masters events from three to two. VCT Challengers began on February 11, 2022. The 2022 Champions Tournament took place from September 1 to 18 in Istanbul, Turkey.
=== 2023–present: Partnerships era ===
Riot Games announced a new format starting in 2023. The season will be split into three international regions – Americas, EMEA, and Pacific instead of the 7 regions format used in previous years. Each international region will have its own International League that replaces the Challengers to become the domestic competitions to qualify for Masters and Champions. On September 21, 2022, Riot Games announced the thirty teams that had been selected as part of their new partnership format.
In February 2023, Riot partnered with Grid Esports for performance analysis data.
For China, Riot Games showed favor towards players here by giving Chinese teams a number of direct slots to participate in global tournaments (Masters and Champions) through third parties competitions in Hong Kong server, instead of having to play through Pacific league. In a June 2023 press conference, Riot COO Whalen Rozelle confirmed that Valorant would launch in China in July under the name 无畏契约 (lit. 'Fearless Contract'), with hopes to launch a VCT league there in 2024. Shortly after in August, Riot announced an own regional league for China, and raising the number of partnered teams to 40.
== Leagues and format ==
=== Franchised leagues ===
==== International Leagues ====
As of 2023, 30 teams are selected to be partner teams in International Leagues for five years (to 2027) with 10 teams per region. Non-partner teams compete in many sub-regions of Challengers events to qualify for "Ascension" events. The Ascension events in 2023 and 2024 had one winner per region, which earned them a temporary (initially two-year) promotion into their regions' International League. The promoted teams have a chance to qualify for the global tournaments (Masters and Champions), as well as get benefits provided to other partnered teams. Through the Challengers promotion system, International Leagues expanded by one team each, until they reached a cap of 12 teams in each region in 2025 (beforehand this was supposed to be a 14-team cap by 2027).
For 2025, the two temporary teams per International League can stay up via qualifying for Champions, compete in Ascension to stay in the league if they finished 5th to 8th, or get relegated back to their Challengers region if finishing 9th to 12th; only one of the guest teams per region can stay up via Champions, with the best performer of the two guests taking the spot if both qualify.
Riot Games later decided to end the first era of franchising in 2026, one year earlier than originally planned (2027), in order to reassess existing partners and prepare for the next franchising era.
Teams in each International League play on LAN in a centralized local: the Riot Games Arena in Los Angeles for VCT Americas, Riot Games Arena in Berlin for VCT EMEA, and Sangam SOOP Colosseum in Seoul for VCT Pacific.
==== China League ====
Right from global launch, although Valorant had not been licensed for release in China, Riot Games showed favor towards Chinese players by allowing Chinese teams to participate in global tournaments (Masters and Champions) through achievements in domestic tournaments organized by third parties, played at Hong Kong server.
Since 2024, with Valorant licensed for release servers in mainland, Riot launched the VCT CN specifically for the only country that they considers a pro region on the same level as the three International Leagues for many countries, as well as competition slots for only teams from China at Masters and Champions. They also announced the second Masters event of the year to take place in Shanghai and released a new Chinese agent Iso alongside previous agent Sage.
Similar to three International Leagues, ten Chinese teams were selected as partner teams for the first franchising era of the China League (originally planned to run until 2027, but later decided to end in 2026 at the same time as International Leagues), with two additional non-partner teams qualifying through China Ascension. The China League is based at the VCT CN Arena in Shanghai.
==== Former teams and timeline ====
=== Global tournaments ===
==== Valorant Masters ====
The Valorant Masters is a biannual Valorant international tournament organized by Riot Games in the middle of the year since 2021. Similar to the Mid-Season Invitational for League of Legends, it is the second most important international Valorant tournament after Champions. There are usually two Masters tournaments each year. Teams must place near the top of their regional league to qualify for Masters.
==== Valorant Champions ====
The Valorant Champions is the annual professional Valorant world championship tournament hosted by Riot Games and is the culmination of each VCT season. It includes spots with points earned throughout the year. Teams compete for the world champion title of Valorant esports.
=== Non-partner leagues as tier 2 ===
==== Challengers and Ascension ====
Non-partner teams compete in Challengers events of sub-regions in Americas, EMEA and Pacific to qualify for "Ascension", the yearly promotion event to the respective International Leagues. Originally, it was announced that teams would have two-year stays in their International League after winning Ascension, with one team promoted every year until 2026, when two teams would be promoted every year until 2028. The leagues would have 14 teams each, totaling to 42 teams across the three leagues.
On June 21, 2024, Riot announced changes to the Ascension format from 2025, with teams promoted to the International Leagues for one-year stays instead, after which they would be relegated to Challengers again if they did not finish in the top 8 in their region's regional League; if they qualified for Champions however, they get to stay for another year; if they finished in the playoffs of the International League, they qualify for that year's Ascension for a chance to keep their place in the league.
In 2023-24, there are 23 minor regional leagues across the three international territories. From 2025, they got decreased to 15.
In 2026, due to end the first franchising era one year earlier, Ascensions will be not hosted. Instead, Challengers teams will have chance to join their respective VCT league's in Stage 2 play-off, giving them a pathway to qualify for Champions directly.
=== Valorant Game Changers ===
Valorant Game Changers is a series of domestic competitions for women and other marginalized genders within Valorant esports. Teams that finish in top places qualify for the Valorant Game Changers Championship, the world championship event of Game Changers, and also earn the chance to be promoted to their region's Challengers league.
== Results ==
=== International Leagues & China League winners ===
(*) Non-partner teams in franchise system
=== Global tournaments ===
==== Teams' titles ====
* Team or organization no longer participates in Valorant esports.
==== Regions' titles ====
=== Ascension winners ===
=== Valorant Game Changers Championship ===
== Awards ==
=== Masters ===
The original masters trophy was unveiled by Riot at a May 2021 media preview event in the build up to Masters Reykjavik. It features a metal bottom and a glass top.The trophy was redesigned in 2023, again by Volpin Props, to be reusable for Masters tournaments in multiple regions. It stands at 18 inches (46 cm) and features a swappable 'Radianite' core. The body of the trophy is palladium-plated with plastic components.
Each trophies were designed with motifs reflecting the game's agents or maps. For Masters Tokyo, it featured duelist Yoru's ultimate Oni mask. For Madrid, it featured butterflies, which is the motif for the newest controller, Clove. For Shanghai, it featured duelist Iso's lilac-themed shield. For Bangkok, it featured a diamond, which is the ability icon for the newest duelist, Waylay. For Toronto, the trophy's core is redesigned in an pink-colored iceberg, which is the theme for the newest map, Corrode. For Santiago, it featured a soundbox, which is the motif for the newest controller, Miks.
=== Champions ===
The Valorant Champions trophy was first unveiled ahead of Valorant Champions 2021. Also designed and built by Volpin Props of Atlanta, Georgia, it stands at 2 feet (61 cm) tall and is partially 3D-printed, with 24 karat gold decoration overlaid. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling_at_the_2020_Summer_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Men%27s_freestyle_86_kg | Wrestling at the 2020 Summer Olympics – Men's freestyle 86 kg | The men's freestyle 86 kilograms competition at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, took place on 4–5 August 2021 at the Makuhari Messe in Mihama-ku. The qualification rounds were held on 4 August, with medal matches the next day.
This freestyle wrestling competition consists of a single-elimination tournament, with a repechage used to determine the winner of two bronze medals. The two finalists face off for gold and silver medals. Each wrestler who loses to one of the two finalists moves into the repechage, culminating in a pair of bronze medal matches featuring the semifinal losers each facing the remaining repechage opponent from their half of the bracket.
The medals for the competition were presented by the United World Wrestling president Nenad Lalović, IOC Executive Board Member from Serbia, and the medalists' bouquets were presented by Pedro Gama Filho, UWW Board Member from Brazil.
David Taylor from the United States won the gold medal after beating 2016 Olympic Champion Hassan Yazdani from Iran 4–3 in the gold medal match.
== Schedule ==
All times are Japan Standard Time (UTC+09:00)
== Results ==
=== Main bracket ===
=== Repechage ===
== Final standing == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Watson | Emma Watson | Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson (born 15 April 1990) is an English actress. In the 2010s, she was ranked among the world's highest-paid actresses by Forbes and Vanity Fair, and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2015. Watson was also listed by Forbes as an honouree on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2015 and 2016.
Watson attended the Dragon School and trained in acting at the Oxford branch of Stagecoach Theatre Arts. As a child, she rose to stardom after landing her first professional acting role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter film series, having previously acted only in school plays. Watson made her first major foray beyond the Potter franchise starring in Ballet Shoes (2007), and she lent her voice to The Tale of Despereaux (2008). After the final Harry Potter film, she took on a supporting role in My Week with Marilyn (2011), before starring as Sam, a flirtatious, free-spirited student in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), to critical success. Further acclaim came from portraying Alexis Neiers in Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring (2013) and the titular character's adoptive daughter in Darren Aronofsky's biblical epic Noah (2014). That same year, Watson was honoured by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, winning British Artist of the Year. She also starred as Belle in the live-action musical romantic fantasy Beauty and the Beast (2017), and as Meg March in Greta Gerwig's coming-of-age drama Little Women (2019).
From 2011 to 2014, Watson split her time between working on films and continuing her education, graduating from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in English literature in May 2014. That year, she was appointed a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador and helped launch the UN Women campaign HeForShe, which advocates for gender equality. In 2018, she helped launch Time's Up UK as a founding member. Watson was appointed to a G7 advisory body for women's rights in 2019, consulting with leaders on foreign policy. Her modelling work has included campaigns for Burberry and Lancôme. She also lent her name to a clothing line for the sustainable brand People Tree. From 2020 to 2023, she sat on the board of directors of Kering, a luxury brand group, as an advocate for sustainable fashion.
== Early life and education ==
Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson was born on 15 April 1990 in Paris, to English lawyers Jacqueline Luesby and Chris Watson. Watson lived in Maisons-Laffitte near Paris until age five, when her parents divorced. She moved to England to live with her mother in Oxfordshire while spending weekends at her father's house in London. In a 2008 interview, Watson said that she speaks some French, though "not as well" as she had previously. After moving to Oxford with her mother and brother, she attended the Dragon School until 2003. From age six, she wanted to become an actress, and trained at the Oxford branch of Stagecoach Theatre Arts, a part-time theatre school where she studied singing, dancing, and acting.
By age 10, Watson had performed in Stagecoach productions and school plays including Arthur: The Young Years and The Happy Prince, but she had never acted professionally prior to the Harry Potter series. After the Dragon School, Watson moved to Headington School, Oxford. While on film sets, she and her castmates were tutored for up to five hours a day. In June 2006, she took GCSE school examinations in ten subjects, achieving eight A* and two A grades. In May 2007, she took AS levels in English, Geography, Art, and History of Art. The following year, she dropped History of Art to pursue the three A levels, receiving an A grade in each.
Watson took a gap year after finishing secondary school, to film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Parts 1 & 2 beginning in February 2009. She attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In March 2011, after 18 months, Watson announced she was deferring her course for "a semester or two", though she attended Worcester College, Oxford, during the 2011–12 academic year as part of the Visiting Student Programme. In a 2014 interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Watson said just before graduation that it took five years to finish her degree instead of four because she had taken two semesters off owing to her acting work. On 25 May 2014, she graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature. In 2016, she was appointed a visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. In 2023, she began a Master of Studies in creative writing at New College, Oxford.
== Acting career ==
=== 1999–2009: Harry Potter and worldwide recognition ===
In 1999, casting began for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the film adaptation of British author J. K. Rowling's best-selling novel. Casting agents found Watson through her Oxford theatre teacher. She had acted in school plays, but had no film acting experience. Her first audition took place when she was nine years old. Although Watson had to audition a total of eight times before earning the role, Rowling supported her casting after her first screen test. Prior to casting Watson, the producers considered Hatty Jones for the role.
The release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2001 was Watson's debut screen performance. The film broke records for opening-day sales and opening-weekend takings and was the highest-grossing film of 2001. Critics singled out Watson for particular acclaim; The Daily Telegraph called her performance "admirable", and IGN said she "stole the show". Watson was nominated for five awards for her performance in Philosopher's Stone, winning the Young Artist Award for Leading Young Actress. She was chosen as one of Entertainment Weekly's Breakout Performers of 2001.
A year later, Watson reprised her role as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second installment of the series. Reviewers praised the lead actors' performances. The Los Angeles Times said Watson and her co-stars had matured between films, while The Times criticised director Chris Columbus for "under-employing" Watson's hugely popular character. Watson received an Otto Award from the German magazine Bravo for her performance.
In 2004, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was released. Watson was appreciative of the more assertive role Hermione played, calling her "charismatic" and "a fantastic role to play". Critics lauded Watson's performance; A. O. Scott of The New York Times remarked: "Luckily Mr. Radcliffe's blandness is offset by Ms. Watson's spiky impatience. Harry may show off his expanding wizardly skills ... but Hermione ... earns the loudest applause with a decidedly unmagical punch to Draco Malfoy's deserving nose." Although Prisoner of Azkaban proved to be the lowest-grossing Harry Potter film in the entire series, Watson's performance won her two Otto Awards and the Child Performance of the Year award from Total Film.
With Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), both Watson and the Harry Potter film series reached new milestones. The film set records for a Harry Potter opening weekend and opening weekend in the UK. Critics praised the increasing maturity of Watson and her teenage co-stars; The New York Times called her performance "touchingly earnest", and Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that "Watson's gutsy, confident performance nicely shows that inside and outside the world of magic there is a growing discrepancy between a teenage girl's status and her accelerating emotional and intellectual development." For Watson, much of the film's humour sprang from the tension among the three lead characters as they matured. She said, "I loved all the arguing. ... I think it's much more realistic that they would argue and that there would be problems." Nominated for three awards for Goblet of Fire, Watson won a bronze Otto Award. Watson almost quit the franchise after Goblet of Fire, saying, "I think I was scared. I don’t know if you ever felt like it got to a tipping point where you were like, 'this is kind of forever now.'"
In 2006, Watson played Hermione in The Queen's Handbag, a special mini-episode of Harry Potter in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's 80th birthday. The fifth film in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was released in 2007. A huge financial success, the film set a record worldwide opening-weekend gross of $332.7 million. Watson won the inaugural National Movie Award for Best Female Performance. As the fame of the actress and the series continued to rise, Watson and her Harry Potter co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint left imprints of their hands, feet and wands in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on 9 July 2007. That month, Watson's work on the Harry Potter series was said to have earned her more than £10 million, and she acknowledged she would never have to work for money again.
Prior to the release of Order of the Phoenix, the future of the Harry Potter series was in jeopardy, as all three lead actors were hesitant to sign on to continue their roles for the final installments. Watson was considerably more ambivalent than her co-stars during renegotiations. She explained that the decision was significant, as the films represented a further four-year commitment to the role, but eventually conceded that she "could never let [the role of] Hermione go", signing for the role on 23 March 2007.
Watson's first non-Potter role was the 2007 BBC film Ballet Shoes, a television adaptation of the 1936 novel of the same name by Noel Streatfeild, which starred Emilia Fox, Victoria Wood and Richard Griffiths. The film's director, Sandra Goldbacher, commented that Watson was "perfect" for the starring role of aspiring actress Pauline Fossil: "She has a piercing, delicate aura that makes you want to gaze and gaze at her." Ballet Shoes was broadcast in the UK on Boxing Day to 5.7 million viewers, to mixed reviews. The following year, she voiced the character Princess Pea in the animation The Tale of Despereaux, a children's comedy, based on the 2003 novel of the same name, by Kate DiCamillo, starring Matthew Broderick, with Harry Potter co-star Robbie Coltrane also starring in the film. The Tale of Despereaux was released in December 2008 and grossed $87 million worldwide.
Principal photography for the sixth Harry Potter film began in late 2007, with Watson's part being filmed from 18 December to 17 May 2008. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince premiered on 15 July 2009, having been delayed from November 2008. With the lead actors in their late teens, critics were increasingly willing to review them on the same level as the rest of the franchise's all-star cast, which the Los Angeles Times described as "a comprehensive guide to contemporary UK acting". The Washington Post felt Watson had given "[her] most charming performance to date", while The Daily Telegraph described the lead actors as "newly liberated and energised, eager to give all they have to what's left of the series".
Watson's filming for the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, began on 18 February 2009 and ended on 12 June 2010. For financial and scripting reasons, the original book was divided into two films which were shot consecutively. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 was released in November 2010 while the second film was released in July 2011. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 became a commercial and critical success. The highest-grossing film in the franchise, it grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide and proved to be Watson's most commercially successful film to date.
=== 2010–2016: Independent films and mainstream work ===
Watson appeared in a music video for One Night Only, after meeting lead singer George Craig at the 2010 Winter/Summer Burberry advertising campaign. The video, "Say You Don't Want It", was screened on Channel 4 on 26 June 2010 and released on 16 August. In her first post-Harry Potter film, Watson appeared in My Week with Marilyn (2011) as Lucy, a wardrobe assistant who briefly dates protagonist Colin Clark, portrayed by Eddie Redmayne.
In May 2010, Watson was reported to be in talks to star in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, based on the 1999 novel of the same name. Filming began in summer of 2011, and the film was released in September 2012. Watson starred opposite Logan Lerman as Sam, a high school senior who befriends a fellow student called Charlie (Lerman), and helps him through his freshman year. The film opened to favourable reviews; David Sexton of the Evening Standard opined that Watson's performance was "plausible and touching", while The Atlantic reviewer thought that Watson "sheds the memory of a decade playing Hermione in the Harry Potter series with an about-face as a flirtatious but insecure free spirit.
Watson joined the cast of the satirical crime film The Bling Ring on 29 February 2012, The Sofia Coppola-directed film is based on the real-life Bling Ring robberies, with Watson playing a fictionalised version of Alexis Neiers, a television personality who was one of seven teenagers involved in the robberies. The film was released in 2013. While the film mostly received mixed reviews, critics gave almost unanimous praise for Watson's performance. Adam White of The Independent later stated that "She prove[d] remarkable.... Watson oozes casual disdain. Her sticky American vocal fry is clipped and monotone, as if she's swallowed a Kardashian for breakfast." Watson also had a supporting role in the apocalyptic comedy This Is the End (2013), in which she, Seth Rogen, James Franco and many others played "exaggerated versions of themselves" and Watson memorably dropped the "f-bomb". She said she could not pass up the opportunity to make her first comedy and "work with some of the best comedians [...] in the world right now".
In June 2012, Watson was confirmed for the role as Ila, Shem's wife, in Darren Aronofsky's Noah, which began filming the following month, and was released in March 2014. Watson referred to the role as "physically very demanding" given the usage of special effects and did extensive research on childbirth to effectively portray a scene in the film. The film, a box office success, received mixed reviews for its direction and casting; Vanity Fair wrote that "Watson anchors the film's rawest emotional scenes.... Sitting on an Icelandic beach with Russell Crowe, her hair wild and eyes burning, Watson is quiet but ferocious." In March 2013, it was reported that Watson was in negotiations to star as the title character in Kenneth Branagh's live-action Disney adaptation of Cinderella. Watson was offered the role, but turned it down because she did not connect with the character. The role ultimately went to Lily James.
Watson performed the background vocals in the second chorus of the song "Pantomime" by singer Ben Hammersley, alongside Ólafur Arnalds. The song was released on 20 January 2014.
Watson joined Judi Dench, Robert Downey Jr., Mike Leigh, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Mark Ruffalo as recipients of the 2014 Britannia Awards, presented on 30 October in Los Angeles. Watson was awarded British Artist of the Year and she dedicated the prize to Millie, her pet hamster who died as Watson was filming Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Watson starred in two 2015 releases, the thrillers Colonia, opposite Daniel Brühl and Michael Nyqvist; and Regression by Alejandro Amenábar, alongside Ethan Hawke and her Harry Potter co-star David Thewlis. Both of these films received generally negative reviews; The Daily Telegraph critic blamed Regression's script for her "pure dramatic cardboard" role. She also appeared in an episode of BBC's The Vicar of Dibley, in which she played Reverend Iris. In February 2016, Watson announced she was taking a year-long break from acting. She planned to spend the time on her "personal development" and her women's rights work.
=== 2017–present: work and hiatus ===
Watson starred as Belle in the 2017 live-action Disney adaptation of Beauty and the Beast directed by Bill Condon, and starring opposite Dan Stevens as the Beast. She was given autonomy within Belle's portrayal; she re-characterised her as an assistant to her inventor father and incorporated bloomers and boots into her wardrobe. The film grossed over $1.2 billion at the worldwide box office and emerged as the second-highest-grossing film of 2017 and the 17th-highest-grossing film of all time. Her reported fee was $3 million upfront with profit participation, bringing her salary up to $15 million. The film garnered positive reviews; Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times thought her performance was "all pluck and spunk and sass and smarts and fierce independence as Belle". Watson later said "When I finished the film, it kind of felt like I had made that transition into being a woman on-screen".
In the same year, she starred opposite Tom Hanks in the film adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel The Circle as Mae Holland, who begins working at a powerful tech corporation and enters a perilous situation concerning surveillance and freedom. The film received negative reviews but was a moderate box office success. In 2019, Watson starred as Meg March in Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women, co-starring with Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, and Meryl Streep. On the premise, Watson has stated "I think [Little Women] was good literary device to explain that there's not one way to be a feminist.... [Meg's] way of being a feminist is making the choice – because that's really, for me anyway, what feminism is about. Her choice is that she wants to be a full-time mother and wife." Forbes stated that "Watson has perhaps the most challenging [...] role, as the proverbial straight woman of the sisters who is put on the defensive when her dreams end up being the most conventional of the lot." The film was critically acclaimed and grossed over $218 million against its $40 million budget.
In 2020, Watson discussed her future career plans, stating: "Having been so public in making films and being so active on social [media] in my activism, I am curious to embrace a role where I work to amplify more voices, to continue to learn from those with different experiences", adding that her work would include "fewer red carpets and more conference meetings".
In 2021, various reports surfaced stating that Watson was engaged or retiring from acting. Watson and her representatives refuted these reports; she later labelled the speculation as clickbait and attributed her relative public absence to continued social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, Watson reunited with multiple cast members of the Harry Potter film series for an HBO Max special titled Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts. The following year, Watson revealed in an interview with the Financial Times that a reason why she had not acted in almost five years was because she "wasn't very happy" with the profession and that she felt "a bit caged". However, she went on to say that she would "absolutely" return to acting while also saying, "But I'm happy to sit and wait for the next right thing. I love what I do. It's finding a way to do it where I don't have to fracture myself into different faces and people. And I just don't want to switch into robot mode any more."
== Fashion career ==
In 2005, Watson began her modelling career with a photo shoot for Teen Vogue, which made her the youngest person to cover the magazine. Three years later, the British press reported that Watson was to replace Keira Knightley as the face of Chanel, but this was denied by both parties. In June 2009, following several months of rumours, Watson confirmed she would be partnering with Burberry as the face of their Autumn/Winter 2009 campaign, for which she received an estimated six-figure fee. She also appeared in Burberry's 2010 Spring/Summer campaign alongside her brother Alex, musicians George Craig and Matt Gilmour, and model Max Hurd. In February 2011, Watson was awarded the Style Icon award from British Elle by Dame Vivienne Westwood. Watson continued her involvement in fashion advertising when she announced she had been chosen as the face of Lancôme in March 2011.
In September 2009, Watson announced her involvement with People Tree, a fair trade fashion brand. Watson worked as a creative adviser for the company to create a spring line of clothing, which was released in February 2010; the range featured styles inspired by southern France and London. The collection, described by The Times as "very clever" despite their "quiet hope that [she] would become tangled at the first hemp-woven hurdle", was widely publicised in magazines such as Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and People. Watson, who was not paid for the collaboration, admitted that competition for the range was minimal, but argued that "Fashion is a great way to empower people and give them skills; rather than give cash to charity you can help people by buying the clothes they make and supporting things they take pride in"; adding, "I think young people like me are becoming increasingly aware of the humanitarian issues surrounding fast fashion and want to make good choices but there aren't many options out there." Watson continued her involvement with People Tree, resulting in the release of a 2010 Autumn/Winter collection.
In 2013, Madame Tussauds in London unveiled a wax statue of Watson wearing an Elie Saab haute couture design donated to the museum by the designer. A spokesperson for the museum stated, "[Watson] is one of the most requested personalities by our guests. She's a true English rose known and loved by millions of film and fashion fans around the world". Watson was awarded Best British Style at the 2014 British Fashion Awards. The competition included David Beckham, Amal Clooney, Kate Moss, and Keira Knightley.
Watson has been described as "an early adopter of sustainable fashion" and is noted for dressing ethically on the red carpet. She wore a Calvin Klein gown to the 2016 Met Gala made out of recycled plastic bottles. Watson has supported Good On You, an app that acts as a directory for the sustainability level of fashion brands. In 2017, she began updating an Instagram account entitled "The Press Tour", detailing the ethical brands she wore during the press tours for films such as Beauty and the Beast and The Circle. Watson guest-edited the March 2018 issue of Vogue Australia focusing on fashion sustainability, and was photographed by Peter Lindbergh for the magazine. In January 2020, she partnered with consignment website ThredUP to launch a "Fashion Footprint Calculator", which allows website visitors to calculate the carbon impact of their wardrobes and ways to reduce it.
In June 2020, Watson was appointed the youngest member of the board of directors of Kering, the owner of various fashion brands such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Watson will chair Kering's sustainability committee. Kering chairman François-Henri Pinault praised the new board members' "knowledge and competences, and the multiplicity of their backgrounds and perspectives". Watson stated she "hope[d] to influence decisions that will impact future generations and the world that we leave them" and was "extremely excited" to collaborate with the Kering Foundation as part of their women's rights work and looked forward to making a difference "behind the scenes". She served in this capacity until 2023.
In August 2022, Watson became the face of Prada Beauty's new fragrance Paradoxe. She starred in, directed, wrote and narrated the short film for the fragrance's promotional campaign. In January 2024, Watson became the face of Prada's Re-Nylon collection, the sustainable product line of the brand.
== Activism and advocacy ==
=== UN Women Goodwill Ambassadorship and feminism ===
Watson is an outspoken feminist. She has promoted education for girls, travelling to Bangladesh and Zambia to do so. In July 2014, she was appointed a UN Women Goodwill ambassador. That September, an admittedly nervous Watson delivered an address at UN Headquarters in New York City to launch the UN Women campaign HeForShe, which aims to urge men to advocate for gender equality. In that speech she said she began questioning gender-based assumptions at age eight when she was called "bossy", a trait she has attributed to her being a "perfectionist", whilst boys were not, and at 14 when she was "sexualised by certain elements of the media". Watson's speech described feminism as "the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities" and declared that the perception of feminism as being "man-hating" is something that "has to stop". The speech made worldwide headlines from both major news outlets and fashion blogs, and the organisation's website crashed after press coverage of the event. Watson later said she received threats within less than twelve hours of making the speech, which left her "raging. [...] If they were trying to put me off [women's rights work], it did the opposite."
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of UN Women, stated, "For a time, there was a conversation about whether 'feminism' was a good thing or a bad thing... [Her speech] gave us the word back." In 2015, Malala Yousafzai told Watson she decided to call herself a feminist after hearing her speech.
Also in September, Watson made her first country visit as a UN Women Goodwill ambassador to Uruguay, where she gave a speech at the Legislative Palace in Montevideo highlighting the need for women's political participation. In November 2014, Watson designed a Paddington Bear statue, one of fifty located around London prior to the release of the film Paddington, which was auctioned to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). In December, the Ms. Foundation for Women named Watson its Feminist Celebrity of 2014, following an online poll. Watson also gave a speech about gender equality in January 2015, at the World Economic Forum's annual winter meeting.
Watson took the top spot on the AskMen "Top 99 Outstanding Women 2015" list on the strength of having "thrown her back" into women's rights issues. In the same year, Watson was included on the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people, her first-ever appearance on the list. For its recap, former The New York Times editor Jill Abramson noted Watson's "gutsy, smart take on feminism" and called her effort to get men involved "refreshing".
Watson has cited Gloria Steinem and Maya Angelou as influences. In January 2016, Watson started a feminist Goodreads book club: Our Shared Shelf. The goal of the club is to share feminist ideas and encourage discussion on the topic. One book is selected per month and is discussed in the last week of that month. The first book to be selected was My Life on the Road by Steinem, whom Watson would later interview that February at the How to: Academy in London. Our Shared Shelf ceased updates in January 2020, but continues to be open as a discussion board for recommendations.
On 2016 International Day of the Girl Child, Watson visited Malawi to meet with traditional chiefs and girls who returned to school after being freed from child marriage. Watson has partnered with organisations such as Book Fairies and Books on the Underground to leave literature on public transit for consumption.
In March 2017, Watson received backlash for a Vanity Fair photo shoot in which one of the shots had her breasts partly visible, for which some in the news media accused her of hypocrisy. Bemused by the controversy, she argued that "feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women" but is instead about freedom, liberation and equality, adding, "I really don't know what my tits have to do with it."
Watson has discussed her white privilege in feminist spaces; in an interview with British Vogue, she commented, "I saw 'white feminism' coming up again and again, and I was like, 'Hey, this is clearly something that I have to meaningfully engage with. I have to understand this better". She has written about intersectionality for Our Shared Shelf, discussing her self-reflection on "What are the ways I have benefited from being white? In what ways do I support and uphold a system that is structurally racist?"
=== Time's Up UK and advocacy against harassment ===
Watson is a founding member of Time's Up UK and coordinated its launch at the 71st British Academy Film Awards. Watson also assisted in the establishment of nationwide industry guidelines on bullying and harassment, implemented by the British Film Institute and British Academy of Film and Television Arts. She donated £1 million to Time's Up UK in February 2018 and later helped set up the organisation's Justice and Equality Fund in October, which donated to women's groups across the country. Marai Larasi, an activist on the issue of violence against women, was her guest to the 2018 Golden Globe Awards.
In July 2019, Watson helped launch a legal helpline for people who have suffered sexual harassment in the workplace. Legal advice is provided by Rights of Women, a charity which works to help women through the law. In the same year, she joined a G7 gender equality advisory group convened by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, to "call on G7 to make political and economic advances for women within their own countries" as well as a "centerpiece of foreign policy". She attended their first meeting at the Élysée Palace in Paris in February and attended the 45th G7 summit in August as part of the committee.
In an interview with Paris Lees, she voiced her support for transgender rights, reiterating this on Twitter amidst controversy concerning Rowling's remarks on gender identity. Watson has spoken out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement; in June 2020, she shared anti-racism educational resources on social media in support of the George Floyd protests after initially participating in Blackout Tuesday, and uploaded a podcast episode onto Spotify interviewing Reni Eddo-Lodge about her book Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race.
In July 2020, she partnered with Lodge and the WOW Foundation to spearhead a project reimagining the London Underground Map, renaming the 270 stops to spotlight women and non-binary people who have shaped the city's history. The initiative will consult writers, museums, and librarians and is set to be published by Haymarket Books on International Women's Day 2021. Watson was among the 400 signatories in a letter calling for the UK government to include women in "decision-making roles" at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.
In June 2021, it was reported that Watson was part of a group of investors funding $12.5 million into FabricNano, a startup developing sustainable alternatives to petrochemical products.
=== Palestine ===
In January 2022, Watson showed support for the Palestine cause by posting an image of a pro-Palestinian protest with a "Solidarity is a verb" banner on Instagram. This received backlash from former Israeli science minister Danny Danon, who posted on Twitter, "10 points from Gryffindor for being an antisemite". Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan also criticised her. Danon's comment was criticised by Leah Greenberg, a co-executive director of Indivisible Project and Conservative Party peer Sayeeda Warsi. More than forty people, including Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Miriam Margolyes, Gael García Bernal, Peter Capaldi, Maxine Peake, Viggo Mortensen, Steve Coogan and Charles Dance, supported Watson in a letter organised by Artists for Palestine UK.
In September 2025, in an interview with Jay Shetty on his podcast, On Purpose with Jay Shetty, when asked about her views on the 7 October attacks and the Gaza war, she stated:
"This duality created where we don’t seem able to care about the victims of terrorism and care about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine at the same time, and both things have to be allowed to be true. You have to be allowed to care about 50,000 civilians dying, 17,000 of which are children, and care deeply about the victims of this awful terrorist attack.”
=== Environmental and climate activism ===
Watson is an activist for environmental justice and climate change mitigation. In 2019, Swedish researchers from Lund University analysed the carbon footprints of ten celebrities including Watson's. Watson's carbon footprint was the lowest of the celebrities analysed, but her CO2 emissions from flying alone were still 15.1 tons of CO2 – three times the global average. At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Watson hosted a panel on climate change with guests including climate activist Greta Thunberg.
== Public image ==
Watson has often been cited as a role model, though she shies away from the term, stating that "it puts the fear of God into [her]". Her impact on teenage girls' view of women's rights has been referred to as the "Emma Watson effect", with respondents from a National Citizen Service survey stating that her work in activism had inspired them to label themselves feminists. In her initial post-Harry Potter career, she was noted to focus on smaller films rather than big-budget studio films. Adam White of The Independent states that Watson's acting style possesses "a very human sensitivity and quiet strength".
Describing Watson's off-screen persona, Derek Blasberg of Vanity Fair has called her "shy", "friendly, intelligent, and down to earth". Steinem has described her as "way more like a real person than a movie star", while author bell hooks considers her to be part of "a very different, new breed [of actors] who are interested in being whole and having a holistic life, as opposed to being identified with just wealth and fame."
Watson's character in Harry Potter has had a significant impact on pop culture; the actress has commented, "I have met fans [with] my face tattooed on their bod[ies]. I've met people who used the Harry Potter books to get through cancer. I don't know how to explain it, but the Harry Potter phenomenon steps into a different zone." Watson has been the subject of substantial media attention since the beginning of her career; on her eighteenth birthday she was photographed by paparazzi attempting to take pictures up her skirt, and she has been victim of numerous stalking threats. Watson does not take selfies with fans, citing security concerns, and instead prefers to talk one-on-one during interactions.
In March 2009, she was ranked sixth on the Forbes list of "Most Valuable Young Stars" and in February 2010, she was Hollywood's highest-paid female star, having earned an estimated £19 million in 2009. In 2017, Forbes ranked her among the world's highest-paid actresses, with annual earnings of $14 million. In 2013, Watson was British GQ's Woman of the Year and topped Empire's list of the 100 sexiest movie stars. Watson was found to be the sixth most admired woman in the world in global surveys conducted by YouGov in 2020.
== Business ventures ==
In April 2023, Watson, and her brother Alex launched Renais, a sustainable gin brand. The gin is made from recycled skin grapes and is certified carbon neutral. The Watsons were inspired by their childhood in France and their father Chris Watson's wine business. The name Renais comes from the French word meaning "rebirth" and the gin is an ode to the Chablis wine region.
In September 2023, Watson and Alex won the Soho House Award for "Breakthrough Entrepreneur" for Renais. In January 2025, it was reported that the company raised $6 million for investment.
== Personal life ==
When asked about her religious beliefs in 2014, Watson described herself as a spiritual universalist. In February 2016, Watson was appointed visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University.
In 2019, she described herself as single with the self-coined phrase "self-partnered".
On coping with intense fame from a young age, she has said that remaining rooted in her own identity helped her eventually "find peace". She regarded herself as devout Buddhist. In 2013, she had become certified to teach yoga and meditation. As part of this certification, she attended a week-long meditation course at a Canadian facility, in which residents are not allowed to speak, in order "to figure out how to be at home with myself". Regarding her meditation training, she stated in an interview with Elle Australia that an uncertain future meant finding "a way to always feel safe and at home within myself. Because I can never rely on a physical place." In 2022, she went on a ten-day spiritual retreat in a Buddhist temple to take a vow of silence.
=== Driving offences ===
On 16 July 2025, Watson received a six-month driving ban after a speed camera recorded her travelling at 38 mph (61 km/h) in a 30 mph (48 km/h) zone in Oxford on the evening of 31 July 2024. She was ordered to pay a total of £1,044 to High Wycombe Magistrates' Court and given three penalty points following a five-minute hearing that she did not attend. The ban followed three previous speeding offences that had resulted in nine points on her licence and a separate incident on 6 February 2024 in which her Audi S3 was towed after being parked obstructively for nearly four hours outside a Stratford-upon-Avon pub.
== Filmography ==
=== Film ===
=== Television ===
=== Music videos ===
=== Theme park attractions ===
== Authored articles ==
Watson, Emma; Mlambo-Ngcuka, Phumzile; Iversen, Katja; Kaufman, Michael (22 August 2019). "Every G7 country should have a feminist foreign policy". The Guardian.
== Recognition and accolades ==
Throughout her career, Watson has received several awards and nominations, including a Young Artist Award for her portrayal of Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001). Additionally, she received nominations for three Critics' Choice Movie Awards, four Empire Awards, 14 MTV Movie & TV Awards (winning three), six People's Choice Awards (winning two), 12 Teen Choice Awards (winning eight).
Watson's efforts in activism and philanthropy, most notably her support of women's rights and her role in launching the UN Women campaign HeForShe, has received widespread media recognition and acclaim. Watson was listed among the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2015. She has received several recognitions for her style, from the Teen Choice Awards and British Fashion Awards. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_California#Cities | Northern California#Cities | Northern California (commonly shortened to NorCal) is a geocultural region that comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California, spanning the northernmost 48 of the state's 58 counties. Northern California in its largest definition is determined by dividing the state into two regions, the other being Southern California. The main northern population centers include the San Francisco Bay Area (anchored by the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland), the Greater Sacramento area (anchored by the state capital Sacramento), the Redding, California, area south of the Cascade Range, and the Metropolitan Fresno area (anchored by the city of Fresno). Northern California is coterminous with the natural range of the coast redwood and the giant sequoia, with many well-known old-growth forests and smaller groves. It contains most of the Sierra Nevada, including Yosemite Valley and part of Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta (the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range after Mount Rainier in Washington), and most of the Central Valley, one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. Northern California is also home to Silicon Valley, the global headquarters for several of the largest most powerful companies in the world, including Alphabet Inc. (Google), Apple, Meta, and Nvidia.
The Northern California Megaregion, one of the 11 megaregions of the United States is centered in Northern California, and extends from Metropolitan Fresno north to Greater Sacramento, and from the Bay Area east across the Nevada state line to encompass the entire Lake Tahoe–Reno area.
Evidence of Native American habitation in the area dates from at least 19,000 years ago and successive waves of arrivals led to one of the most densely populated areas of pre-Columbian North America. The arrival of European explorers from the early 16th to the mid-18th centuries did not establish European settlements in northern California. In 1770, the Spanish mission at Monterey was the first European settlement in the area, followed by other missions along the coast—eventually extending as far north as Sonoma County.
== Description ==
=== North–south divisions of California ===
California experienced a population boom during its gold rush (1848–1855), bringing more than 300,000 new residents, with very few of these settling in the southern part of the state. The northern two-thirds of the state was seen as the main part, and was often referred to as simply "California", while the southern third was called "Southern California". At that time, the state was profoundly divided by the Tehachapi Mountains which were a barrier to travelers before highways were built, and remain a bioregion barrier. This geographical barrier curves from Point Conception at the Pacific Ocean eastward through the Transverse Ranges including Mount Pinos and Tejon Pass, continuing through the Tehachapi Mountains including Tehachapi Pass, then cutting northward through the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range to Mount Patterson and the Nevada border. The Mojave Desert and the Great Basin Desert are separated from Northern California by mountain ranges in this definition of bioregions. Southern California in the 1850s was a backwater of mainly Spanish-speaking Californios who resented paying state taxes without receiving state projects.
In 1859, as proposed by the Californio politician Andrés Pico, the California State Legislature passed the Pico Act aiming to divide the state and create a new territory in the south. The border started in the west at a latitude of six standard parallels south of Mount Diablo—meaning 144 miles south of Mount Diablo at the latitude of 35°45'N, currently the border between Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties. The proposed border bent southward to capture more of the Central Valley, then it angled northeast from Old Tejon Ranch to the California border. The new southern portion was to be called the Territory of Colorado because much of its eastern border was the Colorado River. This legislation was signed by Governor John B. Weller and sent to the United States Congress for ratification, but it never came to a vote. Congress was too divided with tensions which would soon break out into the American Civil War, and despite the efforts of Senator Milton Latham, the bill died. However, the proposed east-west line continued to define one of the views of north–south division of the state.
"Northern California" may refer to the state's northernmost 48 counties, using the line established by the Pico Act, or it may refer to the portion north of the geographic barrier formed by the Transverse Ranges, the Tehachapi Mountains, and the Southern Sierras. Because of California's large size and diverse geography, the state can be subdivided in other ways as well. For example, the Central Valley is a region that is distinct both culturally and topographically from coastal California, though in northern versus southern California divisions, the Sacramento Valley and most of the San Joaquin Valley are usually placed in northern California. Some observers describe three partitions of California, with north and south sections separated by Central California.
Technically, California's exact north–south midway division is around 37°N, near the latitude of Morgan Hill and Chowchilla. The geographic center of California is at 37°09′58″N 119°26′58″W near North Fork, northeast of Fresno.
The state is often considered as having an additional division north of the urban areas of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento metropolitan areas. Extreme northern residents have felt under-represented in state government and, in 1941, attempted to form a new state with southwestern Oregon to be called Jefferson, or more recently to introduce legislation to split California into two or three states.
=== Popular usage ===
The coastal area north of the Bay Area is often referred to as the North Coast, touching the counties of Mendocino, Lake, Humboldt, and Del Norte. The interior region north of Sacramento metropolitan area is referred to by locals as the Northstate, consisting of about 20 counties.
"Northern California" was used by Tim Draper as the name of the northernmost state to be created by splitting California into three new states. The bill, Cal 3, was prevented from appearing on the 2018 California ballot because of a constitutional review by the Supreme Court of California.
== Significance ==
Since the events of the California Gold Rush, Northern California has been a leader on the world's economic, scientific, and cultural stages. From the development of gold mining techniques and logging practices in the 19th century that were later adopted around the world, to the development of world-famous and online business models (such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Yahoo!, and eBay), northern California has been at the forefront of new ways of doing business. In science, advances range from being the first to isolate and name fourteen transuranic chemical elements, to breakthroughs in microchip technology. Cultural contributions include the works of Ansel Adams, George Lucas, and Clint Eastwood, as well as beatniks, the Summer of Love, winemaking, the cradle of the international environmental movement, and the open, casual workplace first popularized in the Silicon Valley dot-com boom and now widely in use around the world. Other examples of innovation across diverse fields range from Genentech (development and commercialization of genetic engineering) to CrossFit as a pioneer in extreme human fitness and training.
It is also home to one of the largest Air Force Bases on the West Coast, and the largest in California by square meters, Travis Air Force Base.
== Cities ==
Northern California's largest metropolitan area is the San Francisco Bay Area which consists of 9 counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties. The Bay Area consists of the major cities of San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and their many suburbs. Although not a part of the Bay Area, in recent years the Bay Area has drawn more commuters from as far as Central Valley cities such as Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Turlock and Modesto. These cities in the central part of the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills may be viewed as part of a single megalopolis. The 2010 U.S. Census showed that the Bay Area grew at a faster rate than the Greater Los Angeles Area while Greater Sacramento had the largest growth rate of any metropolitan area in California.
The state's larger inland cities are considered part of Northern California in cases when the state is divided into two parts. Key cities in the region which are not in major metropolitan areas include Eureka on the far North Coast, Redding, at the northern end of the Central Valley, Chico, and Yuba City in the mid-north of the Central Valley, as well as Fresno and Visalia on the southern end. Though smaller in each case, with the notable exception of Fresno, than the larger cities of the general region, these smaller regional centers are often of historical and economic importance for their respective size, due to their locations, which are primarily rural or otherwise isolated.
== History ==
=== Prehistory to 1847 ===
Inhabited for millennia by Native Americans, from the Shasta tribe in the north, to the Miwoks in the central coast and Sierra Nevada, to the Yokuts of the southern Central Valley, northern California was among the most densely populated areas of pre-Columbian North America.
==== European explorers ====
The first European to explore the coast was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, sailing for the Spanish Crown; in 1542, Cabrillo's expedition sailed perhaps as far north as the Rogue River in today's Oregon. Beginning in 1565, the Spanish Manila galleons crossed the Pacific Ocean from Mexico to the Spanish Philippines, with silver and gemstones from Mexico. The Manila galleons returned across the northern Pacific, and reached North America usually off the coast of northern California, and then continued south with their Asian trade goods to Mexico.
In 1579, northern California was visited by the English explorer Sir Francis Drake who landed north of today's San Francisco and claimed the area for England. In 1602, the Spaniard Sebastián Vizcaíno explored California's coast as far north as Monterey Bay, where he went ashore. Other Spanish explorers sailed along the coast of northern California for the next 150 years, but no settlements were established.
==== Spanish era ====
The first European inhabitants were Spanish missionaries, who built missions along the California coast. The mission at Monterey was first established in 1770, and at San Francisco in 1776. In all, ten missions stretched along the coast from Sonoma to Monterey (and still more missions to the southern tip of Baja California). In 1786, the French signaled their interest in the northern California area by sending a voyage of exploration to Monterey.
The first twenty years of the 19th century continued the colonization of the northern California coast by Spain. By 1820, Spanish influence extended inland approximately 25 to 50 miles (80 km) from the missions. Outside of this zone, perhaps 200,000 to 250,000 Native Americans continued to lead traditional lives. The Adams-Onís Treaty, signed in 1819 between Spain and the young United States, set the northern boundary of the Spanish claims at the 42nd parallel, effectively creating today's northern boundary of northern California.
==== Russian presence ====
In 1812, the Russian state-sponsored Russian-American Company established Fort Ross, a fur trading outpost on the coast of today's Sonoma County. Fort Ross was the southernmost Russian settlement, located some 60 miles (97 km) north of Spanish colonies in San Francisco. In 1839, the settlement was abandoned due to its inability to meet resource demands, and the increasing Mexican and American presence in the region.
==== Mexican era ====
After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico continued Spain's missions and settlements in northern California as well as Spain's territorial claims. The Mexican Californios (Spanish-speaking Californians) in these settlements primarily traded cattle hides and tallow with American and European merchant vessels.
In 1825, the Hudson's Bay Company established a major trading post just north of today's Portland, Oregon. British fur trappers and hunters then used the Siskiyou Trail to travel throughout northern California. The leader of a further French scientific expedition to northern California, Eugene Duflot de Mofras, wrote in 1840 "...it is evident that California will belong to whatever nation chooses to send there a man-of-war and two hundred men." By the 1830s, a significant number of non-Californios had immigrated to northern California. Chief among these was John Sutter, a European immigrant from Switzerland, who was granted 48,827 acres (197.60 km2) centered on the area of today's Sacramento.
==== American interest ====
American trappers began entering northern California in the 1830s. In 1834, American visionary Ewing Young led a herd of horses and mules over the Siskiyou Trail from missions in northern California to British and American settlements in Oregon. Although a small number of American traders and trappers had lived in northern California since the early 1830s, the first organized overland party of American immigrants to arrive in northern California was the Bartleson-Bidwell Party of 1841 via the new California Trail. Also in 1841, an overland exploratory party of the United States Exploring Expedition came down the Siskiyou Trail from the Pacific Northwest. In 1846, the Donner Party earned notoriety as they struggled to enter northern California.
==== Californian independence and beginning of the United States era ====
When the Mexican–American War was declared on May 13, 1846, it took almost two months (mid-July 1846) for word to get to California. On June 14, 1846, some 30 non-Mexican settlers, mostly Americans, staged a revolt and seized the small Mexican garrison in Sonoma. They raised the "Bear Flag" of the California Republic over Sonoma. The "Bear Flag Republic" lasted only 26 days, until the U.S. Army, led by John Frémont, took over on July 9. The California state flag today is based on this original Bear Flag, and continues to contain the words "California Republic."
Commodore John Drake Sloat ordered his naval forces to occupy Yerba Buena (present San Francisco) on July 7 and within days American forces controlled San Francisco, Sonoma, and Sutter's Fort in Sacramento. The treaty ending the Mexican–American War was signed on February 2, 1848, and Mexico formally ceded Alta California (including all of present-day northern California) to the United States.
=== Gold Rush and California statehood ===
The California Gold Rush took place almost exclusively in northern California from 1848 to 1855. It began on January 24, 1848, when gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in Coloma. News of the discovery soon spread, resulting in some 300,000 people coming to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. San Francisco grew from a tiny hamlet, home to about 1,000 Californios into a boomtown of over 50,000 people in the 12 years between 1848 and 1860. New roads, churches, and schools were built, and new towns sprung up, aided in part by the development of new methods of transportation such as steamships which came into regular service and railroads which now connected the coasts. The Gold Rush also had negative effects: American colonists chose to use genocide as a tool to remove the Indigenous people so that they could look for gold on their land.
The Gold Rush also increased pressure to make California a U.S. state. Pro-slavery politicians initially attempted to permanently divide northern and southern California at 36 degrees, 30 minutes, the line of the Missouri Compromise. But instead, the passing of the Compromise of 1850 enabled California to be admitted to the Union as a free state.
=== Population and agricultural expansion (1855–1899) ===
The decades following the Gold Rush brought dramatic expansion to northern California, both in population and economically – particularly in agriculture. The completion of the First transcontinental railroad in 1869, with its terminus in Sacramento (and then later, Oakland), meant that northern California's agricultural produce (and some manufactured goods) could now be shipped economically to the rest of the United States. In return, immigrants from the rest of the United States (and Europe) could comfortably come to northern California. A network of railroads spread throughout northern California, and in 1887, a rail link was completed to the Pacific Northwest. Almost all of these railways came under the control of the Southern Pacific Railroad, headquartered in San Francisco, and San Francisco continued as a financial and cultural center.
Substantial tensions during this era included nativist sentiments (primarily against Chinese immigrants), tensions between the increasing power of the Southern Pacific Railroad and small farmers, and the beginnings of the labor union movement.
== Economy ==
Northern California's economy is noted for being the de facto world leader in high-tech industry (software, semiconductor/micro-electronics, biotechnology and medical devices/instruments), as well as being known for clean power, biomedical, government, and finance. Other significant industries include tourism, shipping, manufacturing, and agriculture. Its economy is diverse, though more concentrated in high technology. It is home to the state capital, as well as several Western United States regional offices in San Francisco, such as the Federal Reserve and 9th Circuit Court.
== Climate ==
Northern California has a warm or mild to cool climate, in which the Sierra mountains gets snow in the late fall through winter and occasionally into spring. Summers are mild along the coast and generally warm and dry, while winters are cool and usually wet. The high temperatures range from 50s °F (10–15 °C) to 30s °F (−1 – +4 °C) in the winters while summers temperature range is 90s °F (32–37 °C) to 60s °F (15–20 °C) or 50s °F (10–15 °C), with highs well into the 100s °F (37–42 °C) for the Sacramento region. Snow covers the mountains (generally above 3,000 feet (910 m)) in mid January through February. Fog occurs infrequently or occurs normally in the west and coast, especially in the summer, creating some of the coolest summer conditions in North America. Since the first decade of the 21st century, droughts and wildfires have increased in frequency as a consequence of climate change.
== Population ==
The population of the forty-eight counties of northern California has shown a steady increase over the years.
The largest percentage increase outside the Gold Rush era (52%) came during the 1940s, as the region was the destination of many post-War veterans and their families, attracted by the greatly expanding industrial base and (often) by their time stationed in northern California during World War II. The largest absolute increase occurred during the 1980s (over 2.1 million person increase), attracted by job opportunities in part by the expansion taking place in Silicon Valley and the Cold War–era expansion of the defense industry. Since the 2000 U.S. Census, Northern California has grown at a faster rate than Southern California due to the strong economic performances of the Bay Area and Sacramento.
== Parks and other protected areas ==
=== National Park System ===
The U.S. National Park System controls a large and diverse group of parks in northern California. The best known is Yosemite National Park, which is displayed on the reverse side of the California state quarter. Other prominent parks are the Kings Canyon-Sequoia National Park complex, Redwood National Park, Pinnacles National Park, Lassen Volcanic National Park and the largest in the contiguous forty-eight states, Death Valley National Park.
=== National Monuments and other federally protected areas ===
Other areas under federal protection include Muir Woods National Monument, Giant Sequoia National Monument, Devils Postpile National Monument, Lava Beds National Monument, Point Reyes National Seashore, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and the Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuaries (both off the coast of San Francisco). Included within the latter National Marine Sanctuary is the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge; this National Wildlife Refuge is one of approximately twenty-five such refuges in northern California. National forests occupy large sections of northern California, including the Shasta–Trinity, Klamath, Modoc, Lassen, Mendocino, Eldorado, Tahoe, and Sequoia national forests, among others. Included within (or adjacent to) national forests are federally protected wilderness areas, including the Trinity Alps, Castle Crags, Granite Chief, and Desolation wilderness areas.
In addition, the California Coastal National Monument protects all islets, reefs, and rock outcroppings from the shore of northern California out to a distance of 12 nmi (22 km), along the entire northern California coastline. In addition, the National Park Service administers protected areas on Alcatraz Island, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Whiskeytown–Shasta–Trinity National Recreation Area, and the Smith River National Recreation Area. The NPS also administers the Manzanar National Historic Site in Inyo County, the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, and the Tule Lake National Monument outside of Tulelake.
=== Other ===
== Educational institutions ==
Northern California hosts a number of world-renowned universities including Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. Top-tier public graduate schools include Boalt Hall and Hastings law schools and UC San Francisco (a top-ranked medical school) and UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, the largest veterinary school in the United States.
=== Public ===
Six University of California campuses:
Eleven California State University campuses:
A large number of local community colleges
=== Private ===
(Partial list)
Academy of Art University
California College of the Arts
Dominican University of California
Fresno Pacific University
Golden Gate University
Jessup University
Menlo College
Northwestern Polytechnic University
Notre Dame de Namur University
Pacific Union College
Samuel Merritt University
Santa Clara University
Saint Mary's College of California
Simpson University
Stanford University
Touro University California
University of San Francisco
University of the Pacific
=== Research ===
(Partial list)
American Institute of Mathematics
Bodega Marine Reserve
Hopkins Marine Station
Joint Genome Institute
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lick Observatory
Long Marine Laboratory
Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
NASA Ames Research Center
Owens Valley Radio Observatory
Pacific Institute
Point Reyes Bird Observatory
White Mountain Research Station
== Counties ==
== Regions ==
The following regions are entirely or partly within northern California:
== Cities and towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants ==
=== Metropolitan areas ===
Northern California is home to three of the state's four extended metropolitan areas, which are home to over three-fourths of the region's population as of the 2010 United States census:
=== Major business districts ===
The following are major central business districts:
San Francisco Financial District
Downtown Oakland
Downtown Sacramento
Downtown San Jose
== Transportation ==
See also articles:
Transportation in the Sacramento metropolitan area
Transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area
See also categories:
=== Airports ===
There are 11 airports in Northern California categorized as Primary Service Commercial airports by the FAA:
=== Railroad ===
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) – commuter subway connecting most of the core Bay Area including San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose
Caltrain – commuter rail between San Francisco and Gilroy (south of San Jose)
Muni Metro (San Francisco)
VTA light rail (San Jose)
Altamont Corridor Express (ACE) – commuter train connecting Stockton and the Central Valley with San Jose and the Bay Area
Sacramento Regional Transit District light rail
Amtrak:
California Zephyr – connects Chicago to the Bay Area
Capitol Corridor – San Jose to Auburn (eastern suburb of Sacramento)
Coast Starlight – coastal train between Los Angeles and Seattle with northern California stops in San Jose, Oakland, and Sacramento
Gold Runner – Central Valley train linking Bakersfield in the Central Valley to Sacramento and Oakland
=== Major transit organizations ===
AC Transit
Arcata and Mad River Transit System
County Connection
El Dorado Transit
Eureka Transit Service
Fairfield and Suisun Transit
Fresno Area Express
Golden Gate Transit
Lake Transit
Mendocino Transit Authority
Monterey-Salinas Transit
Porterville City Operated Local Transit
Redwood Transit System
SamTrans
San Benito Express
SF MUNI
San Joaquin Regional Transit District
Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA)
Santa Cruz Metro
Solano Express
SolTrans
Sonoma County Transit
Tri Delta Transit
Visalia Transit
VINE (Napa County)
=== Major transit ferries ===
San Francisco Bay Ferry
Golden Gate Ferry
Blue & Gold Fleet
Angel Island – Tiburon Ferry
=== Freeways ===
==== Interstate highways ====
Interstate 80 (Eastshore Freeway/Lincoln Highway)
Interstate 280 (Southern Embarcadero Freeway/Southern Freeway/Junipero Serra Freeway/Sinclair Freeway)
Interstate 380
Interstate 580 (Eastshore Freeway/MacArthur Freeway/Brown Freeway)
Interstate 680 (Joseph P. Sinclair Freeway/Donald D. Doyle Highway/Blue Star Memorial Highway/Luther E. Gibson Freeway)
Interstate 780
Interstate 880 (Nimitz Freeway)
Interstate 980 (Grove-Shafter Freeway)
Interstate 238
Interstate 5 (Golden State Freeway/West Side Freeway)
Interstate 205 (Robert T. Monagan Freeway)
Interstate 505
Interstate 80 Business (Capital City Freeway)
==== U.S. Routes ====
U.S. Route 6
U.S. Route 50 (El Dorado Freeway)
U.S. Route 101 (South Valley Freeway/Bayshore Freeway/James Lick Freeway/Central Freeway/Redwood Highway/Michael J. Burns Freeway/Redwood Highway)
U.S. Route 395
U.S. Route 97
U.S. Route 199
==== Principal state highways ====
State Route 1 (Pacific Coast Highway/Cabrillo Highway)
State Route 3
State Route 4
State Route 9
State Route 12
State Route 13 (Ashby Avenue/Tunnel Road/Warren Freeway)
State Route 16
State Route 17
State Route 20
State Route 24
State Route 25
State Route 26
State Route 29
State Route 32
State Route 33
State Route 35 (Skyline Boulevard)
State Route 36
State Route 37 (Sears Point Tollway)
State Route 41 (E.G. Lewis Highway, Yosemite Freeway, Southern Yosemite Highway, Wawona Road)
State Route 43
State Route 44
State Route 49 (Golden Chain Highway)
State Route 59
// State Route 61 (Webster Tube/Posey Tube/Doolittle Drive/Davis Street)
State Route 63
State Route 65
State Route 68
State Route 70
State Route 82 (Monterey Highway/El Camino Real/Mission Street)
State Route 84
State Route 85 (Stevens Creek Freeway/West Valley Freeway/Norman Y. Mineta Highway/CHP Officer Scott M. Greenly Memorial Freeway)
State Route 87 (Guadalupe Parkway)
State Route 88
State Route 89
State Route 92 (J. Arthur Younger Freeway/Jackson Street)
State Route 96
State Route 99
State Route 104
State Route 108
State Route 113
State Route 116
State Route 120
State Route 121
State Route 128
State Route 130
State Route 132
State Route 137
State Route 139
State Route 140
State Route 152
State Route 156
State Route 160 (North Sacramento Freeway/River Road)
State Route 162
State Route 165
State Route 168
State Route 174
State Route 180
/ State Route 185 (International Boulevard/East 14th Street/Mission Boulevard)
State Route 190
State Route 193
State Route 198
State Route 201
State Route 216
State Route 219
State Route 236
State Route 237
State Route 238 (Mission Boulevard, Foothill Boulevard)
State Route 245
State Route 254 (Avenue of the Giants)
State Route 262 (Mission Boulevard)
State Route 267
State Route 269
State Route 275 (Tower Bridge Gateway)
State Route 299
== Communication ==
=== Telephone area codes ===
209 — Northern San Joaquin Valley (Stockton, Modesto, and Merced).
408/669 — Most of Santa Clara County (San Jose and Gilroy).
415/628 — San Francisco, Daly City, and Marin County. One of the three original Area Codes in California.
510/341 — Inner East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and Fremont). Originally part of area code 415.
530 — A large northeastern section of the region including Tehama County, Shasta County, Lassen County, Yuba County, Sutter County, Butte County, and Nevada County. Split from area code 916 in 1997–1998.
559 — Southern San Joaquin Valley (Madera, Fresno, and Visalia).
650 — San Francisco Peninsula (San Mateo, Redwood City, and Palo Alto). Originally part of area code 415.
707 — The North Coast section of the region from Sonoma County to the Oregon border. Cities include Eureka, Ukiah, Santa Rosa, Napa, Vallejo and Fairfield.
831 — Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz Counties. Originally part of area code 408.
916/279 — Sacramento County and the Sacramento suburbs in western Placer and El Dorado Counties. One of the three original area codes in California, formerly covered all areas now within 530.
925 — Outer East Bay (Concord, Pittsburg, Walnut Creek, San Ramon, Pleasanton and Livermore). Originally part of area codes 415 and 510.
== Sports ==
=== Major league professional sports teams ===
=== College sports teams ===
California Golden Bears
Cal Poly Humboldt Lumberjacks
Stanford Cardinal
Fresno State Bulldogs
San Jose State Spartans
Sacramento State Hornets
UC Davis Aggies
USC Trojans
=== Sports venues ===
Laguna Seca Raceway (motorsport)
Sonoma Raceway (motorsport)
Olympic Club (golf)
Silverado Country Club (golf)
TPC Harding Park (golf)
TPC Stonebrae (golf)
=== Sporting events ===
Pac-12 Football Championship Game (college football)
Emerald Bowl (college football)
AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (golf)
Frys.com Open (golf)
Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic (golf)
Grand Prix of Sonoma (motorsport)
Toyota/Save Mart 350 (motorsport)
Monterey Sports Car Championships (motorsport)
Superbike World Championship (motorsport) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens | Amiens | Amiens (English: or AM-ee-ənz; French: [amjɛ̃] ; Picard: Anmien, Anmiens or Anmyin) is a city and commune in northern France, located 120 km (75 mi) north of Paris and 100 km (62 mi) south-west of Lille. With 136,449 inhabitants (2023), it is the capital of the Somme department in the region of Hauts-de-France. A central landmark of the city is Amiens Cathedral, the largest Gothic cathedral in France. Amiens also has one of the largest university hospitals in France, with a capacity of 1,200 beds. The author Jules Verne lived in Amiens from 1871 until his death in 1905, and served on the city council for 15 years. Amiens is the birthplace of French president Emmanuel Macron.
The town was fought over during both World Wars, suffering significant damage, and was repeatedly occupied by both sides. The 1918 Battle of Amiens was the opening phase of the Hundred Days Offensive which directly led to the Armistice with Germany. The Royal Air Force heavily bombed the town during the Second World War. In the aftermath, the city was rebuilt according to Pierre Dufau's plans with wider streets to ease traffic congestion. These newer structures were primarily built of brick, concrete and white stone with slate roofs. The architect Auguste Perret designed the Gare d'Amiens train station and nearby Tour Perret.
Amiens has an important historical and cultural heritage, on which a significant amount of tourism is based. Apart from the cathedral, there are the hortillonnages, the Jules Verne House, the Tour Perret, the Musée de Picardie, the zoo, and the Saint-Leu and Saint-Maurice neighborhoods. A total of 60 monuments are listed in the inventory of monuments historiques, over 1600 places and monuments listed in the general inventory of cultural heritage, and 187 objects listed in the inventory of monuments historiques. During December, the town hosts the largest Christmas market in northern France. It is known for a few local foods, including "macarons d'Amiens", almond paste biscuits; "tuiles amienoises", chocolate and orange curved biscuits; "pâté de canard d'Amiens", duck pâté in pastry; "la ficelle Picarde", an oven-baked cheese-topped crêpe; and "flamiche aux poireaux", a puff pastry tart made with leeks and cream.
== History ==
The first known settlement at this location was Samarobriva ("Somme bridge"), the central settlement of the Ambiani tribe, one of the principal tribes of Gaul. The Romans named the town Ambianum, meaning settlement of the Ambiani people. Amiens was part of Francia starting from the 5th century. The Normans sacked the city in 859 and again in 882.
In 1113, the city was recognized by King Louis VI of France, and in 1185 it was linked to the Crown of France. In 1597, Spanish soldiers held the city during the six-month Siege of Amiens, before Henry IV regained control. During the 18th and 19th century, the textile tradition of Amiens became famous for its velours. As a result of the French Revolution, the provinces of France were dismantled and the territory was organised into departments. Much of Picardy became the newly created department of Somme with Amiens as the departmental capital. During the industrial revolution, the city walls were demolished, opening up space for large boulevards around the town center. The Henriville neighborhood in the south of the city was developed around this time. In 1848, the first railway arrived in Amiens, linking the city to Boulogne-sur-Mer. During the 1870 Battle of Amiens, the city was occupied by invading Prussian forces.
The town was fought over during both the First and Second World Wars, suffering significant damage and being occupied several times by both sides. The 1918 Battle of Amiens was the opening phase of the Hundred Days Offensive which led directly to the Armistice with Germany that ended the war. In June 1944 following D-Day, Amiens was heavily bombed by the Royal Air Force. The town was liberated by British forces on 31 August. The city was rebuilt according to Pierre Dufau's plans with a focus on widening the streets to ease traffic congestion. These newer structures were primarily built of brick, concrete and white stone with slate roofs. The architect Auguste Perret designed the Gare d'Amiens train station and nearby Tour Perret.
== Geography ==
=== Location ===
Amiens, once regional prefecture of the former Picardy Region, is the prefecture of the Somme department, one of the three departments (with Oise and Aisne) in the region. Located in the Paris Basin, the city benefits from a privileged geographical position, with close proximity to Paris, Lille, Rouen, London and Brussels. At the crossroads of major European routes of travel (A1, A16 and A29), the city is also at the heart of a major rail star.
As the crow flies, the city is 115 kilometres (71 mi) north of Paris, 97 kilometres (60 mi) south-west of Lille, 100 kilometres (62 mi) north-east of Rouen, 162 kilometres (101 mi) east-north-east of Le Havre and 144 kilometres (89 mi) north-west of Reims. At the regional level, Amiens is located 53 kilometres (33 mi) north of Beauvais, 71 kilometres (44 mi) west of Saint-Quentin, 66 kilometres (41 mi) from Compiègne and 102 kilometres (63 mi) from Laon.
In area, Amiens is the third-largest settlement in the Somme, after Crécy-en-Ponthieu and Hornoy-le-Bourg.
=== Geography and relief ===
The area of the commune is 4,946 hectares (12,220 acres); the altitude varies between 14 and 106 metres (46 and 348 ft).
=== Hydrography: Somme and canal, Avre and Selle ===
The main stem of the River Somme passes through Amiens and is generally benign, except during exceptional floods that can last up to several weeks (such as in spring 2001). It is also, on its southeastern outskirts, close to Camon and Longueau, the confluence with its main tributary on the left bank (to the south), and the Avre. The Selle enters from the northwest of Amiens, with two arms (including the Haute Selle) passing behind the Unicorn Stadium, the exhibition park, the megacity and horse racing track, then passing the end of the Promenade de la Hotoie and the zoo of Amiens, and to the right of the water treatment plant, in front of the island Sainte-Aragone, opposite the cemetery of La Madeleine in Amiens.
The city developed in a natural narrowing of the river due to the advance of the rim of the Picard plateau in Saint-Pierre (ford crossing). The Amiens citadel is built on this limestone butte of the Picard plateau and Rue Saint-Pierre is a slightly inclined path to leave the city from the north. At this narrowing, a network of narrow canals led to the construction of bridges and buildings including textile mills in the Middle Ages.
The marshes of the old bed of the river Somme was used to dig peat. Farmers maintained rieux, canals and ditches by cleaning out the silt and used it to append to their vegetable garden plot. During the 20th century maintenance of the canals was stopped and gardens were gradually left to lie fallow or sold to private individuals who created pleasure gardens accessible by boat.
The hydrographic network has always been an important city-operated asset. The river helped shape the identity of the landscape, urban and economic territory. It is around the Saint-Leu and Saint-Maurice neighborhoods that border the River Somme, as well as most of the administrative and civil area of the current city center which the city has developed since antiquity.
The Canal de la Somme dates from the beginning of the 19th century and the bridge at the foot of the citadel was built after World War II.
=== Climate ===
Amiens has the typical oceanic climate of the north of France, with relatively mild winters, cool summers, and rainfall well distributed throughout the year.
=== Transport ===
Amiens is a hub between the Île de France and the rest of northern France; Normandy and Benelux; and France and Great Britain. Amiens is not directly on principal European road and rail arteries, such as the A1 motorway and the Paris-Lille TGV train line, at present.
However, due to its position halfway between the urban areas of Lille and Paris, Amiens has good conditions for service and accessibility, including motorways (at the junction of the A16 and A29).
==== Rail ====
Amiens station is served by regional train services to destinations that include Rouen, Calais, Lille, Reims, Compiègne and Paris-Nord. Saint-Roch (Somme) station in the western part of the city is served by local trains towards Rouen and Abbeville. A regular bus route with the TGV Haute-Picardie station also provides access to the Charles-de-Gaulle Airport station. On the horizon of 2025, the Roissy–Picardie Link will put Amiens 55 minutes from Paris Charles-de-Gaulle Airport and its TGV station.
By train, Amiens is located at:
==== Roads ====
Since antiquity, Amiens has been a crossroads of important routes. The contemporary city is served by the A16 and A29 autoroutes. The Jules Verne Viaduct, 943 metres (3,094 ft) long, crosses the River Somme to the east of the city and allows circumvention of the city by motorway-type roads. The A16 and A29 autoroutes, the RN1 and the RN25 form a bypass-type motorway around the city that the population has called the Rocade d'Amiens or Amiens ring road. Initially constituting national roads which are downgraded today, mostly as departmental roads, the greater urban area of Amiens is served by:
Amiens is served by several motorways:
A16 to Calais via Abbeville and Boulogne-sur-Mer
A16 to Paris via Beauvais
A29 to Rouen and Le Havre via Neufchâtel-en-Bray
A29 to Reims via Saint-Quentin and Laon
The proposed A24 autoroute from Amiens to Lille via Doullens was cancelled in 2006.
==== Parking ====
According to the urban transport plan (PDU) approved 19 December 2013 for the period 2013–2023 parking supply is considered abundant in Amiens. Although important, demand for parking is less than what is available (capacity reserves are still 20% minimum: If the road is sometimes saturated, the occupancy rate of the underground parking remains globally less than 100%).
In 2013, the city counted approximately 70,000 public parking spaces, including 8,400 in the city center and in its immediate vicinity, where 70% of places are paid.
4,400 spaces on highways (1,950 in the inner city, including 1,600 paid)
4,000 spaces in underground parking (620 other new places are programmed in a project for the Gare La Vallée development zone).
As of 2007, a residential parking system has been deployed in Saint-Anne ward to cope with congestion in the streets caused by SNCF railway station users. During the campaign for the municipal election of 2008, parking was one of the important topics of debate. A year after the change of majority, the Gilles Demailly team launched a consultation with the population. From 2011, residential parking was extended to the Gare-La-Vallée and Riolan neighborhoods, then in 2012 to the Noyon neighborhood and the area east of the Riolan sector. In 2014, 2,600 parking spaces were affected by this system which allowed city residents more parking near their homes in order to promote a better rotation of vehicles in the streets and reduce permanent occupation of public space by the cars cluttering the highway.
==== Public transport ====
Amiens was once served by two tram lines with a combined length of 10.7 kilometres (6.6 mi), opened in 1887. They intersected at Place Gambetta, one linking La Madeleine Cemetery, the Church of Saint-Acheul, Cagnard bridge, Rue de Noyon and Rue Jules-Barni; the other from the Church of Saint-Pierre at the racecourse, by the streets of Saint-Leu, Frédéric-Petit and Colbert. Electrified in 1899, the network grew to seven lines totaling 19 kilometres (12 mi) in 1906. From 1932, Longueau was linked to Amiens by a bus service. German bombing in 1940 destroyed most of the city center and hit the Jules-Ferry Road tram depot, totally destroying the tram fleet. Only the Longueau bus survived. A few old Parisian buses were also used in an extremely reduced service. These buses as well as the surviving bus were then converted to city gas and equipped with tanks on the roof covered by a huge white dome. This service continued until approximately 1946. There were only two urban lines: An east–west line (Saint-Acheul – Montieres) and a northeast–southwest line (Beauville – road to Rouen). It was decided after the war to serve the city by a trolleybus with one route to Longueau. This was only in part realized, serving Saint-Acheul, Rouen, La Madeleine and Saint-Pierre. In 1964, trolleybuses were abandoned and the bus became ubiquitous in Amiens transportation.
The current public transport network consists of a bus network managed by the Ametis mixed economy company, whose network covers Amiens Métropole, the agglomeration of Amiens. The establishment of dedicated bus lanes began in 2006. Former Mayor Gilles de Robien had envisioned the creation of a tram, but the choice of dedicated bus lanes had been preferred for reasons of cost and patronage. His successor, Mayor Gilles Demailly, had been considering the development of a TSCP in the metropolitan area. As a result of numerous studies and conferences, elected representatives voted for the creation of a tram at the municipal Council of 15 November 2012. The project had been endorsed by the Communauté d'agglomération Amiens Métropole on 18 December 2012 and the commissioning of a first north–south tram route was scheduled for 2018/2019. Following the elections of 2014, which were a defeat for most municipal and community carriers of the project, the new mayor of Amiens Brigitte Fouré, and by extension the new president of Amiens Métropole Alain Gest, decided to suspend the project at least during the time of their respective mandates, thus applying a campaign promise (the tram was at the heart of debate) and despite a project announcement of trams on tyres (of TVR type). Improvement of public transit would then be only by that of the bus network. Indeed, in December of the same year, the Community Council approved funding for a study (the sixth in 20 years) relating to the establishment of a rapid transit bus network (BHNS), which should enter into service in March 2019, and whose vehicles could be electric.
==== Cycle networks ====
Amiens has developed two bike services: Buscyclette and Velam.
Buscyclette is a service of rental bikes on demand, created in May 1999. In 2014, nearly 2,400 "green bikes" are available for rent, essentially city bikes but also electric bikes (VAE), folding bicycles and specific bikes (such as kids bikes, child trailers, mountain bikes, cargo bikes, tandems). The rental period varies from half a day to one year.
Velam is a bike sharing system created on 16 February 2008, an adaptation of the Cyclocity system managed by JCDecaux, similar to Vélo'v in Lyon and Vélib' in Paris. Velam offers 313 bikes distributed every 300 to 400 metres in the center of Amiens and 26 stations.
In 2012, Amiens Métropole had 100 kilometres (62 mi) of routes for cyclists. Despite the development of a bicycle plan in 1997 which was planning the development of 500 kilometres (310 mi) of equipped cycleways, the network of the territory in terms of paths is still incomplete.
The blueprint of the bicycle facilities of the agglomeration (SDAC) provides, over a period of 10 years (2014–2024), for 188 kilometres (117 mi) of cycle routes and equips 490 sites for the parking of bikes. This plan also includes the deployment of parking facilities over the entire territory of the city, close to the facilities frequented by bikers, as well as cyclist right-turns at traffic lights or even the maintenance of existing facilities.
==== Railways ====
There are three railway stations:
Two stations on the Paris-Boulogne and Amiens – Rouen lines:
The Amiens station, main station, known as Gare du Nord, in memory of the Compagnie du Nord who created it. Every day, 15,000 travelers use its seven lines.
The station of Saint-Roch
Connections from these two stations include to Lille via Arras and Douai, to Boulogne via Abbeville, to Paris-Nord via Creil or Compiègne, to Reims via Tergnier, and to Rouen.
A station located on the Paris – Lille line in Longueau serving the south of Amiens and the communes of Longueau, Cagny, and Boves
Longueau station, a passenger station of the historic railway hub in Longueau. Every day, 2,500 travellers use its two lines.
Montieres station, station assigned to the freight traffic, it serves only the industrial zone of Amiens. This station is located on the former railway line of Doullens.
Many regional and extra regional links (Normandie, Grand Est and Île-de-France) pass through Amiens, especially by TER Hauts-de-France.
A station located 45 kilometres (28 mi) from Amiens, the Haute-Picardie TGV station, allows access to the TGV network. It is served by buses from Amiens. Its isolated character earned it the name of gare des betteraves, or gare betteraves, at the time of its construction.
==== Air transport ====
In addition to Amiens – Glisy Aerodrome, bordering the town's eastern edge 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from the center, there are several airports nearby.
Albert – Picardie Airport is located 20 minutes northeast of the city.
Beauvais-Tillé Airport, the ninth largest French airport by usage, located 45 minutes by car south of the city, and served by a bus service from Amiens.
Lille Airport, reachable by train or by road using the A29 and A1.
Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, reachable by train or by road using the A29 and A1, or A16 and N104. The creation of a railway between Creil and Roissy will put Amiens 55 minutes from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport by 2020.
==== Waterways ====
The Somme canal runs through the town to the English Channel. This canal is linked to the Canal du Nord (Paris to Lille metropolitan area).
== Urbanism ==
=== Urban morphology ===
Amiens comprises a number of neighborhoods (French: quartiers) with their own characteristics, including Saint-Leu, St-Maurice, Henriville, and Saint-Acheul.
==== Saint-Leu neighborhood ====
St-Leu forms part of Amiens, north of the city center. It has many older wooden and brick houses and several canals. At the foot of the cathedral, traversed by canals, this picturesque area was largely rehabilitated during the 1990s. It extends to the Somme canal, located more to the north, at the foot of the Coteau Saint-Pierre on which the fortress of Jean Errard, called Citadelle, was built. Historically, it was the poor neighborhood of the city, where butchers, tanners and dyers gathered.
Amiens University's Faculty of Sciences, present since the 1960s, has been renovated and expanded on occasion. The Faculty of Law and Economics has also been transferred since the mid-1990s from the campus (offset to the south of the city) to its new location at the foot of the cathedral. The open-air parking it replaces was a "gap" in the landscape dating from World War II. Nonetheless, it allowed an unobstructed view of the cathedral. Most of the buildings have been renovated and transformed into housing much of which is for students.
The area became the heart of the Amiens people's evenings, with many establishments (bars, restaurants, etc.) on Place du Don and Quai Bélu.
The church is found at Rue Saint-Leu, located just between the Faculty of Science and Law-Economy (UPJV).
Two theatres were established in the neighborhood, that of the Chés Cabotans (puppet shows in the Picard language) and the Maison du Théâtre at the foot of the Saint-Leu Church. There is also La Lune des Pirates, a concert hall.
==== Saint-Maurice neighborhood ====
Located to the west of the Citadelle, and east of the La Madeleine Cemetery, this very old working-class neighborhood of Amiens acted as an industrial center in the 18th century. It is currently undergoing significant housing renovation and development.
Bordered by the Canal de la Somme, it offers a stopover for leisure boats, which must go through a lock.
The walls of the city's former dye factory are now those of the École supérieure d'art et de design d'Amiens (ESAD) as well as those of the Faculty of Arts. The École supérieure d'ingénieurs en électronique et électrotechnique (ESIEE) is in the same neighborhood. As the Citadelle, it will be renovated by the architect Renzo Piano to accommodate the university departments (UFR) of: letters, history and geography, languages, the École supérieure du professorat et de l'éducation (ESPE), the House of Languages, the House of Research and the University Library in 2015.
The Jardin des plantes, known as the Jardin du Roy within the city, is also located in this neighborhood.
==== Henriville neighborhood ====
The Henriville neighborhood was mostly built during the 19th century after the demolition of the city wall. It lies at the south of the town center. It has numerous bourgeois houses and townhouses, predominantly in brick, blending architectural styles of the period, including neoclassical, troubadour and neo-Gothic. There are also private mansions, such as the Acloque mansion and the house of Jules Verne.
==== Saint-Acheul neighborhood ====
The Saint-Acheul neighborhood (IPA: [sɛ̃t‿aʃœl]) existed before Amiens' inception, as people have lived there since prehistoric times. This is where archaeological excavations in the nineteenth century discovered prehistoric tool sets typical of the "Acheulean" prehistorical era, named after this neighborhood (also spelled Acheulian, pronounced [aʃœljɑ̃]). Civilians can freely visit the archaeological garden there.
Not to be confused with the commune of Saint-Acheul situated 37 km (23 mi) to the north, the Saint-Acheul neighborhood is the site of a military cemetery from the First World War (1914–1918).
It also contains the Church of Saint-Acheul, the Jesuit former Saint-Acheul College and the former normal school of teachers which became the Lycée Robert-de-Luzarches. A number of famous people are buried in the former Saint-Acheul cemetery such as the creator of Bécassine J.P. Pinchon, and many resistance fighters. Part of the neighborhood includes a so-called "English neighborhood," with typical English style houses. At the feet of this area lie the hortillonnages, a marshy area criss-crossed by canals.
==== Other neighborhoods ====
Amiens, like other big cities, has its large HLM high-rise tower blocks:
North of the city the neighborhoods du Pigeonnier, which is famous for its weekend market, Messenger, Mozart, Fafet-Brossolette-la Cité, Balzac, and Léo Lagrange-Schweitzer;
Southeast of the city: Victorine-Autier, Philéas Lebesgue, Condorcet, Pierre-Rollin.
West: Etouvie and Montières (an ecodistrict is provided in this industrial space, where there are 19th century in brick buildings).
East: Saint-Acheul-la-Cité and the Clos de l'Avre.
These areas experience a lot of social troubles and have regularly been the place for riots. The northern neighborhoods were the scene of violent events in 1994, 1999 and 2000 (clashes between several districts of the city and between the neighbourhoods of Amiens and the districts of Creil), in 2006 and 2008 (in the wake of incidents in the Paris suburbs) and more recently in August 2012 following a conflict between youth and the police. The cost of the latest vandalism to occur in the north of Amiens would amount, according to Gilles Demailly, to between four and six million euros. These extremely violent riots caused sixteen police officers to be injured.
An extensive programme of redevelopment of these neighborhoods began recently, with demolition of HLM tower blocks and new infrastructure having been built, especially for schools. In 2009, the public transport network of the Amiens agglomeration was significantly modified.
=== Housing ===
In 2017, the total number of dwellings in the municipality was 73,541, while it was 63,178 in 1999.
Among this housing, 88.7% were primary residences, 2.1% of secondary residences and 9.2% vacant housing. These dwellings were 35.6% of houses and 63.4% of apartments.
The proportion of principal residences, which were the properties of occupants, was 31.9%, down from 2007 (34.4%). The share of empty rented HLM homes (social housing) was up: 29.8% against 29.4% in 2007, their number increased from 18,268 to 19,431. However, this percentage remains much greater than the rate of 20% required by the Law on Solidarity and Urban Renewal (SRU) for cities and agglomerations of more than 50,000 inhabitants.
The identity of the city is strongly marked by the specificity of its housing stock, consisting in a large proportion of detached houses, semi-detached, single or bourgeois: the amiénoises. These traditional houses in the suburbs, in brick, were intrinsically linked to the expansion of the city during and after the Industrial Revolution.
The amiénoise simple includes a window on the ground floor and floors for attic and basement. It is built on a plot of a few metres wide but is very deep, and includes a garden, forming hearts with green islets and sparse areas. The amiénoise double has two windows at each level. The grandes amiénoises and townhouses rise to at least two floors with large rooms. They can have a gate opening onto a paved courtyard.
The official buildings or mansions regularly use brick façades on a sandstone base, decorated by stone window and door frames.
The Chanoines neighborhood has stone façades exclusively.
In historic areas such as the Saint-Leu neighborhood, façades widely use wood, half-timbered or siding, and wattle and daub.
=== Development projects ===
Amiens 2030: Amiens, in the context of the Communauté d'agglomération Amiens Métropole, is developing a master development plan called Amiens 2030. This strategic outreach project is centered around the priority issues of economic, social and cultural development of the agglomeration. The whole process of reflection will determine the development of the metropolis by 2030.
La Citadelle: This flagship project for the agglomeration involves the amalgamation of units of training and research from the University of Picardie in letters, languages, history, geography, philosophy, sociology, psychology and the College teaching and education (ESPE) on the site of La Citadelle. It is to be set on 18 acres (7.3 ha) on the outskirts of downtown. This university construction program is intended to strengthen regional competitiveness and the development of higher education and research. The project, entrusted to the Italian architect Renzo Piano, will be accessible to all inhabitants.
ZAC Gare-la-Vallée: The project intends to strengthen Amiens in its role as the regional capital and allow the creation of a genuine business district in the heart of the city. With a budget of €157 million, the project combines tertiary activities, shops and a habitat walk from the station and the inner city. The first buildings were inaugurated in 2008. The second phase of development extended from 2012 to 2017. Under the control of the Chief Architect, Paul Chemetov, the project will accommodate 2,000 homes, 200,000 square metres (2,200,000 sq ft) of offices and two urban parks creating a visible link between downtown, the Somme and the hortillonnages.
ZAC Intercampus: This new housing and services project in the south of the city is projected to host 1,900 dwellings by 2030. A first tranche of 850 dwellings must be delivered in 2015. Located in the immediate vicinity of the campus and the CHU d'Amiens, it will be served by a future TCSP. The ecodistrict of 80 hectares (200 acres) is projected to provide green spaces and gardens, with 60% of its total area to not be built-up. It will include 12 hectares (30 acres) of gardens.
ZAC Paul Claudel: This new housing and services project of 40 hectares (99 acres) is located at the southern entrance to the city. Intended as a small neighborhood, it must accommodate 1,400 units and 1,800 square metres (19,000 sq ft) of commercial space. Designed in 4 slices, together with its inhabitants, it entered its final phase of development in 2013.
ZAC Renancourt: This new project must ensure the development of the city to the west. Located between the Grâce Valley, the Selle Valley, the Renancourt neighborhood and its suburb, this planning area is a natural viewpoint over the city. It is also adjacent to emblematic facilities of the city: The Zenith of Amiens, the Stade de la Licorne and the megacity. By 2018, this residential area is projected to accommodate 1,400 houses, a hotel, facilities and shops.
Bus rapid transit (BRT): A project of three BRT lines is under consideration for commissioning in 2019, at the end of two years of work. Estimated at €85 million excluding taxes, and spanning 44 kilometres (27 mi), the project would include the construction of a new bus depot and four park and ride stops. This project follows the cancellation of a tram project, which was endorsed by the municipal team in place between 2008 and 2014.
== Toponymy ==
The toponym is derived from the name of the local Gallic people, the Ambiani, which in the 4th century, replaced the old name of the town Samarobriva (the bridge on the Samara – Somme). Amiens then became the episcopal headquarters. In Picard, Amiens is called Anmyen.
== Politics and administration ==
=== Municipal administration ===
The Amiens municipal council has 55 elected members.
As a result of the French municipal elections of 2014, the distribution of seats is as follows:
=== The cantons ===
Amiens is divided into seven cantons:
=== Deputies ===
Amiens is divided into two legislative districts (as of the 2022 elections):
Somme's 1st constituency (including Amiens II North-West, Amiens IV East, Amiens VIII North): François Ruffin (Picardie Debout, NUPES)
Somme's 2nd constituency (including Amiens I West, Amiens III North-East, Amiens V South-East, Amiens VII South-West, Amiens VI South): Barbara Pompili (RE)
=== List of mayors ===
On 4 April 2014, Brigitte Fouré (IDU (NC)) succeeded Gilles Demailly (PS) as mayor of Amiens. Her list was elected in the second round on 30 March 2014 with 50.39% of the votes.
=== Judicial and administrative authorities ===
Amiens is a city marked by a strong judicial tradition, with the historical presence of its Court of Appeal, the Cour d'appel d'Amiens, as well as all courts of first and second degree of judicial order. The Court of Appeal of Amiens has jurisdiction over the three departments of Picardy, with nine high courts.
More recently, Amiens has become the seat of:
The national court of disability and the pricing of insurance for work accidents.
An administrative tribunal whose rulings may be appealed to the administrative court of appeal of Douai.
The Regional Chamber of Auditors of Picardy.
== Twin towns – sister cities ==
Amiens is twinned with:
Dortmund, Germany (1960)
Görlitz, Germany (1971)
Darlington, England, United Kingdom (1973)
Tulsa, United States (2006)
Amiens also has friendly relations with Mianyang in China and Amiens in Australia.
== Population and society ==
=== Demography ===
The inhabitants of Amiens are called the Amiénois and their blason populaire is Chés maqueux d'gueugues (the eaters of nuts).
The population of Amiens has risen sharply since the mid-19th century: Its population doubled between 1850 and 1960, from 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, i.e. a gain of 50,000 people over this period of 110 years, and gaining about 30,000 others since (over 50 years only this time).
==== Demographic evolution ====
==== Age structure ====
Amiens is distinguished by the youthfulness of its population. In 2017, more than 25% of the population of the city was less than 20 years old. The rate of people of an age over 60 years (19.3%) is also lower than the national rate (25.5%) and the departmental rate (25.4%). Like national and departmental allocations, the female population of the municipality is greater in number to the male population, with a rate of 52.5%, whereas the national rate is 51.6%.
=== Education ===
==== Primary and secondary education ====
Educational institutions of the city fall under the supervision of the Academy of Amiens which develops curriculum according to the Inspection académique la Somme.
On 1 September 2010, 10,658 children were enrolled in the Amiens public schools: 4,341 in nursery school and 6,317 in elementary school.
In 2011, the Amiens agglomeration included 46 nursery schools, six elementary schools and 54 primary schools including eleven private. It had nine public colleges and six private colleges. Amiens has 24 schools:
Vocational high schools: Acheuléen, Édouard-Branly, Edouard-Gand, La Providence (private), Montaigne, Romain Rolland, Sacré-Cœur (private), Saint-Martin (private), Saint-Rémi (private) and Saint-Riquier (private).
General and technological high schools: Robert de Luzarches, La Hotoie, Jean Baptiste Delambre, La Providence (private), Sacré-Cœur (private), Saint-Martin (private), Saint-Rémi (private), Saint-Riquier (private) and Sainte-Famille (private).
General secondary schools: Louis Thuillier, Madeleine Michelis (former high school for girls, established in 1883 by Marie Hugonin, wife of Charles Eugène Bertrand, mother of Paul Bertrand and niece of Bishop Flavien-Abel-Antoine Hugonin, Bishop of Bayeux and Lisieux – the inaugural speech was delivered by Jules Verne.)
Technological lycées: Édouard-Branly, Édouard-Gand.
==== Higher education ====
The Amiens metropole welcomes one of the largest student populations in France. In 2013, the city had 26,000 students (3,300 in short-term) and 800 researchers who are divided into some 40 institutions of higher education, 32 laboratories, and 10 units associated with the National Scientific Research Centre or the French Institute of Health and Medical Research.
=== Health ===
The Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) or, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire of Amiens Picardie, is organized around four sites:
South Hospital, Avenue René-Laënnec
North Hospital, Place Victor-Pauchet
Saint-Victor Centre, 354 Bis Boulevard de Beauville
Obstetrics and Gynaecology Centre, 124 Rue Camille-Desmoulins
Since 2014, the four sites have been gradually gathered on the current site of the South Hospital, with the exception of the long stay units for the elderly remaining in the Saint-Victor Centre. This merger will be completed in 2016 and allow the CHU of Amiens to increase its national and inter-regional dimension. This group represents the largest hospital construction of France and one of the most important in Europe with more than €630 million for work and equipment. At the end of the work, the total space of the CHU of Amiens will be 172,000 square metres (1,850,000 sq ft). It will total three blocks of hospitals with 400 beds each. The CHU of Amiens is the largest employer in the Picardy region. At the end of the merger, there will be 6,700 employees, 1,300 students of the health professions, and 1,250 consultants who will go there each day.
In order to maintain the availability of health units to the north of the city, a health center will open its doors in the first quarter of 2016, at the crossroads of the Avenue de l'Europe and the Rue Maurice-Ravel. This health space of 1,200 square metres (13,000 sq ft) will host general practitioners and specialists of the CHU such as: cardiologist, a service of gynaecology-obstetrics, psychologists, dentist, and masseurs-physiotherapists. There is a promise of a permanence of care, 7 days a week and 24 hours a day.
Alongside the CHU, there are three private clinics, resulting from the consolidation of old clinics in the city. These care and hospitalisation institutions for medical, surgical, and obstetrics came together to create a private hospital center in the Vallée des Vignes neighborhood, south of the city.
Polyclinic of Picardy, 43 Rue Alexandre Dumas
Clinic of Europe, 5 Allée des Pays-Bas
Victor Pauchet Heath Group, 2 Avenue Irlande
The CHU of Amiens figured in 11th place in the 2013 awards of the hospitals and clinics of the magazine Le Point. In this ranking, the CHU stands out for ankle surgery (3rd), hip prosthesis (5th), foot surgery (7th) and paediatrics (14th). In this same classification, the Victor Palmer Health Group, equipped with a solid "mother-to-child hub", gained a 5th place in the table for the gynaecological clinics and an 8th place for breast cancers.
In 2005, the CHU of Amiens became of international renown thanks to Professor Bernard Devauchelle, a native of the city, where his team performed the first partial face transplant in the world.
=== Sport ===
Thanks to a large proportion of youth in its population and the dynamism and the success of its sports clubs, Amiens has been awarded the title of "Sportiest city of France" by the L'Équipe newspaper in 1999. The city had already won the title in 1969. In 2013, Amiens Métropole had nearly 300 sports associations and Sports Recreation: approximately 150 associations are grouped within the Office of Amiens Metropole Sports and 150 others are referenced without being adherents. According to this same Office for Sports, Amiens has 25,000 members of sports clubs, excluding school and university members.
American football
The Amiens Spartiates, operating in the top-level Ligue Élite de Football Américain, have been champions of France in 2004, 2010 and 2012. Created in 1987, the club has more than 400 licensees.
Archery
The Compagnie d'Arc d'Amiens is an archery club founded on 14 November 1803.
Athletics
AUC Athlétisme is a multidisciplinary athletic club which particularly developed Stella Akakpo, specialist of the sprint and the relay. Bertrand Moulinet specialist of the 20 km and 50 km walk.
Badminton
The AUC Badminton (Amiens University Badminton Club) was founded in 1986. Labeled "French school of badminton" by the French Badminton Federation, the club had 205 members in 2014. The city hosted the French National Badminton Championships in 2011.
Ballon au poing
Each 15 August at the Parc de la Hotoie, Amiens receives the final stages of Ballon au poing.
Fencing
The Circle of Fencing of Amiens Métropole is one of the oldest French clubs. It was succeeded in the Hall of arms of Amiens opened in 1886. The circle has approximately 150 members and remains a major club of French fencing with many qualifications and results at the French Fencing Championships. The club held the Elite French Championships in 2001 and 2011.
Field hockey
The Amiens Sports Club, currently playing in League Elite D1), were men's champions of France in 1981, 1982, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and women's champions France in 1983, 1984, 1993, and 1995.
Floorball
The Hoplites d'Ambiani, D1. A second team is evolving in D2.
Football
The main club in the city is Amiens SC. The team was finalist of the Coupe de France in 2001 and reached semifinals in 1930 and 2008, and played top-division Ligue 1 last time in 2020. Its associated women's team is CS Amiens Club. Before the 2012–2013 season, the team was known under the name of CS Amiens Montieres Etouvie.
AC Amiens is the second biggest club in the city, currently playing in semi-professional Championnat National level.
Golf
The Golf Club D'amiens was founded in 1924. The men's team plays in D1, women team in D2. The club has 530 members in 2013.
Handball
The Amiens Picardie Hand (APH), currently playing in National 2 (D4). The club, a result of the merger of several Amiens clubs, was created in 1991.
Ice hockey
The Gothiques d'Amiens, currently playing in Ligue Magnus (D1), were champions of France in 1999 and 2004, and runners-up in France for 1989, 1997, 1998, 2003 and 2006. The team plays at the Coliséum on the largest area of permanent ice in France (3800 seats). Amiens hosted
Division I of the 2006 Ice Hockey World Championships.
Longue paume
Amiens won the Championship of France in 6/6, 10 times.
Roller in-line hockey
The Écureuils d'Amiens, Elite League (D1), were the runners-up of France in 2010, finalists of the Coupe de France in 2007 and finalists of the European Cup of clubs in 2008.
Rowing
The Sport Nautique d'Amiens (SNA) was founded in 1866. Located on the edge of the Parc Saint-Pierre, it is labeled "French rowing school 3 stars" by the French Federation of rowing. With 465 members in 2013, the club currently competes in the 2nd division.
Rugby union
The Rugby Club Amiénois (RCA) was founded in 1900. The men's first team plays in Fédérale 3.
Swimming
The Amiens Métropole swim team, is that of Jérémy Stravius, who was a triple world champion of swimming and Olympic champion in the 4 × 100 m relay. The club hosted the French Youth Championships in 2012 at the Coliséum
Table tennis
The Amiens Sport Table Tennis (ASTT) was founded in 1945. It was twice crowned champion of France in 1968 and 1969. The men's first team also won the Coupe de France in 1966 and 1967.
Tennis
Amiens Athletic Club (AAC) was founded in 1904. It is one of the 10 biggest clubs in France with almost 1,000 members in 2013.
Volleyball
The Amiens Longueau Métropole Volley-Ball (ALMVB) including women's first team plays in Women's Elite Division (D2) and the Amiens Métropole Volley-Ball (AMVB). The men's first team plays in Nationale 1 (D3).
Since the start of the Tour de France in 1903, Amiens has hosted the start of a stage on ten occasions (1932, 1962, 1964, 1967, 1970, 1971, 1975, 1979, 1999, 2004) and the stage finish ten times (1932, 1962, 1964, 1967, 1970, 1971, 1975, 1993, 1999, 2015). Amiens hosted the finish of Stage 8 of the 2018 Tour de France.
On 29 April 2006, Amiens hosted the French Federation of ice hockey created during the World Cup of Ice Hockey of Group B (antechamber of the world elite) organised in Amiens at the same time. It is now installed at Issy-les-Moulineaux.
Each 15 August at the Parc de la Hotoie, the city receives the final stages of the Picardy sports and in particular those of the most emblematic, traditional Picard sport: The Ballon au poing. This Picard game is played by teams of six. To be able to hit the ball, players surround their hand and their wrist with a strip of canvas or leather.
From August 29 to September 1, 2012, the Compagnie d'Arc d'Amiens organizes the French FITA Archery Championships at the Hippodrome du petit Saint-Jean.
=== Media ===
==== Newspapers and news magazines ====
Le Courrier picard, the principal regional newspaper was founded in 1944. Its headquarters are located at 29 Rue de la République (it sold 64,587 copies in 2013).
Fakir, an independent journal was founded in Amiens in 1999 by François Ruffin.
Le Télescope d'Amiens, pure player of local information, was in publication from September 2012 to April 2014.
Free newspapers Metro and 20 minutes are distributed in the city, including in Amiens railway station.
Since 7 February 1996, the Communauté d'agglomération Amiens Métropole distributes a free weekly local newspaper: JDA (Journal des Amiénois). This publication, which appears every Wednesday, is distributed to all homes in the metropolitan area and is made available in public places (taken at about 95,000 copies) as well as on the internet site of the city in its digital version. Over time, the journal has evolved through various forms. Carried out by the Directorate of communication of Amiens Métropole, the latest form dates to 16 January 2015. In addition to the JDA which is attached to information on the whole of the territory of Amiens Métropole, the city has also had monthly publications specific to the city, which no longer exist today: Amiensville then Amiens Forum (from April 2009 to June 2014).
The people of Amiens have other sources of information on their territory, such as the monthly publication of the Regional Council of Picardy, Agir en Picardie. The Departmental Council of the Somme also sees its magazine distributed each month to the samariens homes, Vivre en Somme. Since 2006, the regional tourism committee of Picardy publishes Esprit de Picardie, a travel magazine on the Picardy region, every six months.
Several associative journals and specialised magazines are also distributed free of charge in public places: L'Écho des Amphis (student monthly), Bon Temps (quarterly magazine dedicated to the culture of Amiens and the art of living), Style & Co Amiens (deco magazine, trends and lifestyle), Night Clubbing Magazine (magazine of the nightlife in Amiens), Picardie la Gazette (economics weekly), Entreprises 80 (monthly of the Chamber of commerce and industry of Amiens-Picardie).
==== Audiovisual ====
===== Television channels =====
The headquarters of France 3 Picardie, the channel that broadcasts Picardie Matin - Picardy Morning among other programming, is located on Rue Roger Martin du Gard, to the north of the city.
Canal Nord, a local channel created in the mid-1980s in the northern districts, is now extended to the entire city via the Wibox network;
Wéo Picardie, (broadcast suspended since 8 January 2014).
TV Amiens, a local television channel on the internet.
WebTV Picardie, an internet television channel of the Regional Council of Picardy.
===== FM radio stations =====
Most of the national radio stations broadcast their programs in the Amiens area and can be added to France Bleu Picardie (100.2 MHz) and local stations Radio Campus Amiens (87.7 MHz) and Radio Galaxie programme Évasion (97.7 MHz).
===== Digital terrestrial radio stations =====
As of 1 March 2015, the CSA has not selected Amiens for broadcast or experimentation of this broadcasting standard.
==== Telecommunications ====
The city of Amiens is covered for:
Cable by Wibox/Cityplay since 2002.
Fibre optic by Wibox/Cityplay since 2007 and by Orange since 2013.
ADSL, with five telephone exchanges, the majority of which are unbundled, by SFR, Free, Bouygues Telecom and Completel.
=== Houses of worship ===
==== Buddhist ====
The Zen Sōtō Zen centre affiliated with the international Zen Association, on Rue Vulfran Warmé.
==== Catholic ====
Notre-Dame Cathedral, Place Notre-Dame
Chapelle du Bon Pasteur (first of the name): Situated on Rue Daire, it belonged to the Conseil général de la Somme. Leased to the Society of St. Pius X from 1983 to 2007, it was sold, with the property complex to which it belonged, to Picardy in May 2007.
Chapelle Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, situated on Rue Jules Barni, the offices are run by the Society of St. Pius X according to the Tridentine Mass (an extraordinary form the Roman rite).
The church of Saint Honoré known as the église de Beauvais, Rue Dom Bouquet
The church of Saint-Acheul, Chaussée Jules Ferry
The church of Saint-Firmin-le-Martyr, 137 Rue du Faubourg du Hem
The church of Saint-Germain-l'Écossais, Rue Pingre
The church of Sacré-Cœur, Rue de Mareuil
The church of Saint-Jacques, Rue Saint-Jacques
The church of Saint-Leu, Rue Saint-Leu
The church of Saint-Martin, Rue Morgan
The church of Saint-Maurice, Rue Turgot
The church of Saint-Pierre, Rue St Pierre
The church of Saint-Rémi, Rue des Cordeliers
The church of Saint-Roch, Rue de l'Abbaye
The church of Sainte-Anne, Rue Vulfran Warmé
The church of Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc, Route de Rouen
The church of Saint-Paul, Rue de l'Île-de-France
The church of Saint-Pierre in the Montières neighborhood
The church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine in the Renancourt neighborhood
The church of Sainte-Thérèse, Avenue de la Paix
The church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Rue de Cagny
==== Jewish ====
The synagogue in Amiens is located at 12 Rue du Port d'Amont, near Pont-Beauville.
==== Mormon ====
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a place of worship on the Doullens road.
==== Muslim ====
The city of Amiens has the largest Muslim community of Picardy and one of the largest in the north of France. Places of worship are evolving, several mosques are in a phase of expansion or relocation. The city has fifteen Muslim places of worship including eight independent prayer rooms and seven mosques:
The An-Nour mosque where sits the Institute of the Arab-Muslim world of Picardy in Rue de la Hotoie.
The Al-Fath mosque (currently moving premises), also the Association of Worship and Culture of Muslims in Picardy located at 375 Boulevard Beauvillé.
The Al Badr mosque, also the Association of workers and Moroccan traders of Amiens, located at 33 Rue Winston-Churchill.
The Masjid Al Muhsinin mosque located on the Rue de l'île-de-France.
The Sounnahs mosque located Rue Victorine-Autier.
The Chekkar mosque, also Association of the Committee of the Briqueterie located at 40 Rue Ronsard.
The Mosque of the "19" is located at 19 Avenue de l'Europe and is home to the Association of Muslims in Picardy.
Several independent prayer rooms are present in the urban community. On the other hand, Muslim committees and associations exist in the image of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Amiens in the Rue de Savoie, the Muslim Cultural Freedom Association – Institute of Enlightenment and also the Association of residents of the home at 21 Route d'Allonville.
==== Protestant ====
The Protestant Church of Amiens, Rue Saint-Jacques.
== Economy ==
As both an industrial hub and a services center, Amiens enjoys a large pool of workers with a labor pool of over 350,000 inhabitants and numerous professional training courses.
The magazine L'Entreprise elected Amiens "Most attractive city of France" for businesses, in 2009 and 2007, for the category less than 200,000 inhabitants. The city finished second in 2010, 2008 and 2006. The strengths of the city include a developed real estate business and taxation around the average for French cities. In addition, its geographical position in the center of the triangle "Paris – London – Brussels", is between three major European cities.
The magazine Challenges has also designated Amiens as "Best managed city of France", for the category large cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, in 2011, 2010 and 2008.
=== Income of the population and taxation ===
In 2010, the median taxable household income was €22,539, which placed Amiens at 177th place among the 31,525 communes with more than 39 households in metropolitan France.
In 2017, the proportion of taxable households was 45%.
=== Employment ===
In 2017, the population aged 15 to 64 years amounted to 91,555 persons, among which there were 64.5% of assets including 51.4% having a job and 13.1% of unemployed.
There were 78,284 jobs in the employment area, against 80,908 in 2007. The number of assets employed and residing in the area of employment being 47,588. The concentration of jobs indicator is 164.5%, which means that the employment area offers three jobs for every two active inhabitants.
Agriculture has very little representation among Amiens jobs with only 0.2%, just as the construction sector which represents 4.3% of jobs. Unlike these two sectors whose share is below the national average, the tertiary sector (trade, transport, services) represents a significant part of the Amiens workforce, 42.3%. Public services (public administration, education, health, social work) accounts for 42.7%. Industry includes 10.5% of jobs.
The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company announced more than 400 job cuts in May 2008 at the Amiens plant, which has had 1,450 employees; in March 2009, the management announced new collective redundancies of a thousand jobs.
=== Businesses and shops ===
On 31 December 2015, at Amiens, there were 10,436 businesses: 51 in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, 394 in industry, 685 in construction, 7,110 in trade, transportation and various services and 2,196 were related to the administrative sector.
In 2018, 1,505 companies had been recorded as being established in Amiens, including 1,206 companies owned by sole proprietors.
Philatelic publishers Yvert et Tellier (catalogues of quotes) and l'Écho de la timbrologie (magazine) have their management in Amiens, even if they have more of their services in the Paris region. The Gueudet Group, one of the largest car dealers in France, was established at Amiens in 1918. The old textile tradition of the city remains with the factory of Lee Cooper France (122 employees).
Since the end of World War II, much of the city's economy was tied to automotive equipment with companies such as Valeo, Goodyear and Sumitomo-Dunlop tires. In 2003, the American Goodyear company bought Dunlop. These two companies suffered financially through late 2007 and early 2008, and in response, the American Goodyear company headquarters in the United States offered workers a change to their working hours and the number of posts, which a high percentage of staff refused.
Procter & Gamble, settled in Amiens in 1964 to produce soap, and inaugurated its new detergents unit in 1966. Established on over more than 45 hectares (110 acres), it is one of the largest factories in the world for laundry cleaning products (Ariel, Dash, Bonux, Gama) and for domestic cleaning products (Mr. Clean, Febreze). More than 85% of its production is intended for export.
The Amiens plant employs approximately 930 people.
Since the mid-1990s, the city has tried to convert the economy towards the internet and telephony industries. Many call centres (Intracall center, Coriolis France, Médiamétrie) have opened mainly within the city, region or state. The Unilog (now Logica) computer service company has installed a service center in Amiens (the CSA).
Amiens is the seat of the Regional Chamber of commerce and industry of Picardy. It is also the seat of the Chamber of commerce and industry of Amiens. It manages the Amiens - Glisy Aerodrome.
== Culture, tourism and heritage ==
The strategic position of Amiens makes it an attractive destination for a weekend or a few days, from Paris, Lille or Brussels. Amiens also benefits from the proximity of the Baie de Somme, a tourist hotspot registered at the Club des plus belles baies du monde and labelled Great Site of France.
Amiens has the label of Towns and Lands of Art and History since 1992. Within this framework, the host of the heritage organises guided tours on themes intended for an audience of adults and children, with educational workshops. A signposted circuit allows an independent tour of the town, with information panels offering comment on places and notable buildings.
Amiens has an important historical and cultural heritage, and an accessible and varied natural heritage, on which tourism is based. The main attractions are the cathedral, which is included in the world heritage of UNESCO, the hortillonnages, Jules Verne House, the Tour Perret, the Musée de Picardie, the zoo, and the Saint-Leu and Saint-Maurice neighborhoods.
=== Places and monuments ===
The commune has an exceptional heritage: 60 monuments listed in the inventory of monuments historiques and over 1600 places and monuments listed in the general inventory of cultural heritage; and on the other hand, 187 objects listed in the inventory of monuments historiques and 254 objects listed in the general inventory of cultural heritage. The information given below is relative only to a brief selection.
==== Notre-Dame d'Amiens ====
C’est une femme adorable, cette Cathédrale, c’est une Vierge. [...] Point de confusion vaine, ici, point d’exagération ni d’enflure. C’est l’empire absolu de l’élégance suprême.
[She's an adorable woman, this Cathedral – a Virgin. [...] No empty confusion, here, no exaggeration or pompousness. It is the absolute empire of supreme elegance.]
Amiens Cathedral deserves the name given by M. Viollet-le-Duc, 'the Parthenon of Gothic architecture'.
The city is famous for its Notre-Dame Cathedral, masterpiece of Gothic art and one of the largest cathedrals in the world by its interior volume (200,000 m3 (7,100,000 cu ft)). The largest religious and medieval building of France, its interior could twice hold Notre-Dame de Paris.
The cathedral measures 145 metres (476 ft) long and its spire rises 112 metres (367 ft) high. The vaults of the central nave, finished in 1247, are 42.3 metres (139 ft), close to the maximum limit for this architecture.
Dating back to the 13th century, its construction is due to the wealth of the city in the Middle Ages and to the fire of the Romanesque cathedral which stood previously. Three architects, including Robert of Luzarches succeeded to complete the construction.
Amiens Cathedral is notable for the coherence of its plan, the beauty of its three-tier interior elevation, the particularly fine display of sculptures on the principal façade and in the south transept, and inlays of its floor. It is also described by John Ruskin as "Gothic, clear of Roman tradition and of Arabian taint, Gothic pure, authoritative, unsurpassable, and unaccusable."
Regarded as the archetype of the classic Gothic style, the cathedral also presents some elements of the radiant Gothic style and flamboyant Gothic. The speed of construction, barely 70 years for the shell (1220 to 1269), explains this remarkable homogeneity of style. Its façade is decorated with more than 3,000 statues, gargoyles and chimeras.
Registered since 1981 as a World Heritage Site of UNESCO, it is a "masterpiece of world heritage". For a second time in 1998, it is a monumental step on the Camino de Santiago. Despite the two World Wars of the 20th century, which severely affected the city, it managed to stay intact.
A show of the reproduction of the original polychromy of façades, discovered as a result of recent laser cleaning, is given annually for free in December and during the summer period. The show is a projection on the façade of slides in color.
The zodiac is a set of reliefs on the foundations of the western façade formed series of quatrefoil medallions, carved in a representative agrarian calendar and the signs of the zodiac.
The statue of the weeping Angel that is on a tomb carved by Nicolas Blasset, and the reliefs evoking Saint-Firmin and St. John the Baptist, are some of the well-known works of the cathedral.
At ground level lies the intact labyrinth of 234 metres (768 ft) long.
On the north side of the cathedral is the former Palace of the Bishop of Amiens, occupied by the École supérieure de commerce in Amiens.
==== Belfry ====
The origin of the Belfry of Amiens dates back to the establishment of the commune of Amiens by Louis VI. It is mentioned for the first time in an arbitral award issued by the chapter of Amiens in 1244.
Symbolizing the independence of the commune, it was formerly used for meetings of the notables of the city and then as archive rooms, weapons store and prison. A spotter nearby monitored arrivals and warned the population of the external dangers. During the Middle Ages, the building was repeatedly engulfed by fire.
The belfry is composed of a base in white cut stone, built in the 15th century between 1406 and 1410, a stone superstructure bell tower built from 1749 with Baroque volutes at its base, and a dome covered with slate and then the renowned arrow weather vane. At the time, a huge 11-ton bell was installed inside, it was later destroyed along with the dome, whose copper component melted, in the bombardment and fire of the city on 19 May 1940. Abandoned and devoid of a roof since World War II, the monument was fully restored between February 1989 and July 1990.
Located on the Place au Fil, the old central square of the city before the arrival of the railway and the rise of the Rue des Trois Calloux, the belfry is adjacent to Les Halles and the back of the Hôtel de Ville (city hall). At a height of 52 metres (171 ft), it rings every hour of the day.
Since July 2005, the belfry of Amiens is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as part of a set of 56 Belfries of Belgium and France which were inscribed because of their architecture and their importance in the rise of municipal power in Northern France and Belgium. The belfry is also recorded in the inventory of Historic Monuments.
==== Cirque Jules-Verne ====
In 1845, the traditional fair of Saint-Jean, formerly held at Place René Goblet, was transferred to Place Longueville. It is a wide esplanade that took the place of the Longueville bastion, after the demolition of the city walls in the early 19th century. Each year, a temporary circus is established for this occasion.
In 1865, a circus company emerged to claim a permanent circus, which would be built in wood by the Schytte contractor in 1874. However, expensive maintenance prompted the municipality to consider the construction of a new building. The decision was made in 1886 under the leadership of Mayor Frédéric Petit and the work began.
The Chief Architect of the Somme, Émile Ricquier, a disciple of Gustave Eiffel, was responsible for its construction. It was inspired by the Cirque d'hiver of Paris but with a cast metal frame, supplemented by brick from the local countryside. The architect of civil buildings, Charles Garnier, claimed that the frames should be hidden with a plaster imitating stone. The "moderninst" design of Ricquier, who chose to display the structure, and to favor local material such as brick, is visible at the rear of the monument.
With its 16-sided polygonal shape and a diameter of 44 metres (144 ft), it includes lodges and stalls in its enclosure. As a completely modern project, it hosted two steam engines, dedicated to fully electric lights and central heating. Since its construction, it was also the first circus which included a buffet and a refreshment bar. The cost of the construction of the building finally reached double the forecast. In 1888, the new city councilor responsible for festivals and celebrations, Jules Verne, was responsible for monitoring the work, and it was he who opened it on Sunday 23 June 1889, for the opening of the fair and the centenary of the French Revolution:
The new circus is a work of art that your municipal administration wanted to build with all of the enhancements of modern industry. It is the very best, undoubtedly, it is also the most comprehensive, with its facilities and equipment, to have been built in France and abroad.
The roof was damaged by a shell in 1916. The circus was the setting for Federico Fellini's The Clowns (1971), and the film by Jean-Jacques Beineix, Roselyne and the Lions (1989), with Isabelle Pasco as lead actress. The largest of the circuses of the province with its 3,000-seats, the building has acquired a multidisciplinary use for decades of performances of theatre, dance, concerts, galas, sports and public meetings.
Renovated in 2003, it now bears the name of Cirque Jules-Verne. After hosting the performances of Cirque Rancy, it hosts resident Cirque Arlette Gruss.
Since 1 January 2011, the circus has been labelled "national hub circus and street arts", managed by an EPCC. It is one of seven in France and is still in use today.
==== The house of Jules-Verne ====
In 1882, Jules Verne and his wife, Honorine, rented the house at the corner of Rue Charles-Dubois and Boulevard Longueville until 1900. Acquired in 1980 by the city, the house is labeled Maisons des Illustres by the Ministry of Culture. Restored in 2006, thanks to the work of the Centre international Jules-Verne, this 19th-century mansion, registered as a national heritage site, traces through the exhibition of more than 700 objects, the personality, the sources of inspiration and memories of Jules Verne.
==== Tour Perret ====
Opposite the Gare d'Amiens, is located the Tour Perret (from the name of its architect Auguste Perret). Over 100 metres (330 ft) high, it was one of the first skyscrapers built in Europe, and the highest for a long time.
==== The Church of Saint-Leu ====
The Église Saint-Leu d'Amiens was built at the end of the 15th century, on the model of the hall-churches. It is dedicated, as its district, to Saint Leu, referring to the 7th century bishop who was exiled to the Vimeu. It has three naves. A flamboyant portal adorns the base of the steeple. The latter, struck by lightning, had to be rebuilt at the beginning of the 16th century. The ends of beams are carved. Stone and wood statues date from the 17th century. The choir houses the glory of the Duthoit brothers.
==== Other notable buildings or monuments ====
===== Architecture from antiquity =====
Numerous archaeological excavations have uncovered remains from proto-historic times to the Roman era. Two skylights cut in the last development of Place Gambetta, allow observation of a few remains of the forum. And, important remnants of a large Gallo-Roman theatre uncovered in early 2007, have been dismantled and stored in accordance with the rules of archaeological conservation, during the redevelopment of the Gare neighborhood in March 2007.
The Archaeological garden of Saint-Acheul testifies to the presence of Paleolithic man in the Somme Valley some 450,000 years ago. A stratigraphic cut, classified as an historic monument since 1947, allows visualisation of successive strata of the Somme Valley.
===== Architecture from the Middle Ages =====
The Church of Saint-Germain is disused, but where exhibitions are regularly held on the colourisation of the cathedral and the St-Germain neighborhood, and historical competitor of the Saint-Leu neighborhood. The animosity, between the populations of the two districts has marked the history of Amiens. This church has a high and oddly leaning tower. Affected by the bombing of 1940, it was returned temporarily to worship in October 1965, after a thorough restoration.
The remains of the Hôtel-Dieu (Saint-Leu district, between the CRDP and the Faculty of Sciences),
The mills Passe avant and Passe arrière (at Saint-Leu).
===== Architecture from the Renaissance =====
The renaissance façade of the Maison du Sagittaire (moved to adjoin the Logis du Roy).
The Logis du Roy (Faculty of Arts until 2003).
The House of the Bailiwick or Malmaison.
The Citadelle: First ravelin, erected north of the Montrescu gate, the fortress was located in 1531 by F. di Giorgio on the order of Francis I (Francis I gate, with sculpted salamanders). After the capture by the Spaniards and its takeover by Henry IV (1597), Jean Errard received the charge to rebuild the defences of the city.
===== Architecture from the 17th and 18th centuries =====
Abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Prémontrés of Amiens (cloister Dewailly)
Abbey of Saint-Acheul (17th and 18th centuries) and the Church (built in 1760 on the vault of Fermin of Amiens)
The water tower and fountains of Amiens (1753)
The façade of the former theatre (now a bank). It was moved 4 metres (13 ft) to the line of the Rue des Trois-Cailloux.
The façade of the Stengel barracks (currently an apartment building)
The Palace of the Bishop of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Seminary of the Lazarists: located on Rue Jules-Barni, it was built between 1736 and 1741 and benefitted from several extensions of which the last was built under the aegis of François-Auguste Cheussey in 1828. Seized by the State, following the Act of 1905, the seminary was the barracks office (named after the general assigned to the Committee of fortifications, Pierre Charles Dejean) from 1909 to 1993. During this period, it housed the headquarters of the 8th infantry division.
The Hôtel de Ville (city hall) (partly 18th century and partly 19th century). Made in the regional style of stone and brick, with bedrock of sandstone, and stone pavilions. On the pediment is found the statues of King Louis VI and Bishop Geoffroi, which granted freedom to Amiens in 1115.
===== Architecture from the 19th century =====
The Palace of Justice was built from 1865 to 1880 on the site of the Abbey of Saint-Martin-les-Jumeaux (1073 to 1634) established at the supposed place of the sharing of the cloak of Saint Martin and the convent of the religious Order of the Celestines (1634 to 1781). Les Célestins, whose order was abolished in 1778, left the premises in 1881.
Henriville neighborhood, including the hotel Acloque (neo-Louis XIII style) and the Saint-Martin Church (neo-Gothic, built by Louis Antoine in 1874).
The House of Jules Verne, which was reopened after renovation, in 2006, including the present neo-Gothic dining room and antique desk. The tower was covered with an armillary sphere commissioned from artist François Schuiten, who also signed the mural extending the imaginary garden of yesteryear.
The Cimetière de la Madeleine (Madeleine Cemetery) contains a number of listed monuments including the sculpture on Jules Verne's Tomb. His tomb is decorated with a sculpture by Albert Roze symbolising the resurrection: Jules Verne lifting the slab to glimpse the modern world.
Saint-Acheul cemetery where various Amiens personalities are buried and where there is a domed tomb with a sculpture by Auguste Rodin.
The Dewailly clock, by Émile Ricquier (completely redone in 1999), supplemented by the statue of Marie-sans chemise of Albert Roze, originally in the Place Gambetta.
The former insurance house, Rue Marotte, built by E. Ricquier in 1893 (now a bar).
The Louis Aragon library, Rue de la République, built by François-Auguste Cheussey in 1823, neoclassical style with a peristyle with columns in Tuscan drums.
The monastery of the visitation, built between 1839 and 1841 by Herbault.
The Palace of Justice, new buildings constructed by Cheussey in 1834 and 1846.
The renovations by Cheussey (1816–1848) of the cathedral.
Place Saint-Denis (now place René Goblet) is designed in 1839 by the architect François Auguste Cheussey.
The parish church Saint-Firmin-le-Martyr by Cheussey in 1843.
The Church of Sainte-Anne of the architect Victor Delefortrie.
The Church St-Rémi of architect Paul Delefortrie.
===== Architecture from the 20th century =====
The hotel Bouctot-Vagniez (seat of the Regional Chamber of commerce and industry), built by Louis Duthoit in 1909, a rare Art Nouveau building in Amiens.
The English neighborhood, located on the road from Longueau, including a British phone box. An island of London in the heart of Amiens.
The ESIEE Amiens, designed by the architects Jean Dubus and Jean-Pierre Lott. A modern building identified by its saucer.
Complex of Art Deco buildings on Rue Cauvin, as well as the Gueudet garages (Rue des Otages).
Église Saint-Honoré, rebuilt between 1957 and 1961, by Paul Tournon, on the plans of the pontifical pavilion of the universal exhibition in Paris in 1937.
The hotel Vagniez-Renon (current headquarters of the administrative tribunal): A former residence of Henriville, it houses a Moorish-style hydrotherapy room, designed by Émile Ricquier.
The Saint-Pierre church, destroyed in 1940 and rebuilt in 1949 by Evrard, in glass and concrete, with a brick bell tower.
Le Courrier Picard: The headquarters of the daily life of Amiens, first Progrès de la Somme, belongs to a set of Art Deco buildings.
The monument of Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque by Jan and Joël Martel in 1950.
The Carmel of the Holy Spirit, on the Montjoie Hill, built in 1965 by architect Pierre Pinsard.
The House of culture of Amiens, inaugurated on 19 March 1966 by André Malraux, built by Jean Duthilleul.
The Coliséum, inaugurated on 5 January 1996, built by the architect Pierre Parat (designer of the Palais omnisports de Paris-Bercy).
The Stade de la Licorne, built in 1999 by architects Philippe Chaix and Jean-Paul Morel.
===== Architecture from the 21st century =====
The Cinema Gaumont Amiens opened in 2005. It is the work of architects Philippe Chaix and Jean-Paul Morel. The interior decoration is the work of Christian Lacroix and artists Alain Balzac and François Michel.
The Verrière de la place de la gare d'Amiens, also called the Canopy. It is the work of architect Claude Vasconi, known especially for the Forum des Halles in Paris. A subject of a controversy when it opened in March 2008, the canopy is designed to create a link between the pedestrian zone of the city center and the ZAC Gare la Vallée, and to become a business district of Amiens. Criticised for its massive and imposing area of more than 10,000 square metres (110,000 sq ft), the canopy rises to 15 metres (49 ft) in height and is composed of pixellated glass panels created by Bernard Pictet. This is one of the largest canopies in Europe.
The Zenith of Amiens by Massimiliano Fuksas, in the Renancourt neighborhood between the Mégacité and the Hippodrome. Construction was completed in 2008.
=== Environmental heritage ===
Amiens has 270 hectares (670 acres) of green space (excluding communal woodland) 118,300 hectares (292,000 acres) of hortillonnages, 300 hectares (740 acres) of forests, 30 hectares (74 acres) of marshland, in addition to its river and its streams.
Floral City awarded the maximum score of 4 flowers in the floral contest of cities and villages of France to Amiens, and it offers a particularly rich wooded heritage. With 38,650 trees (excluding woodland), of which 17,000 are situated on highways, Amiens to win the national tree award. In 2014, the city ranked in the top 10 greenest cities of France.
Presenting itself as a city concerned with the environment, Amiens has made the link between the city and nature a central axis of its metropolitan development project called Amiens 2030.
==== The hortillonages ====
Amiens is also known for the hortillonnages, gardens on small islands in over 300 hectares (740 acres) of marshland between the River Somme and River Avre, surrounded by a grid network of human-made canals (locally known as "rieux"). They are also known as the "floating gardens of Amiens". The hortillonnages are sometimes called "Little Venice of the North", because of the canals.
Hortillon means market garden in Picard, and derives from the Latin hortillus, small garden. It is navigated in flat bottom boats, formerly called barque à cornet [Cornet boat], due to the very raised front, which allows the boats to easily dock on the fragile shores of the cultivated fields. It is the upstream port, located at the foot of the cathedral, where a weekly market is held on the water, although the arrival the growers by boat can only be accomplished once a year, in summer.
==== Amiens Metropolitan Zoo ====
Prior to its opening in May 1952, the Amiens Zoo is a green space bordering the basin of the Park of the Hotoie. It was the mayor of the time, Maurice Vast, who decided to develop the site in 1949. Originally intended as an entertainment venue, the zoo began its mission of conservation, education and research between 1970 and 1980. Between 1990 and 2000, the zoo was completely renovated and became a permanent member of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) in 2001 and the National Association of Zoological Parks (ANPZ) in 2002. Today, there are 300 animals, representing approximately 75 species from all continents, cohabiting on 6.5 hectares (16 acres). They live in environments, which are close to their natural environment, favouring their well-being. In 2014, the zoo received 161,128 visitors. Traditionally, entry is free on 14 July, Bastille Day.
==== The main parks and gardens ====
As a floral city, 4 flowers were awarded in 2013 by the National Council of Cities and Villages of France for the competition of floral cities and villages. The national Council of Cities and Villages awarded the 2012 National Tree Prize to the city for "its exceptional and innovative management of its wooded heritage" with its 37,000 trees, some more than a century old.
=== Cultural heritage ===
==== Museums ====
The Musée de Picardie is a key site in the history of the National Museum, since it is the first building to have been built in France to serve as a museum. Built under the Second Empire on the model of the new Louvre of Napoleon III, it opened its doors to the public in 1867 after the visit of the emperor. Considered the French model of a 19th-century museum, it was nicknamed the "Little Louvre of the Province". It hosted very early rich collections which are now divided into four departments: Archaeology in the basement, the Medieval art on the ground floor, fine arts on the ground floor and the first floor, and modern and contemporary art on the first floor. Rooms are also devoted to temporary exhibitions. The department of fine arts brings together paintings by Van Dyck, Jordaens, Ruysdael, El Greco, Ribera, Tiepolo, Guardi, Fragonard, Chardin, Boucher, Quentin de La Tour, Vouet, Corot and Courbet. The modern and contemporary collection is represented by Picasso, Picabia, Balthus, Dubuffet, Hélion, Bacon, Miró and Manessier. Access to the picture galleries of the first floor is by a mounumental staircase in a setting dedicated to the famous wall compositions of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
The Hotel de Berny Museum is a regional museum of local art and history. This building, typical of the Louis XIII architecture, was built in 1634 as a mansion of the treasurers of France. Property of Gérard de Berny, Senator of the Somme in the first half of the 20th century, has restored the façades and settled its collections. Located a few metres from the cathedral, this Museum of France retains an exceptional collection of woodwork, furniture and objets d'art (tapestries, ceramics, ironworks) and memories (objects and arrays) of Amiens personalities: Jules Verne, Choderlos de Laclos, Édouard Branly, Jean-Baptiste Gresset, Vincent Voiture, Joseph Pinchon, Maréchal Leclerc. The museum is currently undergoing a complete renovation of its buildings and an overhaul of the installation of its museum collections.
The House of Jules Verne, labeled Maisons des Illustres, is the home of the most translated writer in the world after Agatha Christie: Jules Verne. He lived here from 1882 to 1900 with his wife Honorine, and wrote part of his work in this mansion of the 19th century. To visit is to enter into the intimate and creative universe of the author. The building largely retains its original decor and opens almost all of its rooms, from the ground floor to the attic. The permanent collections are presented on two floors, in the attic, the tower and the belvedere of the house: Approximately 700 collected objects evoke the personality, sources of inspiration and memories of Jules Verne. Costumed tours, performances, parties and literary encounters of thematic conferences are also regularly organised.
The Gallery of stained glass is located in the workshop of master glassmaker Claude Barre, in a 16th-century house near to the cathedral. It presents a large collection to the public, including religious stained-glass windows and interiors, from the 11th to the 19th century. The gallery also offers demonstrations on the techniques of stained glass.
The House of culture of Amiens (MCA or MACU) was inaugurated on 19 March 1966 by André Malraux. A major cultural institution in the region, it has two exhibition halls for contemporary art; the Matisse Hall and the Giacometti Room, which both regularly host exhibitions of sculptures, photographs and plastic arts.
The Fonds régional d'art contemporain of Picardie (FRAC Picardie), created in 1983, aims to promote contemporary art, in particular through dissemination actions. As early as 1985, FRAC Picardie had specialised its action in the field of the design and its contemporary dimensions. It is also interested in new media, on and off paper, since artists are now working through the video medium. This has allowed it to acquire a good reputation in France and abroad. In 30 years, the FRAC has brought together a unique collection of a thousand drawings which include major names of contemporary art, such as Basquiat, Dubuffet, Oppenheim, Twombly, Matta, and Manessier. In 2001, discussions are undertaken to construct a new building to accommodate the fonds and its collections.
Amiens was strongly tipped to host the Louvre II.
==== Concert halls ====
The city has a number of concert spaces, mostly small venues, and pubs also host numerous concerts throughout the year.
The Zenith of Amiens was inaugurated in September 2008. With a capacity of 6,000 seats, it is the work of the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas. Holder of the required Zénith label, this facility allows the hosting of national and international headline acts and ensures a high level of services and organisation. The accessibility of the place by motorway (A16, A29, A1), and the possibilities of free parking, the venue radiates to Belgium and to the Paris region.
The megacity is the Park of the Congress and Exhibitions of Amiens. Located in immediate proximity of the Zenith of Amiens and the Stade de la Licorne, there are two auditoriums of 350 and 1,000 places where concerts and comedy shows are programmed.
Cirque Jules-Verne, the biggest grand circus of France, has about 1,700 seating spaces since its renovation in 2003. It welcomes, among other shows, concerts.
The House of culture of Amiens offers many live shows and concerts. It manages also New Dreams, a room for 120 seated or 300 standing, which also hosts concerts.
The Auditorium Henri Dutilleux is the auditorium of the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional d'Amiens. With high acoustic quality, it offers 370 seats on three levels. It offers mainly classical concerts.
La Lune des Pirates is the stage of contemporary music (SMAC) of the city. Created in 1987 in a former banana warehouse of the Belu Wharf, La Lune has a capacity of 250 seats.
==== Theaters ====
The House of Culture of Amiens has the Scène nationale accreditation from the Ministry of Culture. Cultural place of the city, its mission is broad and covers many disciplines: theatre, music, dance, cinema and visual arts. It brings together two theatres: the Grand Théâtre (1,070 seats) and the Petit Théâtre (300 seats).
The Comédie de Picardie (ComDePic) is one of the city's main theatres. This Scène conventionnée was founded in 1989 by the Regional Council of Picardy and offers fifteen plays every year. The theatre has a room of 400 places and houses its own company.
The Maison du Théâtre was established in April 1988 in the historic neighborhood of Saint-Leu. Its activities range from creation to dissemination, training and theatrical information. Focused on contemporary theatre, the Maison du Théâtre also hosts local theatrical companies and their creations.
The puppet theatre "Chés cabotants of Amiens", founded in 1933, is the heir of some eighty cabotan theatres which were created in Amiens in the 19th century. Amiens is known as the French capital of the puppet son. Since 1997, a theatre is dedicated to Chés Cabotans of Amiens and its popular hero Lafleur. It is located in the heart of the Saint-Leu neighborhood.
The Boîte à Rire is a café-théâtre, created in September 2012. This 48-seat hall is located near to Amiens Cathedral, and proudly displays a one-man show and Boulevard theatre.
==== Cultural Centers ====
Amiens Métropole has nine cultural centers which cover much of the metropolitan area: six in various districts of Amiens, and three in the neighbouring communes of Longueau, Camon and Glisy. These outreach facilities working in the field of art and creation are openly oriented "venues". Open to all, they offer an eclectic programme; theatre and concerts, shows for young people and dance, projections of films, exhibitions, meetings and debates. In 2013, they accommodated 48,000 people.
The Briqueterie was installed in 2001 on the site of the former Friant military barracks in the Elbeuf neighborhood. As part of its programming, it hosts concerts, as well as exhibitions, public theatre and shows for youths. To this end, it has a room that can accommodate 120 people.
The Jacques Tati cultural center is located in the heart of the Pierre Rollin. Opened in January 2008, the Jacques Tati theatre has 198 seats and hosts plays, public youth performances, and concerts.
The Léo-Lagrange cultural center is located in Saint Germain district. A venue for exhibitions, meetings and performances of music, theatre, dance and circus, it has a room of 85 seats named the chapel.
The CSC is installed in the heart of the Etouvie neighborhood. Its missions include the dissemination of exhibitions and performances. To this end, it has a room of 150 seats.
The Étoile du sud is located in the neighbourhood Victorine-Autier. This cultural center is specialized in urban cultures and has the peculiarity of having a computer (MAO) recording studio.
The Safran is located in the north neighborhood of Amiens. This 'multidisciplinary and experimental' Scène conventionnée offers diverse programming: Drama, public youth shows, dance and exhibitions. Its theatre hall, known as Gérard-Philipe has 220 spaces. Saffron also hosts a music complex, the Cité Carter, which offers rehearsal studios, recording sessions and organises concerts of contemporary music in its 250-seat hall.
==== Libraries ====
The Bibliothèques d'Amiens Métropole is a network of 28 facilities spread over the whole territory of the metropolis. The heart of this network is the Louis Aragon library, located on Rue de la République. Built between 1823 and 1826, it is one of the oldest municipal libraries in France. It experienced several improvements, including campaigns of work between 1982 and 1993, which have endowed it with new spaces: Two auditoriums, a youth space, a library and an art library.
Registration and borrowing is free for all of the people of Amiens in all libraries. Two libraries also provide service to neighborhoods and the communes of the agglomeration, and there is home delivery of documents for people with reduced mobility.
==== Cinemas ====
There are three cinemas:
The Cinema Gaumont Amiens (12 rooms, 2,700 seats) was inaugurated in September 2005. Located just steps from the Amiens railway station, it has a large lobby and a 600-seat room. A 500-space car park is located under the cinema. It is the work of the architects Philippe Chaix and Jean-Paul Morel and its interior decoration was entrusted to Christian Lacroix. In 2011, this multiplex received 887,000 cinemagoers.
The Cine-Saint-Leu (one room with 250 seats) was inaugurated in October 2000, after the closure of the Regent Cinema located near the railway station. An arthouse cinema, it is part of the major cultural facilities of the Cathedral Centre. Its eclectic and cinephile programming offers the possibility to see the original version of contemporary films.
The Studio Orson Welles (one room with 180 seats in the Maison de la culture d'Amiens). An arthouse cinema operated by the Maison de la culture d'Amiens, it offers arthouse films as well as retrospectives of great names of the seventh art, old or contemporary.
=== Cultural events and festivals ===
Throughout the year, Amiens is the seat of many cultural, traditional or economic events.
=== Music ===
Even if it rarely achieves national notoriety (with the notable exceptions of Les Fatals Picards, The Rabeats, Olympe, Albin de la Simone, Disiz and Rokia Traoré), the Amiens music scene is active and developed. In this dynamic, the New French Rock scene holds a central place and is organised around a collective, Amiens Burning, which is responsible for networking the breeding ground for the local rock scene, to accompany its projects, and organize concerts.
Since their creation, La Lune des Pirates and Cité Carter also provide support to the local scene. For example, the Cité Carter produces a compilation each year, with local groups.
Highlights of the Amiens music scene:
Pop: Olympe, Nathaniel Isaac Smog, Ribo
Hip Hop/Rap: Disiz (born in Amiens), D.S.C. (Dirty South Crew), Lj Crackus
French singers: Albin de la Simone (born in Amiens), EmilieAnneCharlotte
World Music: Rokia Traoré (Malian-born singer who lived in Amiens in the 1990s)
Multiple genres: Les Fatals Picards, Zic Zazou (group of nine musicians created in 1982 and winner of La Grande Battle in November 2012)
Classical music is represented by the Orchestre de Picardie and the University Orchestra of Picardy. Vocal practice is represented by the Regional Choir of Picardy, the University Choir of Picardie, and the Choir of France Picardy.
One can also include the Harmony Saint-Pierre, a fanfare of 70 musicians, which has become a local institution since its inception in 1894.
The city has the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional d'Amiens, seat of strong musical activity (framed by 70 teachers, an administrative and technical team with an additional 20 people).
=== Literature ===
Amiens saw rise, over the centuries, to major writers. In the first half of the 17th century, Vincent Voiture, poet and letter writer, was the darling of the Précieuses for the fluidity of his style. In 1634, he was member of the 1st Académie française. In 1678, Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange, nicknamed "the French Varro", published his Glossarium in 3 volumes. This glossary of medieval Latin is still authoritative today. In 1750, Jean Baptiste Gresset, a playwright and poet who was celebrated in his time and was a member of the Académie française, founded the Academy of Amiens which is still active today. He was named perpetual president.
In 1782, the Amiens native Choderlos de Laclos published Les Liaisons dangereuses where he staged a depraved nobility. Considered one of the masterpieces of 18th-century literature, the book has toured the world and is known as an Oscar-winning film adaptation.
Here I am quite citizen of Amiens. It seems to me that I was born. I live very happy, although uncomfortable to work. Amiens is a wise city, even-tempered, and the company is friendly and literate. It is near Paris, close enough to have the highlights without unbearable noise and bustle.
In the 19th century, there was a brilliant literary life around the Académie des sciences, des lettres et des arts d'Amiens with historian Albéric de Calonne and the Yvert family. However, the great name of Amiens literary life is Jules Verne. He animated all intellectual activity, giving balls and parties, while his wife held a famous salon. He often attended the library of the industrial society, which subscribed to numerous scientific journals. A member of the Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Amiens from 8 March 1872, he was elected Director in 1875, and in 1881 and, on this occasion, he delivered several speeches of welcome, especially for one of his friends, Amiens cartoonist Gédéon Baril, who signed illustrations of Dix heures en chasse with Hetzel. Engaged in local life, he was Councillor of Amiens from 1888 to 1904. He was closely interested in the affairs of the city, wrote many reports on the theatre and brought its support to the construction of the municipal circus.
Amiens does appear explicitly in his novels but there are however characteristic elements of the city such as the cathedral and the river. This is the case, for example, for the imaginary city of Ragz in Le secret de Wilhem Storitz. In the novel Une fantaisie du docteur Ox, the inhabitants of the fictional town of Virgamen, the Virgamenois, refer directly to the Amiénois and their prudent nature.
In 1875, he delivered before the Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Amiens a speech entitled "An ideal city: Amiens in the year 2000" where he portrays himself wandering in a forward-thinking city of Amiens. Since then, the city has built a tourist route from this text.
He died in Amiens in 1905, and he deeply marked the town's footprint, so that today many places, monuments and events bear his name. He rests at La Madeleine cemetery where one can read on his tomb: Vers l'immortalité et l'éternelle jeunesse. [Towards immortality and eternal youth].
Such as it is with his distinctive smile, how much I love the Golden Virgin, with her smile of heavenly hostess; how much I love its home at the door of the Cathedral in its adornment exquisite and simple of hawthorns.
In 1885, Englishman John Ruskin published the Bible of Amiens, which was translated into French, extensively annotated and prefaced, in 1904, by Marcel Proust. This book dedicated to Notre-Dame d'Amiens was the opportunity for Proust to recall his admiration for the English author and the Cathedral of Amiens.
I would like to give the reader the desire and the means to spend a day at Amiens in a sort of Ruskinesque pilgrimage. It was not worth starting by asking him to go to Florence or Venice, when Ruskin wrote a whole book on Amiens.
In the second half of the 19th century, Jules Barni, Member of Parliament for the Somme, Associate Professor of philosophy and brilliant scholar translated Kant's work in French and thus enabled its dissemination in France.
A native of Amiens, Paul Bourget published Le Disciple in 1889, a novel today considered his major work. He was elected, 5 years later, to the Académie française.
Born in Sainte-Anne district in 1885, Roland Dorgelès published Les Croix de bois in 1919. A masterpiece written from his notes taken at the Front, the novel won the Prix Femina the same year. Though capable of obtaining the Prix Goncourt, it was beaten by À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs by Marcel Proust, 6 votes against 4. A member of the Académie Goncourt in 1929, he was elected president in 1954 until his death in 1973.
In 1926, the Amiens native Henri Deberly, won the Prix Goncourt with Le Supplice de Phèdre, a novel inspired by his home city.
=== Cinema ===
Many films or scenes from films were shot in Amiens and its surroundings.
1946: Jéricho by Henri Calef with Nadine Alari, Pierre Brasseur and Jacques Charon
1959: Head Against the Wall, film of Georges Franju, with Pierre Brasseur and Jean-Pierre Mocky
1970: The Clowns of Federico Fellini around the Cirque Jules-Verne
1973: La Rose de Fer of Jean Rollin with Françoise Pascal, Hugues Quester and Nathalie Perrey
1976: La Saga des Français: La Rumeur, film of Michel Pamart and Marcel Trillat
1980: La femme enfant, film of Raphaële Billetdoux, with Klaus Kinski
1989: Roselyne and the Lions of Jean-Jacques Beineix, with Isabelle Pasco filmed around Cirque Jules-Verne
1991: Walking a Tightrope of Nico Papatakis, with Michel Piccoli also filmed around Cirque Jules-Verne
1994: Sister My Sister of Nancy Meckler with Julie Walters and Joely Richardson
1997: Arlette of Claude Zidi, with Josiane Balasko and Christopher Lambert
1999: Je suis né d'une cigogne, film of Tony Gatlif, with Romain Duris
2000: Elle et lui au 14e étage of Sophie Blondy, with Guillaume Depardieu and Benoît Magimel
2000: Confort moderne of Dominique Choisy
2002: Carnage of Delphine Gleize
2002: Paris selon Moussa, film of Cheik Doukouré
2008: Paul Rondin est...Paul Rondin, short film of Frédéric Vin, with François Berland
2008: Blanche, short film of Eric Griffon du Bellay, with Romane Bohringer and Clémence Poésy
2008: Louise Hires a Contract Killer, film of Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine, with Yolande Moreau and Benoît Poelvoorde filmed around the Tour Bleue (before its destruction), in the Étouvie neighborhood.
2008: Française, film of Souad El-Bouhati, with Hafsia Herzi
2009: Ricky of François Ozon with Alexandra Lamy
2010: Copacabana, film of Marc Fitoussi, with Isabelle Huppert
2012: Les Fraises des bois, film of Dominique Choisy
2013: La Tête la première, film of Amélie Van Elmbt
=== Comics ===
Amiens is a stronghold of comics in France. A whole generation of designers and Amiens writers make the city an important creative center of the 9th art. The main actors in this generation, include Régis Hautière, Norédine Allam who notably led the recolouring of the 33 Asterix albums in the framework of the project "The great collection" and also Antoine Dodé, David François, Fraco, Hardoc, Greg Blondin, and Nicolas Hitori De.
The city was also the birthplace or home of big names in the comic strip universe, such as the Amiens native Joseph Pinchon, creator of the character of Bécassine; Paul Gillon, winner of the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême and also Philippe Thirault.
Actor of this dynamic around the BD, the association On a marché sur la bulle [Explorers on the bubble] organises the Rendez-vous de la bande dessinée d'Amiens, one of the greatest French comic book festivals. Active throughout the territory, the structure also manages a resource center and has an editorial department with the Éditions de la Gouttière.
=== Regional culture ===
Chés Cabotans d'Anmien or the Cabotins of Amiens is a small Picardy traditional puppet theatre founded in 1933. Lafleur, the hero, was created around 1811 at Saint-Leu. He talks in Picard, exclusively. Traditionally a lackey costume (wearing a red velvet tricorne hat) dressed, Lafleur is cheerful, dynamic, independent and resourceful; its motto is: "bin mier, bin boere, pis did rin foere!" (Drink well, eat well and then do nothing).
The Picard language is recognised regional language. It is spoken in France in the Picardy and Nord-Pas-de-Calais regions, and in Belgium in the Province of Hainaut. Various associations work for the promotion and development of Picardy culture expressed in theatre, song, in spoken tales but also in writing, notably in novels, journals, and poetry. Since 1993, the Regional Council of Picardy has developed within the "Office Culturel Régional de Picardie" a cultural policy for the language and the Picardy culture. "The Agency for Picard", created in 2008, is headquartered in Amiens. Picard is taught at the University of Amiens.
The blasons populaires are surnames or the nicknames given to the inhabitants of cities and the Picardy villages. These surpitchets sometimes come from the history of the city, sometimes a verbal game, sometimes through a mockery of people. The nickname of the inhabitants of Amiens is: Chés Maqueus d'gueugues d'Anmien [Amiens nut eaters] in reference to an episode of the Spanish invasion. On 11 March 1597, the Spanish armies developed a ploy to seize the city: The soldiers of Hernán Tello de Portocarrero, Governor of Doullens, disguised as peasants, came to the gates of the walls with nuts. The starving citizens of Amiens opened the doors and the Spaniards took the city.
==== Gastronomic specialities ====
During December, the town hosts the largest Christmas market in northern France. Amiens, in the image of the Picardy region, has a rich gastronomic heritage. Here are some of the specialities:
Amiens is known for a few local foods, including "macarons d'Amiens", small, round-shaped biscuit-type macaroons made from almond paste, fruit and honey, which were first recorded in 1855; "tuiles amienoises", chocolate and orange curved "tuiles" or biscuits; Pâté de canard d'Amiens – duck pâté in pastry, made since the 17th century; and "la ficelle Picarde", an oven-baked cheese-topped crêpe with ham and mushroom filling, then topped with fresh cream flavoured with nutmeg, white pepper, and sprinkled with grated cheese before being browned in the oven. The region is also known for "flamiche aux poireaux", a puff pastry tart made with leeks and cream.
Other dishes include:
The Summer Rambo apple cultivar originated near Amiens in the 16th century.
=== Notable people ===
==== Sportspeople ====
==== Linked to the city ====
=== Heraldry, logo and motto ===
Logo of the city of Amiens
In 1991, the municipality formed around Gilles de Robien designed a new logo, incorporating the Fleur-de-lis and the Ivy leaf present on the coat of arms, placed side by side in red with a background of grey or white, depending on usage.
A stamp representing the arms of the city was issued in 1962, this issue fitted into one of the Arms of cities. Its power of postage was five cents. It was issued on 23 January 1962 and withdrawn from sale on 23 January 1977. A first day was arranged in Amiens on 21 July 1962. It was designed by Robert Louis. Artist Arman made a board collage of this stamp. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House | Winchester Mystery House | The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester. The house became a tourist attraction nine months after Winchester's death in 1922. The Victorian and Gothic-style mansion is renowned for its size and its architectural curiosities and for the numerous myths and legends surrounding the structure and its former owner.
== Sarah Winchester ==
Sarah Winchester was born in 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. She was called Sallie by people closest to her, after her paternal grandmother. She married William Wirt Winchester in 1862.
In 1866, Winchester gave birth to a girl named Annie Pardee Winchester. Diagnosed with marasmus, she did not thrive and lived only a month. Between the fall of 1880 and the spring of 1881, Winchester's mother, father-in-law, and husband died. She was left with a large inheritance from her husband. In 1884, her eldest sister, Mary Converse, died.
Around this time, Winchester began developing rheumatoid arthritis. Her doctor suggested that a warmer and drier climate might help improve her health. In 1885, at the age of 46, Winchester moved to California from New Haven, Connecticut. According to Mary Jo Ignoffo in her book Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, her doctor's recommendation, her happy memories of traveling to San Francisco with her husband in the 1870s, and advertising about the weather and health benefits of California were possible factors in Winchester's decision to move. Winchester invited her three remaining sisters to follow her to California, which they did.
In 1886, Edward "Ned" Rambo, a San Francisco agent for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, took Winchester on a tour of the Santa Clara valley to look for a home. He showed her a 45-acre ranch for sale located near San Jose. Winchester purchased the property (from John Hamm) which included a two-story, eight-room farmhouse. Since the property reminded her of Llanada Alavesa from the Basque area, she named her new home Llanada Villa.
In 1890, Winchester's 21-year-old niece, Marion Merriman (called Daisy) came to live with her. Merriman became Winchester's personal secretary, looking after business correspondence and banking. They attended charitable events together and were paying members of Associated Charities and the Red Cross.
In 1903, Winchester paid for Daisy's wedding to Frederick Marriott III. That same year, Winchester purchased several homes and properties in Atherton. One of the homes was offered to Daisy and her new husband to live in, which they accepted. Winchester subsequently purchased a home for the couple closer to the train station for Frederick to travel to work from.
In 1904, Winchester purchased a large property near the hamlet of Burlingame, north of Coyote Point, then bought a houseboat, or ark as they were called at the time, instead of building a house.
Winchester died September 7, 1922, at age 83.
== San Jose house renovation ==
Winchester and her husband had developed an interest in architecture and interior design while building a home on Prospect Hill in New Haven. With plans to expand the farmhouse, Winchester hired at least two architects but dismissed them, deciding to do the planning herself. She designed the rooms one by one, supervised the project, and sought advice from the carpenters she hired. She took inspiration for the house from the world's fairs that were common at the time. While the home was similar in scope to other homes of that period, it was unusual for a woman to look after such a project and, Colin Dickey states in his book Ghostland: an American History in Haunted Places, she could be considered an architectural pioneer of her time.
She was known to rebuild and abandon construction if the progress did not meet her expectations, which resulted in a maze-like design. In the San Jose News of 1897, it was reported that a seven-story tower was torn down and rebuilt 16 times. As a result of her expansions, there are walled-off exterior windows and doors that were not removed as the house grew in size. Multiple levels, up to five, were added to different parts of the home. The design was essentially Victorian, with elements of Gothic and Romanesque features.
=== Features of the house ===
There was carved wood on the ballroom walls and ceilings. Woods such as teak, maple, and mahogany made an intricate pattern on the ballroom floor. A large brick fireplace was framed by two windows that included quotes from Shakespeare. The second-floor bedrooms each had adjoining sitting rooms and sewing rooms. The wall coverings (known as Lincrusta) had a leather or metal appearance. The ceilings had mouldings, stencils, and faux finishes. There were chandeliers from Germany, art glass from Austria, furnishings from Asia, and paintings from France. An annunciator (an early form of intercom, a common feature of large homes during this period) was installed for calling servants. There was an indoor garden with slanted floors that would carry excess water to trapdoors; the doors had pipes to supply water to flowers outdoors. A generator was installed for a water pump and electricity. Because of Winchester's height of four feet ten inches and her health issues, a stairway was built that has 44 steps but rises only ten feet.
The windows are unusual since they are pastel colored and asymmetrical and have sharp bevels. The windows on the upper levels had spider-web tracery, a popular design then. The windows to the right and left of the brick fireplace feature Shakespearean quotations from Richard II and Troilus and Cressida. It has been claimed by tour guides and articles over the years that the windows were made by Tiffany & Co despite the fact that the company rarely used beveled glass. This style of window is also found at Craigdarroch Castle in British Columbia, Canada, prompting architectural historian Jim Wolf to believe that the windows were made by the same company. Wolf determined that glass artist John Mallon from Alexander Dunsmuir's company, the Pacific American Decorative Company, was the most likely artisan of the windows. This theory was confirmed when an envelope postmarked July 1894, which had the seal of Dunsmuir's company on it and a scribbled note that appears to be in Winchester's hand, was discovered in the wall of one of the dining rooms that was being restored. Many of the art glass windows that were purchased were never installed and have been housed in a storage room.
Winchester would take regular breaks from construction to rest, sometimes for months, since she tired easily. It slowed construction considerably and is counter to the claims made in articles and by tour guides that she had the house under construction around the clock for thirty-eight years until her death in 1922.
At its largest the house had approximately 500 rooms.
As claimed by Bruce Spoon, a student from San Jose State College who decided to write his master's thesis about Winchester in 1951, the reasons for building her large home were to keep workers employed and to express her artistic vision. He reached this conclusion after interviewing people who remembered her and after reviewing newspaper and magazine articles.
=== 1906 earthquake ===
When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit, the Llanada Villa was severely damaged. Though there are rumors that Winchester was trapped in the San Jose home, there is no evidence that she was there. She owned several homes in California, and after the earthquake spent most of her time at her home in Atherton.
The seven-story tower and most of the chimneys collapsed. One entire wing was destroyed along with the third- and fourth-story additions. Winchester had the rubble removed but had little more done to the property after the earthquake. It left doors that opened to nothing where balconies had once been, pipes that were protruding from what were once window boxes, and staircases that once led to upper floors ending suddenly.
After 1910, owing to failing health, Winchester did not work on the San Jose home except for odd maintenance jobs and adding an elevator in 1916. Instead she dedicated her time to finances and building an investment portfolio. Mary Jo Ignoffo claims that "She was far more successful constructing an investment portfolio than a mansion."
When Winchester died in 1922 the house had 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens.
== As a tourist attraction ==
The house became a tourist attraction nine months after Winchester's death in 1922. The house was in disrepair and considered to be of no monetary value. A group of investors purchased the property subsequently leasing the house to John and Mayme Brown who turned it into an attraction. They later purchased the house in 1931. There were many room additions and deletions made to the home after Winchester's death.
The first tour guide of the house was Mayme Brown. Past neighbors, friends, and workers for Winchester were distressed when they read about superstitious claims being made about the house and Winchester, and were upset the Browns were making money from falsehoods. They described Winchester as clearheaded and savvier with finances and business than most men.
In 1924 Harry Houdini briefly visited the house and was reportedly impressed by its unusual layout and architectural novelties but could not make a detailed investigation because of more pressing engagements. According to some accounts, Houdini suggested tour operators use "Winchester mystery house" as a promotional name for the property.
When Keith Kittle, a past Disneyland and Frontier Village employee, became the general manager in 1973, the house was in poor shape. He had the house renovated in the 1970s and 1980s and added a Winchester rifle museum. He sought historical landmark status and began an advertising campaign that included large billboards along the highways. The billboards feature a silhouetted house with implications that a ghost encounter was possible. Attendance increased as he played off the history and superstition that was already circulating. Kittle was general manager until 1996.
As of September 2022 the house was owned and operated by Winchester Mystery House, LLC, a private company that represents the descendants of the Browns. Captive of the Labyrinth author Mary Jo Ignoffo wrote that tour guides are required to follow a script emphasizing fabrications and inaccuracies. According to Ignoffo, one guide lamented, "I feel so torn because I have to tell people untruths! Every time I go through the house and have to talk about 13s and other 'kooky' things, my heart breaks a little for Sarah ... I have to bite my tongue every time I hear a guest say, 'what a nutcase.'"
== Legends and lore ==
Winchester's story has been embellished over the years by various rumors, hyperbole, and myths, and popular writers have misrepresented or invented details about the house and its owner in order to enhance the legend.
=== Inheritance ===
Claims of Winchester inheriting as much as $20 million and earning $1,000 per day in royalties from her inheritance can be found in tourist literature purchased at the Winchester Mystery House. Ignoffo states that her husband's estate in 1881 was valued at $362,330 (equal to $12,088,078 today), but this amount included approximately $300,000 of stock that Winchester would only inherit when her mother-in-law died, which did not happen until 1898. With the addition of her husband's Winchester Repeating Arms Company shares, she owned a total of 777 shares valuing $77,700, which paid average dividends of $7,770 annually between 1880 and 1885.
=== Moving to California ===
Myths around her decision to move from the East Coast to California are thought to have originated from author Susy Smith in her book Prominent American Ghosts, published in 1967. In Smith's version of events, Winchester visited a medium in Boston named Adam Coons who told her that she and her family were being haunted by the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles, that she must construct a house for these ghosts, and that she must never complete the project. This assertion of Winchester meeting with a medium has been repeated in brochures and articles ever since. According to Ignoffo, while it is plausible that Winchester did meet with a psychic medium since it was a common practice for women of her status at the time, there is no evidence that she did so.
Emily Mace, a scholar, and others have looked through issues of Banner of Light, which was a spiritualist periodical, and in the Boston city directories, which listed spiritualists in the area, and no one named Adam Coons could be found.
=== Neverending construction ===
Beginning around 1895, Winchester started appearing in newspapers. The articles in these local papers were filled with speculation about Winchester and the ongoing construction of her San Jose home. Her lack of interaction with neighbors and the known fact that her money came from the firearms industry fed into a superstitious narrative, despite large, ornate homes being commonly built by the wealthy. The newspapers declared that the reason that the construction was ongoing was that Winchester feared she would have bad luck if the construction would stop. This theory eventually grew into stories that she believed she would die if construction stopped.
In the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), when it added the Winchester home to the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, they incorrectly stated that the construction lasted 38 years, and reiterated that Winchester believed she must continue building or she would die. HABS also incorrectly listed the purchase date as 1884 when county records state the purchase was not until 1886.
There were some articles published against the superstitious slant. In one, an unidentified acquaintance refuted these superstitious accusations, stating that they were nonsense and that Winchester was an unusually sensible woman.
While Winchester lived at the Atherton house, her relatives stayed at the San Jose home for almost a year in 1915 to attend the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, which ran for nine months. No construction happened during this time and the staff closed up the house for a week to attend the fair.
Ignoffo states that there is no evidence that Winchester was compelled to keep her construction project running and preferred to focus on estate planning.
=== Labyrinthine construction ===
The belief that Winchester built her house in its strange, maze-like manner to confuse and keep spirits from harming her and that her sanity was questionable started in the mid-1890s and has grown in scale since her death. The doors and windows that open to nothing, the unusually shallow stairs, the stairs that end in a ceiling, interior barred windows and trap doors in the floor are used to confirm Winchester's spirituality and poor state of mind. According to paranormal investigators Nickell and Ignoffo these house oddities have simple explanations. The barred windows were previously exterior windows blocked off as the house additions grew. The doors and windows that opened to nothing resulted from the 1906 earthquake and the severe damage that happened to the house. The small steps were built because of Winchester's declining health. The trap doors were constructed in a greenhouse room where excess water could run and be piped to an outdoor garden. After the damage from the earthquake, Winchester did not rebuild the house.
=== Bell tower ===
The tower bell was used to call workmen and to serve as a fire alarm on the property. According to Joe Nickell, fanciful claims later arose that it was used to "summon spirits".
=== Ghostly music ===
According to Joe Nickell, claims that local residents heard "ghostly music" coming from the house are explained by the fact that Winchester often played the pump organ in the Grand Ballroom when she was unable to sleep.
=== Parties for spirits ===
According to Joe Nickell, claims that Winchester held parties for the spirits in her home featuring lavish dishes served on gold plates kept in a safe are fanciful and unsubstantiated. Nickell wrote that after her death when the safe was opened, no gold plates were found, only personal mementos and a lock of her baby's hair.
=== Gun guilt ===
At the turn of the twentieth century, the most common belief regarding Winchester's house building was that she felt tremendous guilt resulting from all the deaths caused by Winchester rifles and from inheriting so much money from the arms company. Ignoffo claims that it is unlikely Winchester had any guilt, since in the 1800s the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was seen as a success, and weapons were viewed as a necessity for survival. Nevertheless, this story persists today.
=== Health and superstition ===
Ignoffo and paranormal investigator Joe Nickell report that as Winchester aged, particularly after 1900 as her health issues grew worse, which included arthritis, missing teeth and neuritis, she became more private and reclusive. This reluctance to appear in public or to socialize with her peers gave her a mysterious reputation feeding the gossip in the community and local newspapers which fuelled the rumor that she was superstitious. Winchester's companion of many years, Miss Henrietta Severs states Winchester had no superstitious beliefs. Winchester's relatives, employees and gardeners never made claims that she was superstitious, guilt-ridden or crazed.
All her employees were named as beneficiaries in her will.
=== Presidents ===
Rumors surrounding the alleged ill mental health of Winchester include that she twice declined to host a U.S. President. In 1901, President William McKinley visited and a committee to arrange accommodations was formed, but Winchester did not extend an invitation. The President and his official coaches drove past the mansion without stopping. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the area. Legend states that Winchester would not open a locked gate to admit him. This was not true; President Roosevelt had no interest in meeting Winchester, since a stop at her home could have been used to promote rifle sales and he did not want to be seen as endorsing any product.
Despite there being plausible reasons for her not hosting the Presidents, these instances furthered rumors that she was a "crank" and not of sound mind.
=== The number thirteen ===
According to lore, architectural features such as thirteen bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms, and thirteen windows in certain rooms are due to Winchester's apparent fascination with the number thirteen. However, according to carpenter James Perkins, these items and "the more irregular features, which have made the house a world-famed oddity were built after Mrs Winchester's death." The first time that this apparent superstition appeared was in an article printed in 1929. Subsequently, it has been mentioned in most articles about Winchester and her house.
=== Nightly séances ===
Winchester's staff, who spent every day with her, stated she had no interest in séances and there is no record of them being held in the house. Nevertheless, a false urban legend has arisen claiming she held nightly séances in the blue room or in a closet by herself from midnight until two in the morning, talking to ghosts about what construction should be accomplished the following day. In addition to the lack of records found about seances at Llanada Villa, the closet séances were unlikely given that they were usually social events and not done by individuals and records show that the blue room was the gardener's bedroom.
=== Hauntings ===
Visitors and tour guides claim to have experienced cold spots, footsteps, cooking smells, odd sounds, whispering, doors and windows slamming, and feelings of being watched. Investigator Joe Nickell explains that they could be the result of confirmation bias and suggestibility due to publicity and rumors that the house is the most haunted house in the United States or even the world; or that over a thousand ghosts reside in the home. Nickell reports one example where a shadowy figure thought to be a ghost turned out to be a staff member at the house. According to Nickell, there is no evidence that the house is haunted, and that alleged whispering sounds can be imagined or due to wind. Additionally, it is common for large, rambling, and drafty old houses to have temperature variations, and the house's settling and exterior temperature changes can explain odd noises.
== In popular culture ==
In 1960, the Winchester Mystery House was used as the Cyrus Zorba House in the film 13 Ghosts.
In 1966, the house was featured on the cover for the single "Psychotic Reaction" by the garage rock band Count Five.
The tale of the Winchester Mystery House was inspiration for The Haunted Mansion ride at Disney theme parks, the first of which opened in 1969 at Disneyland.
The house is the primary setting for Michaela Roessner's 1993 science fiction novel Vanishing Point in which it becomes the home of a squatter community following the disappearance of most of the human race.
The house is the setting of a subplot in the 1997 Tim Powers fantasy novel Earthquake Weather.
The plot of the 2002 miniseries Rose Red (written by Stephen King) was inspired by the lore surrounding Sarah Winchester and the Winchester Mystery House.
The Haunting of Winchester is a ghost story musical by composer Craig Bohmler and writer Mary Bracken Phillips that takes place in the house. It was commissioned by the San Jose Repertory Theatre for its 25th anniversary season and premiered in September–October 2005.
The British paranormal TV investigation show Most Haunted Live! conducted a seven-hour live TV investigation of the house in an episode that aired live in the U.S. only on October 19, 2007.
In 2011, Ghost Adventures featured the Winchester Mystery House in the fourth episode of season five.
In the MythBusters episode "Smell of Fear", the build team visited the Winchester Mystery House to look around and later watch "one of the scariest movies of all time" on a television that they set up in the grand ballroom, with the purpose of determining if fear does smell different by gathering their sweat samples for testing at the end of the night. While the team watched the movie in the dark, the show's crew randomly made loud noises to increase the frightening experience.
Sarah Winchester, Phantom Opera is a 24-minute film by French filmmaker Bertrand Bernello that had its North American premiere at the 54th New York Film Festival in October 2016.
The house was featured in seasons 1 and 4 of BuzzFeed Unsolved Supernatural in episodes where Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej stayed there overnight.
In 2017, the house was featured on an episode of Ghost Brothers.
In 2017, Em Schulz told the story of the house to Christine Schiefer on the first episode of our And That's Why We Drink.
Features of the house are referenced in I the Mighty's song "111 Winchester".
In 2017, filming took place on the property for the film Winchester, featuring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester. The film was released on February 23, 2018. In trailers and on posters, the film is noted to be based on a true story despite evidence that much of the stories in the movie are disputed in Mary Jo Ignoffo's book Captive of the Labyrinth.
In 2018, the house was described in "Locked Away", an episode of the podcast Lore.
In 2019, the podcast Criminal produced an episode about the house titled "The Widow and the Winchester".
House of Penance, a Dark Horse comic by Peter Tomasi, Ian Bertram and Dave Stewart, is "perhaps the first biographical horror graphic novel" that illustrates the house as haunted and Sarah as obsessed.
Mrs Winchester's Gun Club is a 2019 adult fiction novel by Douglas Bruton concerning Sarah Winchester that tells a group of stories voiced by the victims of Winchester guns.
In January 2021, an episode of the award-winning podcast This Paranormal Life was released that discussed the Winchester Mystery House. The hosts deemed all claims of haunting to be false.
The "Winchester Mystery House" episode of Destination Fear (Season 4, Episode 5) aired on December 23, 2022.
In June 2024, content creation group OfflineTV featured the Winchester Mystery House in a video on their YouTube channel, where they played hide and seek and explored the history and myths surrounding the property.
In October 2025, pinball manufacturer Barrels of Fun announced their third title, Winchester Mystery House, which is inspired by the unique design and supernatural elements associated with the Winchester mansion.
== Gallery == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Williams_(actress) | Michelle Williams (actress) | Michelle Ingrid Williams (born September 9, 1980) is an American actress. Known primarily for starring in small-scale independent films with dark or tragic themes, she has received various accolades, including three Golden Globe Awards, two Actor Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for five Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards and a Tony Award.
Williams, daughter of politician and trader Larry R. Williams, began her career with television guest appearances and made her film debut in the family film Lassie in 1994. She gained emancipation from her parents at age fifteen, and soon achieved recognition for her leading role as Jen Lindley in the teen drama television series Dawson's Creek (1998–2003). This was followed by low-profile films, before having her breakthrough with the drama film Brokeback Mountain (2005), which earned Williams her first Academy Award nomination.
Williams received critical acclaim for playing emotionally troubled women coping with loss or loneliness in the independent dramas Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), and Manchester by the Sea (2016). She has won three Golden Globes: for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in the drama My Week with Marilyn (2011), Gwen Verdon in the miniseries Fosse/Verdon (2019), and a woman with terminal cancer in the miniseries Dying for Sex (2025), as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Fosse/Verdon. Her highest-grossing releases came with the thriller Shutter Island (2010), the fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), the musical The Greatest Showman (2017), and the superhero films Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021). Williams has also led major studio films, such as Ridley Scott's thriller All the Money in the World (2017) and Steven Spielberg's drama The Fabelmans (2022).
On Broadway, Williams starred in revivals of the musical Cabaret in 2014 and the drama Blackbird in 2016, for which she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She is an advocate for equal pay in the workplace. Consistently private about her personal life, Williams has a daughter from her relationship with actor Heath Ledger and was briefly married to musician Phil Elverum. She has three children with her second husband, theater director Thomas Kail.
== Early life and education ==
Michelle Ingrid Williams was born on September 9, 1980, in Kalispell, Montana, to Carla, a homemaker, and Larry R. Williams, an author and commodities trader. She has Norwegian ancestry and her family has lived in Montana for generations. Her father twice ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate as a Republican Party nominee. In Kalispell, Williams lived with her three paternal half-siblings and her younger sister, Paige. Although she has described her family as "not terribly closely knit", she shared a close bond with her father, who taught her to fish and shoot, and encouraged her to become a keen reader. Williams has recounted fond memories of growing up in the vast landscape of Montana. When she was nine, the family moved to San Diego, California. She has said of the experience, "It was less happy probably by virtue of it being my preteen years, which are perhaps unpleasant wherever you go." She mostly kept to herself and was self-reliant. She said that growing up, she had a connection with Judaism due to being raised around San Diego Jewish families.
Williams became interested in acting at an early age when she saw a local production of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She performed in an amateur production of the musical Annie, and her parents would drive her from San Diego to Los Angeles to audition for parts. Her first screen appearance was as Bridget Bowers, a girl who tries to date Mitch Buchannon's son, Hobie, in a 1993 episode of the television series Baywatch. The following year, she made her film debut in the family feature Lassie, about the bond between the titular dog and a young boy (played by Tom Guiry). Williams played the love interest of Guiry's character, which led the critic Steven Gaydos to take notice of her "winning perf". She next took on guest roles in the television sitcoms Step by Step and Home Improvement, and appeared as the child form of Sil, an alien played in adulthood by Natasha Henstridge, in the 1995 science fiction film Species.
By 1995, Williams had completed ninth grade at Santa Fe Christian Schools in San Diego. She disliked going there as she did not get along well with other students. To focus on her acting pursuits, she left the school and enrolled in in-home tutoring. At age fifteen, with her parents' approval, Williams filed for emancipation from them, so she could better pursue her acting career with less interference from child labor work laws. To comply with the emancipation guidelines, she completed her high school education in nine months through correspondence. She later regretted not getting a proper education.
== Career ==
=== 1996–2000: Dawson's Creek and transition to adult roles ===
Following her emancipation, Williams moved to Los Angeles and lived by herself in Burbank. She said of her initial experience in the city, "There are some really disgusting people in the world, and I met some of them." To support herself, she took assignments in low-budget films and commercials. She had minor roles in the television films My Son is Innocent (1996) and Killing Mr. Griffin (1997), and the drama A Thousand Acres (1997), which starred Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange. Williams later described her early work as "embarrassing", saying she had taken those roles merely to support herself as she "didn't have any taste [or] ideals". In 1997, unhappy with the roles she was being offered, Williams collaborated with two other actors to write a script titled Blink, about prostitutes living in a Nevada brothel, which despite being sold to a production company was never made. Having learned to trade under her father's guidance, a seventeen-year-old Williams entered the Robbins World Cup Championship, a futures trading contest; with a return of 1,000%, she became the first woman to win the title and the third-highest winner of all time (her father ranks first).
In 1998, Williams began starring in the teen drama television series Dawson's Creek, created by Kevin Williamson and co-starring James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, and Joshua Jackson. The series aired for six seasons from January 1998 to May 2003 and featured her as Jen Lindley, a precocious New York-based teenager who relocates to the fictional town of Capeside. The series was shot in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she lived for the six years of filming. Reviewing the first season for The New York Times, Caryn James called it a soap opera that was "redeemed by intelligence and sharp writing" but found Williams to be "too earnest to suit this otherwise shrewdly tongue-in-cheek cast". Ray Richmond of Variety labeled it "an addictive drama with considerable heart" and considered all four leads appealing. The series was a ratings success and raised Williams's profile. Her first film release since the debut of Dawson's Creek was the Jamie Lee Curtis-starring slasher picture Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)—the seventh installment in the Halloween film series—in which she played one of several teenagers traumatized by the murderer Michael Myers. It grossed $55 million domestically against its $17 million budget.
Williams credited Dawson's Creek as "the best acting class", but also admitted to not having fully invested herself in the show as "my taste was in contradiction to what I was doing every single day." She would film the series for nine months each year and spend the remaining time playing against type in independent features, which she considered a better fit for her personality. She said the financial stability of a steady job empowered her to act in such films. Williams found her first such role in the comedy Dick (1999), a parody of the Watergate scandal, in which she and Kirsten Dunst played teenagers obsessed with Richard Nixon. Praising the film's political satire, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly credited both actresses for playing their roles with "screwball verve". Dick failed to recoup its $13 million investment. In the same year Williams played a small part in But I'm a Cheerleader, a satirical comedy about conversion therapy.
Keen to play challenging roles in adult-oriented projects, Williams spent the summer of 1999 starring in an off-Broadway play titled Killer Joe. Written by Tracy Letts, it is a black comedy about a dysfunctional family who kills their matriarch for insurance money; she was cast as the family's youngest daughter. The production featured gruesome violence and required Williams to perform a nude scene. Her socially conservative parents were displeased with it, but she said she found it "cathartic and freeing". Her next role was in the HBO television film If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), a drama about three lesbian couples in different time periods. Williams signed on to the project after ensuring that a sex scene with co-star Chloë Sevigny was pertinent to the story and not meant to titillate. In a mixed review of the film, Ken Tucker criticized Williams for overplaying her character's eagerness. When asked about playing a series of sexual roles, she stated, "I don't think of any of them as sexy, hot girls. They were just defined at an early age by the fact that others saw them that way." She subsequently made an effort to play roles that were not sexualized.
=== 2001–2005: Independent films and Brokeback Mountain ===
The British film Me Without You (2001), about an obsessive female friendship, starred Williams and Anna Friel. Williams played Holly, an insecure bibliophile, a part that came close to her personality. The writer-director Sandra Goldbacher was initially reluctant to cast an American in a British part but was impressed by Williams's self-deprecating humor and a "European stillness". Roger Ebert praised Williams's British accent and found her to be "cuddly and smart both at once". Williams returned to the stage the following year in a production of Mike Leigh's farce Smelling a Rat. Her part, that of a scatterbrained teenager exploring her sexuality, led Karl Levett of Backstage to label her "a first-class creative comedienne". She played a supporting role in the Christina Ricci-starring Prozac Nation, a drama about depression based on Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir.
Dawson's Creek completed its run in 2003, and Williams was satisfied with how it had run its course. She relocated to New York City soon after. She had supporting parts in two art-house films that year, the drama The United States of Leland and the comedy-drama The Station Agent. In the former, starring Ryan Gosling, she played the grieving sister of a murdered boy; it was described by The Globe and Mail's Liam Lacey as "neither an insightful nor well-made film". The Station Agent, about a lonely dwarf (played by Peter Dinklage), featured Williams as a librarian who develops an attraction towards him. Critically acclaimed, the film's cast was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. On stage, Williams played Varya in a 2004 production of Anton Chekhov's drama The Cherry Orchard, alongside Linda Emond and Jessica Chastain, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. The theater critic Ben Brantley credited her for "cannily play[ing] her natural vibrancy against the anxiety that has worn the young Varya into a permanent high-strung sullenness."
German filmmaker Wim Wenders wrote the film Land of Plenty (2004), which investigates anxiety and disillusionment in a post-9/11 America, with Williams in mind. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times praised Wenders's thoughtful examination of the subject and noted Williams's screen appeal. She received an Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead nomination for the film. The actor next appeared in Imaginary Heroes, a drama about a family coping with their son's suicide, and played an impressionable young woman fixated on mental health in the period film A Hole in One. Williams returned to the comedy genre with The Baxter, in which she played a geeky secretary. The film received negative reviews; Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe wrote, "Only when Williams is around does the movie seem human, true, and funny. Even in her slapstick, there's pain." As with her other films during this period, it received only a limited release and was not widely seen.
Her film breakthrough came later in 2005 when Williams appeared in Ang Lee's drama Brokeback Mountain, about the romance between two men, Ennis and Jack (played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, respectively). Impressed with her performance in The Station Agent, the casting director Avy Kaufman recommended Williams to Lee. He found a vulnerability in her and cast her as Alma, the wife of Ennis, who discovers her husband's homosexual infidelity. The actor was emotionally affected by the story and, despite her limited screen time, she was drawn to the idea of playing a woman constricted by the social mores of the time. Deeming her the standout among the cast, Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine commended Williams for "fascinatingly spiking [Alma's] unspoken resentment for her sham of a marriage with a hint of compassion for Ennis's secret suffering". Brokeback Mountain proved to be her most widely seen film to that point, grossing $178 million against its $14 million budget, and she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
=== 2006–2010: Work with auteurs ===
Williams had two film releases in 2006. She first featured opposite Paul Giamatti in the drama The Hawk Is Dying. Five months after giving birth to her daughter, she returned to work on Ethan Hawke's directorial venture The Hottest State, based on his own novel. Leslie Felperin of Variety found her role too brief. Following the awards-season success of Brokeback Mountain, Williams was unsure of what to do next. After six months of indecision, she agreed to a small part in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There (2007), a musical inspired by the life of Bob Dylan. She was then drawn to the part of an enigmatic seductress named S in the 2008 crime thriller Deception. The film, which co-starred Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor, was considered by critics to be middling and predictable. In her next release, Incendiary, based on Chris Cleave's novel of the same name, Williams reteamed with McGregor to play a woman whose family is killed in a terrorist attack. A reviewer for The Independent called the film "sloppy" and added that Williams deserved better.
Williams's two other releases of 2008 were better received. The screenwriter Charlie Kaufman was impressed with her comic timing in Dick and thus cast her in his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, an ensemble experimental drama headlined by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was a box office bomb and polarized critics, although Roger Ebert named it the best film of the decade. Two days after finishing work on Synecdoche, New York, Williams began filming Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, playing the part of a poor and lonesome young woman traveling with her dog and looking for employment. With a shoestring budget of $300,000, the film was shot on location in Portland, Oregon, with a largely volunteer crew. She was pleased with Reichardt's minimalistic approach and identified with her character's self-sufficiency and fortitude. Sam Adams of the Los Angeles Times considered her performance to be "remarkable not only for its depth but for its stillness" and Mick LaSalle commended her for effectively conveying a "lived-in sense of always having been close to the economic brink".
Her next project Mammoth was helmed by the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson and featured Williams and Gael García Bernal as a couple dealing with issues stemming from globalization. Her role was that of an established surgeon, a part she deemed herself too young to logically play. In the same year, she co-starred with Natalie Portman in a Roman Polanski-directed faux perfume commercial called Greed. For her next project, Martin Scorsese cast her opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the psychological thriller Shutter Island. Based on Dennis Lehane's novel, it featured her as a depressed housewife who drowns her own children. The high-profile production marked a departure for her, and she found it difficult to adjust to the slower pace of filming. In preparation, she read case studies on infanticide. Shutter Island was released in 2010 and was a commercial success, earning over $294 million worldwide.
Williams had first read the script for Derek Cianfrance's romantic drama Blue Valentine at age 21. When funding came through after years of delay, she was reluctant to accept the offer as filming in California would take her away from her daughter for too long. Keen to have her in the film, Cianfrance decided to shoot it near Brooklyn, where Williams lived. Co-starring Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine traces the tribulations faced by a disillusioned married couple. Before production began, Cianfrance had Williams and Gosling live together for a month on a stipend that matched their characters' income. This exercise led to conflicts between them, which proved conducive for filming their characters' deteriorating marriage. On set, she and Gosling practiced method acting by improvising several scenes. The film premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. The New York Times's reviewer A. O. Scott found Williams to be "heartbreakingly precise in every scene" and commended the duo for being "exemplars of New Method sincerity, able to be fully and achingly present every moment on screen together". She received Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actress.
In her final film project of 2010, she reunited with Kelly Reichardt for the western Meek's Cutoff. Set in 1845, it is based on an ill-fated historical incident on the Oregon Trail, in which the frontier guide Stephen Meek led a wagon train through a desert. Williams starred as one of the passengers on the wagon, a feisty young mother who is suspicious of Meek. In preparation, she took lessons on firing a gun and learned to knit. Filming in extreme temperatures in the desert proved arduous for her, though she enjoyed the challenge. Writing for The Arizona Republic, Bill Goodykoontz praised the subtlety both in the film and in Williams's performance.
=== 2011–2016: My Week with Marilyn and Broadway ===
In 2011, Williams portrayed Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, a drama depicting the troubled production of the 1957 comedy The Prince and the Showgirl, based on accounts by Colin Clark, who worked on the latter film. Initially skeptical about playing Monroe, as she had little in common with her looks or personality, Williams spent six months researching her by reading biographies, diaries and notes, and studying her posture, gait, and mannerisms. She also gained weight for the part, bleached her hair blonde, and on days of filming, underwent over three hours of makeup. She sang three songs for the film's soundtrack and recreated a performance of Monroe singing and dancing to "Heat Wave". Roger Ebert considered Williams's performance to be the film's prime asset and credited her for successfully evoking multiple aspects of Monroe's personality. Peter Travers opined that despite not physically resembling Monroe, she had "with fierce artistry and feeling [illuminated] Monroe's insights and insecurities about herself at the height of her fame". For her portrayal, she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress and received a second consecutive Oscar nomination.
In Sarah Polley's romance Take This Waltz (2011), co-starring Seth Rogen and Luke Kirby, Williams played a married writer attracted to her neighbor. Though the actor considered it to be a light-hearted film, Jenny McCartney of The Daily Telegraph found a darker undertone to it and favorably compared its theme to that of Blue Valentine. To play a part that would appeal to her daughter, Williams starred as Glinda in Sam Raimi's fantasy picture Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). Based on the Oz children's books, it served as a prequel to the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz. It marked her first appearance in a film involving special effects and she credited Raimi for making her comfortable with the process. The film earned over $490 million worldwide to rank as one of her highest-grossing releases. Suite Française, a period drama that Williams filmed in 2013, was released in a few territories in 2015 but was not theatrically distributed in America. She later admitted to being displeased with how the film turned out, adding that she found it hard to predict the quality of a project during production. Eager to work in a different medium and finding it tough to obtain film roles that enabled her to maintain her parental commitments, Williams spent the next few years working on the stage.
Her desire to star in a musical led Williams to the role of Sally Bowles in a 2014 revival of Cabaret, which was staged at Studio 54 and marked her Broadway debut. Jointly directed by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, it tells the story of a free-spirited cabaret performer (Williams) in 1930s Berlin during the rise of the Nazi Party. Before production began, she spent four months privately rehearsing with music and dance coaches. She read the works of Christopher Isherwood, whose novel Goodbye to Berlin inspired the musical, and visited Berlin to research Isherwood's life and inspirations. Her performance received mixed reviews; Jesse Green of Vulture praised her singing and commitment to the role, but Newsday's Linda Winer thought her portrayal lacked depth. The rigorousness of the assignment led Williams to consider Cabaret her toughest project.
Challenged by her work on Cabaret, Williams was eager to continue working on the stage. She found a part in a 2016 revival of the David Harrower play Blackbird. Set entirely in the lunchroom of an office, it focuses on a young woman (Williams), who confronts a much older man (played by Jeff Daniels) for his sexual abuse of her when she was twelve years old. Williams, who had not seen previous stagings of the play, was drawn to the ambiguity of her role and found herself unable to detach from it after each performance. Hilton Als of The New Yorker considered her "daring and nonjudgmental embodiment of her not easily assimilable character" to be the production's highlight. She received a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play nomination for Blackbird.
Williams returned to film in 2016 with supporting roles in two small-scale dramas, Certain Women and Manchester by the Sea. The former marked her third collaboration with Kelly Reichardt and told three interconnected narratives based on the short stories of Maile Meloy. As with their previous collaborations, the film featured minimal dialogue and required Williams to act through silences. Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea starred Casey Affleck as Lee, a depressed man who separates from his wife, Randi (Williams), following the tragic death of their children. Williams agreed to the project to work with Lonergan, whom she admired, and despite the film's bleakness she found a connection with her character's desire to reclaim her life in the face of tragedy. In preparation, she visited Manchester to interview local mothers about their lives and worked with a dialect coach to speak in a Massachusetts accent. Several critics hailed Williams's climactic monologue, in which Randi confronts Lee, as the film's highlight; Justin Chang termed it an "astonishing scene that rises from the movie like a small aria of heartbreak." She received her fourth Oscar nomination, her second in the Best Supporting Actress category.
=== 2017–2022: Mainstream films and Fosse/Verdon ===
Following a brief appearance in Todd Haynes's drama Wonderstruck (2017), Williams appeared in the musical The Greatest Showman. Inspired by P. T. Barnum's creation of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, the film featured her as Charity, the wife of Barnum (played by Hugh Jackman). She likened her character's joyful disposition to that of Grace Kelly, and she sang two songs for the film's soundtrack. The film emerged as one of her most successful, earning over $434 million worldwide.
Ridley Scott's crime thriller All the Money in the World (2017) was Williams's first leading role in film since 2013. She starred as Gail Harris, whose son, John Paul Getty III, is kidnapped for ransom. She considered it a major opportunity, since she had not headlined a big-budget Hollywood production before. A month prior to the film's release, Kevin Spacey, who originally played J. Paul Getty, was accused of sexual misconduct; he was replaced with Christopher Plummer, and Williams reshot her scenes days before the release deadline. The critic David Edelstein bemoaned that Williams's work had been overshadowed by the controversy and went on to commend her "marvelous performance", noting how she conveyed her character's grief through "the tension in her body and intensity of her voice". She received her fifth Golden Globe nomination for the role. It was later reported that her co-star Mark Wahlberg had been paid $1.5 million to Williams's $1,000 for the reshoots, which sparked a discourse on gender pay gap amongst Hollywood.
Her first film role of the year was as a haughty but insecure executive in the Amy Schumer-starring comedy I Feel Pretty, which satirizes body image issues among women. The comedic role, which required her to speak in a high-pitched voice, led Peter Debruge of Variety to term it "the funniest performance of her career". The film was a modest box office success. In a continued effort to work on different genres, Williams played Anne Weying in the superhero film Venom, co-starring Tom Hardy as the titular antihero. Influenced by the #MeToo movement, she provided off-screen inputs regarding her character's wardrobe and dialogue, but the critic Peter Bradshaw found it to be "an outrageously boring and submissive role". Venom earned over $855 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film in which Williams has appeared.
Williams returned to the Sundance Film Festival in 2019 with After the Wedding, a remake of Susanne Bier's Danish film of the same name, in which she and Julianne Moore played roles portrayed by men in the original. Benjamin Lee of The Guardian considered the low-key part to be a better fit than her previous few roles. Fosse/Verdon, an FX miniseries about the troubled personal and professional relationship between Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, marked her first leading role on television since Dawson's Creek. Williams felt her Broadway run in Cabaret helped prepare her to portray Verdon. She also served as an executive producer on the series, and was pleased not to have to negotiate to receive equal pay to her co-star Sam Rockwell. John Doyle of The Globe and Mail lauded Williams for "play[ing] Verdon with a wonderfully controlled sense of the woman's total commitment to her art and craft while always standing on the edge of an emotional abyss." She won the Primetime Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Miniseries.
In 2021, Williams reprised the role of Anne Weying in the superhero sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage. It received mixed reviews, but grossed over $500 million worldwide. In her fourth collaboration with Kelly Reichardt, Williams starred in the drama Showing Up (2022). For her role as a sculptor in it, she shadowed the artist Cynthia Lahti. Tim Robey of The Independent opined that Williams "thrives more intelligently than ever under Reichardt's watch here". Later in 2022, Williams starred in The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical film about his childhood, in which she played Mitzi Fabelman, a character inspired by his mother. Spielberg had her in mind for the part after seeing her performance in Blue Valentine; in preparation, she heard recordings and watched home movies of his childhood. The film received critical acclaim; Pete Hammond of Deadline Hollywood labeled Williams "gut-wrenchingly great" and Kyle Buchanan of The New York Times wrote that she "really goes for it, attacking this part like someone who knows she’s been handed her signature role". She was nominated for the Actor Award, Golden Globe Award, two Critics' Choice Awards (Best Actress and Best Acting Ensemble), and the Academy Award.
=== 2023–present: Hiatus and return ===
After filming The Fabelmans, Williams took a two-and-a-half year break from acting. In 2023, she was enlisted by singer Britney Spears to narrate the audiobook version of her memoir The Woman in Me. A clipping from the audiobook, in which Williams imitates Justin Timberlake speaking in "blaccent" went viral on social media. She returned to acting with Dying for Sex (2025), an FX miniseries based on the podcast of the same name, about a married woman who begins to explore her sexuality after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Williams was drawn to the project's theme of sex positivity as well as for its focus on female friendship. For the sex scenes in it, she worked with an intimacy coordinator for the first time in her career. Time's Judy Berman took note of the "impish vivacity and quiet resolve" in her performance, and was pleased that the portrayal "bear[ed] little resemblance to the Hollywood archetype of the beautiful young woman dying of cancer". For Dying for Sex, she received Emmy Award and Actor Award nominations and won a Golden Globe Award.
Williams returned to theatre playing the title role in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie, starring opposite Tom Sturridge at St. Ann's Warehouse, with performances running from November 25, 2025, to February 1, 2026.
== Public image and acting style ==
Describing Williams's off-screen persona, Debbie McQuoid of Stylist magazine wrote in 2016 that she is "predictably petite but her poise and posture make her seem larger than life". The journalist Andrew Anthony has described her as unpretentious, low-key, and unassuming. Charles McGrath of The New York Times considers her to be unlike a movie star and has called her "shy, earnest, thoughtful, and [...] a little wary of publicity". Williams has spoken about how she tries to balance her desire to be private and her wish to use her celebrity to speak out on issues such as sexism, gender pay gap, and sexual harassment. On Equal Pay Day in 2019, she utilized the pay gap controversy surrounding her film All the Money in the World to deliver an address at the United States Capitol urging passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act. During her 2020 Golden Globe acceptance speech for Fosse/Verdon, she advocated for the importance of women's and reproductive rights.
In the aftermath of her ex-partner Heath Ledger's death in January 2008, Williams became the subject of intense media scrutiny and was frequently stalked by paparazzi. She disliked the attention, saying it interfered with her work and made her self-conscious. Although reluctant to publicly discuss her romantic relationships, Williams was forthright in expressing her grief over Ledger's death, saying it had left a permanent hole in both her and her daughter's life. She has since affirmed her determination to look after her daughter in spite of her difficulties as a single parent. In 2018, she opened up about her relationship and marriage to Phil Elverum to provide grieving women with inspiration.
Williams prefers acting in small-scale independent films to high-profile, mainstream productions, finding this to be "a very natural expression of [her] interest". Elaine Lipworth of The Daily Telegraph has identified a theme of "dark, often tragic characters" in her career, and Katie O'Malley of Elle writes that she specializes in "playing strong, independent and forthright female characters". Susan Dominus of The New York Times considers her to be a "tragic embodiment of grief, in life and in art". Regarding her selection of roles, Williams has said she is drawn toward "people's failings, blind spots, inconsistencies". She believes that her own unconventional adolescence informs these choices. She agrees to a project on instinct, calling it an "un-thought out process". Describing her acting process in 2008, she stated:Acting sometimes reminds me of therapy in that the more you talk about a traumatic or profound event, the more it loses its emotional tension. [The trick is] to live in so much mystery, to rely on a feeling, an instinct, on faith, really, that everything I need is already inside me, and best I just don't block the exit.
Erica Wagner of Harper's Bazaar has praised Williams for combining "startlingly emotional performance with a sense of groundedness" and the critic David Thomson opines that she "can play anyone, without undue glamour or starriness". Adam Green of Vogue considers Williams's ability to reveal "the inner lives of her characters in unguarded moments" to be her trademark, and credits her for not "trading on her sex appeal" despite her willingness to perform nude scenes. Her Manchester by the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan has stated that her versatility allows her to be "transformed, in her whole person" by the role she plays. Dominus also believes that she physically transforms herself "as if all her molecules have fallen apart and been reassembled to create a slightly different version of herself, the material attributes the same but the essence transformed". Describing her career in 2016, Boris Kachka of Elle termed it a metamorphosis from "celebrated indie ingenue to muscular, chameleonic movie star". In a 2022 readers' poll by Empire magazine, Williams was voted one of the 50 greatest actors of all time. The magazine attributed her success to playing "damaged, broken and hurt characters with such heartbreaking sensitivity, you can never see the seams".
The saffron Vera Wang gown Williams wore to the 78th Academy Awards in 2006 is regarded as one of the greatest Oscar dresses of all time. Williams has featured as the brand ambassador for the fashion label Band of Outsiders and the luxury brand Louis Vuitton. She has appeared in several advertisement campaigns for the latter company, and in 2015, she starred alongside Alicia Vikander in their short film named The Spirit of Travel.
== Personal life ==
Williams began dating Heath Ledger in 2004 while working on the film Brokeback Mountain. The couple lived together in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, New York, and in 2005, she gave birth to their daughter Matilda. In September 2007, Williams's father confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that Ledger and Williams had broken up.
In January 2008, when Williams was filming in Sweden for her movie, Mammoth (2009), news broke that Ledger had died of an accidental intoxication from prescription drugs. Although Williams continued filming, she later said, "It was horrible. I don't remember most of it." In her first public statement, a week after his death, she expressed her heartbreak and described Ledger's spirit as surviving in their daughter. She attended his memorial and funeral services later that month. After finishing work on the film Shutter Island in 2008, Williams admitted that playing a series of troubled women coupled with her own personal difficulties had taken an emotional toll. She took a year off work to focus on her daughter.
Williams dated filmmaker Spike Jonze from July 2008 to September 2009. In 2011, she dated American filmmaker Cary Joji Fukunaga but they never publicly confirmed the relationship. Williams began dating American actor Jason Segel in February 2012, and they broke up in February 2013. She then dated American artist Dustin Yellin from April 2013 to May 2014, and American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer from July 2015 to 2016. In July 2017, Williams started dating financial consultant Andrew Youmans. They became engaged in January 2018, but broke up soon after.
In July 2018, Williams married the musician Phil Elverum in a secret ceremony in the Adirondack Mountains. They filed for divorce in April 2019. She later described the marriage as a "mistake".
In December 2019, Williams became engaged to the theater director Thomas Kail, with whom she worked on Fosse/Verdon; they married in March 2020. She gave birth to their son later in 2020 and another child in 2022. They welcomed their third child, Michelle's fourth overall, via surrogacy, in 2025.
== Acting credits and accolades ==
According to the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes and the box-office site Box Office Mojo, Williams's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful films are The Station Agent (2003), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), Shutter Island (2010), Meek's Cutoff (2010), My Week with Marilyn (2011), Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), Manchester by the Sea (2016), Certain Women (2016), The Greatest Showman (2017), Venom (2018), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), and The Fabelmans (2022). Among her stage roles, she has appeared on Broadway in revivals of Cabaret in 2014 and Blackbird in 2016.
Williams has received five Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actress for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Manchester by the Sea (2016); and Best Actress for Blue Valentine (2010), My Week with Marilyn (2011), and The Fabelmans (2022). She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical for My Week with Marilyn (2011) and Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film for Fosse/Verdon (2019) and Dying for Sex (2024); she has been nominated five more times: Best Actress in a Drama for Blue Valentine (2010), All the Money in the World (2017), and The Fabelmans (2022); and Best Supporting Actress for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Manchester by the Sea (2016). Williams also won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for Fosse/Verdon (2019) and received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Blackbird. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough | Aerith Gainsborough | Aerith Gainsborough (Japanese: エアリス・ゲインズブール, Hepburn: Earisu Geinzubūru) is a character in the media franchise Compilation of Final Fantasy VII by Square Enix. Her first appearance was in the role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII, developed by Square, and she has appeared in other installments in the Final Fantasy series and the Kingdom Hearts series by Square Enix and The Walt Disney Company. She was designed by Tetsuya Nomura with influence from Yoshinori Kitase, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yoshitaka Amano.
Aerith is a young woman allied with the eco-terrorist organization AVALANCHE. During the group's pursuit of the game's antagonist Sephiroth, it is revealed that Aerith is the last surviving Cetra, or "Ancient", one of the planet's oldest races. She is ultimately murdered by Sephiroth. Aerith has been met with generally positive reception, and her unexpected death is considered to be one of the most memorable scenes in the series.
== Concept and design ==
Aerith was designed by Tetsuya Nomura, who based her on an earlier design of Lemure from Final Fantasy V, with influence from director and scenario writer Yoshinori Kitase and Hironobu Sakaguchi, while Yoshitaka Amano created conceptual artwork for her design. She has green eyes and long light ash brown hair tied in a braid with a pink ribbon. She wears a long pink dress, a bolero jacket, and brown hiking boots. The long dress was designed to appear ladylike and contrast with the miniskirt worn by Tifa Lockhart. During development, Aerith was supposed to be Sephiroth's sister, as their designs resembled each other. However, they were made former lovers, with Aerith remembering Sephiroth when meeting Cloud as both are ex-SOLDIERS. Late during development, Aerith's first love was changed to Zack Fair.
Aerith is a white mage, a recurring Final Fantasy class, who uses magic spells to heal her allies in combat. Her green eyes are meant to symbolize nature and contrast with Tifa's red eyes. Nomura did not change much of Aerith's design for Advent Children, but her design was updated in Kingdom Hearts with the removal of her bolero jacket, which made her attire resemble how Amano had originally drawn her. Other changes included the addition of bracelets and a belt. Nomura modified her dress in Before Crisis, adding white and green colors; this version was also used as the basis for her design in Kingdom Hearts II.
Aerith's original Japanese name is Earisu (エアリス) pronounced [eaɾisɯ] . This was transliterated to "Aeris" in Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy Tactics and "Aerith" in later products. However, official Japanese material uses the spelling "Aerith", and developers stated that "Aerith" is a near-anagram of "Earth".
In Final Fantasy VII, Aerith was to be one of only three protagonists alongside Cloud and Barret Wallace. During a phone call to Kitase, it was suggested that at some point in the game, one of the main characters should die, and after much discussion as to whether it should be Barret or Aerith, the producers chose Aerith. Nomura stated in a 2005 Electronic Gaming Monthly interview: "Cloud's the main character, so you can't really kill him. And Barrett... [sic] well, that's maybe too obvious". While designing Final Fantasy VII, Nomura was frustrated with the "perennial cliché where the protagonist loves someone very much and so has to sacrifice himself and die in a dramatic fashion to express that love". He found this trope appeared in both films and video games from North America and Japan, and asked "Is it right to set such an example to people?" Kitase concluded: "In the real world things are very different. You just need to look around you. Nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and accident. Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness. When you lose someone you feel this big empty space and think, 'If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently'. These are the feelings I wanted to arouse in the players with Aerith's death relatively early in the game. Feelings of reality and not Hollywood".
According to Nomura, "death should be something sudden and unexpected, and Aerith's death seemed more natural and realistic". He said: "When I reflect on Final Fantasy VII, the fact that fans were so offended by her sudden death probably means that we were successful with her character. If fans had simply accepted her death, that would have meant she wasn't an effective character". From the original release of the game, rumors have circulated that Aerith can be resurrected in or that the original plan was to have her come back, but this was scrapped in development. Nomura has categorically stated that neither of these rumors were ever true, as he said that "the world was expecting us to bring her back to life, as this is the classic convention". A lengthy petition asking for Aerith's revival by Japanese players was sent to Kitase, but he dismissed it, pointing out that "there are many meanings in Aerith's death and [her revival] could never happen". Mena Suvari explained that for Advent Children, Aerith was given a motherly feel with an ephemeral presence, and expressed joy for her role.
For Final Fantasy VII Remake, voice actress Briana White studied the acting of Maaya Sakamoto, the Japanese voice of Aerith, to appeal to fans for the English performance of the role.
=== Voice actresses ===
Aerith is voiced in Japanese by Maaya Sakamoto. In English, she is voiced by Mandy Moore in Kingdom Hearts; Mena Suvari in Kingdom Hearts II and Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, Andrea Bowen in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and the Re Mind DLC of Kingdom Hearts III; and Briana White in Final Fantasy VII Remake, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
== Musical theme ==
"Aerith's Theme", a leitmotif associated with Aerith and written by Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, is used several times throughout Final Fantasy VII. It is first heard during the flashback scenes with Aerith's mother at her house and also plays as she is killed by Sephiroth. The piece "Flowers Blooming in the Church" is based on the theme.
"Aerith's Theme" is popular among Final Fantasy fans and has inspired orchestral and piano versions, as well as a vocal rendition performed by the artist Rikki, who also sang "Suteki Da Ne" for Final Fantasy X. A piano arrangement of the theme appears twice in Advent Children; the opening phrase of "Aerith's Theme" appears prior to the climax of the track "Divinity II", whose final line is the Latin phrase "Sola Dea fatum novit" ("Only the goddess knows fate"), and it is also featured during the end credits of the film. The theme also shares similarities with the track "Water". It has been reinterpreted on the OverClocked ReMix Final Fantasy VII compilation Voices of the Lifestream. In 2013, "Aerith's Theme" was voted third place in the Classic FM Hall of Fame poll for classical music.
== Appearances ==
=== Final Fantasy VII ===
Aerith Gainsborough is first introduced as a florist who briefly converses with Cloud Strife, a mercenary working for the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE, as he flees the group's bombing of a Mako reactor. The two later meet in Aerith's church in the Sector 5 slums, where the Turks attempt to capture her. Aerith asks Cloud to be her bodyguard, offering a date in return. She is eventually apprehended but ultimately rescued by Cloud and his allies. Aerith then joins them in the pursuit of Sephiroth, while also embarking on her own journey of self-discovery.
After a failed attempt to foil Sephiroth's theft of the Black Materia, Aerith ventures alone into the Forgotten City. Cloud and his companions pursue her and eventually find her praying at an altar. As Aerith looks up to smile at Cloud, Sephiroth appears and kills her by impaling her through the torso. Cloud carries Aerith's body out into a lake in the Forgotten City and releases her back to the Planet. Reeve Tuesti, the head of Shinra Urban and Development, brings the news of her death to Elmyra Gainsborough, Aerith's adoptive mother. The party later learns why Aerith was in the Forgotten City; through her White Materia, Aerith was able to summon Holy, the only force capable of repelling the ultimate destructive magic, Meteor, which Sephiroth has summoned. Although Aerith successfully casts Holy before her death, the spell is held back by the power of Sephiroth's will. When Sephiroth is finally defeated and Holy is released, it appears that it is too late to function effectively, as Meteor is approaching the Planet's surface. While Holy clashes with Meteor and attempts to prevent its impact, the gravity of both Meteor and the Planet, pulling on Holy in opposite directions, weakens it. Aerith is seen praying whilst urging the Lifestream to defend the planet. The Planet's Lifestream then flows forth, intervening between Holy and Meteor and aiding in the destruction of Meteor.
=== Compilation of Final Fantasy VII ===
In Before Crisis, which is set several years prior to the events of Final Fantasy VII, Aerith becomes the target of the original incarnation of AVALANCHE, led by Elfé, who seek to prevent Shinra from acquiring the last surviving Cetra. Instead, AVALANCHE intend to use her to learn the whereabouts of the Promised Land for their own purposes, although a member of the Turks tries to protect her.
Aerith makes a few appearances in the CGI film Advent Children as a hallucination in Cloud's mind, urging him to move on with his life and forgive himself for the tragedies that were beyond his control. During one such introspection, Cloud imagines Aerith speaking to him in an open meadow laden with flowers, poking fun at how he needlessly burdens himself with the past. One of Aerith's interactions with Cloud comes when each member of the original game's party helps in Cloud's final attack against Bahamut SIN; he imagines she appears as the last party member to assist him. When Cloud hangs between life and death after his battle with Sephiroth, her and Zack Fair can be heard referring to Cloud as a child "too big to adopt" before returning him to the living world. She appears again in the final scene of the film, along with Zack Fair, where she gives Cloud more words of encouragement before she and Zack walk into the light. Near the end of the film, it is discovered that water mixed with the Lifestream flows beneath the flowerbed in Aerith's church, which manifests as a cure for a disease called Geostigma.
The On the Way to a Smile novella "Case of the Lifestream – Black & White" focuses on Aerith and Sephiroth's respective journeys through the Lifestream after the end of the game but before the events of the film. The "Black" section deals with Sephiroth, and the "White" with Aerith.
Aerith appears in the prequel game Crisis Core, where she is 16 years old. She meets Zack, whom she falls in love with during his stay in Midgar. Aerith and Zack develop a romantic relationship, but Zack is killed after escaping from being held in a Mako chamber for four years in the Shinra Mansion basement and defending Cloud from Shinra soldiers. During those years, Aerith helped her adopted mother earn a living by growing and selling flowers, a job that results in her meeting Cloud at the beginning of Final Fantasy VII.
Aerith is featured prominently in Final Fantasy VII Remake, which covers the Midgar portion of the original game. Unlike in the original localization, the remake gives her name as the more widely accepted Aerith rather than Aeris.
=== Other appearances ===
Aerith's character has appeared in several games outside of the Final Fantasy VII continuity. In Final Fantasy Tactics, she appears as a flower girl; when a group of criminals harasses her, Cloud appears and the player engages in battle with the group, letting her escape. Itadaki Street Special features a playable version of Aerith, as well as other Final Fantasy VII characters Tifa Lockhart, Cloud Strife, and Sephiroth. She also appears in Itadaki Street Portable with the same characters from Special, with the addition of Yuffie Kisaragi. Aerith appears in the fighting game Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy as an assistant character. She is also featured in the rhythm game Theatrhythm Final Fantasy as a sub-character representing Final Fantasy VII. In LittleBigPlanet 2, Aerith is featured as a downloadable character model. Aerith also appears as a Mii costume and Spirit in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Aerith appears in the Kingdom Hearts series as a member of a group dedicated to defeating the Heartless, which includes fellow Final Fantasy VII characters Yuffie Kisaragi and Cid Highwind, and Leon of Final Fantasy VIII. In the plot of Kingdom Hearts, Aerith suggests a method for defeating the Heartless to protagonists Donald Duck, Goofy and Sora, and gives advice to the player throughout the game. She also appears in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories as a figment of Sora's memories. Aerith returns in Kingdom Hearts II, wearing a modified version of her dress from Before Crisis. She, Leon, Cid and Yuffie run a restoration committee for the town of Hollow Bastion. Aerith and the restoration committee return in the Kingdom Hearts III Re Mind expansion, helping Riku search for the missing Sora.
Hoshi o Meguru Otome, a novella written by Benny Matsuyama which appears in the Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω guide, follows Aerith's journey through the Lifestream following her death in Final Fantasy VII. Aerith is referenced in a graffiti depicted in Wreck-It Ralph, which reads "Aerith Lives".
== Reception ==
Aerith has received an overall positive reception from critics. GamesTM referred to her as a "gaming legend". RPGamer's Stuart Hoggan opined that although Aerith "represented the token damsel in distress", she "broke the mould in terms of personality", possessing "an admirable pluck that was not brassy nor off-putting". In a This American Life episode, titled "Save the Girl", reporter Lina Misitzis described the character as one-dimensional and lacking in personality. She and Kotaku writer Mike Fahey conclude that had the character been anything other than a pretty girl, she would have needed much more development in order to elicit an emotional response from the player. Alana Hagues of RPGFan was bothered by the game's initial characterization of Aerith as a damsel in distress, but she praised the contrast of her dealing with personal struggles, including the death of her boyfriend Zack and being the last Cetra, with remaining strong enough to appreciate life and lift the mood of the party. Aerith's romantic relationship with Cloud was also praised, though some sites noted there were arguments between fans about whether or not Tifa was more suitable to be Cloud's love interest. In a retrospective, Polygon analyzed several fan arguments about Cloud's preferred partner and how each side misrepresents the other's chosen heroine. Polygon concludes that there is no winning couple as, after killing Sephiroth, Cloud has a vision of Aerith when Tifa tries to help him and the duo agrees to meet her again. In contrast to this, Aerith's relationship with Zack Fair was noted to be more impactful based on her role in Crisis Core.
Aerith's death in Final Fantasy VII has received a great deal of attention. Tom's Games called the scene "one of the most powerful and memorable scenes of the Final Fantasy series—or any other game, for that matter". The game's incorporation of computer-animated cutscenes, the first in the series to do so, allowed the use of cinematic techniques to magnify players' emotional connection with the scene. Edge called her death the "dramatic highpoint" of Final Fantasy VII, and suggested that reintroducing her through the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII titles "arguably undermines this great moment". Her death has also been cited as the defining moment of a star-crossed love story between her and main character Cloud Strife. Benjamin Banasik from Heidelberg University noted that the impact of Aerith's death is mostly seen in Cloud's characterization in Advent Children as he seeks redemption for her, leading him to his transformation into a heroic leader in the process. Her death has been described as a disastrous and traumatic reminder of the eventual war.
According to GamesTM, Aerith's death helped establish the popularity of Final Fantasy VII. Players commented on message boards and blogs about the emotional impact the scene held, and fans submitted a petition to Yoshinori Kitase requesting her return. Brian Taylor, writing for Kill Screen, described a cottage industry of fan theories for how to return Aerith to life or prevent her death, comparing these efforts to the letter-writing campaign to convince Charles Dickens not to let Nell, the endearing protagonist of The Old Curiosity Shop, die at the end of the book. Taylor affirmed that the acts of discussing these fan theories and dissecting the game code to test them comprise a valid and important part of the game experience. In A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture, Aerith is seen a highly developed character, citing Cloud's visits to her mother and how often the protagonist and the heroine talk. As Aerith plays a more active role in combat, her death is also noted to affect the gamer, as a result of the loss of her usefulness and her healing abilities.
Siliconera praised the humanization of Aerith's character in Remake, feeling that the original game depicted Aerith as "an idealized character on a pedestal". The Escapist stated that while the player primarily controls Cloud, Aerith remains the actual hero of the game, causing players to wonder if it was possible to save her. Game journalist Mike Fahey expressed concern for the repeat of Aerith's death in the Remake chronology, as he considered her to be the least developed heroine in the original game. A paper presented at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts highlights Remake's use of the player's knowledge of Aerith's death, as it poses the decision of repeating the original game's narrative or defying fate in "boundless, terrifying freedom", as said by Aerith. A paper published by the Digital Games Research Association notes the scene where a specter of Aerith warns Cloud not to fall in love with her, "as if Square Enix is reacting to the player's constricted conditions, potential desires, and narrative expectations". Digital Trend describes Aerith's impending death in the Remake chronology as fuel for "an emotional, character-driven story about heroes overcoming self-doubt to fight for a better future", allowing Cloud's heroism in his efforts to save Aerith to overshadow his failure to do so. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Northern_University | Ohio Northern University | Ohio Northern University (Ohio Northern or ONU) is a private college in Ada, Ohio, United States. Founded by Henry Solomon Lehr in 1871, ONU offers over 60 programs across five undergraduate and graduate colleges and is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. The college had an enrollment of about 3,000 students as of 2023.
== History ==
Henry Solomon Lehr founded the "Northwestern Ohio Normal School" in August 1871. When the college's curriculum grew to include pharmacy, engineering, law and business programs, its name was changed to "Ohio Normal University" in 1885 and, eventually, in 1903, to Ohio Northern University. In 1899, it became affiliated with the United Methodist Church to reduce debt.
Before the Great Depression, more than one thousand students were typically enrolled at Ohio Northern every year. Both the Great Depression and the following World War II plunged the school into low enrollment, and the possibility of closure was considered. During World War II, enrollment reached a low of 156 students. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, Ohio Northern was able to bring enrollment back up to nine hundred students by 1946.
Throughout the 1960s, a number of ONU students and faculty/staff participated in the American Civil Rights Movement. ONU hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on January 11, 1968, four days before his 39th birthday and just three months before his assassination. During his visit at ONU, King famously spoke regarding the myth that many immigrant and/or ethnic groups successfully pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, whereas African Americans were incapable of doing so. ONU honored King and his speech on campus with the unveiling of a statue in his likeness on April 17, 2018.
Growth continued under DeBow Freed through the 1980s and 1990s with additions to the Taggart Law Library, Presser Hall, Dukes Memorial, Wilson Art Building, Biggs Engineering, Heterick Memorial Library, and Meyer Hall of Science, and the construction of the Freed Center for the Performing Arts and a new president's on-campus home. Under Kendall Baker, campus additions include Dicke Hall, an expansion of the Robertson-Evans Pharmacy building, the Dial-Roberson Stadium and the Mathile Center for the Natural Sciences. In 2008, Ohio Northern University built and opened The Inn at Ohio Northern University. A new engineering building was opened in October 2019.
To honor professor Forrest Clingerman's legacy Ohio Northern University created an Honors course “Clingerman on Environmental Studies,” offered in fall 2025.
== Organization and administration ==
Melissa J. Baumann is Ohio Northern University's 12th president, and first female to serve in the role.
== Academics ==
ONU is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. The institution comprises five colleges:
Getty College of Arts and Sciences
James F. Dicke College of Business Administration
T.J. Smull College of Engineering
Rudolph H. Raabe College of Pharmacy
Claude W. Pettit College of Law
Founded in 1885, the Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law was named in honor of Claude W. Pettit, a judge and former dean of the college. ONU Law has been fully accredited by the American Bar Association since 1948 and a member of the Association of American Law Schools since 1965.
In the 2025 U.S. News & World Report college rankings, Ohio Northern University was ranked second out of 165 regional master's universities in the Midwest. In 2024, Washington Monthly ranked Ohio Northern University 9th among 223 colleges that award almost exclusively bachelor's degrees in the U.S. based on its contribution to the public good, as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.
== Campus ==
=== Hill Memorial ===
Hill Memorial Building is a historic building on campus. The building was finished in 1879 and is the second structure built on the grounds. Initially, Hill held administrative offices and classrooms, though many University departments would enter and leave the building throughout its history. The building is currently the oldest on campus and one of the oldest standing structures in Ada. In July 2024, the administration of Ohio Northern announced the closure of Hill Building citing age and a need of extensive repairs.
== Athletics ==
ONU students participate in intercollegiate, intramural, and sports clubs in a variety of sports. The ONU Polar Bears compete in the NCAA Division III Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC). The men's volleyball team participates in the Midwest Intercollegiate Volleyball Association in the Great Midwest Men's Volleyball Conference. The school mascot is a polar bear named Klondike.
The ONU varsity football team defeated Mount Union College in 2005 to snap the Purple Raiders 110-game regular season winning streak. The ONU women's volleyball team had an NCAA All-Divisions record 36 consecutive winning seasons.
=== National honors ===
1993 Men's Basketball NCAA Division III Champions
1989 Women's Volleyball NCAA Division III Runners-up
2012 Men's Soccer NCAA Division III Runners-up
2001 Men's Basketball NCAA Division III Final Four
2008 Women's Volleyball NCAA Division III Final Four
2007 Men's Volleyball NIRSA Division II National Champions
== Notable alumni ==
Anthony Alaimo, jurist
Frank T. Bow, jurist and politician who was honored by naming the Frank T. Bow Federal Building in Canton, Ohio.
James Cloyd Bowman, a children's book author who received a Newbery Honor in 1938 for Pecos Bill: The Greatest Cowboy of All Time.
Benjamin Brafman, a prominent criminal defense attorney based in New York.
William J. Brown, former Ohio Attorney General (1971–1983).
Anthony J. Celebrezze, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the 49th Mayor of Cleveland, and a Sixth Circuit Appellate Judge
George Washington Crile, founder of the Cleveland Clinic and inventor of the system for blood transfusion
Robert R. Cupp, former Ohio Supreme Court Justice and former Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives
Mike DeWine, Governor of Ohio
Simeon Davison Fess, a Republican politician a former president of Antioch College
Amanda Everlove, two time Paralympian
George Getty, American lawyer, father of industrialist J. Paul Getty and patriarch of the Getty family
John W. Grabiel, Arkansas Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1922 and 1924; Ohio native, attorney in Fayetteville, Arkansas, until his death in 1928
Stephanie L. Haines, United States federal judge
Stacey Hairston, former Cleveland Browns player
Thomas Hutson, doctor and medical researcher
Robert Franklin Jones, served as Allen County (Ohio) prosecuting attorney, 1935–1939. Elected in 1938 to the Seventy-sixth U.S. Congress, and elected for three subsequent terms to Congress, serving from 1939 to 1947. Appointed commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, serving from 1947 to 1952
Cassius Jackson Keyser, a mathematician
George E. Killian, a sports administrator and a president of the International University Sports Federation
Carla F. Kim, Associate Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Principal Investigator at the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children's Hospital
Cheryl L. Mason, Chairman, Board of Veterans' Appeals, US Department of Veterans' Affairs (2017-2022), Inspector General, US Department of Veterans’ Affairs (Incumbant)
Clay Mathile, former owner of Iams pet food
Harry McNeal, Major League baseball player
Bill Peterson, former head football coach at Florida State, Rice University, and with the Houston Oilers
Bob Peterson, story artist, animator and voice actor
Tom Reed, United States Congressman from New York
David P. Reese (1871–1935), member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives
Joseph Banks Rhine, founder of the parapsychology lab at Duke University
Nate Riles, retired CFL player
Jamal Robertson, retired NFL football player
Ralph L. Ropp (class of 1923), president of Louisiana Tech University from 1949 to 1962
Joe Thomas (1921–1983), professional football coach and executive
Jason Trusnik, retired NFL football player. Owner of Pro Sports Performance in Strongsville, OH
Steve Vagedes, former Arena Football League player
Baldemar Velasquez, is president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL–CIO
Jim Wilson, Los Angeles city council member, studied pharmacy |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Baseball_Hall_of_Fame | List of members of the Baseball Hall of Fame | |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qufu#Geography | Qufu#Geography | Qufu (pronounced [tɕʰý.fû]; Chinese: 曲阜) is a county-level city in southwestern Shandong province, East China. It is located about 130 kilometres (81 mi) south of the provincial capital Jinan and 45 km (28 mi) northeast of the prefectural seat at Jining. Qufu has an area of 815 square kilometers, and a total population of 653,000 inhabitants, of which, 188,000 live in urban areas.
Qufu is best known as the hometown of Confucius, who is traditionally believed to have been born at nearby Mount Ni. The city contains numerous historic palaces, temples and cemeteries. The three most famous cultural sites of the city, collectively known as San Kong (三孔; 'the Three Confucian [sites]', are the Temple of Confucius (Chinese: 孔庙; pinyin: Kǒngmiào), the Cemetery of Confucius (孔林; Kǒnglín), and the Kong Family Mansion (孔府; Kǒngfǔ). Together, these three sites have been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994.
== Etymology ==
The name Qufu literally means "crooked hill", and refers to a mile-long hill that was part of the city during its time as capital of the state of Lu.
Before the wide adoption of Pinyin, the name of the city (often viewed as a county seat, i.e. Qufu xian) was transcribed in English in a variety of ways, such as Ch'ü-fou-hien, Kio-feu-hien, Kio-fou-hien,
Kiu-fu,
Kiuh Fow, Keuhfow, Kufow, and Chufou.
Japanese city Gifu (岐阜) was partially named after Qufu. After Oda Nobunaga conquered Inabayama Castle in 1567, he renamed it as Gifu. Gi came from Qishan (岐山), a legendary mountain from which most of China was unified, whereas fu came from Qufu (曲阜). Nobunaga chose those characters because he wanted to unify all of Japan and he wanted to be viewed as a great mind.
== Administrative divisions ==
The city of Qufu is divided into 4 subdistricts, and 8 towns. The city government is located within Lucheng Subdistrict.
== History ==
=== Pre Qin era ===
During the Shang, the area around Qufu was home to the people of Yan, who were counted by the Chinese among the "Eastern Barbarians" or Dongyi. Along with Pugu (around Binzhou) and Xu (along the Huai River), Yan joined the Shang prince Wu Geng and the Three Guards in their failed rebellion against the Duke of Zhou c. 1042 BC. After the rebels' defeat, the Duke launched punitive campaigns against the Dongyi, forcing their submission and placing their territory under loyal nobles. The territory of the Yan became part of the state of Lu, who made Qufu their capital throughout the Spring and Autumn period. This city had walls considerably larger than the present Ming-era fortifications, including more land to the east and north.
=== Imperial era ===
During the Tang dynasty and the early days of the Song dynasty, the city was centered around the present-day Temple of Duke Zhou, at the northeastern corner of today's walled city. At 1012, Qufu was renamed to Xianyuan County (仙源縣), and relocated to the new site, some 4 km (2.5 mi) east of today's walled city, next to the supposed birthplace of the legendary Yellow Emperor and the tomb of his son Shaohao. A temple in honor of the Yellow Emperor was built there; all that remains today are two giant stelae (the Shou Qiu site).
After the conquest of the northern China by the Jurchens, the new Jin dynasty renamed Xianyuan back to Qufu (in 1142), but the city stayed at its Song location. It was not until the reign of the Jiajing Emperor of the Ming dynasty (1522) that the present-day city wall was built. The site of the city in 1012–1522 is now Jiuxian Village (旧县村).
During the Southern Song dynasty the descendant of Confucius at Qufu, the Duke Yansheng Kong Duanyou fled south with the future Song Emperor Gaozong to Quzhou in Zhejiang, while the newly established Jin dynasty in the north appointed Kong Duanyou's brother Kong Duancao who remained in Qufu as Duke Yansheng. From that time up until the Yuan dynasty, there were two Duke Yanshengs, one in the north in Qufu and the other in the south at Quzhou. An invitation to come back to Qufu was extended to the southern Duke Yansheng Kong Zhu by the Yuan dynasty emperor Kublai Khan. The title was taken away from the southern branch after Kong Zhu rejected the invitation, so the northern branch of the family kept the title of Duke Yansheng. The southern branch still remained in Quzhou where they lived to this day. Confucius's descendants in Quzhou alone number 30,000. The Hanlin Academy rank of Wujing Boshi (五經博士) was awarded to the southern branch at Quzhou by a Ming emperor while the northern branch at Qufu held the title Duke Yansheng. Kong Ruogu (孔若古), also known as Kong Chuan (孔傳) 47th generation was claimed to be the ancestor of the Southern branch after Kong Zhu died by Northern branch member Kong Guanghuang.
=== Modern era ===
During the Late Qing reforms, the Qing government planned to construct a major railroad connecting the North and South, which was known as Tianjin–Pukou Railway (Jinpu Railway), and later merged into Beijing-Shanghai Railway. The originally planned route of the Tianjin–Pukou Railway did not pass through Yanzhou. Instead, it was designed to run from Nanyi, pass through Qufu, cross the Si River, and then proceed directly south to Zouxian and Tengxian. During actual construction, however, the route was altered on the grounds of protecting the Confucian Temple in Qufu: south of Xiemating in Qufu, the railway was diverted southwestward toward Yanzhou, and then turned southeast again south of Yanzhou, forming a large curve in the line.
The German-proposed plan that would have passed through Qufu would have placed the railway only 50 zhang (less than 200 meters) from the Confucius Cemetery (Konglin), which aroused dissatisfaction among some conservative figures, who believed it would damage the site’s feng shui. Moreover, since Qufu was rich in mineral resources, some suspected that Britain and Germany intended to exploit and transport local minerals by rail after the line’s completion. Subsequently, Kong Lingyi, the Duke Yansheng, encouraged by opponents of the proposal, submitted a formal petition citing the need to protect the "sacred veins of the Kong Forest". Following his intervention, the Governor of Shandong memorialized the superintendent of the Jin–Pu Railway, requesting that the original plan be altered to avoid the sacred forest. Local gentry also submitted a joint petition demanding a rerouting in order to protect local railway and mining rights. They argued that “Qufu is surrounded by mountains rich in minerals and has long attracted German attention. From Jining to Zou, however, the land becomes flat plains with no nearby minerals", and therefore insisted that the railway must be diverted westward.
Under mounting pressure, several officials responsible for the northern section of the Jinpu Railway personally traveled to Qufu to survey the route and agreed with Kong Lingyi to shift the line five li westward. Just as construction was about to begin, the magistrate of Ziyang County submitted another petition requesting that the line be routed around eastern Yanzhou to promote local ritual activities. Consequently, the railway authorities moved the line further west to its present alignment, surveyed and designated the site of Yanzhou Prefectural Station, acquired land for station construction, and agreed to build a branch line from Yanzhou to Jining. With this, the controversy over the railway’s rerouting was brought to an end. In 1910, Kong Lingyi was summoned to Beijing to express gratitude to the new emperor Puyi for his handling of the affair and was rewarded with permission to wear a sable-trimmed court robe (帶嗉貂褂).
Although the successful diversion of the railway away from Qufu County was celebrated by conservatives and by Kong Lingyi himself, their actions also drew criticism. Song Huanwu, principal of the Second Shandong Provincial Normal School, once remarked: "When construction of the Jinpu Railway was first proposed, it was originally planned to establish a station in Qufu city. The Duke Yansheng’s household, clinging to superstitious notions of feng shui, strongly opposed this, and the route was therefore changed to Yaocun, eighteen li away from the city. As a result, merchants and travelers were greatly inconvenienced. Consequently, social life within Qufu County remained in a medieval state and failed to undergo modernization."
In 1948, Qufu played a minor role in the Yanzhou Campaign of the Chinese Civil War.
The artifacts of the historical sites at Qufu suffered extensive damage during the Cultural Revolution when about 200 staff members and students of Beijing Normal University led by Tan Houlan (谭厚兰, 1937–1982), one of the five most powerful student leaders of the Cultural Revolution, came to Qufu and destroyed more than 6,000 artifacts as part of the campaign to destroy the "Four Olds" in November 1966.
== Geography ==
The small historical center of Qufu is surrounded by the restored Ming-era city wall and rivers/moats. The Drum Tower (Gulou) is in the center of the walled city; the Temple of Confucius (Kong Miao), Confucius Mansion (Kong Fu) and the Temple of Yan Hui (Yan Miao) occupy large sections of the land within the wall.
The Confucius Cemetery (Kong Lin) is located 1.3 km (0.81 mi) to the north of the walled city. The modern downtown is located south of the walled city. There is also a mosque and a thriving Muslim neighborhood and market that is located just outside the west gate of the walled city.
The Qufu train station and major industrial areas are on the east side, a few kilometers east of the historical city. The Shaohao Tomb (少昊陵; Shǎohào Líng) and Shou Qiu historical site (寿丘; Shòu Qiū, the purported birthplace of the legendary Yellow Emperor), are on the eastern outskirts of the modern Qufu as well, near Jiuxian village.
The town of Shimenshan in Qufu is part of the international Cittaslow movement in China.
The Si River and the Yi River both pass through the city.
=== Climate ===
Qufu has a humid continental climate, bordering on a humid subtropical climate. Qufu experiences an average annual precipitation of 666.3 mm (26.23 in), and an average annual temperature of 13.6 °C (56.5 °F).
== Transportation ==
=== Rail transport ===
The original Beijing–Shanghai railway, constructed in the early 20th century, passes through Qufu. For a century, most passengers traveling to or from Qufu, would use the train station at Yanzhou, some 15 km (9.3 mi) to the west.
The Yanshi Railway, which connects Yanzhou and Rizhao as part of the broader Xinshi Railway (新石铁路), passes through the city. A small passenger station operating on the southeast side of the city (35.582860°N 117.025091°E / 35.582860; 117.025091) serves this line.
The north–south Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway, which opened in 2011, runs through Qufu. This line's Qufu East railway station is located a few kilometers south-east of the city (35.556390°N 117.063656°E / 35.556390; 117.063656). Qufu South railway station, on the east–west Rizhao–Lankao high-speed railway, opened in 2021.
=== Road transport ===
China National Highway 104 and China National Highway 327 both pass through Qufu.
=== Monorail ===
A 12 km (7.5 mi), 12 station monorail to connect Qufu and Zoucheng began construction in the first half of 2017, however construction was halted. A 6.3 km (3.9 mi) section was due to be completed in January 2018 to allow for testing to commence. The complete line was originally due to open in 2018. As of July 2021 the local government hopes to complete the line.
== Sites related with Confucius ==
Since 1994, the Temple of Confucius (Chinese: 孔庙; pinyin: Kǒng Miào) has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Temple and Cemetery of Confucius and the Kong Family Mansion in Qufu". The two other parts of the site are the nearby Kong Family Mansion (Chinese: 孔府; pinyin: Kǒng Fǔ), where the main-line descendants of Confucius lived, and the Cemetery of Confucius (Chinese: 孔林; pinyin: Kǒng Lín) a couple kilometers to the north, where Confucius and many of his descendants have been buried. Those three sites are collectively known in Qufu as San Kong (三孔), i.e. "The Three Confucian [sites]".
=== Temple of Confucius (Kong Miao) ===
Within two years after the death of Confucius, his former house in Qufu was already consecrated as a temple by the Duke of Lu. In 205 BC, Emperor Liu Bang of the Han dynasty was the first emperor to offer sacrifices to the memory of Confucius in Qufu. He set an example for many emperors and high officials to follow. Later, emperors would visit Qufu after their enthronement or on important occasions such as a successful war. In total, 12 different emperors paid 20 personal visits to Qufu to worship Confucius. About 100 others sent their deputies for 196 official visits. The original three-room house of Confucius was removed from the temple complex during a rebuilding undertaken in 611 AD. In 1012 and in 1094, during the Song dynasty, the temple was extended into a design with three sections and four courtyards, around which eventually more than 400 rooms were arranged. Fire and vandalism destroyed the temple in 1214, during the Jin dynasty. It was restored to its former extent by the year 1302 during the Yuan dynasty. Shortly thereafter, in 1331, the temple was framed in an enclosure wall modelled on the Imperial palace. After another devastation by fire in 1499, the temple was finally restored to its present scale. In 1724, yet another fire destroyed the main hall and the sculptures it contained. The subsequent restoration was completed in 1730. Many of the replacement sculptures were again destroyed during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In total, the Temple of Confucius has undergone 15 major renovations, 31 large repairs, and numerous small building measures.
The temple complex is the second largest historical building complex in China (after the Forbidden City)—it covers an area of 16,000 square metres (170,000 sq ft) and has a total of 460 rooms. Because the last major redesign following the fire in 1499 took place shortly after the building of the Forbidden City in the Ming dynasty, the architecture of the Temple of Confucius resembles that of the Forbidden City in many ways. The main part of the temple consists of 9 courtyards arranged on a central axis, which is oriented in the north–south direction and is 1.3 kilometres (0.81 mi) in length. The first three courtyards have small gates and are planted with tall pine trees, they serve an introductory function. The first (southernmost) gate is named "Lingxing Gate" after a star in the Great Bear constellation, the name suggests that Confucius is a star from heaven. The buildings in the remaining courtyards form the heart of the complex. They are impressive structures with yellow roof-tiles (otherwise reserved for the emperor) and red-painted walls, they are surrounded by dark-green pine trees to create a color contrast with complementary colors. The main buildings are the Stele Pavilions (e.g., Jin and Yuan dynasties, 1115–1368), the Kuiwen Hall (built in 1018, restored in 1504 during the Ming dynasty and in 1985), the Xing Tan Pavilion (simplified Chinese: 杏坛; traditional Chinese: 杏壇; pinyin: Xìng Tán, Apricot Platform), the De Mu Tian Di Arch, the Dacheng Hall (built in the Qing dynasty), and the Hall of Confucius' Wife. The Dacheng Hall (Chinese: 大成殿; pinyin: Dàchéng diàn, Great Perfection Hall) is the architectural center of the present day complex. The hall covers an area of 54 by 34 metres (177 by 112 ft) and stands slightly less than 32 m (105 ft) tall.
It is supported by 28 richly decorated pillars, each 6 m (20 ft) high and 0.8 m (2 ft 7 in) in diameter and carved in one piece out of local rock. The ten columns on the front side of the hall are decorated with coiled dragons. It is said that these columns were covered during visits by the emperor in order not to arouse his envy. Dacheng Hall served as the principal place for offering sacrifices to the memory of Confucius. In the center of the courtyard in front of Dacheng Hall stands the "Apricot Platform", which commemorates Confucius teaching his students under an apricot tree. Each year at Qufu and at many other Confucian temples a ceremony is held on September 28 to commemorate Confucius' birthday.
=== Cemetery of Confucius (Kong Lin) ===
The Cemetery of Confucius (孔林; Kǒng Lín) lies to the north of the town of Qufu. The oldest graves found in this location date back to the Zhou dynasty. The original tomb erected here in memory of Confucius on the bank of the Sishui River had the shape of an axe. In addition, it had a brick platform for sacrifices. The present-day tomb is a cone-shaped hill. Tombs for the descendants of Confucius and additional stela to commemorate him were soon added around Confucius' tomb.
Since Confucius' descendants were conferred noble titles and were given imperial princesses as wives, many of the tombs in the cemetery show the status symbols of noblemen. Tombstones came in use during the Han dynasty, today, there are about 3,600 tombstones dating from the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties still standing in the cemetery.
In 1331 construction work began on the wall and gate of the cemetery. In total, the cemetery has undergone 13 renovations and extensions. Eventually, by the late 18th century, the perimeter wall reached a length of 7.5 km (4.7 mi), enclosing an area of 3.6 square kilometres (1.4 sq mi). In this space, the tombs of more than 100,000 descendants of Confucius, who have been buried there over a period of about 2000 years, can be found. The oldest graves date back to the Zhou dynasty, the most recent of which belong to descendants in the 76th and 78th generation.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Kong family cemetery was branded a "reactionary" site and was subject to vandalism and desecration. The tombs of Confucius and his descendants were dug up, looted and flattened. Confucius statue was pulled down and paraded through the streets. According to statistics published after the Cultural Revolution, 100,000 volumes of classical texts were burned, 6,618 cultural artefacts were destroyed or damaged, one thousand stelae were smashed, 5,000 ancient pines were felled and over 2,000 graves were dug up during the period.
The corpse of the 76th Duke of Qufu was removed from its grave, hung naked from a tree in front of the palace and later incinerated.
More than 10,000 mature trees give the cemetery a forest-like appearance. A road runs from the north gate of Qufu to the exterior gate of the cemetery in a straight line. It is 1,266 m (4,154 ft) in length and lined by cypresses and pine trees. Along this road lies the Yan Temple, dedicated to Confucius' favorite student.
=== Kong Family Mansion (Kong Fu) ===
The direct descendants of Confucius lived in the Kong family Mansion (孔府; Kǒng Fǔ) located to the east of the temple. They were in charge of tending to the temple and cemetery. In particular, they were in charge of conducting elaborate religious ceremonies on occasions such as plantings, harvests, honoring the dead, and birthdays. The Kong family was in control of the largest private rural estate in China. The first mansion was built in 1038 during the Song dynasty and was originally connected directly to the temple. During a rebuilding in 1377 directed by the first Ming dynasty emperor, it was moved a short distance away from the temple. In 1503, it was expanded into three rows of buildings with 560 rooms and—like the Confucius Temple—9 courtyards. The mansion underwent a complete renovation in 1838 only to perish in a fire 47 years later in 1887. It was rebuilt two years later; the cost of both 19th-century renovations was covered by the Emperor. Today, the mansion comprises 152 buildings with 480 rooms, which cover an area of 12,470 square metres (134,200 sq ft). Its tallest structure is the four-story refuge tower (避难楼; Bìnán Lóu) that was designed as a shelter during an attack but was never used. The family mansion was inhabited by descendants of Confucius until 1937, when Confucius' descendant in the 76th and 77th generations fled to Chongqing during the Second Sino-Japanese War and later during the Chinese Civil War to Taiwan, where the head of the family still resides.
The layout of the mansion is traditionally Chinese, it separates official rooms in the front from the residential quarters in the rear. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of the buildings according to the seniority, gender, and status of their inhabitants reflects the Confucian principle of order and hierarchy: The most senior descendant of Confucius took up residence in the central of the three main buildings; his younger brother occupied the Yi Gun hall to the east.
=== Digital Confucian Culture Project ===
In Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, a "Digital Confucian Culture Protection Project" is underway. This initiative involves the high-resolution 3D scanning of ancient temples, cemeteries, and archival documents to create a comprehensive digital archive for preservation, research, and virtual access.
== Economy ==
Qufu's economy consists of a number different industries. Agriculture, specifically grain production, is a major industry for the city. The other main industries are food processing, textile, construction materials, chemical, coal mining, pharmacy, paper making and industrial machinery. Qufu has also benefited greatly from tourism, holding a number of cultural festivals and exhibitions, largely centered around Confucius.
=== Natural resources ===
The city's main mineral deposits include coal, phosphorus, and limestone.
== Education ==
Qufu Normal University is located in Qufu city, and has an additional campus in Rizhao. The university, founded in 1955, offers 87 undergraduate majors, 25 master's degrees, and 11 doctoral degrees.
== Religion ==
Qufu is a traditional centre of Confucianism, being the area where Confucius was born. The city is home to the holiest Temple of Confucius, to the Mausoleum of Confucius and to the Mansion of the Kong Family. The city also has a branch of the Holy Church of Confucius (孔圣堂; Kǒngshèngtáng) and hosts the headquarters of the Federation of Confucian Culture.
== Gallery == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakel_Hiltunen | Rakel Hiltunen | Lea Rakel Hiltunen (née Lyytikäinen; born 2 July 1940 in Keitele) is a Finnish social worker and politician. She was a member of the Parliament of Finland from 1999 to 2015, representing the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP). |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Eyre | Jane Eyre | Jane Eyre ( AIR; originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first American edition was published in January 1848 by Harper & Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is a bildungsroman that follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.
The novel revolutionised prose fiction, being the first to focus on the moral and spiritual development of its protagonist through an intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a psychological intensity. Literary critic Daniel S. Burt has called Charlotte Brontë "the first historian of the private consciousness" and the literary ancestor of writers such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
The book contains elements of social criticism with a strong sense of Christian morality at its core, and it is considered by many to be ahead of its time because of Jane's individualistic character and how the novel approaches the topics of class, sexuality, religion and feminism. Jane Eyre, along with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, is one of the most famous romance novels. It is considered one of the greatest novels in the English language, and in 2003 was ranked as the tenth best-loved book in Britain by the BBC in The Big Read poll.
== Plot ==
Jane Eyre is divided into 38 chapters. It was originally published in three volumes in the 19th century, consisting of chapters 1 to 15, 16 to 27, and 28 to 38.
The second edition was dedicated to William Makepeace Thackeray.
The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of the title character. Its setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III (1760–1820). It has five distinct stages: Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she gains friends and role models but suffers privations and oppression; her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester; her time in the Moor House, during which her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St John Rivers, proposes to her; and ultimately her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester. Throughout these sections it provides perspectives on a number of important social issues and ideas, many of which are critical of the status quo.
The five stages of Jane's life are as follows:
=== Gateshead Hall ===
Jane Eyre, aged 10, lives at Gateshead Hall with her maternal uncle's family, the Reeds, as a result of her uncle's dying wish. Jane was orphaned several years earlier when her parents died of typhus. Jane's uncle, Mr Reed, was the only one in the Reed family who was kind to Jane. Jane's aunt, Sarah Reed, dislikes her and treats her as a burden. Mrs Reed also discourages her three children from associating with Jane. As a result Jane becomes defensive against her cruel judgement. The nursemaid, Bessie, proves to be Jane's only ally in the household, even though Bessie occasionally scolds Jane harshly. Excluded from the family activities, Jane lives an unhappy childhood.
One day, as punishment for defending herself against the bullying of her 14-year-old cousin John, the Reeds' only son, Jane is locked in the red room in which her late uncle had died; there she faints from panic after she thinks she has seen his ghost. The red room is significant because it lays the grounds for the "ambiguous relationship between parents and children" which plays out in all of Jane's future relationships with male figures throughout the novel. She is subsequently attended to by the kindly apothecary, Mr Lloyd, to whom Jane reveals how unhappy she is living at Gateshead Hall. He recommends to Mrs Reed that Jane should be sent to school, an idea Mrs Reed happily supports.
Mrs Reed then enlists the aid of the harsh Mr Brocklehurst, the director of Lowood Institution, a charity school for girls, to enroll Jane. Mrs Reed cautions Mr Brocklehurst that Jane has a "tendency to deceit", which he interprets as Jane being a liar. Before Jane leaves, however, she confronts Mrs Reed and declares that she'll never call her "aunt" again. Jane also tells Mrs Reed and her daughters, Georgiana and Eliza, that they are the ones who are deceitful, and that she will tell everyone at Lowood how cruelly the Reeds treated her. Mrs Reed is hurt badly by these words but has neither the courage nor the tenacity to show it.
=== Lowood Institution ===
At Lowood Institution, a school for poor and orphaned girls, Jane soon finds that life is harsh. She attempts to fit in and befriends an older girl, Helen Burns. During a class session her new friend is criticised for her poor stance and dirty nails and receives a lashing as a result. Later Jane tells Helen that she could not have borne such public humiliation, but Helen philosophically tells her that it would be her duty to do so. Jane then tells Helen how badly she has been treated by Mrs Reed, but Helen tells her that she would be far happier if she did not bear grudges.
In due course Mr Brocklehurst visits the school. While Jane is trying to make herself look inconspicuous, she accidentally drops her slate, thereby drawing attention to herself. She is then forced to stand on a stool and is branded a sinner and a liar. Later Miss Temple, the caring superintendent, facilitates Jane's self-defence and publicly clears her of any wrongdoing. Helen and Miss Temple are Jane's two main role models who positively guide her development despite the harsh treatment she has received from many others.
The 80 pupils at Lowood are subjected to cold rooms, poor meals and thin clothing. Many students fall ill when a typhus epidemic strikes; Helen dies of consumption in Jane's arms. When Mr Brocklehurst's maltreatment of the pupils is discovered, several benefactors erect a new building and install a sympathetic management committee to moderate Mr Brocklehurst's harsh rule. Conditions at the school then improve dramatically.
=== Thornfield Hall ===
After six years as a pupil and two as a teacher at Lowood, Jane decides to leave in pursuit of a new life, growing bored with her life at Lowood. Her friend and confidante, Miss Temple, also leaves after getting married. Jane advertises her services as a governess in a newspaper. The housekeeper at Thornfield Hall, Alice Fairfax, replies to Jane's advertisement. Jane takes the position, teaching Adèle Varens, a young French girl.
One night, while Jane is carrying a letter to the post from Thornfield, a horseman and dog pass her. The horse slips on ice and throws the rider. Despite the rider's surliness, Jane helps him get back onto his horse. Later, back at Thornfield, she learns that this man is Edward Rochester, master of the house. Adèle was left in his care when her mother, a famous dancer, abandoned her. It is not immediately apparent whether Adèle is Rochester's daughter.
At Jane's first meeting with Mr Rochester he teases her, accusing her of bewitching his horse to make him fall. Jane stands up to his initially arrogant manner. Despite his strange behaviour, Mr Rochester and Jane soon come to enjoy each other's company and they spend many evenings together.
Odd things start to happen at the house, such as a strange laugh being heard, a mysterious fire in Mr Rochester's room (from which Jane saves Rochester by rousing him and throwing water on him) and an attack on a house-guest named Mr Richard Mason.
After Jane saves Mr Rochester from the fire, he thanks her tenderly and emotionally, and that night Jane feels strange emotions of her own towards him. The next day, however, he leaves unexpectedly for a distant party and several days later returns with the whole party, including the beautiful and talented Blanche Ingram. Just as she realises that she is in love with Mr Rochester, Jane sees that he and Blanche favour each other and starts to feel jealous, particularly because she also sees that Blanche is snobbish and heartless.
Jane then receives word that Mrs Reed has suffered a stroke and is calling for her. Jane returns to Gateshead Hall and remains there for a month to tend to her dying aunt. Mrs Reed confesses to Jane that she wronged her, bringing forth a letter from Jane's paternal uncle, Mr John Eyre, in which he asks for her to live with him and be his heir. Mrs Reed admits to telling Mr Eyre that Jane had died of fever at Lowood. Soon afterward Mrs Reed dies, and Jane helps her cousins after the funeral before returning to Thornfield.
Back at Thornfield Jane broods over Mr Rochester's rumoured impending marriage to Blanche Ingram. However one midsummer evening Rochester baits Jane by saying how much he will miss her after getting married and how she will soon forget him. The normally self-controlled Jane reveals her feelings for him. To her surprise, Rochester reciprocates, having courted Blanche only to make Jane jealous, and proposes marriage. Jane is at first sceptical of his sincerity, before accepting his proposal. She then writes to her Uncle John, telling him of her happy news.
As she prepares for her wedding Jane's forebodings arise when a strange woman sneaks into her room one night and rips Jane's wedding veil in two. As with the previous mysterious events, Mr Rochester attributes the incident to Grace Poole, one of his servants. During the wedding ceremony, however, Mr Mason and a lawyer declare that Mr Rochester cannot marry because he is already married to Mr Mason's sister, Bertha. Mr Rochester admits this is true but explains that his father tricked him into the marriage for her money. Once they were united he discovered that she was rapidly descending into congenital madness, and so he eventually locked her away in Thornfield, hiring Grace Poole as a nurse to look after her. When Grace gets drunk, Rochester's wife escapes and causes the strange happenings at Thornfield.
It turns out that Jane's uncle, Mr John Eyre, is a friend of Mr Mason's and was visited by him soon after Mr Eyre received Jane's letter about her impending marriage. After the marriage ceremony is broken off, Mr Rochester asks Jane to go with him to the south of France and live with him as husband and wife, even though they cannot be married. Jane is tempted but realises that she will lose herself and her integrity if she allows her passion for a married man to consume her and she must stay true to her Christian values and beliefs. Refusing to go against her principles, and despite her love for Rochester, Jane leaves Thornfield Hall at dawn before anyone else is up.
=== Moor House ===
Jane travels as far from Thornfield Hall as she can using the little money she had previously saved. She accidentally leaves her bundle of possessions on the coach and is forced to sleep on the moor. She unsuccessfully attempts to trade her handkerchief and gloves for food. Exhausted and starving, she eventually makes her way to the home of Diana and Mary Rivers but is turned away by the housekeeper. She collapses on the doorstep, preparing for her death. Clergyman St John Rivers, Diana and Mary's brother, rescues her. After Jane regains her health, St John finds her a teaching position at a nearby village school. Jane becomes good friends with the sisters, but St John remains aloof.
The sisters leave for governess jobs, and St John becomes slightly closer to Jane. St John learns Jane's true identity and astounds her by telling her that her uncle, John Eyre, has died and left her his entire fortune of 20,000 pounds (equivalent to US $2.24 million in 2022). When Jane questions him further, St John reveals that John Eyre is also his and his sisters' uncle. They had once hoped for a share of the inheritance but were left virtually nothing. Jane, overjoyed by finding that she has living and friendly family members, insists on sharing the money equally with her cousins, and Diana and Mary come back to live at Moor House.
=== Proposals ===
Thinking that the pious and conscientious Jane will make a suitable missionary's wife, St John asks her to marry him and to go with him to India, not out of love, but out of duty. Jane initially accepts going to India but rejects the marriage proposal, suggesting they travel as brother and sister. As Jane's resolve against marriage to St John begins to weaken, she seems to hear Mr Rochester's voice calling her name. Jane then returns to Thornfield Hall to see if Rochester is all right, only to find blackened ruins. She learns that Rochester sent Mrs Fairfax into retirement and Adèle to school a few months following her departure. Shortly afterwards, his wife set the house on fire and died after jumping from the roof. While saving the servants and attempting to rescue his wife, Rochester lost a hand and his eyesight.
Jane reunites with Rochester, and he is overjoyed at her return, but fears that she will be repulsed by his condition. "Am I hideous, Jane?", he asks. "Very, sir; you always were, you know", she replies. Now a humbled man, Rochester vows to live a purer life, and reveals that he has intensely pined for Jane ever since she left. He had even called out her name in despair one night, the very call that she heard from Moor House, and heard her reply from miles away, signifying the connection between them. Jane asserts herself as a financially independent woman and assures him of her love, declaring that she will never leave him. Rochester proposes again, and they are married. The narrator breaks the fourth wall and in a famous metafictional manner directly addresses the reader: "Reader, I married him." They live blissfully together in an old house in the woods called Ferndean Manor. The couple stay in touch with Adèle as she grows up, as well as Diana and Mary, who each gain loving husbands of their own. St John moves to India to accomplish his missionary goals, but is implied to have fallen gravely ill there. Rochester regains sight in one eye two years after his and Jane's marriage, enabling him to see their newborn son.
== Major characters ==
In order of first line of dialogue:
=== Introduced in first chapter ===
Jane Eyre: The novel's narrator and protagonist. Orphaned as a baby, Jane struggles through her nearly loveless childhood and becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall. Small and facially plain, Jane is passionate and strongly principled and values freedom and independence. She also has a strong conscience and is a determined Christian. She is ten at the beginning of the novel, and nineteen or twenty at the end of the main narrative. As the final chapter of the novel states that she has been married to Edward Rochester for ten years, she is approximately thirty at its completion.
Mrs Sarah Reed (née Gibson): Jane's maternal aunt by marriage, who reluctantly adopted Jane in accordance with her late husband's wishes. According to Mrs Reed, he pitied Jane and often cared for her more than for his own children. Mrs Reed's resentment leads her to abuse and neglect the girl. She lies to Mr Brocklehurst about Jane's tendency to lie, preparing him to be severe with Jane when she arrives at Brocklehurst's Lowood School.
John Reed: Jane's fourteen-year-old first cousin who bullies her incessantly and violently, sometimes in his mother's presence. Addicted to food and sweets, causing him ill health and bad complexion. John eventually ruins himself as an adult by drinking and gambling and is rumoured to have killed himself.
Eliza Reed: Jane's thirteen-year-old first cousin. Envious of her more attractive younger sister and a slave to a rigid routine, she self-righteously devotes herself to religion. She leaves for a nunnery near Lisle (France) after her mother's death, determined to estrange herself from her sister.
Georgiana Reed: Jane's eleven-year-old first cousin. Although beautiful and indulged, she is insolent and spiteful. Her elder sister Eliza foils Georgiana's marriage to the wealthy Lord Edwin Vere when the couple is about to elope. Georgiana eventually marries a "wealthy worn-out man of fashion."
Bessie Lee: The nursemaid at Gateshead Hall. She often treats Jane kindly, telling her stories and singing her songs, but she has a quick temper. Later, she marries Robert Leaven with whom she has three children.
Miss Martha Abbot: Mrs Reed's maid at Gateshead Hall. She is unkind to Jane and tells Jane she has less right to be at Gateshead than a servant does.
=== Chapters 3–5 ===
Mr Lloyd: A compassionate apothecary who recommends that Jane be sent to school. Later, he writes a letter to Miss Temple confirming Jane's account of her childhood and thereby clears Jane of Mrs Reed's charge of lying.
Mr Brocklehurst: The clergyman, director, and treasurer of Lowood School, whose maltreatment of the pupils is eventually exposed. A religious traditionalist, he advocates for his charges the most harsh, plain, and disciplined possible lifestyle, but, hypocritically, not for himself and his own family. His second daughter, Augusta, exclaimed, "Oh, dear papa, how quiet and plain all the girls at Lowood look… they looked at my dress and mama's, as if they had never seen a silk gown before."
Miss Maria Temple: The kind superintendent of Lowood School, who treats the pupils with respect and compassion. She helps clear Jane of Mr Brocklehurst's false accusation of deceit and cares for Helen in her last days. Eventually, she marries Reverend Naysmith.
Miss Scatcherd: A sour and strict teacher at Lowood. She constantly punishes Helen Burns for her untidiness but fails to see Helen's substantial good points.
Helen Burns: Jane's best friend at Lowood School. She refuses to hate those who abuse her, trusts in God, and prays for peace one day in heaven. She teaches Jane to trust Christianity and dies of consumption in Jane's arms. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of the Brontë sisters, wrote that Helen Burns was 'an exact transcript' of Maria Brontë, who died of consumption at age 11.
=== Chapters 11–12 ===
Mrs Alice Fairfax: The elderly, kind widow and the housekeeper of Thornfield Hall; distantly related to the Rochesters.
Adèle Varens: An excitable French child to whom Jane is a governess at Thornfield Hall. Adèle's mother was a dancer named Céline. She was Mr Rochester's mistress and claimed that Adèle was Mr Rochester's daughter, though he refuses to believe it due to Céline's unfaithfulness and Adèle's apparent lack of resemblance to him. Adèle seems to believe that her mother is dead (she tells Jane in chapter 11, "I lived long ago with mamma, but she is gone to the Holy Virgin"). Mr Rochester later tells Jane that Céline actually abandoned Adèle and "ran away to Italy with a musician or singer" (ch. 15). Adèle and Jane develop a strong liking for one another, and although Mr Rochester places Adèle in a strict school after Jane flees Thornfield Hall, Jane visits Adèle after her return and finds a better, less severe school for her. When Adèle is old enough to leave school, Jane describes her as "a pleasing and obliging companion—docile, good-tempered and well-principled", and considers her kindness to Adèle well repaid.
Grace Poole: "…a woman of between thirty and forty; a set, square-made figure, red-haired, and with a hard, plain face…" Mr Rochester pays her a very high salary to keep his mad wife, Bertha, hidden and quiet. Grace is often used as an explanation for odd happenings at the house such as strange laughter that was heard not long after Jane arrived. She has a weakness for drinking that occasionally allows Bertha to escape.
Edward Fairfax Rochester: The master of Thornfield Hall. He has a "dark, strong, and stern" face. He married Bertha Mason years before the novel begins, although readers are unaware of this until much later. Rochester is an example of a Byronic hero.
Leah: The housemaid at Thornfield Hall.
=== Chapters 17–21 ===
Blanche Ingram: Young socialite whom Mr Rochester plans to marry. Though possessing great beauty and talent, she treats social inferiors, Jane in particular, with undisguised contempt. Mr Rochester exposes her and her mother's mercenary motivations when he puts out a rumour that he is far less wealthy than they imagine.
Richard Mason: An Englishman whose arrival at Thornfield Hall from the West Indies unsettles Mr Rochester. He is the brother of Rochester's first wife, the woman in the attic, and still cares about his sister's well-being. During the wedding ceremony of Jane and Mr Rochester, he exposes the bigamous nature of the marriage.
Robert Leaven: The coachman at Gateshead Hall, who brings Jane the news of the death of the dissolute John Reed, an event which has brought on Mrs Reed's stroke. He informs her of Mrs Reed's wish to see Jane before she dies.
=== Chapters 26–32 ===
Bertha Antoinetta Mason: The first wife of Edward Rochester. After their wedding, her mental health began to deteriorate, and she is now violent and in a state of intense derangement, apparently unable to speak or go into society. Mr Rochester, who insists that he was tricked into the marriage by Bertha's family, who knew she was likely to develop this condition, has kept Bertha locked in the attic at Thornfield Hall for years. She is supervised and cared for by Grace Poole, whose drinking sometimes allows Bertha to escape. After Richard Mason stops Jane and Mr Rochester's wedding, Rochester finally introduces Jane to Bertha: "In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell… it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face." Eventually, Bertha sets fire to Thornfield Hall and throws herself to her death from the roof. Bertha is viewed as Jane's "double": Jane is pious and just, while Bertha is savage and animalistic. Though her race is never mentioned, it is sometimes conjectured that she was of mixed race. Rochester suggests that Bertha's parents wanted her to marry him, because he was of "good race", implying that she was not pure white, while he was. There are also references to her "dark" hair and "discoloured" and "black" face. A number of writers during the Victorian period suggested that madness could result from a racially "impure" lineage, compounded by growing up in a tropical West Indian climate.
Diana and Mary Rivers: Sisters in a remote moors house who take Jane in when she is hungry and friendless, having left Thornfield Hall without making any arrangements for herself. Financially poor but intellectually curious, the sisters are deeply engrossed in reading the evening Jane appears at their door. Eventually, they are revealed to be Jane's cousins. They want Jane to marry their stern clergyman brother so that he will stay in England rather than journey to India as a missionary. Diana marries naval Captain Fitzjames, and Mary marries clergyman Mr Wharton. The sisters remain close to Jane and visit her and Rochester every year.
Hannah: The kindly housekeeper at the Rivers home; "…comparable with the Brontës' well-loved servant, Tabitha Aykroyd."
St John Eyre Rivers: A handsome, though severe and serious, clergyman who befriends Jane and turns out to be her cousin. St John is thoroughly practical and suppresses all of his human passions and emotions, particularly his love for the beautiful and cheerful heiress Rosamond Oliver, in favour of good works. He wants Jane to marry him and serve as his assistant on his missionary journey to India. After Jane rejects his proposal, St John goes to India unmarried.
Rosamond Oliver: A beautiful, kindly, wealthy, but rather simple young woman, and the patron of the village school where Jane teaches. Rosamond is in love with St John, but he refuses to declare his love for her because she would not be suitable as a missionary's wife. She eventually becomes engaged to the respected and wealthy Mr Granby.
Mr Oliver: Rosamond Oliver's wealthy father, who owns a foundry and needle factory in the district. "…a tall, massive-featured, middle-aged, and grey-headed man, at whose side his lovely daughter looked like a bright flower near a hoary turret." He is a kind and charitable man, and he is fond of St John.
== Context ==
The early sequences, in which Jane is sent to Lowood, a harsh boarding school, are derived from the author's own experiences. Helen Burns's death from tuberculosis (referred to as consumption) recalls the deaths of Charlotte Brontë's sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, who died of the disease in childhood as a result of the conditions at their school, the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, near Tunstall, Lancashire. Mr Brocklehurst is based on Rev. William Carus Wilson (1791–1859), the Evangelical minister who ran the school. Additionally, John Reed's decline into alcoholism and dissolution recalls the life of Charlotte's brother Branwell, who became an opium and alcohol addict in the years preceding his death. Finally, like Jane, Charlotte became a governess. These facts were revealed to the public in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) by Charlotte's friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.
The Gothic manor of Thornfield Hall was probably inspired by North Lees Hall, near Hathersage in the Peak District in Derbyshire. This was visited by Charlotte Brontë and her friend Ellen Nussey in the summer of 1845, and is described by the latter in a letter dated 22 July 1845. It was the residence of the Eyre family, and its first owner, Agnes Ashurst, was reputedly confined as a lunatic in a padded second floor room. It has been suggested that the Wycoller Hall in Lancashire, close to Haworth, provided the setting for Ferndean Manor to which Mr Rochester retreats after the fire at Thornfield: there are similarities between the owner of Ferndean—Mr Rochester's father—and Henry Cunliffe, who inherited Wycoller in the 1770s and lived there until his death in 1818; one of Cunliffe's relatives was named Elizabeth Eyre (née Cunliffe). The sequence in which Mr Rochester's wife sets fire to the bed curtains was prepared in an August 1830 homemade publication of Brontë's The Young Men's Magazine, Number 2. Charlotte Brontë began composing Jane Eyre in Manchester, and she likely envisioned Manchester Cathedral churchyard as the burial place for Jane's parents and Manchester as the birthplace of Jane herself. The novel may also have been inspired by Charlotte's visit to Norton Conyers house in North Yorkshire in 1839 as governess to the then-tenants' grandchildren. The house has a family legend of a madwoman confined in the attics.
== Adaptations and influence ==
The novel has been adapted into a number of other forms, including theatre, film, television, and at least three full-length operas. The novel has also been the subject of a number of significant rewritings and related interpretations, notably Jean Rhys's seminal 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea.
A famous line in the book is at the beginning of Chapter 38: "Reader, I married him." Many authors have used a variation of this line in their work. For example, Liane Moriarty discussed and used the line in her 2018 novel Nine Perfect Strangers.
The book Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre, a 2016 anthology of short stories, edited by Tracy Chevalier, was also inspired by this line. It was commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary of Brontë's birth, and is published by The Borough Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Thai novel Ruk Diow Kong Jenjira was adapted by Nida in 1993. In 1996, it was made into a television drama on Channel 3 starred by Willie McIntosh and Sirilak Pongchoke.
The novel The French Dancer's Bastard, by Emma Tennant, reimagines the back story of Adèle, exploring whether she was Rochester's love child and what her relationship with Jane Eyre is.
The most recent film adaptation, Jane Eyre, was released in 2011, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, and starred Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre and Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester. The film, actors, and costume design team were nominated and won various awards from 2011 to 2012.
== Reception ==
=== Contemporary reviews ===
Jane Eyre's initial reception contrasts starkly to its reputation today. In 1848, Elizabeth Rigby (later Elizabeth Eastlake), reviewing Jane Eyre in The Quarterly Review, found it "pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition," declaring: "We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre."
An anonymous review in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction writes of "the extraordinary daring of the writer of Jane Eyre"; however, the review is mostly critical, summarising: "There is not a single natural character throughout the work. Everybody moves on stilts—the opinions are bad—the notions absurd. Religion is stabbed in the dark—our social distinctions attempted to be levelled, and all absurdly moral notions done away with."
There were some who felt more positive about the novel contemporaneously. George Henry Lewes said, "It reads like a page out of one's own life; and so do many other pages in the book." Another critic from the Atlas wrote, "It is full of youthful vigour, of freshness and originality, of nervous diction and concentrated interest ...It is a book to make the pulses gallop and the heart beat, and to fill the eyes with tears."
A review in The Era praised the novel, calling it "an extraordinary book", observing that "there is much to ponder over, rejoice over, and weep over, in its ably-written pages. Much of the heart laid bare, and the mind explored; much of greatness in affliction, and littleness in the ascendant; much of trial and temptation, of fortitude and resignation, of sound sense and Christianity—but no tameness."
The People's Journal compliments the novel's vigour, stating that "the reader never tires, never sleeps: the swell and tide of an affluent existence, an irresistible energy, bears him onward, from first to last. It is impossible to deny that the author possesses native power in an uncommon degree—showing itself now in rapid headlong recital, now in stern, fierce, daring dashes in portraiture—anon in subtle, startling mental anatomy—here in a grand illusion, there in an original metaphor—again in a wild gush of genuine poetry."
American publication The Nineteenth Century defended the novel against accusations of immorality, describing it as "a work which has produced a decided sensation in this country and in England... Jane Eyre has made its mark upon the age, and even palsied the talons of mercenary criticism. Yes, critics hired to abuse or panegyrize, at so much per line, have felt a throb of human feeling pervade their veins, at the perusal of Jane Eyre. This is extraordinary—almost preternatural—smacking strongly of the miraculous—and yet it is true... We have seen Jane Eyre put down, as a work of gross immorality, and its author described as the very incarnation of sensualism. To any one, who has read the work, this may look ridiculous, and yet it is true."
The Indicator, concerning speculation regarding the gender of the author, wrote, "We doubt not it will soon cease to be a secret; but on one assertion we are willing to risk our critical reputation—and that is, that no woman wrote it. This was our decided conviction at the first perusal, and a somewhat careful study of the work has strengthened it. No woman in all the annals of feminine celebrity ever wrote such a style, terse yet eloquent, and filled with energy bordering sometimes almost on rudeness: no woman ever conceived such masculine characters as those portrayed here."
=== Twentieth century ===
Literary critic Jerome Beaty believed the close first-person perspective leaves the reader "too uncritically accepting of her worldview", and often leads reading and conversation about the novel towards supporting Jane, regardless of how irregular her ideas or perspectives are.
In 2003, the novel was ranked number 10 in the BBC's survey The Big Read, a survey to find British people's favourite novel.
== Genres ==
=== Romance ===
Before the Victorian era, Jane Austen wrote literary fiction that influenced later popular fiction, as did the work of the Brontë sisters produced in the 1840s. Brontë's love romance incorporates elements of both the gothic novel and Elizabethan drama, and "demonstrate[s] the flexibility of the romance novel form."
=== Gothic ===
The Gothic genre uses a combination of supernatural features, intense emotions, and a blend of reality and fantasy to create a dark, mysterious atmosphere and experience for characters and readers. Jane Eyre is a homodiegetic narrator, which allows her to exist both as a character and narrator in the story world, and her narration establishes an emotional connection and response for the reader. This intentional, narrative technique works in tandem with Gothic features and conventions. Jane and the reader are unaware of the cause behind the "demoniac laugh--low, suppressed, and deep" or "a savage, a sharp, a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall," though the reason comes from Bertha Mason. The element of the unknown works in conjunction to the possibility of the supernatural. The intensity of emotions and reactions to Gothic conventions can solely exist in the protagonist's imagination. Instances that a protagonist interprets to be their imagination turns into reality. Jane's experience in the red room represents an aspect of Gothic conventions as Jane feels fear towards being punished in the red room because she believes and imagines that her dead uncle haunts the room.
The Gothic genre uses the Gothic double: a literary motif, which is described as the protagonist having a double, alter ego, or doppelgänger interpreted between Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason, where Bertha represents the other side of Jane and vice versa. The commonly used Gothic literary device, foreshadowing, creates an environment filled with tension, ominousity, and dread. After Jane agrees to marry Rochester, a horse-chestnut tree in an orchard is struck by lightning, splitting the tree in half. The lightning strike is ominous and foreshadows Jane and Rochester's separation.
The Gothic Genre in tandem with Murphy's the "New Woman Gothic" establishes an opportunity to go against the Romantic's concept that the antagonist is usually a villainous father. The Gothic genre allows there to be a complex consideration of who or what hinders Jane's happiness. The barriers Jane experiences, whether related to social class, societal and cultural norms, Bertha Mason, or Rochester, have antagonistic elements.
=== Bildungsroman ===
The Bildungsroman representation in Jane Eyre uses romantic elements that emphasise the journey of one pursuing the discovery of one's identity and knowledge. Jane Eyre desires the thrill and action that comes from being an active individual in society, and she refuses to allow the concept of gender and class to hinder her.
Bildungsroman was primarily viewed through male life progression, but feminist scholars have worked to counteract the male norm of bildungsroman by including female development. Experiences that deem a female narrative to be bildungsroman would be the female protagonist discovering how to manage living in a restrictive society. The novel's setting is the English society of the early 19th century, and with that time setting come specific restrictions women encountered during that time, such as the law of coverture, the lack of rights, and the restricted expectations placed on women. Jane Eyre does not specifically and directly deal with the restrictions of, for example coverture, but her character lives in a society where coverture exists, which inadvertently impacts social and cultural norms and expectations. Progression in the bildungsroman does not necessarily occur in a linear direction. Many narratives that employ bildungsroman do so through the protagonist's development of maturity, which is represented through the protagonist's experiences from childhood to adulthood; this progression is in conjunction with the novel's narrative technique set as an autobiography. Temporally, the beginning of the novel begins with Jane at age ten and ends with Jane at age thirty, but Jane's development of maturity goes beyond her age. For example, Jane's emotional intelligence grows through her friendship with Helen Burns as Jane experiences and processes the loss of her friendship with Helen.
Many times, the 19th-century female bildungsroman can be interpreted as the heroine's growth of self and education in the context of prospective marriage, especially when, in the context of 19th-century womanhood, a wife experiences new knowledge in the private sphere of her role. Jane develops knowledge and experience regarding a romantic journey before her almost marriage to Mr. Rochester; a physical, spiritual, and financial knowledge during her time with St. John; and lastly, with her marriage with Mr. Rochester at the end of the novel. Jane's search for excitement and understanding of life goes beyond her romantic journey. In the text, Jane's childhood beliefs about religion, as seen in her interactions with Mr. Brocklehurt, shift considerably in comparison to her friendship with Helen in Lowood as a child and in her marital and missionary rejection of St. John as an adult woman.
== Themes ==
=== Race ===
Throughout the novel there are frequent themes relating to ideas of ethnicity (specifically that of Bertha), which are a reflection of the society that the novel is set within. Mr Rochester claims to have been forced to take on a "mad" Creole wife, a woman who grew up in the West Indies, and who is thought to be of mixed-race descent. In the analysis of several scholars, Bertha plays the role of the racialised "other" through the shared belief that she chose to follow in the footsteps of her parents. Her apparent mental instability casts her as someone who is incapable of restraining herself, almost forced to submit to the different vices she is a victim of. Many writers of the period believed that one could develop mental instability or mental illnesses simply based on their race.
This means that those who were born of ethnicities associated with a darker complexion, or those who were not fully of European descent, were believed to be more mentally unstable than their white European counterparts were. According to American scholar Susan Meyer, in writing Jane Eyre, Brontë was responding to the "seemingly inevitable" analogy in 19th-century European texts which "[compared] white women with blacks in order to degrade both groups and assert the need for white male control". Bertha serves as an example of both the multiracial population and of a 'clean' European, as she is seemingly able to pass as a white woman for the most part, but also is hinted towards being of an 'impure' race since she does not come from a purely white or European lineage. The title that she is given by others of being a Creole woman leaves her a stranger where she is not black but is also not considered to be white enough to fit into higher society.
Unlike Bertha, Jane Eyre is thought of as being sound of mind before the reader is able to fully understand the character, simply because she is described as having a complexion that is pale and she has grown up in a European society rather than in an "animalistic" setting like Bertha. Jane is favoured heavily from the start of her interactions with Rochester, simply because like Rochester himself, she is deemed to be of a superior ethnic group than that of his first wife. While she still experiences some forms of repression throughout her life (the events of the Lowood Institution) none of them are as heavily taxing on her as that which is experienced by Bertha. Both women go through acts of suppression on behalf of the men in their lives, yet Jane is looked at with favour because of her supposed "beauty" that can be found in the colour of her skin. While both are characterised as falling outside of the normal feminine standards of this time, Jane is thought of as superior to Bertha because she demands respect and is able to use her talents as a governess, whereas Bertha is seen as a creature to be confined in the attic away from "polite" society.
Scholars have also noted the novel's overt references and allusions to slavery, arguably its North American iteration.
==== Wide Sargasso Sea ====
Jean Rhys intended her critically acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea as an account of the woman whom Rochester married and kept in his attic. The book won the notable WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. Rhys explores themes of dominance and dependence, especially in marriage, depicting the mutually painful relationship between a privileged English man and a Creole woman from Dominica made powerless on being duped and coerced by him and others. Both the man and the woman enter marriage under mistaken assumptions about the other partner. Her female lead marries Mr Rochester and deteriorates in England as "The Madwoman in the Attic". Rhys portrays this woman from a quite different perspective from the one in Jane Eyre.
=== Feminism ===
The idea of the equality of men and women emerged more strongly in the Victorian period in Britain, after works by earlier writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft. R. B. Martin described Jane Eyre as the first major feminist novel, "although there is not a hint in the book of any desire for political, legal, educational, or even intellectual equality between the sexes." This is illustrated in chapter 23, when Jane responds to Rochester's callous and indirect proposal:
Do you think I am an automaton? a machine without feelings?...Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart...I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,—as we are.
The novel "acted as a catalyst" to feminist criticism with the publication by S. Gilbert and S. Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the title of which alludes to Rochester's wife. The Brontës' fictions were cited by feminist critic Ellen Moers as prime examples of Female Gothic, exploring woman's entrapment within domestic space and subjection to patriarchal authority, and the transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restriction. Both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre explore this theme.
=== Social class ===
Throughout the novel, Jane undergoes various social class transitions, in response to her life's varying situations. As a child, she mixes with middle class people through the Reed family, though Jane is not at the same level of social class as the rest of the Reed family. While at Lowood, she experiences the life of children whose guardians can afford the school fees of "fifteen pounds per year" but nonetheless are "charity children" "because fifteen pounds is not enough for board and teaching", living in poor conditions, and later working there as an adult as a teacher on a salary of fifteen pounds. She has an opportunity to be a private governess, and in so doing double her salary, but her governess position makes her aware of her ambiguous social position as a governess to a child with a wealthy guardian. After Jane leaves Thornfield Hall, she is stripped of her class identity as she travels across the moors and arrives at Moor House. But Jane receives an inheritance which she shares with her new-found family, and this offers a different form of independence. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_Pulido_Valente | Hospital Pulido Valente | Hospital Pulido Valente is a hospital located in the civil parish of Lumiar, in the Portuguese municipality of Lisbon. The hospital is dedicated mainly to Pulmonary care medicine, being the biggest hospital of this speciality in Portugal.
== History ==
A plan by architectural landscaper Francisco Caldeira Cabral and an architectural project authored by Vasco Morais Palmeiro Regaleira was established in 1947. The DGEMN Direcção Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais (General Directorate for Buildings and National Monuments) was involved in public works between 25 April 1928 and 27 April 1953 resulting in the expansion, remodeling and adaption of the hospital.
As part of these plans, in 1951, construction began on a preventorium and re-organization of the operating block, by the Direcções dos Serviços de Construção e Conservação (Directorates for Construction and Conservation Services). Five years later, construction began on an experimental pavilion, that included 60 beds, in addition to conservation projects and work on the kitchen by the Directorates. The following year work began on the first wing of a new sanitorium, which continued in the next year. The completed work included the completion of a crematorium, the execution of the a major part of the civil construction work, remodeling and expansion of the Radiology Services and sanitarium's Surgery block. Work began on the Serviços Industriais (Industrial Service) block, that included laboratory, pharmacy services, and deposits; installation of the distribution channels for electricity to many of the buildings, including transformation post, along with accesses and exterior landscaping. In addition, the chapel in the sanitorium was refurbished.
In 1959, equipment and furniture were installed for the satellite unit of the sanitorium, by the Comissão para Aquisição de Mobiliário (Furniture Acquisition Commission).
In 1961, during phase two of the public project, saw expansion of pathological anatomy block, cardiology and operator rooms, improvements of the central heating and conservation work on the Lambert de Morais Pavilion, by the Serviços de Construção e de Conservação.
The extinction of the Pulmonary Emergency block, after a political decision in 1997, left the hospital without the possibility of using a specialized facility. The crisis in the Pulmonary Care Medicine Department, resulted in a reduction of staff and the exit of junior physicians caused by the restructuring in the National Health Care System in 2003.
On 24 August 2006, the building was undergoing heritage classification, under the terms of the transitional regime, under Article 1.1 of Decree 173/2006 (Diário da República, Série 1, 16), but it expired before the limits of Article 24, Decree 107/2001 (Diário da República, Série-1A, 209) on 8 September 2001. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Football_Group | City Football Group | City Football Group Limited (CFG) is a British-based holding company that administers association football clubs. The group is owned by three organisations, of which 81% is majority-owned by Abu Dhabi United Group, 18% by the American firm Silver Lake, and 1% by Chinese firms China Media Capital and CITIC Capital. The Abu Dhabi United Group is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and vice president of the United Arab Emirates.
The group derives its name from Manchester City, its flagship football club, and acts as the club's parent company. CFG also owns stakes in clubs in the United States, Australia, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay, China, Belgium, France, Italy and Turkey.
== History ==
Founded in 2013, City Football Group is the realisation of a business vision by former Barcelona Economy Vice President Ferran Soriano. Soriano first conceived of the ideal of a global football entity while at the Catalan club, beginning with the creation of Barca-branded overseas academies. Soriano contacted Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber about creating a Barcelona-branded MLS franchise, and the pair progressed as far as looking into several locations to place the team, but ultimately these plans were curtailed when Soriano and seven other members of Barcelona's board chose to resign in protest of then-President Joan Laporta's leadership.
After a four-year break from football management, Soriano was hired in late 2012 to replace Garry Cook as CEO of Manchester City following the latter's resignation. Soriano revived his ambitions of creating a global football business entity, beginning by resuming dialogues with Garber. Their discussions resulted in the announcement of New York City as MLS' 20th expansion side less than one year later in May 2013. In the process of managing the creation of a second football team City Football Group was created, designed to be the holding company to which both Manchester City and NYCFC belonged. CFG expanded at the start of 2014 when it partnered with Rugby league side Melbourne Storm to acquire a controlling stake in A-League franchise Melbourne Heart for 12 million Australian dollars. The club would subsequently be rebranded to Melbourne City, and their badge changed to a design similar to New York City's badge as part of CFG's early attempts to synergise their investments as a brand, and the club's colours would slowly be changed to sky blue with their red-and-white stripes retained as away colours.
In the weeks following their purchase of Melbourne City, CFG indicated their intentions of investing in women's football by rebranding Manchester City's female affiliate as Manchester City Women's Football Club, and successfully lobbied for the team to be added to the top tier of the FA Women's Super League, promising to invest in women's football on a scale never before seen in England. Later the following year, CFG would grow again with the purchase of a 20% in Japanese side Yokohama F Marinos, the traditional company team of group sponsor Nissan.
In April 2017, after a near three-year pause in its expansion, City Football Group announced the Uruguayan second-tier side Club Atletico Torque, who would later be renamed Montevideo City Torque. Several months later, Torque would be followed in by Spanish second division club Girona, a club with ownership links to incumbent Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola.
2019 saw the beginning of an increase in CFG's activity. The purchase of Chinese third division club Shenzhen Peng City (known as Sichuan Jiuniu F.C. at that time) was followed towards the end of the year by a second venture in Asia, when the group bought a controlling stake in Indian Super League franchise Mumbai City. 2020 similarly would see two club purchases in European football, first of Lommel of Belgium and then of Troyes of France, with both acquisitions occurring amid financial challenges faced by clubs across European football during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the same year they would also expand their business interests by taking sole control of US-based five-a-side football business Goals Soccer Centers, a business they had previously invested in, following the near-collapse of the company's owners due to an internal scandal.
In March 2022, Dutch second-tier side NAC Breda announced that following an investigation into the best bidders to sell the club's shares, the shareholders of the club had agreed to a sale to CFG. In response, the club's fans held protests both in Breda and also Manchester and Lommel. A month later, a group of shareholders with key voting rights announced that, in light of the backlash, they had elected instead to sell their shares to a local consortium.
In December 2025, due to uncertainty in Indian football, CFG divested their shares in Mumbai City, marking the end of their six-year stint as majority owners.
== Principles and interests ==
Since its inception, commenters have drawn parallels between City Football Group and Ferran Soriano's ideas spelled out in his 2011 book Goal: The Ball Doesn't Go In By Chance, in which Soriano remarked that the natural evolution of club brands was to expand globally, and that doing so could include the creation of franchise clubs in foreign leagues. His book continued to expound upon the notion that appealing to foreign fans who had no strongly-ingrained non-domestic allegiances was an important facet of business growth of sporting brands, and that giving those fans a domestic side to support alongside and affiliated to their European club could encourage more loyalty from them. This idea would be termed "Disneyfication" by Professor Simon Chadwick, an expert in Eurasian sport at Emlyon Business School and himself a confidant of Soriano.
=== Branding and player development ===
Early growth in the group focused on teams sharing a common identity and an associated brand, which aligned with the traditional identity of Manchester City and was viewed as a key way of helping the Manchester club build up its foreign support. This also matched Soriano's well-reported interest in placing City Football Group as a lynchpin in the opening-up of national markets in which association football has not previously been able to secure a strong presence, through the operation of and investment in franchises in those countries.
The first entity to join CFG was the newly created New York City, with the club announcing that they would sport the familiar sky blue kit with white shorts which Manchester City have traditionally been associated with, and the rebranded Melbourne City (originally named Melbourne Heart) similarly switched to sky blue after defeating challenges from fellow A-League club Sydney. With the purchase of Mumbai City and the renaming of Club Atletico Torque to Montevideo City Torque, five teams in the group feature the word "City" in their name, and similarly all five wear sky blue kits. NYCFC's circular badge design would also be mimicked by the majority of the clubs in CFG: Melbourne City, Manchester City, Mumbai City, Torque, Girona, Lommel, and Shenzhen Peng City all went on to adopt badges with the same basic style. Following from these changes, it was reported that the company's aim was to own a team on each continent with the "City" brand in its name. They have aggressively defended the City brand, issuing a cease and desist letter against the Chilean side Santiago City for using a club crest similar to Manchester City's.
Developments within Manchester City's academy would ultimately lead to a shift in strategy and focus of the group. Efforts to continue their success in bringing through youth talent led to the buying of promising players in the early teenage years, many of whom would go on to be sold for a large profit. This prompted Soriano and CFG's executive management to change their ambitions to put more emphasis on purchasing smaller clubs in strong existing football markets, with the intention of turning them into specialists centres for acquiring and training future stars from their local areas.
=== Collaboration between clubs ===
One of the core philosophies of City Football Group since its inception has been the mutual supporting of clubs through combined scouting and player sharing. While virtually all large European clubs operate an international scouting network, financial demands make it impossible to access local knowledge in foreign countries to the same extent as a domestic club could. CFG clubs therefore provide invaluable services to each other by using their own local scouting networks to share information on players between clubs. With their combined knowledge, the group claims to have extensive information on half a million players around the world. Possessing such a network then allows the local clubs to sign players early in their development, safe in the knowledge that the range of clubs CFG owns means that they can be placed at any of a number of sides as their development continues and the need for other challenges arises. The player-sharing element of the City network was first evident with the high-profile transfer of Aaron Mooy from Melbourne City to Manchester City – an early case of utilising the network to support revenue generation – with the 2020–21 season seeing Manchester City send 14 foreign-sourced youth players out on loan, predominantly to other group clubs.
In addition to internal player movements, CFG has also sought to foster movements of coaching staff within their network; among the most notable relocations are French manager Eric Mombaerts, who has worked with Yokohama F. Marinos, Melbourne City and Troyes, Manchester City Women manager Nick Cushing transferring to New York and English coach Liam Manning transferring from the NYCFC academy to take over management of Lommel's first team.
The second of CFG's core philosophies regarding club collaboration is on- and off-pitch technical information sharing. Based around the tactics of Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola – long coveted for the Manchester job by Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain after their experience working with him in Barcelona – all of City Football Group's clubs are given access to extensive databases of Manchester City's tactics and coaching methods, enabling them all to follow the group directive to use the same style of football, a style occasionally referred to as "the City Way". This synergy of tactical style extends beyond their first teams to the academies and women's sections. In addition to this, the clubs also share other information, such as medical, performance monitoring and player management.
=== Investment in women's football ===
Four of City Football Group's ten clubs sport women's teams, with Montevideo City Torque expected to launch a women's team in 2021 and New York City having previously held discussions about an affiliation with Sky Blue in 2014. In both Manchester and Melbourne, CFG (re)launched new women's sides in 2014 and 2015, promising to invest in women's football in unprecedent ways. In both cities, the women's teams would ultimately be given bespoke facilities which, in contrast to the standard for football clubs, shared training locations with their affiliated men's teams. Similarly, both cities would see returns for their investment, with Manchester City Women repeatedly finishing amongst the top two and winning a series of domestic trophies while Melbourne City's unprecedented investment in Australian women's football – an area which had previously been underfunded and largely forgotten in the country – earned the side plaudits for their forward-thinking and would see their female side crowned Grand Final winners four times in five seasons.
=== Esports ===
Looking to capitalise on the growth of esports, and for City Football Group to be seen as always being at the forefront of innovation, CFG made their first venture into digital gaming in June 2016 when they signed Kieran "Kez" Brown to represent Manchester City at FIFA tournaments and fan events, as well as to make digital content for their media profiles.
Over the following years, CFG expanded their esports footprint as most of their clubs signed players to represent them in FIFA tournaments, with most clubs keeping one PlayStation player and one Xbox player on their books to represent them at all times. By early 2021, CFG would have a total of 16 professional esports players across their various clubs. In 2021, Manchester City became the first CFG club to expand beyond FIFA when they signed Aiden "Threats" Mong to represent them in Fortnite tournaments. Unlike the other CFG teams, Manchester City would also go on to create separate esports teams in China and South Korea to compete in Asia-localised tournaments.
In addition to having their own esports players, CFG have also collaborated with existing teams. In 2019, Manchester City announced a partnership with FaZe Clan which would see the two run various esports competitions and merchandising lines, as well as allowing City's and FaZe's FIFA players to share facilities and train together. In 2022, CFG announced that it was sponsoring Blue United eFC, in a move which would see Blue United wear CFG-style sky blue shirts at competitive events.
== CFG-owned clubs ==
=== UEFA ===
Manchester City
Manchester City Women
Girona
Girona Femení
Palermo
Palermo Women
Troyes
Lommel
=== CONCACAF ===
New York City
New York City II
=== AFC ===
Melbourne City
Melbourne City Women
Yokohama F. Marinos
Shenzhen Peng City
=== CONMEBOL ===
Montevideo City Torque
Bahia
Bahia (Women)
=== Former ===
Mumbai City (2019–2025)
== CFG partner clubs ==
=== UEFA ===
Vannes
İstanbul Başakşehir
=== AFC ===
Geylang International
Al Jazira
=== CONMEBOL ===
Club Bolivar
=== Club Bolivar ===
It was announced on 12 January 2021 that Club Bolivar had become the first partner club for the group. Club Bolivar is the most successful Bolivian club, having won 30 domestic titles since it was founded in La Paz on 12 April 1925. The owner of Club Bolivar, Marcelo Claure, would go on to join the ownership group of New York City FC in September 2024, taking a 10% interest in the MLS club.
Honours after partnership :
División de Fútbol Profesional (2): 2022-A, 2024
Copa de la División Profesional (1): 2023
=== Vannes ===
It was announced on 17 February 2021 that French fourth tier side Vannes had become the latest partner club for the group. The two clubs were already linked after Vannes' President Maxime Ray had joined CFG to become a minority shareholder in Troyes as part of the 2020 purchase, though he agreed to have no operational role at Troyes as part of the takeover.
=== Geylang International ===
It was announced on 1 February 2023 that Singapore Premier League club Geylang International had become the first Southeast Asian partner club for the group. The agreement is set to be an initial, highly targeted collaboration between both entities with the potential to evolve into a broader, more comprehensive strategic partnership in the future.
=== İstanbul Başakşehir ===
It was revealed on 18 February 2024 that Turkish Süper Lig club İstanbul Başakşehir signed an agreement with the group in order to improve their football strategy, recruitment, scouting and coaching methodology.
=== Al Jazira ===
On September 9 2025 it was announced that the group would be collaborating with UAE Pro League club Al Jazira, an expansion upon existing consultation work with Al Jazira Academy. Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the majority owner of City Football Group, is the chairman of Al Jazira club dating back to before his initial takeover of Manchester City F.C.
== Businesses ==
=== Goals Soccer Centers ===
On 25 July 2017, City Football Group signed a joint venture partnership with Goals Soccer Centres, a 5-a-side football pitch operator, to invest capital into the US operations of the company in order to expand across North America. On 3 February 2020, CFG purchased the remaining 50% to take full ownership of the joint venture |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnastics_at_the_1992_Summer_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Women%27s_artistic_team_all-around | Gymnastics at the 1992 Summer Olympics – Women's artistic team all-around | These are the results of the women's artistic team all-around competition, one of six events for female competitors in artistic gymnastics at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. The compulsory and optional rounds took place on July 28 at the Palau Sant Jordi.
== Qualification ==
The top 12 teams at the 1991 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships earned places in the team all-around competition.
== Results ==
Tatiana Gutsu did not officially qualify for the individual all-around, and Rozalia Galiyeva did. However, coaches pulled Galiyeva out due to a knee injury and replaced her with Gutsu, who later won the all-around. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyderabad | Hyderabad | Hyderabad is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana. It occupies 650 km2 (250 sq mi) on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River, in the northern part of Southern India. With an average altitude of 536 m (1,759 ft), much of Hyderabad is situated on hilly terrain around artificial lakes, including the Hussain Sagar lake, predating the city's founding, in the north of the city centre. According to the 2011 census of India, Hyderabad is the fourth-most populous city in India with a population of 6.9 million residents within the city limits, and has a population of 9.7 million residents in the metropolitan region, making it the sixth-most populous metropolitan area in India.
The Qutb Shahi dynasty's Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah established Hyderabad in 1591 to extend the capital beyond the fortified Golconda. In 1687, the city was annexed by the Mughals. In 1724, Asaf Jah I, the Mughal viceroy, declared his sovereignty and founded the Asaf Jahi dynasty, also known as the Nizams. Hyderabad served as the imperial capital of the Asaf Jahis from 1769 to 1948. As the capital of the princely state of Hyderabad, the city housed the British Residency and cantonment until Indian independence in 1947. Hyderabad was annexed by the Indian Union in 1948 and continued as a capital of Hyderabad State from 1948 to 1956. After the introduction of the States Reorganisation Act of 1956, Hyderabad was made the capital of the newly formed Andhra Pradesh. In 2014, Andhra Pradesh was split to form the state of Telangana, and Hyderabad became the joint capital of the two states until 2024. Since 1956, the city has housed the Rashtrapati Nilayam, the winter office of the president of India.
Relics of the Qutb Shahi and Nizam eras remain visible today; the Charminar has come to symbolise the city. By the end of the early modern era, the Mughal Empire had declined in the Deccan, and the Nizam's patronage attracted men of letters from various parts of the world. A distinctive culture arose from the amalgamation of local and migrated artisans, with painting, handicraft, jewellery, literature, dialect and clothing prominent even today. For its cuisine, the city is listed as a creative city of gastronomy by UNESCO. The Telugu film industry based in the city is the highest-grossing film industry in India as of 2021.
Until the 19th century, Hyderabad was known for its pearl industry and was nicknamed the "City of Pearls", and was the only trading centre for Golconda diamonds in the world. Many of the city's historical and traditional bazaars remain open. Hyderabad's central location between the Deccan Plateau and the Western Ghats, and industrialisation throughout the 20th century attracted major Indian research, manufacturing, educational and financial institutions. Since the 1990s, the city has emerged as an Indian hub of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology and information technology. The formation of the special economic zones of Hardware Park and HITEC City, dedicated to information technology, has encouraged leading multinationals to set up operations in Hyderabad.
== History ==
=== Toponymy ===
The name Hyderabad means "Haydar's City" or "Lion City", from Haydar 'lion' and ābād 'city', after Caliph Ali Ibn Abi Talib, also known as Haydar because of his lion-like valour in battle. The city was originally called Baghnagar (city of gardens). The European travellers von Poser and Thévenot found both names in use in the 17th century.
A popular legend suggests that the founder of the city, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, named it Bhagya-nagar ("fortunate city") after Bhagmati, a local nautch (dancing girl) whom he married. She converted to Islam and adopted the title Hyder Mahal, the city being subsequently named Hyderabad in her honour.
In the year 1597, Hyderabad gained the epithet Farkhunda Bunyad (lit. 'Of Auspicious Foundation'). Following the Mughal conquest of Hyderabad, emperor Aurangzeb changed the epithet to Dar-ul-Jihad (lit. 'Abode of Holy War'), a title which appears on coins minted in the city during the reigns of Aurangzeb and Kam Bakhsh. The later Mughal emperor Shah Alam returned the city to its older epithet of Farkhunda Bunyad, and consequently Mughal coins of Shah Alam and Muhammad Shah feature this title as the city's mint-name.
=== Early and medieval history ===
The discovery of Megalithic burial sites and cairn circles in the suburbs of Hyderabad, in 1851 by Philip Meadows Taylor, a polymath in the service of the Nizam, had provided evidence that the region in which the city stands has been inhabited since the Stone Age. In 2008, Archaeologists excavating near the city have unearthed Iron Age sites that may date from 500 BCE. The region comprising modern Hyderabad and its surroundings was ruled by the Chalukya dynasty from 624 CE to 1075 CE. Following the dissolution of the Chalukya empire into four parts in the 11th century, Golconda—now part of Hyderabad—came under the control of the Kakatiya dynasty from 1158, whose seat of power was at Warangal—148 km (92 mi) northeast of modern Hyderabad. The Kakatiya ruler Ganapatideva (1199–1262) built a hilltop outpost—later known as Golconda Fort—to defend their western region.
The Kakatiya dynasty was reduced to a vassal of the Khalji dynasty in 1310 after its defeat by Sultan Alauddin Khalji of the Delhi Sultanate. This lasted until 1321 when the Kakatiya dynasty was annexed by Malik Kafur, Khalji's general. During this period, Khalji took the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which is said to have been mined from the Kollur Mines of Golconda, to Delhi. Muhammad bin Tughluq succeeded to the Delhi sultanate in 1325, bringing Warangal under the rule of the Tughlaq dynasty; Malik Maqbul Tilangani was appointed its governor. In 1336 the regional chieftains Musunuri Nayakas—who revolted against the Delhi sultanate in 1333—took Warangal under their direct control and declared it as their capital. In 1347 when Ala-ud-Din Bahman Shah, a governor under bin Tughluq, rebelled against Delhi and established the Bahmani Sultanate in the Deccan Plateau, with Gulbarga—200 km (124 mi) west of Hyderabad—as its capital, both the neighbouring rulers Musunuri Nayakas of Warangal and Bahmani Sultans of Gulbarga engaged in many wars until 1364–65 when a peace treaty was signed and the Musunuri Nayakas ceded Golconda Fort to the Bahmani Sultan. The Bahmani Sultans ruled the region until 1518 and were the first independent Muslim rulers of the Deccan.
In 1496 Sultan Quli was appointed as a Bahmani governor of Telangana. He rebuilt, expanded and fortified the old mud fort of Golconda and named the city "Muhammad Nagar". In 1518, he revolted against the Bahmani Sultanate and established the Qutb Shahi dynasty. The fifth Qutb Shahi sultan, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, established Hyderabad on the banks of the Musi River in 1591, to avoid water shortages experienced at Golconda. During his rule, he had the Charminar and Mecca Masjid built in the city. On 21 September 1687, the Golconda Sultanate came under the rule of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb after a year-long siege of the Golconda Fort. The annexed city "Hyderabad" was renamed Darul Jihad (House of War), whereas the main territories of the Golconda Sultanate were incorporated into the Mughal empire as the province Hyderabad Subah. Mughal rule in Hyderabad was administered by three main governors: Jan Sipar Khan (1688–1700), his son Rustam Dil Khan (1700–13) and Mubariz Khan (1713–24).
=== Modern history ===
In 1713, Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar appointed Mubariz Khan as Governor of Hyderabad. During his tenure, he fortified the city and controlled the internal and neighbouring threats. In 1714 Farrukhsiyar appointed Asaf Jah I as Viceroy of the Deccan—(administrator of six Mughal governorates) with the title Nizam-ul-Mulk (Administrator of the Realm). In 1721, he was appointed as Prime Minister of the Mughal Empire. His differences with the court nobles led him to resign from all the imperial responsibilities in 1723 and leave for Deccan. Under the influence of Asaf Jah I's opponents, Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah issued a decree to Mubariz Khan, to stop Asaf Jah I which resulted in the Battle of Shakar Kheda. In 1724, Asaf Jah I defeated Mubariz Khan to establish autonomy over the Deccan, named the region Hyderabad Deccan, and started what came to be known as the Asaf Jahi dynasty. Subsequent rulers retained the title Nizam ul-Mulk and were referred to as Asaf Jahi Nizams, or Nizams of Hyderabad. The death of Asaf Jah I in 1748 resulted in a period of political unrest as his sons and grandson—Nasir Jung (1748–1750), Muzaffar Jang (1750–1751) and Salabat Jung (1751–1762)—contended for the throne backed by opportunistic neighbouring states and colonial foreign forces. The accession of Asaf Jah II, who reigned from 1762 to 1803, ended the instability. In 1768 he signed the Treaty of Masulipatam—by which the East India Company in return for a fixed annual rent, got the right to control and collect the taxes at Coromandel Coast.
In 1769 Hyderabad city became the formal capital of the Asaf Jahi Nizams. In response to regular threats from Hyder Ali (Dalwai of Mysore), Baji Rao I (Peshwa of the Maratha Empire), and Basalath Jung (Asaf Jah II's elder brother, who was supported by French General the Marquis de Bussy-Castelnau), the Nizam signed a subsidiary alliance with the East India Company in 1798, allowing the British Indian Army to be stationed at Bolarum (modern Secunderabad) to protect the state's capital, for which the Nizams paid an annual maintenance to the British.
Until 1874 there were no modern industries in Hyderabad. With the introduction of railways in the 1880s, four factories were built to the south and east of Hussain Sagar lake, and during the early 20th century, Hyderabad was transformed into a modern city with the establishment of transport services, underground drainage, running water, electricity, telecommunications, universities, industries, and Begumpet Airport. The Nizams ruled the princely state of Hyderabad during the British Raj.
==== Post-Independence ====
After India gained independence, the Nizam declared his intention to remain independent rather than become part of the Indian Union or newly formed Dominion of Pakistan. The Hyderabad State Congress, with the support of the Indian National Congress and the Communist Party of India, began agitating against Nizam VII in 1948. On 17 September that year, the Indian Army took control of Hyderabad State after an invasion codenamed Operation Polo. With the defeat of his forces, Nizam VII capitulated to the Indian Union by signing an Instrument of Accession, which made him the Rajpramukh (Princely Governor) of the state until it was abolished on 31 October 1956.
Between 1946 and 1951, the Communist Party of India fomented the Telangana uprising against the feudal lords of the Telangana region. The Constitution of India, which became effective on 26 January 1950, made Hyderabad State one of the part B states of India, with Hyderabad city continuing to be the capital. In his 1955 report Thoughts on Linguistic States, B. R. Ambedkar, then chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, proposed designating the city of Hyderabad as the second capital of India because of its amenities and strategic central location.
On 1 November 1956 the states of India were reorganised by language. Hyderabad state was split into three parts, which were merged with neighbouring states to form Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The nine Telugu- and Urdu-speaking districts of Hyderabad State in the Telangana region were merged with the Telugu-speaking Andhra State to create Andhra Pradesh, with Hyderabad as its capital. Several protests, known collectively as the Telangana movement, attempted to invalidate the merger and demanded the creation of a new Telangana state. Major actions took place in 1969 and 1972, and a third began in 2010. On 30 July 2013 the government of India declared that part of Andhra Pradesh would be split off to form a new Telangana state and that Hyderabad city would be the capital city and part of Telangana, while the city would also remain the capital of Andhra Pradesh for no more than ten years. On 3 October 2013 the Union Cabinet approved the proposal, and in February 2014 both houses of Parliament passed the Telangana Bill. With the final assent of the President of India, Telangana state was formed on 2 June 2014.
== Geography ==
Hyderabad is 1,566 km (973 mi) south of Delhi, 699 km (434 mi) southeast of Mumbai, and 570 km (350 mi) north of Bangalore by road. It is situated in the southern part of Telangana in southeastern India, along the banks of the Musi River, a tributary of Krishna River located on the Deccan Plateau in the northern part of South India. Greater Hyderabad covers 650 km2 (250 sq mi), making it one of the largest metropolitan areas in India. With an average altitude of 536 m (1,759 ft), Hyderabad lies on predominantly sloping terrain of grey and pink granite, dotted with small hills, the highest being Banjara Hills at 672 m (2,205 ft). The city has numerous lakes sometime referred to as sagar, meaning "sea". Examples include artificial lakes created by dams on the Musi, such as Hussain Sagar (built-in 1562 near the city centre), Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar. As of 1996, the city had 140 lakes and 834 water tanks (ponds).
=== Climate ===
Hyderabad has a tropical wet and dry climate (Köppen Aw) bordering on a hot semi-arid climate (Köppen BSh). The annual mean temperature is 26.6 °C (79.9 °F); monthly mean temperatures are 21–33 °C (70–91 °F). Summers (March–June) are hot and dry, with average highs in the mid-to-high 30s Celsius; maximum temperatures often exceed 40 °C (104 °F) between April and June. The coolest temperatures occur in December and January when the lowest temperature occasionally dips to 10 °C (50 °F). May is the hottest month when daily temperatures range from 26–39 °C (79–102 °F); December, the coldest, has temperatures varying from 14.5–28 °C (58.1–82.4 °F).
Heavy rain from the south-west summer monsoon falls between June and October, supplying Hyderabad with most of its mean annual rainfall. Since records began in November 1891, the heaviest rainfall recorded in a 24-hour period was 241.5 mm (10 in) on 24 August 2000. The highest temperature ever recorded was 45.5 °C (114 °F) on 2 June 1966, and the lowest was 6.1 °C (43 °F) on 8 January 1946. The city receives 2,731 hours of sunshine per year; maximum daily sunlight exposure occurs in February.
Hyderabad has been ranked 21st best "National Clean Air City" (under Category 1 >10L Population cities) in India according to 'Swachh Vayu Survekshan 2024 Results'
=== Conservation ===
Hyderabad's lakes and the sloping terrain of its low-lying hills provide habitat for an assortment of flora and fauna. As of 2016, the tree cover is 1.7% of the total city area, a decrease from 2.7% in 1996. The forest region in and around the city encompasses areas of ecological and biological importance, which are preserved in the form of national parks, zoos, mini-zoos and a wildlife sanctuary. Nehru Zoological Park, the city's largest zoo, is the first in India to have a lion and tiger safari park. Hyderabad has three national parks (Mrugavani National Park, Mahavir Harina Vanasthali National Park and Kasu Brahmananda Reddy National Park), and the Manjira Wildlife Sanctuary is about 50 km (31 mi) from the city.
The other environmental reserves of Hyderabad are Kotla Vijayabhaskara Reddy Botanical Gardens, Ameenpur Lake, Shamirpet Lake, Hussain Sagar, Fox Sagar Lake, Mir Alam Tank and Patancheru Lake, which is home to regional birds and attracts seasonal migratory birds from different parts of the world. Organisations engaged in environmental and wildlife preservation include the Telangana Forest Department, Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the Animal Welfare Board of India, the Blue Cross of Hyderabad and the University of Hyderabad.
== Administration ==
=== Common capital status ===
According to the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 part 2 Section 5: "(1) On and from the appointed day, Hyderabad in the existing State of Andhra Pradesh, shall be the common capital of the State of Telangana and the State of Andhra Pradesh for such period not exceeding ten years. (2) After the expiry of the period referred to in subsection (1), Hyderabad shall be the capital of the State of Telangana and there shall be a new capital for the State of Andhra Pradesh."
The same sections also define that the common capital includes the existing area designated as the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation under the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Act, 1955. As stipulated in sections 3 and 18(1) of the Reorganisation Act, city MLAs are members of the Telangana state assembly.
=== Local government ===
The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) oversees the civic infrastructure of the city, there are six administrative zones of GHMC: South Zone–(Charminar), East Zone–(L. B. Nagar), West Zone–(Serilingampally), North Zone–(Kukatpally), Northeast Zone–(Secunderabad) and Central Zone–(Khairatabad); these zones consist of 30 "circles", which together encompass 150 municipal wards. Each ward is represented by a corporator, elected by popular vote, as of 2020 the city has 7,400,000 voters of which 3,850,000 are male and 3,500,000 are female. The corporators elect the Mayor, who is the titular head of GHMC; executive powers rest with the Municipal Commissioner, appointed by the state government. The GHMC carries out the city's infrastructural work such as building and maintenance of roads and drains, town planning including construction regulation, maintenance of municipal markets and parks, solid waste management, the issuing of birth and death certificates, the issuing of trade licences, collection of property tax, and community welfare services such as mother and child healthcare, and pre-school and non-formal education. The GHMC was formed in April 2007 by merging the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) with 12 municipalities of the Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy and Medak districts covering a total area of 650 km2 (250 sq mi). The Secunderabad Cantonment Board is a civic administration agency overseeing an area of 40.1 km2 (15.5 sq mi), where there are several military camps. The Osmania University campus is administered independently by the university authority. Appointed in February 2021, Gadwal Vijayalakshmi of Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) is serving as the mayor of GHMC.
In Hyderabad police jurisdiction is divided into three commissionerates: Hyderabad (established in 1847 AD, the oldest police commissionerate in India), Cyberabad, and Rachakonda, each headed by a commissioner of police, who are Indian Police Service (IPS) officers. The Hyderabad police is a division of the Telangana Police, under the state Home Ministry.
The jurisdictions of the city's administrative agencies are, in ascending order of size: the Hyderabad Police area, Hyderabad district, the GHMC area ("Hyderabad city"), and the area under the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA). The HMDA is an apolitical urban planning agency that covers the GHMC and its suburbs, extending to 54 mandals in five districts encircling the city. It coordinates the development activities of GHMC and suburban municipalities and manages the administration of bodies such as the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWSSB).
Hyderabad is the seat of the Government of Telangana, Government of Andhra Pradesh and the President of India's winter retreat Rashtrapati Nilayam, as well as the Telangana High Court and various local government agencies. The Lower City Civil Court and the Metropolitan Criminal Court are under the jurisdiction of the High Court. The GHMC area contains 24 State Legislative Assembly constituencies, which form five constituencies of the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Parliament of India).
=== Municipal finance ===
According to audited financial statements published on the CityFinance Portal of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation reported total revenue receipts of ₹38.83 billion (US$468 million) and total expenditure of ₹31.22 billion (US$376 million) for the financial year 2022–23. The data is sourced from audited financial statements published by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
=== Utility services ===
The HMWSSB (Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply & Sewage Board) regulates rainwater harvesting, sewerage services, and water supply. In 2005, the HMWSSB started operating a 116 km-long (72 mi) water supply pipeline from Nagarjuna Sagar Dam to meet increasing demand. The Telangana Southern Power Distribution Company Limited (TSPDCL) manages electricity supply. As of 2014, there were 15 fire stations in the city, operated by the Telangana State Disaster and Fire Response Department. The government-owned India Post has five head post offices and many sub-post offices in Hyderabad, which are complemented by private courier services.
=== Pollution control ===
Hyderabad produces around 4,500 tonnes of solid waste daily, which is transported from collection units in Imlibun, Yousufguda and Lower Tank Bund to the dumpsite in Jawaharnagar. Disposal is managed by the Integrated Solid Waste Management project which was started by the GHMC in 2010. Rapid urbanisation and increased economic activity has led to increased industrial waste, air, noise and water pollution, which is regulated by the Telangana Pollution Control Board (TPCB). The contribution of different sources to air pollution in 2006 was: 20–50% from vehicles, 40–70% from a combination of vehicle discharge and road dust, 10–30% from industrial discharges and 3–10% from the burning of household rubbish. Deaths resulting from atmospheric particulate matter are estimated at 1,700–3,000 each year. The city's "VIP areas", the Assembly building, Secretariat, and Telangana chief minister's office, have particularly low air quality index ratings, suffering from high levels of PM2.5's. Ground water around Hyderabad, which has a hardness of up to 1000 ppm, around three times higher than is desirable, is the main source of drinking water but the increasing population and consequent increase in demand has led to a decline in not only ground water but also river and lake levels. This shortage is further exacerbated by inadequately treated effluent discharged from industrial treatment plants polluting the water sources of the city.
=== Healthcare ===
The Commissionerate of Health and Family Welfare is responsible for planning, implementation and monitoring of all facilities related to health and preventive services. As of 2010–11, the city had 50 government hospitals, 300 private and charity hospitals and 194 nursing homes providing around 12,000 hospital beds, fewer than half the required 25,000. For every 10,000 people in the city, there are 17.6 hospital beds, 9 specialist doctors, 14 nurses and 6 physicians. The city has about 4,000 individual clinics. Private clinics are preferred by many residents because of the distance to, poor quality of care at and long waiting times in government facilities, despite the high proportion of the city's residents being covered by government health insurance: 24% according to a National Family Health Survey in 2005. As of 2012, many new private hospitals of various sizes were opened or being built. Hyderabad has outpatient and inpatient facilities that use Unani, homoeopathic and Ayurvedic treatments.
In the 2005 National Family Health Survey, it was reported that the city's total fertility rate is 1.8, which is below the replacement rate. Only 61% of children had been provided with all basic vaccines (BCG, measles and full courses of polio and DPT), fewer than in all other surveyed cities except Meerut. The infant mortality rate was 35 per 1,000 live births, and the mortality rate for children under five was 41 per 1,000 live births. The survey also reported that a third of women and a quarter of men are overweight or obese, 49% of children below 5 years are anaemic, and up to 20% of children are underweight, while more than 2% of women and 3% of men suffer from diabetes.
== Demographics ==
When the GHMC was created in 2007, the area occupied by the municipality increased from 175 km2 (68 sq mi) to 650 km2 (250 sq mi). Consequently, the population increased by 87%, from 3,637,483 as of 2001 census to 6,809,970 as of 2011 census, 24% of which are migrants from elsewhere in India, making Hyderabad the nation's fourth most populous city. As of 2011, the population density is 18,480/km2 (47,900/sq mi) and the Hyderabad urban agglomeration had a population of 7,749,334 making it the sixth most populous urban agglomeration in the country. as of 2011 census, there are 3,500,802 male and 3,309,168 female citizens—a sex ratio of 945 females per 1000 males, higher than the national average of 926 per 1000. Among children aged 0–6 years, 373,794 are boys and 352,022 are girls—a ratio of 942 per 1000. Literacy stands at 83% (male 86%; female 80%), higher than the national average of 74.04%. The socio-economic strata consist of 20% upper class, 50% middle class and 30% working class.
=== Ethnicity ===
Referred to as "Hyderabadi", the residents of Hyderabad are predominantly Telugu and Urdu speaking people, with minority Arab, Marathi, Marwari, and Pathan communities.
Hyderabadi Muslims are a unique community who owe much of their history, language, cuisine, and culture to Hyderabad, and the various dynasties who previously ruled. Hadhrami Arabs, African Arabs, Armenians, Abyssinians, Iranians, Pathans and Turkish people were present before 1948; these communities, of which the Hadhrami Arabs are the largest, declined after Hyderabad State became part of the Indian Union, as they lost the patronage of the Asaf Jahi Nizams.
=== Religion ===
Hindus are in the majority. Muslims form a very large minority and are present throughout the city and predominate in and around the Old City of Hyderabad. There are also Christian, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and Parsi communities and iconic churches, mosques and temples. According to the 2011 census, the religious make-up of Greater Hyderabad was: Hindus (64.9%), Muslims (30.1%), Christians (2.8%), Jains (0.3%), Sikhs (0.3%) and Buddhists (0.1%); 1.5% did not state any religion.
=== Languages ===
Telugu and Urdu are both official languages of the city, and most Hyderabadis are bilingual. The Telugu dialect spoken in Hyderabad is called Telangana Mandalika, and the Urdu spoken is called Deccani. English is a "Secondary official language" is pervasive in business and administration, and it is an important medium of instruction in education and publications.
=== Slums ===
As of 2012, in the greater metropolitan area, 13% of the population live below the poverty line. According to a 2012 report submitted by GHMC to the World Bank, Hyderabad has 1,476 slums with a total population of 1.7 million, of whom 66% live in 985 slums in the "core" of the city (the part that formed Hyderabad before the April 2007 expansion) and the remaining 34% live in 491 suburban tenements. About 22% of the slum-dwelling households had migrated from different parts of India in the last decade of the 20th century, and 63% claimed to have lived in the slums for more than 10 years. Overall literacy in the slums is 60–80% and female literacy is 52–73%. A third of the slums have basic service connections, and the remainder depend on general public services provided by the government. There are 405 government schools, 267 government-aided schools, 175 private schools, and 528 community halls in the slum areas. According to a 2008 survey by the Centre for Good Governance, 87.6% of the slum-dwelling households are nuclear families, 18% are very poor, with an income up to ₹20,000 (US$240) per annum, 73% live below the poverty line (a standard poverty line recognised by the Andhra Pradesh Government is ₹24,000 (US$280) per annum), 27% of the chief wage earners (CWE) are casual labour and 38% of the CWE are illiterate. About 3.7% of the slum children aged 5–14 do not go to school and 3.2% work as child labour, of whom 64% are boys and 36% are girls. The largest employers of child labour are street shops and construction sites. Among the working children, 35% are engaged in hazardous jobs.
== Cityscape ==
=== Neighbourhoods ===
The historic city established by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah on the southern side of the Musi River forms the heritage region of Hyderabad called the Purana Shahar (Old City), while the "New City" encompasses the urbanised area on the northern banks. The two are connected by many bridges across the river, the oldest of which is Purana Pul—("old bridge") built in 1578 AD. Hyderabad is twinned with neighbouring Secunderabad, to which it is connected by Hussain Sagar.
Many historic and heritage sites lie in south central Hyderabad, such as the Charminar, Mecca Masjid, Salar Jung Museum, Nizam Museum, Telangana High Court, Falaknuma Palace, Chowmahalla Palace and the traditional retail corridor comprising the Pearl Market, Laad Bazaar and Madina Circle. North of the river are hospitals, colleges, major railway stations and business areas such as Begum Bazaar, Koti, Abids, Sultan Bazar and Moazzam Jahi Market, along with administrative and recreational establishments such as the Telangana Secretariat, the India Government Mint, the Telangana Legislature, the Public Gardens, Shahi Masjid, the Nizam Club, the Ravindra Bharathi, the State Museum, the Birla Temple and the Birla Planetarium.
North of central Hyderabad lies Hussain Sagar, Tank Bund Road, Rani Gunj and the Secunderabad railway station. Most of the city's parks and recreational centres, such as Sanjeevaiah Park, Indira Park, Lumbini Park, NTR Gardens, the Buddha statue and Tankbund Park are located here. In the northwest part of the city there are upscale residential and commercial areas such as Banjara Hills, Jubilee Hills, Begumpet, Khairtabad, Tolichowki, Jagannath Temple and Miyapur. The northern end contains industrial areas such as Kukatpally, Sanathnagar, Moosapet, Balanagar, Patancheru and Chanda Nagar. The northeast end is dotted with residential areas such as Malkajgiri, Neredmet, A. S. Rao Nagar and Uppal. In the eastern part of the city lie many defence research centres and Ramoji Film City. The west and southwest regions of the city, dubbed "Cyberabad", have grown rapidly since the 1990s and are home to several information technology and bio-pharmaceutical companies. Numerous skyscrapers and high-rise buildings have been constructed in key economic corridors such as Gachibowli, the Financial District, HITEC City, and Kukatpally. The rapid vertical development in these localities has propelled Hyderabad to become the city with the second-highest number of skyscrapers in India. Several landmarks such as the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Osman Sagar, Himayath Sagar and Kasu Brahmananda Reddy National Park are also located in the west and southwest regions of the city.
=== Landmarks ===
Heritage buildings constructed during the Qutb Shahi and Nizam eras showcase Indo-Islamic architecture influenced by Medieval, Mughal and European styles. After the 1908 flooding of the Musi River, the city was expanded and civic monuments constructed, particularly during the rule of Mir Osman Ali Khan (the VIIth Nizam), whose patronage of architecture led to him being referred to as the maker of modern Hyderabad. In 2012, the government of India declared Hyderabad the first "Best heritage city of India".
Qutb Shahi architecture of the 16th and early 17th centuries followed classical Persian architecture featuring domes and colossal arches. The oldest surviving Qutb Shahi structure in Hyderabad is the ruins of the Golconda Fort built in the 16th century. Most of the historical bazaars that still exist were constructed on the street north of Charminar towards the fort. The Charminar has become an icon of the city; located in the centre of old Hyderabad, it is a square structure with sides 20 m (66 ft) long and four grand arches each facing a road. At each corner stands a 56 m (184 ft)-high minaret. The Charminar, Golconda Fort and the Qutb Shahi tombs are considered to be monuments of national importance in India; in 2010 the Indian government proposed that the sites be listed for UNESCO World Heritage status.
Among the oldest surviving examples of Nizam architecture in Hyderabad is the Chowmahalla Palace, which was the seat of royal power. It showcases a diverse array of architectural styles, from the Baroque Harem to its Neoclassical royal court. The other palaces include Falaknuma Palace (inspired by the style of Andrea Palladio), Purani Haveli, King Kothi Palace and Bella Vista Palace all of which were built at the peak of Nizam rule in the 19th century. During Mir Osman Ali Khan's rule, European styles, along with Indo-Islamic, became prominent. These styles are reflected in the Indo-Saracenic style of architecture seen in many civic monuments such as the Hyderabad High Court, Osmania Hospital, City College and the Kacheguda railway station, all designed by Vincent Esch. Other landmark structures of the city constructed during his regin are the State Central Library, the Telangana Legislature, the State Archaeology Museum, Jubilee Hall, and Hyderabad railway station. Other landmarks of note are Paigah Palace, Asman Garh Palace, Basheer Bagh Palace, Errum Manzil and the Spanish Mosque, all constructed by the Paigah family.
== Economy ==
Recent estimates of the economy of Hyderabad's metropolitan area have ranged from US$40-US$74 billion (PPP GDP), and have ranked it either fifth- or sixth- most productive metro area of India. Hyderabad is the largest contributor to the gross domestic product (GDP), tax and other revenues, of Telangana, and the sixth largest deposit centre and fourth largest credit centre nationwide, as ranked by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in June 2012. Its per capita annual income in 2011 was ₹44,300 (US$520). As of 2006, the largest employers in the city were the state government (113,098 employees) and central government (85,155). According to a 2005 survey, 77% of males and 19% of females in the city were employed. The service industry remains dominant in the city, and 90% of the employed workforce is engaged in this sector.
Hyderabad's role in the pearl trade has given it the name "City of Pearls" and up until the 18th century, the city was the only global trading centre for diamonds known as Golconda diamonds. Industrialisation began under the Nizams in the late 19th century, helped by railway expansion that connected the city with major ports. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Indian enterprises, such as Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), Nuclear Fuel Complex (NFC), National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC), Bharat Electronics (BEL), Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH) and Andhra Bank (AB) were established in the city. The city is home to Hyderabad Securities formerly known as Hyderabad Stock Exchange (HSE), and houses the regional office of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). In 2013, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) facility in Hyderabad was forecast to provide operations and transactions services to BSE-Mumbai by the end of 2014. The growth of the financial services sector has helped Hyderabad evolve from a traditional manufacturing city to a cosmopolitan industrial service centre. Since the 1990s, the growth of information technology (IT), IT-enabled services (ITES), insurance and financial institutions has expanded the service sector, and these primary economic activities have boosted the ancillary sectors of trade and commerce, transport, storage, communication, real estate and retail. As of 2021, the IT exports from Hyderabad were ₹ 1,45,522 crore (US$19.66 billion), the city houses 1500 IT and TES companies that provide 628,615 jobs.
Hyderabad's commercial markets are divided into four sectors: central business districts, sub-central business centres, neighbourhood business centres and local business centres. Many traditional and historic bazaars are located throughout the city, Laad Bazaar being the prominent among all is popular for selling a variety of traditional and cultural antique wares, along with gems and pearls.
The establishment of Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Limited (IDPL), a public sector undertaking, in 1961 was followed over the decades by many national and global companies opening manufacturing and research facilities in the city. As of 2010, the city manufactured one third of India's bulk drugs and 16% of biotechnology products, contributing to its reputation as "India's pharmaceutical capital" and the "Genome Valley of India". Hyderabad is a global centre of information technology, for which it is known as Cyberabad (Cyber City). As of 2013, it contributed 15% of India's and 98% of Andhra Pradesh's exports in IT and ITES sectors and 22% of NASSCOM's total membership is from the city. The development of HITEC City, a township with extensive technological infrastructure, prompted multinational companies to establish facilities in Hyderabad. The city is home to more than 1300 IT and ITES firms that provide employment for 407,000 individuals; the global conglomerates include Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, IBM, Yahoo!, Oracle Corporation, Dell, Facebook, CISCO, and major Indian firms including Tech Mahindra, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Polaris, Cyient and Wipro. In 2009 the World Bank Group ranked the city as the second best Indian city for doing business. The city and its suburbs contain the highest number of special economic zones of any Indian city.
The Automotive industry in Hyderabad is also emerging and making it an automobile hub. Automobile companies including as Hyundai, Hyderabad Allwyn, Praga Tools, HMT Bearings, Ordnance Factory Medak, Deccan Auto and Mahindra & Mahindra have units in the Hyderabad economic zone. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Maruti Suzuki and Triton Energy will invest in Hyderabad.
Like the rest of India, Hyderabad has a large informal economy that employs 30% of the labour force. According to a survey published in 2007, it had 40–50,000 street vendors, and their numbers were increasing. Among the street vendors, 84% are male and 16% female, and four fifths are "stationary vendors" operating from a fixed pitch, often with their own stall. Most are financed through personal savings; only 8% borrow from moneylenders. Vendor earnings vary from ₹50 (59¢ US) to ₹800 (US$9.50) per day. Other unorganised economic sectors include dairy, poultry farming, brick manufacturing, casual labour and domestic help. Those involved in the informal economy constitute a major portion of the urban poor.
In 2024, the World Economic Forum established a Centre for Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), in the city. Which it describes as a hub to leverage the latest technology in advancing the life sciences and health sectors.
== Culture ==
Hyderabad emerged as the foremost centre of culture in India with the decline of the Mughal Empire. After the fall of Delhi in 1857, the migration of performing artists to the city particularly from the north and west of the Indian subcontinent, under the patronage of the Nizam, enriched the cultural milieu. This migration resulted in a mingling of North and South Indian languages, cultures and religions, which has since led to a co-existence of Hindu and Muslim traditions, for which the city has become noted. A further consequence of this north–south mix is that both Telugu and Urdu are official languages of Telangana. The mixing of religions has resulted in many festivals being celebrated in Hyderabad such as Ganesh Chaturthi, Diwali and Bonalu of Hindu tradition and Eid ul-Fitr and Eid al-Adha by Muslims.
Traditional Hyderabadi garb reveals a mix of Muslim and Hindu influences with men wearing sherwani and kurta–paijama and women wearing khara dupatta and salwar kameez. Most Muslim women wear burqa and hijab outdoors. In addition to the traditional Hindu and Muslim garments, increasing exposure to western cultures has led to a rise in the wearing of western style clothing among youths.
=== Literature ===
In the past, Qutb Shahi rulers and Asaf Jahi Nizams attracted artists, architects, and men of letters from different parts of the world through patronage. The resulting ethnic mix popularised cultural events such as mushairas (poetic symposia), Qawwali (devotional songs) and Dholak ke Geet (traditional folk songs). The Qutb Shahi dynasty particularly encouraged the growth of Deccani literature leading to works such as the Deccani Masnavi and Diwan poetry, which are among the earliest available manuscripts in Urdu. Lazzat Un Nisa, a book compiled in the 15th century at Qutb Shahi courts, contains erotic paintings with diagrams for secret medicines and stimulants in the eastern form of ancient sexual arts. The reign of the Asaf Jahi Nizams saw many literary reforms and the introduction of Urdu as a language of court, administration and education. In 1824, a collection of Urdu Ghazal poetry, named Gulzar-e-Mahlaqa, authored by Mah Laqa Bai—the first female Urdu poet to produce a Diwan—was published in Hyderabad. Hyderabad has continued with these traditions in its annual Hyderabad Literary Festival, held since 2010, showcasing the city's literary and cultural creativity. Organisations engaged in the advancement of literature include the Sahitya Akademi, the Urdu Academy, the Telugu Academy, the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language, the Comparative Literature Association of India, and the Andhra Saraswata Parishad. Literary development is further aided by state institutions such as the State Central Library, the largest public library in the state which was established in 1891, and other major libraries including the Sri Krishna Devaraya Andhra Bhasha Nilayam, the British Library and the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram.
=== Music and films ===
South Indian music and dances such as the Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam styles are popular in the Deccan region. As a result of their cultural policies, North Indian music and dance gained popularity during the rule of the Mughals and Nizams, and it was also during their reign that it became a tradition among the nobility to associate themselves with tawaif (courtesans). These courtesans were revered as the epitome of etiquette and culture and were appointed to teach singing, poetry, and classical dance to many children of the aristocracy. This gave rise to certain styles of court music, dance and poetry. Besides western and Indian popular music genres such as filmi music, the residents of Hyderabad play city-based marfa music, Dholak ke Geet (household songs based on local folklore), and qawwali, especially at weddings, festivals and other celebratory events. The state government organises the Golconda Music and Dance Festival, the Taramati Music Festival and the Premavathi Dance Festival to further encourage the development of music.
Although the city is not particularly noted for theatre and drama, the state government promotes theatre with multiple programmes and festivals in such venues as the Ravindra Bharathi, Shilpakala Vedika, Lalithakala Thoranam and Lamakaan. Although not a purely music-oriented event, Numaish, a popular annual exhibition of local and national consumer products, does feature some musical performances.
The city is home to the Telugu film industry, popularly known as Tollywood—as of 2021 it is the highest-grossing Indian film industry. In the 1970s, Deccani language realist films by globally acclaimed Shyam Benegal started a movement of coming of age art films in India, which came to be known as parallel cinema. The Deccani film industry ("Dollywood") produces films in the local Hyderabadi dialect, which have gained regional popularity since 2005. The city has hosted international film festivals such as the International Children's Film Festival and the Hyderabad International Film Festival. In 2005, Guinness World Records declared Ramoji Film City to be the world's largest film studio.
=== Art and handicrafts ===
The region is well known for its Golconda and Hyderabad painting styles which are branches of Deccan painting. Developed during the 16th century, the Golconda style is a native style blending foreign techniques and bears some similarity to the Vijayanagara paintings of neighbouring Mysore. A significant use of luminous gold and white colours is generally found in the Golconda style. The Hyderabad style originated in the 17th century under the Nizams. Highly influenced by Mughal painting, this style makes use of bright colours and mostly depicts regional landscape, culture, costumes, and jewellery.
Although not a centre for handicrafts itself, the patronage of the arts by the Mughals and Nizams attracted artisans from the region to Hyderabad. Such crafts include: Wootz steel, Filigree work, Bidriware, a metalwork handicraft from neighbouring Karnataka, which was popularised during the 18th century and has since been granted a Geographical Indication (GI) tag under the auspices of the WTO act; and Zari and Zardozi, embroidery works on textile that involve making elaborate designs using gold, silver and other metal threads. Chintz—a glazed calico textiles was originated in Golconda in 16th century. and another example of a handicraft drawn to Hyderabad is Kalamkari, a hand-painted or block-printed cotton textile that comes from cities in Andhra Pradesh. This craft is distinguished in having both a Hindu style, known as Srikalahasti and entirely done by hand, and an Islamic style, known as Machilipatnam which uses both hand and block techniques. Examples of Hyderabad's arts and crafts are housed in various museums including the Salar Jung Museum (housing "one of the largest one-man-collections in the world"), the Telangana State Archaeology Museum, the Nizam Museum, the City Museum and the Birla Science Museum.
=== Cuisine ===
Hyderabadi cuisine comprises a broad repertoire of rice, wheat and meat dishes and the skilled use of various spices. Hyderabad is listed by UNESCO as a creative city of gastronomy. Hyderabadi biryani and Hyderabadi haleem, with their blend of Mughlai and Arab cuisines, carry the national Geographical Indications tag. Hyderabadi cuisine is influenced to some extent by French, but more by Arabic, Turkish, Iranian and native Telugu and Marathwada cuisines. Popular native dishes include nihari, chakna, baghara baingan and the desserts qubani ka meetha, double ka meetha and kaddu ki kheer (a sweet porridge made with sweet gourd).
== Media ==
One of Hyderabad's earliest newspapers, The Deccan Times, was established in the 1780s. Major Telugu dailies published in Hyderabad are Eenadu, Sakshi and Namasthe Telangana, while major English papers are The Times of India, The Hindu and Deccan Chronicle. The major Urdu papers include The Siasat Daily, The Munsif Daily and Etemaad. The Secunderabad Cantonment Board established the first radio station in Hyderabad State around 1919. Deccan Radio was the first radio public broadcast station in the city starting on 3 February 1935, with FM broadcasting beginning in 2000. The available channels in Hyderabad include All India Radio, Radio Mirchi, Radio City, Red FM, Big FM and Fever FM.
Television broadcasting in Hyderabad began in 1974 with the launch of Doordarshan, the government of India's public service broadcaster, which transmits two free-to-air terrestrial television channels and one satellite channel. Private satellite channels started in July 1992 with the launch of Star TV. Satellite TV channels are accessible via cable subscription, direct-broadcast satellite services or internet-based television. Hyderabad's first dial-up internet access became available in the early 1990s and was limited to software development companies. The first public internet access service began in 1995, with the first private sector internet service provider (ISP) starting operations in 1998. In 2015, high-speed public WiFi was introduced in parts of the city.
== Education ==
Public and private schools in Hyderabad are governed by the Board of Secondary Education, Telangana or Central Board of Secondary Education, depending on the affiliation and follow a "10+2+3" plan. About two-thirds of pupils attend privately run institutions. Languages of instruction include English, Hindi, Telugu and Urdu. Depending on the institution, students are required to sit the Secondary School Certificate or the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education. After completing secondary education, students enrol in schools or junior colleges with higher secondary facilities. Admission to professional graduation colleges in Hyderabad, many of which are affiliated with either Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad (JNTUH) or Osmania University (OU), is through the Engineering Agricultural and Medical Common Entrance Test (EAM-CET).
There are 13 universities in Hyderabad: six private universities, two deemed universities, six state universities, and three central universities. The central universities are the University of Hyderabad (Hyderabad Central University, HCU), Maulana Azad National Urdu University and the English and Foreign Languages University. Osmania University, established in 1918, was the first university in Hyderabad and as of 2012 is India's second most popular institution for international students. The Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, established in 1982, is the first distance-learning open university in India.
Hyderabad is home to a number of centres specialising in particular fields such as biomedical sciences, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, such as the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) and National Institute of Nutrition (NIN). Hyderabad has five major medical schools—Osmania Medical College, Gandhi Medical College, Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences, Deccan College of Medical Sciences and Shadan Institute of Medical Sciences—and many affiliated teaching hospitals. An All India Institute of Medical Sciences has been sanctioned in the outskirts of Hyderabad. The Government Nizamia Tibbi College is a college of Unani medicine. Hyderabad is also the headquarters of the Indian Heart Association, a non-profit foundation for cardiovascular education.
Notable central institutions in Hyderabad include the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad (NLU), Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), National Geophysical Research Institute, National Institute of Rural Development, Indian Air Force Academy, National Industrial Security Academy, Central Institute of Tool Design, Institute of Public Enterprise, Administrative Staff College of India and the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy. Technical and research institutions include the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH), Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani – Hyderabad (BITS Pilani), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Hyderabad (TIFR-H) and Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IIT-H) as well as agricultural engineering institutes such as the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Acharya N. G. Ranga Agricultural University.Hyderabad also has schools of fashion design including NIFT Hyderabad, management schools including the Indian School of Business, ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education, and the National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM) offering undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
== Sports ==
At the professional level, the city has hosted national and international sports events such as the 2002 National Games of India, the 2003 Afro-Asian Games, the 2004 AP Tourism Hyderabad Open women's tennis tournament, the 2007 Military World Games, the 2009 World Badminton Championships and the 2009 IBSF World Snooker Championship. The city hosts several venues suitable for professional competition such as the Swarnandhra Pradesh Sports Complex for field hockey, the G. M. C. Balayogi Stadium in Gachibowli for athletics and football, and for cricket, the Lal Bahadur Shastri Stadium and Rajiv Gandhi International Cricket Stadium, home ground of the Hyderabad Cricket Association. Hyderabad has hosted many international cricket matches, including matches in the 1987 and the 1996 ICC Cricket World Cups. The Hyderabad cricket team competes in the first-class cricket tournament Ranji Trophy, List A Vijay Hazare Trophy and Twenty20 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy. Hyderabad is home to the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Sunrisers Hyderabad, champion of 2016 Indian Premier League. Previous franchise Deccan Chargers was the champion of 2009 Indian Premier League. The former professional football club of the city Hyderabad FC competed in Indian Super League (ISL) and were the champions of 2021–22 Indian Super League.
During British rule, Secunderabad became a well-known sporting centre and many race courses, parade grounds and polo fields were built. Many elite clubs formed by the Nizams and the British such as the Secunderabad Club, the Nizam Club and the Hyderabad Race Club, which is known for its horse racing especially the annual Deccan derby, still exist. In more recent times, motorsports has become popular with the Andhra Pradesh Motor Sports Club organising popular events such as the Deccan 1⁄4 Mile Drag, TSD Rallies and 4x4 off-road rallying. The 2023 Hyderabad ePrix, at the Hyderabad Street Circuit, was the first FIA Formula E World Championship race in India.
== Transport ==
As of 2018, the most commonly used forms of medium-distance transport in Hyderabad include government-owned services such as light railways and buses, as well as privately operated taxis and auto rickshaws. These altogether serve 3.5 million passengers daily. Bus services operate from the Mahatma Gandhi Bus Station in the city centre with a fleet of 3800 buses serving 3.3 million passengers.
Hyderabad Metro, a light-rail rapid transit system, was inaugurated in November 2017. As of 2020 it is a 3-track network spread upon 69.2 km (43 mi) with 57 stations and is the third-largest metro rail network in India after Delhi Metro and Namma Metro. Hyderabad's Multi-Modal Transport System (MMTS), is a three-line suburban rail service with 121 services carrying 180,000 passengers daily. Complementing these government services are minibus routes operated by Setwin (Society for Employment Promotion & Training in Twin Cities). Intercity rail services operate from Hyderabad; the main, and largest, station is Secunderabad railway station, which serves as Indian Railways' South Central Railway zone headquarters and a hub for both buses and MMTS light rail services connecting Secunderabad and Hyderabad. Other major railway stations in Hyderabad are Hyderabad Deccan, Kacheguda, Begumpet, Malkajgiri and Lingampalli.
As of 2018, there are over 5.3 million vehicles operating in the city, of which 4.3 million are two-wheelers and 1.04 million four-wheelers. The large number of vehicles coupled with relatively low road coverage—roads occupy only 9.5% of the total city area—has led to widespread traffic congestion especially since 80% of passengers and 60% of freight are transported by road. The Inner Ring Road, the Outer Ring Road, the Hyderabad Elevated Expressway, the longest flyover in India, and various interchanges, overpasses and underpasses were built to ease congestion. Maximum speed limits within the city are 50 km/h (31 mph) for two-wheelers and cars, 35 km/h (22 mph) for auto rickshaws and 40 km/h (25 mph) for light commercial vehicles and buses.
Hyderabad sits at the junction of three National Highways linking it to six other states: NH-44 runs 3,963 km (2,462 mi) from Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, in the north to Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, in the south; NH-65, runs 841 km (523 mi) east-west between Machilipatnam, Andhra Pradesh connects Hyderabad and Suryapet with Pune, Maharashtra; 334 km (208 mi) NH-163 links Hyderabad and Bhopalpatnam, Chhattisgarh; 270 km (168 mi) NH-765 links Hyderabad to Srisailam, Andhra Pradesh. Five state highways, 225 km (140 mi) SH-1 links Hyderabad, to Ramagundam, SH-2, SH-4, and SH-6, either start from, or pass through, Hyderabad.
Air traffic was previously handled via Begumpet Airport established in 1930, but this was replaced by Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA) (IATA: HYD, ICAO: VOHS) in 2008, capable of handling 25 million passengers and 150,000 metric-tonnes of cargo per annum. In 2020, Airports Council International, an autonomous body representing the world's airports, judged RGIA the Best Airport in Environment and Ambience and the Best Airport by Size and Region in the 15-25 million passenger category.
== Sister cities ==
Hyderabad is twinned with the following cities:
Brisbane, Australia
Ipswich, Australia
Uberaba, Brazil
Qingdao, China
Indianapolis, United States
Montgomery County, Maryland, United States
Riverside, California, United States |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Agreement | Potsdam Agreement | The Potsdam Agreement (German: Potsdamer Abkommen) was the agreement among three of the Allies of World War II: the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union after the war ended in Europe that was signed on 1 August 1945 and published the following day. A product of the Potsdam Conference, it concerned the military occupation and reconstruction of Germany, its border, and the entire European Theatre of War territory. It also addressed Germany's demilitarisation, reparations, the prosecution of war criminals and the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from various parts of Europe. France was not invited to the conference but formally remained one of the powers occupying Germany.
Executed as a communiqué, the agreement was not a peace treaty according to international law, although it created accomplished facts. It was superseded by the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany signed on 12 September 1990.
As De Gaulle had not been invited to the Conference, the French resisted implementing the Potsdam Agreement within their occupation zone. In particular, the French refused to resettle any expelled Germans from the east. Moreover, the French did not accept any obligation to abide by the Potsdam Agreement in the proceedings of the Allied Control Council; in particular resisting all proposals to establish common policies and institutions across Germany as a whole (for example, France separated Saarland from Germany to establish its protectorate on 17 December 1947), and anything that they feared might lead to the emergence of an eventual unified German government.
== Overview ==
After the end of World War II in Europe (1939–1945), and the decisions of the earlier Tehran, Casablanca and Yalta Conferences, the Allies assumed supreme authority over Germany by the Berlin Declaration of June 5, 1945.
At the Potsdam Conference the Western Allies were presented with Stalin's fait accompli awarding Soviet-occupied Poland the river Oder as its western border, placing the entire Soviet Occupation Zone east of it (with the exception of the Kaliningrad exclave), including Pomerania, most of East Prussia, and Danzig, under Polish administration. The German population who had not fled were expelled and their properties acquisitioned by the state. President Truman and the British delegations protested at these actions.
The Three Power Conference took place from 17 July to 2 August 1945, in which they adopted the Protocol of the Proceedings, August 1, 1945, signed at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam. The signatories were General Secretary Joseph Stalin, President Harry S. Truman, and Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who, as a result of the British general election of 1945, had replaced Winston Churchill as the UK's representative. The three powers also agreed to invite France and China to participate as members of the Council of Foreign Ministers established to oversee the agreement. The Provisional Government of the French Republic accepted the invitation on August 7, with the key reservation that it would not accept a priori any commitment to the eventual reconstitution of a central government in Germany.
James F. Byrnes wrote "we specifically refrained from promising to support at the German Peace Conference any particular line as the western frontier of Poland". The Berlin Protocol declared: "The three heads of government reaffirm their opinion that the final delimitation of the western frontier of Poland should await the [final] peace settlement." Byrnes continues: "In the light of this history, it is difficult to credit with good faith any person who asserts that Poland's western boundary was fixed by the conferences, or that there was a promise that it would be established at some particular place." Despite this, the Oder–Neisse Line was set as Poland's provisional (and therefore theoretically subject to change) western frontier in Article 8 of the Agreement but was not finalized as Poland's permanent western frontier until the 1990 German–Polish Border Treaty, having been recognized by East Germany in 1950 (in the Treaty of Zgorzelec) and acquiesced to by West Germany in 1970 (in the Treaty of Moscow (1970) and the Treaty of Warsaw (1970)).
== Protocol ==
In the Potsdam Agreement (Berlin Conference) the Allies (UK, USSR, US) agreed on the following matters:
Establishment of a Council of Foreign Ministers, also including France and China; tasked the preparation of a peace settlement for Germany, to be accepted by the Government of Germany once a government adequate for the purpose had been established.
See the London Conference of Foreign Ministers and the Moscow Conference which took place later in 1945.
The principles to govern the treatment of Germany in the initial control period.
See European Advisory Commission and Allied Control Council.
A. Political principles.
Post-war Germany to be divided into four Occupation Zones under the control of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States and France; with the Commanders-in-chief of each country's forces exercising sovereign authority over matters within their own zones, while exercising authority jointly through the Allied Control Council for 'Germany as a whole'.
Democratization. Treatment of Germany as a single unit. Disarmament and Demilitarization. Elimination of all Nazi influence.
B. Economic principles.
Reduction or destruction of all civilian heavy industry with war potential, such as shipbuilding, machine production and chemical factories. Restructuring of German economy towards agriculture and light industry.
Reparations from Germany.
This section covered reparation claims of the USSR from the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. The section also agreed that 10% of the industrial capacity of the western zones unnecessary for the German peace economy should be transferred to the Soviet Union within two years. The Soviet Union withdrew its previous objections to French membership of the Allied Reparations Commission, which had been established in Moscow following the Yalta Conference.
Disposal of the German Navy and merchant marine.
All but thirty submarines to be sunk and the rest of the German Navy was to be divided equally between the three powers.
The German merchant marine was to be divided equally between the three powers, and they would distribute some of those ships to the other Allies. But until the end of the war with the Empire of Japan all the ships would remain under the authority of the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board and the United Maritime Authority.
City of Königsberg and the adjacent area (then East Prussia, now Kaliningrad Oblast).
The United States and the United Kingdom declared that they would support the transfer of Königsberg and the adjacent area to the Soviet Union at the peace conference.
War criminals
This was a short paragraph and covered the creation of the London Charter and the subsequent Nuremberg trials:
The Three Governments have taken note of the discussions which have been proceeding in recent weeks in London between British, United States, Soviet and French representatives with a view to reaching agreement on the methods of trial of those major war criminals whose crimes under the Moscow Declaration of October 1943 have no particular geographical localization. The Three Governments reaffirm their intention to bring these criminals to swift and sure justice. They hope that the negotiations in London will result in speedy agreement being reached for this purpose, and they regard it as a matter of great importance that the trial of these major criminals should begin at the earliest possible date. The first list of defendants will be published before 1st September.
Austria:
The government of Austria was to be decided after British and American forces entered Vienna, and that Austria should not pay any reparations.
Poland
There should be a Provisional Government of National Unity recognised by all three powers, and that those Poles who were serving in British Army formations should be free to return to Poland. The provisional western border should be the Oder–Neisse line, with territories to the east of this excluded from the Soviet Occupation zone and placed under Polish and Soviet civil administration. Poland would receive former German territories in the north and west, but the final delimitation of the western frontier of Poland should await the peace settlement; which eventually took place as the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany in 1990.
Conclusion on peace treaties and admission to the United Nations organization.
See Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers which took place later in 1945.
It was noted that Italy had fought on the side of the Allies and was making good progress towards establishment of a democratic government and institutions and that after the peace treaty the three Allies would support an application from a democratic Italian government for membership of the United Nations. Further,
[t]he three Governments have also charged the Council of Foreign Ministers with the task of preparing peace treaties for Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary and Romania. The conclusion of Peace Treaties with recognized democratic governments in these States will also enable the three Governments to support applications from them for membership of the United Nations. The three Governments agree to examine each separately in the near future in the light of the conditions then prevailing, the establishment of diplomatic relations with Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary to the extent possible prior to the conclusion of peace treaties with those countries.
The details were discussed later that year at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers and the treaties were signed in 1947 at the Paris Peace Conference.
By that time the governments of Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary were Communist.
Territorial Trusteeship
Italian former colonies would be decided in connection with the preparation of a peace treaty for Italy. Like most of the other former European Axis powers the Italian peace treaty was signed at the 1947 Paris Peace Conference.
Revised Allied Control Commission procedure in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary
Now that hostilities in Europe were at an end the Western Allies should have a greater input into the Control Commissions of Central and Eastern Europe, the Annex to this agreement included detailed changes to the workings of the Hungarian Control Commission.
Orderly transfer of German Populations
The Three Governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.
"German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland" refers to Germans living within the 1937 boundaries of Poland up to the Curzon Line going East. In theory, that German ethnic population could have been expelled to the Polish temporarily administered territories of Silesia, Farther Pomerania, East Prussia and eastern Brandenburg.
Because Allied-occupied Germany was under great strain, the Czechoslovak government, the Polish provisional government and the control council in Hungary were asked to submit an estimate of the time and rate at which further transfers could be carried out having regard to the present situation in Germany and suspend further expulsions until these estimates were integrated into plans for an equitable distribution of these "removed" Germans among the several zones of occupation.
Oil equipment in Romania
Iran
Allied troops were to withdraw immediately from Tehran and that further stages of the withdrawal of troops from Iran should be considered at the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers to be held in London in September 1945.
The international zone of Tangier.
The city of Tangier and the area around it should remain international and discussed further.
The Black Sea straits
The Montreux Convention should be revised and that this should be discussed with the Turkish government.
International inland waterways
European inland transport conference
Directives to the military commanders on allied control council for Germany
Use of Allied property for satellite reparations or war trophies
These were detailed in Annex II.
Military Talks
Annex I
Annex II
Moreover, towards concluding the Pacific Theatre of War, the Potsdam Conference issued the Potsdam Declaration, the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender (26 July 1945) wherein the Western Allies (UK, US, USSR) and the Nationalist China of General Chiang Kai-shek asked Japan to surrender or be destroyed.
== Aftermath ==
Already during the Potsdam Conference, on 30 July 1945, the Allied Control Council was constituted in Berlin to execute the Allied resolutions (the "Four Ds"):
Denazification of the German society to eradicate Nazi influence
Demilitarization of the former Wehrmacht forces and the German arms industry; however, the circumstances of the Cold War soon led to Germany's Wiederbewaffnung including the re-establishment of both the Bundeswehr and the National People's Army
Democratization, including the formation of political parties and trade unions, freedom of speech, of the press and religion
Decentralization resulting in the re-establishment of German federalism, along with disassemblement as part of the industrial plans for Germany. Dismantling was stopped in West Germany in 1951 according to the Truman Doctrine, whereafter East Germany had to cope with the impact alone.
=== Territorial changes ===
The northern half of the German province of East Prussia, occupied by the Red Army during its East Prussian Offensive followed by its evacuation in winter 1945, had already been incorporated into Soviet territory as the Kaliningrad Oblast. The Western Allies promised to support the annexation of the territory north of the Braunsberg–Goldap line when a Final German Peace Treaty was held.
The Allies had acknowledged the legitimacy of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity, which was about to form a Soviet satellite state. Urged by Stalin, the UK and the US gave in to put the German territories east of the Oder–Neisse line from the Baltic coast west of Świnoujście up to the Czechoslovak border "under Polish administration"; allegedly confusing the Lusatian Neisse and the Glatzer Neisse rivers. The proposal of an Oder–Bober–Queis line was rejected by the Soviet delegation. The cession included the former Free City of Danzig and the seaport of Stettin on the mouth of the Oder River (Szczecin Lagoon), vital for the Upper Silesian Industrial Region.
Post-war, 'Germany as a whole' would consist solely of aggregate territories of the respective zones of occupation. As all former German territories east of the Oder–Neisse line were excluded from the Soviet Occupation Zone, they were consequently excluded from 'Germany as a whole'.
=== Expulsions ===
In the course of the proceedings, and after the German state killed around 5-6 million Polish citizens during the war, Polish communists had begun to suppress the German population west of the Bóbr river to underline their demand for a border on the Lusatian Neisse. The Allied resolution on the "orderly transfer" of German population became the legitimation of the expulsion of Germans from the nebulous parts of Central Europe, if they had not already fled from the advancing Red Army.
The expulsion of ethnic Germans by the Poles concerned, in addition to Germans within areas behind the 1937 Polish border in the West (such as in most of the old Prussian province of West Prussia), the territories placed "under Polish administration" pending a Final German Peace Treaty, i.e. southern East Prussia (Masuria), Farther Pomerania, the New March region of the former Province of Brandenburg, the districts of the Grenzmark Posen-West Prussia, Lower Silesia and those parts of Upper Silesia that had remained with Germany after the 1921 Upper Silesia plebiscite. It further affected the German minority living within the territory of the former Second Polish Republic in Greater Poland, eastern Upper Silesia, Chełmno Land and the Polish Corridor with Danzig.
The Germans in Czechoslovakia (34% of the population of the territory of what is now the Czech Republic), known as Sudeten Germans but also Carpathian Germans, were expelled from the Sudetenland region where they formed a majority, from linguistic enclaves in central Bohemia and Moravia, as well as from the city of Prague.
Though the Potsdam Agreement referred only to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, expulsions also occurred in Romania, where the Transylvanian Saxons were deported and their property seized, and in Yugoslavia. In the Soviet territories, Germans were expelled from northern East Prussia (Oblast Kaliningrad) but also from the adjacent Lithuanian Klaipėda Region and other lands settled by Baltic Germans. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502 | MOS Technology 6502 | The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small team led by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology and was launched in September 1975. The design team had formerly worked at Motorola on the Motorola 6800 project; the 6502 is essentially a simplified, less expensive and faster version of that design using depletion-load NMOS technology that made using the microchip in computers much cheaper.
When it was introduced, the 6502 was the least expensive microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin. It initially sold for less than one-sixth the cost of competing designs from larger companies, such as the 6800 or Intel 8080. Its introduction caused rapid decreases in pricing across the entire processor market. Along with the Zilog Z80, it sparked a series of projects that resulted in the home computer revolution of the early 1980s.
Home video game consoles and home computers of the 1970s through the early 1990s, such as the Atari 2600, Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Atari Lynx, BBC Micro and others, use the 6502 or variations of the basic design. Soon after the 6502's introduction, MOS Technology was purchased outright by Commodore International, who continued to sell the microprocessor and licenses to other manufacturers. In the early days of the 6502, it was second-sourced by Rockwell and Synertek, and later licensed to other companies.
In 1981, the Western Design Center started development of a CMOS version, the 65C02. This continues to be widely used in embedded systems, with estimated production volumes in the hundreds of millions.
== History and use ==
=== Genesis at Motorola ===
Motorola started the 6800 microprocessor project in 1971 with Tom Bennett as the main architect. Bennett hired Chuck Peddle in 1973 to do architectural support work on the 6800 family products already in progress. Bennett already was at work on what became the 6800. "He hired me," Peddle says of Bennett, "to do the architectural support work for the product he'd already started." … Peddle says. "Motorola tried to kill it several times. Without Bennett, the 6800 would not have happened, and a lot of the industry would not have happened, either." Peddle contributed in many areas, including the design of the 6850 ACIA (serial interface).
Peddle would accompany Motorola salespeople on customer visits, and found that customers were put off by the high cost of the microprocessor chips. At the same time, these visits invariably resulted in the engineers he presented to producing lists of required instructions that were much smaller than "all these fancy instructions" that had been included in the 6800. Peddle and other team members started outlining the design of an improved feature, reduced-size microprocessor. At that time, Motorola's new semiconductor fabrication facility in Austin, Texas, was having difficulty producing MOS chips, and mid-1974 was the beginning of a year-long recession in the semiconductor industry. Also, many of the Mesa, Arizona employees were displeased with the upcoming relocation to Austin.
Motorola's Semiconductor Products Division management showed no interest in Peddle's low-cost microprocessor proposal. Eventually, Peddle was given an official letter telling him to stop working on the system. Peddle responded to the order by informing Motorola that the letter represented an official declaration of "project abandonment", and as such, the intellectual property he had developed to that point was now his. The 6502 was designed by many of the same engineers that had designed the Motorola 6800 microprocessor family.
In a November 1975 interview, Motorola's Chairman, Bob Galvin, ultimately agreed that Peddle's concept was a good one and that the division missed an opportunity, "We did not choose the right leaders in the Semiconductor Products division." The division was reorganized and the management replaced. The new group vice president John Welty said, "The semiconductor sales organization lost its sensitivity to customer needs and couldn't make speedy decisions."
=== MOS Technology ===
Peddle began looking outside Motorola for a source of funding for this new project. He initially approached Mostek CEO L. J. Sevin, but was declined. Sevin later admitted this was because he was afraid Motorola would sue them.
While Peddle was visiting Ford Motor Company on one of his sales trips, Bob Johnson, later head of Ford's engine automation division, mentioned that their former colleague John Paivinen had moved to General Instrument and taught himself semiconductor design. Paivinen then formed MOS Technology in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania in 1969 with two other executives from General Instrument, Mort Jaffe and Don McLaughlin. Allen-Bradley, a supplier of electronic components and industrial controls, acquired a majority interest in 1970. The company designed and fabricated custom ICs for customers and had developed a line of calculator chips.
After the Mostek efforts fell through, Peddle approached Paivinen, who "immediately got it". On 19 August 1974, Chuck Peddle, Bill Mensch, Rod Orgill, Harry Bawcom, Ray Hirt, Terry Holdt, and Wil Mathys left Motorola to join MOS. Mike Janes joined later. Of the seventeen chip designers and layout people on the 6800 team, eight left. The goal of the team was to design and produce a low-cost microprocessor for embedded applications and to target as wide as possible a customer base. This would be possible only if the microprocessor was low cost, and the team set the price goal for volume purchases at $5. Mensch later stated the goal was not the processor price itself, but to create a set of chips that could sell at $20 to compete with the recently introduced Intel 4040 that sold for $29 in a similar complete chipset.
Chips are produced by printing multiple copies of the chip design on the surface of a wafer, a thin disk of highly pure silicon. Smaller chips can be printed in greater numbers on the same wafer, decreasing their relative price. Additionally, wafers always include some number of tiny physical defects that are scattered across the surface. Any chip printed in that location will fail and has to be discarded. Smaller chips mean any single copy is less likely to be printed on a defect. For both of these reasons, the cost of the final product is strongly dependent on the size of the chip design.
The original 6800 chips were intended to be 180 by 180 mils (4.6 mm × 4.6 mm), but layout was completed at 212 by 212 mils (5.4 mm × 5.4 mm), or an area of 29.0 mm2. For the new design, the cost goal demanded a size goal of 153 by 168 mils (3.9 mm × 4.3 mm), or an area of 16.6 mm2, roughly half that of the 6800. Several new techniques would be needed to hit this goal.
=== Moving to NMOS ===
Two significant advances arrived in the market just as the 6502 was being designed that provided significant cost reductions. The first was the move to depletion-load NMOS. The 6800 used an early NMOS process, enhancement mode, that required three supply voltages. One of the 6800's headlining features was an onboard voltage doubler that allowed a single +5 V supply be used for +5, −5 and +12 V internally, as opposed to other chips of the era like the Intel 8080 that required three separate supply pins. While this feature reduced the complexity of the power supply and pin layout, it still required separate power line to the various gates on the chip, driving up complexity and size. By moving to the new depletion-load design, a single +5 V supply was all that was needed, eliminating all of this complexity.
A further advantage was that depletion-load designs used less power while switching, thus running cooler and allowing higher operating speeds. Another practical offshoot is that the clock signal for earlier CPUs had to be strong enough to survive all the dissipation as it traveled through the circuits, which almost always required a separate external chip that could supply a powerful signal. With the reduced power requirements of depletion-load design, the clock could be moved onto the chip, simplifying the overall computer design. These changes greatly reduced complexity and the cost of implementing a complete system.
A wider change taking place in the industry was the introduction of projection masking. Previously, chips were patterned onto the surface of the wafer by placing a mask on the surface of the wafer and then shining a bright light on it. The masks often picked up tiny bits of dirt or photoresist as they were lifted off the chip, causing flaws in those locations on any subsequent masking. With complex designs like CPUs, 5 or 6 such masking steps would be used, and the chance that at least one of these steps would introduce a flaw was very high. In most cases, 90% of such designs were flawed, resulting in a 10% yield. The price of the working examples had to cover the production cost of the 90% that were thrown away.
In 1973, Perkin-Elmer introduced the Micralign system, which projected an image of the mask on the wafer instead of requiring direct contact. Masks no longer picked up dirt from the wafers and lasted on the order of 100,000 uses rather than 10. This eliminated step-to-step failures and the high flaw rates formerly seen on complex designs. Yields on CPUs immediately jumped from 10% to 60 or 70%. This meant the price of the CPU declined roughly the same amount and the microprocessor suddenly became a commodity device.
MOS Technology's existing fabrication lines were based on the older PMOS technology, they had not yet begun to work with NMOS when the team arrived. Paivinen promised to have an NMOS line up and running in time to begin the production of the new CPU. He delivered on the promise, the new line was ready by June 1975.
=== Design notes ===
Chuck Peddle, Rod Orgill, and Wil Mathys designed the initial architecture of the new processors. A September 1975 article in EDN magazine gives this summary of the design:
The MOS Technology 650X family represents a conscious attempt of eight former Motorola employees who worked on the development of the 6800 system to put out a part that would replace and outperform the 6800, yet undersell it. With the benefit of hindsight gained on the 6800 project, the MOS Technology team headed by Chuck Peddle, made the following architectural changes in the Motorola CPU…
The main change in terms of chip size was the elimination of the tri-state drivers from the address bus outputs. A three-state bus has states for 1, 0 and high impedance. The last state is used to allow other devices to access the bus, and is typically used for multiprocessing, or more commonly in these roles, for direct memory access (DMA). While useful, this feature is expensive in terms of on-chip circuitry. The 6502 simply removed this feature, in keeping with its design as an inexpensive controller being used for specific tasks and communicating with simple devices. Peddle suggested that anyone who required this style of access could implement it with a 74158.
The next major difference was to simplify the registers. To start with, one of the two accumulators was removed. General-purpose registers like accumulators have to be accessed by many parts of the instruction decoder, and thus require significant amounts of wiring to move data to and from their storage. Two accumulators makes many coding tasks easier but costs the chip design itself significant complexity. Further savings were made by reducing the stack register from 16 to 8 bits, meaning that the stack could only be 256 bytes long, which was enough for its intended role as a microcontroller.
The 16-bit IX index register was split in two, becoming X and Y. More importantly, the style of access changed. In the 6800, IX held a 16-bit address which was offset by an 8-bit number stored with the instruction and added to the address. In the 6502 (and most other contemporary designs), the 16-bit base address was stored in the instruction, and the 8-bit X or Y was added to it.
Finally, the instruction set was simplified, simplifying the decoder and control logic. Of the original 72 instructions in the 6800, 56 were implemented. Among those removed were instructions that operated between the 6800's two accumulators, and several branch instructions inspired by the PDP-11.
The chip's high-level design had to be turned into drawings of transistors and interconnects. At MOS Technology, the layout was a very manual process done with colored pencils and vellum paper. The layout consisted of thousands of polygon shapes on six different drawings; one for each layer of the fabrication process. Given the size limits, the entire chip design had to be constantly considered. Mensch and Paivinen worked on the instruction decoder while Mensch, Peddle and Orgill worked on the ALU and registers. A further advance, developed at a party, was a way to share some of the internal wiring to allow the ALU to be reduced in size.
Despite their best efforts, the final design ended up being larger than the original target. The first 6502 chips were 168 by 183 mils (4.3 mm × 4.6 mm), for an area of 19.8 mm2. The original version of the processor had no rotate right (ROR) capability, so the instruction was omitted from the original documentation. The next iteration of the design shrank the chip and added the rotate right capability, and ROR was included in revised documentation.
=== Introducing the 6501 and 6502 ===
MOS would introduce two microprocessors based on the same underlying design: the 6501 would plug into the same socket as the Motorola 6800, while the 6502 re-arranged the pinout to support an on-chip clock oscillator. Both would work with other support chips designed for the 6800. They would not run 6800 software because they had a different instruction set, different registers, and mostly different addressing modes. Rod Orgill was responsible for the 6501 design; he had assisted John Buchanan at Motorola on the 6800. Bill Mensch did the 6502; he was the designer of the 6820 PIA at Motorola. Harry Bawcom, Mike Janes and Sydney-Anne Holt helped with the layout.
MOS Technology's microprocessor introduction was different from the traditional months-long product launch. The first run of a new integrated circuit is normally used for internal testing and shared with select customers as engineering samples. These chips often have minor design defects that will be corrected before production begins. Chuck Peddle's goal was to sell the first run 6501 and 6502 chips to the attendees at the WESCON trade show in San Francisco beginning on September 16, 1975. Peddle was a very effective spokesman and the MOS Technology microprocessors were extensively covered in the trade press. One of the earliest was a full-page story on the MCS6501 and MCS6502 microprocessors in the July 24, 1975 issue of Electronics magazine. Stories also ran in EE Times (August 24, 1975), EDN (September 20, 1975), Electronic News (November 3, 1975), Byte (November 1975) and Microcomputer Digest (November 1975). Advertisements for the 6501 appeared in several publications the first week of August 1975. The 6501 would be for sale at WESCON for $20 each. In September 1975, the advertisements included both the 6501 and the 6502 microprocessors. The 6502 would cost only $25 (equivalent to $150 in 2025).
When MOS Technology arrived at Wescon, they found that exhibitors were not permitted to sell anything on the show floor. They rented the MacArthur Suite at the St. Francis Hotel and directed customers there to purchase the processors. At the suite, the processors were stored in large jars to imply that the chips were in production and readily available. The customers did not know the bottom half of each jar contained non-functional chips. The chips were $20 and $25 while the documentation package was an additional $10. Users were encouraged to make photocopies of the documents, an inexpensive way for MOS Technology to distribute product information. The preliminary data sheets listed just 55 instructions and excluded the Rotate Right (ROR) instruction, which was not supported on these early chips. The reviews in Byte and EDN noted the lack of the ROR instruction. The next revision of the layout fixed this problem and the May 1976 datasheet listed 56 instructions. Peddle wanted every interested engineer and hobbyist to have access to the chips and documentation, whereas other semiconductor companies only wanted to deal with "serious" customers. For example, Signetics was introducing the 2650 microprocessor and its advertisements asked readers to write for information on their company letterhead.
=== Motorola lawsuit ===
The 6501/6502 introduction in print and at Wescon was a success. The press coverage got Motorola's attention, precipitating pricing adjustments and lawsuits. In October 1975, Motorola reduced the price of a single 6800 microprocessor from $175 to $69. The $300 system design kit was reduced to $150 and it now came with a printed circuit board. On November 3, 1975, Motorola sought an injunction in Federal Court to stop MOS Technology from making and selling microprocessor products. They also filed a lawsuit claiming patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. Motorola claimed that seven former employees joined MOS Technology to create that company's microprocessor products.
Motorola was a billion-dollar company with a plausible case and expensive lawyers. On October 30, 1974, Motorola had filed numerous patent applications on the microprocessor family and was granted twenty-five patents. The first was in June 1976 and the second was to Bill Mensch on July 6, 1976, for the 6820 PIA chip layout. These patents covered the 6800 bus and how the peripheral chips interfaced with the microprocessor. Motorola began making transistors in 1950 and had a portfolio of semiconductor patents. Allen-Bradley decided not to fight this case and sold their interest in MOS Technology back to the founders. Four of the former Motorola engineers were named in the suit: Chuck Peddle, Will Mathys, Bill Mensch and Rod Orgill. All were named inventors in the 6800 patent applications. During the discovery process, Motorola found that one engineer, Mike Janes, had ignored Peddle's instructions and brought his 6800 design documents to MOS Technology. In March 1976, the now independent MOS Technology was running out of money and had to settle the case. They agreed to drop the 6501 processor, pay Motorola $200,000 and return the documents that Motorola contended were confidential. Both companies agreed to cross-license microprocessor patents. That May, Motorola dropped the price of a single 6800 microprocessor to $35. By November, Commodore had acquired MOS Technology.
=== Computers and games ===
With legal troubles behind them, MOS was still left with the problem of getting developers to try their processor, prompting Chuck Peddle to design the MDT650 development system. Another group inside the company designed the KIM-1, which was sold semi-complete and could be turned into a usable system with the addition of a 3rd party computer terminal and compact cassette drive. While it sold well to its intended market, the company found the KIM-1 also sold well to hobbyists and tinkerers. The related Rockwell AIM-65 control, training, and development system also did well. The software in the AIM 65 was based on that in the MDT. Another roughly similar product was the Synertek SYM-1.
One of the first external uses for the design was the Apple I microcomputer, introduced in 1976. The 6502 was next used in the Commodore PET and Apple II, both released in 1977. It was later used in the Atari 8-bit computers, Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, VIC-20 and other designs both for home computers and business, such as Ohio Scientific and Oric computers. The 6510, a direct successor of the 6502 with a digital I/O port and a tri-state address bus, was the CPU utilized in the best-selling Commodore 64 home computer.
Another important use of the 6500 family was in video games. The first to make use of the processor design was the 1977 Atari VCS, later renamed the Atari 2600. The VCS used a 6502 variant named the 6507, which had fewer pins, so it could address only 8 KB of memory. Millions of the Atari consoles would be sold, each with a MOS processor. Another significant use was by the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Famicom. The 6502 used in the NES was a second source version by Ricoh, a partial system on a chip, that lacked the binary-coded decimal mode but added 22 memory-mapped registers and on-die hardware for sound generation, joypad reading, and sprite list DMA. Called 2A03 in NTSC consoles and 2A07 in PAL consoles, this processor was produced exclusively for Nintendo.
6502 or variants were used in all of Commodore's floppy disk drives for all of their 8-bit computers, from the PET line through the Commodore 128D, including the Commodore 64. 8-inch PET drives had two 6502 processors. Atari used the same 6507 used in the Atari 2600 for its 810 and 1050 disk drives used for all of their 8-bit computer line, from the 400/800 through the XEGS.
In the 1980s, a popular electronics magazine Elektor used the processor in its microprocessor development board Junior Computer.
The CMOS successor to the 6502, the WDC 65C02, also saw use in home computers and video game consoles. Apple used it in the Apple II line, starting with the Apple IIc and later variants of the Apple IIe, and also offered a kit to upgrade older IIe systems with the new processor. The Hudson Soft HuC6280 chip used in the TurboGrafx-16 was based on a 65C02 core. The Atari Lynx used a custom chip named "Mikey" designed by Epyx which included a VLSI VL65NC02 licensed cell. The G65SC12 by GTE Microcircuits (renamed California Micro Devices) variant was used in the BBC Master. Some models of the BBC Master also included an additional G65SC102 co-processor.
== Programmers model ==
The 6502 is a little-endian 8-bit processor with a 16-bit address bus. The original versions were fabricated using an 8 µm process technology with a die size of 3.9 mm × 4.3 mm (153 by 168 mils), for a total area of 16.6 mm2.
The internal logic runs at the same speed as the external clock rate. It featured a simple two-stage pipeline; on each cycle, the processor fetches one byte from memory and processes another. This means that any single instruction can take as few as two cycles to complete, depending on the number of operands that instruction uses. For comparison, the Zilog Z80 required two cycles to fetch memory, and the minimum instruction time was four cycles. Thus, despite the lower clock speeds compared to competing designs, typically in the neighborhood of 1 to 2 MHz, the 6502's performance was competitive with CPUs using significantly faster clocks. This is partly due to a simple state machine implemented by combinational (clockless) logic to a greater extent than in many other designs; the two-phase clock (supplying two synchronizations per cycle) could thereby control the machine cycle directly.
This design also led to one useful design note of the 6502, and the 6800 before it. Because the chip only accessed memory during a certain part of the clock cycle, other chips in a system could access memory during those times when the 6502 was off the bus. This was sometimes known as hidden access. This technique was widely used by computer systems; they would use memory capable of access at 2 MHz, and then run the CPU at 1 MHz. This guaranteed that the CPU and video hardware could interleave their accesses, with a total performance matching that of the memory device. Because this access was every other cycle, there was no need to signal the CPU to avoid using the bus, making this sort of access easy to implement without any bus logic. When faster memories became available in the 1980s, newer machines could use this same technique while running at higher clock rates; the BBC Micro used newer RAM that allowed its CPU to run at 2 MHz while still using the same bus sharing techniques.
Like most simple CPUs of the era, the dynamic NMOS 6502 chip is not sequenced by microcode but decoded directly using a dedicated PLA. The decoder occupied about 15% of the chip area. This compares to later microcode-based designs like the Motorola 68000, where the microcode ROM and decoder engine represented about a third of the gates in the system.
=== Registers ===
Like its precursor, the 6800, the 6502 has very few registers. They include
A = 8-bit accumulator
P = 7-bit processor status
n = Negative
v = Overflow
b = Break (only in stack values, not in hardware)
d = Decimal
i = Interrupt disable
z = Zero
c = Carry
PC = 16-bit program counter
S = 8-bit stack pointer
X = 8-bit index
Y = 8-bit index
This compares to a contemporaneous competitor, the Intel 8080, which likewise has one 8-bit accumulator and a 16-bit program counter, but has six more general-purpose 8-bit registers (which can be combined into three 16-bit pointers) and a larger 16-bit stack pointer.
In order to make up somewhat for the lack of registers, the 6502 includes a zero page addressing mode that uses one address byte in the instruction instead of the two needed to address the full 64 KB of memory. This provides fast access to the first 256 bytes of RAM by using shorter instructions. For instance, an instruction to add a value from memory to the value in the accumulator would normally be three bytes, one for the instruction and two for the 16-bit address. Using the zero page reduces this to an 8-bit address, reducing the total instruction length to two bytes, and thus improving instruction performance.
The stack address space is hardwired to memory page $01, i.e. the address range $0100–$01FF (256–511). Software access to the stack is done via four implied addressing mode instructions, whose functions are to push or pop (pull) the accumulator or the processor status register. The same stack is also used for subroutine calls via the JSR (jump to subroutine) and RTS (return from subroutine) instructions and for interrupt handling.
=== Addressing ===
The chip uses the index and stack registers effectively with several addressing modes, including a fast zero page mode, similar to that found on the PDP-8, that accesses memory locations from addresses 0 to 255 with a single 8-bit address (saving the cycle normally required to fetch the high-order byte of the address)—code for the 6502 uses the zero page much as code for other processors would use registers. On some 6502-based microcomputers with an operating system, the operating system uses most of the zero page, leaving only a handful of locations for the user.
Addressing modes also include implied (1-byte instructions); absolute (3 bytes); indexed absolute (3 bytes); indexed zero-page (2 bytes); relative (2 bytes); accumulator (1); indirect,x and indirect,y (2); and immediate (2). Branch instructions use a signed 8-bit offset relative to the instruction after the branch; the numerical range −128..127 therefore translates to 128 bytes backward and 127 bytes forward from the instruction following the branch (which is 126 bytes backward and 129 bytes forward from the start of the branch instruction). Accumulator mode operates on the accumulator register and does not need any operand data. Immediate mode uses an 8-bit literal operand.
=== Indirect addressing ===
The indirect modes are useful for array processing and other looping. With the 5/6 cycle "(indirect),y" mode, the 8-bit Y register is added to a 16-bit base address read from zero page, which is located by a single byte following the opcode. The Y register is therefore an index register in the sense that it is used to hold an actual index (as opposed to the X register in the 6800, where a base address was directly stored and to which an immediate offset could be added). Incrementing the index register to walk the array byte-wise takes only two additional cycles. With the less frequently used "(indirect,x)" mode the effective address for the operation is found at the zero page address formed by adding the second byte of the instruction to the contents of the X register. Using the indexed modes, the zero page effectively acts as a set of up to 128 additional (though very slow) address registers.
The 6502 is capable of performing addition and subtraction in binary or binary-coded decimal. Placing the CPU into BCD mode with the SED (set D flag) instruction results in decimal arithmetic, in which $99 + $01 would result in $00 and the carry (C) flag being set. In binary mode (CLD, clear D flag), the same operation would result in $9A and the carry flag being cleared. Other than Atari BASIC, BCD mode was seldom used in home-computer applications.
See the Hello world! article for a simple but characteristic example of 6502 assembly language.
=== Instructions and opcodes ===
6502 instruction operation codes (opcodes) are 8 bits long and have the general form AAABBBCC, where AAA and CC define the opcode, and BBB defines the addressing mode. For example, the ORA instruction performs a bitwise OR on the bits in the accumulator with another value. The instruction opcode is of the form 000bbb01, where bbb may be 010 for an immediate mode value (constant), 001 for zero-page fixed address, 011 for an absolute address, and so on. This pattern is not universal, as there are exceptions, but it allows opcode values to be easily converted to assembly mnemonics for the majority of instructions, handling the edge cases with special-purpose code.
Of the 256 possible opcodes available using an 8-bit pattern, the original 6502 uses 151 of them, organized into 56 instructions with (possibly) multiple addressing modes. Depending on the instruction and addressing mode, the opcode may require zero, one or two additional bytes for operands. Hence 6502 machine instructions vary in length from one to three bytes. The operand is stored in the 6502's customary little-endian format.
Each CPU machine instruction takes up a certain number of clock cycles, usually equal to the number of memory accesses. For example, the absolute indexing mode of the ORA instruction takes 4 clock cycles; 3 cycles to read the instruction and 1 cycle to read the value of the absolute address. If no memory is accessed, the number of clock cycles is two. The minimum clock cycles for any instruction is two. When using indexed addressing, if the result crosses a page boundary an extra clock cycle is added. Also, when a zero page address is used in indexing mode (e.g. zp,X) an extra clock cycle is added.
The 65C816, the 16-bit CMOS descendant of the 6502, also supports 24-bit addressing, which results in instructions being assembled with three-byte operands, also arranged in little-endian format.
The remaining 105 opcodes are undefined. In the original design, instructions where the low-order 4 bits (nibble) were 3, 7, B or F were not used, providing room for future expansion. Likewise, the $x2 column had only a single entry, LDX #constant. The remaining 25 empty slots were distributed. Some of the empty slots were used in the 65C02 to provide both new instructions and variations on existing ones with new addressing modes. The $xF instructions were initially left free to allow 3rd-party vendors to add their own instructions, but later versions of the 65C02 standardized a set of bit manipulation instructions developed by Rockwell Semiconductor.
=== Assembly language ===
A 6502 assembly language statement consists of a three-character instruction mnemonic, followed by any operands. Instructions that do not take a separate operand but target a single register based on the addressing mode combine the target register in the instruction mnemonic, so the assembler uses INX as opposed to INC X to increment the X register.
=== Instruction table ===
=== Example code ===
The following 6502 assembly language source code is for a subroutine named TOLOWER, which copies a null-terminated character string from one location to another, converting upper-case letter characters to lower-case letters. The string being copied is the "source", and the string into which the converted source is stored is the "destination".
== IC hardware design ==
The processor's non-maskable interrupt (NMI) input is edge sensitive, which means that the interrupt is triggered by the falling edge of the signal rather than its level. Consequently a wired-OR interrupt circuit cannot be readily supported. However, this also prevents nested NMI interrupts from occurring until the interrupt source hardware makes the NMI input inactive again, often under control of the NMI interrupt handler.
The simultaneous assertion of the NMI and IRQ (maskable) hardware interrupt lines causes IRQ to be ignored. However, if the IRQ line remains asserted after the servicing of the NMI, the processor will almost immediately respond to IRQ, as IRQ is level sensitive. Thus a sort of built-in interrupt priority was established in the 6502 design. (The first opcode of the NMI handler is executed before the IRQ is detected again.)
The B flag is set by the 6502's periodically sampling its NMI edge detector's output and its IRQ input. The IRQ signal being driven low is only recognized though if IRQs are not masked by the I flag. If in this way a NMI request or (maskable) IRQ is detected the B flag is set to zero and causes the processor to execute the BRK instruction next instead of executing the next instruction based on the program counter.
The BRK instruction then pushes the processor status onto the stack, with the B flag bit set to zero. At the end of its execution the BRK instruction resets the B flag's value to one. This is the only way the B flag can be modified. If an instruction other than the BRK instruction pushes the B flag onto the stack as part of the processor status the B flag always has the value one.
A high-to-low transition on the SO input pin will set the processor's overflow status bit. This can be used for fast response to external hardware. For example, a high-speed polling device driver can poll the hardware once in only three cycles using a Branch-on-oVerflow-Clear (BVC) instruction that branches to itself until overflow is set by an SO falling transition. The Commodore 1541 and other Commodore floppy disk drives use this technique to detect when the serializer is ready to transfer another byte of disk data. The system hardware and software design must ensure that an SO will not occur during arithmetic processing and disrupt calculations.
== Variations and derivatives ==
The 6502 was the most prolific variant of the 65xx series family from MOS Technology.
The 6501 and 6502 have 40-pin DIP packages; the 6503, 6504, 6505, and 6507 are 28-pin DIP versions, for reduced chip and circuit board cost. In all of the 28-pin versions, the pin count is reduced by leaving off some of the high-order address pins and various combinations of function pins, making those functions unavailable.
Typically, the 12 pins omitted to reduce the pin count from 40 to 28 are the three not connected (NC) pins, one of the two Vss pins, one of the clock pins, the SYNC pin, the set overflow (SO) pin, either the maskable interrupt or the non-maskable interrupt (NMI), and the four most-significant address lines (A12–A15). The omission of four address pins reduces the external addressability to 4 KB (from the 64 KB of the 6502), though the internal PC register and all effective address calculations remain 16-bit.
The 6507 omits both interrupt pins in order to include address line A12, providing 8 KB of external addressability but no interrupt capability. The 6507 was used in the popular Atari 2600 video game console, the design of which divides the 8 KB memory space in half, allocating the lower half to the console's internal RAM and peripherals, and the upper half to the Game Cartridge, so Atari 2600 cartridges have a 4 KB address limit (and the same capacity limit unless the cartridge contains bank switching circuitry).
One popular 6502-based computer, the Commodore 64, used a modified 6502 CPU, the 6510. Unlike the 6503–6505 and 6507, the 6510 is a 40-pin chip that adds internal hardware: a 6-bit parallel I/O port mapped to addresses 0000 and 0001. The 6508 is another chip that, like the 6510, adds internal hardware: 256 bytes of SRAM and an 8-bit I/O port similar to those featured by the 6510. Though these chips do not have reduced pin counts compared to the 6502, they need new pins for the added parallel I/O port. In this case, no address lines are among the removed pins.
=== 16-bit derivatives ===
The Western Design Center designed and, as of 2025, still produces the WDC 65C816S processor, a 16-bit, static-core successor to the 65C02. The W65C816S is a newer variant of the 65C816, which is the core of the Apple IIGS computer and is the basis of the Ricoh 5A22 processor that powers the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The W65C816S incorporates minor improvements over the 65C816 that make the newer chip not an exact hardware-compatible replacement for the earlier one. Among these improvements was conversion to a static core, which makes it possible to stop the clock in either phase without the registers losing data. Available through electronics distributors, as of March 2020, the W65C816S is officially rated for 14 MHz operation.
The Western Design Center also designed and produced the 65C802, which was a 65C816 core with a 64-kilobyte address space in a 65(C)02 pin-compatible package. The 65C802 could be retrofitted to a 6502 board and would function as a 65C02 on power-up, operating in "emulation mode." As with the 65C816, a two-instruction sequence would switch the 65C802 to "native mode" operation, exposing its 16-bit accumulator and index registers, and other 65C816 features. The 65C802 was not widely used and production ended.
== Bugs and quirks ==
The 6502 had several bugs and quirks, which had to be accounted for when programming it:
The earliest revisions of the 6502, such as those shipped with some KIM-1 computers, did not have a ROR (rotate right memory or accumulator) instruction. In these chips, the operation of the opcode that was later assigned to ROR is effectively an ASL (arithmetic shift left) instruction that does not affect the carry bit in the status register. Initially, MOS intentionally excluded ROR from the instruction set, deeming it not of enough value to justify its costs. In reaction to many customer inquiries, MOS promised in the second edition of the MCS6500 Programming Manual (document no. 6500-50A) that ROR would appear in 6502 chips starting in 1976. The vast majority of 6502 chips in existence today do feature the ROR instruction; these include all those CPUs originally installed in popular fully-assembled microcomputers such as the Apple II and Commodore 64 lines, all of which were manufactured after 1976.
The NMOS 6502 family has a variety of undocumented instructions, which vary from one chip manufacturer to another. The 6502 instruction decoding is implemented in a hardwired logic array (similar to a programmable logic array) that is only defined for 151 of the 256 available opcodes. The remaining 105 trigger strange and occasionally hard-to-predict actions, such as crashing the processor, performing two valid instructions consecutively, performing strange mixtures of two instructions, or simply doing nothing at all. Some hardware designers used the undefined opcodes to extend the 6502 instruction set by detecting when a certain undefined opcode is fetched and performing an extension operation externally to the processor while substituting a neutral (NOP-like) opcode to the 6502 in order to make it idle while the external hardware handles the extension operation. Also, some programmers utilized this feature to extend the 6502 instruction set by providing functionality for the unimplemented opcodes with specially written software intercepted at the BRK instruction's 0xFFFE vector. All of the undefined opcodes have been replaced with NOP instructions in the 65C02, an enhanced CMOS version of the 6502, although with varying byte sizes and execution times. (Some of them actually perform memory read operations but then ignore the data.) In the 65C802/65C816, all 256 opcodes perform defined operations.
The 6502's memory indirect jump instruction, JMP (<address>), has a nonintuitive limitation which many users consider a defect. If <address> is hex xxFF (i.e., any word ending in FF), the processor will not jump to the address stored in xxFF and xxFF+1 as expected, but rather the one defined by xxFF and xx00 (for example, JMP ($10FF) would jump to the address stored in 10FF and 1000, instead of the one stored in 10FF and 1100). This can be avoided simply by not placing any indirect jump target address across a page boundary, and the MOS Technology MCS6500 Programming Manual gives reason to believe that this was the intention of the designers of the 6502, in order to save space on the chip that would have been used to implement the more complex behavior of conditionally adding 1 clock cycle to propagate the carry when necessary. This ostensible defect continued through the entire NMOS line but was corrected in the CMOS derivatives.
The NMOS 6502 indexed addressing across page boundaries will do an extra read of an invalid address in the page of the base address (to which the index is added). This characteristic may cause random issues by accessing hardware that acts on a read, such as clearing timer or IRQ flags, sending an I/O handshake, etc. The extra read can be predicted and managed to avoid such problems, but only with special care in both hardware and software design. This flaw continued through the entire NMOS line but was corrected in the CMOS derivatives, in which the processor does an extra read of the last instruction byte.
The 6502 read–modify–write instructions perform one read and two write cycles. First, the unmodified data that was read is written back, and then the modified data is written. This characteristic may cause issues by twice accessing hardware that acts on a write. This anomaly continued through the full NMOS line but was fixed in the CMOS derivatives, in which the processor does two reads and one write cycle. Defensive programming practice will generally avoid this problem by not executing read/modify/write instructions on hardware registers.
The N (result negative), V (sign bit overflow) and Z (result zero) status flags are generally meaningless when performing arithmetic operations while the processor is in BCD mode, as these flags are undefined in decimal mode and have been empirically shown to reflect the binary, not BCD, result. This limitation was removed in the CMOS derivatives, at the cost of one added clock cycle for an ADC or SBC instruction in decimal mode (except on the 65C816). Therefore, this feature may be used to distinguish a CMOS processor from an NMOS version (by relying on the undocumented behavior of the NMOS version).
If the 6502 happens to be in BCD mode when a hardware interrupt occurs, it will not revert to binary mode. This characteristic could result in obscure bugs in the interrupt service routine (ISR) if it fails to clear BCD mode before performing any arithmetic operations. The 6502 programming manual thus requires each ISR to reset or set the D flag if it uses the ADC or SBC instruction, but occasionally a human programmer may mistakenly omit to do this, causing a bug. For example, the Commodore 64's KERNAL did not correctly handle this processor characteristic, requiring that IRQs be disabled or re-vectored during BCD math operations. This issue was addressed in the CMOS derivatives also, by making reset and all interrupts automatically reset the D flag. (The change has the one disadvantage that it makes a [rare] program that operates continuously in decimal mode slightly longer and slower, as now every ISR must set the D flag before executing ADC or SBC.)
The 6502 instruction set includes BRK (opcode $00), which is technically a software interrupt (similar in spirit to the SWI mnemonic of the Motorola 6800 and ARM processors). BRK is most often used to interrupt program execution and start a machine language monitor for testing and debugging during software development. BRK could also be used to route program execution using a simple jump table (analogous to the manner in which the Intel 8086 and derivatives handle software interrupts by number). However, if a maskable hardware interrupt occurs when the processor is fetching a BRK instruction, the NMOS version of the processor will fail to execute BRK and instead proceed as if only the hardware interrupt had occurred. This fault—an unequivocal hardware bug—was corrected in the CMOS implementation of the processor, which first calls the ISR for the hardware interrupt and then executes the BRK instruction.
When executing JSR (jump to subroutine) and RTS (return from subroutine) instructions, the return address pushed to the stack by JSR is that of the last byte of the JSR operand (that is, the most significant byte of the subroutine address), rather than the address of the following instruction. This is because the actual copy (from program counter to stack and then conversely) takes place before the automatic increment of the program counter that occurs at the end of every instruction. This characteristic would go unnoticed unless the code examined the return address in order to retrieve parameters in the code stream. It remains a characteristic of 6502 derivatives to this day. The original MCS6500 Programming Manual points it out and explains the reason: it saves one clock cycle in the JSR by not incrementing the PC before pushing it, while in the RET instruction, the deferred increment of the pulled PC is overlapped with other steps and adds no clock cycle. As designed, a JSR and RET take 12 clock cycles total; if the JSR pushed the incremented PC, the call and return would take 13 clock cycles. To do an indirect branch, an address-1 is loaded from a table, pushed onto the stack, and then RTS.
The SBC instruction (Subtract Memory from Accumulator with Borrow) uses inverted carry as borrow. A zero carry flag is used to signal borrow from previous subtract. If a borrow is not desired, the carry bit must be set before the SBC instruction. This way the ALU subtract logic can reuse the add logic with just inverted second input which saves a lot of gates.
The read access of the CPU can be delayed by setting the RDY pin to low temporarily. However, during write access, which can take up to three consecutive clock cycles for a BRK instruction, the CPU will stop only in the next read cycle. This quirk was corrected in the CMOS derivatives and also in the 6510 and its variants. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnieszka_Kotlarska | Agnieszka Kotlarska | Agnieszka Kotlarska may refer to:
Agnieszka Kotlarska (model) (1972–1996), the first Polish winner of the Miss International beauty pageant
Agnieszka Kotlarska (actress) (1971–2015), Polish film and stage actress |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_B._Jordan | Michael B. Jordan | Michael Bakari Jordan ( bah-KAR-ee; born February 9, 1987) is an American actor, producer, and director. His accolades include an Academy Award, three Actor Awards, and a Producers Guild Award, in addition to nominations for a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award and two Emmy Awards. Jordan was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2020 and 2023, People's Sexiest Man Alive in 2020, and in 2020 was ranked 15th on The New York Times list of the 25 greatest actors of the 21st century.
Jordan initially gained recognition in television, playing Wallace in the first season of the HBO crime drama series The Wire (2002). He starred in the ABC soap opera All My Children (2003–2006) and the NBC sports drama series Friday Night Lights (2009–2011). He later starred in and produced the HBO television film Fahrenheit 451 (2018), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie.
Jordan's film breakthrough came as Oscar Grant in Ryan Coogler's biopic Fruitvale Station (2013), his performance in which received critical praise. He earned further acclaim for his performances in Coogler's subsequent films, including Creed (2015), Black Panther (2018), and Sinners (2025); the latter earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Jordan reprised his role of Donnie Creed in Creed II (2018) and Creed III (2023), the latter of which also marked his directorial debut. His other films include Chronicle (2012), That Awkward Moment (2014), Fantastic Four (2015), and Just Mercy (2019).
== Early life and education ==
Michael Bakari Jordan was born on February 9, 1987, in Santa Ana, California, to Donna and Michael A. Jordan, a supervisor at the John F. Kennedy International Airport who later started a catering business and was involved in Pan-Africanism. He has an older sister and a younger brother. His family lived in Santa Ana for two years before moving to Newark, New Jersey, where Jordan grew up. He attended Newark Arts High School, where his mother worked as a teacher, and where he also played basketball.
== Career ==
=== 1999–2012: Beginnings ===
Jordan worked as a child model for several companies and brands, including Modell's Sporting Goods and Toys "R" Us, before deciding to embark on a career as an actor. He launched his career as a professional actor in 1999, when he appeared briefly in single episodes of the television series Cosby and The Sopranos. His first principal film role followed in 2001, when he was featured in Hardball, which starred Keanu Reeves. In 2002, he gained more attention by playing the small but pivotal role of Wallace in the first season of HBO's The Wire.
In March 2003, he joined the cast of All My Children, replacing Chadwick Boseman, playing Reggie Montgomery, a troubled teenager, until June 2006, when Jordan was released from his contract. Jordan's other credits include guest-starring appearances on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Without a Trace, and Cold Case. Thereafter, he had a lead role in the independent film Blackout and starred in The Assistants on The-N. In 2008, Jordan appeared in the music video "Did You Wrong" by rhythm and blues artist Pleasure P.
In 2009, Jordan began starring in the NBC drama Friday Night Lights as quarterback Vince Howard, and lived in an apartment in Austin, where the show was filmed. He played the character for two seasons until the show ended in 2011. In 2009, he guest-starred on Burn Notice in the episode "Hot Spot", playing a high-school football player who got into a fight and is being hunted by a local gangster. In 2010, he was considered one of the 55 faces of the future by Nylon in its "Young Hollywood" issue.
In 2010, he guest-starred in the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Inhumane Society", as a boxer involved in a Michael Vick-inspired dog-fighting scandal. That year, he landed a recurring role on the NBC show Parenthood playing Alex (Haddie Braverman's love interest). This marked his second collaboration with showrunner Jason Katims, who was in charge of Friday Night Lights. BuddyTV ranked him number 80 on its list of "TV's Sexiest Men of 2011". Jordan voiced Jace in the Xbox 360 game Gears of War 3. In 2012, Jordan appeared in the George Lucas-produced film Red Tails, and played lead character Steve Montgomery in Chronicle, a film about three teenaged boys who develop superhuman abilities. He also guest-starred in an episode of House's final season, playing a blind patient.
=== 2013–2018: Rise to prominence ===
In 2013, Jordan starred as shooting victim Oscar Grant in Fruitvale Station, directed by Ryan Coogler. His performance garnered critical acclaim, with Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter stating that Jordan reminded him of "a young Denzel Washington". Following his role in Fruitvale Station, Jordan was named an "actor to watch" by People and Variety. Time magazine named him, with Coogler, one of 30 people under 30 who are changing the world, and he was also named one of 2013's breakout stars by Entertainment Weekly and GQ.
In 2015, he starred as Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in Fantastic Four. The film was universally panned by critics, holding a 9% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and was a bust at the box office. Jordan rebounded with critical acclaim later that year when he starred as Donnie Creed, the son of boxer Apollo Creed, in the spinoff of the Rocky film, Creed, his second collaboration with Coogler, which co-starred Sylvester Stallone. Jordan prepared for his role as a boxer in Creed by undertaking one year of rigorous physical training and a stringent, low-fat diet. He did not have a body double during filming, and was "routinely bloodied, bruised, and dizzy" when fighting scenes were being filmed.
In 2016, Jordan featured in the popular sports game NBA 2K17, portraying Justice Young, a teammate of the player in the game's MyCareer mode. In October 2017, Jordan was announced as being cast in a supporting role as Mark Warren in the upcoming Netflix superhero series Raising Dion. In February 2018, Jordan starred as the villain Erik Killmonger in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Black Panther; this marked Jordan's third collaboration with Coogler. His performance in Black Panther received critical acclaim, with Dani Di Placido of Forbes stating that Jordan "steals the show", while Jason Guerrasio of Business Insider wrote that the actor "plays a Killmonger fueled with hate and emptiness – we won't give away why – but he also delivers it with a swagger that's just a joy to watch ... the movie takes off more in story and viewing enjoyment whenever Jordan is on screen." In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jordan shared how his preparation for the role of Killmonger left an impact on him, for which he sought out therapy.
Later in 2018, Jordan starred in Fahrenheit 451 with Michael Shannon and Sofia Boutella. The television film was distributed on HBO by HBO Films. That same year, Jordan reprised his role as boxer Adonis "Donnie" Creed in Creed II, a sequel to Creed (2015) and the eighth installment in the Rocky film series. Creed II was released in the United States by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on November 21, 2018. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, and it went on to debut to $35.3 million in its opening weekend (a five-day total of $55.8 million), marking the biggest debut ever for a live-action release over Thanksgiving.
=== 2019–present: Established actor and awards success ===
He also voiced the character Julian Chase in Rooster Teeth's animated series Gen:Lock, since January 2019, which he also co-produced through his production company, Outlier Society Productions. Jordan portrayed attorney Bryan Stevenson in a legal drama, Just Mercy, which he also co-produced. The film, based on a real-life story, was released in December 2019 to positive reviews. Jordan starred in Without Remorse, based on the book by Tom Clancy, as John Kelly, a former Navy SEAL and director of the elite counterterrorism unit Rainbow Six. Originally planned for release on September 18, 2020, it was released on April 30, 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jordan reprised his Marvel role as Erik "Killmonger" Stevens in two episodes of the first season of What If...? (2021), and in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), and made a cameo appearance in Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021). He also starred in A Journal for Jordan (2021), directed by Denzel Washington, as a soldier who "kept a journal full of poignant life lessons for their newborn son, Jordan, while deployed overseas." Jordan made his directorial debut with Creed III, a sequel to Creed II, in addition to producing and reprising his starring role as boxer Adonis "Donnie" Creed. It was released on March 3, 2023. He next reteamed with Coogler in the period horror film Sinners (2025), playing twin brothers in a dual role performance. He received the Academy Award for Best Actor and the Actor Award in the same category, becoming the seventh Black performer in history to win an Oscar in the lead acting category.
Jordan is slated to work with Coogler for the fifth time in Wrong Answer, a film based on the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. He is also set to direct, produce, and star in a second remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, as well as starring in the vampire film Blood Brothers. His production company Outlier Society signed a first-look deal with Amazon, and is also developing Val-Zod, an HBO Max series featuring a black version of the DC Comics character Superman. As of March 2022, Jordan was to produce and star in the sequel of I Am Legend with Will Smith.
== Personal life ==
Jordan has resided in Los Angeles since 2006. He grew up in a religious household and considers himself to be spiritual. As of 2018, he lived with his parents in a Sherman Oaks home that he purchased.
Jordan is a fan of anime, citing Naruto: Shippuden and the Dragon Ball franchise as his favorite series and Princess Mononoke as his favorite film. Having grown up in Newark, New Jersey, he is a lifelong supporter of the New York Giants. He is also a supporter of Premier League club Everton FC.
Michael B. Jordan considers Tom Cruise and Will Smith his career idols, citing their ability to build global careers and become movie stars. Jordan has also sought advice from Smith and Cruise and has received endorsements from Cruise, indicating a mentorship and respect among the three actors.
Jordan cites Ryan Coogler, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Stanley Kubrick, Alfonso Cuarón, George Lucas, and Christopher Nolan as his influences in film making.
In November 2020, Jordan began dating model Lori Harvey, adoptive daughter of television personality Steve Harvey. In June 2022, the couple announced they had ended their relationship.
In December 2023, Jordan wrecked his Ferrari 812 Superfast when he crashed it into a parked Kia. He was uninjured and police investigated the incident for street racing. Another driver who was near the incident said they were "pacing" but insists they were not racing. Jordan was eventually not charged "due to lack of evidence".
=== Sports ownership ===
In December 2022, Jordan was announced as part-owner of English soccer club AFC Bournemouth. The club was taken over by the consortium group the Black Knights Football Club, led by fellow American businessman Bill Foley. Jordan led the minority ownership group with Kosmos founder Nullah Sarker.
He is also an investor in the Alpine F1 Team alongside fellow actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
== Performances and works ==
=== Film ===
=== Television ===
=== Video games ===
=== Music video appearances ===
== Accolades == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/70th_Academy_Awards | 70th Academy Awards | The 70th Academy Awards ceremony, organized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), took place on March 23, 1998, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles beginning at 6:00 p.m. PST / 9:00 p.m. EST. During the show, AMPAS presented Academy Awards (commonly referred to as Oscars) in 24 categories honoring films released in 1997. The ceremony, which was televised in the United States by ABC, was produced by Gil Cates and directed by Louis J. Horvitz. Actor Billy Crystal hosted the show for the sixth time. He had first hosted the 62nd ceremony held in 1990, and most recently the previous year's awards. Nearly a month earlier in an event held at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California on February 28, the Academy Awards for Technical Achievement were presented by host Ashley Judd.
Titanic won 11 awards, including Best Picture, a number that is tied with Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Other winners included As Good as It Gets, Good Will Hunting, and L.A. Confidential with two awards, and Character, The Full Monty, Geri's Game, The Long Way Home, Men in Black, A Story of Healing, and Visas and Virtue with one. The telecast garnered more than 57 million viewers in the United States, making it the most-watched Oscars broadcast in history.
== Winners and nominees ==
The nominees for the 70th Academy Awards were announced on February 10, 1998, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, California, by Robert Rehme, president of the academy, and actress Geena Davis. Titanic led all nominees with fourteen nominations; Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential came in second with nine apiece.
The winners were announced during the awards ceremony on March 23, 1998. With eleven awards, Titanic tied with Ben-Hur (1959) for the most Academy Awards in Oscar history. It also became the first film to win Best Picture without a screenwriting nomination since The Sound of Music (1965). Jack Nicholson became the fourth performer to win at least three acting Oscars. Both Nicholson and Helen Hunt won for their roles in As Good as It Gets, making it the seventh film to win both lead acting awards. Nominated for their performances as Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic, Best Actress nominee Kate Winslet and Best Supporting Actress nominee Gloria Stuart became the first pair of actresses nominated for portraying the same character in the same film.
=== Awards ===
Winners are listed first, highlighted in boldface, and indicated with a double dagger (‡).
=== Honorary Award ===
To Stanley Donen in appreciation of a body of work marked by grace, elegance, wit and visual innovation.
=== Films with multiple nominations and awards ===
== Presenters and performers ==
The following individuals presented awards or performed musical numbers.
=== Presenters ===
=== Performers ===
== Ceremony information ==
In December 1997, the academy hired veteran Oscar telecast producer Gil Cates to oversee the 1998 ceremony. "Gil has become the consummate Oscar show producer, consistently garnering top television ratings for the telecast," said AMPAS President Robert Rehme in a press release announcing the selection. "His shows are full of wit, charm and surprise." A few days later, actor and comedian Billy Crystal was chosen to emcee the upcoming telecast. Cates explained his reason to bring back the veteran comedian saying, "Billy's performance last year was spectacular. There is nobody like him." In an article published in USA Today he initially requested to Cates and AMPAS five months after the previous year's ceremony that he would like to take a break from hosting duties. However, pressure from the academy, Cates, and several friends and family members made him reconsider his decision. His sixth stint would make him second only to Bob Hope in number of ceremonies hosted.
To commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Academy Awards, 70 actors who have received both competitive and honorary awards appeared seated onstage together during a segment called Oscar's Family Album. Each former winner was acknowledged by announcer Norman Rose with the films he or she won for. At the end of the segment newly minted winners Kim Basinger, Helen Hunt, and Robin Williams joined them. This marked the largest gathering of former winners since the 50th ceremony held in 1978. The Academy also commissioned musician and composer Jerry Goldsmith to compose a new leitmotif for the Oscars telecast entitled "Fanfare for Oscar".
Several others participated in the production of the ceremony. Bill Conti served as musical director for the telecast. Dancer Daniel Ezralow choreographed a dance number showcasing the nominees for Best Original Comedy or Musical Score. Bart the Bear made a surprise appearance during the presentation of the Best Sound Effects Editing award with Mike Myers.
=== Box office performance of nominees ===
At the time of the nominations announcement on February 10, the combined gross of the five Best Picture nominees was $579 million with an average of $116 million per film. Titanic was the highest earner among the Best Picture nominees with $338.7 million in domestic box office receipts. The film was followed by As Good as It Gets ($92.6 million), Good Will Hunting ($68.9 million), L.A. Confidential ($39.7 million), and finally The Full Monty ($38.7 million).
Of the top 50 grossing movies of the year, 40 nominations went to 15 films on the list. Only Titanic (1st), As Good as It Gets (16th), Good Will Hunting (20th), and In & Out (24th) were nominated for directing, acting, screenwriting, or Best Picture. The other top 50 box office hits that earned nominations were Men in Black (2nd), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (3rd), Air Force One (5th), My Best Friends Wedding (7th), Face/Off (9th), Con Air (12th), Contact (13th), Hercules (14th), The Fifth Element (25th), Anastasia (30th), and Starship Troopers (34th).
=== Critical response ===
The show received a positive reception from most media publications. Television critic Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times lauded Crystal's performance writing that he "would earn top billing as that unusual comedian as artful at doing musical comedy as jokes." San Francisco Chronicle columnist John Carman raved,"It was the best Oscar show in two decades." He also gave high marks for the host, commenting, "But last night, Crystal was back in razor form." The Seattle Times television editor Kay McFadden praised Crystal commenting that "he possesses nearly impeccable timing and judgment." In addition, she noted that while the ceremony dragged on, "Last night was one of television's smartest live ceremonies in recent memory."
Some media outlets were more critical of the show. Ray Richmond of Variety complained that the ceremony proved to be a "Yawner of an Oscarcast." He added that Crystal's "off-the-cuff one-liners sank faster than the great ship herself." Boston Globe television critic Matthew Gilbert bemoaned,"There was hardly a spontaneous moment during last night's Oscarcast." Film critic Carrie Rickey from The Philadelphia Inquirer lamented that the inevitable Titanic sweep "sank a telecast loaded with montages of previous years' Oscar highlights."
=== Ratings and reception ===
The American telecast on ABC drew in an average of 57.25 million people over its length, which was a 29% increase from the previous year's ceremony. An estimated 87.50 million total viewers watched all or part of the awards. The show also earned higher Nielsen ratings compared to the previous ceremony with 35.32% of households watching over a 55.77 share. In addition, it garnered a higher 18–49 demo rating with a 24.90 rating over a 44.30 share among viewers in that demographic. It was the most watched Oscar ceremony in television history since viewership figures were compiled beginning with the 46th ceremony in 1974.
In July 1998, the ceremony presentation received eight nominations at the 50th Primetime Emmys. Two months later, the ceremony won five of those nominations for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program (Billy Crystal), Outstanding Directing for a Variety or Music Program (Louis J Horvitz), Outstanding Lighting Direction (Electronic) for a Drama Series, Variety Series, Miniseries, or Movie (Bob Barnhart, Robert Dickinson, Matt Ford, Andy O'Reilly), Outstanding Music Direction (Bill Conti), and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Variety Series or Special (Patrick Baltzell, Robert Douglass, Edward J. Greene, Tommy Vicari).
== "In Memoriam" ==
The annual "In Memoriam" tribute was presented by actress Whoopi Goldberg. The montage featured an excerpt of "Appassionata" from The Passage composed by Michael J. Lewis. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_of_Rhodes | Colossus of Rhodes | The Colossus of Rhodes (Ancient Greek: ὁ Κολοσσὸς Ῥόδιος, romanized: ho Kolossòs Rhódios; Modern Greek: Κολοσσός της Ρόδου, romanized: Kolossós tis Ródou) was a statue of the Greek sun god Helios, erected in the city of Rhodes, on the Greek island of the same name, by Chares of Lindos in 280 BC. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it was constructed to celebrate the successful defence of Rhodes against an attack by Demetrius I of Macedon, who had besieged it for a year with a large army and navy.
According to most contemporary descriptions, the Colossus stood approximately 70 cubits, or 33 metres (108 feet) high—approximately two-thirds of the height of the modern Statue of Liberty from feet to crown—making it the tallest statue in the ancient world. It collapsed during the earthquake of 226 BC, although parts of it were preserved. In accordance with the Oracle of Delphi, the Rhodians did not rebuild it. John Malalas wrote that Hadrian in his reign re-erected the Colossus, but he was mistaken. According to the Suda, the Rhodians were called Colossaeans (Κολοσσαεῖς), because they erected the statue on the island.
In 653, an Arab force under Muslim general Mu'awiya I conquered Rhodes, and according to the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, the remains of the collapsed statue were completely destroyed and sold.
Since 2008, a series of proposals to build a new Colossus at Rhodes Harbour have been announced, although the actual location of the original monument remains in dispute.
== Siege of Rhodes ==
In the late fourth century BC, Rhodes, allied with Ptolemy I of Egypt, prevented a mass invasion staged by their common enemy, Antigonus I Monophthalmus.
In 304 BC, a relief force of ships sent by Ptolemy arrived, and Demetrius I of Macedon (son of Antigonus) and his army abandoned the siege, leaving behind most of their siege equipment. To celebrate their victory, the Rhodians sold the equipment left behind for 300 talents and decided to use the money to build a colossal statue of their patron god, Helios. Construction was left to the direction of Chares, a native of Lindos in Rhodes, who had been involved with large-scale statues before. His teacher, the sculptor Lysippos, had constructed a 22-metre-high (72-foot) bronze statue of Zeus at Tarentum.
== Construction ==
Construction began in 292 BC. Ancient accounts, which differ to some degree, describe the structure as being built with iron tie bars to which bronze plates were fixed to form the skin. The interior of the structure, which stood on a 15-metre-high (49-foot) white marble pedestal near the Rhodes harbour entrance, was then filled with stone blocks as construction progressed. Other sources place the Colossus on a breakwater in the harbour. According to most contemporary descriptions, the statue itself was about 70 cubits, or 32 metres (105 feet) tall. Much of the iron and bronze was reforged from the various weapons Demetrius's army left behind, and the abandoned second siege tower may have been used for scaffolding around the lower levels during construction.
Philo of Byzantium wrote in De septem mundi miraculis that Chares created the sculpture in situ by casting it in horizontal courses and then placing "...a huge mound of earth around each section as soon as it was completed, thus burying the finished work under the accumulated earth, and carrying out the casting of the next part on the level."
Modern engineers have put forward a hypothesis for the statue's construction (based on the technology of the time), and the accounts of Philo and Pliny, who saw and described the ruins.
The base pedestal was said to be at least 18 metres (59 feet) in diameter, and either circular or octagonal. The feet were carved in stone and covered with thin bronze plates riveted together. Eight forged iron bars set in a radiating horizontal position formed the ankles and turned up to follow the lines of the legs while becoming progressively smaller. Individually cast curved bronze plates 1.5 metres (60 in) square with turned-in edges were joined by rivets through holes formed during casting to form a series of rings. The lower plates were 25 millimetres (1 in) in thickness to the knee and 20 millimetres (3⁄4 in) thick from knee to abdomen, while the upper plates were 6.5 to 12.5 millimetres (1⁄4 to 1⁄2 in) thick except where additional strength was required at joints such as the shoulder, neck, etc.
Archaeologist Ursula Vedder has proposed that the sculpture was cast in large sections following traditional Greek methods and that Philo's account is "not compatible with the situation proved by archaeology in ancient Greece."
After twelve years, in 280 BC, the statue was completed. Greek anthologies of poetry have preserved what is believed to be the dedication text on the Colossus.
== Collapse (226 BC) ==
The statue stood for 54 years until a 226 BC earthquake caused significant damage to large portions of Rhodes, including the harbour and commercial buildings, which were destroyed. The statue snapped at the knees and fell over onto land. Ptolemy III offered to pay for the reconstruction of the statue, but the Oracle of Delphi made the Rhodians fear that they had offended Helios, and they declined to rebuild it.
== Fallen state (226 BC to 653 AD) ==
The remains lay on the ground for over 800 years and, even broken, they were so impressive that many travelled to see them.
The remains were described briefly by Strabo (64 or 63 BC – c. 24 AD), in his work Geography (Book XIV, Chapter 2.5). Strabo was a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian who lived in Asia Minor during the transitional period of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.
Strabo is best known for his work Geographica ("Geography"), which presented a descriptive history of people and places from different regions of the world known during his lifetime. Strabo states that:
The city of the Rhodians lies on the eastern promontory of Rhodes; and it is so far superior to all others in harbours and roads and walls and improvements in general that I am unable to speak of any other city as equal to it, or even as almost equal to it, much less superior to it. It is remarkable also for its good order, and for its careful attention to the administration of affairs of state in general; and in particular to that of naval affairs, whereby it held the mastery of the sea for a long time and overthrew the business of piracy, and became a friend to the Romans and to all kings who favoured both the Romans and the Greeks. Consequently, it not only has remained autonomous but also has been adorned with many votive offerings, which for the most part are to be found in the Dionysium and the gymnasium, but partly in other places. The best of these are, first, the Colossus of Helius, of which the author of the iambic verse says, "seven times ten cubits in height, the work of Chares the Lindian"; but it now lies on the ground, having been thrown down by an earthquake and broken at the knees. In accordance with a certain oracle, the people did not raise it again. This, then, is the most excellent of the votive offerings (at any rate, it is by common agreement one of the Seven Wonders).
Pliny the Elder remarked:
But that which is by far the most worthy of our admiration, is the colossal statue of the Sun, which stood formerly at Rhodes, and was the work of Chares the Lindian, a pupil of the above-named Lysippus; no less than seventy cubits in height. This statue fifty-six years after it was erected, was thrown down by an earthquake; but even as it lies, it excites our wonder and admiration. Few men can clasp the thumb in their arms, and its fingers are larger than most statues. Where the limbs are broken asunder, vast caverns are seen yawning in the interior. Within it, too, are to be seen large masses of rock, by the weight of which the artist steadied it while erecting it.
== Destruction of the remains ==
The ultimate fate of the remains of the statue is uncertain. Rhodes has two serious earthquakes per century, owing to its location on the seismically unstable Hellenic arc. Pausanias mentions in the Descriptio Graeciae, writing ca. 174, how the city was so devastated by an earthquake that the sibyl oracle foretelling its destruction was considered fulfilled. This means the statue could not have survived for long if it had ever been repaired. By the 4th century Rhodes was Christianized, so any further maintenance or rebuilding, if there ever was any before, on an ancient pagan statue is unlikely. The metal would probably have been used for coins and maybe also tools by the time of the Arab wars, especially during earlier conflicts such as the Sasanian wars.
The onset of Islamic naval incursions against the Byzantine Empire gave rise to a dramatic account of what became of the Colossus. In 653, an Arab force under Muslim general Mu'awiya I raided Rhodes, and according to the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, the remains of the statue constituted part of the booty, being melted down and sold to a Jewish merchant of Edessa who loaded the bronze onto 900 camels. The same story is recorded by Bar Hebraeus, writing in Syriac in the 13th century in Edessa (after the Arab pillage of Rhodes): "And a great number of men hauled on strong ropes which were tied around the brass Colossus which was in the city and pulled it down. And they weighed from it three thousand loads of Corinthian brass, and they sold it to a certain Jew from Emesa" (the Syrian city of Homs).
Ultimately, Theophanes is the sole source of this account, and all other sources can be traced to him. As Theophanes' source was Syriac, it may have had vague information about a raid and attributed the statue's demise to it, not knowing much more. Or the Arab destruction and the purported sale to a Jew may have been a metaphor for Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the destruction of a great statue.
Given the likely previous neglect of the remains and various opportunities for authorities to have repurposed the metal, as well as the fact that, Islamic incursions notwithstanding, the island remained an important Byzantine strategic point well into the ninth century, an Arabic raid is unlikely to have found much, if any, remaining metal to carry away. For these reasons, as well as the negative perception of the Arab conquests, L.I. Conrad considers Theophanes' story of the dismantling of the statue as likely propaganda, like the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
== Posture ==
The harbour-straddling Colossus was a figment of medieval imaginations based on the dedication text's mention of "over land and sea" twice and the writings of an Italian visitor who in 1395 noted that local tradition held that the right foot had stood where the church of St John of the Colossus was then located. Many later illustrations show the statue with one foot on either side of the harbour mouth with ships passing under it. References to this conception are also found in literary works. William Shakespeare's Cassius in Julius Caesar (I, ii, 136–38) says of Caesar:
Shakespeare alludes to the Colossus also in Troilus and Cressida (V.5) and in Henry IV, Part 1 (V.1).
"The New Colossus" (1883), a sonnet by Emma Lazarus written on a cast bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, contrasts the latter with:
While these fanciful images feed the misconception, the mechanics of the situation reveal that the Colossus could not have straddled the harbour as described in Lemprière's Classical Dictionary. If the completed statue had straddled the harbour, then the entire mouth of the harbour would have been effectively closed during the entirety of the construction, and the ancient Rhodians would not have had the means to dredge and re-open the harbour after construction was finished. Additionally, the fallen statue would have blocked the harbour, and since the ancient Rhodians did not have the ability to remove the fallen statue from the harbour, it would not have remained visible on land for the next 800 years, as discussed above. Even neglecting these objections, the statue was made of bronze, and engineering analyses indicate that it could not have been built with its legs apart without collapsing under its own weight.
Many researchers have considered alternative positions for the statue which would have made it more feasible for actual construction by the ancients. There is also no evidence that the statue held a torch aloft; the records simply say that after completion, the Rhodians kindled the "torch of freedom". A relief in a nearby temple shows Helios standing with one hand shielding his eyes (as if saluting) and it is quite possible that the colossus was constructed in the same pose.
While scholars do not know what the statue looked like, they do have a good idea of what the head and face looked like, as it was of a standard rendering at the time. The head would have had curly hair, similar to the images found on contemporary Rhodian coins.
== Possible locations ==
While scholars generally agree that anecdotal depictions of the Colossus straddling the harbour's entry point have no historic or scientific basis, the monument's actual location remains a matter of debate. As mentioned above, the statue is thought locally to have stood where two pillars now stand at the Mandraki port entrance.
The floor of the Fortress of St Nicholas, near the harbour entrance, contains a circle of sandstone blocks of unknown origin or purpose. Curved blocks of marble that were incorporated into the Fortress structure, but are considered too intricately cut to have been quarried for that purpose, have been posited as the remnants of a marble base for the Colossus, which would have stood on the sandstone block foundation.
Archaeologist Ursula Vedder postulates that the Colossus was not located in the harbour area at all, but rather was part of the Acropolis of Rhodes, which stood on a hill that overlooks the port area. The ruins of a large temple, traditionally thought to have been dedicated to Apollo, are situated at the highest point of the hill. Vedder believes that the structure would actually have been a Helios sanctuary, and a portion of its enormous stone foundation could have served as the supporting platform for the Colossus.
== Modern Colossus projects ==
In 2008, The Guardian reported that a modern Colossus was to be built at the harbour entrance by the German artist Gert Hof leading a Cologne-based team. It was to be a giant light sculpture made partially out of melted-down weapons from around the world. It would cost up to €200 million.
In December 2015, a group of European architects announced plans to build a modern Colossus bestriding two piers at the harbour entrance, despite a preponderance of evidence and scholarly opinion that the original monument could not have stood there. The new statue, 150 metres (490 ft) tall (five times the height of the original), would cost an estimated US$283 million, funded by private donations and crowdsourcing. The statue would include a cultural centre, a library, an exhibition hall, and a lighthouse, all powered by solar panels. No such plans were carried out, however, and the website for the project went offline. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chancellors_of_Germany | List of chancellors of Germany | The chancellor of Germany is the political leader of Germany and the head of the federal government. The office holder is responsible for selecting all other members of the government and chairing cabinet meetings.
The office was created in the North German Confederation in 1867, when Otto von Bismarck became the first chancellor. With the unification of Germany and establishment of the German Empire in 1871, the Confederation evolved into a German nation-state and its leader became known as the chancellor of Germany. Originally, the chancellor was only responsible to the emperor. This changed with the constitutional reform in 1918, when the Parliament was given the right to dismiss the chancellor. Under the 1919 Weimar Constitution the chancellors were appointed by the directly elected president, but were responsible to the Reichstag (parliament).
The constitution was set aside during the 1933–1945 Nazi regime. During the Allied occupation, no independent German government and no chancellor existed; and the office was not reconstituted in East Germany, thus the head of government of East Germany was chairman of the Council of Ministers. The 1949 Basic Law made the chancellor the most important office in West Germany, while diminishing the role of the president.
== North German Confederation (1867–1871) ==
The North German Confederation came into existence after the German Confederation was dissolved following the Prussian victory in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The chancellor was appointed by the Bundespräsidium, a position that was held constitutionally by the Prussian king.
Political parties:
None
== German Empire (1871–1918) ==
The German Empire was born out of the North German Confederation as result of the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71). The Präsidium (the Prussian king), which now had also the title Emperor, named the chancellor.
Political parties:
None
Centre
== Weimar Republic (1918–1933) ==
On 9 November 1918, Chancellor Max von Baden handed over his office to Friedrich Ebert. Ebert continued to serve as head of government during the three months between the end of the German Empire in November 1918 and the first gathering of the National Assembly in February 1919 as Chairman of the Council of the People's Deputies, until 29 December 1918 together with USPD Leader Hugo Haase.
The Weimar Constitution of 1919 set the framework for the Weimar Republic. The chancellors were officially installed by the president; in some cases the chancellor did not have a majority in parliament.
Political parties:
SPD
Centre
DVP
NSDAP
None
== Nazi Germany (1933–1945) ==
Soon after Adolf Hitler was appointed as chancellor in 1933, the German Reichstag (parliament) passed the Enabling Act (German: Ermächtigungsgesetz), officially titled "Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich" (German: Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich), which effectively gave the chancellor the power of a dictator. This event marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Nazi Germany. Hitler thereupon destroyed all democratic systems and consolidated all power to himself. After the death of president Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler merged the offices of chancellor and president in his own person and called himself Führer und Reichskanzler.
Political parties:
NSDAP
== Federal Republic of Germany (1949–present) ==
In 1949, two separate German states were established: the Federal Republic of Germany (known as West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (known as East Germany). The list below gives the chancellors of West Germany; the government of East Germany was headed by the chairman of the Council of Ministers. In 1990, East Germany was dissolved as it merged with West Germany; Germany was reunified. It retained the name of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Political parties:
CDU (6)
SPD (4)
== Timeline ==
=== German Reich ===
=== Federal Republic of Germany ===
== Longest-serving chancellors ==
The following table lists all chancellors of the Federal Republic of Germany (since 1949) ranked by their length of tenure, with the incumbent chancellor's tenure automatically updating daily.
== Chancellors by party ==
The following table summarizes chancellors of the Federal Republic of Germany grouped by political party.
Notes:
Green indicates the party of the current incumbent chancellor
Bold name indicates the current incumbent chancellor
CDU total time includes the ongoing tenure of Friedrich Merz
== Age-related statistics ==
The following table shows age-related data for all chancellors of the Federal Republic of Germany, with living chancellors' ages automatically updating.
Notes:
Light green indicates living former chancellors
Green indicates the current incumbent chancellor
Living chancellors' post-chancellorship timespan and lifespan automatically update daily
== Graphical representation ==
This is a graphical lifespan timeline of the Chancellors of Germany since 1949. They are listed in order of first assuming office.
The following chart shows chancellors by their age (living chancellors in green), with the years of their time in office in color. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#In_academia | Noam Chomsky#In academia | Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American intellectual, philosopher, linguist, political activist, and social critic. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s, Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American Left as a consistent critic of the foreign policy of the United States, contemporary capitalism, and corporatocracy.
Born to immigrant Ashkenazi Jews in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas remain highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.
== Life ==
=== Childhood: 1928–1945 ===
Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in East Oak Lane, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents, William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. In 1913, William fled the Russian Empire, from what is now Ukraine, to escape conscription, and worked in Baltimore sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools before attending college. Elsie emigrated from the region of what is present-day Belarus. Both parents' first language was Yiddish although it was taboo to speak it at home; his father spoke English with a foreign accent while his mother spoke a native New York City English dialect. After moving to Philadelphia, William became principal of the Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school and joined the Gratz College faculty. He placed great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and independent in their thinking, concerned about improving and enhancing the world, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a mission that shaped and was subsequently adopted by his son. Elsie, who also taught at Mikveh Israel, shared her leftist politics and care for social issues with her sons.
Noam's only sibling, David Eli Chomsky, was born five years later, and worked as a cardiologist in Philadelphia. The brothers were close, though David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive. They were raised Jewish, being taught Hebrew and regularly involved with discussing the political theories of Zionism; the family was particularly influenced by the Left Zionist writings of Ahad Ha'am. He faced antisemitism as a child, particularly from Philadelphia's Irish and German communities.
Chomsky attended the independent, Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School and Philadelphia's Central High School, where he excelled academically and joined various clubs and societies, but was troubled by the school's hierarchical and domineering teaching methods. He also attended Hebrew High School at Gratz College, where his father taught.
Chomsky has described his parents as "normal Roosevelt Democrats" with center-left politics, but relatives involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union exposed him to socialism and far-left politics. He was substantially influenced by his uncle and the Jewish leftists who frequented his New York City newspaper stand to debate current affairs. Chomsky himself often visited left-wing and anarchist bookstores when visiting his uncle in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He became absorbed in the story of the 1939 fall of Barcelona and suppression of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement, writing his first article on the topic at the age of 10. That he came to identify with anarchism first rather than another leftist movement, he described as a "lucky accident". Chomsky was firmly anti-Bolshevik by his early teens.
=== University: 1945–1955 ===
In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic. Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew. Frustrated with his experiences at the university, he considered dropping out and moving to a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine, but his intellectual curiosity was reawakened through conversations with the linguist Zellig Harris, whom he first met in a political circle in 1947. Harris introduced Chomsky to the field of theoretical linguistics and convinced him to major in the subject. Chomsky's BA honors thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", applied Harris's methods to the language. Chomsky revised this thesis for his MA, which he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951; it was subsequently published as a book. He also developed his interest in philosophy while at university, in particular under the tutelage of Nelson Goodman.
From 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he undertook research on what became his doctoral dissertation. Having been encouraged by Goodman to apply, Chomsky was attracted to Harvard in part because the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine was based there. Both Quine and a visiting philosopher, J. L. Austin of the University of Oxford, strongly influenced Chomsky. In 1952, Chomsky published his first academic article in The Journal of Symbolic Logic. Highly critical of the established behaviorist currents in linguistics, in 1954, he presented his ideas at lectures at the University of Chicago and Yale University. He had not been registered as a student at Pennsylvania for four years, but in 1955 he submitted a thesis setting out his ideas on transformational grammar; he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before being published in 1975 as part of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Harvard professor George Armitage Miller was impressed by Chomsky's thesis and collaborated with him on several technical papers in mathematical linguistics. Chomsky's doctorate exempted him from compulsory military service, which was otherwise due to begin in 1955.
In 1947, Chomsky began a romantic relationship with Carol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since early childhood. They married in 1949. After Chomsky was made a Fellow at Harvard, the couple moved to the Allston area of Boston and remained there until 1965, when they relocated to the suburb of Lexington. The couple took a Harvard travel grant to Europe in 1953. He enjoyed living in Hashomer Hatzair's HaZore'a kibbutz while in Israel, but was appalled by his interactions with Jewish nationalism, anti-Arab racism and, within the kibbutz's leftist community, Stalinism. On visits to New York City, Chomsky continued to frequent the office of the Yiddish anarchist journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime and became enamored with the ideas of Rudolf Rocker, a contributor whose work introduced Chomsky to the link between anarchism and classical liberalism. Chomsky also read other political thinkers: the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Diego Abad de Santillán, democratic socialists George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Dwight Macdonald, and works by Marxists Karl Liebknecht, Karl Korsch, and Rosa Luxemburg. His politics were reaffirmed by Orwell's depiction of Barcelona's functioning anarchist society in Homage to Catalonia (1938). Chomsky read the leftist journal Politics, which furthered his interest in anarchism, and the council communist periodical Living Marxism, though he rejected the Marxist orthodoxy of its editor, Paul Mattick.
=== Early career: 1955–1966 ===
Chomsky befriended two linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—Morris Halle and Roman Jakobson—the latter of whom secured him an assistant professor position there in 1955. At MIT, Chomsky spent half his time on a mechanical translation project and half teaching a course on linguistics and philosophy. He described MIT as open to experimentation where he was free to pursue his idiosyncratic interests. MIT promoted him to the position of associate professor in 1957, and over the next year he was also a visiting professor at Columbia University. The Chomskys had their first child, Aviva, that same year. He also published his first book on linguistics, Syntactic Structures, a work that radically opposed the dominant Harris–Bloomfield trend in the field. Responses to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline. The linguist John Lyons later asserted that Syntactic Structures "revolutionized the scientific study of language". From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Chomsky's provocative critique of B. F. Skinner, who viewed language as entirely learned behavior, and that critique's challenge to the dominant behaviorist paradigm thrust Chomsky into the limelight. Chomsky argued that behaviorism underplayed the role of human creativity in learning language and overplayed the role of external conditions in influencing verbal behavior. He proceeded to found MIT's graduate program in linguistics with Halle. In 1961, Chomsky received tenure and became a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. He was appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which established him as the de facto spokesperson of American linguistics. Between 1963 and 1965 he consulted on a military-sponsored project to teach computers to understand natural English commands from military generals.
Chomsky continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout the decade, including in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), and Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). Along with Halle, he also edited the Studies in Language series of books for Harper and Row. As he began to accrue significant academic recognition and honors for his work, Chomsky lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. These lectures were published as Language and Mind in 1968. In the late 1960s, a high-profile intellectual rift later known as the linguistic wars developed between Chomsky and some of his colleagues and doctoral students—including Paul Postal, John Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley—who contended that Chomsky's syntax-based, interpretivist linguistics did not properly account for semantic context (general semantics). A post hoc assessment of this period concluded that the opposing programs ultimately were complementary, each informing the other.
=== Anti-war activism and dissent: 1967–1975 ===
Chomsky joined protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, speaking on the subject at small gatherings in churches and homes. His 1967 critique of U.S. involvement, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", among other contributions to The New York Review of Books, debuted Chomsky as a public dissident. This essay and other political articles were collected and published in 1969 as part of Chomsky's first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins. He followed this with further political books, including At War with Asia (1970), The Backroom Boys (1973), For Reasons of State (1973), and Peace in the Middle East? (1974), published by Pantheon Books. These publications led to Chomsky's association with the American New Left movement, though he thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm and preferred the company of activists to that of intellectuals. Chomsky remained largely ignored by the mainstream press throughout this period.
Chomsky also became involved in left-wing activism. Chomsky refused to pay half his taxes, publicly supported students who refused the draft, and was arrested while participating in an anti-war teach-in outside the Pentagon. During this time, Chomsky co-founded the anti-war collective RESIST with Hans Koning, Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald. Although he questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests, Chomsky regularly gave lectures to student activist groups and, with his colleague Louis Kampf, ran undergraduate courses on politics at MIT independently of the conservative-dominated political science department. When student activists campaigned to stop weapons and counterinsurgency research at MIT, Chomsky was sympathetic but felt that the research should remain under MIT's oversight and limited to systems of deterrence and defense. Chomsky has acknowledged that his MIT lab's funding at this time came from the military. He later said he considered resigning from MIT during the Vietnam War. There has since been a wide-ranging debate about what effects Chomsky's employment at MIT had on his political and linguistic ideas.
Chomsky's anti-war activism led to his arrest on multiple occasions and he was on President Richard Nixon's master list of political opponents. Chomsky was aware of the potential repercussions of his civil disobedience, and his wife began studying for her own doctorate in linguistics to support the family in the event of Chomsky's imprisonment or joblessness. Chomsky's scientific reputation insulated him from administrative action based on his beliefs. In 1970 he visited southeast Asia to lecture at Vietnam's Hanoi University of Science and Technology and toured war refugee camps in Laos. In 1973 he helped lead a committee commemorating the 50th anniversary of the War Resisters League.
Chomsky's work in linguistics continued to gain international recognition as he received multiple honorary doctorates. He delivered public lectures at the University of Cambridge, Columbia University (Woodbridge Lectures), and Stanford University. His appearance in a 1971 debate with French continental philosopher Michel Foucault positioned Chomsky as a symbolic figurehead of analytic philosophy. He continued to publish extensively on linguistics, producing Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), an enlarged edition of Language and Mind (1972), and Reflections on Language (1975). In 1974 Chomsky became a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
=== Edward S. Herman and the Faurisson affair: 1976–1980 ===
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky's linguistic publications expanded and clarified his earlier work, addressing his critics and updating his grammatical theory. His political talks often generated considerable controversy, particularly when he criticized the Israeli government and military. In the early 1970s Chomsky began collaborating with Edward S. Herman, who had also published critiques of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Together they wrote Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, a book that criticized U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and the mainstream media's failure to cover it. Warner Modular published it in 1973, but its parent company disapproved of the book's contents and ordered all copies destroyed.
While mainstream publishing options proved elusive, Chomsky found support from Michael Albert's South End Press, an activist-oriented publishing company. In 1979, South End published Chomsky and Herman's revised Counter-Revolutionary Violence as the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights, which compares U.S. media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. It argues that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored the East Timorese situation while focusing on events in Cambodia, a U.S. enemy. Chomsky's response included two testimonials before the United Nations' Special Committee on Decolonization, successful encouragement for American media to cover the occupation, and meetings with refugees in Lisbon. Marxist academic Steven Lukes most prominently publicly accused Chomsky of betraying his anarchist ideals and acting as an apologist for Cambodian leader Pol Pot. Herman said that the controversy "imposed a serious personal cost" on Chomsky, who considered the personal criticism less important than the evidence that "mainstream intelligentsia suppressed or justified the crimes of their own states".
Chomsky had long publicly criticized Nazism, and totalitarianism more generally, but his commitment to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely characterized as Holocaust denial. Without Chomsky's knowledge, his plea for Faurisson's freedom of speech was published as the preface to the latter's 1980 book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire. Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson, and France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their accusations. Critiquing Chomsky's position, sociologist Werner Cohn later published an analysis of the affair titled Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers. The Faurisson affair had a lasting, damaging effect on Chomsky's career, especially in France.
=== Critique of propaganda and international affairs ===
In 1985, during the Nicaraguan Contra War—in which the U.S. supported the contra militia against the Sandinista government—Chomsky traveled to Managua to meet with workers' organizations and refugees of the conflict, giving public lectures on politics and linguistics. Many of these lectures were published in 1987 as On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures. In 1983 he published The Fateful Triangle, which argued that the U.S. had continually used the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for its own ends. In 1988, Chomsky visited the Palestinian territories to witness the impact of Israeli occupation.
Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) outlines their propaganda model for understanding mainstream media. Even in countries without official censorship, they argued, the news is censored through five filters that greatly influence both what and how news is presented. The book received a 1992 film adaptation. In 1989, Chomsky published Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, in which he suggests that a worthwhile democracy requires that its citizens undertake intellectual self-defense against the media and elite intellectual culture that seeks to control them. By the 1980s, Chomsky's students had become prominent linguists who, in turn, expanded and revised his linguistic theories.
In the 1990s, Chomsky embraced political activism to a greater degree than before. Retaining his commitment to the cause of East Timorese independence, in 1995 he visited Australia to talk on the issue at the behest of the East Timorese Relief Association and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance. The lectures he gave on the subject were published as Powers and Prospects in 1996. As a result of the international publicity Chomsky generated, his biographer Wolfgang Sperlich opined that he did more to aid the cause of East Timorese independence than anyone but the investigative journalist John Pilger. After East Timor attained independence from Indonesia in 1999, the Australian-led International Force for East Timor arrived as a peacekeeping force; Chomsky was critical of this, believing it was designed to secure Australian access to East Timor's oil and gas reserves under the Timor Gap Treaty.
Chomsky was widely interviewed after the September 11 attacks in 2001 as the American public attempted to make sense of the attacks. He argued that the ensuing war on terror was not a new development but a continuation of U.S. foreign policy and concomitant rhetoric since at least the Reagan era. He gave the D.T. Lakdawala Memorial Lecture in New Delhi in 2001, and in 2003 visited Cuba at the invitation of the Latin American Association of Social Scientists. Chomsky's 2003 Hegemony or Survival articulated what he called the United States' "imperial grand strategy" and critiqued the Iraq War and other aspects of the war on terror. Chomsky toured internationally with greater regularity during this period.
=== Retirement ===
Chomsky retired from MIT in 2002, but continued to conduct research and seminars on campus as an emeritus. That same year he visited Turkey to attend the trial of a publisher who had been accused of treason for printing one of Chomsky's books; Chomsky insisted on being a co-defendant and amid international media attention, the Security Courts dropped the charge on the first day. During that trip Chomsky visited Kurdish areas of Turkey and spoke out in favor of the Kurds' human rights. A supporter of the World Social Forum, he attended its conferences in Brazil in both 2002 and 2003, also attending the Forum event in India.
Chomsky supported the 2011 Occupy movement, speaking at encampments and publishing on the movement, which he called a reaction to a 30-year class war. The 2015 documentary Requiem for the American Dream summarizes his views on capitalism and economic inequality through a "75-minute teach-in".
In 2015, Chomsky and his wife purchased a residence in São Paulo, Brazil, and began splitting their time between Brazil and the U.S. Chomsky taught a short-term politics course at the University of Arizona in 2017. He was later hired as the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice, a part-time professorship in the linguistics department with duties including teaching and public seminars. His salary was covered by philanthropic donations. After a stroke in June 2023, Chomsky moved to Brazil full-time.
== Linguistic theory ==
The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited. He argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed speech, thought, and all behavior as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species. Chomsky argues that his nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism" and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism", which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external stimuli. Historians have disputed Chomsky's claim about rationalism on the basis that his theory of innate grammar excludes propositional knowledge and instead focuses on innate learning capacities or structures.
=== Universal grammar ===
Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge is partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain language-specific features of their native languages. He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition and describes a "poverty of the stimulus": an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language. To explain this, Chomsky proposed that the primary linguistic data must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity. Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky referred to this difference in capacity as the language acquisition device, and suggested that linguists needed to determine both what that device is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that result from these constraints would constitute "universal grammar". Multiple researchers have challenged universal grammar on the grounds of the evolutionary infeasibility of its genetic basis for language, the lack of crosslinguistic surface universals, and the unproven link between innate/universal structures and the structures of specific languages. Michael Tomasello has challenged Chomsky's theory of innate syntactic knowledge as based on theory and not behavioral observation. The empirical basis of poverty of the stimulus arguments has been challenged by Geoffrey Pullum and others, leading to back-and-forth debate in the language acquisition literature. Recent work has also suggested that some recurrent neural network architectures can learn hierarchical structure without an explicit constraint.
=== Generative grammar ===
Chomsky is generally credited with launching the research tradition of generative grammar, which aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative grammar proposes models of language consisting of explicit rule systems, which make testable falsifiable predictions. The goal of generative grammar is sometimes described as answering the question "What is that that you know when you know a language?"
Within generative grammar, Chomsky's initial model was called transformational grammar. Chomsky developed transformational grammar in the mid-1950s, whereupon it became the dominant syntactic theory in linguistics for two decades. "Transformations" are syntactic rules that derive surface structure from deep structure, which was often considered to reflect the structure of meaning. Transformational grammar later developed into the 1980s government and binding theory and thence into the minimalist program. This research focused on the principles and parameters framework, which explained children's ability to learn any language by filling open parameters (a set of universal grammar principles) that adapt as the child encounters linguistic data. The minimalist program, initiated by Chomsky, asks which minimal principles and parameters theory fits most elegantly, naturally, and simply.
Chomsky is commonly credited with inventing transformational-generative grammar, but his original contribution was considered modest when he first published his theory. In his 1955 dissertation and his 1957 textbook Syntactic Structures, he presented recent developments in the analysis formulated by Zellig Harris, who was Chomsky's PhD supervisor, and by Charles F. Hockett. Their method derives from the work of the structural linguist Louis Hjelmslev, who introduced algorithmic grammar to general linguistics. Based on this rule-based notation of grammars, Chomsky grouped logically possible phrase-structure grammar types into a series of four nested subsets and increasingly complex types, together known as the Chomsky hierarchy. This classification remains relevant to formal language theory and theoretical computer science, especially programming language theory, compiler construction, and automata theory. Chomsky's Syntactic Structures became, beyond generative linguistics as such, a catalyst for connecting what in Hjelmslev's and Jespersen's time was the beginnings of structural linguistics, which has become cognitive linguistics.
== Political views ==
Chomsky is a prominent political dissident. His political views have changed little since his childhood, when he was influenced by the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition. He usually identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a libertarian socialist. He views these positions not as precise political theories but as ideals that he thinks best meet human needs: liberty, community, and freedom of association. Unlike some other socialists, such as Marxists, Chomsky believes that politics lies outside the remit of science, but he still roots his ideas about an ideal society in empirical data and empirically justified theories.
In Chomsky's view, the truth about political realities is systematically distorted or suppressed by an elite corporatocracy, which uses corporate media, advertising, and think tanks to promote its own propaganda. His work seeks to reveal such manipulations and the truth they obscure. Chomsky believes this web of falsehood can be broken by "common sense", critical thinking, and understanding the roles of self-interest and self-deception, and that intellectuals abdicate their moral responsibility to tell the truth about the world in fear of losing prestige and funding. He argues that, as such an intellectual, it is his duty to use his social privilege, resources, and training to aid popular democracy movements in their struggles.
Although he has participated in direct action demonstrations—joining protests, being arrested, organizing groups—Chomsky's primary political outlet is education, i.e., free public lessons. Chomsky is a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a longtime member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) international union, as was his father.
=== United States foreign policy ===
Chomsky has been a prominent critic of American imperialism, but is not a pacifist, believing World War II was justified as America's last defensive war. He believes that U.S. foreign policy's basic principle is the establishment of "open societies" that are economically and politically controlled by the U.S. and where U.S.-based businesses can prosper. He argues that the U.S. seeks to suppress any movements within these countries that are not compliant with U.S. interests and to ensure that U.S.-friendly governments are placed in power. When discussing current events, he emphasizes their place within a wider historical perspective. He believes that official, sanctioned historical accounts of U.S. and British extraterritorial operations have consistently whitewashed these nations' actions in order to present them as having benevolent motives in either spreading democracy or, in older instances, spreading Christianity; by criticizing these accounts, he seeks to correct them. Prominent examples he regularly cites are the actions of the British Empire in India and Africa and U.S. actions in Vietnam, the Philippines, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Chomsky's political work has centered heavily on criticizing the actions of the United States. He has said he focuses on the U.S. because the country has militarily and economically dominated the world during his lifetime and because its liberal democratic electoral system allows the citizenry to influence government policy. His hope is that, by spreading awareness of the impact U.S. foreign policies have on the populations affected by them, he can sway the populations of the U.S. and other countries into opposing the policies. He urges people to criticize their governments' motivations, decisions, and actions, to accept responsibility for their own thoughts and actions, and to apply the same standards to others as to themselves.
Chomsky has been critical of U.S. involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, arguing that it has consistently blocked a peaceful settlement. He also criticizes the U.S.'s close ties with Saudi Arabia and involvement in Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, highlighting that Saudi Arabia has "one of the most grotesque human rights records in the world".
Chomsky called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a criminal act of aggression and noted that Russia was committing major war crimes in the country. He considered support for Ukraine's self-defense legitimate and said Ukraine should be given enough military aid to defend itself, but not enough to cause "an escalation". His criticism of the war focused on the United States. He alleged that the U.S. rejected any compromise with Russia and that this might have provoked the invasion. According to Chomsky, the U.S. was arming Ukraine only to weaken Russia, and Ukrainian requests for heavy weaponry were untrue "Western propaganda", despite Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeatedly asking for them. More than a year into the invasion, Chomsky argued that Russia was waging the war "more humanely" than the U.S. did the invasion of Iraq.
=== Capitalism and socialism ===
In his youth, Chomsky developed a dislike of capitalism and the pursuit of material wealth. At the same time, he developed a disdain for authoritarian socialism, as represented by the Marxist–Leninist policies of the Soviet Union. Rather than accepting the common view among U.S. economists that a spectrum exists between total state ownership of the economy and total private ownership, he instead suggests that a spectrum should be understood between total democratic control of the economy and total autocratic control (whether state or private). He argues that Western capitalist countries are not really democratic, because, in his view, a truly democratic society is one in which all persons have a say in public economic policy. He has stated his opposition to ruling elites, among them institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and GATT (precursor to the WTO).
Chomsky highlights that, since the 1970s, the U.S. has become increasingly economically unequal as a result of the repeal of various financial regulations and the unilateral rescinding of the Bretton Woods financial control agreement by the U.S. He characterizes the U.S. as a de facto one-party state, viewing both the Republican Party and Democratic Party as manifestations of a single "Business Party" controlled by corporate and financial interests. Chomsky highlights that, within Western capitalist liberal democracies, at least 80% of the population has no control over economic decisions, which are instead in the hands of a management class and ultimately controlled by a small, wealthy elite.
Noting the entrenchment of such an economic system, Chomsky believes that change is possible through the organized cooperation of large numbers of people who understand the problem and know how they want to reorganize the economy more equitably. Acknowledging that corporate domination of media and government stifles any significant change to this system, he sees reason for optimism in historical examples such as the social rejection of slavery as immoral, the advances in women's rights, and the forcing of government to justify invasions. He views violent revolution to overthrow a government as a last resort to be avoided if possible, citing the example of historical revolutions where the population's welfare has worsened as a result of upheaval.
Chomsky sees libertarian socialist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas as the descendants of the classical liberal ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, arguing that his ideological position revolves around "nourishing the libertarian and creative character of the human being". He envisions an anarcho-syndicalist future with direct worker control of the means of production and government by workers' councils, who would select temporary and revocable representatives to meet together at general assemblies. The point of this self-governance is to make each citizen, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "a direct participator in the government of affairs". He believes that there will be no need for political parties. By controlling their productive life, he believes that individuals can gain job satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment and purpose. He argues that unpleasant and unpopular jobs could be fully automated, specially remunerated, or communally shared.
=== Israeli–Palestinian conflict ===
Chomsky has written prolifically about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, aiming to raise public awareness of it. A labor Zionist who later became what is today considered an anti-Zionist, Chomsky has criticized the Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which he likens to a settler colony. He has said that the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a bad decision, but given the realpolitik of the situation, he has also considered a two-state solution on the condition that the nation-states exist on equal terms.
Chomsky has said that characterizing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as apartheid, similar to the system that existed in South Africa, would be a "gift to Israel", as he has long held that "the Occupied Territories are much worse than South Africa". South Africa depended on its black population for labor, but Chomsky argues the same is not true of Israel, which in his view seeks to make the situation for Palestinians under its occupation unlivable, especially in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where "atrocities" take place every day. He also argues that, unlike South Africa, Israel has not sought the international community's approval, but rather relies solely on U.S. support. Chomsky has said that the Israeli-led blockade of the Gaza Strip has turned it into a "concentration camp" and expressed fears similar to Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz's 1990s warning that the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories could turn Israeli Jews into "Judeo-Nazis". Chomsky has said that Leibowitz's warning "was a direct reflection of the continued occupation, the humiliation of people, the degradation, and the terrorist attacks by the Israeli government". He has also called the U.S. a violent state that exports violence by supporting Israeli "atrocities" against the Palestinians and said that listening to American mainstream media, including CBS, is like listening to "Israeli propaganda agencies".
Chomsky was denied entry to the West Bank in 2010 because of his criticisms of Israel. He had been invited to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University and was to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman later said that Chomsky was denied entry by mistake.
In his 1983 book The Fateful Triangle, Chomsky criticized the Palestine Liberation Organization for its "self-destructiveness" and "suicidal character" and disapproved of its programs of "armed struggle" and "erratic violence". He also criticized the Arab governments as not "decent". Given what he has described as his very Jewish upbringing with deeply Zionist activist parents, Chomsky's views have drawn controversy and criticism. They are rooted in the kibbutzim and socialist binational cooperation. In a 2014 interview on Democracy Now!, Chomsky said that the charter of Hamas, which calls for Israel's destruction, "means practically nothing", having been created "by a small group of people under siege, under attack in 1988". He compared it to the electoral program of the Likud party, which, he said, "states explicitly that there can never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. And they not only state it in their charter, that's a call for the destruction of Palestine, explicit call for it".
=== Mass media and propaganda ===
Chomsky's political writings have largely focused on ideology, social and political power, mass media, and state policy. One of his best-known works, Manufacturing Consent, dissects the media's role in reinforcing and acquiescing to state policies across the political spectrum while marginalizing contrary perspectives. Chomsky asserts that this version of censorship, by government-guided "free market" forces, is subtler and harder to undermine than was the equivalent propaganda system in the Soviet Union. As he argues, the mainstream press is corporate-owned and thus reflects corporate priorities and interests. Acknowledging that many American journalists are dedicated and well-meaning, he argues that the mass media's choices of topics and issues, the unquestioned premises on which that coverage rests, and the range of opinions expressed are all constrained to reinforce the state's ideology: although mass media will criticize individual politicians and political parties, it will not undermine the wider state-corporate nexus of which it is a part. As evidence, he highlights that the U.S. mass media does not employ any socialist journalists or political commentators. He also points to examples of important news stories that the U.S. mainstream media has ignored because reporting on them would reflect badly upon the country, including the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton with possible FBI involvement, the massacres in Nicaragua perpetrated by U.S.-funded Contras, and the constant reporting on Israeli deaths without equivalent coverage of the far larger number of Palestinian deaths in that conflict. To remedy this situation, Chomsky calls for grassroots democratic control and involvement of the media.
Chomsky considers most conspiracy theories fruitless, distracting substitutes for thinking about policy formation in an institutional framework, where individual manipulation is secondary to broader social imperatives. He separates his Propaganda Model from conspiracy in that he is describing institutions following their natural imperatives rather than collusive forces with secret controls. Instead of supporting the educational system as an antidote, he believes that most education is counterproductive. Chomsky describes mass education as a system solely intended to turn farmers from independent producers into unthinking industrial employees.
=== Reactions of critics and counter-criticism: 1980s–present ===
In the 2004 book The Anti-Chomsky Reader, Peter Collier and David Horowitz accuse Chomsky of cherry-picking facts to suit his theories. Horowitz has also criticized Chomsky's anti-Americanism:
For 40 years Noam Chomsky has turned out book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet and speech after speech with one message, and one message alone: America is the Great Satan; it is the fount of evil in the world. In Chomsky's demented universe, America is responsible not only for its own bad deeds, but for the bad deeds of others, including those of the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In this attitude he is the medium for all those who now search the ruins of Manhattan not for the victims and the American dead, but for the "root causes" of the catastrophe that befell them.
For the conservative public policy think tank the Hoover Institution, Peter Schweizer wrote in January 2006, "Chomsky favors the estate tax and massive income redistribution—just not the redistribution of his income." Schweizer criticized Chomsky for setting up an estate plan and protecting his own intellectual property as it relates to his published works, as well as the high speaking fees that Chomsky received on a regular basis, around $9,000–$12,000 per talk at that time.
Mark Bauerlein has accused Chomsky of credulity about socialist or communist regimes while examining capitalist regimes with greater scrutiny or criticism:Chomsky's analysis of U.S. actions plunged deep into dark U.S. machinations, but when traveling among the Communists he rested content with appearances. The countryside outside Hanoi, he reported in The New York Review of Books, displayed "a high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels." But how could he tell? Chomsky did not speak Vietnamese, and so he depended on government translators, tour guides, and handlers for information. In [Communist] Vietnamese hands, the clear-eyed skepticism turned into willing credulousness.According to Nikolas Kozloff, writing for Al Jazeera in September 2012, Chomsky "has drawn the world's attention to the various misdeeds of the US and its proxies around the world, and for that he deserves credit. Yet, in seeking to avoid controversy at all costs Chomsky has turned into something of an ideologue. Scour the Chomsky web site and you won't find significant discussion of Belarus or Latin America's flirtation with outside authoritarian leaders, for that matter."
Political activist George Monbiot has argued that "Part of the problem is that a kind of cult has developed around Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, which cannot believe they could ever be wrong, and produces ever more elaborate conspiracy theories to justify their mistakes."
Defenders of Chomsky have countered that he has been censored or left out of public debate. Claims of this nature date to the Reagan era. Writing for The Washington Post in February 1988, Saul Landau wrote, "It is unhealthy that Chomsky's insights are excluded from the policy debate. His relentless prosecutorial prose, with a hint of Talmudic whine and the rationalist anarchism of Tom Paine, may reflect a justified frustration."
== Philosophy ==
Chomsky has also been active in a number of philosophical fields, including philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. In these fields he is credited with ushering in the "cognitive revolution", a significant paradigm shift that rejected logical positivism, the prevailing philosophical methodology of the time, and reframed how philosophers think about language and the mind. Chomsky views the cognitive revolution as rooted in 17th-century rationalist ideals. His position—the idea that the mind contains inherent structures to understand language, perception, and thought—has more in common with rationalism than behaviorism. He named one of his key works Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). This sparked criticism from historians and philosophers who disagreed with Chomsky's interpretations of classical sources and use of philosophical terminology. In the philosophy of language, Chomsky is particularly known for his criticisms of the notion of reference and meaning in human language and his perspective on the nature and function of mental representations.
Chomsky's famous 1971 debate on human nature with the French philosopher Michel Foucault was a symbolic clash of the analytic and continental philosophy traditions, represented by Chomsky and Foucault, respectively. It showed what appeared to be irreconcilable differences between two moral and intellectual luminaries of the 20th century. Foucault held that any definition of human nature is connected to our present-day conceptions of ourselves; Chomsky held that human nature contained universals such as a common standard of moral justice as deduced through reason. Chomsky criticized postmodernism and French philosophy generally, arguing that the obscure language of postmodern, leftist philosophers gives little aid to the working classes. He has also debated analytic philosophers, including Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Willard Van Orman Quine, and John Searle.
Chomsky's contributions span intellectual and world history, including the history of philosophy. Irony is a recurring characteristic of his writing, such as rhetorically implying that his readers already know something to be true, which engages the reader more actively in assessing the veracity of his claims.
== Personal life ==
Chomsky endeavors to separate his family life, linguistic scholarship, and political activism from each other. An intensely private person, he is uninterested in appearances and the fame his work has brought him. McGilvray suggests that Chomsky is not motivated by a desire for fame but impelled to tell what he perceives as the truth and by a desire to aid others in doing so. Chomsky acknowledges that his income affords him a privileged life compared to the majority of the world's population. Nevertheless, he characterizes himself as a "worker", albeit one who uses his intellect as his employable skill. He reads four or five newspapers daily. In the U.S., he subscribes to The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. Chomsky is not religious but has expressed approval of forms of religion such as liberation theology.
Chomsky is known to use charged language ("corrupt", "fascist", "fraudulent") when describing established political and academic figures, which can polarize his audience but is in keeping with his belief that much scholarship is self-serving. His colleague Steven Pinker has said that Chomsky "portrays people who disagree with him as stupid or evil, using withering scorn in his rhetoric", and that this contributes to the extreme reactions he receives. Chomsky avoids academic conferences, including left-oriented ones such as the Socialist Scholars Conference, preferring to speak to activist groups or hold university seminars for mass audiences. His approach to academic freedom has led him to support MIT academics whose actions he deplores. In 1969, when he heard that Walt Rostow, a major architect of the Vietnam War, wanted to return to work at MIT, Chomsky threatened "to protest publicly" if Rostow were denied a position there. In 1989, when Pentagon adviser John Deutch applied to be president of MIT, Chomsky supported his candidacy. Later, when Deutch became head of the CIA, The New York Times quoted Chomsky as saying, "He has more honesty and integrity than anyone I've ever met. ... If somebody's got to be running the CIA, I'm glad it's him."
Chomsky was married to Carol Doris (née Schatz) from 1949 until her death in 2008. They had three children together: Aviva (b. 1957), Diane (b. 1960), and Harry (b. 1967). In 2014, Chomsky married Valeria Wasserman, a translator for the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of São Paulo. They have owned a home in Wasserman's native country, Brazil, since 2015. Judith Chomsky and Marvin J. Chomsky are Noam's cousins.
In 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke and was flown to a hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, to recuperate. He can no longer walk or communicate, making his return to public life improbable. He was discharged in June 2024 to continue his recovery at home. The same month, Chomsky trended on social media amid false reports of his death; periodicals retracted premature obituaries. As of November 2025, Chomsky was reportedly still convalescing in Brazil.
=== Friendship with Jeffrey Epstein ===
Emails related to the activities of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein released by the House Oversight Committee in November 2025 revealed that Chomsky befriended him after Epstein's 2008 conviction and remained in touch with him at least through 2017. In a letter, he wrote that he considered Epstein a "highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation". In December 2025, Congress released a photo of Chomsky with Steve Bannon from Epstein's estate and another showing him flying with Epstein in the latter's private plane. Before the files' release, Chomsky had said he received around $270,000 from an account connected to Epstein while sorting through common funds after his wife Carol's death. In 2016, Epstein invited Chomsky and his wife, Valeria, to meet in either New York or the Caribbean. Chomsky replied: "Valeria's always keen on New York. I'm really fantasizing about the Caribbean island." In 2019, Epstein referenced advice he said Chomsky had given him on handling media scrutiny after his 2008 plea deal: "The best way to proceed is to ignore it ... That's particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder." Chomsky consulted Epstein for guidance on drafting an email to his financial advisor about a $187,000 payment that had already been disbursed. He also contacted Bannon using an email address Epstein provided.
In 2026, Wasserman wrote that Chomsky's relationship with Epstein was a "grave mistake" and apologized on her husband's behalf, writing, "It was deeply disturbing for both of us to realize we had engaged with someone who presented as a helpful friend but led a hidden life of criminal, inhumane, and perverted acts." The couple's two financial transactions with Epstein were related to retirement income, according to reporting in both The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post.
== Reception and influence ==
Chomsky has been a defining Western intellectual figure, central to the field of linguistics and definitive in cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, and psychology. In addition to being known as one of the most important intellectuals of his time, Chomsky has a dual legacy as a leader and luminary in both linguistics and the realm of political dissent. Despite his academic success, his political viewpoints and activism have resulted in his being distrusted by mainstream media, and he is regarded as being "on the outer margin of acceptability". Chomsky's public image and social reputation often color his work's public reception.
=== In academia ===
McGilvray observes that Chomsky inaugurated the "cognitive revolution" in linguistics, and that he is largely responsible for establishing the field as a formal, natural science, moving it away from the procedural form of structural linguistics dominant during the mid-20th century. As such, some have called Chomsky "the father of modern linguistics". Linguist John Lyons further remarked that within a few decades of publication, Chomskyan linguistics had become "the most dynamic and influential" school of thought in the field. By the 1970s his work had also come to exert a considerable influence on philosophy, and a Minnesota State University Moorhead poll ranked Syntactic Structures as the single most important work in cognitive science. In addition, his work in automata theory and the Chomsky hierarchy have become well known in computer science, and he is much cited in computational linguistics.
Chomsky's criticisms of behaviorism contributed substantially to the decline of behaviorist psychology; in addition, he is generally regarded as one of the primary founders of the field of cognitive science. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results; Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.
ACM Turing Award winner Donald Knuth credited Chomsky's work with helping him combine his interests in mathematics, linguistics, and computer science. IBM computer scientist John Backus, another Turing Award winner, used some of Chomsky's concepts to help him develop FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level computer programming language. Chomsky's theory of generative grammar has also influenced work in music theory and analysis, such as Fred Lerdahl's and Ray Jackendoff's generative theory of tonal music.
Chomsky is among the most cited authors living or dead. He was cited within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992. Chomsky was also extensively cited in the Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index during the same period. The librarian who conducted the research said that the statistics show that "he is very widely read across disciplines and that his work is used by researchers across disciplines ... it seems that you can't write a paper without citing Noam Chomsky." As a result of his influence, there are dueling camps of Chomskyan and non-Chomskyan linguistics. Their disputes are often acrimonious. Additionally, according to journalist Maya Jaggi, Chomsky is among the most quoted sources in the humanities, ranking alongside Karl Marx, William Shakespeare and the Bible.
=== In politics ===
Chomsky's status as the "most-quoted living author" is credited to his political writings, which vastly outnumber his writings on linguistics. Chomsky biographer Wolfgang B. Sperlich characterizes him as "one of the most notable contemporary champions of the people"; journalist John Pilger has described him as a "genuine people's hero; an inspiration for struggles all over the world for that basic decency known as freedom. To a lot of people in the margins—activists and movements—he's unfailingly supportive." Arundhati Roy has called him "one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time", and Edward Said thought him "one of the most significant challengers of unjust power and delusions". Fred Halliday has said that by the start of the 21st century Chomsky had become a "guru" for the world's anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. The propaganda model of media criticism that he and Herman developed has been widely accepted in radical media critiques and adopted to some level in mainstream criticism of the media, also exerting a significant influence on the growth of alternative media, including radio, publishers, and the Internet, which in turn have helped to disseminate his work.
Despite this broad influence, university departments devoted to history and political science rarely include Chomsky's work on their undergraduate syllabi. Critics have argued that despite publishing widely on social and political issues, Chomsky has no formal expertise in these areas; he has responded that such issues are not as complex as many social scientists claim and that almost everyone is able to comprehend them regardless of whether they have been academically trained to do so. Some have responded to these criticisms by questioning the critics' motives and their understanding of Chomsky's ideas. Sperlich, for instance, says that Chomsky has been vilified by corporate interests, particularly in the mainstream press. Likewise, according to McGilvray, many of Chomsky's critics "do not bother quoting his work or quote out of context, distort, and create straw men that cannot be supported by Chomsky's text".
Chomsky drew criticism for not calling the Bosnian War's Srebrenica massacre a "genocide". While he did not deny the fact of the massacre, which he called "a horror story and major crime", he felt the massacre did not meet the definition of genocide. Critics have accused Chomsky of denying the Bosnian genocide.
Chomsky's far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy. A document obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the U.S. government revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) monitored his activities and for years denied doing so. The CIA also destroyed its files on Chomsky at some point, possibly in violation of federal law. He has often received undercover police protection at MIT and when speaking on the Middle East but has refused uniformed police protection. German news magazine Der Spiegel described Chomsky as "the Ayatollah of anti-American hatred", while American conservative commentator David Horowitz called him "the most devious, the most dishonest and ... the most treacherous intellect in America", whose work is infused with "anti-American dementia" and evidences his "pathological hatred of his own country".
Chomsky's criticism of Israel has led to his being called a traitor to the Jewish people and an antisemite. Criticizing Chomsky's defense of the right of individuals to engage in Holocaust denial on the grounds that freedom of speech must be extended to all viewpoints, Werner Cohn called Chomsky "the most important patron" of the neo-Nazi movement. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called him a Holocaust denier, describing him as a "dupe of intellectual pride so overweening that he is incapable of making distinctions between totalitarian and democratic societies, between oppressors and victims". In turn, Chomsky has claimed that the ADL is dominated by "Stalinist types" who oppose democracy in Israel. The lawyer Alan Dershowitz has called Chomsky a "false prophet of the left"; Chomsky called Dershowitz "a complete liar" who is on "a crazed jihad, dedicating much of his life to trying to destroy my reputation". In early 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey publicly rebuked Chomsky after he signed an open letter condemning Erdoğan for his anti-Kurdish repression and double standards on terrorism. Chomsky accused Erdoğan of hypocrisy, noting that Erdoğan supports al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, the al-Nusra Front.
=== Academic achievements, awards, and honors ===
In 1970, the London Times named Chomsky one of the "makers of the twentieth century". He was voted the world's leading public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll jointly conducted by American magazine Foreign Policy and British magazine Prospect. New Statesman readers listed Chomsky among the world's foremost heroes in 2006. In 2011, the US Peace Memorial Foundation awarded The US Peace Prize to Chomsky, "whose antiwar activities for five decades both educate and inspire".
In the United States he is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Philosophical Society. Abroad he is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, an honorary member of the British Psychological Society, a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, and a foreign member of the Department of Social Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He received a 1971 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1984 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology, the 1988 Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the 1996 Helmholtz Medal, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, the 2010 Erich Fromm Prize, and the British Academy's 2014 Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics. He is also a two-time winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language (1987 and 1989). He has also received the Rabindranath Tagore Centenary Award from The Asiatic Society.
Chomsky received the 2004 Carl-von-Ossietzky Prize from the city of Oldenburg, Germany, to acknowledge his body of work as a political analyst and media critic. He received an honorary fellowship in 2005 from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. He received the 2008 President's Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway. Since 2009, he has been an honorary member of International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI). He received the University of Wisconsin's A.E. Havens Center's Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship and was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems". Chomsky has an Erdős number of four.
In 2011, the US Peace Memorial Foundation awarded Chomsky the US Peace Prize for anti-war activities over five decades. For his work in human rights, peace, and social criticism, he received the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize, the Sretenje Order in 2015, the 2017 Seán MacBride Peace Prize and the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award.
Chomsky has received honorary doctorates from institutions including the University of London and the University of Chicago (1967), Loyola University Chicago and Swarthmore College (1970), Bard College (1971), Delhi University (1972), the University of Massachusetts (1973), and the International School for Advanced Studies (2012). Public lectures given by Chomsky include the 1969 John Locke Lectures, 1975 Whidden Lectures, 1977 Huizinga Lecture, and 1988 Massey Lectures.
Various tributes to Chomsky have been dedicated over the years. He is the eponym for a bee species, a frog species, an asteroid, and a building complex at the Indian university Jamia Millia Islamia. Actor Viggo Mortensen and avant-garde guitarist Buckethead dedicated their 2003 album Pandemoniumfromamerica to Chomsky.
== Selected bibliography == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritsa_Iztok_Complex | Maritsa Iztok Complex | The Maritsa Iztok Complex generates coal power in Bulgaria. Maritsa Iztok 1 and 3 located entirely within Stara Zagora Province in south-central Bulgaria while Maritsa Iztok 2 is split with eastern neighboring Sliven Province. It consists of three lignite-fired thermal power stations. The complex is located in a large lignite coal basin, which includes several mines, enrichment plants, a briquette plant and its own railway system. The development of the thermal power and mining complex at Maritsa Iztok began in 1952, but the lignite deposits used to be known well in the mid-19th century. The Maritsa Iztok mines and power plants are interdependent as the only market for coal is the power plants, while the power plants have no other supplier of coal but the mines.
The complex is the largest source of CO2 emissions in Bulgaria with over 10 million tons in 2024. The complex is politically controversial; it has badly polluted local towns but many people rely on it for jobs.
== Maritsa Iztok-1 (TPS AES Galabovo) ==
Maritsa Iztok-1 is located near Galabovo. In October 1998, the old power plant with a capacity of 500 megawatts (MW) was privatized and sold to Consolidated Continental Commerce (3C), later purchased by AES Corporation. On 15 February 2000, AES and the Bulgarian grid operator Natzionalna Elektricheska Kompania EAD (NEK) signed a 15-year tolling agreement, according to which AES has an obligation to replace the old power station with a new facility. In June 2006, AES started construction of the new 670 MW power station. It became operational on 3 June 2011. The new power station consists of two pulverised coal boilers of 335 MW each, two steam turbines, two generators and desulphurisation facilities. The plant was constructed by Alstom. It cost €1.2 billion.
== Maritsa Iztok-2 ==
Maritsa Iztok-2 is the largest thermal power plant in the Balkans. It is located 60 kilometres (37 mi) from Stara Zagora in the vicinity of the village of Radetski and the dam lake Ovcharitsa. The construction of Maritsa Iztok-2 started on 7 May 1962; it was inaugurated on 10 November 1966. Between 1979 and 1995 the power station was expanded by four additional units. 1977 and 1980 two new 325 metres (1,066 ft) tall chimneys were built. Maritsa Iztok-2 has a total installed capacity of 1,465 MW and generates 30% of Bulgaria's electricity. It consists of eight generating units, two of which are equipped with flue gas desulphurization plants. The rehabilitation of the older power units, including construction of FGD plants for units 1 to 6, are in progress.
Maritsa Iztok-2 is wholly state-owned. It is a subsidiary of Bulgarian Energy Holding EAD.
In November 2014 the power station was ranked as the industrial facility that is causing the highest damage costs to health and the environment in Bulgaria and the entire European Union by the European Environment Agency.
In June 2019 a fire thought to be caused by routine maintenance broke out on the smokestack of the flue gas desulphurisation system at Unit 8.
== Maritsa Iztok-3 ==
Maritsa Iztok-3 is Bulgaria's third-largest power plant. It is located 40 kilometres (25 mi) from Stara Zagora. The power plant has an installed capacity of 900 MW, which is produced by four units of each 225 MW. It has a 325 metres (1,066 ft) tall chimney.
In 1998, the United States power utility Entergy Corporation purchased 73% of Maritsa Iztok-3 shares for US$375 million from the Bulgarian state. Entergy also has the obligation to modernize the power station. In 2002, the Italian power company Enel joined the project; in 2006 Enel acquired Entergy's stake. At present, Maritsa Iztok-3 is owned and operated by Energiina Kompaniya Maritsa Iztok 3 AD, a joint venture of ContourGlobal (73%) and NEK (27%). |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltburn_(film) | Saltburn (film) | Saltburn is a 2023 black comedy thriller film written, directed, and produced by Emerald Fennell, starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe and Carey Mulligan. Set in Oxford and Northamptonshire, it focuses on a student at the University of Oxford who becomes fixated with a popular, aristocratic fellow student, who later invites him to spend the summer at his eccentric family's estate.
Saltburn premiered at the 50th Telluride Film Festival on 31 August 2023. It was released in cinemas in the United Kingdom on 17 November 2023 and in select cinemas in the United States on the same day. The film had its US wide release on 22 November before its streaming release by Amazon Prime Video on 22 December, on which it became one of the most-streamed films. The film received critical acclaim (particularly for the performances of Keoghan and Pike, production design, score, and cinematography) and was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and five BAFTA Film Awards.
== Plot ==
In 2006, scholarship student Oliver Quick struggles to fit in at the University of Oxford because of his inexperience with upper-class manners. He befriends Felix Catton, an affluent and popular student who is sympathetic to Oliver's stories of his parents' substance abuse and mental health issues. When Oliver becomes distraught over his father's sudden death, Felix comforts him and invites him to spend the summer at his family's country house, Saltburn.
At Saltburn, Oliver meets Felix's parents Sir James and Lady Elspeth Catton, his sister Venetia, and Elspeth's friend Pamela, and he reunites with Felix's American cousin Farleigh, with whom Oliver has had a tense relationship as Oxford classmates. Oliver quickly wins over Felix's family except for Farleigh, and his obsession with Felix grows. One night, after watching Felix masturbate in a bathtub, he lustfully drinks the semen-laced bathwater. Later, having seen Venetia waiting outside his bedroom window, he performs oral sex on her while she is on her period. Farleigh witnesses this and informs Felix, but Oliver claims nothing happened when Felix confronts him. At night, Oliver sneaks into Farleigh's room while he's sleeping and initiates sexual advances on Farleigh, threatening him in the process. The next morning, James evicts Farleigh after receiving a report from Sotheby's about his intention to sell some of James's valuable Huguenot ceramics.
As the summer ends, Elspeth and James plan a party for Oliver's birthday. Felix surprises Oliver with a trip to see his estranged mother, causing Oliver to panic. Upon arriving at the family's house in Prescot, Felix realises Oliver had lied to him about his upbringing. His father is still alive, neither of his parents has substance abuse or mental health troubles, and they live in a respectable middle class suburb. Horrified and hurt by Oliver's deception, Felix decides not to tell anyone to spare his own family the humiliation but orders Oliver to leave Saltburn after the party. During the extravagant celebrations, Oliver seeks to make amends with Felix by expressing his adoration for him, but Felix rejects him and suggests he seek help.
The next morning, Felix is found dead in Saltburn's hedge maze. Oliver implies Felix's death was connected to Farleigh supplying drugs during the party, and James withdraws financial support from Farleigh and bans him from ever returning. Oliver mourns Felix and visits his grave alone, where he lies naked on the grave and humps the soil. After Felix's funeral, Elspeth insists Oliver extend his stay at Saltburn. Venetia, increasingly distraught and disturbed, accuses Oliver of destroying her family. He attempts to seduce her, but she eventually rebuffs him. The next day, Venetia is found dead, having slit her wrists in the bathtub. Despondent over Oliver's continuing presence at Saltburn and Elspeth's closeness to him, James bribes him to leave, which Oliver accepts.
In 2022, Oliver reads about James's death in a newspaper. He subsequently has what seems to be a chance encounter with Elspeth at a café. She is delighted to see him again, insisting he return with her to Saltburn. After spending several months with Oliver, Elspeth becomes terminally ill. On her deathbed, Oliver confides to Elspeth that he is responsible for all of the tragic and horrifying events at Saltburn. He orchestrated his initial meeting with Felix at Oxford and poisoned Felix's drink in the maze, resulting in his death. He seduced Farleigh in order to use his e-mail to offer Sotheby's the ceramics so James would oust him. He also placed razor blades beside Venetia while she was bathing, encouraging her suicide. He even engineered his encounter with Elspeth at the café, after which she bequeathed all her assets, including Saltburn, to him. He then removes her life support, killing her. Having now assumed ownership of Saltburn and the Catton family fortune, Oliver happily dances naked around the mansion.
== Cast ==
== Production ==
=== Development and casting ===
Saltburn is the second film written and directed by Emerald Fennell, after Promising Young Woman (2020). The project was first announced in January 2022, in which it was described as "a story of obsession." In May 2022, Tom Ackerley, Margot Robbie, and Josey McNamara were confirmed as producers, while Rosamund Pike, Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan joined the cast. Fennell said that Australian actor Elordi "...did the most exceptional audition... He did such a genius, genius bit of observational comedy. He really really understood that for all of [Felix's] beauty and charisma, he's just sort of a spoiled little boy. He came in and just absolutely blew us all away". Carey Mulligan, star of Promising Young Woman, was revealed to be part of the cast in December 2022.
In writing the film, Fennell wanted to sympathise with unlikeable people, saying
the sorts of people that we can't stand, the sorts of people who are abhorrent—if we can love them, if we can fall in love with these people, if we can understand why this is so alluring, in spite of its palpable cruelty and unfairness and sort of strangeness, if we all want to be there too, I think that's just such an interesting dynamic.
She had long wanted to make her own version of films and books set in a country house, and set the film in 2006 to "really [knock] the fucking glamour off things" by setting it in the recent past.
=== Filming ===
Filming began on 16 July 2022, with Linus Sandgren serving as cinematographer. The film is shown in a 4:3 aspect ratio, with Fennell saying it gives the impression of "peeping in".
Fennell was determined not to film in an estate familiar to viewers, and wanted to set the movie in one location, so aligning the filming with the film's plot, saying, "It was important to me that we were all in there together, that the making of the film in some way had that feeling of a summer where everyone loses their mind together...I didn't want to be constantly picking up and moving" and avoiding the need for post-production adjustments due to multiple locations. Fennell was successful, with filming occurring at the University of Oxford at Magdalen College, St Hugh's College and Brasenose College and in Drayton House, Northamptonshire, which had never been used for a film before. As part of the contract, no one was allowed to reveal the location of the house or the identity of its owners. Despite the house's opulence, the actors ultimately became familiar with Drayton's interiors over the course of filming and comfortable working in it, in order to convey the idea that this grand location was for their characters completely normal and simply their home.
Costumes were designed with 2000s fashion displayed in the form of ostentatious jackets, rugby shirts, and ostentatious jewellery.
== Music ==
The film is scored by Anthony Willis, who previously scored Fennell's Promising Young Woman. The soundtrack was released by Milan Records on 17 November 2023.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor's 2001 song "Murder on the Dancefloor" was featured in the last scene of the film. As a result, the song received 1.5 million streams on New Year's Eve on Spotify and subsequently re-entered the UK Singles Chart at number eight on 5 January 2024 with 2.2 million streams, marking the song's best-ever streaming week. The film also features Ladytron's 2005 track "Destroy Everything You Touch", Mason and Princess Superstar's 2006 track "Perfect (Exceeder)" and Tomcraft's 2002 track "Loneliness" which, in addition to "Murder on the Dancefloor", became trending songs, particularly on TikTok.
== Themes and influences ==
The film focuses on excess and obsession. Fennell stated "I drew from my own experience of being a human person, who has felt that thing we all feel at that time in our life which is that absolute insane grip of obsessive love...But obviously I didn't quite go to the lengths that some of the people [in the film] do".
Discussing the film's influences, Fennell has cited A Clockwork Orange (1971), Cruel Intentions (1999), Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), and the novel The Go-Between (1953) by L.P. Hartley and its 1971 film adaptation. She commented, "I think that I was sort of looking more at that British Country House tradition of The Go-Between and that sort of very specific British... sort of Joseph Losey world, where class and power and sex all kind of collide in one specific place". Fennell cited Losey's The Servant (1963) as an influence because of its "undeniable erotic power" that "relies entirely on the threat of violence—not just literal violence, but a complete chaotic upending of the status quo".
Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and its film adaptation (1999) have often been cited as an influence by critics due to the common themes of social class and the similarities between Oliver and Tom Ripley, though Fennell herself has downplayed these comparisons. Richard Brody of The New Yorker also found similarities to Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. A reviewer for the Australian student magazine Farrago described the film as "the lovechild of Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Parasite (2019)".
Some critics noted that the rich stylisation and visual influences in the film show aesthetic influences from Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). According to these critics, Fennell's Gothic visual style in general mirrors the mythical elements of Coppola's 1992 Dracula film about otherworldly seduction: the Saltburn garden scene, especially, parallels the carnal possessions of Lucy (Sadie Frost) and Mina (Winona Ryder), who are cosmically drawn to Gary Oldman's Count Dracula. Saltburn has been billed as a sort of "vampire movie" by the filmmaker herself.
Other critics have found similarities to Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Theorem (1968) and Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), which also addressed themes of class, power, desire, and seduction. Fennell described her satire of the British class system as "Barry Lyndon meets indie sleaze".
== Release ==
Saltburn had its world premiere at the 50th Telluride Film Festival on 31 August 2023. It premiered in the United Kingdom as the opening film of the 67th BFI London Film Festival on 4 October 2023. It also premiered in Australia at SXSW Sydney on 20 October 2023.
Amazon MGM Studios spent $75 million to acquire distribution rights. In the United States, Saltburn was given a limited release on 17 November 2023, followed by a wide release on 22 November. It was originally scheduled to be released a week earlier but was moved to take advantage of the initial positive response it received at its Telluride premiere. Warner Bros. Pictures handled the UK and Ireland release of Saltburn, with a 16 November release in Australia and a 17 November release in the UK.
The film became available to stream worldwide on Amazon Prime Video on 22 December 2023. The film was highly popular on Amazon Prime, becoming one of its top 10 worldwide film debuts, as viewership quadrupled two weeks after its launch. Deadline Hollywood credited the success to the film's viral marketing and word-of-mouth. Saltburn-themed videos amassed nearly 4 billion views on TikTok, with three million influencers and content creators engaging with the film across all platforms and the official Saltburn socials obtaining 153 million views.
== Reception ==
=== Box office ===
Saltburn grossed $11.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $9.7 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $21.1 million.
In its limited opening weekend, the film made $322,651 from seven theatres. Expanding to 1,566 theatres the following Wednesday, the wide expansion of the film was released alongside Napoleon and Wish, and made $684,000 on its first day of wide release and then $301,000 on Thanksgiving Day. Its debut made $1.8 million on the weekend (and a total of $2.9 million over the five-day frame), finishing in ninth. The film dropped just 16% the following weekend, grossing $1.6 million.
=== Critical response ===
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 72% of 302 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The website's consensus reads: "Emerald Fennell's candy-coated and incisive Saltburn is a debauched jolt to the senses that will be invigorating for most." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 61 out of 100, based on 53 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an "A+" to "F" scale, and those polled by PostTrak gave it a 75% overall positive score, and 42% said they would definitely recommend it.
Esteemed film critic Rex Reed gave the film 4/4 stars in a rave review, writing "The power of Barry Keoghan’s center-ring performance cannot be adequately over-praised" and called it an "intricately palpitating and jaw-dropping performance". He also praised the supporting cast and clever script, saying "As each one (character) comes alive, so does Fennell’s scrupulously disguised screenplay, which stabs the pretentious English class system with a priceless antique knife dipped in potassium cyanide."
Nicholas Barber reviewing for the BBC, enjoyed the "outrageous, laugh-out-loud punchlines" but felt that "Fennell is prone to fumble" plot twists. Barber praised the "superb ensemble cast", especially Keoghan ("magnetic"), Pike ("steals the show"), and Elordi ("a revelation"). He concluded that "if you see it as a lurid pulp fantasy rather than a penetrating satire, then Saltburn is deliriously enjoyable" and awarded it four out of five. Empire also praised the charismatic ensemble cast and gave the film three out of five. In her review, Sophie Butcher reported that "Saltburn looks divine. Fennell's eye is extraordinary, and alongside cinematographer Linus Sandgren, she captures the grand beauty of her architectural locations impeccably" but was disappointed that "scenes often build to reach the cusp of something truly electric, but are let down by clunky dialogue".
Writing in Sight and Sound, Sophie Monks Kaufman found that "the story's superficial treatment of its characters ... becomes increasingly ruinous" and that "the most menacing thing anyone can muster here is a passive-aggressive karaoke choice". She was also underwhelmed by the film's "ostentatious visual language". However, Entertainment Weekly columnist Maureen Lee Lenker gave Saltburn an "A", saying the film is a "Gothic thriller dusted with poisonous candy-pop glitter…Its endless visual and literary layers will bring its ardent admirers back to it again and again, because it is a triumph of the cinema of excess, in all its orgiastic, unapologetic glory." Filmmakers Drew Goddard and Robert Eggers named it as among of their favorite films of 2023, with Goddard saying "This is a group of artists who feel safe and protected and emboldened to do truly dangerous work. This only happens when you have a director in complete command of her craft. You can feel Emerald just out of frame, lifting them ever upwards, upwards, upwards. It is staggering, fearless filmmaking. And thank God they’ve asked us to dance with them while the house burns right down around us all."
=== Accolades === |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Stark | Johannes Stark | Johannes Stark (German: [joˈhanəs ˈʃtaʁk] ; 15 April 1874 – 21 June 1957) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 for his discovery of the Stark effect.
A supporter of Adolf Hitler from 1924, Stark was one of the main figures, along with fellow Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, in the antisemitic Deutsche Physik movement, which sought to remove Jewish physicists from German institutions. In 1947, he was found guilty as a "Major Offender" by a denazification court, but this was reduced to "Lesser Offender" in 1949 after appeal.
== Education ==
Johannes Stark was born on 15 April 1874 in Schickenhof (now part of Freihung), Germany.
Stark was educated at the gymnasium (secondary school) in Bayreuth, and later in Regensburg. In 1894, he entered the University of Munich, where he studied physics, mathematics, chemistry, and crystallography. In 1897, he received his Ph.D. in Physics; his thesis, supervised by Eugen von Lommel, was titled Untersuchung über einige physikalische, vorzüglich optische Eigenschaften des Rußes (Investigation of some physical, in particular optical properties of soot). Stark stayed at Munich as an assistant to von Lommel until 1900.
== Career and research ==
In 1900, Stark became a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) at the University of Göttingen. In 1906, he was appointed Extraordinary Professor at Königliche Technische Hochschule (Royal Technical College) in Hanover, and in 1909 became Professor at Technische Hochschule Aachen (Technical College of Aachen). From 1917 to 1922, he worked as a professor at the universities of Greifswald and Würzburg.
In 1919, Stark was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields" (the latter is known as the Stark effect).
From 1933 until his retirement in 1939, Stark was President of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (Physical-Technical Reich Institute), while also President of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science).
It was Stark who, as the editor of the Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik, asked in 1907, then still rather unknown, Albert Einstein to write a review article on the principle of relativity. Stark seemed impressed by relativity and Einstein's earlier work when he quoted "the principle of relativity formulated by H. A. Lorentz and A. Einstein" and "Planck's relationship M0 = E0/c2" in his 1907 paper in Physikalische Zeitschrift, where he used the equation e0 = m0c2 to calculate an "elementary quantum of energy", i.e. the amount of energy related to the mass of an electron at rest. While working on his article, Einstein began a line of thought that would eventually lead to his general theory of relativity, which in turn became (after its confirmation) the start of Einstein's worldwide fame. This is ironic, given Stark's later work as an anti-Einstein and anti-relativity propagandist in the Deutsche Physik movement.
Stark published more than 300 papers, mainly regarding electricity and other such topics.
== Affiliation with Nazism ==
From 1924 onwards, Stark supported Hitler. During the Nazi regime, Stark attempted to become the Führer of German physics through the Deutsche Physik (Aryan Physics) movement (along with fellow Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard) against the "Jewish physics" of Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg (who was not Jewish). After Werner Heisenberg defended Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, Stark wrote an angry article in the official SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps, calling Heisenberg a "White Jew".
On August 21, 1934, Stark wrote to physicist and fellow Nobel laureate Max von Laue, telling him to toe the party line or suffer the consequences. The letter was signed off with "Heil Hitler."
In his 1934 book, Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft (National Socialism and Science), Stark maintained that the priority of the scientist was to serve the nation—thus, the important fields of research were those that could help German arms production and industry. He attacked theoretical physics as "Jewish" and stressed that scientific positions in Nazi Germany should only be held by pure-blooded Germans.
Writing in Das Schwarze Korps, Stark argued that even if racial antisemitism were to triumph, it would only be a 'partial victory' if 'Jewish' ideas were not similarly defeated: "We also have to eradicate the Jewish spirit, whose blood can flow just as undisturbed today as before if its carriers hold beautiful Aryan passes".
In 1947, following the defeat of Germany in World War II, Stark was classified as a "Major Offender" and received a sentence of four years' imprisonment (later suspended) by a denazification court. This verdict was modified in 1949 by the Appelate Tribunal in Munich, reducing the sentence to "Lesser Offender" and a fine of 1000 marks.
== Personal life and death ==
Stark married Luise Uepler, with whom he had five children. His hobbies were the cultivation of fruit trees and forestry. He worked in his private laboratory, which he set up using his Nobel Prize money, on his country estate in Upper Bavaria after the Second World War. There, he studied the deflection of light in an electric field.
Stark spent the last years of his life on his Gut Eppenstatt[needs translation] near Traunstein in Upper Bavaria, where he died on 21 June 1957 at the age of 83. He is buried at the mountain cemetery in Schönau am Königssee.
== Awards and honors ==
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Stark received various awards, including the Baumgartner Prize of the Vienna Academy of Sciences (1910), the Vahlbruch Prize of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences (1914), and the Matteucci Medal of the Rome Academy. In 1970, the International Astronomical Union honored him with a crater on the far-side of the Moon, without knowing about his Nazi activities. The name was dropped on August 12, 2020. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire | New Hampshire | New Hampshire ( HAMP-shər) is a state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the north. Of the 50 U.S. states, New Hampshire is the seventh-smallest by land area and the tenth-least populous, with a population of 1,377,529 residents as of the 2020 census. Concord is the state capital and Manchester is the most populous city. New Hampshire's motto, "Live Free or Die", reflects its role in the American Revolutionary War; its nickname, "The Granite State", refers to its extensive granite formations and quarries. It is well known for holding the first primary in the U.S. presidential election cycle, and its resulting influence on American electoral politics.
New Hampshire was inhabited for thousands of years by Algonquian-speaking peoples such as the Abenaki. Europeans arrived in the 17th century, with the English establishing some of the earliest non-indigenous settlements. The Province of New Hampshire was established in 1629, named after the English county of Hampshire. Up to the time of the French and Indian War, New Hampshire was on the frontier of British territory and saw action against the French and their Indian allies. Following tensions between the British colonies and the crown in the 1760s, New Hampshire saw one of the earliest acts of rebellion, with the seizing of Fort William and Mary from the British in 1774. In 1776, it became the first of the British North American colonies to establish an independent government and state constitution. It signed the United States Declaration of Independence and contributed troops, ships, and supplies in the war against Britain. In 1788, it was the 9th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, bringing it into effect. Through the mid-19th century, New Hampshire was an active center of abolitionism, and fielded close to 32,000 Union soldiers during the U.S. Civil War. Afterwards the state saw rapid industrialization and population growth, becoming a center of textile manufacturing, shoemaking, and papermaking; the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester was the largest cotton textile plant in the world. French Canadians formed the most significant influx of immigrants, and a quarter of New Hampshire residents have French American ancestry.
Reflecting a nationwide trend, New Hampshire's industrial sector declined after World War II. Since 1950, its economy has diversified to include financial services, real estate, education, transportation and high-tech, with manufacturing still higher than the US average. Its population surged as highways connected it to Greater Boston and led to more commuter towns. New Hampshire is among the wealthiest and most-educated states, tying Massachusetts for the highest Human Development in the nation. It is one of nine states without an income tax and has no taxes on sales, capital gains, or inheritance while relying heavily on local property taxes to fund education; consequently, its state tax burden is among the lowest in the country. New Hampshire is one of the least religious states and known for its libertarian-leaning political culture; it is one of the least liberal states in New England. The New Hampshire Republican Party has held a trifecta majority in state level government since 2017, with the exception of 2019 and 2020, while the Democratic Party has held a majority on federal level representation in Congress. New Hampshire is the only state to have a woman as governor and women as both U.S. senators.
With its mountainous and heavily forested terrain, New Hampshire has a growing tourism sector centered on recreation. It has some of the highest ski mountains on the East Coast and is a major destination for winter sports; Mount Monadnock is among the most climbed mountains in the world. Other activities include observing the fall foliage, summer cottages along lakes and the seacoast, motorsports at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, and Motorcycle Week, a motorcycle rally held in Weirs Beach in Laconia. The White Mountain National Forest includes most of the Appalachian Trail between Vermont and Maine, and has the Mount Washington Auto Road, where visitors may drive to the top of 6,288-foot (1,917 m) Mount Washington.
== History ==
Various Algonquian-speaking Abenaki tribes, largely divided between the Androscoggin, Cowasuck and Pennacook nations, inhabited the area before European colonization. Despite the similar language, they had a very different culture and religion from other Algonquian peoples.
Indigenous people lived near Keene, New Hampshire 12,000 years ago, according to 2009 archaeological digs, and the Abenaki were present in New Hampshire in pre-colonial times.
English and French explorers visited New Hampshire in 1600–1605, and David Thompson settled at Odiorne's Point in present-day Rye in 1623. The first permanent European settlement was at Hilton's Point (present-day Dover). By 1631, the Upper Plantation comprised modern-day Dover, Durham and Stratham; in 1679, it became the "Royal Province". Southern New Hampshire was on the front lines during King William's War during which both Dover and Durham were burned in 1689 and 1692, respectively. Father Rale's War was fought between the colonists and the Wabanaki Confederacy throughout New Hampshire.
New Hampshire was one of the Thirteen Colonies that rebelled against British rule during the American Revolution. During the American Revolution, New Hampshire was economically divided. The Seacoast region revolved around sawmills, shipyards, merchants' warehouses, and established village and town centers, where wealthy merchants built substantial homes, furnished them with luxuries, and invested their capital in trade and land speculation. At the other end of the social scale, there developed a permanent class of day laborers, mariners, indentured servants and slaves.
In December 1774, Paul Revere warned Patriots that Fort William and Mary would be reinforced with British troops. The following day, John Sullivan raided the fort for weapons. During the raid, the British soldiers fired at rebels with cannon and muskets, but there were apparently no casualties. These were among the first shots in the American Revolutionary period, occurring approximately five months before the Battles of Lexington and Concord. On January 5, 1776, New Hampshire became the first colony to declare independence from Great Britain, almost six months before the Declaration of Independence was signed by the Continental Congress.
The United States Constitution was ratified by New Hampshire on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to do so.
New Hampshire was a Jacksonian stronghold; the state sent Franklin Pierce to the White House in the election of 1852. Industrialization took the form of numerous textile mills, which in turn attracted large flows of immigrants from Quebec (the "French Canadians") and Ireland. The northern parts of the state produced lumber, and the mountains provided tourist attractions. After 1960, the textile industry collapsed, but the economy rebounded as a center of high technology and as a service provider.
Starting in 1952, New Hampshire gained national and international attention for its presidential primary held early in every presidential election year. It immediately became an important testing ground for candidates for the Republican and Democratic nominations but did not necessarily guarantee victory. The media gave New Hampshire and Iowa significant attention compared to other states in the primary process, magnifying the state's decision powers and spurring repeated efforts by out-of-state politicians to change the rules.
== Geography ==
New Hampshire is part of the six-state New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bounded by Quebec, Canada, to the north and northwest; Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east; Massachusetts to the south; and Vermont to the west. New Hampshire's major regions are the Great North Woods, the White Mountains, the Lakes Region, the Seacoast, the Merrimack Valley, the Monadnock Region, and the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee area. New Hampshire has the shortest ocean coastline of any U.S. coastal state, with a length of 18 miles (29 km), sometimes measured as only 13 miles (21 km).
The White Mountains range in New Hampshire spans the north-central portion of the state. The range includes Mount Washington, the tallest in the northeastern U.S.—site of the second-highest wind speed ever recorded— as well as Mount Adams and Mount Jefferson. With hurricane-force winds every third day on average, more than a hundred recorded deaths among visitors, and conspicuous krumholtz (dwarf, matted trees much like a carpet of bonsai trees), the climate on the upper reaches of Mount Washington has inspired the weather observatory on the peak to claim that the area has the "World's Worst Weather". The White Mountains were home to the rock formation called the Old Man of the Mountain, a face-like profile in Franconia Notch, until the formation disintegrated in May 2003. Even after its loss, the Old Man remains an enduring symbol for the state, seen on state highway signs, automobile license plates, and many government and private entities around New Hampshire.
In southwestern New Hampshire, the landmark Mount Monadnock has given its name to a class of earth-forms—a monadnock—signifying, in geomorphology, any isolated resistant peak rising from a less resistant eroded plain.
New Hampshire has more than 800 lakes and ponds, and approximately 19,000 miles (31,000 km) of rivers and streams. Major rivers include the 110-mile (177 km) Merrimack River, which bisects the lower half of the state north–south before passing into Massachusetts and reaching the sea in Newburyport. Its tributaries include the Contoocook River, Pemigewasset River, and Winnipesaukee River. The 410-mile (660 km) Connecticut River, which starts at New Hampshire's Connecticut Lakes and flows south to Connecticut, defines the western border with Vermont. The state border is not in the center of that river, as is usually the case, but at the low-water mark on the Vermont side; meaning the entire river along the Vermont border (save for areas where the water level has been raised by a dam) lies within New Hampshire. Only one town—Pittsburg—shares a land border with the state of Vermont. The "northwesternmost headwaters" of the Connecticut also define part of the Canada–U.S. border.
The Piscataqua River and its several tributaries form the state's only significant ocean port where they flow into the Atlantic at Portsmouth. The Salmon Falls River and the Piscataqua define the southern portion of the border with Maine. The Piscataqua River boundary was the subject of a border dispute between New Hampshire and Maine in 2001, with New Hampshire claiming dominion over several islands (primarily Seavey's Island) that include the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2002, leaving ownership of the island with Maine. New Hampshire still claims sovereignty of the base, however.
The largest of New Hampshire's lakes is Lake Winnipesaukee, which covers 71 square miles (184 km2) in the east-central part of New Hampshire. Umbagog Lake along the Maine border, approximately 12.3 square miles (31.9 km2), is a distant second. Squam Lake is the second largest lake entirely in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire has the shortest ocean coastline of any state in the United States, approximately 18 miles (29 km) long. Hampton Beach is a popular local summer destination. About 7 miles (11 km) offshore are the Isles of Shoals, nine small islands (four of which are in New Hampshire) known as the site of a 19th-century art colony founded by poet Celia Thaxter, and the alleged location of one of the buried treasures of the pirate Blackbeard.
It is the state with the highest percentage of timberland area in the country. New Hampshire is in the temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome. Much of the state, in particular the White Mountains, is covered by the conifers and northern hardwoods of the New England-Acadian forests. The southeast corner of the state and parts of the Connecticut River along the Vermont border are covered by the mixed oaks of the Northeastern coastal forests. The state's numerous forests are popular among autumnal leaf peepers seeking the brilliant foliage of the numerous deciduous trees.
The northern third of the state is locally referred to as the "north country" or "north of the notches", in reference to the White Mountain passes that channel traffic. It contains less than 5% of the state's population, suffers relatively high poverty, and is steadily losing population as the logging and paper industries decline. However, the tourist industry, in particular visitors who go to northern New Hampshire to ski, snowboard, hike and mountain bike, has helped offset economic losses from mill closures.
Environmental protection emerged as a key state issue in the early 1900s in response to poor logging practices. In the 1970s, activists defeated a proposal to build an oil refinery along the coast and limited plans for a full-width interstate highway through Franconia Notch to a parkway.
Winter season lengths are projected to decline at ski areas across New Hampshire due to the effects of climate change, which is likely to continue the historic contraction and consolidation of the ski industry and threaten individual ski businesses and communities that rely on ski tourism.
=== Flora and fauna ===
Black bears, white-tailed deer, and moose can be found all over New Hampshire. There are also less-common animals such as the marten and the Canadian lynx.
=== Climate ===
New Hampshire experiences a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification Dfa in some southern areas, Dfb in most of the state, and Dfc subarctic in some northern highland areas), with warm, humid summers, and long, cold, and snowy winters. Precipitation is fairly evenly distributed all year. The climate of the southeastern portion is moderated by the Atlantic Ocean and averages relatively milder winters (for New Hampshire), while the northern and interior portions experience colder temperatures and lower humidity. Winters are cold and snowy throughout the state, and especially severe in the northern and mountainous areas. Average annual snowfall ranges from 60 inches (150 cm) to over 100 inches (250 cm) across the state.
Average daytime highs are in the mid 70s°F to low 80s°F (24–28 °C) throughout the state in July, with overnight lows in the mid 50s°F to low 60s°F (13–15 °C). January temperatures range from an average high of 34 °F (1 °C) on the coast to overnight lows below 0 °F (−18 °C) in the far north and at high elevations. Average annual precipitation statewide is roughly 40 inches (100 cm) with some variation occurring in the White Mountains due to differences in elevation and annual snowfall. New Hampshire's highest recorded temperature was 106 °F (41 °C) in Nashua on July 4, 1911, while the lowest recorded temperature was −47 °F (−44 °C) atop Mount Washington on January 29, 1934. Mount Washington also saw an unofficial −50 °F (−46 °C) reading on January 22, 1885, which, if made official, would tie the record low for New England (also −50 °F (−46 °C) at Big Black River, Maine, on January 16, 2009, and Bloomfield, Vermont on December 30, 1933).
Extreme snow is often associated with a nor'easter, such as the Blizzard of '78 and the Blizzard of 1993, when several feet accumulated across portions of the state over 24 to 48 hours. Lighter snowfalls of several inches occur frequently throughout winter, often associated with an Alberta Clipper.
New Hampshire, on occasion, is affected by hurricanes and tropical storms—although, by the time they reach the state, they are often extratropical—with most storms striking the southern New England coastline and moving inland or passing by offshore in the Gulf of Maine. Most of New Hampshire averages fewer than 20 days of thunderstorms per year and an average of two tornadoes occur annually statewide.
The National Arbor Day Foundation plant hardiness zone map depicts zones 3, 4, 5, and 6 occurring throughout the state and indicates the transition from a relatively cooler to warmer climate as one travels southward across New Hampshire. The 1990 USDA plant hardiness zones for New Hampshire range from zone 3b in the north to zone 5b in the south.
=== Metropolitan areas ===
Metropolitan areas in the New England region are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as New England City and Town Areas (NECTAs). The following is a list of NECTAs fully or partially in New Hampshire:
== Demographics ==
=== Population ===
As of the 2020 census, the resident population of New Hampshire was 1,377,529, a 4.6% increase since the 2010 United States census. The center of population of New Hampshire is in Merrimack County, in the town of Pembroke. The center of population has moved south 12 miles (19 km) since 1950, a reflection of the fact that the state's fastest growth has been along its southern border, which is within commuting range of Boston and other Massachusetts cities.
As indicated in the census, in 2020 88.3% of the population were White; 1.5% were Black or African American; 0.2% were Native American or Alaskan Native; 2.6% were Asian; 0.0% were Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; 1.7% were some other race; and 5.6% were two or more races. 4.3% of the total population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 18.6% of the population were under 18 years of age; 19.3% were 65 years and over. The female population was 50.5%.
The most densely populated areas generally lie within 50 miles (80 km) of the Massachusetts border, and are concentrated in two areas: along the Merrimack River Valley running from Concord to Nashua, and in the Seacoast Region along an axis stretching from Rochester to Portsmouth. Outside of those two regions, only one community, the city of Keene, has a population of over 20,000. The four counties covering these two areas account for 72% of the state population, and one (Hillsborough) has nearly 30% of the state population, as well as the two most populous communities, Manchester and Nashua. The northern portion of the state is very sparsely populated: the largest county by area, Coos, covers the northern one-fourth of the state and has only around 31,000 people, about a third of whom live in a single community (Berlin). The trends over the past several decades have been for the population to shift southward, as many northern communities lack the economic base to maintain their populations, while southern communities have been absorbed by the Greater Boston metropolis.
As of the 2010 census, the population of New Hampshire was 1,316,470. The gender makeup of the state at that time was 49.3% male and 50.7% female. 21.8% of the population were under the age of 18; 64.6% were between the ages of 18 and 64; and 13.5% were 65 years of age or older. Additionally, about 57.3% of the population was born out of state.
According to HUD's 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, there were an estimated 1,605 homeless people in New Hampshire.
Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.8% of the population in 2010: 0.6% were of Mexican, 0.9% Puerto Rican, 0.1% Cuban, and 1.2% other Hispanic or Latino origin. As of 2020, the Hispanic or Latino population was counted as 4.3%. The Native American/Alaska native population is listed as 0.3% in the 2020 census, but may be higher.
According to the 2012–2017 American Community Survey, the largest ancestry groups in the state were Irish (20.6%), English (16.5%), French (14.0%), Italian (10.4%), German (9.1%), French Canadian (8.9%), and American (4.8%).
New Hampshire has the highest percentage (22.9%) of residents with French/French Canadian/Acadian ancestry of any U.S. state.
In 2018, the top countries of origin for New Hampshire's immigrants were India, Canada, China, Nepal and the Dominican Republic.
According to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimates from 2017, 2.1% of the population aged 5 and older speak Spanish at home, while 1.8% speak French. In Coös County, 9.6% of the population speaks French at home, down from 16% in 2000. In the city of Nashua, Hillsborough County, 8.02% of the population speaks Spanish at home.
=== Birth data ===
Note: Percentages in the table do not add up to 100, because Hispanics are counted both by their ethnicity and by their race, giving a higher overall number.
Since 2016, data for births of White Hispanic origin are not collected, but included in one Hispanic group; persons of Hispanic origin may be of any race.
In 2022, New Hampshire had the lowest teen birth rate of any state, at 4.6 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19 years of age.
=== Religion ===
A Pew survey in 2014 showed that the religious affiliations of the people of New Hampshire was as follows: nonreligious 36%, Protestant 30%, Catholic 26%, Jehovah's Witness 2%, LDS (Mormon) 1%, and Jewish 1%.
A survey suggests people in New Hampshire and Vermont are less likely than other Americans to attend weekly services and only 54% say they are "absolutely certain there is a God" compared to 71% in the rest of the nation. New Hampshire and Vermont are also at the lowest levels among states in religious commitment. In 2012, 23% of New Hampshire residents in a Gallup poll considered themselves "very religious", while 52% considered themselves "non-religious". According to the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) in 2010, the largest denominations were the Catholic Church with 311,028 members; the United Church of Christ with 26,321 members; and the United Methodist Church with 18,029 members.
In 2016, a Gallup Poll found that New Hampshire was the least religious state in the United States. Only 20% of respondents in New Hampshire categorized themselves as "very religious", while the nationwide average was 40%.
According to the 2020 Public Religion Research Institute study, 64% of the population was Christian, dominated by Roman Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism. In contrast with varying studies of estimated irreligiosity, the Public Religion Research Institute reported that irreligion declined from 36% at the separate 2014 Pew survey to 25% of the population in 2020. In 2021, the unaffiliated increased to 40% of the population, although Christianity altogether made up 54% of the total population (Catholics, Protestants, and Jehovah's Witnesses).
== Economy ==
Total employment : 628,166
Number of employer establishments: 39,298
The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that New Hampshire's total state product in 2018 was $86 billion, ranking 40th in the United States. Median household income in 2017 was $74,801, the fourth highest in the country (including Washington, DC). Its agricultural outputs are dairy products, nursery stock, cattle, apples and eggs. Its industrial outputs are machinery, electric equipment, rubber and plastic products, and tourism is a major component of the economy.
New Hampshire experienced a major shift in its economic base during the 20th century. Historically, the base was composed of traditional New England textiles, shoemaking, and small machine shops, drawing upon low-wage labor from nearby small farms and parts of Quebec. Today, of the state's total manufacturing dollar value, these sectors contribute only two percent for textiles, two percent for leather goods, and nine percent for machining. They experienced a sharp decline due to obsolete plants and the lure of cheaper wages in the Southern United States.
New Hampshire today has a broad-based and growing economy, with a state GDP growth rate of 2.8% in 2024. The state's largest economic sectors in 2018, based on contribution to GDP, are: 15% real estate and rental and leasing; 13% professional business services; 12% manufacturing; 10% government and government services; and 9% health care and social services. Small businesses make up 99.0% of businesses in the state and employ 50.3% of its work force.
The state's budget in FY2018 was $5.97 billion, including $1.79 billion in federal funds. The state has a property tax (subject to municipal control) but no sales or income tax. The state does have narrower taxes on meals, lodging, vehicles, and business income; it has tolls on some expressways. In 2025, the state was ranked third-best on the Tax Competitiveness Index created by the Tax Foundation.
According to the Energy Information Administration, New Hampshire's energy consumption and per capita energy consumption are among the lowest in the country. The Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant is the largest individual electrical generating unit on the New England power grid and provided 56% of New Hampshire's electricity generation in 2024. Natural gas accounted for around 25% of the state's electricity generation, while renewables, including hydroelectric power, biomass, wind, and solar supplied around 17%. Coal and petroleum sources account for around 1% of the total electricity generation in New Hampshire. New Hampshire is a net exporter of electricity and in 2024 it exported 10,913,961 megawatthours (MWh) of electricity.
New Hampshire's residential electricity use is low compared with the national average, in part because demand for air conditioning is low during the generally mild summer months and because few households use electricity as their primary energy source for home heating. Nearly half of New Hampshire households use fuel oil for winter heating, which is one of the largest shares in the United States.
The (preliminary) seasonally unemployment rate in November 2025 was 3.0% based on a 774,900 person civilian workforce with 751,300 people in employment.
=== Largest employers ===
In March 2018, 86% of New Hampshire's workforce were employed by the private sector, with 53% of those workers being employed by firms with fewer than 100 employees. About 14% of private-sector employees are employed by firms with more than 1,000 employees.
According to community surveys by the Economic & Labor Market Information Bureau of NH Employment Security, the following are the largest private employers in the state as of 2018:
New Hampshire's state government employs approximately 6,100 people. Additionally, the U.S. Department of State employs approximately 1,600 people at the National Visa Center and National Passport Center in Portsmouth, which process United States immigrant visa petitions and United States passport applications.
== Law and government ==
The governor of New Hampshire, since January 9, 2025, is Republican Kelly Ayotte. New Hampshire's two U.S. senators are Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, both of whom are Democrats and former governors. New Hampshire's two U.S. representatives as of January 2025 are Chris Pappas and Maggie Goodlander, both Democrats.
New Hampshire is an alcoholic beverage control state, and through the State Liquor Commission takes in $100 million from the sale and distribution of liquor.
New Hampshire is the only state in the U.S. that does not require adults to wear seat belts in their vehicles. It is one of three states that have no mandatory helmet law.
=== Governing documents ===
The New Hampshire State Constitution of 1783 is the supreme law of the state, followed by the New Hampshire Revised Statutes Annotated and the New Hampshire Code of Administrative Rules. These are roughly analogous to the federal United States Constitution, United States Code and Code of Federal Regulations respectively.
=== Branches of government ===
New Hampshire has a bifurcated executive branch, consisting of the governor and a five-member executive council which votes on state contracts worth more than $10,000 and "advises and consents" to the governor's nominations to major state positions such as department heads and all judgeships and pardon requests. New Hampshire does not have a lieutenant governor; the Senate president serves as "acting governor" whenever the governor is unable to perform the duties.
The legislature is called the General Court. It consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. There are 400 representatives, making it one of the largest elected bodies in the English-speaking world, and 24 senators. Legislators are paid a nominal salary of $200 per two-year term plus travel costs, the lowest in the U.S. by far. Thus most are effectively volunteers, nearly half of whom are retirees. (For details, see the article on Government of New Hampshire.)
The state's sole appellate court is the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The Superior Court is the court of general jurisdiction and the only court which provides for jury trials in civil or criminal cases. The other state courts are the Probate Court, District Court, and the Family Division.
=== Local government ===
New Hampshire has 10 counties and 234 cities and towns.
New Hampshire is a "Dillon Rule" state, meaning the state retains all powers not specifically granted to municipalities. Even so, the legislature strongly favors local control, particularly concerning land use regulations. New Hampshire municipalities are classified as towns or cities, which differ primarily by the form of government. Most towns generally operate on the town meeting form of government, where the registered voters in the town act as the town legislature, and a board of selectmen acts as the executive of the town. Larger towns and the state's thirteen cities operate either on a council–manager or council–mayor form of government. There is no difference, from the state government's point of view, between towns and cities besides the form of government. All state-level statutes treat all municipalities identically.
New Hampshire has a small number of unincorporated areas that are titled as grants, locations, purchases, or townships. These locations have limited to no self-government, and services are generally provided for them by neighboring towns or the county or state where needed. As of the 2000 census, there were 25 of these left in New Hampshire, accounting for a total population of 173 people (as of 2000); several were entirely depopulated. All but two of these unincorporated areas are in Coös County.
=== Politics ===
New Hampshire is known for its fiscal conservatism and cultural liberalism. The state's politics are cited as libertarian leaning. It is the least religious state in the Union as of a 2016 Gallup poll. The state has long had a great disdain for state taxation and state bureaucracy.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party, in that order, are the two largest parties in the state. A plurality of voters are registered as undeclared, and can choose either ballot in the primary and then regain their undeclared status after voting. The Libertarian Party had official party status from 1990 to 1996 and from 2016 to 2018. A movement known as the Free State Project suggests libertarians move to the state to concentrate their power. As of August 30, 2022, there were 869,863 registered voters, of whom 332,008 (38.17%) did not declare a political party affiliation, 273,921 (31.49%) were Democratic, and 263,934 (30.34%) were Republican.
As of 2025, the Republican Party controls the governorship, the Executive Council, and both houses of the legislature. However, the Democratic Party controls all four seats in the state's delegation to Congress.
==== New Hampshire primary ====
The New Hampshire primary is the first primary election in the quadrennial American presidential election cycle. State law requires that the Secretary of State schedule this election at least one week before any "similar event". While the Iowa caucus precedes the New Hampshire primary, the New Hampshire election is the nation's first contest that uses the same procedure as the general election. It draws more attention than those in other states and shapes the national contest.
In February 2023, the Democratic National Committee awarded that party's first primary to South Carolina, to be held on February 3, 2024, directing New Hampshire and Nevada to vote three days later. New Hampshire officials from both parties stood by the state's "first in the nation" law and ignored the DNC.
State law permits a town with fewer than 100 residents to open its polls at midnight and close when all registered citizens have cast their ballots. Dixville Notch in Coos County and Hart's Location in Carroll County, among others, have implemented these provisions. Dixville Notch and Hart's Location are thus the first precincts in both New Hampshire and the U.S. to report results in presidential primaries and elections.
Nominations for all other partisan offices are decided in a separate primary election. In Presidential election cycles, this is the second primary election held in New Hampshire.
Saint Anselm College in Goffstown has become a popular campaign spot for politicians as well as several national presidential debates.
==== Elections ====
In the past, New Hampshire has often voted Republican. Between 1856 and 1988, New Hampshire cast its electoral votes for the Democratic presidential ticket six times: Woodrow Wilson (twice), Franklin D. Roosevelt (three times), and Lyndon B. Johnson (once).
Beginning in 1992, New Hampshire became a swing state in national and local elections, and in that time has supported Democrats in all presidential elections except 2000. It was the only state in the country to switch from supporting Republican George W. Bush in the 2000 election to supporting his Democratic challenger in the 2004 election, when John Kerry, a senator from neighboring Massachusetts, won the state.
The Democrats dominated elections in New Hampshire in 2006 and 2008. In 2006, Democrats won both congressional seats (electing Carol Shea-Porter in the first district and Paul Hodes in the second), re-elected Governor John Lynch, and gained a majority on the Executive Council and in both houses for the first time since 1911. Democrats had not held both the legislature and the governorship since 1874. Neither U.S. Senate seat was up for a vote in 2006. In 2008, Democrats retained their majorities, governorship, and Congressional seats; and former governor Jeanne Shaheen defeated incumbent Republican John E. Sununu for the U.S. Senate in a rematch of the 2002 contest.
The 2008 elections resulted in women holding a majority, 13 of the 24 seats, in the New Hampshire Senate, a first for any legislative body in the United States.
In the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans made historic gains in New Hampshire, capturing veto-proof majorities in the state legislature, taking all five seats in the Executive Council, electing a new U.S. senator, Kelly Ayotte, winning both U.S. House seats, and reducing the margin of victory of incumbent Governor John Lynch compared to his 2006 and 2008 landslide wins.
In the 2012 state legislative elections, Democrats took back the New Hampshire House of Representatives and narrowed the Republican majority in the New Hampshire Senate to 13–11. In 2012, New Hampshire became the first state in U.S. history to elect an all-female federal delegation: Democratic Congresswomen Carol Shea-Porter of Congressional District 1 and Ann McLane Kuster of Congressional District 2 accompanied U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Kelly Ayotte in 2013. Further, the state elected its second female governor: Democrat Maggie Hassan.
In the 2014 elections, Republicans retook the New Hampshire House of Representatives with a 239–160 majority and expanded their majority in the New Hampshire Senate to 14 of the Senate's 24 seats. On the national level, incumbent Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen defeated her Republican challenger, former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown. New Hampshire also elected Frank Guinta (R) for its First Congressional District representative and Ann Kuster (D) for its Second Congressional District representative.
In the 2016 elections, Republicans held the New Hampshire House of Representatives with a majority of 220–175 and held onto their 14 seats in the New Hampshire Senate. In the gubernatorial race, retiring Governor Maggie Hassan was succeeded by Republican Chris Sununu, who defeated Democratic nominee Colin Van Ostern. Sununu became the state's first Republican governor since Craig Benson, who left office in 2005 following defeat by John Lynch. In the presidential race, the state voted for the Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, by a margin of 2,736 votes, or 0.3%, one of the closest results the state has ever seen in a presidential race, while Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson received 4.12% of the vote. The Democrats also won a competitive race in the Second Congressional District, as well as a competitive senate race.
Since 2017, Democrats have controlled New Hampshire's entire congressional delegation, while Republicans have controlled the governorship and (except in 2019–2020) both houses of the legislature.
==== Free State Project ====
The Free State Project (FSP) is a movement founded in 2001 to recruit at least 20,000 libertarians to move to a single low-population state (New Hampshire, was selected in 2003), to concentrate libertarian activism around a single region. The Free State Project emphasizes decentralized decision-making, encouraging new movers and prior residents of New Hampshire to participate in a way the individual mover deems most appropriate. For example, as of 2017, there were 17 so-called Free Staters elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives, and in 2021, the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, which ranks bills and elected representatives based on their adherence to what they see as libertarian principles, scored 150 representatives as "A−" or above rated representatives. Participants also engage with other like-minded activist groups such as Rebuild New Hampshire, Young Americans for Liberty, and Americans for Prosperity. As of April 2022, approximately 6,232 participants have moved to New Hampshire for the Free State Project.
== Transportation ==
=== Highways ===
New Hampshire has a well-maintained, well-signed network of Interstate highways, U.S. highways, and state highways. State highway markers still depict the Old Man of the Mountain despite that rock formation's demise in 2003. Several route numbers align with the same route numbers in neighboring states. State highway numbering is arbitrary, with no overall system, while the U.S. highway and Interstate systems follow national numbering conventions. Major routes include:
Interstate 89 runs northwest from near Concord to Lebanon on the Vermont border.
Interstate 93 is the main Interstate highway in New Hampshire and runs north from Salem (on the Massachusetts border) to Littleton (on the Vermont border). I-93 connects the more densely populated southern part of the state to the Lakes Region and the White Mountains further to the north.
Interstate 95 runs north–south briefly along New Hampshire's seacoast to serve the city of Portsmouth, before entering Maine
U.S. Route 1 runs north–south briefly along New Hampshire's seacoast to the east of and paralleling I-95.
U.S. Route 2 runs east–west through Coos County from Maine, intersecting Route 16, skirting the White Mountain National Forest passing through Jefferson and into Vermont.
U.S. Route 3 is the longest numbered route in the state, and the only one to run completely through the state from the Massachusetts border to the Canada–U.S. border. It generally parallels Interstate 93. South of Manchester, it takes a more westerly route through Nashua. North of Franconia Notch, U.S. 3 takes a more easterly route, before terminating at the Canada–U.S. border.
U.S. Route 4 terminates at the Portsmouth Traffic Circle and runs east–west across the southern part of the state connecting Durham, Concord, Boscawen, and Lebanon.
New Hampshire Route 16 is a major north–south highway in the eastern part of the state that generally parallels the border with Maine, eventually entering Maine as Maine Route 16. The southernmost portion of NH 16 is a four-lane freeway, co-signed with U.S. Route 4.
New Hampshire Route 101 is a major east–west highway in the southern part of the state that connects Keene with Manchester and the Seacoast region. East of Manchester, NH 101 is a four-lane, limited-access highway that runs to Hampton Beach and I-95.
=== Air ===
New Hampshire has 25 public-use airports, three with some scheduled commercial passenger service. The busiest airport by number of passengers handled is Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in Manchester and Londonderry, which serves the Greater Boston metropolitan area. The closest airport with international service is Logan International Airport in Boston.
=== Public transportation ===
Long-distance intercity passenger rail service is provided by Amtrak's Vermonter and Downeaster lines.
Greyhound, Concord Coach, Vermont Translines, and Dartmouth Coach all provide intercity bus connections to and from points in New Hampshire and to long-distance points beyond and in between.
As of 2013, Boston-centered MBTA Commuter Rail services reach only as far as northern Massachusetts. The New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority is working to extend "Capital Corridor" service from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Nashua, Concord, and Manchester, including Manchester-Boston Regional Airport; and "Coastal Corridor" service from Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Plaistow, New Hampshire. Legislation in 2007 created the New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority (NHRTA) with the goal of overseeing the development of commuter rail in the state of New Hampshire. In 2011, Governor John Lynch vetoed HB 218, a bill passed by Republican lawmakers, which would have drastically curtailed the powers and responsibilities of NHRTA. The I-93 Corridor transit study suggested a rail alternative along the Manchester and Lawrence branch line which could provide freight and passenger service. This rail corridor would also have access to Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.
Eleven public transit authorities operate local and regional bus services around the state, and eight private carriers operate express bus services which link with the national intercity bus network. The New Hampshire Department of Transportation operates a statewide ride-sharing match service, in addition to independent ride matching and guaranteed ride home programs.
Tourist railroads include the Conway Scenic Railroad, Hobo-Winnipesaukee Railroad, and the Mount Washington Cog Railway.
=== Freight railways ===
Freight railways in New Hampshire include Claremont & Concord Railroad (CCRR), Pan Am Railways via subsidiary Springfield Terminal Railway (ST), the New England Central Railroad (NHCR), the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad (SLR), and New Hampshire Northcoast Corporation (NHN).
== Education ==
New Hampshire’s education system includes public school districts, private schools, and a variety of school choice initiatives. One significant component of the latter is the New Hampshire Education Freedom Accounts program, a statewide initiative that allows eligible families to direct a portion of state education funding toward approved educational expenses outside of traditional public schools.
The average cost per pupil for public K-12 education in New Hampshire exceeded $21,000, with most funding coming from local property taxes. In 2025, the state expanded Education Freedom Accounts into a universal school choice program, making most students eligible to participate.
=== High schools ===
The first public high schools in the state were the Boys' High School and the Girls' High School of Portsmouth, established either in 1827 or 1830, depending on the source.
New Hampshire has more than 80 public high schools, many of which serve more than one town. The largest is Pinkerton Academy in Derry, which is owned by a private non-profit organization and serves as the public high school of several neighboring towns. There are at least 30 private high schools in the state.
New Hampshire is also the home of several prestigious university-preparatory schools, such as Phillips Exeter Academy, St. Paul's School, Proctor Academy, Brewster Academy, and Kimball Union Academy.
Traditionally, school funding has been decided by municipalities, often at town meeting. In 1993, the Claremont litigation began when that town's school district secured a verdict that Part 2, Article 83 of the state constitution required the state to fund education adequately and uniformly. This was never achieved despite additional rounds of litigation. In 2002, New Hampshire enacted a statewide property tax to be forwarded to school districts to address the problem. In 2008, the Court ended its supervisory role because the original laws had been replaced, but it did not reverse its earlier finding. In 2023, a district judge set a new, higher amount for educational "adequacy". In June 2025, the legislature enacted language asserting its right to determine funding. The New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the 2023 verdict but declined to force the legislature to comply.
=== Colleges and universities ===
Antioch University New England
Colby-Sawyer College
Community College System of New Hampshire:
Great Bay Community College
Lakes Region Community College
Manchester Community College
Nashua Community College
NHTI, Concord's Community College
River Valley Community College
White Mountains Community College
Dartmouth College
Tuck School of Business
Geisel School of Medicine
Thayer School of Engineering
Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies
Franklin Pierce University
Hellenic American University
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
New England College
New Hampshire Institute of Art
Rivier University
Saint Anselm College
Southern New Hampshire University
Thomas More College of Liberal Arts
University System of New Hampshire:
University of New Hampshire
University of New Hampshire School of Law
University of New Hampshire at Manchester
Granite State College
Keene State College
Plymouth State University
== Media ==
=== Daily newspapers ===
=== Other publications ===
The Telegraph of Nashua
=== Radio stations ===
=== Television stations ===
ABC affiliate WMUR, Channel 9, Manchester
PBS affiliate Channel 11, Durham (New Hampshire Public Television); repeater stations in Keene and Littleton
True Crime Network affiliate WWJE, Channel 50, Derry/Manchester
Ion Television station WPXG, Channel 21, Concord (satellite of WBPX in Boston)
== Sports ==
The following sports teams are based in New Hampshire:
The sport of paintball was invented in Henniker in 1981. Sutton was the home of the world's first commercial paintball facility.
The New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon is an oval track and road course that has been visited by national motorsport championship series such as the NASCAR Cup Series, the NASCAR Xfinity Series, the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour, American Canadian Tour (ACT), the Champ Car and the IndyCar Series. Other motor racing venues include Star Speedway and New England Dragway in Epping, Lee USA Speedway in Lee, Twin State Speedway in Claremont, Monadnock Speedway in Winchester and Canaan Fair Speedway in Canaan.
New Hampshire has two universities competing at the NCAA Division I in all collegiate sports: the Dartmouth Big Green (Ivy League) and the New Hampshire Wildcats (America East Conference), as well as three NCAA Division II teams: Franklin Pierce Ravens, Saint Anselm Hawks, and Southern New Hampshire Penmen (Northeast-10 Conference). Most other schools compete in NCAA Division III or the NAIA.
Annually since 2002, high-school statewide all-stars compete against Vermont in 10 sports during "Twin State" playoffs.
== Culture ==
In the spring, New Hampshire's many sap houses hold sugaring-off open houses. In summer and early autumn, New Hampshire is home to many county fairs, the largest being the Hopkinton State Fair, in Contoocook. New Hampshire's Lakes Region is home to many summer camps, especially around Lake Winnipesaukee, and is a popular tourist destination. The Peterborough Players have performed every summer in Peterborough since 1933. The Barnstormers Theatre in Tamworth, founded in 1931, is one of the longest-running professional summer theaters in the United States. The Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park is the sole National Park Unit in the state, and a section of the Appalachian Trail passes through the north.
In September, New Hampshire is host to the New Hampshire Highland Games. New Hampshire has also registered an official tartan with the proper authorities in Scotland, used to make kilts worn by the Lincoln Police Department while its officers serve during the games. The fall foliage peaks in mid-October. In the winter, New Hampshire's ski areas and snowmobile trails attract visitors from a wide area. After the lakes freeze over they become dotted with ice fishing ice houses, known locally as bobhouses.
Funspot, the world's largest video arcade (now termed a museum), is in Laconia.
=== In fiction ===
Many novels, plays and screenplays have been set in New Hampshire.
==== Theater ====
The fictional New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners serves as the setting of the Thornton Wilder play Our Town. Grover's Corners is based, in part, on the real town of Peterborough. Several local landmarks and nearby towns are mentioned in the text of the play, and Wilder himself spent some time in Peterborough at the MacDowell Colony, writing at least some of the play while in residence there.
==== Comics ====
Al Capp, creator of the comic strip Li'l Abner, used to joke that Dogpatch, the setting for the strip, was based on Seabrook, where he would vacation with his wife.
==== Television ====
Many television programs have been set in New Hampshire. Notable recent examples include:
In the AMC drama Breaking Bad ("Granite State") series lead Walter White escapes to a cabin in a fictional county in northern New Hampshire.
An episode of the NBC drama The West Wing takes place in the fictional Hartsfield's Landing, New Hampshire.
In the sixth season of HBO series The Sopranos, in an episode named for New Hampshire's slogan "Live Free or Die", a character flees to the fictional town of Dartford, New Hampshire, because of inadvertently being outed as a gay man.
== Notable people ==
Prominent individuals from New Hampshire include 14th President of the United States Franklin Pierce, founding father Nicholas Gilman, Senator Daniel Webster, Revolutionary War hero John Stark, editor Horace Greeley, founder of the Christian Science religion Mary Baker Eddy, poet Robert Frost, sculptor Daniel Chester French, astronaut Alan Shepard, rock musician Ronnie James Dio, author Dan Brown, actor-comedian Adam Sandler, inventor Dean Kamen, comedians Sarah Silverman and Seth Meyers, restaurateurs Richard and Maurice McDonald, WWE wrestler Triple H, and streamer Ludwig Ahgren. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States#History_and_development | President of the United States#History and development | The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.
The power of the presidency has grown since the first president, George Washington, took office in 1789. While presidential power has ebbed and flowed over time, the presidency has played an increasing role in American political life since the beginning of the 20th century, carrying over into the 21st century with some expansions during the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush. In the 21st century, the president is one of the world's most powerful political figures and the leader of a superpower. As the leader of the nation with the largest economy by nominal GDP, the president possesses significant domestic and international hard and soft power. For much of the 20th century, especially during the Cold War, the U.S. president was often called "the leader of the free world".
Article II of the Constitution establishes the executive branch of the federal government and vests executive power in the president. The power includes the execution and enforcement of federal law and the responsibility to appoint federal executive, diplomatic, regulatory, and judicial officers. Based on constitutional provisions empowering the president to appoint and receive ambassadors and conclude treaties with foreign powers, and on subsequent laws enacted by Congress, the modern presidency has primary responsibility for conducting U.S. foreign policy. The role includes responsibility for directing the world's most expensive military, which has the second-largest nuclear arsenal.
The president also plays a leading role in federal legislation and domestic policymaking. As part of the system of separation of powers, Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution gives the president the power to sign or veto federal legislation. Since modern presidents are typically viewed as leaders of their political parties, major policymaking is significantly shaped by the outcome of presidential elections, with presidents taking an active role in promoting their policy priorities to members of Congress who are often electorally dependent on the president. Over time, presidents have also made increasing use of executive orders, agency regulations, and judicial appointments to shape domestic policy.
The president is elected through the Electoral College to a four-year term, along with the vice president. Under the Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1951, no person who has been elected to two presidential terms may be elected to a third. In addition, nine vice presidents have become president by virtue of a president's intra-term death or resignation. In all, 45 individuals have served, or are serving, 47 presidencies as of the current 60th four-year term. Donald Trump is the 47th and current president since January 20, 2025.
== History and development ==
=== Origins ===
In July 1776, the Thirteen Colonies, represented at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, unanimously adopted the United States Declaration of Independence in which the colonies declared themselves to be independent sovereign states and no longer under British rule. The affirmation was made in the Declaration of Independence, which was written predominantly by Thomas Jefferson and adopted unanimously on July 4, 1776, by the Second Continental Congress. Recognizing the necessity of closely coordinating their efforts against the British, the Continental Congress simultaneously began the process of drafting a constitution that would bind the states together. There were long debates on a number of issues, including representation and voting, and the exact powers to be given the central government. Congress finished work on the Articles of Confederation to establish a perpetual union between the states in November 1777 and sent it to the states for ratification.
Under the Articles, which took effect on March 1, 1781, the Congress of the Confederation was a central political authority without any legislative power. It could make its own resolutions, determinations, and regulations, but not any laws, and could not impose any taxes or enforce local commercial regulations upon its citizens. This institutional design reflected how Americans believed the deposed British system of Crown and Parliament ought to have functioned with respect to the royal dominion: a superintending body for matters that concerned the entire empire.
The states were out from under any monarchy and assigned some formerly royal prerogatives (e.g., making war, receiving ambassadors, etc.) to Congress; the remaining prerogatives were lodged within their own respective state governments. The members of Congress elected a president of the United States in Congress Assembled to preside over its deliberation as a neutral discussion moderator. Unrelated to and quite dissimilar from the later office of president of the United States, it was a largely ceremonial position with no executive powers other than presiding over a parliamentary body.
In 1783, the Treaty of Paris secured independence for each of the former colonies. With peace at hand, the states each turned toward their own internal affairs. By 1786, Americans found their continental borders besieged and weak and their respective economies in crises as neighboring states agitated trade rivalries with one another. They witnessed their hard currency pouring into foreign markets to pay for imports, their Mediterranean commerce preyed upon by North African pirates, and their foreign-financed Revolutionary War debts unpaid and accruing interest. Civil and political unrest loomed. Events such as the Newburgh Conspiracy and Shays' Rebellion demonstrated that the Articles of Confederation were not working, in particular that a stronger national government with an empowered executive was necessary.
Following the successful resolution of commercial and fishing disputes between Virginia and Maryland at the Mount Vernon Conference in 1785, Virginia called for a trade conference between all the states, set for September 1786 in Annapolis, Maryland, with an aim toward resolving further-reaching interstate commercial antagonisms. When the convention failed for lack of attendance due to suspicions among most of the other states, Alexander Hamilton of New York led the Annapolis delegates in a call for a convention to offer revisions to the Articles, to be held the next spring in Philadelphia. Prospects for the next convention appeared bleak until James Madison and Edmund Randolph succeeded in securing George Washington's attendance to Philadelphia as a delegate for Virginia.
When the Constitutional Convention convened in May 1787, the 12 state delegations in attendance (Rhode Island did not send delegates) brought with them an accumulated experience over a diverse set of institutional arrangements between legislative and executive branches from within their respective state governments. Most states maintained a weak executive without veto or appointment powers, elected annually by the legislature to a single term only, sharing power with an executive council, and countered by a strong legislature. New York offered the greatest exception, having a strong, unitary governor with veto and appointment power elected to a three-year term, and eligible for reelection to an indefinite number of terms thereafter. It was through the closed-door negotiations at Philadelphia that the presidency framed in the U.S. Constitution emerged.
=== 1789–1933 ===
As the nation's first president, George Washington established many norms that would come to define the office. His decision to retire after two terms helped address fears that the nation would devolve into monarchy and established a precedent that would not be broken until 1940 and would eventually be made permanent by the Twenty-Second Amendment. By the end of his presidency, political parties had developed, with John Adams defeating Thomas Jefferson in 1796, the first truly contested presidential election. After Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800, he along with James Madison and James Monroe would each serve two terms, eventually dominating the nation's politics during the Era of Good Feelings until Adams' son John Quincy Adams won election in 1824 after the Democratic-Republican Party split.
The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 was the first time someone outside of the Virginia and Massachusetts elite won the presidency, 40 years after Washington got elected. Jacksonian democracy sought to strengthen the presidency at the expense of Congress, while broadening public participation as the nation rapidly expanded westward. However, his successor, Martin Van Buren, became unpopular after the Panic of 1837, and the death of William Henry Harrison and subsequent poor relations between John Tyler and Congress led to further weakening of the office.
Including Van Buren, in the 24 years between 1837 and 1861, six presidential terms were filled by eight different men, with none serving two terms. The Senate played an important role during this period, with the Great Triumvirate of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun playing key roles in shaping national policy in the 1830s and 1840s, until debates over slavery began pulling the nation apart in the 1850s.
Abraham Lincoln's leadership during the Civil War has led historians to regard him as one of the nation's greatest presidents. The circumstances of the war and Republican domination of Congress made the office very powerful. Lincoln's re-election in 1864 was the first time a president had been re-elected since Jackson in 1832. After Lincoln's assassination, his successor Andrew Johnson lost all political support and was nearly removed from office. Congress remained powerful during the two-term presidency of Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. After the end of Reconstruction, Grover Cleveland was the first Democratic president elected since before the war, running in three consecutive elections (1884, 1888, 1892) and winning twice. In 1900, William McKinley became the first incumbent to win re-election since Grant in 1872.
After McKinley's assassination by Leon Czolgosz in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became a dominant figure in American politics. Historians believe Roosevelt permanently changed the political system by strengthening the presidency, with some key accomplishments including breaking up trusts, conservationism, labor reforms, making personal character as important as the issues, and hand-picking his successor, William Howard Taft. In the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson led the nation to victory during World War I, although Wilson's proposal for the League of Nations was rejected by the Senate. Warren Harding, while popular in office, would see his legacy tarnished by scandals, especially Teapot Dome, and Herbert Hoover quickly became very unpopular after failing to alleviate the Great Depression.
=== Imperial presidency ===
The ascendancy of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 led further toward what historians now describe as the Imperial presidency. Backed by enormous Democratic majorities in Congress and public support for major change, Roosevelt's New Deal dramatically increased the size and scope of the federal government, including more executive agencies. The traditionally small presidential staff was greatly expanded, with the Executive Office of the President being created in 1939, none of whom require Senate confirmation.
Roosevelt's unprecedented re-election to a third and fourth term, the victory of the United States in World War II, and the nation's growing economy all helped established the office as a position of global leadership. His successors, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, each served two terms as the Cold War led the presidency to be viewed as the "leader of the free world", while John F. Kennedy was a youthful and popular leader who benefited from the rise of television in the 1960s.
After Lyndon B. Johnson lost popular support due to the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon's presidency collapsed in the Watergate scandal, Congress enacted a series of reforms intended to reassert itself. These included the War Powers Resolution, enacted over Nixon's veto in 1973, and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 that sought to strengthen congressional fiscal powers. By 1976, Gerald Ford conceded that "the historic pendulum" had swung toward Congress, raising the possibility of a "disruptive" erosion of his ability to govern. Ford failed to win election to a full term and his successor, Jimmy Carter, failed to win re-election. Ronald Reagan, who had been an actor before beginning his political career, used his talent as a communicator to help reshape the American agenda away from New Deal policies toward more conservative ideology.
After the Cold War, the United States became the world's undisputed leading power. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama each served two terms as president. Meanwhile, the nation gradually became more politically polarized, leading to the ascendency of increasingly polarized Congressmembers, especially following the 1994 mid-term elections which saw Republicans control the House for the first time in 40 years, and the rise of routine filibusters in the Senate. Recent presidents have thus increasingly focused on executive orders, agency regulations, and judicial appointments to implement major policies, at the expense of legislation and congressional power. Presidential elections in the 21st century have reflected this continuing polarization, with no candidate except Obama in 2008 winning by more than five percent of the popular vote and two, George W. Bush (2000) and Donald Trump (2016), winning in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. Bush (2004) and Trump (2024) were later re-elected, winning both in the Electoral College and the popular vote.
=== Critics of presidency's evolution ===
The nation's Founding Fathers expected the Congress, which was the first branch of government described in the Constitution, to be the dominant branch of government; they did not expect a strong executive department. However, presidential power has shifted over time, which has resulted in claims that the modern presidency has become too powerful, unchecked, unbalanced, and "monarchist" in nature.
In 2008 professor Dana D. Nelson expressed belief that presidents over the previous thirty years worked towards "undivided presidential control of the executive branch and its agencies". She criticized proponents of the unitary executive theory for expanding "the many existing uncheckable executive powers—such as executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements—that already allow presidents to enact a good deal of foreign and domestic policy without aid, interference or consent from Congress". Bill Wilson, board member of Americans for Limited Government, opined that the expanded presidency was "the greatest threat ever to individual freedom and democratic rule".
== Legislative powers ==
Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution vests all lawmaking power in Congress's hands, and Article 1, Section 6, Clause 2 prevents the president (and all other executive branch officers) from simultaneously being a member of Congress. Nevertheless, the modern presidency exerts significant power over legislation, both due to constitutional provisions and historical developments over time.
=== Signing and vetoing bills ===
The president's most significant legislative power derives from the Presentment Clause, which gives the president the power to veto any bill passed by Congress. While Congress can override a presidential veto, it requires a two-thirds vote of both houses, which is usually very difficult to achieve except for widely supported bipartisan legislation. The framers of the Constitution feared that Congress would seek to increase its power and enable a "tyranny of the majority", so giving the indirectly elected president a veto was viewed as an important check on the legislative power.
While George Washington believed the veto should only be used in cases where a bill was unconstitutional, it is now routinely used in cases where presidents have policy disagreements with a bill. The veto – or threat of a veto – has thus evolved to make the modern presidency a central part of the American legislative process.
Specifically, under the Presentment Clause, once a bill has been presented by Congress, the president has three options:
Sign the legislation within ten days, excluding Sundays, the bill becomes law.
Veto the legislation within the above timeframe and return it to the house of Congress from which it originated, expressing any objections, the bill does not become law, unless both houses of Congress vote to override the veto by a two-thirds vote.
Take no action on the legislation within the above timeframe—the bill becomes law, as if the president had signed it, unless Congress is adjourned at the time, in which case it does not become law, which is known as a pocket veto.
In 1996, Congress attempted to enhance the president's veto power with the Line Item Veto Act. The legislation empowered the president to sign any spending bill into law while simultaneously striking certain spending items within the bill, particularly any new spending, any amount of discretionary spending, or any new limited tax benefit. Congress could then repass that particular item. If the president then vetoed the new legislation, Congress could override the veto by its ordinary means, a two-thirds vote in both houses. In Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417 (1998), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such a legislative alteration of the veto power to be unconstitutional.
=== Setting the agenda ===
For most of American history, candidates for president have sought election on the basis of a promised legislative agenda. Article II, Section 3, Clause 2 requires the president to recommend such measures to Congress which the president deems "necessary and expedient". This is done through the constitutionally based State of the Union address, which usually outlines the president's legislative proposals for the coming year, and through other formal and informal communications with Congress.
The president can be involved in crafting legislation by suggesting, requesting, or even insisting that Congress enact laws that the president believes are needed. Additionally, the president can attempt to shape legislation during the legislative process by exerting influence on individual members of Congress. Presidents possess this power because the Constitution is silent about who can write legislation, but the power is limited because only members of Congress can introduce legislation.
The president or other officials of the executive branch may draft legislation and then ask senators or representatives to introduce these drafts into Congress. Additionally, the president may attempt to have Congress alter proposed legislation by threatening to veto that legislation unless requested changes are made.
=== Promulgating regulations ===
Many laws enacted by Congress do not address every possible detail, and either explicitly or implicitly delegate powers of implementation to an appropriate federal agency. As the head of the executive branch, presidents control a vast array of agencies that can issue regulations with little oversight from Congress.
In the 20th century, critics charged that too many legislative and budgetary powers that should have belonged to Congress had slid into the hands of presidents. One critic charged that presidents could appoint a "virtual army of 'czars'—each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House". Presidents have been criticized for making signing statements when signing congressional legislation about how they understand a bill or plan to execute it. This practice has been criticized by the American Bar Association as unconstitutional. Conservative commentator George Will wrote of an "increasingly swollen executive branch" and "the eclipse of Congress".
=== Convening and adjourning Congress ===
To allow the government to act quickly in case of a major domestic or international crisis arising when Congress is not in session, the president is empowered by Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution to call a special session of one or both houses of Congress. Since John Adams first did so in 1797, the president has called the full Congress to convene for a special session on 27 occasions. Harry S. Truman was the most recent to do so in July 1948, known as the Turnip Day Session.
In addition, prior to ratification of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, which brought forward the date on which Congress convenes from December to January, newly inaugurated presidents would routinely call the Senate to meet to confirm nominations or ratify treaties. In practice, the power has fallen into disuse in the modern era as Congress now formally remains in session year-round, convening pro forma sessions every three days even when ostensibly in recess. Correspondingly, the president is authorized to adjourn Congress if the House and Senate cannot agree on the time of adjournment; no president has ever had to exercise this power.
== Executive powers ==
The president is head of the executive branch of the federal government and is constitutionally obligated to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed". The executive branch has over four million employees, including the military.
=== Administrative powers ===
Presidents make political appointments. An incoming president may make up to 4,000 upon taking office, 1,200 of which must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Ambassadors, members of the Cabinet, and various officers, are among the positions filled by presidential appointment with Senate confirmation.
The power of a president to fire executive officials has long been a contentious political issue. Generally, a president may remove executive officials at will. However, Congress can curtail and constrain a president's authority to fire commissioners of independent regulatory agencies and certain inferior executive officers by statute.
To manage the growing federal bureaucracy, presidents have gradually surrounded themselves with many layers of staff, who were eventually organized into the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Within the Executive Office, the president's innermost layer of aides, and their assistants, are located in the White House Office.
The president also possesses the power to manage operations of the federal government by issuing various types of directives, such as presidential proclamation and executive orders. When the president is lawfully exercising one of the constitutionally conferred presidential responsibilities, the scope of this power is broad. Even so, these directives are subject to judicial review by U.S. federal courts, which can find them to be unconstitutional. Congress can overturn an executive order through legislation.
=== Foreign affairs ===
Article II, Section 3, Clause 4 requires the president to "receive Ambassadors". This clause, known as the Reception Clause, has been interpreted to imply that the president possesses broad power over matters of foreign policy, and to provide support for the president's exclusive authority to grant recognition to a foreign government. The Constitution also empowers the president to appoint United States ambassadors, and to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries. Such agreements, upon receiving the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate (by a two-thirds majority vote), become binding with the force of federal law.
While foreign affairs has always been a significant element of presidential responsibilities, advances in technology since the Constitution's adoption have increased presidential power. Where formerly ambassadors were vested with significant power to independently negotiate on behalf of the United States, presidents now routinely meet directly with leaders of foreign countries.
=== Commander-in-chief ===
One of the most important of executive powers is the president's role as commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. The power to declare war is constitutionally vested in Congress, but the president has ultimate responsibility for the direction and disposition of the military. The exact degree of authority that the Constitution grants to the president as commander-in-chief has been the subject of much debate throughout history, with Congress at various times granting the president wide authority and at others attempting to restrict that authority. The framers of the Constitution took care to limit the president's powers regarding the military; Alexander Hamilton explained this in Federalist No. 69:The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. ... It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces ... while that [the power] of the British king extends to the DECLARING of war and to the RAISING and REGULATING of fleets and armies, all [of] which ... would appertain to the legislature. [Emphasis in the original.]
In the modern era, pursuant to the War Powers Resolution, Congress must authorize any troop deployments longer than 60 days, although that process relies on triggering mechanisms that have never been employed, rendering it ineffectual. Additionally, Congress provides a check to presidential military power through its control over military spending and regulation. Presidents have historically initiated the process for going to war, but critics have charged that there have been several conflicts in which presidents did not get official declarations, including Theodore Roosevelt's military move into Panama in 1903, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.
The amount of military detail handled personally by the president in wartime has varied greatly. George Washington, the first U.S. president, firmly established military subordination under civilian authority. In 1794, Washington used his constitutional powers to assemble 12,000 militia to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, a conflict in Western Pennsylvania involving armed farmers and distillers who refused to pay an excise tax on spirits. According to historian Joseph Ellis, this was the "first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field", though James Madison briefly took control of artillery units in defense of Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812. Abraham Lincoln was deeply involved in overall strategy and in day-to-day operations during the American Civil War, 1861–1865; historians have given Lincoln high praise for his strategic sense and his ability to select and encourage commanders such as Ulysses S. Grant.
The present-day operational command of the Armed Forces is delegated to the Department of Defense and is normally exercised through the secretary of defense. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combatant Commands assist with the operation as outlined in the presidentially approved Unified Command Plan (UCP).
== Judicial powers ==
The president has the power to nominate federal judges, including members of the United States courts of appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States. However, these nominations require Senate confirmation before they may take office. Securing Senate approval can provide a major obstacle for presidents who wish to orient the federal judiciary toward a particular ideological stance. When nominating judges to U.S. district courts, presidents often respect the long-standing tradition of senatorial courtesy. Presidents may also grant pardons and reprieves. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon a month after taking office. Presidents often grant pardons shortly before leaving office, like when Bill Clinton pardoned Patty Hearst on his last day in office; this is often controversial.
Two doctrines concerning executive power have developed that enable the president to exercise executive power with a degree of autonomy. The first is executive privilege, which allows the president to withhold from disclosure any communications made directly to the president in the performance of executive duties. George Washington first claimed the privilege when Congress requested to see Chief Justice John Jay's notes from an unpopular treaty negotiation with Great Britain. While not enshrined in the Constitution or any other law, Washington's action created the precedent for the privilege. When Nixon tried to use executive privilege as a reason for not turning over subpoenaed evidence to Congress during the Watergate scandal, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Nixon, that executive privilege did not apply in cases where a president was attempting to avoid criminal prosecution. When Bill Clinton attempted to use executive privilege regarding the Lewinsky scandal, the Supreme Court ruled in Clinton v. Jones, that the privilege also could not be used in civil suits. These cases established the legal precedent that executive privilege is valid, although the exact extent of the privilege has yet to be clearly defined. Additionally, federal courts have allowed this privilege to radiate outward and protect other executive branch employees but have weakened that protection for those executive branch communications that do not involve the president.
The state secrets privilege allows the president and the executive branch to withhold information or documents from discovery in legal proceedings if such release would harm national security. Precedent for the privilege arose early in the 19th century when Thomas Jefferson refused to release military documents in the treason trial of Aaron Burr and again in Totten v. United States, when the Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by a former Union spy. However, the privilege was not formally recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court until United States v. Reynolds, where it was held to be a common law evidentiary privilege. Before the September 11 attacks, use of the privilege had been rare, but increasing in frequency. Since 2001, the government has asserted the privilege in more cases and at earlier stages of the litigation, thus in some instances causing dismissal of the suits before reaching the merits of the claims, as in the Ninth Circuit's ruling in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. Critics of the privilege claim its use has become a tool for the government to cover up illegal or embarrassing government actions.
The degree to which the president personally has absolute immunity from court cases is contested and has been the subject of several Supreme Court decisions. Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982) dismissed a civil lawsuit against by-then former president Richard Nixon based on his official actions. Clinton v. Jones (1997) decided that a president has no immunity against civil suits for actions taken before becoming president and ruled that a sexual harassment suit could proceed without delay, even against a sitting president. The 2019 Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election detailed evidence of possible obstruction of justice, but investigators declined to refer Donald Trump for prosecution based on a United States Department of Justice policy against indicting an incumbent president. The report noted that impeachment by Congress was available as a remedy. As of October 2019, a case was pending in the federal courts regarding access to personal tax returns in a criminal case brought against Donald Trump by the New York County District Attorney alleging violations of New York state law.
Memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel issued in 1973 and 2000 internally prohibit the Department of Justice from prosecuting a president, which some legal scholars have criticized but others have endorsed.
In defense against federal criminal prosecution for his alleged 2020 election subversion, in January 2024, Trump argued to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that a president enjoys absolute immunity for criminal acts conducted while in office. The next month, a three-judge panel of the court unanimously ruled against Trump. It was the first time an appeals court had addressed such a presidential immunity matter, since no other sitting or former president had ever been criminally indicted.
In Trump v. United States, on July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents were entitled to absolute immunity from exercising core powers enumerated by the Constitution, presumption of immunity for other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial actions. The case was sent back to lower courts to determine which actions in the criminal complaint should be classified as official vs. unofficial. The ruling was the first time the courts granted a president criminal immunity.
== Leadership roles ==
=== Head of state ===
As head of state, the president represents the United States government to its own people and represents the nation to the rest of the world. For example, during a state visit by a foreign head of state, the president typically hosts a State Arrival Ceremony held on the South Lawn, a custom begun by John F. Kennedy in 1961. This is followed by a state dinner given by the president which is held in the State Dining Room later in the evening.
As a national leader, the president also fulfills many less formal ceremonial duties. For example, William Howard Taft started the tradition of throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in 1910 at Griffith Stadium, Washington, D.C., on the Washington Senators's Opening Day. Every president since Taft, except for Jimmy Carter, threw out at least one ceremonial first ball or pitch for Opening Day, the All-Star Game, or the World Series, usually with much fanfare. Every president since Theodore Roosevelt has served as honorary president of the Boy Scouts of America.
Other presidential traditions are associated with American holidays. Rutherford B. Hayes began in 1878 the first White House egg rolling for local children. Beginning in 1947, during the Harry S. Truman administration, every Thanksgiving the president is presented with a live domestic turkey during the annual National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation held at the White House. Since 1989, when the custom of "pardoning" the turkey was formalized by George H. W. Bush, the turkey has been taken to a farm where it will live out the rest of its natural life.
Presidential traditions also involve the president's role as head of government. Many outgoing presidents since James Buchanan traditionally give advice to their successor during the presidential transition. Ronald Reagan and his successors have also left a private message on the desk of the Oval Office on Inauguration Day for the incoming president.
The modern presidency holds the president as one of the nation's premier celebrities. Some argue that images of the presidency have a tendency to be manipulated by administration public relations officials and by presidents themselves. One critic described the presidency as "propagandized leadership" which has a "mesmerizing power surrounding the office". Administration public relations managers staged carefully crafted photo-ops of smiling presidents with smiling crowds for television cameras.
One critic described the public image of John F. Kennedy as being carefully framed "in rich detail" which "drew on the power of myth" regarding the incident of PT 109, and wrote that Kennedy understood how to use images to further his presidential ambitions. As a result, some political commentators have opined that American voters have unrealistic expectations of presidents: voters expect a president to "drive the economy, vanquish enemies, lead the free world, comfort tornado victims, heal the national soul and protect borrowers from hidden credit-card fees".
=== Head of party ===
The president is typically considered to be the de facto head and spokesperson of their political party. With the advent of binding primaries in most states, presidential nominees typically enjoy the support of a majority or plurality of their party's voters. Since the entire House of Representatives and at least one-third of the Senate is elected simultaneously with the president, candidates from a political party frequently have their electoral success intertwined with the performance of the party's presidential candidate.
The coattail effect, or lack thereof, will also often impact a party's candidates at state and local levels of government as well. However, there are often tensions between a president and others in the party, with presidents who lose significant support from their party's caucus in Congress generally viewed to be weaker and less effective. Also, because the United States is not a parliamentary system, presidents' parties do not necessarily enjoy majorities in one or more houses of Congress, nor in the governorships or state legislatures of many states.
=== Global leader ===
With the rise of the United States as a superpower in the 20th century, and the United States having the world's largest economy into the 21st century, the president is typically viewed as a global leader, and at times the world's most powerful political figure. The position of the United States as the leading member of NATO, and the country's strong relationships with other wealthy or democratic nations like those comprising the European Union, have led to the moniker that the president is the "leader of the free world".
== Selection process ==
=== Eligibility ===
Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution sets three qualifications for holding the presidency. To serve as president, one must:
be a natural-born citizen of the United States;
be at least 35 years old;
be a resident in the United States for at least 14 years.
A person who meets the above qualifications would still be disqualified from holding the office of president under any of the following conditions:
Under Article I, Section 3, Clause 7, having been impeached, convicted and disqualified from holding further public office, although there is some legal debate as to whether the disqualification clause also includes the presidential office: the only previous persons disqualified under this clause were three federal judges.
Under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, no person who swore an oath to support the Constitution, and later rebelled against the United States, is eligible to hold any office. However, this disqualification can be lifted by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress. There is, again, some debate as to whether the clause as written allows disqualification from the presidential position, or whether it would first require litigation outside of Congress, although there is precedent for use of this amendment outside of the original intended purpose of excluding Confederates from public office after the Civil War.
Under the Twenty-second Amendment, no person can be elected president more than twice. The amendment also specifies that if any eligible person serves as president or acting president for more than two years of a term for which some other eligible person was elected president, the former can only be elected president once.
=== Prior experience ===
There are no requirements for previous or concurrent offices held by the president or presidential candidates. However, every president except Donald Trump has been a governor, U.S. senator or Congressman, general or cabinet member.
The most common previous profession of presidents is lawyer, applying to 27 of the 45 men who have served as president. Several future presidents abandoned the study or practice of law prior to the presidency. There has never been a property qualification for the presidency or other federal offices, but, in the early years of the republic, there were property qualifications for voting or for some of the stepping-stone offices to the presidency, particularly governorships. Prior to the Civil War, it was common for presidents to be men of significant property: Presidents from the North tended to own small farms, while several Southern presidents owned plantations and slaves. While several later presidents came from abject poverty, others, such as the Roosevelts, John Kennedy, and Donald Trump, were parties to extensive family fortunes.
33 of the 45 men who served as president, including every president since 1953 and all but one since 1901, have had a bachelor's degree. Of those, 16 presidents received a Bachelor's or advanced degree from colleges in the Ivy League.
=== Campaigns and nomination ===
The modern presidential campaign begins before the primary elections, which the two major political parties use to clear the field of candidates before their national nominating conventions, where the most successful candidate is made the party's presidential nominee. Typically, the party's presidential candidate chooses a vice presidential nominee, and this choice is rubber-stamped by the convention.
Nominees participate in nationally televised debates, and while the debates are usually restricted to the Democratic and Republican nominees, third party candidates may be invited, such as Ross Perot in the 1992 debates. Nominees campaign across the country to explain their views, convince voters and solicit contributions. Much of the modern electoral process is concerned with winning swing states through frequent visits and mass media advertising drives.
=== Election ===
The president is elected indirectly by the voters of each state and the District of Columbia through the Electoral College, a body of electors formed every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president to concurrent four-year terms. As prescribed by Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, each state is entitled to a number of electors equal to the size of its total delegation in both houses of Congress. The Twenty-third Amendment provides that the District of Columbia is entitled to the number it would have if it were a state, but in no case more than that of the least populous state.
Currently, all states and the District of Columbia select their electors based on a popular election. In all but two states, the party whose presidential–vice presidential ticket receives a plurality of popular votes in the state has its entire slate of elector nominees chosen as the state's electors. Maine and Nebraska deviate from this winner-take-all practice, awarding two electors to the statewide winner and one to the winner in each congressional district.
On the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, about six weeks after the election, the electors convene in their respective state capitals, and in Washington, D.C., to vote for president and, on a separate ballot, for vice president. They typically vote for the candidates of the party that nominated them. While there is no constitutional mandate or federal law requiring them to do so, the District of Columbia and 32 states have laws requiring that their electors vote for the candidates to whom they are pledged. The constitutionality of these laws was upheld in Chiafalo v. Washington (2020).
Following the vote, each state then sends a certified record of their electoral votes to Congress. The votes of the electors are opened and counted during a joint session of Congress, held in the first week of January. If a candidate has received an absolute majority of electoral votes for president, currently 270 of 538, that person is declared the winner. Otherwise, the House of Representatives must meet to elect a president using a contingent election procedure in which representatives, voting by state delegation, with each state casting a single vote, choose between the top three electoral vote-getters for president. To win the presidency, a candidate must receive the votes of an absolute majority of states, currently 26 of 50.
There have been two contingent presidential elections in the nation's history. A 73–73 electoral vote tie between Thomas Jefferson and fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr in the election of 1800 necessitated the first. Conducted under the original procedure established by Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which stipulates that if two or three persons received a majority vote and an equal vote, the House of Representatives would choose one of them for president; the runner-up would become vice president. On February 17, 1801, Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot, and Burr elected vice president. Afterward, the system was overhauled through the Twelfth Amendment in time to be used in the 1804 election.
A quarter-century later, the choice for president again devolved to the House when no candidate won an absolute majority of electoral votes, 131 of 261, in the election of 1824. Under the Twelfth Amendment, the House was required to choose a president from among the top three electoral vote recipients: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William H. Crawford. Held February 9, 1825, this second and most recent contingent election resulted in John Quincy Adams being elected president on the first ballot.
=== Inauguration ===
Pursuant to the Twentieth Amendment, the four-year term of office for both the president and the vice president begins at noon on January 20, in the year following the preceding presidential election. The first presidential and vice presidential terms to begin on this date, known as Inauguration Day, were the second terms of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President John Nance Garner in 1937. Previously, Inauguration Day was on March 4. As a result of the date change, the first term (1933–37) of both men had been shortened by 43 days.
Before executing the powers of the office, a president is required to recite the presidential Oath of Office, found in Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the Constitution. This is the only component in the inauguration ceremony mandated by the Constitution:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Presidents have traditionally placed one hand upon a Bible while taking the oath, and have added "So help me God" to the end of the oath. Although the oath may be administered by any person authorized by law to administer oaths, presidents are traditionally sworn in by the chief justice of the United States.
== Incumbency ==
=== Term limit ===
When the first president, George Washington, announced in his Farewell Address that he was not running for a third term, he established a "two terms then out" precedent. Precedent became tradition after Thomas Jefferson publicly embraced the principle a decade later during his second term, as did his two immediate successors, James Madison and James Monroe. In spite of the strong two-term tradition, Ulysses S. Grant sought nomination at the 1880 Republican National Convention for a non-consecutive third term, but was unsuccessful.
In 1940, after leading the nation through the Great Depression and focused on supporting U.S. allied nations at war with the Axis powers, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to a third term, breaking the long-standing precedent. Four years later, with the U.S. engaged in World War II, he was re-elected again despite his declining physical health; he died 82 days into his fourth term on April 12, 1945.
In response to the unprecedented length of Roosevelt's presidency, the Twenty-second Amendment was adopted in 1951. The amendment bars anyone from being elected president more than twice, or once if that person served more than two years (24 months) of another president's four-year term. Harry S. Truman, the president at the time it was submitted to the states by the Congress, was exempted from its limitations. Without the exemption, he would not have been eligible to run for a second full term in 1952, which he briefly sought, as he had served nearly all of Franklin Roosevelt's unexpired 1945–1949 term and had been elected to a full four-year term beginning in 1949.
=== Vacancies and succession ===
Under Section 1 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, the vice president becomes president upon the removal from office, death, or resignation of the president. Deaths have occurred a number of times, resignation has occurred only once, and removal from office has never occurred.
Before the ratification of the Twenty-fifth amendment (which clarified the matter of succession), Article II, Section 1, Clause 6, stated only that the vice president assumes the "powers and duties" of the presidency in the event of a president's removal, death, resignation, or inability. Under this clause, there was ambiguity about whether the vice president would actually become president in the event of a vacancy, or simply act as president, potentially resulting in a special election. Upon the death of President William Henry Harrison in 1841, Vice President John Tyler declared that he had succeeded to the office itself, refusing to accept any papers addressed to the "Acting President", and Congress ultimately accepted it.
In the event of a double vacancy, Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 also authorizes Congress to declare who shall become acting president in the "Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the president and vice president". The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (codified as 3 U.S.C. § 19) provides that if both the president and vice president have left office or are both otherwise unavailable to serve during their terms of office, the presidential line of succession follows the order of: speaker of the House, then, if necessary, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and then if necessary, the eligible heads of federal executive departments who form the president's cabinet.
The cabinet currently has 15 members, of which the secretary of state is first in line. The other Cabinet secretaries follow in the order in which their department, or the department of which their department is the successor, was created. Those individuals who are constitutionally ineligible to be elected to the presidency are also disqualified from assuming the powers and duties of the presidency through succession. No statutory successor has yet been called upon to act as president.
=== Declarations of inability ===
Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the president may temporarily transfer the presidential powers and duties to the vice president, who then becomes acting president, by transmitting to the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate a statement that he is unable to discharge his duties. The president resumes his or her powers upon transmitting a second declaration stating that he is again able. The mechanism has been used by Ronald Reagan (once), George W. Bush (twice), and Joe Biden (once), each in anticipation of surgery.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment also provides that the vice president, together with a majority of certain members of the Cabinet, may transfer the presidential powers and duties to the vice president by transmitting a written declaration, to the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, to the effect that the president is unable to discharge his or her powers and duties. If the president then declares that no such inability exist, he or she resumes the presidential powers unless the vice president and Cabinet make a second declaration of presidential inability, in which case Congress decides the question.
=== Removal ===
Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution allows for the removal of high federal officials, including the president, from office for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors". Article I, Section 2, Clause 5 authorizes the House of Representatives to serve as a "grand jury" with the power to impeach said officials by a majority vote. Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 authorizes the Senate to serve as a court with the power to remove impeached officials from office, by a two-thirds vote to convict.
Three presidents have been impeached by the House of Representatives: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. None have been convicted by the Senate. The House Judiciary Committee conducted an impeachment inquiry against Richard Nixon in 1973–74 and reported three articles of impeachment to the House of Representatives for final action. He resigned from office before the House voted on them.
=== Circumvention of authority ===
Controversial measures have sometimes been taken short of removal to deal with perceived recklessness on the part of the president, or with a long-term disability. In some cases, staff have intentionally failed to deliver messages to or from the president, typically to avoid executing or promoting the president to write certain orders. This has ranged from Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff not transmitting orders to the Cabinet due to the president's heavy drinking, to staff removing memos from Donald Trump's desk. Decades before the Twenty-fifth Amendment, in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson had a stroke that left him partly incapacitated. First lady Edith Wilson kept this condition a secret from the public for a while, and controversially became the sole gatekeeper for access to the president (aside from his doctor), assisting him with paperwork and deciding which information was "important" enough to share with him.
=== Compensation ===
Since 2001, the president's annual salary has been $400,000, along with a $50,000 expense allowance; a $100,000 nontaxable travel account; and a $19,000 entertainment account. The president's salary is set by Congress, and under Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 of the Constitution, any increase or reduction in presidential salary cannot take effect before the next presidential term of office.
=== Residence ===
The Executive Residence of the White House in Washington, D.C., is the official residence of the president. The site was selected by George Washington, and the cornerstone was laid in 1792. Every president since John Adams in 1800 has lived there. At various times in U.S. history, it has been known as the "President's Palace", the "President's House", and the "Executive Mansion". Theodore Roosevelt officially gave the White House its current name in 1901. The federal government pays for state dinners and other official functions, but the president pays for personal, family, and guest dry cleaning and food.
Camp David, officially titled Naval Support Facility Thurmont, a mountain-based military camp in Frederick County, Maryland, is the president's country residence. A place of solitude and tranquility, the site has been used extensively to host foreign dignitaries since the 1940s.
The President's Guest House, located next to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House Complex and Lafayette Park, serves as the president's official guest house and as a secondary residence for the president if needed. Four interconnected, 19th-century houses—Blair House, Lee House, and 700 and 704 Jackson Place—with a combined floor space exceeding 70,000 square feet (6,500 m2) constitute the property.
=== Travel ===
The primary means of long-distance air travel for the president is one of two identical Boeing VC-25 aircraft, which are extensively modified Boeing 747 airliners and are referred to as Air Force One while the president is on board. Any U.S. Air Force aircraft the president is aboard is designated as "Air Force One" for the duration of the flight. In-country trips are typically handled with just one of the two planes, while overseas trips are handled with both, one primary and one backup. The president has access to smaller Air Force aircraft, most notably the Boeing C-32, which are used when the president must travel to airports that cannot support a jumbo jet. Any civilian aircraft the president is aboard is designated Executive One for the flight.
For short-distance air travel, the president has access to a fleet of U.S. Marine Corps helicopters of varying models, designated Marine One when the president is aboard any particular one in the fleet. Flights are typically handled with as many as five helicopters all flying together and frequently swapping positions as to disguise which helicopter the president is actually aboard to any would-be threats.
For ground travel, the president uses the presidential state car, which is an armored limousine designed to look like a Cadillac sedan, but built on a truck chassis. The U.S. Secret Service operates and maintains the fleet of several limousines. The president also has access to two armored motorcoaches, which are primarily used for touring trips.
=== Protection ===
The U.S. Secret Service is charged with protecting the president and the first family. As part of their protection, presidents, first ladies, their children and other immediate family members, and other prominent persons and locations are assigned Secret Service codenames. The use of such names was originally for security purposes and dates to a time when sensitive electronic communications were not routinely encrypted; today, the names simply serve for purposes of brevity, clarity, and tradition.
== Post-presidency ==
=== Activities ===
Some former presidents have had significant careers after leaving office. Prominent examples include William Howard Taft's tenure as chief justice of the United States and Herbert Hoover's work on government reorganization after World War II. Two former presidents served in Congress after leaving the White House: John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives, serving there for 17 years, and Andrew Johnson returned to the Senate in 1875, though he died soon after. Two former presidents returned to the presidency: Grover Cleveland lost in 1888 and won in 1892, and Donald Trump lost in 2020 and won in 2024. Some ex-presidents were very active, especially in international affairs, including Theodore Roosevelt; Herbert Hoover; Richard Nixon; and Jimmy Carter.
Earlier presidents returned to their hometowns to lead charitable work there, or supervised farm work on their farms or plantations, many of which had been neglected during their presidencies. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia during his post-presidency, and, following his death, was succeeded as rector by James Madison. Madison and James Monroe participated in the drafting of one version of the Virginia Constitution, while John Tyler served at the Confederate Constitution and in the Confederate Congress.
Presidents may use their predecessors as emissaries to deliver private messages to other nations or as official representatives of the United States to state funerals and other important foreign events. Richard Nixon made multiple foreign trips to countries including China and Russia and was lauded as an elder statesman. During his post-presidency, Jimmy Carter became a global human rights campaigner, international arbiter, and election monitor, as well as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Bill Clinton also worked as an informal ambassador, most recently in the negotiations that led to the release of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, from North Korea.
During his presidency, George W. Bush called on former presidents George H. W. Bush and Clinton to assist with humanitarian efforts after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. President Obama followed suit by asking presidents Clinton and George W. Bush to lead efforts to aid Haiti after an earthquake devastated that country in 2010. Clinton's relationship with the two Bushes is not the first friendship between former presidents: Carter enjoyed a friendship and correspondence with Gerald Ford, while Jefferson and John Adams had an extended correspondence through letters in their post-presidencies.
Clinton has been active politically since his presidential term ended, working with his wife Hillary on her 2008 and 2016 presidential bids and President Obama on his 2012 reelection campaign. Obama has also been active politically since his presidential term ended, having worked with his former vice president Joe Biden on his 2020 election campaign and Biden's vice president Kamala Harris on her 2024 election campaign after President Biden withdrew his bid for re-election.
After losing his bid for the presidency in 2020, Trump remained politically active and was an outspoken critic of his successor and the Democratic Party. He also contended with four criminal cases. Trump announced his fourth bid to the presidency in 2022, ultimately becoming the nominee of his party for the third time and won a second presidential term in 2024.
=== Pension and other benefits ===
The Former Presidents Act (FPA), enacted in 1958, grants lifetime benefits to former presidents and their widows, including a monthly pension, medical care in military facilities, health insurance, and Secret Service protection; also provided is funding for a certain number of staff and for office expenses. The act has been amended several times to provide increases in presidential pensions and in the allowances for office staff. The FPA excludes any president who was removed from office by impeachment.
According to a 2008 report by the Congressional Research Service:
Chief executives leaving office prior to 1958 often entered retirement pursuing various occupations and received no federal assistance. When industrialist Andrew Carnegie announced a plan in 1912 to offer $25,000 annual pensions to former Presidents, many Members of Congress deemed it inappropriate that such a pension would be provided by a private corporation executive. That same year, legislation was first introduced to create presidential pensions, but it was not enacted. In 1955, such legislation was considered by Congress because of former President Harry S. Truman's financial limitations in hiring an office staff
The pension has increased numerous times with congressional approval. Retired presidents receive a pension based on the salary of the current administration's cabinet secretaries, which was $199,700 per year in 2012. Former presidents who served in Congress may also collect congressional pensions. The act also provides former presidents with travel funds and franking privileges.
Prior to 1997, all former presidents, their spouses, and their children until age 16 were protected by the Secret Service until the president's death. In 1997, Congress passed legislation limiting Secret Service protection to no more than 10 years from the date a president leaves office. On January 10, 2013, President Obama signed legislation reinstating lifetime Secret Service protection for him, George W. Bush, and all subsequent presidents. A first spouse who remarries is no longer eligible for Secret Service protection.
=== Writing ===
Since the publication of Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs in 1885, most presidents, including every president who survived to the end of their term from Calvin Coolidge to Barack Obama, has written at least one autobiography. These autobiographies serve two purposes: to ensure the First Family's financial security (Clinton made over $30 million from writing two books), but also to defend or rehabilitate presidential legacies.
=== Presidential libraries and historic sites ===
The homes where U.S. presidents were born, lived or vacationed have frequently been preserved as house museums and listed as National Historic Sites or on U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
Every president since Herbert Hoover has created a repository known as a presidential library for preserving and making available his papers, records, and other documents and materials. Completed libraries are deeded to and maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); the initial funding for building and equipping each library must come from private, non-federal sources. There are currently thirteen presidential libraries in the NARA system. There are also presidential libraries maintained by state governments and private foundations and Universities of Higher Education, including:
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, which is run by the State of Illinois;
The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which is run by Southern Methodist University;
The George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which is run by Texas A&M University; and
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, which is run by the University of Texas at Austin.
Several former presidents have overseen the building and opening of their own presidential libraries. Some even made arrangements for their own burial at the site. Several presidential libraries contain the graves of the president they document:
The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri;
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home in Abilene, Kansas;
The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California; and
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California.
These gravesites are open to the general public. In some cases (such as with Nixon), the presidential library is adjacent to one of the president's former homes, where in other cases, such as with Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, the presidential library and the historic site are in different cities entirely.
== Political affiliation ==
Political parties have dominated American politics for most of the nation's history. Though the Founding Fathers generally spurned political parties as divisive and disruptive, and their rise had not been anticipated when the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787, organized political parties developed in the U.S. in the mid-1790s nonetheless. They evolved from political factions, which began to appear almost immediately after the Federal government came into existence. Those who supported the Washington administration were referred to as "pro-administration" and would eventually form the Federalist Party, while those in opposition largely joined the emerging Democratic-Republican Party.
Greatly concerned about the very real capacity of political parties to destroy the fragile unity holding the nation together, Washington remained unaffiliated with any political faction or party throughout his eight-year presidency. He was, and remains, the only U.S. president never to be affiliated with a political party. Since Washington, every U.S. president has been affiliated with a political party at the time of assuming office, and, since 1869, every president has been a member of either the Republican or Democratic Parties.
The number of presidents per political party by their affiliation at the time they were first sworn into office (alphabetical, by last name) are:
== Timeline of presidents ==
The following timeline depicts the progression of the presidents and their political affiliation at the time of assuming office. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Lancaster,_Duke_of_Bedford | John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford | John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford (20 June 1389 – 14 September 1435) was a medieval English prince, general, and statesman who commanded England's armies in France during a critical phase of the Hundred Years' War. Bedford was the third son of King Henry IV of England, brother to Henry V, and acted as regent of France for his nephew Henry VI. Despite his military and administrative talent, the situation in France had severely deteriorated (for the English) by the time of his death.
Bedford was a capable administrator and soldier, and his effective management of the war brought the English to the height of their power in France. However, difficulties mounted after the arrival of Joan of Arc, and his efforts were further thwarted by political divisions at home and the wavering of England's key ally, Duke Philip of Burgundy and his faction, the Burgundians. In the last years of Bedford's life, the conflict devolved into a war of attrition, and he became increasingly unable to gather the necessary funds to prosecute the conflict.
Bedford died during the congress of Arras in 1435, just as Burgundy was preparing to abandon the English cause and conclude a separate peace with Charles VII of France.
== Birth and family ==
John of Lancaster was born on 20 June 1389, to Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV, King of England) and his wife, Mary de Bohun. He was a grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, a son of King Edward III.
His father, Henry Bolingbroke, was exiled in 1399 by his cousin, Richard II, when he participated in the revolt of the Lords Appellant in 1388, the year before John's birth. Upon the death of John of Gaunt, Richard II did not allow Bolingbroke to inherit his father's duchy of Lancaster. That year Bolingbroke, with help from the nobility, was able to gather supporters and deposed Richard II, who later died of starvation either by his own will or by force. Bolingbroke was crowned King of England, as Henry IV, on 13 October 1399.
John's eldest sibling was Henry of Monmouth, later King of England as Henry V. John's other siblings were Thomas of Lancaster, Duke of Clarence; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester; Philippa; and Blanche.
== Acquisitions, knighted, and titles ==
After his father's accession to the throne of England as Henry IV in 1399, John began to accumulate lands and lucrative offices. He was knighted on 12 October 1399 at his father's coronation, and made a Knight of the Garter in 1400.
He was appointed master of the mews and falcons in 1402, Constable of England in 1403 and Warden of the East March from 1403 to 1414. He was created Earl of Kendal, Earl of Richmond and Duke of Bedford in 1414 by his brother, King Henry V.
== Warden of the East March ==
John gained his early experiences in warfare when he undertook the office of warden of the east marches of Scotland in 1404; he was fairly successful in this command. By the middle of 1404, his pay was in arrears, his troops were mutinous, he was in a disaffected country, and was engaged in constant hostilities. With the little pay that was sent to him, John borrowed money from Lord Furnival and used revenues from a grant of castles belonging to Henry Percy to maintain his forces.
In 1405, he wrote to inform the council of the revolt of Lord Bardolf, joined Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland, the warden of the west marches, and met the Archbishop Richard Scrope and the other rebels on Shipton Moor. He received grants of the castles of the Earl of Northumberland. In April 1408, and again in April 1411, he was appointed to treat with the Scots. During the rest of his father's reign, which ended in March 1413, he continued to hold his command in the north, fortifying Berwick and keeping peace as far as he was able in the east marches. Like his eldest brother, he seems to have been under the influence of the Beauforts, and acted cordially with the Earl of Westmoreland. He held the command until September 1414.
== Military campaigns ==
In May 1413, his brother, now King Henry V, had created him Duke of Bedford, and after resigning the wardenship he began to take a leading part in the royal councils. He acted as lieutenant of the kingdom during Henry's expedition to France in 1415. In August 1416, he commanded the ships which defeated the French fleet at the mouth of the Seine, and was instrumental in relieving Harfleur. Again appointed lieutenant in July 1417, he marched against the Scots, who abandoned the siege of Berwick at his approach; and on his return to London he brought Sir John Oldcastle to trial and was present at his execution. He appears to have governed the country with considerable success until December 1419, when he resigned his office as lieutenant and joined the king in France. Returning to England, he undertook the lieutenancy for the third time in June 1421, and in the following May conducted the queen to join Henry in Normandy. He then took his brother's place and led the English troops to the relief of Cosne, but on hearing of the king's serious illness he left the army and hurried to his side.
=== Regency ===
Henry V's last wish was that Bedford should be guardian of the kingdom and of the young king, and that Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, should act as regent in France. But when Philip declined to undertake this office, it too was assumed by Bedford, who, after the death of the French king Charles VI in October 1422, presided at a session of the Parlement of Paris, and compelled all present to take an oath of fidelity to King Henry VI of England. Meanwhile the English parliament had decided that Bedford should be Lord Protector of the kingdom, and that in his absence the office should devolve upon his brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Confining himself to the conduct of affairs in France the protector took up Henry V's work of conquest, captured Meulan and other places, and sought to strengthen his position by an alliance with Philip of Burgundy. This task was rendered more difficult as Gloucester had just married Jacqueline, Countess of Holland and Hainaut, a union which gave the English duke a claim on lands which Philip hoped to secure for himself. Bedford, however, having allayed Philip's irritation, formed an alliance with him and with John VI, Duke of Brittany, at Amiens in April 1423, and himself arranged to marry Anne of Burgundy, a sister of the Burgundian duke.
=== Campaigns in France ===
Bedford sought to restore prosperity to the districts under his rule by reforming the debased coinage, granting privileges to merchants and manufacturers, and removing various abuses. He then granted some counties to Philip to check the growing hostility between him and Gloucester, and on 17 August 1424 gained a great victory over a combined army of French and Scots at the Battle of Verneuil. But in spite of the efforts of the protector the good understanding between England and Burgundy was partially destroyed when Gloucester invaded Hainaut in October 1424. The ambition of his brother gave Bedford trouble in another direction also; for on his return from Hainaut Gloucester quarrelled with the chancellor, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, and the council implored Bedford to come to England to settle this dispute. He reached London in January 1426, and after concluding a bond of alliance with Gloucester effected a reconciliation between the duke and the chancellor; and knighted the young king, Henry VI.
Bedford then promised to act in accordance with the will of the council, and in harmony with the decision of this body raised a body of troops and returned to France in March 1427. Having ordered Gloucester to desist from a further attack on Hainaut, he threatened Brittany and compelled Duke John to return to the English alliance; and the success of his troops continued until the Siege of Orléans, to which he consented with reluctance, was undertaken in October 1428. Having assured himself that Philip was prepared to desert him, Bedford sent orders to his army to raise the siege in April 1429. He then acted with great energy and judgment in attempting to stem the tide of disasters which followed this failure, strengthened his hold upon Paris, and sent to England for reinforcements; but before any engagement took place he visited Rouen, where he sought to bind the Normans closer to England, and after his return to Paris resigned the French regency to Philip of Burgundy in accordance with the wish of the Parisians.
Bedford had been Governor in Normandy between 1422 and 1432, where the University of Caen was founded under his auspices. He was an important commissioner of illuminated manuscripts, both from Paris (from the "Bedford Master" and his workshop) and England. The three most important surviving manuscripts of his are the Bedford Hours, the Salisbury Breviary, both made in Paris, and the Bedford Psalter and Hours of about 1420–23, which is English.
Retaining the government of Normandy, Bedford established himself at Rouen and directed the movements of the English forces with some success. He did not interfere to save the life of Joan of Arc. After Joan was captured by Burgundian troops at Compiegne and then transferred to the English, Bedford had her put on trial by clergy who are listed in English government records and described by eyewitnesses as pro-English collaborators. She was executed at Rouen on 30 May 1431.
He was joined by Henry VI in April 1430, when the regency was temporarily suspended, and he secured Henry's coronation at Paris in December 1431.
His next act was to secure an inquiry into the national finances; and when asked by the parliament to stay in England he declared that his services were at the king's disposal. As chief councillor he offered to take a smaller salary than had been previously paid to Gloucester, and undertook this office in December 1433, when his demands with regard to a continual council were conceded. Bedford, who was anxious to prosecute the war in France, left England again in 1434, but early in 1435 was obliged to consent to the attendance of English representatives at a congress held to arrange terms of peace at Arras. Unable to consent to the French terms the English envoys left Arras in September, and Philip of Burgundy made a separate treaty with France.
== Richard of Bedford ==
Richard of Bedford, the illegitimate son of John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, was generally known as Richard Bastard of Bedford, which was not uncommon for illegitimate sons of noblemen in France and Devonshire, England. Richard was likely conceived before John was married in 1423. Richard's cousin, Henry VI of England, legitimised Richard on 30 August 1434 (which was recorded at the tabellionage in Rouen, France, on 27 September 1435). He was allowed to inherit property in England and France after he was legitimised.
Richard succeeded to the lordship of La Haye-du-Puits, France (merged into La Haye, Manche in 2016), and acquired the castle upon the death of his father in 1435. The bequest from his father was set aside.
== Marriages ==
John's first marriage was to Anne of Burgundy (d. 1432), daughter of John the Fearless, on 13 May 1423 in Troyes. The couple were happily married, despite being childless. Anne died of the plague in Paris in 1432.
Louis of Luxembourg, bishop of Thérouanne, arranged a marriage between his niece, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, daughter of Peter I, Count of Saint-Pol, and the regent. It was a strategic move as the House of Luxembourg was rich and powerful. The marriage was performed by the bishop at Therouanne on 20 April 1433. The new duchess was only seventeen. This marriage was also childless. Jacquetta went on to have more than a dozen children in her second marriage to Richard Woodville (later Earl Rivers). Her eldest child, Elizabeth Woodville, became queen consort of England as the spouse of Edward IV.
== Death ==
John died in Rouen on 14 September 1435, and was buried in the choir of Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Rouen. By his will, made four days before his death, he left all his possessions to his wife except one castle, which was to go to his natural son Richard. His nephew, Henry VI, was to have all in remainder.
== In literature ==
He appears in William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2, as John of Lancaster, and in Henry V and Henry VI, Part 1, as the Duke of Bedford. In the former play, he is portrayed as being present at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, when then aged 14, though no chroniclers of the time mention him.
Georgette Heyer's novel My Lord John is the first part of a never-completed trilogy focused on him that deals with his life from when he was four to about twenty. Brenda Honeyman's novel Brother Bedford covers his life from Henry V's death to his own.
In the 2011 Philippa Gregory novel, The Lady of the Rivers, John features in a minor role as the first husband of its main character Jacquetta of Luxembourg.
== Arms ==
As a son of the sovereign, John bore the royal arms of his father King Henry IV, differenced by a label of five points per pale ermine and France, which are published in the Bedford Book of Hours. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Shreve | Richmond Shreve | Richmond Harold Shreve (June 25, 1877 – September 11, 1946) was a Canadian-American architect.
== Biography ==
He was born on June 25, 1877, in Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, the son of Richmond Shreve, an Anglican priest, and Mary Catherine Parker Hocken. Shreve attended Cornell University, taught there from 1902 to 1906, and was a member of the Sphinx Head Society.
He was president of the American Institute of Architects from 1941 through 1943.
He died on September 11, 1946, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
== Legacy ==
His company Shreve, Lamb and Harmon led the construction of the Empire State Building as well as several Cornell University buildings. Shreve was also the lead architect for the landmark 1937 Williamsburg Houses housing development in Brooklyn and the Parkchester planned community developed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in the east Bronx in 1941.
He was profiled in the book The 100 Most Notable Cornellians. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind%27s_Hall | Hind's Hall | "Hind's Hall" is a protest song by American rapper Macklemore, released as a single on May 6, 2024. Written and produced by Macklemore, it expresses support for the pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses that call for an end to the Gaza genocide, divestment from Israel, and a ceasefire in the Gaza war.
The song's title is a reference to pro-Palestinian activists' renaming of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University to "Hind's Hall" in honor of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. In the song, Macklemore is critical of the United States's funding of Israel; he describes Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories as apartheid. Additionally, Macklemore announces his opposition to the music industry for their silence on the issue, and to President Joe Biden because of Biden's support for the Israeli government and military.
== Background ==
In 2024, pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses took place across the world, particularly in the United States, as protesters called on their universities to sever links with Israeli entities due to Israel's actions in the Gaza war. Protestor encampments were raided by US police, who arrested more than 2,300 students, many of whom face expulsion and campus bans.
Protests at Columbia University have been prominent. At Columbia, activists occupied Hamilton Hall and renamed the building as "Hind's Hall" in honor of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza City along with her relatives and paramedics who came to her rescue. On April 30, 2024, New York police sieged Hamilton Hall and arrested the protesters inside.
== Composition ==
"Hind's Hall" was composed and produced by Macklemore, and samples "Ana La Habibi" by Lebanese singer Fairuz. In his lyrics, Macklemore is critical of the United States' funding of Israel and describes Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories as apartheid. He also criticizes US politicians' acceptance of donations from pro-Israel lobbying organizations such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Macklemore characterizes Israel's military operations during the war as "a genocide", and makes references to the Nakba and the Israeli military's killing of Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip.
Macklemore calls for a ceasefire in the Gaza war. He condemns the music industry's "platform of silence" on the war. He also references the ongoing feud between rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar, saying he considers it a minor issue compared to the war. Additionally, Macklemore declared President Joe Biden as complicit in the Israeli government's mass murder of Palestinian civilians, saying "The blood is on your hands, Biden". Macklemore also proclaimed in May 2024 that he would not vote for Biden in the 2024 United States presidential election, and that he was undecided.
The song also denounces Congress' banning of TikTok, the white supremacy apparent in policing and policy decisions, and the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism. Macklemore quotes the title of the 1988 song "Fuck tha Police" by hip hop group N.W.A.
== Release ==
The single was released on social media on May 6, 2024. Macklemore announced that once the song was available on streaming services, all of the single's proceeds would be donated to UNRWA. Macklemore performed the song live for the first time on May 9, 2024 in New Zealand, saying, "I stand here today and every day forward for the rest of my life in solidarity with the people of Palestine, with an open heart, in the belief that our collective liberation is at stake – that we all deserve freedom in this life of ours". On May 11, the song was made available on major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
The song's music video includes a photo of a college building spray-painted with the phrase "Free Palastine [sic]". Some internet users erroneously believed the photo was taken at Columbia University and used it to criticize the protesters. The photo was taken of Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
On September 21, 2024, Macklemore released a new version of the song titled "Hind's Hall 2", featuring Palestinian and Palestinian American artists Anees, MC Abdul, Amer Zahr, the LA Palestinian Kids Choir, the Lifted! Youth Gospel Choir, and Tiffany Wilson. In the song, he endorsed the Uncommitted National Movement, warning presidential candidate Kamala Harris that she would lose the state of Michigan in the 2024 United States presidential election unless she supported an arms embargo on Israel. All proceeds from this version would be donated to UNRWA.
He performed the song at the Palestine Will Live Forever Festival in Seward Park Amphitheatre in Seattle on September 21, 2024.
== Reception ==
Solcyre Burga in Time called it "the latest addition to the catalog of American protest songs that includes Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and Crosby, Stills, and Nash & Young's [sic] "Ohio." Guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine tweeted: "Honestly @macklemore’s 'Hind’s Hall' is the most Rage Against The Machine song since Rage Against The Machine." Jill Stein, the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2024, publicly thanked Macklemore for making the song. Reception from social media has been positive, with many users praising Macklemore's use of his platform to protest. Aja Romano of Vox called the song "electrifying" due to its surprise release; they noted that Macklemore's position as a white independent artist has helped him to express himself freely without career-ending consequences, especially considering the song's contentious subject matter.
== Charts ==
== Release history == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Frans_(politician) | Joe Frans (politician) | Joe Frans (born Kojo Frans in Takoradi, Ghana) is a Swedish politician of Ghanaian descent, social activist, board professional and former member of parliament.
== Career ==
Joe Frans came to Sweden to attend university. During his studies he met his wife and became involved with politics. Frans has a diploma in Communications and has been the producer of the TV-show Sweden Today. He has also been CEO of Sweden Now AB and Skandinavisk Video Teknik AB, companies trading TV-broadcast rights.
For many years he worked as a Senior Political Advisor to the Deputy Mayor of Stockholm and as Press Secretary to the Mayor of Stockholm. He then stepped into national political arena and served as a member of the Swedish Parliament 2002–2006. In the Parliament he served on Committee on Justice and European Union Committee. When the Social Democratic Party lost power in 2006, Frans lost his seat in Parliament.
== Current Appointments ==
Today has several public appointments. He is a member of the Stockholm University board and the Swedish National Police Board.
Joe Frans is also the Chairperson of Forumsyd, the Social Democratic party in Vällingby district, Broderskapdistriktet (a Christian Socialdemocratoc organization) and Rinkeby folketshus.
Frans is the founder and CEO of Next Generation Africa and NGA Novum AB.
He has also served as an Independent Expert for the United Nations Human Rights Council, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.
Frans initiated the Swedish Martin Luther King Prize in 2005. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takarazuka,_Hy%C5%8Dgo | Takarazuka, Hyōgo | Takarazuka (宝塚市, Takarazuka-shi) is a city located in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. As of 1 February 2024, the city had an estimated population of 221,846 in 96,729 households and a population density of 2,200 persons per km². The total area of the city is 101.80 square kilometres (39.31 sq mi). Known as the "inner parlor" of Kansai, Takarazuka is famous for the Takarazuka Revue, hot springs, and the Takarazuka Tourism Fireworks Display held since 1913. It is also famous as a choice residential area along with Ashiya and Nishinomiya.
== Geography ==
Takarazuka is located in the northern part of the Hanshin area, surrounded by the Rokko Range to the west and the Nagao mountain range to the north, with the Muko River flowing through the center.
=== Neighboring municipalities ===
Hyōgo Prefecture
Inagawa
Itami
Kawanishi
Kita-ku, Kobe
Nishinomiya
Sanda
=== Climate ===
Takarazuka has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen Cfa) characterized by warm summers and cool winters with light snowfall. The average annual temperature in Takarazuka is 14.0 °C. The average annual rainfall is 1578 mm with September as the wettest month. The temperatures are highest on average in July, at around 25.7 °C, and lowest in January, at around 2.6 °C.
== Demographics ==
Per Japanese census data, the population of Takarazuka has been increasing steadily since the 1950s.
== History ==
The area of Takarazuka was part of ancient Settsu Province and has been inhabited since ancient times, with many kofun burial mounds found within the city limits. The Mefu Jinja dates from the Nara period. From the Heian period, numerous landed estates shōen controlled by the Fujiwara family were developed in the area. Takarazuka onsen is mentioned in Kamakura period records. In the Muromachi period, Kohama town developed as a temple town for Kōshō-ji, and subsequently Kohama Inn was established as a post station on Arima Road. The area was mostly tenryō territory under direct control of the Tokugawa shogunate in the Edo Period.
The village of Kohama (小浜村) was established on April 1, 1889 within Kawabe District, Hyōgo, with the creation of the modern municipalities system. In 1897, Hankaku Railroad (current Fukuchiyama Line) completed. In 1910, the Minoh Arima Electric Railway (current Hankyu Takarazuka Main Line completed). Takarazuka was a center of the culture from the 1910s to 1940s in what has been dubbed the age of Hanshinkan Modernism. This included the opening of the Takarazuka Girls' Opera (current Takarazuka Revue) on April 1, 1914.
Kohama was elevated to town status on March 15, 1951, changing its name to Takarazuka. On April 1 1954 it merged with the village of Yoshimoto (吉本村) in Muko District to become the city of Takarazuka. The city continued to expand by annexing Nagao Village on March 10, 1955, and Nishitani Village on March 14, 1955, but losing some areas in a border adjustment with the city of Itami on April 1, 1955. On January 17, 1995 the Great Hanshin earthquake caused more than 100 casualties. Takarazuka was designated as a Special City on April 1, 2003 with increased autonomy.
At one time, the idea was raised of merging Takarazuka with Itami, Kawanishi, and Inagawa, but it is currently on hold.
== Government ==
Takarazuka has a mayor-council form of government with a directly elected mayor and a unicameral city council of 26 members. Takarazuka contributes three members to the Hyōgo Prefectural Assembly. In terms of national politics, the city is divided between the Hyōgo 6th districts of the lower house of the Diet of Japan.
== Economy ==
Takarazuka has a mixed economy of commerce, manufacturing and market gardening. It is increasingly becoming a bedroom community for Osaka and Kobe, with quiet, upscale residential neighborhoods like Nigawa, Obayashi, Sakasegawa, and Hibarigaoka.
=== Companies headquartered in Takarazuka ===
HI-LEX Corporation, a manufacturer of remote-controlling cables and accessories for multiple applications is headquartered in the city.
ShinMaywa Industries, a manufacturer of military aircraft (especially seaplanes) and heavy duty trucks is headquartered in the city.
== Education ==
Universities and colleges
Koshien University
Takarazuka University
Takarazuka Music School
Primary and secondary schools
Takazuka has 23 public elementary schools and 12 public middle schools operated by the city government, and five public high schools operated by the Hyōgo Prefectural Board of Education. There are three private elementary schools, two private middle schools and two private high schools. In addition, the prefecture also operates one special education school for the handicapped.
== Transportation ==
=== Railways ===
Kawanishi is serviced by the JR Takarazuka Line and the Hankyu Takarazuka Line. Hankyu's Kawanishi-Noseguchi Station is a transfer station to the Nose Railway, which runs primarily within Kawanishi.
JR West - Fukuchiyama Line
Nakayamadera - Takarazuka - Takedao
Hankyu - Takarazuka Main Line
Yamamoto - Nakayama-kannon - Mefu-Jinja - Kiyoshikōjin - Hankyu Takarazuka
Hankyu - Imazu Line
Hankyu Takarazuka - Takarazuka-Minamiguchi - Sakasegawa - Obayashi - Nigawa
=== Highways ===
Chūgoku Expressway
Shin-Meishin Expressway
National Route 176
=== Buses ===
Hankyu Bus
Hanshin Dentetsu Bus
Hankyu Country Bus
Shinki Bus
== Sister cities ==
Takarazuka is twinned with:
Alsergrund, Austria
Augusta, United States
== Local attractions ==
=== Specialty products ===
Ornamental trees and flowers (dahlias, irises, etc.)
Tansan senbei
=== Places ===
Flower Road (花のみち, Hana-no Michi)
Hanshin Racecourse (阪神競馬場, Hanshin-keibajō)
Kohama Inn Resource Center (小浜宿資料館, Kohama-juku Shiryō-kan)
Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum (手塚治虫記念館, Tezuka Osamu Kinen-kan)
Shōji Residence (正司邸): Mixed Western- and Japanese-style mansion built in 1918–1919. Designed by Masaharu Furuzuka. National Registry of Tangible Cultural Properties. Filming location for NHK drama Twins (ふたりっ子, Futarikko).
Takarazuka City Historical Archives (former Matsumoto Residence): Western-style mansion built in 1937. (National Registry of Tangible Cultural Properties)
Nomura Koumuten House (Designed by Antonino Cardillo in 2009)
Takarazuka Bow Hall
Takarazuka Grand Theatre (宝塚大劇場, Takarazuka Dai Gekijō)
Takarazuka Hotel
Takarazuka Hot Spring (宝塚温泉, Takarazuka Onsen)
Takedao Hot Spring (武田尾温泉, Takedao Onsen)
Tessai Art Museum (鉄斎美術館, Tessai Bijutsu-kan)
== Religious institutions ==
Temples
Gosho-ji
Heirin-ji
Kiyoshikoujin Seichou-ji
Nakayamadera
Shrines
Mefu Jinja
== Sightseeing and festivals ==
Takarazuka Revue
Flower Road
Takarazuka Tourism Fireworks Display
Takarazuka Memorial (horse race)
== Notable people from Takarazuka ==
Saki Aibu, actress and celebrity
Kyoko Hikami, voice actress
Makoto Imaoka, professional baseball player
Minami Itahashi, Olympic diver
Shinji Okazaki, footballer
Akira Raijin, professional wrestler
Riku Miura, pair skater
Kosaku Shimada, professional golfer
Osamu Tezuka, cartoonist
Seigo Yamamoto, drift driver
Tarō Yamamoto, actor and politician |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Done_Quick | Games Done Quick | Games Done Quick (GDQ) is a semiannual video game speedrun charity marathon held in the United States, originally organized by the Speed Demos Archive and SpeedRunsLive communities. Since 2015, it has been handled by Games Done Quick, LLC. Held since 2010, the events have raised money for several charities.
The two flagship events held by Games Done Quick are Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ), held in early January every year, which raises money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, and Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ), usually held in late June or early July every year, which raises money for Doctors Without Borders. Both events last for seven days. In addition to these events, GDQ hosts several other broadcasts throughout the year, including smaller marathons supporting different charities, one-off events for special occasions, and regular GDQ Hotfix programming throughout the year.
The events are broadcast live on Twitch and is simulacasted on YouTube since AGDQ 2026. Viewers are encouraged to donate for incentives during the stream such as selecting the name of the save-file or main characters, having the runners attempt more difficult challenges, and entering sweepstakes for a chance to win prizes. As of January 2026, over $59.8 million has been raised through over a million individual donations.
== Format ==
Speedrunners take turns demonstrating their prowess at beating various video games in the quickest possible time, done in front of an audience as well as a livestream through Twitch. Sometimes these runs may be executed in an unusual or specific way, such as fully completing every level, completing a game blindfolded, or featuring multiple runners racing against one another to complete a game first. Video games run in Games Done Quick events include both retro and modern titles. The runs typically feature commentary from the runner(s) or experienced commentators, as well as donation messages read by an announcer.
Most of the popular runs feature video game glitches and discussion between the runner and the commentators, most frequently describing techniques or using observational humor and banter. Humor and banter is especially used for non-interactive or repetitive sequences that don't require the runner to use much or any skill. Donations from viewers may feature humorous comments that contain inside jokes among the speedrunning community, as well as more personal acknowledgments concerning donations. Because of the live broadcast and wider audience, runners and commentators are encouraged to refrain from using strong profanity and offensive behavior.
When donating, donors have the option to put their money towards a particular incentive. These incentives can be in the form of bonus speedruns, showcases of additional tricks or glitches, or an in-game decision such as naming the player character.
== History ==
Writer and speedrunner Eric Koziel identifies two important precursors to Games Done Quick: the "Desert Bus for Hope" donation drive organized by LoadingReadyRun in November 2007, and a series of charity speedrun marathons held by TheSpeedGamers starting in March 2008.
Users of the site Speed Demos Archive decided to hold a charity marathon in January 2010, during MAGFest 8. It was themed around 8-bit and 16-bit video games and thus dubbed "Classic Games Done Quick" (after the 1990s speedrunning project Quake Done Quick). Internet connectivity problems at the MAGFest hotel forced SDA administrator Mike Uyama to relocate the event to his mother's residence, but it raised over $10,000 for CARE.
Following that initial success, the first Awesome Games Done Quick marathon was held in January 2011, expanding from two days to five days, incorporating newer games such as Halo and Portal, and raising more than $50,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. The first Summer Games Done Quick was held in August 2011, raising $20,000 for the Organization for Autism Research. Since then, both Awesome Games Done Quick and Summer Games Done Quick have recurred annually, soon raising significantly larger amounts than these early marathons.
A one-off additional marathon was held in March 2011 to support victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan; Japan Relief Done Quick raised over $25,000. In addition, a one-off promotional event was held on March 20, 2015, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the God of War franchise. Over the course of five hours, God of War Done Quick ended up raising $3,500 for The AbleGamers Foundation.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Summer 2020 marathon, both 2021 marathons, and the Winter 2022 marathon were held as virtual events. In-person attendance returned for SGDQ 2022 under strict social distancing, masking, and vaccine mandate protocol, with all attendees required to have a full series of COVID-19 vaccine and booster dose, while also continuing to intersperse remote runners alongside those present on-stage. The Winter AGDQ 2023 event was intended to be an in-person event held in Orlando, Florida, but was moved to a virtual event after controversies due to the Florida state government's stances on LGBT rights and COVID-19 (the state strictly prohibits vaccine mandates). Ahead of the event, Uyama announced that he would be stepping down from his role in GDQ after 13 years "to take care of my health and kind of focus on different activities". In February 2023, it was announced he had postponed his departure to cover for his successor's illness.
Speedrunning records have been set at various GDQ marathons in games including Super Mario Galaxy 2, Superman 64 and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3.
== List of marathons ==
=== Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) ===
Originally called Classic Games Done Quick (CGDQ), this annual marathon is held every year in early January. It raises money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
=== Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) ===
Introduced in 2011 as a companion to AGDQ, this marathon is usually held in late June or early July and raises money for Doctors Without Borders. Since 2015, the event has typically been held in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul region.
=== Special marathons ===
Games Done Quick Express (GDQx) is an annual three-day marathon held at TwitchCon since 2018. There was no Games Done Quick Express event held in 2020 or 2021 due to the cancellation of TwitchCon those years, nor was there a Games Done Quick Express event held during the 2022 TwitchCon.
Frame Fatales is a week-long marathon featuring only women and non-binary runners. It started in 2019 as a four-day event and started fundraising for the Malala Fund in 2020. As of 2022, the event has been held twice a year in February–March and August as Frost Fatales and Flame Fatales, respectively.
== Controversies ==
As GDQ events have become more popular, there have been several controversies, with players and commentators being banned, and with the stream chat having to be muted. GDQ has noted they advise attendees to avoid "topics of conversation that are polarizing or controversial in nature" as well as avoiding harassing other players. Some attendees have been banned for making inappropriate comments, although there are criticisms that some of the bans may be without merit.
In 2017, a commentator, PvtCinnamonBun, on a speedrun of the game Ape Escape 2 for AGDQ 2017, was banned from all future events for supposedly wearing a "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) hat on stream shortly after Donald Trump's election to the United States presidency. However, according to Kotaku, PvtCinnamonBun's ban was revoked since it was not actually a MAGA hat, but GDQ officials banned him again for supposedly unplugging a power strip cable. Another speedrunner, Cyberdemon531, was also banned from the event for owning the MAGA hat in the first place.
In 2018, speedrunner "BubblesDelFuego", who speedruns Dark Souls and Fallout 4, was banned from all future GDQ events after sharing edible medicinal cannabis with a friend, which resulted in that friend having a panic attack and being transported to the hospital by paramedics. Bubbles consumed edible cannabis for chronic pain resulting from complications with Hodgkin lymphoma. Bubbles told Kotaku that although he understood why he was banned, he believed that the GDQ "enforcement" staff abused their power and were misinformed about tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical in cannabis.
At SGDQ 2019, speedrunner "QuinnAce" (formerly "ConnorAce") used a spliced run to illegitimately claim the world record on Clustertruck for the "NoAbility%" category, depriving the legitimate record holder from being invited. The run was treated with suspicion due to it not being submitted officially to speedrun.com, with the video being unlisted on YouTube prior to QuinnAce's acceptance into SGDQ. In October 2019, QuinnAce's run was exposed by the YouTuber documentarian Apollo Legend.
At AGDQ 2020, various runners, including "Luzbelheim" (or "Luz"), were scheduled to run a relay playthrough of Final Fantasy VIII. Hours before, however, Luz's Twitter bio went viral for his comment that he hates "feminazism", identifies as "deminonbinary", and he uses the pronouns "luz/luz". Other online news publications negatively reacted to GDQ organizers allowing Luz to play in the relay playthrough. Luz was given a ban without details about its length.
At SGDQ 2022, speedrunner "Mekarazium" admitted that he faked a run of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance Blade Wolf DLC. The game was played remotely, unlike most of the other games at the event, and the DLC was a donation incentive. While the main game was played live by Mekarazium, the DLC was pre-recorded. Viewers quickly noted discrepancies with the run. Mekarazium admitted to faking the run and was banned from future GDQ events. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wyler | William Wyler | William Wyler (; born Willi Wyler (German: [ˈvɪli ˈvi:lɐ]); July 1, 1902 – July 27, 1981) was a German-born American film director and producer. Known for his work in numerous genres over five decades, he received numerous awards and accolades, including three Academy Awards. He holds the record of twelve nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director. For his oeuvre of work, Wyler was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, the Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award, and the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award.
Wyler emigrated to the United States in 1921 where he worked first for Universal Studios in New York before moving to Los Angeles. By 1925, he was the youngest director at Universal, and in 1929 he directed Hell's Heroes, Universal's first sound production filmed entirely on location. Wyler went on to win the Academy Award for Best Director three times, for Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Ben-Hur (1959), all of which also won for Best Picture. He was Oscar-nominated for Dodsworth (1936), Wuthering Heights (1939), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), The Heiress (1949), Detective Story (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), Friendly Persuasion (1956), and The Collector (1965).
Film historian Ian Freer calls Wyler a "bona fide perfectionist", whose penchant for retakes and an attempt to hone every last nuance "became the stuff of legend." His ability to direct a string of classic literary adaptations into huge box-office and critical successes made him one of "Hollywood's most bankable moviemakers" from the 1930s to the 1960s. Through his talent for staging, editing, and camera movement, he turned dynamic theatrical spaces into cinematic ones. Wyler is also known for his work as an actors' director, often propelling them to stardom.
== Early life ==
Wyler was born to a Jewish family in Mulhouse, Alsace-Lorraine (then part of the German Empire, now France). His Swiss-born father Leopold started as a traveling salesman but later became a thriving haberdasher in Mulhouse. His mother, Melanie (née Auerbach; died February 13, 1955, Los Angeles, aged 77), was German-born, and a cousin of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures. During Wyler's childhood, he attended a number of schools and developed a reputation as "something of a hellraiser", being expelled more than once for misbehavior. His mother often took him and his older brother Robert to concerts, opera, and the theatre, as well as the early cinema. Sometimes at home his family and their friends would stage amateur theatricals for personal enjoyment.
Wyler was supposed to inherit the family haberdashery business in Mulhouse. After World War I and the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine to France, he spent a dismal year working in Paris at 100.000 Chemises selling shirts and ties. He was so poor that he often spent his time wandering around the Pigalle district. After realizing that Willy was not interested in the haberdashery business, his mother, Melanie, contacted her distant cousin, Carl Laemmle, who owned Universal Studios, about opportunities for him.
Laemmle was in the habit of coming to Europe each year, searching for promising young men who would work in the United States. In 1921, Wyler, while traveling as a Swiss citizen (his father's status automatically conferred Swiss citizenship on his sons), met Laemmle who hired him to work at Universal Studios in New York. As Wyler said: "America seemed as far away as the moon." Booked onto a ship to New York with Laemmle for his return voyage, Wyler met a young Czech man, Paul Kohner (later the famous independent agent), aboard the same ship. Their enjoyment of the first class trip was short-lived, however, as they found they had to repay the cost of the passage out of their $25 weekly income as messengers to Universal Pictures. After working in New York for several years, and even serving in the New York Army National Guard for a year, Wyler moved to Hollywood to become a director.
== Career ==
=== 1923–1929: Early work and silent films ===
Around 1923, Wyler arrived in Los Angeles and began work on the Universal Studios lot in the swing gang, cleaning the stages and moving the sets. His break came when he was hired as a second assistant editor. But his work ethic was uneven, and he would often sneak off and play billiards in a pool hall across the street from the studio, or organize card games during working hours. After some ups and downs (including getting fired), Wyler put all his efforts into becoming a director. He started as a third assistant director and by 1925 he became the youngest director on the Universal lot directing the westerns that Universal was famed for turning out. Wyler was so engrossed in his work that he would dream about "different ways (for an actor) to get on a horse". In several of the one-reelers, he would join the posse in the inevitable chase of the 'bad man'.
He directed his first non-Western, the lost Anybody Here Seen Kelly?, in 1928. This was followed by his first part-talkie films, The Shakedown and The Love Trap. He proved himself an able craftsman. In 1928 he became a naturalized United States citizen. His first all-talking film, and Universal's first sound production to be filmed entirely on location, was Hell's Heroes, filmed in the Mojave Desert in 1929.
=== 1930–1949: Career acclaim and stardom ===
In the early 1930s Wyler directed a wide variety of films at Universal, ranging from high-profile dramas such as The Storm, A House Divided with Walter Huston, and Counsellor at Law with John Barrymore, to comedies like Her First Mate with Zasu Pitts and The Good Fairy with Margaret Sullavan. He became well known for his insistence on multiple retakes, resulting in often award-winning and critically acclaimed performances from his actors. After leaving Universal he began a long collaboration with Samuel Goldwyn for whom he directed such classics as Dodsworth (1936) where he earned his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. The film starred Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton and Mary Astor, "sparking a 20-year run of almost unbroken greatness." He also directed These Three (1936) with Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, Dead End (1937) with Humphrey Bogart, Wuthering Heights (1939) with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, The Westerner (1940) with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan, The Little Foxes (1941) with Bette Davis, and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) with Myrna Loy and Fredric March.
Wyler's visual style pioneered long, uncut takes in what has come to be called deep-focus cinematography - the use of lenses which can take in the entire depth of a room, keeping everything in focus, i.e. depth of field, and thus can contain dramatic changes in lighting and characters' movements in the same shot. In this, he collaborated with the pathbreaking young cinematographer of 1940's Citizen Kane, Gregg Toland. Gregg Toland shot three of the director's most celebrated films: Wuthering Heights (1939), where Toland's use of low angles, dark shadows and diffusion won him the Oscar for best cinematography; next in Lillian Hellman's adaptation of her searing stage play, The Little Foxes, into Wyler's 1941 film, which had Wyler and Toland working closely together to bring the hard-edged deep focus from Citizen Kane to bear on another tale of soul-destroying family wealth - including inventing a totally white make-up scheme for its star, Bette Davis, conveying her soullessness. Third, and most famously, is Toland's work in one of the cinematographer's last films, Wyler's heart-wrenching masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). This story of three American servicemen struggling to adjust to civilian life after fighting in World War 2 hit a chord with postwar audiences. Memorable examples of deep focus here include the complex scene in which the three men wind up at the same bar, unable to stay at home, and, in its powerful closing shot, a crowded family wedding disperses, leaving only two young lovers staring at one another across the expanse of an empty living room, as stunned in place, seemingly, as the camera. All three films were decorated with multiple Oscars (see the following section).
Bette Davis received three Oscar nominations for her screen work under Wyler, and won her second Oscar for her performance in Wyler's 1938 film Jezebel. She told Merv Griffin in 1972 that Wyler trained her with that film to be a "far, far better actress" than she had been. She recalled a scene that was only a bare paragraph in the script, but "without a word of dialog, Willy created a scene of power and tension. This was moviemaking on the highest plane," she said. "A scene of such suspense that I never have not marveled at the direction of it." During her acceptance speech when she received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1977, she thanked him.
Laurence Olivier, whom Wyler directed in Wuthering Heights (1939) for his first Oscar nomination, credited Wyler with teaching him how to act for the screen, despite clashing with Wyler on multiple occasions. Olivier would go on to hold the record for the most nominations in the Best Actor category at nine, tied with Spencer Tracy. Critic Frank S. Nugent wrote in The New York Times: "William Wyler has directed it magnificently. It is, unquestionably, one of the most distinguished pictures of the year." Variety described Olivier's performance as "fantastic... he not only brings conviction to his portrayal but translates intelligently its mystical quality."
Five years later, in 1944, while visiting London, Wyler met with Olivier and his actress wife, Vivien Leigh. She invited him to see her performance in The Doctor's Dilemma, and Olivier asked him to direct him in his planned film, Henry V. But Wyler said he was "not a Shakespearian" and turned down the offer.
In 1950, Wyler and Olivier made a second film together, Carrie, which was not a commercial success. However, some critics state that it nonetheless contains Olivier's finest film performance, but because of its old-fashioned story, the film was very under-appreciated: In critic Michael Billington's opinion:
If there were any justice in the world, Laurence Olivier would have got an Oscar for his unforgettable performance in Carrie.
Director and screenwriter John Huston had been a close friend of Wyler during his career. When he was twenty-eight and penniless, sleeping in parks in London, Huston returned to Hollywood to see if he could find work. Wyler, four years his senior, had met Huston when he was directing his father, Walter Huston, in A House Divided in 1931, and they got along well. Wyler read dialogue suggestions that Huston had given to his father Walter and hired John to work on the dialogue for the script. He later inspired Huston to become a director and became his "early mentor." When America entered World War II in 1941, Wyler, Huston, Anatole Litvak and Frank Capra, by then all directors, enlisted at the same time. Later in his career, Huston recalled his friendship with Wyler during an interview:
Willy was certainly my best friend in the industry.... We seemed instantly to have many things in common.... Willy liked the things that I liked. We'd go down to Mexico. We'd go up in the mountains. And we'd gamble. He was a wonderful companion....He was equally capable of playing Beethoven on his violin, speeding around town on his motorcycle, or schussing down steep virgin snow trails.
==== Wyler and the Second World War ====
In 1941, Wyler directed Mrs. Miniver, based on the 1940 novel; it was the story of a middle-class English family adjusting to the war in Europe and the bombing blitz in London. It starred Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. Pidgeon originally had doubts about taking on the role, until fellow actor Paul Lukas told him, "You will find working with Wyler to be the most delightful experience you ever had, and that's the way it turned out." Pidgeon recalled: "One thing that would have been a terrific regret in my life is if I had succeeded in getting out of doing Mrs. Miniver" He received his first Oscar nomination for his role, while his co-star, Greer Garson, won her first and only Academy Award for her performance.
The film idea was controversial because it was intended to cause the United States to be less isolationist. It was thought that by seeing the suffering of British citizens depicted in fiction story, Americans might be made more willing to aid Britain during their war effort. The film succeeded in its propagandistic aims, eliciting sympathy for the British people by showing Britain during its darkest days of the war. Years later, having been in the war himself, Wyler said that the film "only scratched the surface of war... It was incomplete."
U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom Joseph Kennedy told the studios to stop making pro-British and anti-German films, because he believed that British defeat was imminent. But MGM producer Eddie Mannix disagreed, saying that "someone should salute England. And even if we lose $100,000, that'll be okay." Mrs. Miniver went on to win six Academy Awards, becoming the top box office hit of 1942. It was Wyler's first Academy Award for Best Director.
President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill both loved the film, said historian Emily Yellin, and Roosevelt wanted prints rushed to theaters nationwide. The Voice of America radio network broadcast the minister's speech from the film, magazines reprinted it, and it was copied onto leaflets and dropped over German-occupied countries. Churchill sent MGM chief Louis B. Mayer a telegram claiming that "Mrs. Miniver is propaganda worth 100 battleships." Bosley Crowther wrote in his New York Times review that Mrs. Miniver was the finest film yet made about the war, "and a most exalting tribute to the British."
Between 1942 and 1945, Wyler volunteered to serve as a major in the United States Army Air Forces and directed a pair of documentaries: The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), about a Boeing B-17 and its U.S. Army Air Force crew; and Thunderbolt! (1947), highlighting a P-47 fighter-bomber squadron in the Mediterranean. Wyler filmed The Memphis Belle at great personal risk, flying over enemy territory on actual bombing missions in 1943; on one flight, Wyler lost consciousness from lack of oxygen. Wyler's associate, cinematographer Harold J. Tannenbaum, a First Lieutenant, was shot down and perished during the filming. Director Steven Spielberg describes Wyler's filming of Memphis Belle in the 2017 Netflix series, Five Came Back. Before being assigned to the Air Force, Wyler was hired to direct the documentary The Negro Soldier on African-Americans in the United States Armed Forces.
Working on Thunderbolt! Wyler was exposed to such loud noise that he passed out. When he awoke, he found he was deaf in one ear. Partial hearing with the aid of a hearing aid eventually came back years later. Wyler returned from the War a lieutenant colonel and a disabled veteran.
Returning from the War and unsure whether he could work again, Wyler turned to a subject that he knew well and directed a film which captured the mood of the nation as it turned to peace after the war, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). This story of the homecoming of three veterans from World War II dramatized the problems of returning veterans in their adjustment back to civilian life. Arguably his most personal film, Best Years drew on Wyler's own experience returning home to his family after three years at the front. The Best Years of Our Lives won the Academy Award for Best Director (Wyler's second) and Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as six other Academy Awards including one Academy Honorary Award.
In 1949, Wyler directed The Heiress, which earned Olivia de Havilland her second Oscar and garnered additional Oscars for Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, and Best Music. The film is considered by some to be a highlight in her career, "that could strike envy even in the most versatile and successful actress," according to one critic.
De Havilland had seen the play in New York and felt she could play the lead perfectly. She then called Wyler to convince him to have Paramount buy the film rights. He flew to New York to see the play and moved by the story, persuaded the studio to buy it. Along with de Havilland, he managed to get Montgomery Clift and Ralph Richardson to co-star.
=== 1950–1959: Established director ===
In 1951, Wyler produced and directed Kirk Douglas and Eleanor Parker in Detective Story, portraying a day in the lives of the various people in a detective squad. Lee Grant and Joseph Wiseman made their screen debuts in the film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including one for Grant. Critic Bosley Crowther lauded the film, describing it as "a brisk, absorbing film by producer-director William Wyler, with the help of a fine, responsive cast."
Carrie was released in 1952 starring Jennifer Jones in the title role and Laurence Olivier as Hurstwood. Eddie Albert played Charles Drouet. Carrie received two Academy Award nominations: Costume Design (Edith Head), and Best Art Direction (Hal Pereira, Roland Anderson, Emile Kuri). Wyler was reluctant to cast Jennifer Jones, and the filming was subsequently plagued by a variety of troubles. Jones had not revealed that she was pregnant; Wyler was mourning the death of his year-old son; Olivier had a painful leg ailment, and he developed a dislike for Jones. Hollywood was reeling under the effects of McCarthyism, and the studio was afraid to distribute a film that could be attacked as immoral. Ultimately, the ending was changed and the film was cut to make it more positive in tone.
During the immediate postwar period, Wyler directed a handful of critically acclaimed and influential films. Roman Holiday (1953) introduced Audrey Hepburn to U.S. audiences in her first starring role, winning her an Academy Award for Best Actress. Wyler said of Hepburn years later, when describing truly great actresses, "In that league there's only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It's a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you've found it." The film was an instant hit, also winning for Best Costume Design (Edith Head), and Best Writing (Dalton Trumbo). Hepburn would eventually do three movies with Wyler, who her son said was one of the most important directors in her career.
Friendly Persuasion (1956) was awarded the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival. And in 1959, Wyler directed Ben-Hur, which won 11 Oscars, a feat unequaled until Titanic in 1997 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003. He had also assisted in the production of the 1925 version.
Wyler and its star, Charlton Heston, both knew what the film meant for MGM, which had massive investments in its outcome, with the film's budget having gone from $7 million to $15 million, and the fact that MGM was already in dire financial straits. They were aware that if it failed at the box office, MGM might go bankrupt.
The film, like many epics, was difficult to make. When Heston was asked which scene he enjoyed doing most, he said "I didn't enjoy any of it. It was hard work." Part of the reason for that was the financial stress placed on making the film a success. With a cast of fifteen thousand extras, a leading star, and shot on 70mm film with stereophonic tracks, it was the most expensive film ever made at that time. The nine-minute chariot race, for example, took six months to film.
Ben-Hur became a great box office success. Wyler won his third Academy Award for Best Director and Charlton Heston his first and only Academy Award as its star. Heston recalled in his autobiography that at first he had doubts about playing the role. But his agent advised him otherwise: "Don't you know that actors take parts with Wyler without even reading the damn script? I'm telling you, you have to do this picture!"
Kirk Douglas had lobbied Wyler, who directed him in Detective Story in 1951, for the title role, but only after Wyler had already decided on Heston. He offered him instead the role of Messala, which Douglas rejected. Douglas then went on to star in Spartacus (1960).
Ben-Hur cost $15 million to produce but earned $47 million by the end of 1961 and $90 million worldwide. Audiences mobbed movie theaters in the months after it opened. Critic Pauline Kael praised Wyler's achievement:
I admire the artist who can make something good for the art house audience; but I also applaud the commercial heroism of a director who can steer a huge production and keep his sanity and perspective and decent human feelings beautifully intact.
=== 1960–1970: Later work and final films ===
In 1961, he became a director for 20th Century Fox and also cast James Garner in The Children's Hour with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Garner had beaten Warner Bros. in a lawsuit, enabling him to leave the television series Maverick, and had been briefly graylisted as a result but Wyler broke the graylist by casting him; the following year, Garner played a leading role in four major motion pictures.
In 1968, he directed Barbra Streisand in her debut film, Funny Girl, costarring Omar Sharif, which became a huge financial success. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and like Audrey Hepburn in her first starring role, Streisand won as Best Actress, becoming the thirteenth actor to win an Oscar under his direction.
Streisand had already starred in the Broadway musical of Funny Girl, with seven hundred performances. And although she knew the part well, Wyler still had to mold her stage role for the screen. She naturally wanted to be involved in the film's production, often asking Wyler questions, but they got along well. "Things were ironed out when she discovered some of us knew what we were doing," kidded Wyler.
What originally attracted him to direct Streisand was similar to what attracted him to Audrey Hepburn, who had also been new to film audiences. He met with Streisand during her musical run and became excited at the prospect of guiding another new star into an award-winning performance. He sensed and admired that Streisand had the same kind of dedication to being an actress as did Bette Davis, early in her career. "It just needed to be controlled and toned down for the movie camera." Wyler said afterwards, "I'm terribly fond of her. She was very professional, very good, a hard worker, too hard at times. She would work day and night if you would let her. She is absolutely tireless".
Wyler was hired to direct Patton (1970), but quit before the beginning of production in 1969.
The last film Wyler directed was The Liberation of L.B. Jones, released in 1970.
== Style and technique ==
=== Visual style ===
Wyler had worked with cinematographer Gregg Toland for six of his films, mostly in the 1930s. Toland used deep focus photographic technique for most of them, whereby he could keep all objects on the screen, whether foreground or background, in sharp focus at the same time. The technique gives the illusion of depth and therefore makes the scene more true to life.
A perfectionist, Wyler earned the nickname "40-take Wyler". On the set of Jezebel, Wyler forced Henry Fonda through 40 takes of one particular scene, his only guidance being "Again!" after each take. When Fonda asked for more direction, Wyler responded, "It stinks." Similarly, when Charlton Heston quizzed the director about the supposed shortcomings of his performance in Ben-Hur, Wyler simply told Heston "Be better!" However, Heston notes that by the time a scene is done, regardless of how hard it was to do, it always came off well:
The only answer I have is that his taste is impeccable and every actor knows it. Your faith in his taste and what it will do for your performance is what makes casting a Wyler picture a cinch...doing a film for Wyler is like getting the works in a Turkish bath. You darn near drown, but you come out smelling like a rose.
=== Actors' director ===
He helped propel a number of actors to stardom, including finding and directing Audrey Hepburn in her debut starring role, Roman Holiday (1953), and directing Barbra Streisand in her debut film, Funny Girl (1968), with both actresses winning Academy Awards. Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis both won their second Oscars in Wyler films, de Havilland for The Heiress (1949) and Davis for Jezebel (1938). Davis said Wyler made her a "far, far better actress" than she had ever been, while Laurence Olivier, who received his first Oscar nomination for Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939), credited Wyler with teaching him how to act for the screen. Wyler's three Best Picture-winning films each featured a Best Actress or Actor Oscar winner – Greer Garson in Mrs Miniver, Fredric March in The Best Years of Our Lives, and Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. Other popular Wyler films include: The Westerner (1940) with Gary Cooper, The Letter (1940) again with Davis, Detective Story (1951) with Kirk Douglas, Friendly Persuasion (1956) with Cooper and Dorothy McGuire, The Big Country (1958) with Gregory Peck and Heston, The Children's Hour (1961) with Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner, and How to Steal a Million (1966) with Hepburn and Peter O'Toole.
== Personal life ==
Wyler was briefly married to actress Margaret Sullavan (from November 25, 1934 – March 13, 1936) and married actress Margaret "Talli" Tallichet on October 23, 1938. The couple remained together until his death. They had five children: Catherine, Judith, William Jr., Melanie and David. Catherine said during an interview that her mother played an important part in his career, often being his "gatekeeper" and his reader of scripts presented to him.
Wyler was a Freemason.
He fluently spoke German, Alsatian, French and English.
=== Death ===
On July 24, 1981, Wyler gave an interview with his daughter, Catherine, for Directed by William Wyler, a PBS documentary about his life and career. Three days later, he died of a heart attack. He is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale, California.
== Legacy ==
Fourteen actors won Oscars under Wyler's direction, including Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938) and her nomination for The Letter (1940). Davis summed up their work together: "It was he who helped me to realize my full potential as an actress. I met my match in this exceptionally creative and talented director."
Other Oscar winners were Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949); Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (1953); Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur (1959); and Barbra Streisand in her debut film, Funny Girl (1968).
Wyler's films garnered more awards for participating artists and actors than any other director in the history of Hollywood. He received 12 Oscar nominations for Best Director, while dozens of his collaborators and actors won Oscars or were nominated. In 1965, Wyler won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for career achievement. Eleven years later, he received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. In addition to his Best Picture and Best Director Oscar wins, 13 of Wyler's films earned Best Picture nominations. Other late Wyler films include The Children's Hour (1961), which was nominated for five Academy Awards. Later films included The Collector (1963), Funny Girl (1968), and his final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970).
Many of Wyler's home movies are held by the Academy Film Archive; the archive preserved a number of them in 2017.
== Awards and honors ==
Wyler is the most nominated director in Academy Awards history with twelve nominations. He won the Academy Award for Best Director on three occasions, for Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Ben-Hur (1959). He is tied with Frank Capra and behind John Ford, who won four Oscars in this category. He is also the only director in Academy history to direct three Best Picture-winning films (the three for which he won Best Director), and shares with Steven Spielberg the record for directing the greatest number of Best Picture nominees (thirteen).
He has the distinction of having directed more actors to Oscar-nominated performances than any other director in history: thirty-six. Out of these nominees, fourteen went on to win Oscars, also a record. He received the fourth AFI Life Achievement Award in 1976. Among those who thanked him for directing her in her debut film was Barbra Streisand. For his contributions to the motion picture industry, on February 8, 1960, Wyler has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1731 Vine Street. In 1961, Wyler was chosen as one of 50 outstanding Americans of meritorious performance in the fields of endeavor, to be honored as a Guest of Honor to the first annual Banquet of the Golden Plate in Monterey, California. The honor was awarded by vote of the National Panel of Distinguished Americans of the Academy of Achievement. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slayer | Slayer | Slayer is an American thrash metal band from Huntington Park, California, formed in 1981 by guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman, drummer Dave Lombardo and bassist/vocalist Tom Araya. Slayer's fast and aggressive musical style made them one of the "big four" bands of thrash metal, alongside Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax. Slayer's current lineup comprises King, Araya, drummer Paul Bostaph and guitarist Gary Holt, who initially joined as a touring musician in 2011 before joining the band permanently after Hanneman's death in 2013. Drummer Jon Dette is a former member of the band.
In the original lineup, King, Hanneman and Araya contributed to the band's lyrics, and all of the band's music was written by King and Hanneman. The band's lyrics and album art, which cover topics such as serial killers, occultism, terrorism, religion, fascism, racism, and war, have generated album bans, delays, lawsuits and criticism from religious groups. However, its music has been highly influential, being cited by many bands as an influence musically, visually and lyrically; the band's third album, Reign in Blood (1986), has been described as one of the heaviest and most influential thrash metal albums.
Slayer released twelve studio albums, three live albums, a box set, six music videos, two extended plays and a cover album. Four of the band's studio albums have received gold certification in the United States. Slayer sold 5 million copies in the United States from 1991 to 2013, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The band has received five Grammy Award nominations, winning one in 2007 for the song "Eyes of the Insane" and one in 2008 for the song "Final Six", both of which were from the album Christ Illusion (2006). Slayer disbanded in 2019 following the conclusion of their global farewell tour, but has reformed to perform sporadic reunion shows since 2024.
== History ==
=== Early years (1981–1983) ===
Slayer was formed in 1981 by Jeff Hanneman, Dave Lombardo, Tom Araya and Kerry King in Huntington Park, California. The group started out playing covers of songs by bands such as Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Venom at parties and clubs in Southern California. The band's early image relied heavily on Satanic themes that featured pentagrams, make-up, spikes, and inverted crosses. Rumors that the band was originally known as Dragonslayer, after the 1981 film of the same name, were denied by King, as he later stated: "We never were; it's a myth to this day." According to Lombardo, the original band name was to be Wings of Fire before they settled in with Slayer. According to him, he also designed the band logo. For inspiration, Lombardo thought in a perspective of a murderer of how they would carve out the logo with a knife and since he is lefthanded, the logo is unintentionally slanted to the right.
In 1983, Slayer was invited to open for the band Bitch at the Woodstock Club in Anaheim, California to perform eight songs, six of which were covers. The band was spotted by Brian Slagel, a former music journalist who had recently founded Metal Blade Records. Impressed with Slayer, he met with the band backstage and asked them to record an original song for his upcoming Metal Massacre III compilation album. The band agreed and their song "Aggressive Perfector" created an underground buzz upon its release in mid-1983, which led to Slagel offering the band a recording contract with Metal Blade.
Araya noted in a 1991 Metal Forces interview that the band had written original songs in its early days that "were more in the Scorpions and Iron Maiden vein", but they left those songs behind after rehearsing Aggressive Perfector extensively in preparation for the Metal Massacre album.
=== Show No Mercy, Haunting the Chapel and Hell Awaits (1983–1986) ===
Without any recording budget, the band had to self-finance its debut album. Combining the savings of Araya, who was employed as a respiratory therapist, and money borrowed from King's father, the band entered the studio in November 1983. The album was rushed into release, stocking shelves three weeks after tracks were completed. Show No Mercy, released in December 1983 by Metal Blade Records, generated underground popularity for the band. The group began a club tour of California to promote the album. The tour gave the band additional popularity and sales of Show No Mercy eventually reached more than 20,000 in the US and another 20,000 worldwide.
In February 1984, King briefly joined Dave Mustaine's new band Megadeth. Hanneman was worried about King's decision, stating in an interview, "I guess we're gonna get a new guitar player." While Mustaine wanted King to stay on a permanent basis, King left after five shows, stating Mustaine's band was "taking too much of my time." The split caused a rift between King and Mustaine, which evolved into a long running feud between the two bands.
In June 1984, Slayer released a three-track EP called Haunting the Chapel. The EP featured a darker, more thrash-oriented style than Show No Mercy, and laid the groundwork for the future direction of the band. The opening track, "Chemical Warfare", has become a live staple, played at nearly every show since 1984.
Later that year, Slayer began their first national club tour, traveling in Araya's Camaro towing a U-Haul trailer. The band recorded the live album Live Undead in November 1984 while in New York City.
In March 1985, Slayer began a national tour with Venom and Exodus, resulting in their first live home video dubbed Combat Tour: The Ultimate Revenge. The video featured live footage filmed at the Studio 54 club. The band then made its live European debut at the Heavy Sound Festival in Belgium opening for UFO.
Show No Mercy had sold over 40,000 copies, which led to the band returning to the studio to record their second full-length album. Metal Blade financed a recording budget, which allowed the band to hire producer Ron Fair. Released in April 1985, Slayer's second full-length album, Hell Awaits, expanded on the darkness of Haunting the Chapel, with hell and Satan as common song subjects. The album was the band's most progressive offering, featuring longer and more complex song structures. The intro of the title track is a backwards recording of a demonic-sounding voice repeating "Join us", ending with "Welcome back" before the track begins. The album was a hit, with fans choosing Slayer for best band and live band, Hell Awaits as 1985's best album, and Dave Lombardo as best drummer in Metal Forces' 1985 Readers Poll.
=== Reign in Blood, Lombardo's brief hiatus and South of Heaven (1986–1989) ===
Following the success of Hell Awaits, Slayer was offered a recording contract with Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin's newly founded Def Jam Records, then a largely hip hop-based label. The band accepted, and with an experienced producer and major label recording budget, the band underwent a sonic makeover for their third album Reign in Blood, resulting in shorter, faster songs with clearer production. The complex arrangements and long songs featured on Hell Awaits were ditched in favor of stripped down, hardcore punk influenced song structures.
Def Jam's distributor, Columbia Records, refused to release the album due to the song "Angel of Death" which detailed Holocaust concentration camps and the human experiments conducted by Nazi physician Josef Mengele. The album was distributed by Geffen Records on October 7, 1986. However, due to the controversy, Reign in Blood did not appear on Geffen Records' release schedule. Although the album received virtually no radio airplay, it became the band's first to enter the Billboard 200, peaking at number 94, and the band's first album certified gold in the United States.
Slayer began touring in support of Reign in Blood in late 1986 with Overkill. The band was added as the opening act on W.A.S.P.'s US tour, but just one month into it, drummer Lombardo left the band: "I wasn't making any money. I figured if we were gonna be doing this professionally, on a major label, I wanted my rent and utilities paid." To continue with the tour, Slayer enlisted Tony Scaglione of Whiplash. However, Lombardo was convinced by his wife to return in 1987. At the insistence of Rubin, Slayer recorded a cover version of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" for the film Less than Zero. Although the band was not happy with the final product, Hanneman deeming it "a poor representation of Slayer" and King labeling it "a hunk of shit", it was one of their first songs to garner radio airplay.
In late 1987, Slayer returned to the studio to record their fourth studio album. To contrast the speed of Reign in Blood, the band consciously decided to slow down the tempos and incorporate more melodic singing. According to Hanneman, "We knew we couldn't top Reign in Blood, so we had to slow down. We knew whatever we did was gonna be compared to that album, and I remember we actually discussed slowing down. It was weird—we've never done that on an album, before or since."
Released in July 1988, South of Heaven received mixed responses from both fans and critics, although it was Slayer's most commercially successful release at the time, debuting at number 57 on the Billboard 200, and their second album to receive gold certification in the United States. Press response to the album was mixed, with AllMusic citing the album as "disturbing and powerful", and Kim Neely of Rolling Stone calling it "genuinely offensive satanic drivel". King said "that album was my most lackluster performance", although Araya called it a "late bloomer" which eventually grew on people. Touring for South of Heaven took place between August 1988 and January 1989, which included opening for Judas Priest on their Ram It Down tour and headlining a North American tour with Motörhead and Overkill.
=== Seasons in the Abyss and Lombardo's second departure (1990–1993) ===
Slayer returned to the studio in early 1990 with co-producer Andy Wallace to record its fifth studio album. Following the backlash created by South of Heaven, Slayer returned to the "pounding speed of Reign in Blood, while retaining their newfound melodic sense." Seasons in the Abyss, released on October 9, 1990, was the first Slayer album to be released under Rubin's new Def American label, as he had parted ways with Def Jam owner Russell Simmons over creative differences. The album debuted at number No. 57 and peaked at No. 40 on the Billboard 200, and was certified gold in 1992. The album spawned Slayer's first music video for the album's title track, which was filmed in front of the Giza pyramids in Egypt. In support of Seasons in the Abyss, the band participated in the Clash of the Titans tour that was co-headlined by Megadeth; a European leg featured Testament and Suicidal Tendencies, while the North American trek had Anthrax and a then-unknown Alice in Chains as the direct support act. The band released a double live album, Decade of Aggression in 1991, to celebrate ten years since their formation. It debuted at number 55 on the Billboard 200.
In May 1992, Lombardo left the band due to conflicts with the other members, as well as his desire to be off tour for the birth of his first child. Lombardo formed his own band Grip Inc., with Voodoocult guitarist Waldemar Sorychta, and Slayer recruited former Forbidden drummer Paul Bostaph to fill in the drummer position. Slayer made its debut appearance with Bostaph at the 1992 Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. Bostaph's first studio effort was a medley of three Exploited songs, "War", "UK '82", and "Disorder", with rapper Ice-T, for the Judgment Night movie soundtrack in 1993.
=== Divine Intervention, Undisputed Attitude and Diabolus in Musica (1994–2000) ===
On September 27, 1994, Slayer released Divine Intervention, the band's first album with Bostaph on the drums. The album featured songs about Reinhard Heydrich, an architect of the Holocaust, and Jeffrey Dahmer, an American serial killer and sex offender. Other themes included murder, the evils of church, and the lengths to which governments went to wield power. Araya's interest in serial killers inspired much of the content of the lyrics.
Slayer geared up for a world tour in 1995, with openers Biohazard and Machine Head. A video of concert footage, Live Intrusion, was released, featuring a joint cover of Venom's "Witching Hour" with Machine Head. Following the tour, Slayer was billed third at the 1995 Monsters of Rock festival, headlined by Metallica. In 1996, Undisputed Attitude, an album of punk covers, was released. The band covered songs by Minor Threat, T.S.O.L., Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, D.I., Verbal Abuse, Dr. Know, and The Stooges. The album featured three original tracks, "Gemini", "Can't Stand You", "DDAMM"; the latter two were written by Hanneman in 1984–1985 for a side project entitled Pap Smear. Bostaph left Slayer shortly after the album's recording to work on his own project, Truth About Seafood. With Bostaph's departure, Slayer recruited Testament drummer Jon Dette and headlined the 1996 Ozzfest alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Danzig, Biohazard, Sepultura, and Fear Factory. Dette was fired after a year due to a fallout with band members. After that, Bostaph returned to continue the tour.
Diabolus in Musica (Latin for "The Devil in Music") was released in 1998, and debuted at number 31 on the Billboard 200, selling over 46,000 copies in its first week. It was complete by September 1997, and scheduled to be released the following month, but got delayed by nine months after their label was taken over by Columbia Records. The album received a mixed critical reception, and was criticized for adopting characteristics of nu metal music such as tuned down guitars, murky chord structures, and churning beats. Blabbermouth.net reviewer Borivoj Krgin described the album as "a feeble attempt at incorporating updated elements into the group's sound, the presence of which elevated the band's efforts somewhat and offered hope that Slayer could refrain from endlessly rehashing their previous material for their future output", while Ben Ratliff of The New York Times had similar sentiments, writing on June 22, 1998, that: "Eight of the 11 songs on Diabolus in Musica, a few of which were played at the show, are in the same gray key, and the band's rhythmic ideas have a wearying sameness too."
The album was the band's first to primarily feature dropped tuning, making use of the tritone interval referred to in the Middle Ages as the Devil's interval. Slayer teamed up with digital hardcore group Atari Teenage Riot to record a song for the Spawn soundtrack titled "No Remorse (I Wanna Die)". The band paid tribute to Black Sabbath by recording a cover of "Hand of Doom" for the second of two tribute albums, titled Nativity in Black II. A world tour followed to support the new album, with Slayer making an appearance at the United Kingdom Ozzfest 1998.
=== God Hates Us All (2001–2005) ===
During mid-2001, the band joined Morbid Angel, Pantera, Skrape and Static-X on the Extreme Steel Tour of North America, which was Pantera's last major tour. After delays regarding remixing and artwork, including slip covers created to cover the original artwork as it was deemed "too graphic", Slayer's next album, God Hates Us All, was released on September 11, 2001. The band received its first Grammy nomination for the lead track "Disciple", although the Grammy was awarded to Tool for "Schism". The September 11 attacks on America jeopardized the 2001 European tour Tattoo the Planet, originally set to feature Pantera, Static-X, Cradle of Filth, Biohazard and Vision of Disorder. The dates in the United Kingdom were postponed due to flight restrictions, with a majority of bands deciding to withdraw, leaving Slayer and Cradle of Filth remaining for the European leg of the tour.
Pantera, Static-X, Vision of Disorder and Biohazard were replaced by other bands depending on location; Amorphis, In Flames, Moonspell, Children of Bodom, and Necrodeath. Biohazard eventually decided to rejoin the tour later on, and booked new gigs in the countries where they missed dates. Drummer Bostaph left Slayer before Christmas in 2001, due to a chronic elbow injury which would hinder his ability to play. Since the band's European tour was unfinished at that time, the band's manager, Rick Sales, contacted original drummer Dave Lombardo and asked if he would like to finish the remainder of the tour. Lombardo accepted the offer, and stayed as a permanent member.
Slayer toured playing Reign in Blood in its entirety throughout the fall of 2003, under the tour banner "Still Reigning". Their playing of the final song, "Raining Blood", culminated with the band drenched in a rain of stage blood. Live footage of this was recorded at the Augusta Civic Center in Augusta, Maine, on July 11, 2004, and released on the 2004 DVD Still Reigning. The band also released War at the Warfield and a box set, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse featuring rarities, live CD and DVD performances and various Slayer merchandise. From 2002 to 2004, the band performed over 250 tour dates, headlining major music festivals including H82k2, Summer tour, Ozzfest 2004 and a European tour with Slipknot. While preparing for the Download Festival in England, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich was taken to a hospital with an unknown and mysterious illness, and was unable to perform. Metallica vocalist James Hetfield searched for volunteers at the last minute to replace Ulrich; Lombardo and Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison volunteered, with Lombardo performing the songs "Battery" and "The Four Horsemen".
=== Christ Illusion (2006–2008) ===
The next studio album, Christ Illusion, was originally scheduled for release on June 6, 2006, and would be the first album with original drummer Lombardo since 1990's Seasons in the Abyss. However, the band decided to delay the release of the record, as they did not want to be among the many, according to King, "half-ass, stupid fucking loser bands" releasing records on June 6, although USA Today reported the idea was thwarted because the band failed to secure sufficient studio recording time. Slayer released Eternal Pyre on June 6 as a limited-edition EP. Eternal Pyre featured the song "Cult", a live performance of "War Ensemble" in Germany and video footage of the band recording "Cult". Five thousand copies were released and sold exclusively through Hot Topic chain stores, selling out within hours of release. On June 30, Nuclear Blast Records released a 7" vinyl picture disc version limited to a thousand copies.
Christ Illusion was eventually released on August 8, 2006, and debuted at number 5 on the Billboard 200, selling over 62,000 copies in its first week. The album became Slayer's highest charting, improving on its previous highest-charting album, Divine Intervention, which had debuted at number 8. However, despite its high positioning, the album dropped to number 44 in the following week. Three weeks after the album's release, Slayer were inducted into the Kerrang! Hall of Fame for their influence to the heavy metal scene.
A worldwide tour dubbed The Unholy Alliance Tour was undertaken to support the new record. The tour was originally set to launch on June 6 in San Diego, but was postponed to June 10 as Araya had to undergo gall bladder surgery. In Flames, Mastodon, Children of Bodom, Lamb of God, and Thine Eyes Bleed (featuring Araya's brother, Johnny) and Ted Maul (London Hammersmith Apollo) were supporting Slayer. The tour made its way through America and Europe and the bands who participated, apart from Thine Eyes Bleed, reunited to perform at Japan's Loudpark Festival on October 15, 2006.
The video for the album's first single, "Eyes of the Insane", was released on October 30, 2006. The track was featured on the Saw III soundtrack, and won a Grammy Award for "Best Metal Performance" at the 49th Grammy Awards, although the band was unable to attend due to touring obligations. A week later, the band visited the 52nd Services Squadron located on the Spangdahlem U.S. Air Force Base in Germany to meet and play a show. This was the first visit ever to a military base for the band. The band made its first network TV appearance on the show Jimmy Kimmel Live! on January 19, playing the song "Eyes of the Insane", and four additional songs for fans after the show (although footage from "Jihad" was cut due to its controversial lyrical themes).
In 2007, Slayer toured Australia and New Zealand in April with Mastodon, and appeared at the Download Festival, Rock Am Ring, and a summer tour with Marilyn Manson and Bleeding Through.
=== World Painted Blood (2009–2011) ===
In 2008, Araya expressed uncertainty about the future of the band, and that he could not see himself continuing the career at a later age. He said that once the band finished its upcoming album, which was the final record in their contract, the band would sit down and discuss its future. King was optimistic that the band would produce at least another two albums before considering to disband: "We're talking of going in the studio next February [2009] and getting the next record out so if we do things in a timely manner I don't see there's any reason why we can't have more than one album out." Slayer, along with Trivium, Mastodon, and Amon Amarth, teamed up for a European tour titled 'The Unholy Alliance: Chapter III', throughout October and November 2008. Slayer headlined the second Mayhem Festival in the summer of 2009. Slayer, along with Megadeth, also co-headlined Canadian Carnage, the first time they performed together in more than 15 years when they co-headlined four shows in Canada in late June 2009 with openers Machine Head and Suicide Silence.
The band's eleventh studio album, World Painted Blood, was released by American Recordings. It was available on November 3 in North America and November 2 for the rest of the world. The band stated that the album takes elements of all their previous works including Seasons in the Abyss, South of Heaven, and Reign in Blood. Slayer, along with Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax performed on the same bill for the first time on June 16, 2010, at Bemowo Airport, in Warsaw, Poland. One of the following Big 4 performances in (Sofia, Bulgaria, June 22, 2010) was sent via satellite in HD to cinemas. They also went on to play several other dates as part of the Sonisphere Festival. Megadeth and Slayer joined forces once again for the American Carnage Tour from July to October 2010 with opening acts Anthrax and Testament, as well as the European Carnage Tour in March and April 2011. The "Big Four" played more dates at Sonisphere in England and France for the first time ever. Slayer returned to Australia in February and March 2011 as part of the Soundwave Festival, and also played in California with the other members of the "Big Four".
In early 2011, Hanneman was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis. According to the band, doctors said that it likely originated from a spider bite. Araya said of Hanneman's condition: "Jeff was seriously ill. Jeff ended up contracting a bacteria that ate away his flesh on his arm, so they cut open his arm, from his wrist to his shoulder, and they did a skin graft on him, they cleaned up ... It was a flesh-eating virus, so he was really, really bad. So we'll wait for him to get better, and when he's a hundred percent, he's gonna come out and join us." The band decided to play their upcoming tour dates without Hanneman. Gary Holt of Exodus was announced as Hanneman's temporary replacement. Cannibal Corpse guitarist Pat O'Brien filled in for Holt during a tour in Europe. On April 23, 2011, at the American Big 4 show in Indio, California, Hanneman rejoined his bandmates to play the final two songs of their set, "South of Heaven" and "Angel of Death". This turned out to be Hanneman's final live performance with the band.
=== Hanneman's death, Lombardo's third split, and Repentless (2011–2016) ===
When asked if Slayer would make another album, Lombardo replied "Yes absolutely; Although there's nothing written, there are definitely plans." However, Araya said Slayer would not begin writing a new album until Hanneman's condition improved. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Reign In Blood, the band performed all of the album's tracks at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival at the Alexandra Palace in London.
In November 2011, Lombardo posted a tweet that the band had started to write new music. This presumably meant that Hanneman's condition improved, and it was believed he was ready to enter the studio. King had worked with Lombardo that year and they completed three songs. The band planned on entering the studio in either March or April 2012 and were hoping to have the album recorded before the group's US tour in late May and release it by the summer of that year. However, King said the upcoming album would not be finished until September and October of that year, making a 2013 release likely. In July 2012, King revealed two song titles for the upcoming album, "Chasing Death" and "Implode".
In February 2013, Lombardo was fired right before Slayer was to play at Australia's Soundwave festival due to an argument with band members over a pay dispute. Slayer and American Recordings released a statement, saying "Mr. Lombardo came to the band less than a week before their scheduled departure for Australia to present an entirely new set of terms for his engagement that were contrary to those that had been previously agreed upon", although Lombardo claimed there was a gag order in place. Dette returned to fill in for Lombardo for the Soundwave dates. It was confirmed that Lombardo was officially out of Slayer for the third time, and in May, Bostaph rejoined the band.
King said in February 2024 that he had severed ties with Lombardo ever since, adding that "he's dead to me."
On May 2, 2013, Hanneman died due to liver failure in a local hospital near his home in Southern California's Inland Empire; the cause of death was later determined to be alcohol-related cirrhosis. King confirmed that the band would continue, saying "Jeff is going to be in everybody's thoughts for a long time. It's unfortunate you can't keep unfortunate things from happening. But we're going to carry on – and he'll be there in spirit." However, Araya felt more uncertain about the band's future, expressing his belief that "After 30 years [with Hanneman active in the band], it would literally be like starting over", and doubting that Slayer's fanbase would approve such a change. Despite the uncertainty regarding the band's future, Slayer still worked on a followup to World Painted Blood. Additionally, it was reported that the new album would still feature material written by Hanneman.
At the 2014 Revolver's Golden Gods Awards ceremony, Slayer debuted "Implode", its first new song in five years. The group announced that they had signed with Nuclear Blast and planned to release a new album in 2015. It was reported that Holt would take over Hanneman's guitar duties full-time, although Holt did not participate in the songwriting. In February, Slayer announced a seventeen-date American tour to start in June featuring Suicidal Tendencies and Exodus. In 2015, Slayer headlined the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival for the second time. Repentless, the band's twelfth studio album, was released on September 11, 2015. Slayer toured for 2+1⁄2 years in support of Repentless. The band toured Europe with Anthrax and Kvelertak in October and November 2015, and embarked on three North American tours: one with Testament and Carcass in February and March 2016, then with Anthrax and Death Angel in September and October 2016, and with Lamb of God and Behemoth in July and August 2017. A lone date in Southeast Asia in 2017 was held in the Philippines.
=== Cancelled thirteenth studio album, Final World Tour and split (2016–2019) ===
In August 2016, King was asked if Slayer would release a follow-up to Repentless. He replied, "We've got lots of leftover material from the last album, 'cause we wrote so much stuff, and we recorded a bunch of it too. If the lyrics don't change the song musically, those songs are done. So we are way ahead of the ballgame without even doing anything for the next record. And I've been working on stuff on my downtime. Like, I'll warm up and a riff will come to mind and I'll record it. I've gotten a handful of those on this run. So wheels are still turning. I haven't worked on anything lyrically yet except for what was done on the last record, so that's something I've gotta get on. But, yeah, Repentless isn't quite a year old yet." King also stated that Slayer was not expected to enter the studio until at least 2018. In an October interview on Hatebreed frontman Jamey Jasta's podcast, King stated that he was "completely open" to having guitarist Gary Holt (who had no songwriting contributions on Repentless) involved in the songwriting process of the next Slayer album. He explained, "I'm entirely open to having Gary work on something. I know he's gotta work on an Exodus record and I've got tons already for this one. But, you know, if he's gonna stick around... I didn't want it on the last one, and I knew that. I'm completely open to having that conversation. I haven't talked to Tom about it, I haven't talked to Gary open about it, but I'm open. That's not saying it is or isn't gonna happen. But my ears are open."
In a June 2017 interview with the Ultimate Guitar Archive, Holt said that he was ready to contribute with the songwriting for the next album. When speaking to Revolver, King was asked if there were any plans in place for the band to begin working on the album, he said, "Funny thing is, Repentless isn't even two years old yet, though it seems like it is. But from that session, there are six or eight songs that are recorded—some with vocals, some with leads, but all with keeper guitar, drums and bass. So when those songs get finished lyrically, if the lyrics don't change the songs, they'll be ready to be on the next record. So we already have more than half a record complete, if those songs make it." He also gave conceivable consideration that it could be released next year, "I'm certainly not gonna promise it, because every time I do, I make a liar of myself! [Laughs]" When asked about any plans or the timeline the band would like to release the album, King said, "It depends on touring—getting time to rehearse, getting time to make up new stuff. We haven't even done Australia on this run yet at all. We're hitting Japan finally later this year. But if things go well, I'd like to record next year. But timelines change all the time." In an October 2017 interview, Holt once again expressed his desire to contribute to the songwriting for the next Slayer album, saying, "When that time comes and we are ready for the next album, if Kerry wants me to contribute, I've got riffs. I've got stuff right now that I've written that I am not using for Exodus, because it was kind of maybe just unintentional subconscious thing, like, 'It sounds a little too Slayer.'"
Plans for a new album were ultimately scrapped when on January 22, 2018, Slayer announced their farewell world tour through a video featuring a montage of press clippings, early posters and press photos spanning the band's entire career. Although the members of Slayer have never publicly explained why they were retiring, it was thought that one of the reasons behind this decision was Tom Araya's desire not to tour anymore and to spend more time with his family; Araya hinted at the possibility of retiring in a 2016 interview. This was confirmed by former drummer Dave Lombardo in a 2019 interview, who said: "Apparently, from what I hear. Tom has been wanting to retire when I was in the band—he wanted to stop. He had the neck issues. He's been wanting to retire for a long time now. So now that he's got it, I'm happy for him, and I hope he gets what he wants out of life and his future."
The farewell tour began with a North American trek in May and June 2018, supported by Lamb of God, Anthrax, Behemoth and Testament. The second leg of the North American tour took place in July and August, with Napalm Death replacing Behemoth, followed in November and December by a European tour with Lamb of God, Anthrax and Obituary. The farewell tour continued into 2019, with plans to visit places such as South America, Australia and Japan; in addition to European festivals such as Hellfest and Graspop. The band toured the United States in May 2019 with Lamb of God, Amon Amarth and Cannibal Corpse. Slayer also played one show in Mexico at Force Fest in October 2018.
On December 2, 2018, Holt announced that he would not perform the remainder of the band's European tour to be with his dying father. Vio-lence and former Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel would fill in for him as a result.
Holt had stated that Slayer would not release a new album before the end of the farewell tour. On how long the tour would last, Holt's Exodus bandmate Steve "Zetro" Souza commented, "I'm speculating it's gonna take a year and a half or two years to do the one final thing, but I believe it's finished. Everybody knows what I know; just because I'm on the outside, I have no insight on that." The final North American leg of the tour, dubbed "The Last Campaign", took place in November 2019, and also included support from Primus, Ministry and Philip H. Anselmo & The Illegals. Despite being referred to as a farewell tour for Slayer, their manager Rick Sales has stated that "the band is not breaking up, they made a decision to stop touring. That doesn't mean the end of the band. It’s just the end of touring". Kristen Mulderig, who works with Rick Sales Entertainment Group, has also been quoted as saying that there would be Slayer-related activities following the tour's conclusion. However, within two days after the tour's completion, King's wife Ayesha stated on her Instagram page that there is "not a chance in hell" that Slayer would ever reunite to perform more shows or release new music.
=== Post-breakup (2020–2024) ===
In March 2020, when talking to Guitar World about his then-latest endorsement with Dean Guitars, King hinted that he would continue to make music outside of Slayer, simply saying, "Dean didn't sign me for nothing!" King stated in an August 2020 interview on the Dean Guitars YouTube channel that he had "more than two records' worth of music" for his yet-to-be disclosed new project. Bostaph later confirmed that he and King were working on a new project that would "sound like Slayer without it being Slayer—but not intentionally so." This project was later revealed to be King's solo debut album, From Hell I Rise, released on May 17, 2024, and the lineup of the album includes King, Bostaph, Death Angel vocalist Mark Osegueda, Hellyeah bassist Kyle Sanders, and former Vio-lence and Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel.
In addition to King and Bostaph, most of the other members of Slayer have remained musically active. Holt continues to record and perform with Exodus, releasing a new album, Persona Non Grata, in 2021. Lombardo has been involved with various acts since his third split with Slayer in 2013, such as Suicidal Tendencies, Dead Cross, the Misfits, Mr. Bungle and Testament, the latter of which he had previously served as the drummer for the band's 1999 album The Gathering and rejoined in March 2022, only to leave again in the following April. Jon Dette has been a member of at least two bands, Animetal USA and Meshiaak, and performed with Anthrax and Volbeat as a fill-in drummer. Araya, aside from an appearance in the Bay Area thrash metal documentary film Murder in the Front Row, had not been publicly active in the music industry nor given any interviews between the conclusion of Slayer's final tour and the band's 2024 reunion.
The members of Slayer had expressed mixed opinions about a reunion. When asked by the Let There Be Talk podcast in June 2020 about the possibility of the band ever reforming, Holt stated, "If it does, if it ever happens, it has nothing to do with me. Someone else would call and say, 'We wanna [do this].' To my knowledge, it's done. And I think it should be that way. The band went out fucking on a bang, went out on Slayer's terms, and how many people get to say they did that?". Holt stated in March 2021 that he was open to a potential Slayer reunion, but it was unlikely to happen in the near future: "Look, if the powers that be ever—like, in a year or something—said, 'Hey, you know what? We feel like playing some shows,' I'm there to do it. But those aren't decisions for me to make, or even me to really speculate on. As far as my knowledge, the band is over, and the final show was November 30, 2019. And I'm full speed ahead with Exodus now." In October 2021, King expressed regret that Slayer had retired "too early." While congratulating Machine Head on their 30th anniversary as a band, he said, "Apparently, it's 30 years, which is quite an achievement. Not a lot of bands get there. We did, and then we quit too early. Fuck us. Fuck me. I hate fucking not playing." When interviewed two months later by Metal Hammer, King did not rule out the possibility of any more "Big Four" shows with Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax, but expressed doubt that a Slayer reunion would ever happen: "The way that I'm moving forward is I don't think Slayer are ever going to play again. There's no business of me playing by myself!" King's wife Ayesha had also ruled out the possibility of a Slayer reunion, insisting that her husband and Araya would "never be Slayer again". In a February 2024 interview with Rolling Stone, King clarified that a reunion of the band was unlikely: "Could Slayer play a show again? I'm sure there's a scenario. Am I looking for it? No, I'm just getting ready to start my career. So if that happens, it happens. But I'm going to be doing this [solo band] for the next 10 years at least." King revealed in the same interview that he has not spoken to Araya since the band's split. King also says that his relationship with Araya is positive, but his relationship with that of former drummer Dave Lombardo is estranged, stating that Lombardo "was listening to this woman that was his attorney at the time, and she thought we had Metallica money, which we've never had fucking Metallica money. So she's just blowing shit in his ear, and he thinks he should be getting more than he should be getting."
=== Reunion (2024–present) ===
A few weeks after King said he did not foresee a Slayer reunion, the band announced on February 21, 2024 that they would play their first show since disbanding at Riot Fest on September 22, and play their second show five days later at Louder Than Life. However, due to weather conditions caused by Hurricane Helene, Louder Than Life canceled their September 27 shows, which included Slayer in the lineup. The lineup of this reunion was the 2013–2019 lineup of bassist/vocalist Tom Araya, guitarists Kerry King and Gary Holt and drummer Paul Bostaph. They also headlined the first of four nights of the Aftershock Festival in Sacramento on October 10, 2024, and while announcing this show, the band said in a statement, "There's been a lot of excited fans out there about our playing a couple of festival dates, so it's great to be able to add this last one."
In an interview with Metal Hammer, King indicated that the planned shows were a one-off and that the reunion was "not going to translate into recording and it's not going to translate into touring", clarifying that "it's three shows marking five years since our final shows, a fun, 'Hey, remember us from before the pandemic?' celebration." In a May 2024 interview on Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk, King said that while he would not rule out more Slayer shows in the future, his solo career is his main priority now. When asked in an October 2024 interview with 107.7 The Bone if more reunion shows were in the works, Bostaph said, "We played our last one… If everybody's asking that question, I am too, but I don't have the answer to that question. So, yeah, Aftershock was the last one." That same month, it was announced that the band would be playing at the 2025 edition of Louder Than Life.
Slayer played its first shows in the UK in six years in July. In addition to two headlining shows there, the band appeared at Villa Park on July 5, 2025 as one of the supporting acts for Black Sabbath's final concert, dubbed "Back to the Beginning". Slayer also performed their first show in Canada in six years at the FEQ Music Festival in Quebec City on July 11, 2025. Two days after their appearance at the Louder Than Life festival, the band played a one-off headlining US show at the Hersheypark Stadium on September 20, with Knocked Loose, Suicidal Tendencies, Power Trip, Cavalera and Exodus as supporting acts.
When asked in July 2025 about the possibility of more shows under the Slayer name, Holt said: "I think it's a year-by-year thing, every year, and this is the second year we've done; it might be the last, you know? Fortunately, none of these shows have interfered with or conflicted with my Exodus schedule, so we'll see what happens. But it's been fun, playing with fire is always a blast. And last year, the shows we did, we were really good. We fucking rehearsed really hard, and we did not suck. And everybody had a great time. Everybody was happy. And so, you know, [we'll] see how it goes this year, and maybe next year, a couple other festivals." Holt also said that Slayer "is not like a permanent commitment on [his] end anymore", and added, "I'm able to focus on family number one, which is Exodus. [They're] my childhood friends. Slayer is my family as well, but they're family number two. And I've at my age, I want to close my career out with the guys I started it with."
Slayer will play only two shows in 2026, headlining the Rocklahoma festival in September and Sick New World Texas in Fort Worth the following month. Both shows will see the band celebrating the 40th anniversary of their third album Reign in Blood.
== Artistry ==
Slayer is generally considered a thrash metal band. In an article from December 1986 by the Washington Post, writer Joe Brown described Slayer as speed metal, a genre he defined as "an unholy hybrid of punk rock thrash and heavy metal that attracts an almost all-male teen-age following". Brown wrote: "Over a jackhammer beat, Slayer's stun guitars created scraping sheets of corrosive metal noise, with occasional solos that sounded like squealing brakes, over which the singer-bassist emitted a larynx-lacerating growl-yowl." In an article from September 1988 by the New York Times, writer Jon Pareles also described Slayer as speed metal, additionally writing that the band "brings the sensational imagery of tabloids and horror movies" and has lyrics that "revel in death, gore and allusions to Satanism and Nazism." Pareles also described other "Big Four" thrash metal bands Metallica and Megadeth as speed metal bands. Slayer's early works were praised for their "breakneck speed and instrumental prowess", combining the structure of hardcore punk tempos and speed metal. The band released fast, aggressive material that was characterized as having a "primitive" sound. AllMusic noted God Hates Us All as "abandoning the extravagances and accessibility of their late-'80s/early-'90s work and returning to perfect the raw approach", with some fans labeling it as nu metal.
King and Hanneman's dual guitar solos have been referred to as "wildly chaotic" and "twisted genius". Invisible Oranges observed, "It’s fun to watch these guys live and see their virtually identical soloing styles. Jeff Hanneman, with atonal runs going up and down the neck, finished with a whammy bar dump! Kerry King, with atonal runs going up and down the neck, finished with a whammy bar dump! These guys were made to be in a band together – because they would sound terrible in any other band." Original drummer Lombardo would use two kick drums instead of a double pedal on a single drum. Lombardo's speed and aggression earned him the title of the "godfather of double bass" by Drummerworld. Lombardo stated his reasons for using two bass drums: "When you hit the bass drum, the head is still resonating. When you hit it in the same place right after that, you kinda get a 'slapback' from the bass drum head hitting the other pedal. You're not letting them breathe." When playing the two kick drums, Lombardo would use the "heel-up" technique.
In the original lineup, King, Hanneman and Araya contributed to the band's lyrics, with King and Hanneman writing the music with additional arrangement from Lombardo and sometimes Araya. Araya formed a lyric writing partnership with Hanneman, which sometimes overshadowed the creative input of King. Hanneman stated that writing lyrics and music was a "free-for-all": "It's all just whoever comes up with what. Sometimes I'll be more on a roll and I'll have more stuff, same with Kerry – it's whoever's hot, really. Anybody can write anything; if it's good, we use it; if not, we don't."
When writing material, the band would write the music first before incorporating lyrics. King or Hanneman used a 24-track and drum machine to show band members the riff that they created and get their opinion. King, Hanneman or Lombardo would mention if any alterations could be made. The band would then add parts to get the basic song structure before figuring out where the lyrics and solos would be placed.
Slayer was influenced by hardcore punk bands such as Minor Threat, T.S.O.L., Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, the Exploited, the Germs, D.R.I., Suicidal Tendencies and GBH. They were also influenced by heavy metal and hard rock acts such as Black Sabbath, Motörhead, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Kiss, UFO, AC/DC, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Rush, Alice Cooper, Rainbow, Venom, Mercyful Fate, Scorpions, Saxon, Accept, Angel Witch and Raven. In addition, they were influenced by their contemporaries in the then-upcoming genre of thrash metal such as Metallica and Exodus, both of whom Slayer had discovered through tape trading before recording their debut album Show No Mercy.
== Legacy ==
Slayer is one of the most influential bands in heavy metal history. Steve Huey of AllMusic believes the musical style of Slayer makes the band stronger than the other members of the "Big Four" thrash metal bands Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax, all of which rose to fame during the 1980s. MTV stated that Slayer's "downtuned rhythms, infectious guitar licks, graphically violent lyrics and grisly artwork set the standard for dozens of emerging thrash bands" and their "music was directly responsible for the rise of death metal", ranking Slayer as the sixth greatest metal band of all time. VH1 ranked them 50th on their 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock list. Hanneman and King ranked number 10 in Guitar World's "100 greatest metal guitarists of all time" in 2004, and were voted "Best Guitarist/Guitar Team" in Revolver's reader's poll. Lombardo was also voted "Best Drummer", and the band entered the top five in the categories "Best Band Ever", "Best Live Band", "Album of the Year" (for Christ Illusion) and "Band of the Year".
Music author Joel McIver considers Slayer very influential in the extreme metal scene, especially in the development of the death metal and black metal subgenres. According to John Consterdine of Terrorizer, without "Slayer's influence, extreme metal as we know it wouldn't exist." Kam Lee of Massacre and formerly Death stated: "there wouldn't be death metal or black metal or even extreme metal (the likes of what it is today) if not for Slayer." Johan Reinholdz of Andromeda said that Slayer "were crucial in the development of thrash metal which then became the foundation for a lot of different subgenres. They inspired generations of metal bands." Alex Skolnick of Testament declared: "Before Slayer, metal had never had such razor-sharp articulation, tightness, and balance between sound and stops. This all-out sonic assault was about the shock, the screams, the drums, and [...] most importantly the riffs." Steve Asheim, drummer for Deicide, declared that "there obviously would not have been a Deicide as we know it without the existence of Slayer." Sepultura guitarist Andreas Kisser affirmed that "without Slayer, Sepultura would never be possible."
In particular, the band's 1986 release Reign in Blood has been an influence to extreme and thrash metal bands since its release and is considered the record which set the bar for death metal. It had a significant influence on genre leaders such as Death, Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel and Napalm Death. The album was hailed the "heaviest album of all time" by Kerrang!, a "genre-definer" by Stylus, and a "stone-cold classic upon its release" by AllMusic. In 2006, Reign in Blood was named the best metal album of the last 20 years by Metal Hammer. According to Nielsen SoundScan, Slayer sold 4,900,000 copies in the United States from 1991 to 2013. In 2016, the staff of Loudwire named them the fifth best metal band of all time.
Other groups who cited Slayer among their major influences include Pantera, Testament, Kreator, Body Count, Children of Bodom, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet for My Valentine, Trivium, As I Lay Dying, All That Remains, System of a Down, Killswitch Engage, Slipknot, Machine Head, DevilDriver, Lamb of God, Gojira, Behemoth, Evile Lacuna Coil, Dope, and Taproot. Dave Grohl recalled "Me and my friends, we just wanted to listen to fucking Slayer and take acid and smash stuff."
== Controversies ==
A lawsuit was brought against the band in 1995 by the parents of Elyse Pahler, who accused the band of encouraging their daughter's murderers through their lyrics. Pahler was drugged, strangled, stabbed, trampled on, and raped as a sacrifice to the devil by three fans of the band. The case was unsealed by the court on May 19, 2000, stating Slayer and related business markets distribute harmful products to teens, encouraging violent acts through their lyrics, and "none of the vicious crimes committed against Elyse Marie Pahler would have occurred without the intentional marketing strategy of the death-metal band Slayer". The lawsuit was dismissed in 2001, for multiple reasons including "principles of free speech, lack of a duty and lack of foreseeability". A second lawsuit was filed by the parents, an amended complaint for damages against Slayer, their label, and other industry and label entities. The lawsuit was again dismissed. Judge E. Jeffrey Burke stated, "I do not consider Slayer's music obscene, indecent or harmful to minors."
Slayer has been accused of holding Nazi sympathies due to the band's eagle logo bearing resemblance to the Eagle atop swastika and the lyrics of "Angel of Death". "Angel of Death" was inspired by the acts of Josef Mengele, the doctor who conducted human experiments on prisoners during World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp and was dubbed the "Angel of Death" by inmates. Araya credits Rubin with coming up with the eagle logo from Hanneman's book on Nazi war medals, with the band using it since Seasons in the Abyss. The band has dismissed these accusations as misinterpretations of their intentions.
Slayer's cover of Minor Threat's "Guilty of Being White" raised questions about a possible message of white supremacy in the band's music. The controversy surrounding the cover involved the changing of the refrain "guilty of being white" to "guilty of being right", at the song's ending. This incensed Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye, who stated "that is so offensive to me". King said it was changed for "tongue-in-cheek" humor as he thought the allegation of racism at the time was "ridiculous".
In a 2004 interview, when asked, "Did critics realize you were wallowing in parody?", Araya replied "No. People thought we were serious!...back then you had that PMRC, who literally took everything to heart, when in actuality you're trying to create an image. You're trying to scare people on purpose." Araya also denied rumors that the band's members are Satanists, stating that they find the subject of Satanism interesting and that "we are all on this planet to learn and experience".
The song "Jihad" from Christ Illusion sparked controversy among families of the September 11 attack victims, as it deals with the attack from the perspective of one of the religious terrorists. King stated "In America every band under the sun has written their 9/11 song. And that's why I didn't want to have any part of it, but this is really cool. It kind of has an 'Angel Of Death' feel because it doesn't condemn anyone or say that anyone's right or wrong." Seventeen bus benches promoting the album in Fullerton, California were deemed offensive by city officials, who contacted the band's record label and had the ads removed.
In India, Christ Illusion was recalled by EMI India after protests from Christian religious groups due to the graphic nature of the artwork. The album cover was designed by Slayer's longtime collaborator Larry Carroll and features Christ in a "sea of despair", with amputated arms, missing an eye, while standing in a sea of blood with severed heads. Joseph Dias of the Mumbai Christian group Catholic Secular Forum took "strong exception" to the original album artwork as well as the lyrics of "Skeleton Christ" and "Jihad", issuing a memorandum to Mumbai's police commissioner in protest. On October 11, 2006, EMI announced that all stocks had been destroyed, noting it had no plans to re-release the record in India in the future.
== Band members ==
=== Timeline ===
== Discography ==
Studio albums
== Awards and nominations ==
== Footnotes ==
== Citations == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Buchberger | Kelly Buchberger | Kelly Michael Buchberger (born December 2, 1966) is a Canadian professional ice hockey coach and former player. He played for several National Hockey League teams from 1986 to 2004. As a coach, he has been an assistant for the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League (NHL) and a head coach of the Tri City Americans of the Western Hockey League (WHL).
== Playing career ==
Buchberger has played for the Edmonton Oilers, Atlanta Thrashers, Los Angeles Kings, Phoenix Coyotes, and the Pittsburgh Penguins. He also played minor hockey with the Western Hockey League Moose Jaw Warriors and pro hockey with the American Hockey League Nova Scotia Oilers.
He was drafted in the ninth round by the Edmonton Oilers in the 1985 NHL Entry Draft, making him the 188th overall pick. He made his NHL debut in 1987 Stanley Cup finals. During his playing career, he was known best for his gritty play and leadership, having captained the Oilers for four years as the team's 9th leader in franchise history. He won the Stanley Cup twice with Edmonton, in 1987 and 1990.
Buchberger was the last remaining active member of the Oilers' roster to have been on one of their five Stanley Cup-winning teams, along with Marty McSorley. He remained with the Oilers until 1999, when he was selected by the Atlanta Thrashers in the 1999 NHL Expansion Draft.
== Coaching career ==
After retiring, Buchberger was an assistant coach with the AHL Edmonton Road Runners team in 2004–05. He then joined the Oilers management as a development coach. On August 3, 2007, he was named head coach of the Oilers' American Hockey League affiliate, the Springfield Falcons, and guided the team to a 35–35–10 record, the team's first .500 season since 1998–99. Buchberger then was promoted to the Edmonton Oilers during the 2008 offseason, becoming an assistant coach with them. On June 10, 2014, he was reassigned to the role of player personnel and replaced as assistant coach by Craig Ramsay.
On July 11, 2017, Buchberger was hired as the assistant coach by the New York Islanders. In 2018, he was named the head coach of the Tri-City Americans in the Western Hockey League. In 2021, his contract with the Americans was not renewed.
Buchberger was hired as the first general manager and head coach of the Devon Xtreme, a junior ice hockey expansion franchise to debut in the Alberta Junior Hockey League in the 2024–25 season.
== Career statistics ==
=== Regular season and playoffs ===
=== International ===
== Coaching record ==
== Awards and honours == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe | Jim Thorpe | James Francis Thorpe (Meskwaki: Wa-Tho-Huk; May 22 or 28, 1887 – March 28, 1953) was an American athlete who won Olympic gold medals and played professional football, baseball, and basketball. A citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation, he was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics. Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, Thorpe won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics (one in classic pentathlon and the other in decathlon).
Thorpe lost his Olympic titles after it was found he had been paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus violating the contemporary amateurism rules. In 1983, 30 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) restored Thorpe's Olympic medals with replicas, after ruling that the decision to strip him of his medals fell outside of the required 30 days. Official IOC records still listed Thorpe as co-champion in decathlon and pentathlon until 2022, when it was decided to restore him as the sole champion in both events.
Thorpe grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation in Indian Territory (what is now the U.S. state of Oklahoma). As a youth, he attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was a three-time All-American for the school's football team under coach Pop Warner. After his Olympic success in 1912, which included a record score in the decathlon, Thorpe added a victory in the All-Around Championship of the Amateur Athletic Union. In 1913, Thorpe signed with the New York Giants, and played six seasons in Major League Baseball between 1913 and 1919. Thorpe joined the Canton Bulldogs American football team in 1915, helping them win three professional championships. He later played for six teams in the National Football League (NFL). Thorpe played as part of several all-American Indian teams throughout his career, and barnstormed as a professional basketball player with a team composed entirely of American Indians.
From 1920 to 1921, Thorpe was nominally the first president of the American Professional Football Association, which became the NFL in 1922. He played professional sports until age 41, the end of his sports career coinciding with the start of the Great Depression. Thorpe struggled to earn a living after that, working several odd jobs. He suffered from alcoholism and lived his last years in failing health and poverty. Thorpe was married three times and had eight children – including Grace Thorpe, an environmentalist and Native rights activist – before suffering from heart failure and dying in 1953.
Thorpe has received numerous accolades for his athletic accomplishments. The Associated Press ranked him as the "greatest athlete" from the first 50 years of the 20th century, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted Thorpe as part of its inaugural class in 1963. The town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, was named in his honor. It has a monument site that contains his remains, which were the subject of legal action. Thorpe appeared in several films and was portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the 1951 film Jim Thorpe – All-American.
== Early life ==
Information about Thorpe's birth, name, and ethnic background varies widely. He was baptized "Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe" in the Catholic Church. Thorpe was born in Indian Territory of the United States (later Oklahoma), but no birth certificate has been found. The Jim Thorpe Museum lists his birth date as May 28, 1887, but others have listed it as May 22, 1887, near the town of Prague. Thorpe said in a note to The Shawnee News-Star in 1943 that he was born May 28, 1888, "near and south of Bellemont – Pottawatomie County – along the banks of the North Fork River ... hope this will clear up the inquiries as to my birthplace." May 22, 1887, is listed on his baptismal certificate. Thorpe referred to Shawnee as his birthplace in his 1943 note to the newspaper.
Thorpe's father, Hiram Thorpe (Sac and Fox), had an Irish father and a Sac and Fox mother. His mother, Charlotte Vieux, was the daughter of Citizen Potawatomi Nation members Elizabeth and Jacob Vieux, and was a descendant of Chief Louis Vieux.
Thorpe was raised in the Sauk, or Thâkîwaki, culture, and his Sauk name was Wa-Tho-Huk, which translates as "Bright path the lightning makes as it goes across the sky", often shortened to "Bright Path". Thorpe's parents were both Roman Catholic, a faith which Thorpe observed throughout his adult life.
Thorpe attended the Sac and Fox Indian Agency School in Stroud, with his twin brother, Charlie. Charlie helped him through school until he died of pneumonia when they were nine years old. Thorpe ran away from school several times. His father sent him to the Haskell Institute, an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, so that Thorpe would not run away again.
When Thorpe's mother died of childbirth complications two years later, he became depressed. After several arguments with his father, Thorpe left home to work on a horse ranch.
In 1904, the 16-year-old Thorpe returned to his father and decided to attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There his athletic ability was recognized and he was coached by Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, one of the most influential coaches of early American football history. Later that year he was orphaned when his father Hiram Thorpe died from gangrene poisoning, after being wounded in a hunting accident. The young Thorpe again dropped out of school. He resumed farm work for a few years before returning to Carlisle School.
== Amateur career ==
=== College career ===
Thorpe began his athletic career at Carlisle in 1907 when he walked past the track and, still in street clothes, beat all the school's high jumpers with an impromptu 5-ft 9-in jump that broke the school record.
He also competed in football, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, boxing, handball, and ballroom dancing, winning the 1912 intercollegiate ballroom dancing championship.
Thorpe made his college football debut for Carlisle on September 22, 1907, against Lebanon Valley, coming off the bench to score two touchdowns in a 40–0 victory. In his second collegiate game, on September 28, 1907, Thorpe again entered as a substitute during Carlisle’s win over Villanova. He made his first career start the next game on October 2, 1907 versus Susquehanna, where he scored four touchdowns.
Pop Warner was hesitant to allow Thorpe, his best track and field athlete, to compete in such a physical game as football. Thorpe, however, convinced Warner to let him try some rushing plays in practice against the school team's defense; Warner assumed he would be tackled easily and give up the idea. Thorpe "ran around past and through them not once, but twice". He walked over to Warner and said, "Nobody is going to tackle Jim", while flipping him the ball.
Thorpe first gained nationwide notice in 1911 for his athletic ability. As a running back, defensive back, placekicker and punter, Thorpe scored all of his team's four field goals in an 18–15 upset of Harvard, a top-ranked team in the early days of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). He also rushed for 173 yards in the game, and afterwards Harvard did not lose again until 1915. Carlisle would go on to finish the 1911 season with an 11–1 record and were retroactively named national collegiate champions in a book titled "Champions of College Football", written by Bill Libby in 1975. In 1912, Thorpe led the nation with 29 touchdowns and 224 points scored during the season, according to the College Football Hall of Fame. Steve Boda, a researcher for the NCAA, credits Thorpe with 27 touchdowns and 224 points. Thorpe rushed 191 times for 1,869 yards, according to Boda; the figures do not include statistics from two of Carlisle's 14 games in 1912 because full records are not available.
Carlisle's 1912 record included a 27–6 victory over the West Point Army team. In that game, Thorpe's 92-yard touchdown was nullified by a teammate's penalty, but on the next play Thorpe rushed for a 97-yard touchdown. Future President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played against him in that game, recalled of Thorpe in a 1961 speech:
Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.
Thorpe was a third-team All-American in 1908 and a first-team All-American in 1911 and 1912. Football was – and remained – Thorpe's favorite sport. He did not compete in track and field in 1910 or 1911, although this turned out to be the sport in which he gained his greatest fame.
In the spring of 1912, he started training for the Olympics. He had confined his efforts to jumps, hurdles and shot-puts, but now added pole vaulting, javelin, discus, hammer and 56 lb weight. In the Olympic trials held at Celtic Park in New York, his all-round ability stood out in all these events and so he earned a place on the team that went to Sweden.
The poet Marianne Moore, who taught Thorpe at Carlisle, recalled: He had a kind of ease in his gait that is hard to describe. Equilibrium with no stricture, but couched in the lineup of football he was the epitome of concentration, wary, with an effect of plenty in reserve.
=== Olympic career ===
For the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, two new multi-event disciplines were included, the pentathlon and the decathlon. A pentathlon, based on the ancient Greek event, had been introduced at the 1906 Intercalated Games. The 1912 version consisted of the long jump, javelin throw, 200-meter dash, discus throw, and 1500-meter run.
The decathlon was a relatively new event in modern athletics, although a similar competition known as the all-around championship had been part of American track meets since the 1880s. A men's version had been featured on the program of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. The events of the new decathlon differed slightly from the American version.
Thorpe was so versatile that he served as Carlisle's one-man team in several track meets. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he could run the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds flat; the 220 in 21.8 seconds; the 440 in 51.8 seconds; the 880 in 1:57, the mile in 4:35; the 120-yard high hurdles in 15 seconds; and the 220-yard low hurdles in 24 seconds. He could long jump 23 ft 6 in and high-jump 6 ft 5 in. He could pole vault 11 feet; put the shot 47 ft 9 in; throw the javelin 163 feet; and throw the discus 136 feet.
Thorpe entered the U.S. Olympic trials for both the pentathlon and the decathlon. He easily earned a place on the pentathlon team, winning three events. The decathlon trial was subsequently cancelled, and Thorpe was chosen to represent the U.S. in the event. The pentathlon and decathlon teams also included Avery Brundage, a future International Olympic Committee president.
Thorpe was extremely busy in the Olympics. Along with the decathlon and pentathlon, he competed in the long jump and high jump. The first competition was the pentathlon on July 7. He won four of the five events and placed third in the javelin, an event he had not competed in before 1912. Although the pentathlon was primarily decided on place points, points were also earned for the marks achieved in the individual events. Thorpe won the gold medal. That same day, he qualified for the high jump final, in which he finished in a tie for fourth. On July 12, Thorpe placed seventh in the long jump.
Thorpe's final event was the decathlon, his first (and as it turned out, his only) decathlon. Strong competition from local favorite Hugo Wieslander was expected. Thorpe, however, defeated Wieslander by 688 points. He placed in the top four in all ten events, and his Olympic record of 8,413 points stood for nearly two decades. Even more remarkably, because someone had stolen his shoes just before he was due to compete, he found a mismatched pair of replacements, including one from a trash can, and won the gold medal wearing them. Overall, Thorpe won eight of the 15 individual events comprising the pentathlon and decathlon.
As was the custom of the day, the medals were presented to the athletes during the closing ceremonies of the games. Along with the two gold medals, Thorpe also received two challenge prizes, which had been donated by King Gustav V of Sweden for the decathlon and Czar Nicholas II of Russia for the pentathlon. Several sources recount that, when awarding Thorpe his prize, King Gustav said, "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world", to which Thorpe replied, "Thanks, King". While the compliment from King Gustav is confirmed in the September 1912 publication of The Red Man, Thorpe biographer Kate Buford suggests that Thorpe's remark was embellished, as she believes that such a response "would have been out of character for a man who was highly uncomfortable in public ceremonies and hated to stand out." The quoted reply did not appear in newspapers until 1948—36 years after his appearance in the Olympics— and surfaced in books by 1952.
Thorpe's successes were followed in the United States. On the Olympic team's return, Thorpe was the star attraction in a ticker-tape parade on Broadway. He remembered later, "I heard people yelling my name, and I couldn't realize how one fellow could have so many friends."
Apart from his track and field appearances, Thorpe also played in one of two exhibition baseball games at the 1912 Olympics, which featured two teams composed mostly of U.S. track and field athletes. Thorpe had previous experience in the sport, as the public soon learned.
=== All-Around champion ===
After his victories at the Olympic Games in Sweden, on September 2, 1912, Thorpe returned to Celtic Park, the home of the Irish American Athletic Club, in Queens, New York (where he had qualified four months earlier for the Olympic Games), to compete in the Amateur Athletic Union's All-Around Championship. Competing against Bruno Brodd of the Irish American Athletic Club and John L. Bredemus of Princeton University, he won seven of the ten events contested and came in second in the remaining three. With a total point score of 7,476 points, Thorpe broke the previous record of 7,385 points set in 1909 (also at Celtic Park), by Martin Sheridan, the champion athlete of the Irish American Athletic Club. Sheridan, a five-time Olympic gold medalist, was present to watch his record broken. He approached Thorpe after the event and shook his hand saying, "Jim, my boy, you're a great man. I never expect to look upon a finer athlete." He told a reporter from New York World, "Thorpe is the greatest athlete that ever lived. He has me beaten fifty ways. Even when I was in my prime, I could not do what he did today."
=== Olympic medal controversy ===
In 1912, strict rules regarding amateurism were in effect for athletes participating in the Olympics. Athletes who received money prizes for competitions, were sports teachers, or had competed previously against professionals, were not considered amateurs. They were barred from competition.
In late January 1913, the Worcester Telegram reported that Thorpe had played semi-professional baseball before the Olympics, and other U.S. newspapers followed up the story. Thorpe had played semi-professional baseball in the Eastern Carolina League for Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1909 and 1910, receiving meager pay; reportedly as little as US$2 ($69 in 2025) per game and as much as US$35 ($1,209 in 2025) per week. College players, in fact, regularly spent summers playing professionally in order to earn some money, but most used aliases, unlike Thorpe. Although the public did not seem to care much about Thorpe's past, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and especially its secretary James Edward Sullivan, took the case very seriously.
Thorpe wrote a letter to Sullivan, in which he admitted playing professional baseball:
I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong, because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they did not use their own names ...
His letter did not help. The AAU decided to withdraw Thorpe's amateur status retroactively. Later that year, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) unanimously decided to strip Thorpe of his Olympic titles, medals and awards, and declare him a professional. The IOC subsequently awarded the gold medal to silver medalist Hugo Wieslander, who refused to accept it, as he felt that Thorpe was the legitimate owner.
Although Thorpe had played for money, the AAU and IOC did not follow their own rules for disqualification. The rulebook for the 1912 Olympics stated that protests had to be made "within 30 days from the closing ceremonies of the games." The first newspaper reports did not appear until January 1913, about six months after the Stockholm Games had concluded. There is also some evidence that Thorpe was known to have played semi-professional baseball before the Olympics, but the AAU had ignored the issue until being confronted with it in 1913. The only positive aspect of this affair for Thorpe was that, as soon as the news was reported that he had been declared a professional, he received offers from professional sports clubs.
== Professional career ==
=== Baseball ===
In 1910, Thorpe had the unusual status of a sought-after free agent at the major league level during the era of the reserve clause, because the minor league team that last held his contract had disbanded that year, so he was free to choose which baseball team to play for. In January 1913, he turned down a starting position with the St. Louis Browns, then at the bottom of the American League. Thorpe signed with the New York Giants baseball club in 1913, the defending 1912 National League champion. With Thorpe playing in 19 of their 151 games, they repeated as the 1913 National League champions. Immediately following the Giants' October loss in the 1913 World Series, Thorpe and the Giants joined the Chicago White Sox for a world tour. Barnstorming across the United States and around the world, Thorpe was the celebrity of the tour.
Thorpe's presence increased the publicity, attendance and gate receipts for the tour. He met with Pope Pius X and Abbas II Hilmi Bey (the last Khedive of Egypt), and played before 20,000 people in London including King George V. Thorpe was the last man to compete in both the Olympics (in a non-baseball sport) and Major League Baseball before Eddy Alvarez did the same in 2020.
Thorpe played sporadically with the Giants as an outfielder for three seasons. After playing in the minor leagues with the Milwaukee Brewers in 1916, he returned to the Giants in 1917. He was sold to the Cincinnati Reds early in the season. In the "double no-hitter" between Fred Toney of the Reds and Hippo Vaughn of the Chicago Cubs, Thorpe drove in the winning run in the 10th inning. Late in the season, he was sold back to the Giants. Again, he played sporadically for them in 1918 before being traded to the Boston Braves on May 21, 1919, for Pat Ragan. In his career, he amassed 91 runs scored, 82 runs batted in and a .252 batting average over 289 games. He continued to play minor league baseball until 1922, and once played for the minor league Toledo Mud Hens.
=== Football ===
Thorpe had not abandoned football either. He first played professional football in 1913 as a member of the Indiana-based Pine Village Pros, a team that had a several-season winning streak against local teams during the 1910s. He signed with the Canton Bulldogs in 1915. They paid him $250 (equivalent to $8,000 in 2025) a game, a tremendous wage at the time. Before signing him Canton was averaging 1,200 fans a game, but 8,000 showed up for Thorpe's debut against the Massillon Tigers. The team won titles in 1916, 1917, and 1919. Thorpe reportedly ended the 1919 championship game by kicking a wind-assisted 95-yard punt from his team's own 5-yard line, effectively putting the game out of reach.
In 1920, the Bulldogs were one of 14 teams to form the American Professional Football Association, which became the National Football League (NFL) two years later. Thorpe was nominally their first president, but spent most of the year playing for Canton; a year later, he was replaced as president by Joseph Carr. He continued to play for Canton, coaching the team as well. Between 1921 and 1923, he helped organize and played for the Oorang Indians (La Rue, Ohio), an all-Native American team. Although the team's record was 3–6 in 1922, and 1–10 in 1923, Thorpe played well and was selected for the Green Bay Press-Gazette's first All-NFL team in 1923. This was later formally recognized in 1931 by the NFL as the league's official All-NFL team.
Thorpe never played for an NFL championship team. He retired from professional football at age 41, having played 52 games for six teams from 1920 to 1928.
=== Basketball ===
Most of Thorpe's biographers were unaware of his basketball career until a ticket that documented his time in professional basketball was discovered in an old book in 2005. By 1926, he was the main feature of the World Famous Indians of La Rue, Ohio, a traveling basketball team. The team barnstormed for at least two years (1927–28) in multiple states. Although stories about Thorpe's team were published in some local newspapers at the time, his basketball career is not well-documented.
For a brief time in 1913, he was considering going into professional hockey for the Tecumseh Hockey Club in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
== Honors and achievements ==
"You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world." — King Gustav V of Sweden
National
Presidential Medal of Freedom (2024)
=== Halls of fame ===
Helms Athletic Foundation Pro Football Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 1950
Oklahoma Hall of Fame – Class of 1950
College Football Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 1951
Pro Football Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 1963
Statue of Jim Thorpe in the lobby of the Pro Football Hall of Fame
Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 1963
American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 1972
National Track and Field Hall of Fame – Class of 1975
U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 1983
Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 1986
Statue of Jim Thorpe
American Football Kicking Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 2008
National Native American Hall of Fame – Inaugural Class of 2018
Middle Atlantic AAU Hall of Fame – Class of 2023
=== Track and field ===
U.S. Olympic Trials Pentathlon Champion (May 18, 1912)
1st place – Running broad jump
1st place – 200 metres
1st place – Discus throw
2nd place – 1500 metres
2nd place – Javelin throw
2× Olympic Challenge Prize Winner (1912)
The Swedish King's Challenge Prize Trophy
The Emperor of Russia's Challenge Prize Trophy
2× Olympic gold medalist (1912)
1912 Olympic Pentathlon gold medal
1st place – Long jump
1st place – 200 metres
1st place – Discus throw
1st place – 1500 metres
3rd place – Javelin throw
1912 Olympic Decathlon gold medal
1st place – Shot put
1st place – High jump
1st place – 110 metres hurdles
1st place – 1500 metres
3rd place – Long jump
3rd place – Discus throw
Tied-3rd place – 100 metres
Tied-3rd place – Pole vault
4th place – Javelin throw
4th place – 400 metres
4th place in the 1912 Olympic Men's High Jump
7th place in the 1912 Olympic Men's Long Jump
Amateur Athletic Union All-Around Championships gold medal (September 2, 1912)
Record-breaking 7,476 points
The Thorpe Cup, an annual international decathlon and heptathlon meeting between the United States and Germany, is named in his honor (1993)
=== Football ===
3× Ohio League champion (1916, 1917, 1919)
First-team All-Pro (1923)
NFL 1920s All-Decade Team
NFL 50th Anniversary All-Time Team
First Commissioner of the NFL (1920–1921)
As a coach
3× Ohio League champion (1916, 1917, 1919)
=== College ===
College Football
National Champion (BL) (1911)
Heisman Trophy (NFF) (1911)
Third-team All-American (1908)
WC third-team All-American (1908)
PI All-American team (1908)
2× Consensus All-American (1911, 1912)
2× WC first-team All-American (1911, 1912)
WSF second-team All-American (1911)
CC first-team All-American (1911)
HL All-American team (1911)
BM All-American team (1911)
CSM All-American team (1911)
SPS All-American team (1911)
COMP first-team All-American (1912)
NYS first-team All-American (1912)
PI first-team All-American (1912)
CSM first-team All-American (1912)
BS All-American team (1912)
RE first-team All-American (1912)
WJM first-team All-American (1912)
ASH first-team All-American
TC first-team All-American (1912)
PHD first-team All-American (1912)
PW first-team All-American (1912)
TET first-team All-American (1912)
HF first-team All-American (1912)
PP first-team All-American (1912)
MDJ first-team All-American (1912)
NCAA "unofficial" interceptions leader (1912)
NCAA "unofficial" scoring leader (1912)
NCAA "unofficial" touchdowns leader (1912)
3× NCAA "unofficial" rushing yards leader (1908, 1911, 1912)
3× NCAA "unofficial" total offense leader (1908, 1911, 1912)
Carlisle Indians All-Time Team
FWAA Early Era All-America Team
Walter Camp All-Time All-American
Walter Camp All-Century Team
The Jim Thorpe Award, named in his memory, has been awarded to the top defensive back in college football since 1986
Track and Field
Penn Relays (1908)
Tied-1st place – High jump
Carlisle vs Syracuse Dual Meet (1908)
1st place – High hurdles
1st place – Low hurdles
1st place – Shot put
1st place – High jump
1st place – Broad jump
2nd place – Hammer throw
Pennsylvania Intercollegiate Championships in Harrisburg, PA (1908)
1st place – High hurdles
1st place – Low hurdles
1st place – High jump
1st place – Broad jump
1st place – Hammer throw
Middle Atlantic Athletic Association Championships in Philadelphia (1908)
1st place – High hurdles
1st place – Low hurdles
1st place – High jump
1st place – Broad jump
1st place – Hammer throw
Carlisle vs Lafayette Dual Meet (1909)
1st place – High hurdles
1st place – Low hurdles
1st place – High jump
1st place – Long jump
1st place – Shot put
1st place – Discus throw
3rd place – 100-yard dash
Middle Atlantic Indoor Championship Games at the Second Regiment Armory (1912)
1st place – 75-yard dash
1st place – 60 yard high hurdles
1st place – High jump
1st place – Shot put
2nd place – Standing triple jump
Ballroom Dancing
Inter-Collegiate Ballroom Dancing Champion (1912)
=== Media ===
Associated Press's Athlete of the Half-Century (1950)
Associated Press's Greatest Football Player of the Half-Century (1950)
Ranked #2 after Jesse Owens on the Associated Press's Greatest Track and Field Athletes of the Half-Century (1950)
Shortly after his death in 1953, Time magazine named him The Greatest Athlete
Greatest American Football Player in History in a poll conducted by Sport magazine (1977)
Ranked #3 on the Associated Press's Top 100 Athletes of the 20th Century (1999)
Ranked #7 on ESPN SportsCentury: Top 50 North American Athletes of the 20th Century (1999)
Named America's Athlete of the Century by a resolutions of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate (1999)
ABC's Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Century (2000)
In 2008, Sports Illustrated retroactively named Thorpe the Heisman Trophy winner for the 1911 and 1912 seasons
Ranked #2 on Bleacher Report's Top 10 Greatest Athletes of All Time (2018)
Ranked #5 on ESPN's Top 150 College Football Players of All Time (2020)
Ranked #7 on GiveMeSport's list of Top 50 Greatest Athletes of All Time (2024)
== Marriage and family ==
Thorpe married three times and had a total of eight children. In 1913, Thorpe married Iva M. Miller, whom he had met at Carlisle. In 1917, Iva and Thorpe bought a house now known as the Jim Thorpe House in Yale, Oklahoma, and lived there until 1923. They had four children: James Jr., Gale, Charlotte, and Grace Frances, an environmentalist and Native rights activist. Their son James Thorpe Jr. died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 at the age of three. Miller filed for divorce from Thorpe in 1925, claiming desertion.
In 1926, Thorpe married Freeda Verona Kirkpatrick (September 19, 1905 – March 2, 2007). She was working for the manager of the baseball team for which he was playing at the time. They had four sons: Phillip, William, Richard, and John Thorpe. Kirkpatrick divorced Thorpe in 1941, after they had been married for 15 years.
Lastly, Thorpe married Patricia Gladys Askew on June 2, 1945. She was with him when he died.
== Later life, film career, and death ==
After his athletic career, Thorpe struggled to provide for his family. He found it difficult to work a non-sports-related job and never held a job for an extended period of time. During the Great Depression in particular, he had various jobs, among others as a movie actor, mostly as an extra, usually playing an American Indian in Westerns, starting with the 1931 serial Battling with Buffalo Bill. In the 1932 comedy Always Kickin', Thorpe was prominently cast in a speaking part as himself, a kicking coach teaching young football players to drop-kick. He played the captain of the guard in 1935's She, an umpire in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American, and a member of the Navajo Nation in the 1950 film Wagon Master. An American Indian Magazine article states Thorpe appeared in over 70 films.
In 1931, during the Great Depression, Thorpe sold the film rights to his life story to MGM for $1,500 (equivalent to $32,000 in 2025). Warner Bros. eventually acquired the rights and memorialized Thorpe in Jim Thorpe – All-American (1951), starring Burt Lancaster. The film was directed by Michael Curtiz. Although there were rumors that Thorpe received no money, he was paid $15,000 by Warner Bros. plus a $2,500 donation toward an annuity for him by the studio's head of publicity. The movie included archival footage of the 1912 and 1932 Olympics. Thorpe was seen in one scene as a coaching assistant. It was also distributed in the United Kingdom, where it was called Man of Bronze.
Apart from his career in films, he worked as a construction worker, a doorman/bouncer, a security guard, and a ditchdigger. He briefly joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1945, during World War II. Thorpe was a chronic alcoholic during his later life. He ran out of money sometime in the early 1950s. When hospitalized for lip cancer in 1950, Thorpe was admitted as a charity case. At a press conference announcing the procedure, his wife, Patricia, wept and pleaded for help, saying, "We're broke ... Jim has nothing but his name and his memories. He has spent money on his own people and has given it away. He has often been exploited."
In early 1953, Thorpe went into cardiac arrest dining with Patricia in their home in Lomita, California. He was briefly revived by artificial respiration and spoke to those around him, but lost consciousness shortly afterward. He died on March 28 at the age of 65.
== Victim of racism ==
Thorpe, whose parents were both mixed-race, was raised as a Native American. He accomplished his athletic feats despite the severe racial inequality of the United States. It has often been suggested that his Olympic medals were stripped by the athletic officials because of his ethnicity. While it is difficult to prove this, the public comment at the time largely reflected this view. At the time Thorpe won his gold medals, not all Native Americans were recognized as U.S. citizens (the U.S. government had frequently demanded that they make concessions to adopt European-American ways to receive such recognition). Citizenship was not granted to all American Indians until 1924.
When Thorpe attended Carlisle, the students' ethnicity was used for marketing purposes. The football team was called the Indians. To create headlines, the school and journalists often portrayed sporting competitions as conflicts of Indians against whites. The first notice of Thorpe in The New York Times was headlined "Indian Thorpe in Olympiad; Redskin from Carlisle Will Strive for Place on American Team." Throughout his life, Thorpe's accomplishments were described in a similar racial context by other newspapers and sportswriters, which reflected the era.
== Legacy ==
=== Olympic awards reinstated ===
Over the years, supporters of Thorpe attempted to have his Olympic titles reinstated. American Olympic officials, including former teammate and later president of the IOC Avery Brundage, rebuffed several attempts. Brundage once said, "Ignorance is no excuse." Most persistent were the author Robert Wheeler and his wife, Florence Ridlon. They succeeded in having the AAU and United States Olympic Committee overturn its decision and restore Thorpe's amateur status before 1913.
In 1982, Wheeler and Ridlon established the Jim Thorpe Foundation and gained support from the U.S. Congress. Armed with this support and evidence from 1912 proving that Thorpe's disqualification had occurred after the 30-day time period allowed by Olympics rules, they succeeded in making the case to the IOC. In October 1982, the IOC Executive Committee approved Thorpe's reinstatement. In an unusual ruling, they declared that Thorpe was co-champion with Ferdinand Bie and Hugo Wieslander, although both of these athletes had always said they considered Thorpe to be the only champion. In a ceremony on January 18, 1983, the IOC presented two of Thorpe's children, Gale and Bill, with commemorative medals. Thorpe's original medals had been held in museums, but they were stolen and have never been recovered. The IOC listed Thorpe as a co-gold medalist.
In July 2020, a petition from Bright Path Strong began circulating that called upon the IOC to reinstate Thorpe as the sole winner in his events in the 1912 Olympics. It was backed by Pictureworks Entertainment, which is making a film about Thorpe. The petition was supported by Olympian Billy Mills, who won a gold medal in the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Games. The IOC voted to reinstate Thorpe as the sole winner of both events on July 14, 2022, after the National Olympic Committees of Norway and Sweden, representing Bie and Wieslander, had given their approval.
=== Honors ===
Thorpe's tribe, the Sac and Fox Nation, added Olympic rings to their official flag to honor him.
Thorpe's monument, featuring the quote from Gustav V ("You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world."), still stands near the town named for him, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. The grave rests on mounds of soil from Thorpe's native Oklahoma and from the stadium in which he won his Olympic medals.
Thorpe's achievements received great acclaim from sports journalists, both during his lifetime and since his death. In 1950, an Associated Press poll of almost 400 sportswriters and broadcasters voted Thorpe the "greatest athlete" of the first half of the 20th century. That same year, the Associated Press ranked Thorpe as the "greatest American football player" of the first half of the century. Pro Football Hall of Fame voters selected him for the NFL 50th Anniversary All-Time Team in 1967. In 1999, the Associated Press placed him third on its list of the top athletes of the century, following Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan. ESPN ranked Thorpe seventh on their list of best North American athletes of the century.
Thorpe was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963, one of seventeen players in the charter class. Thorpe is memorialized in the Pro Football Hall of Fame rotunda with a larger-than-life statue. He was also inducted into halls of fame for college football, American Olympic teams, and the national track and field competition.
In 2018, Thorpe became one of the inductees in the first induction ceremony held by the National Native American Hall of Fame. The fitness center and a hall at Haskell Indian Nations University are named in honor of Thorpe.
President Richard Nixon, as authorized by U.S. Senate Joint Resolution 73, proclaimed Monday, April 16, 1973, as "Jim Thorpe Day" to promote nationwide recognition of Thorpe's life. In 1986, the Jim Thorpe Association established an award with Thorpe's name. The Jim Thorpe Award is given annually to the best defensive back in college football. The annual Thorpe Cup athletics meeting is named in his honor. The United States Postal Service issued a 32¢ stamp on February 3, 1998, as part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.
In a poll of sports fans published in 2000 by ABC Sports, Thorpe was voted the Greatest Athlete of the Twentieth Century; the pool of 15 other top athletes included Muhammad Ali, Pelé, Babe Ruth, Jesse Owens, Wayne Gretzky, Jack Nicklaus, and Michael Jordan.
In 2018, Thorpe was honored with the AAU Gussie Crawford Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to amateur sports. That same year, he was also commemorated on the Native American dollar coin; proposed designs were released in 2015.
In 2024, President Joe Biden announced that Thorpe would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor given in the United States.
=== Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania ===
Thorpe's body was initially intended to be buried in the Garden Grove Cemetery in Oklahoma. A committee raised $2,500 to have his body transported from California to Shawnee. On April 12, 1953, on a farm in Oklahoma, Sac and Fox Thunder clan members, along with indigenous members of Thorpe's family, met to carry out a traditional Sac burial ceremony. During this ceremony, Thorpe's third wife, Patricia, accompanied by law enforcement, interrupted it, and Thorpe's body was removed. Following this, a funeral for Thorpe was held at St. Benedict's Catholic Church in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Afterwards, his body lay in state at Fairview Cemetery. Shawnee residents began a fundraising effort to erect a memorial for Thorpe at the town's athletic park. Local officials had asked state legislators for funding, but a bill that included $25,000 for their proposal was vetoed by Governor Johnston Murray.
Meanwhile, Thorpe's third wife, unbeknownst to the rest of his family, took Thorpe's body and had it shipped to Pennsylvania when she heard that the small Pennsylvania towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk were seeking to attract business. She made a deal with officials which, according to Thorpe's son Jack, was made by the widowed Patricia for monetary considerations. This deal was made in May 1954, a year after Thorpe had died. The towns "bought" Thorpe's remains, which were interred there in 1957, erected a monument to him at the grave, merged, and renamed the newly united town in his honor as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Thorpe had never been there. The monument site contains his tomb, two statues of him in athletic poses, and historical markers recounting his life story.
In June 2010, Jack Thorpe filed a federal lawsuit against the borough of Jim Thorpe, seeking to have his father's remains returned to his homeland and re-interred near other family members in Oklahoma. Citing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Jack was arguing to bring his father's remains to the reservation in Oklahoma, to be buried near those of his father, sisters and brother, a mile from the place he was born. He claimed that the agreement between his stepmother and Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, borough officials was made against the wishes of other family members, who want him buried in Native American land. Jack Thorpe died at 73 on February 22, 2011.
In April 2013, U.S. District Judge Richard Caputo ruled that Jim Thorpe borough amounts to a museum under the NAGPRA and therefore is bound by that law. A lawyer for Bill and Richard Thorpe said the men would pursue the legal process to have their father's remains returned to Sac and Fox land in central Oklahoma. On October 23, 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed Judge Caputo's ruling. The appeals court held that Jim Thorpe borough is not a "museum", as that term is used in NAGPRA, and that the plaintiffs therefore could not invoke that federal statute to seek reinterment of Thorpe's remains. In NAGPRA language, "'museum' means any institution or State or local government agency (including any institution of higher learning) that receives Federal funds and has possession of, or control over, Native American cultural items." The Court of Appeals directed the trial court to enter a judgment in favor of the borough. The appeals court said Pennsylvania law allows the plaintiffs to ask a state court to order reburial of Thorpe's remains, but noted, "once a body is interred there is great reluctance in permitting same to be moved, absent clear and compelling reasons for such a move." On October 5, 2015, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the matter, effectively ending the legal process.
=== Jim Thorpe Marathon ===
The Jim Thorpe Area Running Festival is a series of races started in 2019 in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. It includes a marathon, a 26.2 mile footrace that features a steady elevation drop from start to finish. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Weeks | Stephen Weeks | Stephen Weeks is a British film director, writer, and producer. He started making films when was 16 and made his featured debut aged 22 with I, Monster.
== Select filmography ==
I, Monster (1971)
Gawain and the Green Knight (1973)
Ghost Story (1974)
Scars (1976)
Sword of the Valiant (1983)
The Bengal Lancers! (1984) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_High_School_(St._Paris,_Ohio) | Graham High School (St. Paris, Ohio) | Graham High School is a public high school in St. Paris, Ohio. It is the only high school in the Graham Local School District.
== History ==
Graham High School was constructed in 1957, the same year that Graham Local School District was formed. There have been several major renovations to the school, including the addition of a science wing, updated offices, and a new football stadium. A $13 million renovation took place in June 2009.
== Athletics ==
Sports at Graham include: football, boys' and girls' basketball, baseball, softball, wrestling, track & field, cross country, girls' volleyball, boys' and girls' golf, and boys' and girls' soccer. Graham High School is Division III in football, while all other sports are Division II. Graham's colors are black and white and Freddie Falcon is their mascot. Graham's major rivals are the Hillclimbers of the neighboring town of Urbana, Ohio. Graham is a member of Central Buckeye Conference (CBC). The conference is divided into two divisions: The Kenton Trail Division, which includes Bellefontaine, Jonathan Alder, Kenton Ridge, London, Urbana, and Tecumseh. The Mad River Division includes Benjamin Logan, Graham, Indian Lake, North Union, Northwestern, and Shawnee.
== Ohio High School Athletic Association State Championships ==
Boys Baseball: 1930, 1973
Boys Wrestling State Tournament Team: 1982, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
Boys Wrestling Dual Meet Team: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
== Notable alumni ==
Jim Jordan – two-time NCAA champion wrestler, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 4th district
Dustin Schlatter – folkstyle and freestyle wrestler, NCAA champion, 2009 Team USA World Team member
David Taylor – folkstyle and freestyle wrestler, two-time NCAA champion, three-time World Champion and 2020 Olympic gold medalist |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Physics | List of Nobel laureates in Physics | The Nobel Prize in Physics (Swedish: Nobelpriset i fysik) is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel (who died in 1896), awarded for outstanding contributions in physics. As dictated by Nobel's will, the award is administered by the Nobel Foundation and awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The award is presented in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel's death. Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary award prize that has varied throughout the years.
== Statistics ==
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to 229 individuals as of 2025. The first prize in physics was awarded in 1901 to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, of Germany, who received 150,782 SEK. John Bardeen is the only laureate to win the prize twice—in 1956 and 1972.
William Lawrence Bragg was the youngest Nobel laureate in physics; he won the prize in 1915 at the age of 25. He was also the youngest laureate for any Nobel prize until 2014 (when Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17). The oldest Nobel Prize laureate in physics was Arthur Ashkin who was 96 years old when he was awarded the prize in 2018.
Only five women have won the prize: Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018), Andrea Ghez (2020), and Anne L'Huillier (2023). Before L'Huillier, each woman only ever received a quarter share of the prize, although Marie Curie did receive an unshared Nobel prize in chemistry in 1911. In 2023, L'Huillier received a one-third share.
There have been six years for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was not awarded (1916, 1931, 1934, 1940–1942). There were also nine years for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was delayed for one year:
The 1914 prize awarded to Max von Laue was announced only in November 1915.
The Prize was not awarded in 1917, as the Nobel Committee for Physics decided that none of that year's nominations met the necessary criteria, but was awarded to Charles Glover Barkla in 1918 and counted as the 1917 prize.
This precedent was followed for the 1918 prize awarded to Max Planck in 1919,
the 1921 prize awarded to Albert Einstein in 1922,
the 1924 prize awarded to Manne Siegbahn in 1925,
the 1925 prize awarded to James Franck and Gustav Hertz in 1926,
the 1928 prize awarded to Owen Richardson in 1929,
the 1932 prize awarded to Werner Heisenberg in 1933, and
the 1943 prize awarded to Otto Stern in 1944.
A 2020 study reported that half of the Nobel Prizes for science awarded between 1995 and 2017 are clustered in few disciplines. Particle physics (14%), atomic physics (10.9%), and 3 non-physics disciplines dominate the prize in recent decades, followed by semiconductor physics and magnetics.
== Laureates ==
=== Number of Nobel laureates in Physics by country === |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Kudrow | Lisa Kudrow | Lisa Valerie Kudrow ( KOO-droh; born July 30, 1963) is an American actress and writer. She rose to international fame for her role as Phoebe Buffay in the American television sitcom Friends, which aired from 1994 to 2004. The series earned her Primetime Emmy, Screen Actors Guild, Satellite, American Comedy and TV Guide awards. Phoebe has since been named one of the greatest television characters of all time and is considered to be Kudrow's breakout role, spawning her successful film career.
Kudrow initially appeared in a 1989 episode of the hit sitcom Cheers playing a character named Emily. She also starred in several episodes of the show Mad About You (1993) as Ursula, before auditioning and earning the role of Phoebe on Friends; her character on Mad About You was written into the Friends storyline as Phoebe's twin. In the late 1990s, Kudrow starred in the cult comedy film Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997) and followed it with an acclaimed performance in the comedy/drama The Opposite of Sex (1998), which won her the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress and a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female. She created, produced, wrote, and starred in the HBO mockumentary series The Comeback, which initially lasted for one season in 2005 but was revived for a critically acclaimed second season in 2014 and has since been announced to return for a third season in 2026. She was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for both seasons.
In 2007, Kudrow received praise for her starring role in the film Kabluey and appeared in the film P.S. I Love You. She produced and starred in the Showtime program Web Therapy (2011–2015), which was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. She is a producer on the TLC/NBC reality program Who Do You Think You Are, which has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award five times. She has also received two nominations at the Children's and Family Emmy Awards for her roles in Better Nate Than Ever (2022) and Time Bandits (2024). She played Honey the dog on the FOX animated series HouseBroken.
== Early life ==
Lisa Valerie Kudrow was born in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles on July 30, 1963, the daughter of Nedra, a travel agent, and Lee Kudrow, a doctor who specialized in treating headaches. She has an older sister, Helene, and two older brothers, David and Derrick. She was raised in a middle-class Jewish family and had a Bat Mitzvah. Some of her ancestors came from Ilya, in what is now Belarus, just east of Vilnius, Lithuania. Almost all Jews in Ilya were murdered during the Holocaust, including Kudrow's paternal great-grandmother. Her paternal grandmother left Belarus for Brooklyn, where her father grew up.
Kudrow attended Portola Middle School in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles. She graduated from Taft High School in the Woodland Hills neighborhood, which was attended at the same time by rapper Ice Cube and actress Robin Wright. She received her A.B. in biology from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, intending to become an expert on headaches like her father. While breaking into acting, she worked for her father for eight years and earned a research credit on his study on the comparative likelihood of left-handed individuals developing cluster headaches.
== Career ==
=== 1989–1994: Pre-Friends ===
At the urging of comedian Jon Lovitz, who was a childhood friend of her brother, Kudrow began her comedic career as a member of The Groundlings, an improv and sketch comedy school in Los Angeles. She has credited Cynthia Szigeti, her improv teacher at The Groundlings, for changing her perspective on acting, calling her "the best thing that happened, on so many levels". Briefly, Kudrow joined with Conan O'Brien and director Tim Hillman in the short-lived improv troupe Unexpected Company. She was also the only regular female member of the Transformers Comedy Troupe. She played a role in an episode of the NBC sitcom Cheers. She tried out for Saturday Night Live in 1990, but Julia Sweeney was chosen instead. She had a recurring role as Kathy Fleisher in three episodes of season one of the Bob Newhart sitcom Bob (CBS, 1992–1993), a role she played after taking part in the series finale of Newhart's previous series Newhart. Prior to Friends, she appeared in at least two network-produced pilots: NBC's Just Temporary (also known as Temporarily Yours) in 1989, playing Nicole; and CBS' Close Encounters (also known as Matchmaker) in 1990, playing a Valley girl.
Kudrow was cast as Roz Doyle in Frasier, but the role was re-cast with Peri Gilpin during the taping of the pilot episode. In 2000, Kudrow explained that when rehearsals started, "I knew it wasn't working. I could feel it all slipping away, and I was panicking, which only made things worse." Her first recurring television role was Ursula Buffay, the eccentric waitress on the NBC sitcom Mad About You.
=== 1994–2004: Friends and worldwide recognition ===
Kudrow, the oldest actor of the main cast, reprised the character of Ursula on the NBC sitcom Friends, in which she co-starred as massage therapist Phoebe Buffay, Ursula's twin sister. Praised for her performance, Kudrow was the first Friends cast member to win an Emmy Award with her 1998 honor as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her starring role as Phoebe on Friends (NBC, 1994–2004). Kudrow received critical acclaim for playing Phoebe. According to the Guinness Book of World Records (2005), Kudrow and co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox became the highest paid TV actresses of all time, earning $1 million per episode for the ninth and tenth seasons of Friends. Phoebe has since been named one of the greatest television characters of all time. She played Phoebe until the show ended in 2004. The program was a massive hit and Kudrow, along with her co-stars, gained worldwide recognition. Her character, Phoebe, was especially popular. Entertainment Weekly voted Phoebe on Friends as Kudrow's best performance.
During her tenure on Friends, Kudrow appeared in several comedy films such as Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Hanging Up, Marci X, Dr. Dolittle 2, Analyze This and its sequel Analyze That, and dramatic films, such as Wonderland and The Opposite of Sex. She also guest-starred on numerous television series during Friends, including The Simpsons, Hope and Gloria and King of the Hill, and hosted Saturday Night Live.
=== 2004–present: Post-Friends ===
Following Friends, Kudrow starred as protagonist Valerie Cherish on the single-season HBO series The Comeback (premiered June 5, 2005), about a has-been sitcom star trying for a comeback. She also served as co-creator, writer, and executive producer. Nine years after the original season, HBO revived the series in 2014 for an abbreviated second season. Kudrow received two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on The Comeback. Her production company is 'Is or Isn't Entertainment'. Kudrow serves as the executive producer for the U.S. version of the British television series Who Do You Think You Are?, in which celebrities trace their family trees. The subjects of the first series included Kudrow herself, in which it was discovered her great-grandmother was murdered in the Holocaust.
Kudrow co-created an improvised comedy webseries, Web Therapy on Lstudio.com. The improv series, which launched online in 2008, has earned several Webby nominations and one Outstanding Comedic Performance Webby for Kudrow, who plays therapist Fiona Wallice. She offers her patients three-minute sessions over iChat. In July 2011, a reformatted, half-hour version of the show premiered on Showtime, before being cancelled in 2015 after four seasons. Kudrow has guest starred on multiple television series such as Cougar Town, BoJack Horseman, Angie Tribeca, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Scandal.
Kudrow has appeared in multiple comedic films such as Happy Endings, Hotel for Dogs, Easy A, Neighbors and its sequel Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, Long Shot, and Booksmart. She also appeared in the romantic drama film P.S. I Love You and co-starred in the thriller film The Girl on the Train. In 2020, Kudrow played Hypatia of Alexandria in season 4 episode 12 of The Good Place "Patty", and starred as Maggie Naird in the Netflix comedy series, Space Force. She reunited with her Friends cast mates for an HBO Max unscripted television special titled Friends: The Reunion in May 2021. She is currently, along with Mary McCormack, an executive producer of the syndicated game show, 25 Words or Less; sometimes, Kudrow herself is one of the two celebrity guests playing with a contestant on the show.
In December 2024, Kudrow starred as Lydia in the Netflix comedy-drama No Good Deed, a role for which she gained positive reviews from critics.
== Personal life ==
Kudrow married French advertising executive Michel Stern on May 27, 1995. They live in Beverly Hills, California, and have a son born on May 7, 1998. Kudrow's pregnancy was written into the fourth season of Friends, with her character having triplets as a surrogate mother for her half-brother and his wife. In addition to her Beverly Hills home, Kudrow maintained a penthouse in Park City, Utah, which she sold in April 2017. She revealed in 2019 that she had experienced body dysmorphic disorder while working on Friends.
== Filmography ==
=== Film ===
=== Television ===
== Awards and nominations ==
Kudrow has been honored with numerous accolades over her career. For her role in the sitcom Friends, she received six nominations at the Primetime Emmy Awards, winning in 1998 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, won two Screen Actors Guild Awards, one Satellite Award, one American Comedy award, and one TV Guide award.
In total, she has received fifteen Emmy nominations, with her most recent nomination in the 2021 Primetime Emmy Awards, twelve nominations and two wins at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, one win and eight nominations at the American Comedy Awards, one Golden Globe nomination, one Banff Rockie award, one Blockbuster Entertainment award, one Chicago Film Critics Association nomination, one Chlotrudis award, two Critics' Choice Television nominations, one Dorian award, one Gracie award, one Independent Spirit nomination, one MTV Movie & TV nomination, one National Society of Film Critics nomination, one New York Film Critics Circle award, one Nickelodeon Kids' Choice nomination, one Online Film Critics Society nomination, one People Magazine award, five nominations and one win at the Satellite Awards, three nominations and one win at the Teen Choice Awards, two Streamy nominations, two nominations and one win at the TV Guide Awards, one Viewers for Quality Television nomination and seven nominations and four wins at the Webby Awards. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erica_Rose_(television_personality) | Erica Rose (television personality) | Erica Rose (born April 6, 1983) is an American lawyer, and reality TV personality known for her roles in the American TV series The Bachelor, Bachelor Pad, Below Deck Sailing Yacht and You're Cut Off!.
== Early life and career ==
Erica Rose was born in Houston, Texas, United States, and attended The Kinkaid School and graduated from Emory University where she graduated with a dual major in English and Creative Writing and a minor in Theater. While attending Emory, Rose was a member of the Alpha Epsilon Phi and was the sports editor and a staff writer for The Emory Wheel.
In 2012, she received a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from University of Houston Law Center. also has an LLM degree in Entertainment and Media Law from the Southwestern Law School in California. Rose founded the Rose Sanders Law Firm, a Texas based family law and personal injury law firm.
== Personal life ==
On December 3, 2017, after only three months of being engaged, she married Charles "Chuck" Sanders, whom she met in high school before her reality TV career started.
Erica and Charles’ lavish wedding featured Erica's friends and colleagues from the Bachelor franchise; including, Vienna Girardi, Tara Durr and her husband John Presser, Cory Shivar, Melissa Schreiber, Renee Simlak, Jeannette Pawula, AshLee Frazier Williams and even Prince Lorenzo Borghese who was the Bachelor on Erica's season. Erica and Charles have a daughter named Aspen Rose Sanders. Erica also has a daughter from a previous relationship named Holland Rose Madeleine.
== Reality TV career ==
Rose made her reality TV debut in 2006 as a contestant on the 9th season of The Bachelor.
In 2010, Rose debuted on the TV series You're Cut Off!. The series focused on nine wealthy women who were told they were going to be featured on a fake television production called The Good Life. However, they were later told that their families had "cut them off" from their spending money, and that they were participating in an eight-week program, which introduced them to a simpler lifestyle.
In 2011, Rose debuted on the TV series Bachelor Pad. She was the subject of controversy as a result of the series involving an episode where eggs where thrown at her in a challenge on an episode of Bachelor Pad season 3.
Rose recalled a notable challenge she said was both emotionally traumatic and physically hurtful: "Target on Your Back." The challenge involved the men and then the women lining up blindfolded in either swim trunks or bikinis. With their backs turned, each member of the other group was given a question and tasked with answering by throwing a paint-filled egg at whichever contestant was their answer to the question. They received a point if they hit their target and the person with the most points won.
In 2021, Rose debuted on the TV series Below Deck Sailing Yacht. Rose appeared on season two with her friends. In 2022, Rose reappeared in season three alongside her husband, family and friends. Erica and Chuck's charter left a $6500 tip after criticizing chef Marcos Spaziani's food. Chuck complained that McDonald's tasted better than the chef's preparation. Some considered Erica and Chuck to be "the worst guests in Below Deck Sailing Yacht history."
== Filmography == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris | Arrondissements of Paris | The City of Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements municipaux, administrative districts, referred to as arrondissements (French: [aʁɔ̃dismɑ̃] ). These are not to be confused with departmental arrondissements, which subdivide the larger French departments.
The number of the arrondissement is indicated by the last two digits in most Parisian postal codes, 75001 up to 75020. In addition to their number, each arrondissement has a name, often for a local monument. For example, the 5th arrondissement is also called "Panthéon" in reference to the eponymous building. The first four arrondissements have a shared administration, called Paris Centre.
== Description ==
The twenty arrondissements (French: "rounding") are arranged in the form of a clockwise spiral, often likened to a snail shell, starting from the middle of the city, with the first on the Right Bank (north bank) of the Seine.
In French, notably on street signs, the number is often given in Roman numerals. For example, the Eiffel Tower belongs to the VIIe arrondissement, while Gare de l'Est is in the Xe arrondissement. In daily speech, people use the ordinal number corresponding to the arrondissement, e.g. "Elle habite dans le sixième", "She lives in the 6th (arrondissement)".
Due to suburbanization, the population of Paris has gradually shifted outward, with only two arrondissements still growing.
== Governance ==
Uniquely among French cities, Paris is both a municipality (commune) and a department (département). Under the PLM Law (Loi PLM) of 1982, which redefined the governance of Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, hence the PLM acronym, there are both a city council called the Council of Paris, and 20 arrondissement councils in Paris. The PLM Law set limits to the prerogatives of the mayor of Paris, who has to deal with the powers granted to the prefect of police on security issues.
The 20 arrondissement councils (conseils d'arrondissement) are similar in operation to a municipal council (conseil municipal), but with very few powers. Its members are elected at municipal elections in the same way as in municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants. Each arrondissement council is made up of 2/3 members, elected specifically as arrondissement councillors. Council of Paris members representing the arrondissement, also sit ex officio on their local arrondissement council.
For example, the council of the 19th arrondissement has 42 members. 28 are conseillers d'arrondissement who only sit on the arrondissement council. 14 are conseillers de Paris who also sit on the city council. At its first meeting after the elections, each arrondissement council elects its mayor.
Each arrondissement is subdivided administratively into four quartiers. Paris thus has 80 quartiers administratifs, each containing a police station. For a table giving the names of the eighty quartiers, see Quarters of Paris.
== Arrondissements ==
== History ==
On 11 October 1795, Paris was divided into twelve arrondissements. They were numbered from west to east. The numbers 1–9 were on the Right Bank of the Seine. The numbers were 10–12 on the Left Bank. Each arrondissement was subdivided into four quartiers, which corresponded to the 48 original districts created in 1790.
In the late 1850s, Emperor Napoleon III and the Prefect of the Seine Baron Haussmann developed a plan to incorporate several of the surrounding communes into the Paris jurisdiction. In 1859, Parliament passed the necessary legislation, and the expansion took effect when the law was promulgated on 3 November 1859. City taxes were extended to the new neighborhoods in July 1860.
The previous twelve arrondissements were done away with, and twenty new arrondissements were created. In historical records, when it is necessary to distinguish between the two systems, the original arrondissements are indicated by adding the term ancienne ("former" or "old"), for example, 2ème ancienne or 7ème anc.
Before the reorganization, non-married couples who lived together were said to have "married at the town hall of the 13th arrondissement" ("se marier à la mairie du 13e arrondissement"), as a jocular reference to there being no 13th. When Haussmann released his plan for the new boundaries and numbering system, residents of Passy objected because it placed them in the new 13th arrondissement. The mayor of Passy, Jean-Frédéric Possoz, devised the numbering of the arrondissements in a spiral pattern, beginning on the Right Bank, which put Passy in the 16th. This system turned the Louvre area, which contained the Tuileries Palace and other imperial palaces, into the 1st. The Gobelins area became the 13th instead.
In early 2016, mayor Anne Hidalgo proposed that the first four arrondissements should have their administrations merged. The Council of Paris approved this in February 2016. The four have a combined population of about 100,000, with the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 3rd arrondissements in that order being the four smallest in Paris. In August 2016, the matter was taken up in the National Assembly, and approved in February 2017.
In October 2018, in a postal referendum, the town hall of the 3rd arrondissement was chosen to house the new shared administration. The name "Paris Centre" was chosen for the sector. In June 2020, the reform was implemented, the day after the second round of the 2020 Paris municipal election. The four arrondissements now share a mayor and a district council. The four arrondissements continue to exist, but are no longer used as administrative and electoral sectors.
== Logos of the town halls ==
== Works ==
Paris, je t'aime, a 2006 film composed of five-minute sequences on each arrondissement |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford#Mathematics_and_sciences | University of Oxford#Mathematics and sciences | The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation. It grew rapidly from 1167, when Henry II prohibited English students from attending the University of Paris. After escalating conflict between students and the Oxford townspeople, some Oxford academics fled northeast to Cambridge, where they established the University of Cambridge in 1209. The two universities share many common features and are jointly referred to as Oxbridge.
The University of Oxford is made up of 43 colleges – of which 36 are chartered colleges (independent bodies), four are permanent private halls (owned by religious organisations), and three are societies (controlled by the university) – and a range of academic departments that are organised into four divisions. Colleges control their own membership and activities. Typically social life for students is centred around fellow college members. All students are members of a college. Oxford does not have a main campus. Its buildings and facilities are scattered throughout the city centre and around the town. Undergraduate teaching at the university consists of lectures, small-group tutorials at the colleges and halls, seminars, laboratory work and tutorials provided by the central university faculties and departments. Postgraduate teaching is provided in a predominantly centralised fashion.
Oxford operates the Ashmolean Museum, the world's oldest university museum; Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world; and the largest academic library system nationwide. In the fiscal year ending 31 July 2025, the university had a total consolidated income of £3.02 billion, of which £801.3 million was from research grants and contracts.
Oxford has educated a wide range of notable alumni, including 31 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world. As of October 2025, 76 Nobel Prize laureates, 4 Fields Medalists, and 6 Turing Award winners have matriculated, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford. Its alumni have won 160 Olympic medals. Oxford is home to a number of scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programmes in the world.
== History ==
=== Founding ===
The University of Oxford's foundation date is unknown.
While no official papal bull established Oxford, the university emerged in the 12th century as part of Western Europe's Catholic educational system. Nevertheless, a scholarly tradition observable in the 16th century claimed a far earlier 7th-century foundation by Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus (668–690). This claim lacks documentary support, at least in the surviving record.
Early teaching was conducted by clerics like Theobald of Étampes, and the curriculum focused on theology and canon law, reflecting its ecclesiastical roots. Most scholars were members of the clergy until the Reformation.
In the 1300s, the chronicler Ranulf Higden wrote that the university was founded in the 9th century by Alfred the Great; the story is today considered apocryphal, although it was believed until the 18th century. It is known that teaching at Oxford existed in some form as early as 1096, but it is unclear when the university came into being. Scholar Theobald of Étampes lectured at Oxford in the early 1100s.
The university experienced rapid growth beginning in 1167, when English students were expelled from the University of Paris by order of Henry II of France, who, amid tensions with France and the Church, banned his subjects from studying abroad—prompting many scholars to return and establish a thriving academic community in Oxford. The historian Gerald of Wales lectured to such scholars in 1188, and the first known foreign scholar, Emo of Friesland, arrived in 1190. The head of the university had the title of chancellor from at least 1201, and the masters were recognised as a universitas or corporation in 1231. The university was granted a royal charter in 1248 during the reign of King Henry III. After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled from the violence to Cambridge, later forming the University of Cambridge.
The students associated together on the basis of geographical origins, into two 'nations', representing the North (northerners or Boreales, who included the English people from north of the River Trent and the Scots) and the South (southerners or Australes, who included English people from south of the Trent, the Irish and the Welsh). In later centuries, geographical origins continued to influence many students' affiliations when membership of a college or hall became customary at Oxford. Additionally, members of many religious orders, including Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Augustinians, settled in Oxford in the mid-13th century, gained influence and maintained houses or halls for students. At about the same time, private benefactors established colleges as self-contained scholarly communities. Among the earliest such founders were William of Durham, who in 1249 endowed University College, and John Balliol, father of a future King of Scots; Balliol College bears his name. Another founder, Walter de Merton, a Lord Chancellor of England and afterwards Bishop of Rochester, composed a series of regulations for college life; Merton College thereby became the model for such establishments at Oxford, as well as at Cambridge. Thereafter, an increasing number of students lived in colleges rather than in halls and religious houses.
In 1333–1334, an attempt by some dissatisfied Oxford scholars to found a new university at Stamford, Lincolnshire, was blocked by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge petitioning King Edward III. Thereafter, until the 1820s, no new universities were allowed to be founded in England, even in London; thus, Oxford and Cambridge had a duopoly, which was unusual in large western European countries.
=== Renaissance period ===
The new learning of the Renaissance greatly influenced Oxford from the late 15th century onwards. Among university scholars of the period were William Grocyn, who contributed to the revival of Greek language studies, and John Colet, the noted biblical scholar.
With the English Reformation and the break of communion with the Roman Catholic Church, recusant scholars from Oxford fled to continental Europe, settling especially at the University of Douai. The method of teaching at Oxford was transformed from the medieval scholastic method to Renaissance education, although institutions associated with the university experienced losses of land and revenues. As a centre of learning and scholarship, Oxford's reputation declined in the Age of Enlightenment; enrolments fell and teaching was neglected.
In 1636, William Laud, the chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, codified the university's statutes. These, for the most part, remained its governing regulations until the mid-19th century. Laud was also responsible for the granting of a charter securing privileges for the University Press, and he made notable contributions to the Bodleian Library, the main library of the university. From the beginnings of the Church of England as the established church until 1866, membership of the church was a requirement to graduate as a Bachelor of Arts, and Dissenters were only permitted to be promoted to Master of Arts starting in 1871. The university was a centre of the Royalist party during the English Civil War (1642–1651), while the town favoured the opposing Parliamentarian cause.
Wadham College, founded in 1610, was the undergraduate college of Sir Christopher Wren. He was part of a group of experimental scientists at Oxford in the 1650s, the Oxford Philosophical Club, which included Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. This group, which has at times been linked with Boyle's "Invisible College", held regular meetings at Wadham under the guidance of the college's warden, John Wilkins, and the group formed the nucleus that went on to found the Royal Society.
=== Modern period ===
==== Students ====
In 1827, a major review of the university's statutes, some over 500 years old, was conducted. Among the changes made at this time was the removal of the requirement that students swear an oath of enmity towards an Oxford townsman Henry Symeonis, who was found guilty of murdering an Oxford student in the mid-13th century.
Before reforms in the early 19th century, the curriculum at Oxford was notoriously narrow and impractical. Sir Spencer Walpole, a historian of contemporary Great Britain and a senior government official, had not attended any university. He said, "Few medical men, few solicitors, few persons intended for commerce or trade, ever dreamed of passing through a university career." He quoted the Oxford University Commissioners in 1852 stating: "The education imparted at Oxford was not such as to conduce to the advancement in life of many persons, except those intended for the ministry." Nevertheless, Walpole argued:
Among the many deficiencies attending a university education there was, however, one good thing about it, and that was the education which the undergraduates gave themselves. It was impossible to collect some thousand or twelve hundred of the best young men in England, to give them the opportunity of making acquaintance with one another, and full liberty to live their lives in their own way, without evolving in the best among them, some admirable qualities of loyalty, independence, and self-control. If the average undergraduate carried from University little or no learning, which was of any service to him, he carried from it a knowledge of men and respect for his fellows and himself, a reverence for the past, a code of honour for the present, which could not but be serviceable. He had enjoyed opportunities... of intercourse with men, some of whom were certain to rise to the highest places in the Senate, in the Church, or at the Bar. He might have mixed with them in his sports, in his studies, and perhaps in his debating society; and any associations which he had this formed had been useful to him at the time, and might be a source of satisfaction to him in after life.
Of the students who matriculated in 1840, 65% were sons of professionals (34% were Anglican ministers). After graduation, 87% became professionals (59% as Anglican clergy). Out of the students who matriculated in 1870, 59% were sons of professionals (25% were Anglican ministers). After graduation, 87% became professionals (42% as Anglican clergy).
M. C. Curthoys and H. S. Jones argue that the rise of organised sport was one of the most remarkable and distinctive features of the history of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was carried over from the athleticism prevalent at the public schools such as Eton, Winchester, Shrewsbury, and Harrow.
All students, regardless of their chosen area of study, were required to spend (at least) their first year preparing for a first-year examination that was heavily focused on classical languages. Science students found this particularly burdensome and supported a separate science degree with Greek language study removed from their required courses. This concept of a Bachelor of Science had been adopted at other European universities (London University had implemented it in 1860) but an 1880 proposal at Oxford to replace the classical requirement with a modern language (like German or French) was unsuccessful. After considerable internal haggling over the structure of the arts curriculum, in 1886 the "natural science preliminary" was recognised as a qualifying part of the first year examination.
At the start of 1914, the university housed about 3,000 undergraduates and around 100 postgraduate students. During the First World War, many undergraduates and fellows joined the armed forces. By 1918 nearly all fellows were serving in uniform, and the student population in residence was reduced to 12% of the pre-war total. The University Roll of Service records that, in total, 14,792 members of the university served in the war, with 2,716 (18.36%) killed. Not all the members of the university who served in the Great War fought with the Allies; there is a memorial to members of New College who served in the German armed forces, bearing the inscription, 'In memory of the men of this college who coming from a foreign land entered into the inheritance of this place and returning fought and died for their country in the war 1914–1918'. During the war years the university buildings became hospitals, cadet schools and military training camps.
==== Reforms ====
Two parliamentary commissions in 1852 issued recommendations for Oxford and Cambridge. Archibald Campbell Tait, a former headmaster of Rugby School, was a key member of the Oxford Commission; he wanted Oxford to follow the German and Scottish model in which the professorship was paramount. The commission's report envisioned a centralised university run predominantly by professors and faculties, with a much stronger emphasis on research. The professional staff should be strengthened and better paid. For students, restrictions on entry should be dropped, and more opportunities given to poorer families. It called for an expansion of the curriculum, with honours to be awarded in many new fields. Undergraduate scholarships should be open to all Britons. Graduate fellowships should be opened up to all members of the university. It recommended that fellows be released from an obligation for ordination. Students were to be allowed to save money by boarding in the city, instead of in one of the colleges.
The system of separate honour schools for different subjects began in 1802, with Mathematics and Literae Humaniores. Schools of "Natural Sciences" and "Law, and Modern History" were added in 1853. By 1872, the last of these had split into "Jurisprudence" and "Modern History". Theology became the sixth honour school. In addition to these B.A. Honours degrees, the postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law (B.C.L.) was, and still is, offered.
The mid-19th century saw the impact of the Oxford Movement (1833–1845), led, among others, by the future Cardinal John Henry Newman. Administrative reforms during the 19th century included the replacement of oral examinations with written entrance tests, greater tolerance for religious dissent, and the establishment of four women's colleges. Privy Council decisions in the 20th century - the abolition of compulsory daily worship, dissociation of the Regius Professorship of Hebrew from clerical status, diversion of colleges' theological bequests to other purposes - loosened the link with traditional belief and practice. Furthermore, although the university's emphasis had historically been on classical knowledge, its curriculum expanded during the 19th century to include scientific and medical studies.
The postgraduate degrees of Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Letters (renamed Master of Science and Master of Letters in the 1970s) were introduced in 1895, and the university began to award doctorates for research in 1900 with the Doctor of Letters and Doctor of Science degrees. Oxford was the first British university to institute a Doctor of Philosophy degree (abbreviated DPhil) in 1917; it was first awarded in 1919 to Lakshman Sarup of Balliol College.
=== Women's education ===
The university passed a statute in 1875 allowing examinations for women at a level approximately equivalent to undergraduate studies; for a brief period in the early 1900s, this allowed the "steamboat ladies" to receive ad eundem degrees from the University of Dublin. In June 1878, the Association for the Education of Women (AEW) was formed, aiming for the eventual creation of a college for women in Oxford. Some of the more prominent members of the association were George Granville Bradley, T. H. Green and Edward Stuart Talbot. Talbot insisted on a specifically Anglican institution, which was unacceptable to most of the other members. The two parties eventually split, and Talbot's group founded Lady Margaret Hall in 1878, while T. H. Green founded the non-denominational Somerville College in 1879. Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville opened their doors to their first 21 students (12 at Somerville, 9 at Lady Margaret Hall) in 1879, who attended lectures in rooms above an Oxford baker's shop. There were also 25 women students living at home or with friends in 1879, a group which evolved into the Society of Oxford Home-Students and in 1952 into St Anne's College.
These first three societies for women were followed by St Hugh's (1886) and St Hilda's (1893). All of these colleges later became coeducational, starting with Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne's in 1979, and finishing with St Hilda's, which began to accept male students in 2008. In the early 20th century, Oxford and Cambridge were widely perceived to be bastions of male privilege; however, the integration of women into Oxford moved forward during the First World War. In 1916 women were admitted as medical students on a par with men, and in 1917 the university accepted financial responsibility for women's examinations.
On 7 October 1920 women became eligible for admission as full members of the university and were given the right to take degrees. In 1927 the university's dons created a quota that limited the number of female students to a quarter that of men, a ruling which was not abolished until 1957. Additionally, during this period Oxford colleges were single sex, so the number of women was also limited by the capacity of the women's colleges to admit students. It was not until 1959 that the women's colleges were given full collegiate status.
In 1974, Brasenose, Jesus, Wadham, Hertford and St Catherine's became the first formerly all-male colleges to admit women. The majority of men's colleges accepted their first female students in 1979, with Christ Church following in 1980, and Oriel becoming the last men's college to admit women in 1985. Most of Oxford's graduate colleges were founded as coeducational establishments in the 20th century, with the exception of St Antony's, which was founded as a men's college in 1950 and began to accept women only in 1962. By 1988, 40% of undergraduates at Oxford were female; in 2016, 45% of the student population, and 47% of undergraduate students, were female.
In June 2017, Oxford announced that starting in the 2018 academic year, history students may choose to sit a take-home exam in some courses, with the intention that this will equalise rates of firsts awarded to women and men at Oxford. That same summer, maths and computer science tests were extended by 15 minutes, in a bid to see if female student scores would improve.
The detective novel Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the first women to gain an academic degree from Oxford, is largely set in the all-female Shrewsbury College, Oxford (based on Sayers' own Somerville College), and the issue of women's education is central to its plot. Social historian and Somerville College alumna Jane Robinson's book Bluestockings: A Remarkable History of the First Women to Fight for an Education gives a very detailed and immersive account of this history.
== Buildings and sites ==
=== Map ===
=== Main sites ===
The university is a "city university" in that it does not have a main campus; instead, colleges, departments, accommodation, and other facilities are scattered throughout central Oxford and in some other areas of the city. The Science Area, in which most science departments are located, is the area that bears closest resemblance to a campus. There is a ten-acre (4-hectare) Radcliffe Observatory Quarter in the northwest of the city.
Iconic university buildings include the Radcliffe Camera, the Sheldonian Theatre used for music concerts, lectures, and university ceremonies, and the Examination Schools, where examinations and some lectures take place. The University Church of St Mary the Virgin was used for university ceremonies before the construction of the Sheldonian.
In 2012–2013, the university built the controversial one-hectare (400 m × 25 m) Castle Mill development of 4–5-storey blocks of student flats overlooking Cripley Meadow and the historic Port Meadow, blocking views of the spires in the city centre. The development has been likened to building a "skyscraper beside Stonehenge".
=== Parks ===
The University Parks are a 70-acre (28 ha) parkland area in the northeast of the city, near Keble College, Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall. It is open to the public during daylight hours. There are also various college-owned open spaces open to the public, including Bagley Wood and most notably Christ Church Meadow.
The Botanic Garden on the High Street is the oldest botanic garden in the UK. It contains over 8,000 different plant species on 1.8 ha (4+1⁄2 acres). It is one of the most diverse yet compact major collections of plants in the world and includes representatives of over 90% of the higher plant families. The Harcourt Arboretum is a 130-acre (53 ha) site six miles (9.7 km) south of the city that includes native woodland and 67 acres (27 hectares) of meadow. The 1,000-acre (4.0 km2) Wytham Woods are owned by the university and used for research in zoology and climate change.
== Organisation ==
Colleges arrange the tutorial teaching for their undergraduates, and the members of an academic department are spread around many colleges. Though certain colleges do have subject alignments (e.g., Nuffield College as a centre for the social sciences), these are exceptions, and most colleges will have a diverse community of students and academics representing a wide range of disciplines. Facilities such as libraries are provided on all these levels: by the central university (the Bodleian), by the departments (individual departmental libraries, such as the English Faculty Library), and by colleges (each of which maintains a multi-discipline library for the use of its members).
=== Central governance ===
The university's formal head is the chancellor, with Lord Hague of Richmond expected to be inaugurated in early 2025 although, as at most British universities, the chancellor is a titular figurehead and is not involved with the day-to-day running of the university. The chancellor is elected by the members of convocation, a body comprising all graduates of the university, and may hold office until death.
The vice-chancellor, currently Irene Tracey, is the de facto head of the university. There are five pro-vice-chancellors with specific responsibilities.
Two university proctors, elected annually on a rotating basis from any two of the colleges, are the internal ombudsmen who make sure that the university and its members adhere to its statutes. This role incorporates student discipline and complaints, as well as oversight of the university's proceedings. The university's professors are collectively referred to as the Statutory Professors of the University of Oxford. They are particularly influential in the running of the university's graduate programmes. Examples of statutory professors are the Chichele Professorships and the Drummond Professor of Political Economy.
Oxford is a "public university" in that it receives some public money from the government, but it is a "private university" in that it is entirely self-governing and, in theory, could choose to become entirely private by rejecting public funds.
=== Colleges ===
To be a member of the university, all students, and most academic staff, must also be a member of a college or hall. There are thirty-nine colleges of the University of Oxford and four permanent private halls (PPHs), each controlling its membership and with its own internal structure and activities. Not all colleges offer all courses, but they generally cover a broad range of subjects.
The 39 colleges are:
‡ These three have no royal charter, and are officially departments of the university rather than independent colleges.
The permanent private halls were founded by different Christian denominations. One difference between a college and a PPH is that whereas colleges are governed by the fellows of the college, the governance of a PPH resides, at least in part, with the corresponding Christian denomination. The four PPHs are:
Blackfriars Hall Blackfriars Hall
Campion Hall Campion Hall
Regent's Park Regent's Park
Wycliffe Hall Wycliffe Hall
The PPHs and colleges join as the Conference of Colleges, which represents their common concerns, to discuss matters of shared interest and to act collectively when necessary, such as in dealings with the central university. The Conference of Colleges was established as a recommendation of the Franks Commission in 1965.
Teaching members of the colleges (i.e. fellows and tutors) are collectively and familiarly known as dons, although the term is rarely used by the university itself. In addition to residential and dining facilities, the colleges provide social, cultural, and recreational activities for their members. Colleges have responsibility for admitting undergraduates and organising their tuition; for graduates, this responsibility falls upon the departments.
=== Finances ===
The combined endowment figure of £8.708 billion makes Oxford hold the largest endowment of any university in the UK. The college figure does not reflect all the assets held by the colleges as their accounts do not include the cost or value of many of their main sites or heritage assets such as works of art or libraries.
The central University's endowment, along with some of the colleges', is managed by the university's wholly owned endowment management office, Oxford University Endowment Management, formed in 2007. The university used to maintain substantial investments in fossil fuel companies. However, in April 2020, the university committed to divest from direct investments in fossil fuel companies and to require indirect investments in fossil fuel companies be subjected to the Oxford Martin Principles.
The university was one of the first in the UK to raise money through a major public fundraising campaign, the Campaign for Oxford. The current campaign, its second, was launched in May 2008 and is entitled "Oxford Thinking – The Campaign for the University of Oxford". This is looking to support three areas: academic posts and programmes, student support, and buildings and infrastructure; having passed its original target of £1.25 billion in March 2012, the target was raised to £3 billion.
==== Funding criticisms ====
The university has faced criticism for some of its sources of donations and funding. In 2017, attention was drawn to historical donations including All Souls College receiving £10,000 from slave trader Christopher Codrington in 1710, and Oriel College receiving £100,000 from the will of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes in 1902. In 1996 a donation of £20 million was received from Wafic Saïd who was involved in the Al-Yammah arms deal, and taking £150 million from the US billionaire businessman Stephen A. Schwarzman in 2019. The university has defended its decisions saying it "takes legal, ethical and reputational issues into consideration".
The university also faced criticism, as noted above, over its decision to accept donations from fossil fuel companies having received £21.8 million from the fossil fuel industry between 2010 and 2015, £18.8 million between 2015 and 2020 and £1.6 million between 2020 and 2021.
The university accepted £6 million from The Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust in 2021. Former racing driver Max Mosley stated that he set up the trust "to house the fortune he inherited" from his father, Oswald Mosley, who was founder of two far-right groups: Union Movement and the British Union of Fascists.
=== Affiliations ===
Oxford is a member of the Russell Group of research-led British universities and is regarded to be part of the non-formal grouping of universities which make up the "golden triangle" in South East England. Internationally, it is a member of the Europaeum, the League of European Research Universities, and the International Alliance of Research Universities.
== Academic profile ==
=== Admissions ===
In common with most British universities, prospective undergraduate students apply through the UCAS application system, but prospective applicants for the University of Oxford, along with those for medicine, dentistry, and University of Cambridge applicants, must observe an earlier deadline of 15 October. The Sutton Trust maintains that Oxford University and Cambridge University recruit undergraduates disproportionately from 8 schools which accounted for 1,310 Oxbridge places during three years, contrasted with 1,220 from 2,900 other schools.
To allow a more individualised judgement of students, who might otherwise apply for both, undergraduate applicants are not permitted to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year. The only exceptions are applicants for organ scholarships and those applying to read for a second undergraduate degree.
Oxford has the lowest offer rate of all Russell Group universities.
Most applicants choose to apply to one of the individual colleges. Undergraduate applicants benefit from the collaborative efforts of the colleges, which aim to ensure that top students secure a place at the university, regardless of their initial college choices. Postgraduate applicants who are offered admission by the university are assured a place in one of the colleges, even if their preferred college cannot accommodate them.
Undergraduate shortlisting is based on achieved and predicted exam results, school references, and, in some subjects, written admission tests or candidate-submitted written work. Approximately 60% of applicants are shortlisted, although this varies by subject. If a large number of shortlisted applicants for a subject choose one college, then students who named that college may be reallocated randomly to under-subscribed colleges for the subject. The colleges then invite shortlisted candidates for interview, where they are provided with food and accommodation for around three days in December. Most undergraduate applicants will be individually interviewed by academics at more than one college. In 2020 interviews were moved online, and they will remain online until at least 2027.
Undergraduate offers are sent out in early January, with each offer usually being from a specific college. One in four successful candidates receives an offer from a college that they did not apply to. Some courses may make "open offers" to some candidates, who are not assigned to a particular college until A Level results day in August.
The university has come under criticism for the number of students it accepts from private schools; for instance, Laura Spence's rejection from the university in 2000 led to widespread debate. In 2016, the University of Oxford gave 59% of offers to UK students to students from state schools, while about 93% of all UK pupils and 86% of post-16 UK pupils are educated in state schools. However, 64% of UK applicants were from state schools and the university notes that state school students apply disproportionately to oversubscribed subjects. The proportion of students coming from state schools has been increasing. From 2015 to 2019, the state proportion of total UK students admitted each year was: 55.6%, 58.0%, 58.2%, 60.5% and 62.3%. Oxford University spends over £6 million per year on outreach programs to encourage applicants from underrepresented demographics.
In 2018 the university's annual admissions report revealed that eight of Oxford's colleges had accepted fewer than three black applicants in the past three years. Labour MP David Lammy said, "This is social apartheid and it is utterly unrepresentative of life in modern Britain." In 2020, Oxford had increased its proportion of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students to record levels. The number of BAME undergraduates accepted to the university in 2020 rose to 684 students, or 23.6% of the UK intake, up from 558 or 22% in 2019; the number of Black students was 106 (3.7% of the intake), up from 80 students (3.2%). UCAS data also showed that Oxford is more likely than comparable institutions to make offers to ethnic minority and socially disadvantaged pupils.
The university is consistently designated as a 'high-tariff' institution by the Department for Education, with the average undergraduate entrant to the university in recent years amassing between 163–166 UCAS Tariff points in their top three pre-university qualifications – the equivalent of A*A*A to A*A*A* at A-Level. Based on 2022/23 HESA entry standards data published in domestic league tables, which include a broad range of qualifications beyond the top three exam grades, the average student at the University of Oxford achieved 203 points – the fourth highest score in the United Kingdom.
=== Teaching and degrees ===
Undergraduate teaching is centred on the tutorial, where 1–4 students spend an hour with an academic discussing their week's work, usually an essay (humanities, most social sciences, some mathematical, physical, and life sciences) or problem sheet (most mathematical, physical, and life sciences, and some social sciences). The university itself is responsible for conducting examinations and conferring degrees. Undergraduate teaching takes place during three eight-week academic terms: Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity. (These are officially known as 'Full Term': 'Term' is a lengthier period with little practical significance.) Internally, the weeks in a term begin on Sundays, and are referred to numerically, with the initial week known as "first week", the last as "eighth week" and with the numbering extended to refer to weeks before and after term (for example "noughth week" precedes term). Undergraduates must be in residence from Thursday of 0th week. These teaching terms are shorter than those of most other British universities, and their total duration amounts to less than half the year. However, undergraduates are also expected to do some academic work during the three holidays (known as the Christmas, Easter, and Long Vacations).
=== Scholarships and financial support ===
There are many opportunities for students at Oxford to receive financial help during their studies. The Oxford Opportunity Bursaries, introduced in 2006, are university-wide means-based bursaries available to any British undergraduate, with a total possible grant of £10,235 over a 3-year degree. In addition, individual colleges also offer bursaries and funds to help their students. For graduate study, there are many scholarships attached to the university, available to students from all sorts of backgrounds, from Rhodes Scholarships to the relatively new Weidenfeld Scholarships. Oxford also offers the Clarendon Scholarship which is open to graduate applicants of all nationalities. The Clarendon Scholarship is principally funded by Oxford University Press in association with colleges and other partnership awards. In 2016, Oxford University announced that it is to run its first free online economics course as part of a "massive open online course" (MOOC) scheme, in partnership with a US online university network. The course available is called 'From Poverty to Prosperity: Understanding Economic Development'.
Students successful in early examinations are rewarded by their colleges with scholarships and exhibitions, normally the result of a long-standing endowment, although since the introduction of tuition fees the amounts of money available are purely nominal. Scholars, and exhibitioners in some colleges, are entitled to wear a more voluminous undergraduate gown; "commoners" (originally those who had to pay for their "commons", or food and lodging) are restricted to a short, sleeveless garment. The term "scholar" in relation to Oxford therefore has a specific meaning as well as the more general meaning of someone of outstanding academic ability. In previous times, there were "noblemen commoners" and "gentlemen commoners", but these ranks were abolished in the 19th century. "Closed" scholarships, available only to candidates who fitted specific conditions such as coming from specific schools, were abolished in the 1970s and 1980s.
=== Libraries ===
The university maintains the largest university library system in the UK, and, with over 11 million volumes housed on 120 miles (190 km) of shelving, the Bodleian group is the second-largest library in the UK, after the British Library. The Bodleian is a legal deposit library, which means that it is entitled to request a free copy of every book published in the UK. As such, its collection is growing at a rate of over three miles (five kilometres) of shelving every year.
The buildings referred to as the university's main research library, The Bodleian, consist of the original Bodleian Library in the Old Schools Quadrangle, founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 and opened in 1602, the Radcliffe Camera, the Clarendon Building, and the Weston Library. A tunnel underneath Broad Street connects these buildings, with the Gladstone Link, which opened to readers in 2011, connecting the Old Bodleian and Radcliffe Camera.
The Bodleian Libraries group was formed in 2000, bringing the Bodleian Library and some of the subject libraries together. It now comprises 28 libraries, a number of which have been created by bringing previously separate collections together, including the Sackler Library, Law Library, Social Science Library and Radcliffe Science Library. Another major product of this collaboration has been a joint integrated library system, OLIS (Oxford Libraries Information System), and its public interface, SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online), which provides an electronic catalogue covering all member libraries, as well as the libraries of individual colleges and other faculty libraries, which are not members of the group but do share cataloguing information.
A new book depository opened in South Marston, Swindon, in October 2010, and recent building projects include the remodelling of the New Bodleian building, which was renamed the Weston Library when it reopened in 2015. The renovation is designed to better showcase the library's various treasures (which include a Shakespeare First Folio and a Gutenberg Bible) as well as temporary exhibitions.
The Bodleian engaged in a mass-digitisation project with Google in 2004. Notable electronic resources hosted by the Bodleian Group include the Electronic Enlightenment Project, which was awarded the 2010 Digital Prize by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
=== Museums ===
Oxford maintains a number of museums and galleries, open for free to the public. The Ashmolean Museum, founded in 1683, is the oldest museum in the UK, and the oldest university museum in the world. It holds significant collections of art and archaeology, including works by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Turner, and Picasso, as well as treasures such as the Scorpion Macehead, the Parian Marble and the Alfred Jewel. It also contains "The Messiah", a pristine Stradivarius violin, regarded by some as one of the finest examples in existence.
The University Museum of Natural History holds the university's zoological, entomological and geological specimens. It is housed in a large neo-Gothic building on Parks Road, in the university's Science Area. Among its collection are the skeletons of a Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, and the most complete remains of a dodo found anywhere in the world. It also hosts the Simonyi Professorship of the Public Understanding of Science, currently held by Marcus du Sautoy.
Adjoining the Museum of Natural History is the Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in 1884, which displays the university's archaeological and anthropological collections, currently holding over 500,000 items. It recently built a new research annexe; its staff have been involved with the teaching of anthropology at Oxford since its foundation, when as part of his donation General Augustus Pitt Rivers stipulated that the university establish a lectureship in anthropology.
The Museum of the History of Science is housed on Broad Street in the world's oldest-surviving purpose-built museum building. It contains 15,000 artefacts, from antiquity to the 20th century, representing almost all aspects of the history of science. In the Faculty of Music on St Aldate's is the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, a collection mostly of instruments from Western classical music, from the medieval period onwards. Christ Church Picture Gallery holds a large collection of old master paintings and drawings.
=== Publishing ===
The Oxford University Press is the world's second oldest and currently the largest university press by the number of publications. More than 6,000 new books are published annually, including many reference, professional, and academic works (such as the Oxford English Dictionary, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the Oxford World's Classics, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the Concise Dictionary of National Biography).
=== Reputation and ranking ===
Due to its age and its social and academic status, the University of Oxford is considered to be one of Britain's most prestigious or elite universities and to form, along with the University of Cambridge, a top two that stand above other UK universities in this regard.
Oxford is regularly ranked within the top five universities in the world in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, as well as the Forbes's World University Rankings. It held the number one position in the Times Good University Guide for eleven consecutive years, and the medical school has also maintained first place in the "Clinical, Pre-Clinical & Health" table of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings for the past seven consecutive years. In 2021, it ranked sixth among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. The THE has also recognised Oxford as one of the world's "six super brands" on its World Reputation Rankings, along with Berkeley, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. The university is fourth worldwide on the US News ranking. Its Saïd Business School came 13th in the world in Financial Times Global MBA Ranking.
The university was ranked first in the world in Time magazine's 2026 ranking. Oxford was ranked 13th in the world in 2022 by the Nature Index, which measures the largest contributors to papers published in 82 leading journals. It is ranked fifth best university worldwide and first in Britain for forming CEOs according to the Professional Ranking World Universities, and first in the UK for the quality of its graduates as chosen by the recruiters of the UK's major companies.
In the 2018 Complete University Guide, all 38 subjects offered by Oxford rank within the top 10 nationally meaning Oxford was one of only two multi-faculty universities (along with Cambridge) in the UK to have 100% of their subjects in the top 10. Computer Science, Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and Psychology were ranked first in the UK by the guide.
According to the QS World University Rankings by Subject, the University of Oxford also ranks as number one in the world for four Humanities disciplines: English Language and Literature, Modern Languages, Geography, and History. It also ranks second globally for Anthropology, Archaeology, Law, Medicine, Politics & International Studies, and Psychology.
== Student life ==
=== Traditions ===
Academic dress is required for examinations, matriculation, disciplinary hearings, and when visiting university officers. A referendum held among the Oxford student body in 2015 showed 76% against making it voluntary in examinations – 8,671 students voted, with the 40.2% turnout the highest ever for a UK student union referendum. This was widely interpreted by students as being a vote not so much on making subfusc voluntary, but, in effect, on abolishing it by default, in that if a minority of people came to exams without subfusc, the rest would soon follow. In July 2012 the regulations regarding academic dress were modified to be more inclusive to transgender people.
'Trashing' is a tradition of spraying those who just finished their last examination of the year with alcohol, flour and confetti. The sprayed student stays in the academic dress worn to the exam. The custom began in the 1970s when friends of students taking their finals waited outside Oxford's Examination Schools where exams for most degrees are taken. Other traditions and customs vary by college. For example, some colleges have formal hall six times a week, but in others this only happens occasionally, or even not at all. Balls are major events held by colleges; the largest, held triennially in ninth week of Trinity Term, are known as commemoration balls; the dress code is usually white tie. Many other colleges hold smaller events during the year that they call summer balls or parties.
=== Clubs and societies ===
The Oxford Union (distinct from Oxford University Student Union) is an independent debating society which hosts weekly debates and high-profile speakers. Party political groups include Oxford University Conservative Association and Oxford University Labour Club. Most academic areas have student societies of some form, for example the Scientific Society.
There are two weekly student newspapers: the independent Cherwell and OUSU's The Oxford Student. Other publications include the Isis magazine, the satirical Oxymoron, the graduate Oxonian Review, the Oxford Political Review, and the online only newspaper The Oxford Blue. The student radio station is Oxide Radio.
Sport is played between college teams, in tournaments known as cuppers (the term is also used for some non-sporting competitions). In particular, much attention is given to the termly intercollegiate rowing regattas: Christ Church Regatta, Torpids, and Summer Eights. In addition, there are higher standard university wide teams. Significant focus is given to annual varsity matches played against Cambridge, the most famous of which is The Boat Race, watched by a TV audience of between five and ten million viewers. A blue is an award given to those who compete at the university team level in certain sports.
Music, drama, and other arts societies exist both at the collegiate level and as university-wide groups, such as the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Oxford Revue. Most colleges have chapel choirs. The Oxford Imps, a comedy improvisation troupe, perform weekly at The Jericho Tavern during term time.
Private members' clubs for students include Vincent's Club (primarily for sportspeople) and The Gridiron Club. A number of invitation-only student dining clubs also exist, including the Bullingdon Club.
=== Student union and common rooms ===
The Oxford University Student Union, formerly better known by its acronym OUSU and now rebranded as Oxford SU, exists to represent students in the university's decision-making, to act as the voice for students in the national higher education policy debate, and to provide direct services to the student body. Reflecting the collegiate nature of the University of Oxford itself, OUSU is both an association of Oxford's more than 21,000 individual students and a federation of the affiliated college common rooms, and other affiliated organisations that represent subsets of the undergraduate and graduate students.
The importance of collegiate life is such that for many students their college JCR (Junior Common Room, for undergraduates) or MCR (Middle Common Room, for graduates) is seen as more important than OUSU. JCRs and MCRs each have a committee, with a president and other elected students representing their peers to college authorities. Additionally, they organise events and often have significant budgets to spend as they wish (money coming from their colleges and sometimes other sources such as student-run bars).
== Notable alumni ==
Throughout its history, a sizeable number of Oxford alumni, known as Oxonians, have become notable in many varied fields, both academic and otherwise. More than 70 Nobel prize-winners have studied or taught at Oxford, with prizes won in all six categories.
More information on notable members of the university can be found in the individual college articles. An individual may be associated with two or more colleges, as an undergraduate, postgraduate or member of staff.
Notable alumni include three Fields Medallists, two British kings and at least fifteen monarchs of eleven other sovereign states (including five reigning monarchs), thirty-one British prime ministers, and thirty-five presidents and prime ministers of nineteen other countries. As of July 2019 there are seven Oxonians in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom and two in the Shadow Cabinet.
The university has produced 291 Members of Parliament (excluding MPs who were subsequently peers), eleven Members of the European Parliament (excluding MEPs also serving at Westminster), twelve Lord Chancellors, nine Lord Chief Justices and twenty-two law lords; ten US Senators, ten US Representatives (including a Speaker of the House), three state governors, and four associate justices of the US Supreme Court; as well as six puisne justices of the Supreme Court of Canada and a chief justice of the now defunct Federal Court of Canada.
== Oxford in literature and popular media ==
The University of Oxford is the setting for numerous works of fiction. Oxford was mentioned in fiction as early as 1400 when Chaucer, in Canterbury Tales, referred to a "Clerk [student] of Oxenford". Mortimer Proctor argues the first campus novel was The Adventures of Oxymel Classic, Esq; Once an Oxford Scholar (1768). It is filled with violence and debauchery, with obnoxious, foolish dons becoming easy prey for cunning students. Proctor argues that by 1900, "novels about Oxford and Cambridge were so numerous that they clearly represent a striking literary phenomenon." By 1989, 533 novels based in Oxford had been identified and the number continues to rise.
Famous literary works range from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, which in 1981 was adapted as a television serial, to the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, which features an alternate-reality version of the university and was adapted for film in 2007 and as a BBC television series in 2019.
Other notable examples include:
Zuleika Dobson (1911) by Max Beerbohm, a satire about undergraduate life.
Gaudy Night (1935) by Dorothy L. Sayers, herself a graduate of Somerville College, a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novel.
The Inspector Morse detective novels (1975–1999) by Colin Dexter, adapted for television as Inspector Morse (1987–2000), the spin-off Lewis (2006–2015), and the prequel Endeavour (2012–2023).
True Blue (1996), a film about the mutiny at the time of the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race of 1987.
The History Boys (2004) by Alan Bennett, alumnus of Exeter College, a play about a group of grammar school boys in Sheffield in 1983 applying to read history at Oxford and Cambridge. It premiered at the National Theatre and was adapted for film in 2006.
Posh (2010), a play by Laura Wade, and its film adaptation The Riot Club (2014), about a fictionalised equivalent of the Bullingdon Club.
Testament of Youth (2014), a drama film based on the memoir of the same name written by Somerville alumna Vera Brittain.
Notable non-fiction works on Oxford include Oxford by Jan Morris. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand | Stewart Brand | Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Other organizations he has founded include the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto and Maintenance: Of Everything.
== Life ==
Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He studied biology at Stanford University under Paul R. Ehrlich, graduating in 1960. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he later expressed the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing.
A civilian again in 1962, he moved back to California, where he has mostly lived since. He studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a scientific study of then-legal LSD with Myron Stolaroff's International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park, California.
Brand became acquainted with Richard Raymond, a land-use and community-development expert turned entrepreneur, who had established a nonprofit society, the Portola Institute in Menlo Park. Raymond had become a consultant to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation and recommended Brand for a job there as a photographer.
In 1966, Brand married the mathematician Lois Jennings, a half-Odawa Native American. The couple divorced in 1973.
Brand met Ryan Phelan when she applied for a job to work at Whole Earth Catalog, and the two married in 1983. The couple lives on Mirene, a 64-foot (20 m)-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California. He works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards (90 metres) away. One of his favorite items is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" (Brand acquired it from an antiques dealer in Sausalito).
== USCO and Merry Pranksters ==
By the mid-1960s, Brand became associated with New York multimedia group USCO and Bay Area author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Brand co-produced the 1966 Trips Festival, an early effort blending rock music and light shows, with Kesey and Ramón Sender Barayón. The Trips Festival was among the first Grateful Dead performances in San Francisco. An estimated 10,000 hippies attended, and Haight-Ashbury soon emerged as the epicenter of an emerging counterculture, with the Summer of Love in 1967. Tom Wolfe includes Brand in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
== NASA images of Earth ==
In 1966, while on an LSD trip on the roof of his house in North Beach, San Francisco, Brand became convinced that seeing an image of the whole Earth would change how we think about the planet and ourselves. He then campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each, asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" During this campaign, Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help Brand with his projects. In 1967, a satellite, ATS-3, took the photo. Brand thought the image of our planet would be a powerful symbol; it adorned the first (Fall 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Later in 1968, NASA astronaut Bill Anders took an Earth photo, Earthrise, from Moon orbit, which became the front image of the spring 1969 edition of the Catalog. 1970 saw the first celebration of Earth Day. During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth's an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it's so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum."
== Douglas Engelbart ==
In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with the Mother of All Demos, a presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email, and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
Brand surmised that given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings could reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable.
== Whole Earth Catalog ==
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. In 1968, using the most basic approaches to typesetting and page layout, Brand and his colleagues created issue number one of the Whole Earth Catalog, employing the subtitle "access to tools". The Portola Institute provided financial support for Brand's brainchild. Until 1980, editions of the Whole Earth Catalog were published by the Portola Institute. Brand and his wife, Lois, traveled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which (as a division of the Portola Institute) moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California. That first oversized Catalog, and its successors from the 1970s to the last (in 1994), reckoned a wide assortment of things could serve as useful "tools": books, maps, garden implements, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers, and personal computers. It also comprised ideas, stories, examples of successful projects, mentors like Buckminster Fuller, and the experiences of many pioneers. The catalog anticipated social media by reflecting its readers' contemporary experiences in the world. Brand invited "reviews" (written in the form of a letter to a friend) of the best of these items from experts in specific fields or from ordinary people with experience. The catalog described where these things could be located or purchased, if they could be, or how they could be created. Its publication coincided with the wave of social and cultural experimentation, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the counterculture.
The Whole Earth Catalog had widespread influence within the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia. The 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies, winning the first U.S. National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category.
Steve Jobs ended his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University by acknowledging both Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, quoting its farewell message: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish".
== CoEvolution Quarterly ==
To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, in numerous areas of the arts and the social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general, Brand founded CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974, aimed primarily at educated laypeople. Brand never better revealed his opinions and reason for hope than when he ran, in CoEvolution Quarterly #4, a transcription of technology historian Lewis Mumford's talk "The Next Transformation of Man", in which he stated that "man has still within him sufficient resources to alter the direction of modern civilization, for we then need no longer regard man as the passive victim of his own irreversible technological development".
The content of CoEvolution Quarterly often included futurism or risqué topics. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something to say, Brand presented articles by many respected authors and thinkers, including Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, Orville Schell, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Gerard K. O'Neill, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, Kevin Kelly, and Donella Meadows. In the ensuing years, Brand authored and edited a number of books on topics as diverse as computer-based media, the life history of buildings, and ideas about space colonies.
He founded the Whole Earth Software Review, a supplement to the Whole Earth Software Catalog, in 1984. It merged with CoEvolution Quarterly to form the Whole Earth Review in 1985.
== California government ==
From 1977 to 1979, Brand served as "special advisor" to the administration of California Governor Jerry Brown.
== The WELL ==
In 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for informed participants the world over. The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association.
== All Species Foundation ==
In 2000, Brand helped launch the All Species Foundation, which aimed to catalog all species of life on Earth. The project ceased functioning in 2007, transferring its mission to the Encyclopedia of Life.
== Global Business Network ==
During 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Soon after, he became a private-conference organizer for such corporations as Royal Dutch Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. In 1988, he became a co‑founder of the Global Business Network, which became involved with the evolution and application of scenario thinking, planning, and complementary strategic tools. For fourteen years, Brand was on the board of the Santa Fe Institute (founded in 1984), an organization devoted to "fostering a multidisciplinary scientific research community pursuing frontier science". He has also continued to promote the preservation of tracts of wilderness.
== Whole Earth Discipline ==
The Whole Earth Catalog implied an ideal of human progress that depended on decentralized, personal, and liberating technological development—so‑called "soft technology". However, in 2005, Brand criticized aspects of the international environmental ideology he had helped to develop. He wrote an article called "Environmental Heresies" in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review, in which he described what he considered necessary changes to environmentalism. He suggested, among other things, that environmentalists embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk.
Brand later developed these ideas into a book and published Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto in 2009. The book examines how urbanization, nuclear power, genetic engineering, geoengineering, and wildlife restoration can be used as powerful tools in humanity's ongoing fight against global warming.
In a 2019 interview, Brand described his perspective as "post-libertarian", indicating that at the time when the Whole Earth Catalog was being written, he did not fully understand the significance of the role of government in the development of technology and engineering. In his environmental position, he self-describes as an "eco-pragmatist".
== Long Now Foundation ==
Brand is co‑chair and president of the board of directors of the Long Now Foundation and chairs the foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking. This series on long-term thinking has presented a range of speakers, including Brian Eno, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Philip Rosedale, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, and Cory Doctorow. The Long Now Foundation has worked with Jeff Bezos to build the 10,000 Year Clock.
Brand is the subject of the 2021 documentary film We Are As Gods.
== Works ==
Stewart Brand is the initiator or was involved with the development of the following:
Whole Earth Catalog in 1968
CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974
Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review in 1984
Whole Earth Review in 1985
Point Foundation
Global Business Network (co-founder)
The WELL in 1985, with Larry Brilliant
The Hackers Conference in 1984
Long Now Foundation in 1996, with computer scientist Danny Hillis—one of the foundation's projects is to build a 10,000 year clock, the Clock of the Long Now
New Games Tournament (was involved initially but left the project)
In April 2015, Brand joined with a group of scholars in issuing An Ecomodernist Manifesto. The other authors included: Barry Brook, Ruth DeFries, Erle Ellis, David Keith, Mark Lynas, Ted Nordhaus, Roger A. Pielke Jr., Michael Shellenberger, and Robert Stone.
== Publications ==
=== Books ===
II Cybernetic Frontiers, 1974, ISBN 0-394-49283-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-394-70689-7 (paperback)
The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987, ISBN 0-670-81442-3 (hardcover); 1988, ISBN 0-14-009701-5 (paperback)
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, 1994. ISBN 0-670-83515-3
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 1999. ISBN 0-465-04512-X
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Viking Adult, 2009. ISBN 0-670-02121-0
The Salt Summaries: Seminars About Long-term Thinking, Long Now Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-105-75187-5 (paperback)
Maintenance: Of Everything, Stripe Press, 2025. ISBN 978-1-953953-51-3
=== Editor or co-editor ===
Whole Earth Catalog, original editor, 1968–1972 – winner of the National Book Award, 1972
Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1971
Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools, 1974, ISBN 0-14-003950-3
The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 16th edition, 1975, ISBN 0-14-003544-3
Space Colonies, Whole Earth Catalog, 1977, ISBN 0-14-004805-7
Soft-Tech, co-editor with J. Baldwin, 1978, ISBN 0-14-004806-5
The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1980, ISBN 0-394-73951-5
The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, revised 2nd edition, 1981, ISBN 0-394-70776-1
Whole Earth Software Catalog, editor-in-chief, 1984, ISBN 0-385-19166-9
Whole Earth Software Catalog for 1986, editor-in-chief, 1985, ISBN 0-385-23301-9 – "2.0 edition" of above title
News That Stayed News, 1974–1984: Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly, co-editor with Art Kleiner, 1986, ISBN 0-86547-201-7 (hardcover), ISBN 0-86547-202-5 (paperback)
=== Contributor ===
The Essential Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas, 1986, ISBN 0-385-23641-7 – introduction
Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age, edited by Kevin Kelly, 1988, ISBN 0-517-57084-X – foreword
The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Ted Schultz, 1989, ISBN 0-517-57165-X – foreword
Whole Earth Ecolog: The Best of Environmental Tools & Ideas, edited by J. Baldwin, 1990, ISBN 0-517-57658-9 – foreword |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift | Taylor Swift | Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. An influential figure in popular culture, she is known for her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions. Swift is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and debuted as a country singer with the albums Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008). The singles "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Love Story", and "You Belong with Me" found crossover success on country and pop radio formats. Speak Now (2010) expanded her country pop sound with rock influences, while Red (2012) explored electronic influences. Swift recalibrated her artistic identity from country to pop with the synth-pop album 1989 (2014), while ensuing media scrutiny inspired hip-hop–imbued Reputation (2017). Through the 2010s, she accumulated the US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Bad Blood", and "Look What You Made Me Do".
Shifting to Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the eclectic pop album Lover (2019) and re-recorded four of her first six albums due to a dispute with Big Machine. She explored indie folk on the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, synth-pop on Midnights (2022) and The Tortured Poets Department (2024), and soft rock on The Life of a Showgirl (2025). The singles "Cardigan", "Willow", "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)", "Anti-Hero", "Cruel Summer", "Is It Over Now?", "Fortnight", "The Fate of Ophelia", and "Opalite" topped the Hot 100. Her Eras Tour (2023–2024) and its associated film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023), are the highest-grossing concert tour and concert film of all time.
Swift is the only artist to have been named the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year six times. A record eight of her albums have each sold over a million copies first-week in the US. Publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard have ranked Swift among the greatest artists of all time. She is the first individual from the arts to be named Time Person of the Year (2023) and the youngest female inductee of the Songwriters Hall of Fame (2026). Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards—including a record four Album of the Year wins—and a Primetime Emmy Award. Swift is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards. A subject of extensive media coverage, she has a global fanbase called Swifties.
== Life and career ==
=== Early life ===
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania. She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor; her parents chose a unisex name, hoping it would help her succeed in business. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. Swift's younger brother, Austin, is an actor. The siblings are of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Irish and Italian ancestry; they are paternal great-great-grandchildren of Charles Carmine Antonio Baldi, a prominent Philadelphia businessman. Their maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (née Moehlenkamp), was an opera singer whose singing in church became one of Swift's earliest memories of music.
During childhood, Swift spent her holiday seasons on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, and summers at her family's vacation home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she occasionally performed acoustic songs at a local coffee shop. Raised Christian, she attended preschool and kindergarten at a Montessori school run by the Bernardine Sisters of St. Francis before transferring to the Wyndcroft School in Pottstown. When her family moved to Wyomissing, she attended Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School. At age nine, she aspired to a career in musical theater, performing at local festivals and in Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions, and traveling regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, she changed her goal and became determined to pursue a country music career in Nashville, Tennessee.
At the age of 11, Swift traveled to Nashville with her mother to visit record labels and submit demo tapes of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. She was rejected by all the labels, which led her to focus on songwriting. She started learning the guitar at the age of 12 with the help of a computer repairman and local musician who assisted Swift in writing an original song. In 2003, she and her parents started working with the talent manager Dan Dymtrow. With his help, Swift modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch, had an original song included on a Maybelline compilation CD, and was given an artist development deal from RCA Records at 13. To help Swift break into the country music scene, her father transferred to Merrill Lynch's Nashville office when she was 14 years old, and the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift attended Hendersonville High School for two years before transferring to Aaron Academy, which offered homeschooling.
=== 2004–2008: Career beginnings and Taylor Swift ===
Swift signed with Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing in 2004; at 14, she became the youngest person in that publishing company's history. In Nashville, she worked with experienced Music Row songwriters, including Liz Rose. Rose and Swift would write songs every Tuesday afternoon after school. After one year on the development deal, she left RCA Records, which decided to keep her in development until she turned 18. Swift made this decision because she wanted to release the songs immediately to ensure that they still resonated with her teenage experiences.
Swift organized a showcase concert at the Bluebird Cafe on November 3, 2004; among the attendees was Scott Borchetta, a music executive who was planning to establish an independent record label, Big Machine Records. She signed a recording contract with Big Machine two weeks after the concert, on the condition that her albums would be written by herself; her father purchased a three-percent stake in the company. The contract was finalized by July 2005, when Swift ended the working relationship with Dymtrow. She spent four months near the end of 2005 recording her debut album, Taylor Swift, with the producer Nathan Chapman.
Swift's debut single, "Tim McGraw", was released in June 2006. She and her mother spent mid-2006 sending promotional copies of the song to country radio stations across the US. Taylor Swift was released on October 24, 2006. On the US Billboard 200 chart, the album peaked at number five and spent 157 weeks on the chart—the longest chart run by an album in the 2000s. With Taylor Swift, she became the first female country music artist to write or co-write every track on a platinum-certified debut album. The album was promoted by a six-month radio tour and by Swift opening for other country artists, including Rascal Flatts in 2006, and George Strait, Brad Paisley, and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in 2007. She opened for Rascal Flatts again in 2008, when she dated the singer Joe Jonas.
Taylor Swift was supported by four more singles in 2007 and 2008: "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Our Song", "Picture to Burn", and "Should've Said No". "Our Song" and "Should've Said No" reached number one on the Hot Country Songs chart; with the former single, Swift became the youngest person to single-handedly write and sing a number-one country single. "Teardrops on My Guitar" was Swift's breakthrough single on mainstream radio and charts, reaching the top 10 of the Pop Songs, Adult Pop Songs, and Adult Contemporary charts. Her next releases were the Christmas extended play (EP) The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection in October 2007, and the Walmart-exclusive EP Beautiful Eyes in July 2008. Swift became the youngest person to be awarded with the Nashville Songwriters Association's Songwriter/Artist of the Year in 2007.
=== 2008–2010: Fearless ===
Swift's second album, Fearless, was released on November 11, 2008, in North America, and in March 2009 in other markets. Fearless spent eleven weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, becoming her first chart topper and the longest-running number-one female country album; it was the best-selling album of 2009 in the US. The album's lead single, "Love Story", became the first country song to top the Pop Songs chart, and its third single, "You Belong with Me", was the first country song to top Billboard's all-genre Radio Songs chart; both reached the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 chart and peaked atop the Hot Country Songs chart. Three other singles—"White Horse", "Fifteen", "Fearless"—all reached the top 10 of Hot Country Songs. In 2009, Swift opened for Keith Urban's tour and embarked on her first headlining tour, the Fearless Tour.
Fearless became the most-awarded country album of all time. It won the three highest awards for a country album: Album of the Year by both the Country Music Association Awards and Academy of Country Music Awards in 2009, and Best Country Album by the Grammy Awards in 2010. At the Grammys, it also won Album of the Year, and "White Horse" won Best Country Song and Best Female Country Vocal Performance. Also in 2009, Swift was named Artist of the Year by both the American Music Awards and Billboard, and Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association Awards, becoming the youngest person to win the honor. "You Belong with Me" won Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. Her acceptance speech was interrupted by the rapper Kanye West, an incident that became the subject of controversy and widespread media coverage.
Swift collaborated with other musicians in 2009. She featured on "Half of My Heart" by John Mayer, with whom she was romantically linked later that year. She wrote "Best Days of Your Life" for Kellie Pickler, co-wrote and featured on Boys Like Girls' "Two Is Better Than One, and wrote and recorded "You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home" and "Crazier" for the soundtrack of Hannah Montana: The Movie, in which she had a cameo appearance. She had her acting debut in the 2010 rom-com Valentine's Day and wrote "Today Was a Fairytale" for its soundtrack. "Today Was a Fairytale" reached number one on the Canadian Hot 100. While shooting Valentine's Day in October 2009, Swift dated co-star Taylor Lautner. On television, she made her debut as a rebellious teenager in a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode and hosted and performed as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live; she was the first host to write their own opening monologue.
=== 2010–2014: Speak Now and Red ===
Swift wrote her third album, Speak Now, entirely by herself. Released on October 25, 2010, Speak Now expands on the country pop sound of Fearless and incorporates strong rock music influences. Speak Now debuted atop the US Billboard 200 with over one million first-week copies sold, registering the highest single-week tally for a female country artist. Five of its singles—"Mine", "Back to December", "Mean", "Sparks Fly", and "Ours"—charted in the top three of Hot Country Songs; "Sparks Fly" and "Ours" reached number one. "Mine" peaked at number three and was the highest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100.
Swift embarked on the Speak Now World Tour from February 2011 to March 2012. In 2011, Swift was honored as Woman of the Year by Billboard, Entertainer of the Year by both the Academy of Country Music Awards and the Country Music Association Awards, and Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards. She again won Entertainment of the Year by the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2012. At the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012, "Mean" won Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance. After the release of Speak Now, Swift dated the actor Jake Gyllenhaal.
On October 22, 2012, Swift released her fourth album, Red, which featured collaborations with Chapman and new producers including Max Martin, Shellback, Dan Wilson, Jeff Bhasker, Dann Huff, and Butch Walker. Conceived as a record that expanded beyond Swift's country pop releases, Red incorporates eclectic styles of pop and rock, such as Britrock, dubstep, and dance-pop, leading to a critical debate over Swift's status as a country musician. The album opened at number one on the Billboard 200 with 1.21 million sales, becoming the fastest-selling country album in US history. It was Swift's first number-one album in the UK. During the promotion of Red, Swift was romantically involved with the political heir Conor Kennedy, and subsequently the singer Harry Styles.
The two most successful singles from Red, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "I Knew You Were Trouble", peaked at numbers one and two on the Billboard Hot 100. Both songs also reached the top five on the UK singles chart, and the former was Swift's first chart topper in the US. Two other singles, "Begin Again" and "Red", peaked in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100; while two others, "Everything Has Changed" and "22", reached the top 10 on the UK singles chart. The Red Tour ran from March 2013 to June 2014 and became the highest-grossing country tour with revenue of $150.2 million upon completion. Swift was named Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards in 2013.
Swift wrote and recorded two songs for the soundtrack album to the 2012 dystopian film The Hunger Games: "Eyes Open" and "Safe & Sound". The latter, which was co-written with the Civil Wars and T-Bone Burnett, won the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media in 2013. She wrote and recorded "Sweeter than Fiction" for the soundtrack to the 2013 biographical film One Chance, and featured as a guest vocalist on B.o.B's 2012 single "Both of Us" and Tim McGraw's 2013 single "Highway Don't Care". Her acting roles included a voice acting role in the 2012 animated film The Lorax, a cameo in a 2013 episode of the sitcom New Girl, and a supporting role in the 2014 dystopian film The Giver.
=== 2014–2018: 1989 and Reputation ===
Swift relocated from Nashville to New York City in March 2014 and transformed her image from country to pop with her fifth album, 1989. She produced 1989 with Martin, Shellback, Chapman, and new collaborators Jack Antonoff, Imogen Heap, Ryan Tedder, and Ali Payami. Rooted in 1980s synth-pop, 1989 incorporates upbeat dance and electronic arrangements of synthesizers, drum machines, and processed vocals. Released on October 27, 2014, the album spent eleven weeks at number one and one year in the top 10 of the Billboard 200. It has sold 14 million copies worldwide, becoming Swift's best-selling album.
Three of 1989's singles—"Shake It Off", "Blank Space", and "Bad Blood"—reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100; the first two made Swift the first woman to replace herself at the top spot. Two other singles—"Style" and "Wildest Dreams"—peaked at numbers six and five, making 1989 the first album by Swift to have five consecutive top 10 singles on the Hot 100. The 1989 World Tour was the highest-grossing tour of 2015 with $250 million in revenue. She was named Billboard's Woman of the Year and received the inaugural Dick Clark Award for Excellence at the American Music Awards in 2014, and "Bad Blood" won Video of the Year and Best Collaboration at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. At the 58th Annual Grammy Awards in 2016, 1989 made Swift the first woman to win Album of the Year twice; it also won Best Pop Vocal Album, and "Bad Blood" won Best Music Video.
During the promotion of 1989, Swift publicly opposed free music streaming services. She published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in July 2014 to stress the importance of albums as a creative medium for artists, and, in November, removed her discography from ad-supported, free streaming platforms such as Spotify. Big Machine kept her music only on paid, subscription-required platforms. In a June 2015 open letter, Swift criticized Apple Music for not offering royalties to artists during its free three-month trial period and threatened to withdraw her music from the platform, prompting Apple Inc. to announce that it would pay artists during the free trial period. Big Machine returned Swift's catalog to Spotify and other free streaming platforms in June 2017.
Swift dated the DJ Calvin Harris from March 2015 to June 2016. They co-wrote the EDM single "This Is What You Came For", which featured vocals from Rihanna; Swift was initially credited under the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg. "Better Man", the 2016 single which Swift wrote for the country vocal group Little Big Town, won the Country Music Association Award for Song of the Year. She recorded "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" with Zayn Malik for the soundtrack to the 2017 film Fifty Shades Darker; the song became the highest-charting single from the Fifty Shades franchise on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number two.
In April 2016, Kanye West released the single "Famous", in which he references Swift in the line, "I made that bitch famous." Swift criticized West and said she never consented to the lyric, but West claimed that he had received her approval, and his then-wife, Kim Kardashian, released video clips of Swift and West discussing the song amicably over the phone. Although the clips were proven to be purposefully edited, the controversy made Swift a subject of an online "cancel" movement, in which her critics denounced her as a fake and calculating "snake". In late 2016, after briefly dating the actor Tom Hiddleston, Swift began a six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn and went on hiatus.
In August 2017, Swift countersued and won a case against David Mueller, a former radio jockey for KYGO-FM, who sued her for damages from loss of employment. Four years earlier, she informed Mueller's employer that he had sexually assaulted her by groping her at an event. Public controversies influenced Swift's sixth album, Reputation, which explores themes of fame, drama, and finding love amidst the tumultuous affairs. A primarily electropop album, its maximalist production experiments with urban styles of hip-hop and R&B. Released on November 10, 2017, Reputation opened atop the Billboard 200 with 1.21 million US sales and also reached number one in Australia, Canada, and the UK.
Reputation's lead single, "Look What You Made Me Do", topped the Billboard Hot 100 with the highest sales and streaming week of 2017, and was Swift's first UK number-one single. The singles "...Ready for It?", "End Game", and "Delicate" were released to pop radio and all peaked in the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. In 2018, Swift featured on Sugarland's "Babe", surpassed Whitney Houston as the most-awarded female musician at the American Music Awards, and embarked on the Reputation Stadium Tour, which grossed $345.7 million worldwide.
=== 2018–2021: Lover, Folklore, and Evermore ===
In November 2018, Swift signed a record deal with Universal Music Group, which promoted her albums under Republic Records' imprint. The contract included a provision allowing Swift to maintain ownership of her master recordings. In addition, if Universal sold any part of its stake in Spotify, it agreed to distribute a non-recoupable portion of the proceeds to its artists.
Swift's first album with Republic Records and seventh overall, Lover, was released on August 23, 2019. She produced the album with Antonoff, Louis Bell, Frank Dukes, and Joel Little. Lover peaked atop the charts of such countries as Australia, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US, and was the global best-selling album by a solo artist of 2019. Three of its singles—"Me!", "You Need to Calm Down", and "Lover"—were released in 2019 and peaked in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. "The Man" was released in 2020 and charted highly, and "Cruel Summer" became a resurgent success in 2023, reaching number one.
In 2019, Swift was honored as Artist of the Decade by the American Music Awards and Woman of the Decade by Billboard, and became the first female artist to win Video of the Year for a self-directed video with "You Need to Calm Down" at the MTV Video Music Awards. During the promotion of Lover, Swift became embroiled in a public dispute with the talent manager Scooter Braun after he purchased Big Machine Records, including the masters of her albums under the label. Swift said that Big Machine would allow her to acquire the masters only if she exchanged one new album for each older one under a new contract, which she refused to sign. In November 2020, Swift began re-recording her back catalog, which would enable her to control the licensing of her songs for commercial use.
In February 2020, Swift signed a global publishing deal with Universal Music Publishing Group after her 16-year contract with Sony/ATV expired. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Swift surprise-released two "sister albums" that she recorded and produced with Antonoff and Aaron Dessner: Folklore on July 24, and Evermore on December 11. Joe Alwyn co-wrote and co-produced several songs under the pseudonym William Bowery. Both albums incorporate muted, atmospheric indie folk and indie rock sounds with orchestrations; each was supported by three singles catering to US pop, country, and triple A radio formats. The singles were "Cardigan", "Betty", and "Exile" from Folklore, and "Willow", "No Body, No Crime", and "Coney Island" from Evermore. Folklore and "Cardigan" made Swift the first artist to debut a number-one album and a number-one song in the same week in the US; she achieved the feat again with Evermore and "Willow".
Swift won Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards in 2020 and Album of the Year for Folklore at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards in 2021, becoming the first woman to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year three times. She played Bombalurina in the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats (2019), for which she co-wrote and recorded the original song "Beautiful Ghosts". The documentary Miss Americana, which chronicled parts of Swift's life and career, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and received positive reviews.
=== 2021–2023: Re-recordings and Midnights ===
Swift released two re-recorded albums in 2021: Fearless (Taylor's Version) in April and Red (Taylor's Version) in November. Both peaked atop the Billboard 200, and the former was the first re-recorded album to do so. The latter helped Swift surpass Shania Twain as the female musician with the most weeks at number one on the Top Country Albums chart. The song "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)" from Red (Taylor's Version) became the longest song in history to top the Billboard Hot 100.
Swift's tenth album, Midnights, was released on October 21, 2022. The album features a minimalist electropop and synth-pop sound, with elements of hip-hop, R&B, and electronica. Midnights was Swift's fifth album to open atop the Billboard 200 chart with US first-week sales of one million. Its tracks, led by the single "Anti-Hero", made her the first artist to occupy the entire top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 the same week. The album peaked atop the charts of at least 14 other countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Sweden. Two other singles, "Lavender Haze" and "Karma", both peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100.
In 2023, Swift released two re-recorded albums: Speak Now (Taylor's Version) in July and 1989 (Taylor's Version) in October. The former made Swift the woman with the most number-one albums (12) in the history of the Billboard 200, surpassing Barbra Streisand, and the latter was her sixth album to sell one million US first-week copies. The single "Is It Over Now?" from 1989 (Taylor's Version) peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Swift featured on Big Red Machine's "Renegade" and "Birch" (2021), Haim's "Gasoline" (2021), Ed Sheeran's "The Joker and the Queen" (2022), and the National's "The Alcott" (2023). She wrote and recorded "Carolina" for the soundtrack of the 2022 mystery film Where the Crawdads Sing, and had a supporting role in the 2022 period comedy film Amsterdam.
In 2022, Swift won Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards and Video of the Year for All Too Well: The Short Film, her self-directed short film that accompanies "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)" at the MTV Video Music Awards; All Too Well also won the Grammy Award for Best Music Video. The following year, she again won the MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year with "Anti-Hero", became the first musician to rank at number one on Billboard's year-end top artists list in three different decades (2009, 2015 and 2023), and had five out of the 10 best-selling albums of the year in the US, a record since Luminate began tracking US music sales in 1991. At the 66th Annual Grammy Awards in 2024, Midnights made Swift the first artist to win Album of the Year four times; it also won Best Pop Vocal Album.
=== 2023–present: The Eras Tour, The Tortured Poets Department, and The Life of a Showgirl ===
In March 2023, Swift embarked on the Eras Tour, which she conceived as a tribute to her entire discography. The tour spanned five continents through December 2024. It exerted a global cultural, economic, and political impact and culminated in an unprecedented height of popularity for Swift, resulting in a phenomenon that the media dubbed "Swiftmania". The Eras Tour became the first tour to gross $1 billion in revenue and the highest-grossing tour in history, with $2 billion in total revenue. Its 2023 concert film grossed $250 million to become the highest-grossing of its kind, and its 2024 photobook sold nearly a million copies in its first week in the US, followed by a 2025 documentary miniseries on Disney+. The events that happened during the tour inspired Swift's eleventh and twelfth albums, The Tortured Poets Department (2024) and The Life of a Showgirl (2025).
After splitting from Alwyn in April 2023, Swift dated the musician Matty Healy in May–June. During the run of the Eras Tour, there were controversies surrounding Ticketmaster's monopoly that led to political scrutiny in the US, venue mismanagement that led to a death in Brazil, and Singapore's exclusivity deal that led to political tension in Southeast Asia. In January 2024, AI-generated pornographic images portraying Swift were posted to Twitter and spread to other social media platforms, spurring criticism and demands for legal reform. In July 2024, three children were killed in a stabbing attack at a Swift-themed workshop in Southport, England, leading to civil unrest in the UK. The following month, the Vienna concerts were canceled following the arrest of suspects who planned a terrorist attack.
The Tortured Poets Department was released on April 19, 2024. The same day, it was expanded as a double album, subtitled The Anthology. It became the first album to accumulate one billion streams on Spotify within one week and topped charts of various countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK. In the US, it debuted atop the Billboard 200 with 2.6 million first-week units and stayed at number one for seventeen weeks, becoming Swift's longest-running chart-topping album. The album was the global best-seller of 2024, with 5.6 million pure copies sold. Its songs made her the first artist to monopolize the top fourteen positions of the Billboard Hot 100 the same week; the lead single, "Fortnight", peaked atop the chart, while the second single, "I Can Do It with a Broken Heart", peaked at number three. On May 30, 2025, Swift finalized the purchase of the masters to her first six original albums from Shamrock Holdings, which had acquired them from Braun in 2020.
Swift began dating the football player Travis Kelce in August 2023, with the media dubbing them a "supercouple". They became engaged in August 2025. She introduced The Life of a Showgirl on his podcast New Heights that month. It was released on October 3, 2025, accompanied by the promotional film Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, which topped the US box office and grossed over $50 million worldwide. The Life of a Showgirl debuted atop the Billboard 200 with four million first-week units—3.4 million of which were pure sales—breaking the records for the biggest debut or sales week for any album in the US. It was the best-selling album globally in 2025. The album's tracks occupied the top twelve spots on the Billboard Hot 100, with the lead single, "The Fate of Ophelia", at number one; it later became her first song to top the chart for ten cumulative weeks. "Opalite", the album's second single, also peaked at number one on the Hot 100.
== Artistry ==
=== Musical styles ===
With continuous musical reinventions, Swift was described as a musical "chameleon" by publications such as Time and the BBC. Her discography spans styles of country, pop, and folk, incorporating subgenres like country pop, pop rock, synth-pop, country rock, electropop, and indie rock, with elements of rock, rap, electronica, alternative, indie pop, and R&B. She self-identified as a country musician with her first four albums, from Taylor Swift to Red. Her influences were female country artists of the 1990s, such as Shania Twain, Faith Hill, LeAnn Rimes, and the Dixie Chicks, as well as Keith Urban's country-crossover sound with elements of rock, pop, and blues. The albums feature a country pop sound defined by instruments such as the six-string banjo, mandolin, and fiddle, a slight twang in Swift's vocals, and pop-rock melodies; Speak Now draws on rock styles of the 1970s and 1980s, such as pop rock, pop-punk, and arena rock. Some critics argued that country was an indicator of Swift's songwriting rather than her musical style, and accused her of causing mainstream country to stray from its roots.
Following the critical debate around Red's eclectic sounds, Swift chose 1980s synth-pop as a defining sound for her recalibrated artistry and image, inspired by the music of Phil Collins, Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel, and Madonna. 1989, the first album in this direction, incorporates electronic arrangements consisting of dense synthesizers and drum machines. Swift expanded on the electronic production on her next albums. Reputation consists of hip-hop, R&B, and EDM influences; maximalist arrangements of heavy bass and manipulated vocals; and an emphasis on rhythm. Lover incorporates eclectic sounds from country, pop-punk, and folk rock. Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department both have a minimalist synth-pop sound characterized by analog synthesizers, sustained bass notes, and simple drum machine patterns; and The Life of a Showgirl incorporates pop and soft rock. When Swift embraced a pop identity, rockist critics regarded it as an erosion of her country songwriting authenticity, while others considered it necessary for her artistic evolution and defended her as a pioneer of poptimism.
Her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, described by some critics as "alternative", explore indie folk and rock styles. They incorporate a subtle, stripped-back soundscape with orchestrations, muted synthesizers, and drum pads. Evermore experiments with varied song structures, asymmetric time signatures, and diverse instruments. Critics deemed the indie styles a mature representation of Swift's singer-songwriter status and credited her with popularizing "alternative" music, although there was disagreement over this description.
=== Voice ===
Swift possesses a mezzo-soprano vocal range, but she mostly sings in her alto range. Her pitch, dialect, and accent have undergone many changes throughout her career. Reviews of her early country albums criticized her vocals as weak and strained compared to those of other female country singers. Defenders of Swift appreciated that she refrained from correcting her pitch with Auto-Tune and that she prioritized intimacy and emotion to communicate the messages of her songs with her audience, a style that critics have described as conversational. According to the critic Ann Powers, this singing style is demonstrated through Swift's attention to detail, which conveys an exact feeling—"the subtle adjustment of words and phrases to suggest moods like doubt, hope, and intimacy".
On Red and 1989, Swift's vocals are processed with electronic effects, such as synthesizer tweaking, looping, and multitracking, to accompany the pop production. Her voice on Reputation and Midnights incorporates hip-hop and R&B influences, resulting in a near-rap delivery that emphasizes rhythm and cadence over melody. She uses her lower register vocals extensively in Folklore and both her lower and upper registers in Evermore; the musicologist Alyssa Barca described her timbre in the upper register as "breathy and bright" and the lower register as "full and dark".
The reception of Swift's vocals has been more positive since the release of Folklore. The critic Amanda Petrusich commented in 2023 that her singing had become richer, with greater clarity and a stronger tone, even in live performances. Rolling Stone ranked her 102nd on their 2023 list "200 Greatest Singers of All Time"; the magazine argued that her breathy timbre allows for a broad range of delivery and commented: "A decade ago, including her on this list would have been a controversial move, but recent releases like Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights officially settled the argument." For Powers, Swift's versatile vocals are a result of her evolving artistry, combining "subtle interpolations of hip-hop's cadences and country crooners' relaxed timbre".
=== Songwriting ===
Swift's fascination with songwriting began in her childhood; she credited her mother with igniting her early interest by helping her prepare for class presentations, and would make up lyrics to Disney soundtrack songs once she had run out of words while singing them. In her early career, her influences were the country musicians Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Dolly Parton, and the 1990s female singer-songwriters Melissa Etheridge, Sarah McLachlan, and Alanis Morissette. In later interviews, she listed Joni Mitchell and Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy as additional influences, and Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, and Kris Kristofferson as career role models for their consistent and evolving songwriting.
Swift considers herself a songwriter first and foremost. She divides her lyrics into three types: "quill lyrics", songs rooted in antiquated poeticism; "fountain pen lyrics", based on modern and vivid storylines; and "glitter gel pen lyrics", which are lively and frivolous. Using songwriting to cope with personal experiences, her songs are largely autobiographical and feature narratives that mostly revolve around love and romantic relationships. She would start writing by identifying an emotion she wanted to convey, and the story and melody would follow. Where Taylor Swift and Fearless are rooted in adolescent feelings and detail an optimistic romance inspired by fairy tales, Speak Now reflects her young adulthood, offering newfound wisdom on real-life heartbreak. Red explores the tumult of an intense breakup, and 1989 reflects on failed relationships with a wistful perspective; both albums incorporate lyrics that hint at sex, reflecting her personal growth. Swift described Lover as a "love letter to love", inspired by her realization of "love that was very real".
As her career progressed, Swift wrote about self-perception and confrontation with her critics, influenced by fame, sexism, and scrutiny of her personal life by the press. This was first exhibited in Speak Now, which set the precedent for the frantic media speculation on the subjects of Swift's songs, specifically concerning her dating history; Swift considers this practice sexist. Reputation both tackles the public controversies that tarnished her wholesome image and addresses a blossoming romance with intimacy and vulnerability; its extensive references to sex and alcohol set it apart from the youthful innocence that had informed Swift's past albums. The nocturnal ruminations addressed in Midnights encompass regrets and fantasies, informed by Swift's self-awareness of her fame. The Tortured Poets Department was conceived amidst her heightened fame in 2023, brought on by the Eras Tour and an intensely publicized love life. It explores heartbreak and other themes to extremes: erotic desires, forbidden love, and escaping from the public spotlight.
On Folklore and Evermore, Swift was inspired by escapism and romanticism to explore fictional narratives, deviating from the autobiographical songwriting that had characterized her artistry. She imposed her emotions onto imagined characters and story arcs, inspired by authors and poets of romantic and modernist literature like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson; the last of whom was a distant cousin of Swift. The characters on Folklore and Evermore construct their narratives from fragments of memory, symbolizing the nature of folktales and oral traditions that endure over time.
Swift considers her songwriting "confessional", and academics have linked her style to confessional poetry, noting that her songs reference personal events and express her internal feelings to her audience. Critical reception of her songwriting has been largely positive, and her melodic compositions have been highlighted for optimizing the verse-chorus form with memorable bridges. Several scholars have credited her with taking the confessional singer-songwriter tradition to new heights, and journalists have variedly described her as a "poet laureate"—of puberty, of romance, and of her generation. Some critics have dismissed her "confessional" style as material for tabloid gossip. Objection to the perceived poetic value of her songs, mostly from rockist critics, views her as a pop star using literary subtexts as a commercial ploy, with metaphors that are at times imprecise or self-indulgent.
Scholars have attributed criticisms of Swift's songwriting to sexism. The musicologist Travis Stimeling argued that whereas Swift's autobiographical authenticity conforms to country and rock standards, her detractors, mostly male, view her lyrical depictions of a young woman's experiences as trivial and unworthy of serious merit. According to the English-language academic Ryan Hibbett, this gendered criticism bars Swift from receiving full artistic credentials, as does Bob Dylan, whose reliance on romantic themes and occasional literary imprecisions are not as harshly criticized. In the view of the literary critic Stephanie Burt, although Swift's writing is not poetry in its traditional sense, it is proficient at "placing inventive, evocative language into pop melodies designed to be sung".
=== Performances and stage ===
Swift's concerts are equipped with elaborate settings, incorporating elements from Broadway theatre and high tech. She does not rely on elaborate choreography and instead emphasizes connecting emotionally with her audience through storytelling and vocal delivery. Since 2007, she has toured with the same live band. She plays four instruments live: guitar (including electric, acoustic six-string, and twelve-string), six-string banjo, piano, and ukulele.
Critics have praised her stage presence, stamina, and ability to bring forth an intimate atmosphere for her audience, even in stadium settings. Sasha Frere-Jones, in a 2008 article for The New Yorker, hailed her as a "preternaturally skilled" entertainer who exerted professionalism with a vibrant energy. In Time's 2023 Person of the Year piece, Sam Lansky wrote: "Swift is many things onstage—vulnerable and triumphant, playful and sad—but the intimacy of her songcraft is front and center."
=== Videos and filmmaking ===
Swift emphasizes visuals as a key creative component of her music. She established her production company, Taylor Swift Productions, in 2008. Her directorial debut was the music video for "Mine", co-directed with Roman White, in 2010; and she developed the concept and treatment for "Mean" in 2011. For the music videos of the 1989 and Reputation singles, she collaborated extensively with the director Joseph Kahn on eight videos; among them, she produced "Bad Blood", which won Best Music Video at the Grammy Awards in 2016. She worked with American Express for the "Blank Space" music video (which Kahn directed) and served as executive producer for the interactive app AMEX Unstaged: Taylor Swift Experience, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Program in 2015.
As of February 2026, Swift has directed 15 of her music videos. Her first solo directorial role was for "The Man", which made her the first female artist to win the MTV Video Music Award for Best Direction. All Too Well: The Short Film marked her filmmaking debut, and it made her the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Best Music Video as a solo director. In June 2023, Swift was invited to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She has cited Joseph Kahn, Chloé Zhao, Greta Gerwig, Nora Ephron, Guillermo del Toro, John Cassavetes, and Noah Baumbach as filmmaking influences.
== Achievements ==
Swift has won 14 Grammy Awards (including four Album of the Year wins—the most by an artist), and is the first person to be nominated for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year seven times. She has also won 12 Country Music Association Awards, 8 Academy of Country Music Awards, 2 Brit Awards, and an Emmy Award. She is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards (40 wins), the Billboard Music Awards (49), and the MTV Video Music Awards (30, tied with Beyoncé). Swift is the first woman and second artist overall (after Garth Brooks) to be honored with the Pinnacle Award by the Country Music Association Awards, in 2013, and the first woman to receive the Global Icon Award by the Brit Awards, in 2021.
At the 64th BMI Pop Awards in 2016, Swift became the first female songwriter to be honored with an award named after its recipient, the Taylor Swift Award. She is the youngest person to be featured on Rolling Stone's 2015 list "The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time", received the Songwriter Icon Award from the National Music Publishers' Association in 2021, and was named the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade by the Nashville Songwriters Association International in 2022. In 2026, Swift became the youngest woman to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry honored her as the Global Recording Artist of the Year six times (2014, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025), more than any other artist. She is the most-streamed artist on Spotify as of February 2024, and the highest-grossing touring act of all time, with cumulative revenue at $3.12 billion as of December 2024. Her chart records include the most number-one albums in the UK and Ireland for a female artist in the 21st century; the first artist to occupy the top five of the Australian albums chart, doing so twice, and the top 10 positions on the Australian singles chart; the most entries, most simultaneous entries, and most number-one entries for a soloist on the Billboard Global 200; and the first artist to spend one hundred weeks atop the Billboard Artist 100.
In the US, Swift has sold 116.7 million album units, including 54 million pure sales, as of May 2025. She is the solo artist with the most weeks at number one on the Billboard 200; the female artist with the most number-one albums on the Billboard 200 (fifteen) and most number-one debuts on the Billboard Hot 100 (eight); the artist with the most number-one songs on Pop Airplay (fifteen) and Adult Pop Airplay (fifteen, tied with Maroon 5); the first living artist to chart five albums in the top 10 of the Billboard 200; the first woman to have both an album (Fearless) and a song ("Shake It Off") receive Diamond certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); and the first and only woman to have 100 million album units certified by the RIAA. Billboard ranked her at number eight on its list "Greatest of All Time Artists" (2019), number two on "Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century" (2024), and number one on "Top 100 Women Artists of the 21st Century" and "Top Artists of the 21st Century" (both 2025).
Swift has appeared in power listings. In 2024, she became the first solo artist, and second overall (after Beyoncé and Jay-Z), to top Billboard's annual Power 100 ranking of the top music industry executives. Time included her on its annual list of the 100 most influential people in 2010, 2015, and 2019. She was one of the "Silence Breakers" that the magazine spotlighted as Person of the Year in 2017 for speaking up about sexual assault. In 2023, she became the first person to be recognized as Time's Person of the Year for "achievement in the arts" and the first woman to appear on a Person of the Year cover more than once. She received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from New York University and served as its commencement speaker on May 18, 2022.
== Public image ==
Swift is an enduring figure of 21st-century popular culture. Her career trajectory from a country singer-songwriter to a pop star in the 2000s and 2010s was the subject of extensive commentary. Deemed "America's Sweetheart" in her early career, she was described in the press as a "media darling" with a girl-next-door's polite demeanor and open-hearted conversations. Swift displayed a feminine image but refrained from the "aggressively sexualized feminist pop" of her contemporaries, leading publications to comment that her sex appeal was modest, subtle, and sophisticated. The adolescent themes of Swift's music contributed to her status as a teen idol, although several feminist authors took issue with her songs about romantic relationships as narrow-minded and detrimental to girls and women, who made up the majority of her fanbase known as Swifties.
Upon recalibrating her artistry to pop music, Swift has identified as a feminist and achieved a pop icon status. In 2013, the author Jody Rosen labelled Swift the "Queen of Pop", citing her popularity that defied traditional boundaries between "genres, eras, demographics, paradigms, trends". Her feminist public image garnered varied reactions from the public, including praise for her success in a male-dominated music industry as an inspiration for girls and women, and criticism that dismissed her feminist adoption as superficial and self-interested.
The 2016 dispute with Kanye West bolstered the narrative among Swift's detractors that she was a calculating and manipulative woman despite her sweetheart image, and deepened their feud that has resonated in their respective careers. Her artistic reinventions in the 2020s turned her into an acclaimed singer-songwriter. Buoyed by her enduring pop stardom, she has been recognized as a rare phenomenon that combines the pop star and singer-songwriter archetypes with unprecedented success. Swift is a known triskaidekaphile, known for using the number 13 in her various works.
== Legacy ==
Swift is one of the few artists who have consistently sold millions of albums throughout two decades despite the industry decline in record sales after the album era ended. In this regard, academics and journalists have described her as "the last pop superstar" and "the last great rock star" of the 21st century. Her commercial strategies to bolster sales of albums and concert tickets have earned her a reputation as a savvy businesswoman. The economist Alan Krueger described Swift as an "economic genius". Strategies such as enhanced material for physical album variants and easter egg usage in her works became indicative of music marketing trends.
Swift's success in country music has been credited with popularizing the genre beyond the US and introducing it to adolescent women, a previously ignored demographic. The critic Kelefa Sanneh dubbed Swift the biggest country star since Garth Brooks, "and maybe since before him, too". Her guitar performances resulted in increasing sales of guitars to women, which the media dubbed the "Taylor Swift factor". Her transition from country to pop has been credited as the catalyst for poptimism, and her songwriting and musical transitions have been credited with influencing a new generation of artists. According to Billboard, Swift is one of the few artists who can achieve chart success, critical acclaim, and fan support at the same time, and she has the ability to popularize any sound in mainstream music.
Swift's enduring popularity, particularly among female audiences, contributed to her status as a representation of millennials, or, more broadly, of her generation's zeitgeist. Her fandom of Swifties has been described by journalists and academics as one of the most loyal and dedicated. In the view of Time's Cady Lang, she maintained her superstardom through her "savvy manipulation of both the industry and [her] personal brand". According to the popular-culture scholars Mary Fogarty and Gina Arnold, Swift is arguably the singular artist "whose story encapsulates many of the urgent conflicts in early twenty-first-century American culture". In a 2024 article for The New York Times, Joe Coscarelli wrote that her lasting popularity provoked debates comparing her not only to contemporaries like Drake or Beyoncé, but also to veteran artists like the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Elton John, or Madonna.
Swift's advocacy for artists' rights and re-recording projects have contributed to industry-wide discourses and reforms. Her artistry and career maneuvers have been the subject of various university courses in literary, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts. According to the popular culture scholars Sarai Brinker, Kate Galloway, and Elizabeth Scala, Swift's legacy has been both embraced and critiqued by different affiliations—feminist and queer communities, far-right groups, and religious organizations, and studied by experts in various fields—musicology, literature, sociology, media theory, linguistics, and culture studies.
== Wealth and endorsements ==
Through her management company, TAS Rights Management, LLC, Swift has filed over 300 trademark applications in the US and holds more than 400 registrations worldwide, as of August 2025. Her filings include her name "Taylor Swift", her fanbase name "Swifties", album cover art and titles, tour names, lyrics, slogans, and her cats' names. Swift was listed by Forbes as the world's highest-paid musician in 2016 and 2019, the highest-paid female musician of the 2010s decade, and the highest-paid female musician in 2021, 2022, and 2025.
By October 2023, as reported by both Forbes and Bloomberg L.P., Swift had become a billionaire. She was recognized as the first billionaire "primarily based on her songs and performances", with the majority of her fortune coming from royalties and touring. As of March 2026, her estimated net worth by Forbes stands at $2 billion, making her the richest female musician in the world. The net worth of her music catalog is estimated at $900 million. Her real estate portfolio, estimated by Forbes at $110 million as of 2025, consists of residential properties in Nashville, New York City, Los Angeles (Samuel Goldwyn Estate), and Rhode Island (High Watch).
Swift's use of private jets has drawn scrutiny for its carbon emissions. In 2023, a spokesperson for Swift stated that she had purchased more than double the required carbon credits to offset all tour travel and personal flights. In December 2023, Swift's lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to the American programmer Jack Sweeney for tracking her private jet, alleging stalking and safety risks. Media outlets have reported that the information posted by Sweeney is a synthesis of publicly available data. In February 2024, it was reported that Swift had sold one of her two private jets.
Swift's album rollouts typically consist of multimedia promotional activities that encompass corporate tie-ins and product endorsements. Target is a long-standing business partner with Swift, offering exclusive physical albums and merchandise. In 2008–2011, her albums and tours were promoted with self-designed dolls with Jakks Pacific, fragrances with Elizabeth Arden, clothes with L.E.I., and holiday cards with American Greetings. Her partnership deals included makeup products for CoverGirl and Cyber-shot cameras for Sony Electronics. In 2012–2015, she had tie-ins with Starbucks, Keds, Subway, Diet Coke, Walgreens, Walmart, and Papa John's.
In 2014, New York City named Swift its official tourism ambassador. She had an exclusive streaming deal with Apple Music in 2015, signed a multi-year deal with AT&T in 2016, and partnered with United Parcel Service to distribute her albums in 2017. In 2019, Swift signed a multi-year deal with Capital One and launched a clothing line with Stella McCartney. She became the first global ambassador for Record Store Day in 2022.
== Social activism ==
Swift avoided discussing politics in her early career. In a 2012 interview with Time, she said that she kept herself as educated as possible but did not want to influence others with her political opinions. Due to her apolitical stance, she was appropriated by the alt-right movement in the US, which sparked controversy. She did express support for President Barack Obama in 2008: "I've never seen this country so happy about a political decision in my entire time of being alive."
Since 2018, Swift has been public about her political views and has abandoned her once-apolitical stance. She publicly endorsed two Democratic politicians for the 2018 US midterm election, which resulted in headlines about how she finally dissociated herself from the alt-right and conservatives. In interviews, she attributed her political reluctance in the past to the 2003 Dixie Chicks controversy, which left a lasting impact on country musicians at large and female country musicians in particular. She has openly criticized President Donald Trump. In 2020, Swift urged her fans to check their voter registration ahead of elections, which resulted in 65,000 people registering to vote within one day of her post, and endorsed the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 US presidential election. For the 2024 election, she once again endorsed the Democratic ticket of Harris and Tim Walz.
A pro-choice feminist, Swift is a founding signatory of the Time's Up movement against sexual harassment, and she criticized the US Supreme Court's decision to end federal abortion rights in 2022. A supporter of LGBTQ rights, she has donated to the LGBT organizations Tennessee Equality Project and GLAAD. In 2019, she called for the passing of the Equality Act and performed during WorldPride NYC 2019 at the Stonewall Inn, a gay rights monument. Swift has spoken up against white supremacy, racism, and police brutality in the US. She has supported the March for Our Lives movement and gun control reform in the US, donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Black Lives Matter movement, called for the removal of Confederate monuments in Tennessee, and advocated for Juneteenth to become a national holiday.
Swift's political engagements have been met with mixed reception: they have provoked further public discussion of political issues and empowered Swifties, but critics have questioned whether her political alignments were strategic in her career. While some publications have argued that Swift's stardom had a significant impact on political involvement in the US, others have viewed her influence as sizable but overstated. According to the popular culture scholar Simone Driessen, her political impact extended beyond the US to Australia and Europe.
== Philanthropy ==
Swift ranked first on DoSomething's 2015 "Gone Good" list, having received the Star of Compassion from the Tennessee Disaster Services and the Big Help Award from the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards for her "dedication to helping others" and "inspiring others through action". Especially early in her career, Swift donated to various relief funds following natural disasters. In 2009, she donated $100,000 to the Red Cross to help the victims of the Iowa flood of 2008. The same year, she performed at Sydney's Sound Relief concert, which raised money for those impacted by bushfires and flooding. In 2011, Swift used a dress rehearsal of her Speak Now tour as a benefit concert for victims of recent tornadoes in the US, raising more than $750,000. In response to the May 2010 Tennessee floods, she donated $500,000. In 2009, Swift sang at the BBC's Children in Need concert and raised £13,000 for the cause. In 2016, she donated $1 million to Louisiana flood relief efforts and $100,000 to the Dolly Parton Fire Fund. Swift donated to food banks after Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017. Swift donated $1 million to Tennessee tornado relief in 2020 and again in 2023, as well as $5 million to relief efforts after Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton in 2024.
Swift has also donated to cancer research. As the recipient of the Academy of Country Music's Entertainer of the Year in 2011, Swift donated $25,000 to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Tennessee. In 2012, she participated in the Stand Up to Cancer telethon, performing the charity single "Ronan", which she wrote in memory of a four-year-old boy who died of neuroblastoma. She has also donated $100,000 to the V Foundation for Cancer Research and $50,000 to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She has made donations to her fans several times to help cover their medical or academic expenses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Swift donated to the World Health Organization and Feeding America and supported independent record stores. Swift performed "Soon You'll Get Better" on the One World: Together At Home television special, a benefit concert curated by Lady Gaga for Global Citizen to raise funds for the World Health Organization's COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
She is a supporter of the arts. A benefactor of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Swift has donated $75,000 to Hendersonville High School to help refurbish the school auditorium, $4 million to build a new education center at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, and $100,000 to the Nashville Symphony. In 2012, Swift partnered with Chegg for Good to donate $10,000 to the music departments of six US colleges.
She has also provided one-off donations. In 2007, she partnered with the Tennessee Association of Chiefs of Police to launch a campaign to protect children from online predators. She has donated items to several charities for auction, including the UNICEF Tap Project and MusiCares. Swift has also encouraged young people to volunteer in their local communities as part of Global Youth Service Day. Also a promoter of children's literacy, she has donated money and books to schools around the country. In 2018 and 2021, Swift donated to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network in honor of Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. Swift donated to fellow singer-songwriter Kesha to help with her legal battles against Dr. Luke and to actress Mariska Hargitay's Joyful Heart Foundation.
During the Eras Tour, Swift donated to food banks in Florida, Arizona, and Las Vegas; she also employed local businesses throughout the tour and gave $197 million in bonus payments to her entire crew. In February 2024, she donated $100,000 to the family of a woman who died in a shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl parade. In December 2024, a week before Christmas, Swift donated $250,000 to Operation Breakthrough. The funds were directed to workforce development, childcare, and early learning programs. She made donations to the American Heart Association, Feeding America, MusiCares, and the Academy of Country Music's Lifting Lives program in December 2025.
== Discography ==
== Filmography ==
== Tours ==
Fearless Tour (2009–2010)
Speak Now World Tour (2011–2012)
The Red Tour (2013–2014)
The 1989 World Tour (2015)
Reputation Stadium Tour (2018)
The Eras Tour (2023–2024) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Williams | Miller Williams | Stanley Miller Williams (April 8, 1930 – January 1, 2015) was an American contemporary poet, as well as a university professor, translator and editor. He produced over 25 books and won several awards for his poetry. His accomplishments were chronicled in Arkansas Biography. Williams was chosen to read a poem at the second inauguration of Bill Clinton. One of his best-known poems is "The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina."
He was the father of American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.
== Early life ==
Williams was born in Hoxie, Arkansas, to Ernest Burdette and Ann Jeanette Miller Williams. He was educated in Arkansas, first enrolling at Hendrix College in Conway and eventually transferring to Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where he published his first collection of poems, Et Cetera, while getting his bachelor's degree in biology. He went on to get a masters in zoology at the University of Arkansas in 1952.
== Career ==
He taught in several universities in various capacities, first as a professor of biology and then of English literature, and in 1970 returned to the University of Arkansas as a member of the English Department and the creative writing program. In 1980 he helped found the University of Arkansas Press, where he served as director for nearly 20 years. At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus of literature at the University of Arkansas.
== Poetry ==
Miller received the 1963–64 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and he won the 1991 Poets' Prize for his collection Living on the Surface.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton selected Williams to read his poem "Of History and Hope" at Clinton's second inauguration, instantly bringing Williams to national attention. In addition, President Clinton presented Williams with the National Arts Award for his lifelong contribution to the arts.
== Personal life ==
Miller had spina bifida. He died on January 1, 2015, of Alzheimer's disease. In February, 2016, his daughter Lucinda Williams released a song entitled "If My Love Could Kill," as a testament to her father's suffering from this disability.
Williams lived in Fayetteville with his second wife, Jordan, who had been his student. Williams and his first wife, Lucille Fern Day, had three children together: Lucinda Williams, a three-time Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter, another daughter, Karyn, who graduated from the School of Nursing at the University of Arkansas, and a son, Robert. Williams also had three grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.
== Awards ==
During his lifetime, Williams received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:
Henry Bellman Award (1957)
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellowship in Poetry (1961)
Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship (1963–1964)
Fulbright Professorship, National University of Mexico (1970)
New York Arts Fund Award (1970)
Prix de Rome in Poetry (1976)
Poets' Prize for Living on the Surface (1990)
John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence (1993–1994)
National Arts Award (1997)
The Porter Fund Literary Prize Lifetime Achievement Award (2009)
== Books ==
A Circle of Stone, 1965
So Long at the Fair, 1968
Halfway from Hoxie, 1973
Why God Permits Evil, 1977, Louisiana State University Press
The Boys on Their Bony Mules, 1983, Louisiana State University Press
Patterns of Poetry, 1986, Louisiana State University Press
Living on the Surface, 1989
Adjusting to the Light, 1992, University of Missouri Press
Points of Departure, 1994
The Ways We Touch: Poems, 1997, University of Illinois Press
Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems, 1999, University of Illinois Press, ISBN 978-0-252-06774-7
Making a Poem: Some Thoughts About Poetry and the People Who Write It, 2006, Louisiana State University Press, ISBN 978-0-8071-3132-9
Time and the Tilting Earth: Poems, 2008, Louisiana State University Press, ISBN 978-0-8071-3353-8 |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies | Agilent Technologies | Agilent Technologies, Inc. is an American global company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, that provides instruments, software, services, and consumables for laboratories. Agilent was established in 1999 as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard. The resulting initial public offering of Agilent stock was the largest in the history of Silicon Valley at the time. From 1999 to 2014, the company produced optics (LED, laser), semiconductors, EDA software and test and measurement equipment for electronics; that division was spun off to form Keysight. Since then, the company has continued to expand into pharmaceutical, diagnostics & clinical, and academia & government (research) markets.
== History ==
In 1965, Hewlett-Packard branched out into scientific equipment by acquiring F&M Scientific, maker of gas chromatographs. Agilent Technologies was created in 1999 as a spin-off of several business units of Hewlett-Packard including test & measurement, optics, instrumentation and chemical analysis, electronic components, and medical equipment product lines. The split was predicated on the difficulty of growing HP's revenue stream and on the competitive vigor of smaller, more agile competitors. The company's launch slogan was "Innovating the HP Way", which capitalized on the strong HP corporate culture called The HP Way. The starburst logo was selected to reflect "a burst of insight" (or "spark of insight") and the name "Agilent" aimed to invoke the notion of agility as a trait of the new firm. The Agilent spin-off was accompanied by an initial public offering which raised $2.1 billion, setting a record at the time.
=== 2000–2009 ===
In the early 2000s, "economic uncertainty" depressed demand for Agilent's products, including slow sales of health care products to hospitals in the United States, which accounted for 60% of the company's revenue at the time. The downturn also struck sales in the communications and semiconductor markets, where orders amounting to $500 million were canceled by buyers. These poor economic conditions prompted large reductions in force with 18,500 positions cut in 2003. In 2001, in midst of this downsizing, Agilent sold its health care and medical products organization to Philips Medical Systems, and was noted as having a valuation of about $11 billion. HP Medical Products had been the second oldest part of Hewlett-Packard, acquired in the 1950s.
In August 2005, Agilent announced the sale of its business which produced semiconductor integrated circuits (known as "chips") for consumer and industrial uses to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake Partners for $2.66 billion. This move would involve termination of about 1,300 of the company's 28,000 employees. The group operated as a private company, Avago Technologies, until August 2009, when it was brought public in an IPO. After purchasing Broadcom Corporation in 2016, Avago changed its name to Broadcom Limited.
Also in August 2005, Agilent sold its 47% stake in the light-emitting diode manufacturer Lumileds to Philips for $1 billion. Lumileds originally started as Hewlett-Packard's optoelectronics division.
Also in August 2005, Agilent announced a plan to divest its semiconductor test business, composed of both the system-on-chip and memory test market areas. Agilent listed the new company as Verigy on the Nasdaq in mid-2006.
=== 2010 onwards ===
In 2009, Agilent announced the closure of a subsection of its Test & Measurement division. The product lines affected included the automated optical inspection, solder paste inspection, and automated X-ray products [5DX] in 2004. In 2011, the company, along with the University of California, Davis, announced that it would be establishing the "Davis Millimeter Wave Research Center". Agilent announced it would increase its life sciences engagement through the acquisition of Halo Genomics, based in Uppsala, Sweden, which was involved in next-generation sequencing technology development.
On May 17, 2012, Agilent agreed to buy Dako, a Danish cancer diagnostics company, for $2.2 billion, to expand its presence in the life sciences industry.
On September 19, 2013, Agilent announced its decision to separate into two publicly traded companies: Agilent, a life sciences, diagnostics, and applied markets company, and Keysight, an electronic measurement company. The life sciences company retained the Agilent name and the electronic measurement company was called Keysight Technologies. On October 14, 2014, the company announced that it is exiting its Nuclear Magnetic Resonance business. On November 1, the formal separation of Agilent and Keysight Technologies was completed. Agilent announced it had completed the spin-off of its electronic measurement business, Keysight Technologies.
In September 2015, the company announced it would acquire Seahorse Bioscience for $235 million.
On July 7, 2016, Agilent announced that they had acquired U.K. based Cobalt Light Systems, which develops and manufactures Raman spectroscopy instruments, for £40 million in cash. In December the company acquired Multiplicom N.V.
In January 2018, the company announced it would acquire Luxcel Biosciences, increasing the company's cell analysis portfolio. In May, Agilent acquired Lasergen, Inc. after the end of its two-year option on a prior investment. In the same month it acquired digital laboratory management company, Genohm, Ultra Scientific, provider of chemical standards and reference materials and Advanced Analytical Technologies, Inc. (AATI), provider of capillary electrophoresis-based molecules for $250 million in cash. In August the company announced it would acquire glycan reagent producer, ProZyme, Inc. and South Korean instrument distributor, Young In Scientific Co. Ltd. In September Agilent acquired ACEA Biosciences for $250 million increasing the company's presence in cell analysis technologies. In August 2019, Agilent acquired US-based BioTek Instruments, a designer, manufacturer, and distributor of life science instrumentation, for $1.165 billion.
On May 1, 2024, Padraig McDonnell succeeded Mike McMullen as CEO.
== Products and services ==
Agilent serves analytical laboratories and the clinical and routine diagnostics markets with a full suite of technology platforms. These include: automation, bioreagents, FISH probes, gas and liquid chromatography, immunohistochemistry, informatics, mass spectrometry, microarrays, spectroscopy, target enrichment, and vacuum technologies.
Agilent also provides lab management services, including enterprise asset management, laboratory business intelligence, equipment management and service, software maintenance, regulatory compliance, sample preparation, genomics and cloning, GC and HPLC columns, spectrometry and spectroscopy supplies, and consumables. The company is known for investing in R&D within its own research labs and those of leading universities to advance the state of knowledge in the life sciences, diagnostics, and chemical analysis space.
In recent years, the company has advanced digital lab instrumentation and technology that improves lab workflow and overall efficiency and productivity. In 2020, Agilent introduced CrossLab Virtual Assist, a mobile app that facilities high-quality remote technical support. Agilent's digital advancements, including CrossLab Connect, have also improved lab optimization and sustainability by providing more efficient utilization of instruments, which can lower a lab's energy consumption.
Agilent is also a pioneer of the target enrichment used as part of a NGS workflow. The portfolio also includes sample prep, QA/QC instrumentation, 2100 bioanalyzers, and automation tools.
In early 2023, the company announced a $725 million expansion of its nucleic acid-based therapeutics manufacturing facility in Frederick, Colorado. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tosh | Peter Tosh | Peter Tosh (born Winston Hubert McIntosh; 19 October 1944 – 11 September 1987) was a Jamaican musician and reggae singer. Along with Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer, he was one of the core members of the band the Wailers (1963–1976), after which he established himself as a successful solo artist and a promoter of Rastafari. He was murdered in 1987 during a home invasion.
== Early life ==
Tosh was born Winston Hubert McIntosh on 19 October 1944 in Westmoreland, the westernmost parish of Jamaica. He was abandoned by his parents and "shuffled among relatives". When McIntosh was fifteen, his aunt died and he moved to Trenchtown in Kingston, Jamaica. He was educated in Bluefields up to age 17, then moved to Kingston to live with another aunt. He began an apprenticeship as a welder.
He first learned guitar after watching a man in the country play a song that captivated him. He watched the man play the same song for half a day, memorizing everything his fingers were doing. He then picked up the guitar and played the song back to the man. The man then asked McIntosh who had taught him to play; McIntosh told him that he had. During the early 1960s, as an aspiring musician, Tosh went to vocal teacher Joe Higgs, who gave free music lessons to young people. Through his contact with Higgs, Tosh met Robert Nesta Marley (Bob Marley) and Neville O'Reilly Livingston (Bunny Wailer). He then changed his name to Peter Tosh and the trio started singing together in 1962. Higgs taught the trio to harmonise and while developing their music, they would often play on the street corners of Trenchtown.
== Music career ==
By 1964, Tosh, Marley, and Bunny had formed the Wailing Wailers, with falsetto singer Junior Braithwaite, and backup singers Beverley Kelso and Cherry Smith. Initially, Tosh was the only one in the group who could play musical instruments. According to Bunny Wailer, Tosh was critical to the band because he was a self-taught guitarist and keyboardist, and thus became an inspiration for the other band members to learn to play. The Wailing Wailers had a major ska hit with their first single, "Simmer Down", and recorded several more successful singles before Braithwaite, Kelso and Smith left the band in late 1965. Marley spent much of 1966 in Delaware in the United States with his mother, Cedella (née Malcolm) Marley-Booker, and for a brief time was working at a nearby Chrysler factory. He returned to Jamaica in early 1967 with a renewed interest in music and a new spirituality. Tosh and Bunny were already Rastafarians when Marley returned from the US, and the three became very involved with the Rastafari faith. Soon afterwards, they renamed the musical group the Wailers. Tosh would explain later that they chose the name Wailers because to "wail" means to mourn or to, as he put it, "...express one's feelings vocally". He also claims that he was the beginning of the group, and that it was he who first taught Bob Marley the guitar. Also according to Bunny Wailer, the early Wailers learned to play instruments from Tosh.
During the mid-1960s Tosh, along with Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer, were introduced to Danny Sims and Johnny Nash, who signed the three artists to an exclusive recording contract on Sims' and Nash's JAD Records label as well as an exclusive publishing agreement through Sims' music publishing company, Cayman Music. Rejecting the up-tempo dance of ska, the band slowed their music to a rocksteady pace, and infused their lyrics with political and social messages inspired by their new-found faith. The Wailers composed several songs for the American-born singer Nash before teaming with producer Lee "Scratch" Perry to record some of the earliest well-known reggae songs, including "Soul Rebel", "Duppy Conqueror", and "Small Axe". The collaboration had given birth to reggae music and in 1970 bassist Aston "Family Man" Barrett and his brother, drummer Carlton Barrett, joined the group. They recorded the album The Best of The Wailers, which was produced by Leslie Kong and released in 1971.
In 1972, Danny Sims assigned the balance of the JAD Records recording contract with the band to Chris Blackwell and Island Records company and released their debut, Catch a Fire, in 1973, following it with Burnin' the same year. The Wailers had moved from many producers after 1970 and there were instances where producers would record rehearsal sessions that Tosh did and release them in England under the name "Peter Touch".
In 1973, Tosh was driving home with his girlfriend Evonne when his car was hit by another car driving on the wrong side of the road. The accident killed Evonne and severely fractured Tosh's skull.
After Island Records president Chris Blackwell refused to issue his solo album in 1974, Tosh and Bunny Wailer left the Wailers, citing the unfair treatment they received from Blackwell, to whom Tosh often referred with a derogatory play on Blackwell's surname, 'Whiteworst'. Tosh had written or co-written many of the Wailers' hit songs such as "Get Up, Stand Up", "400 Years", and "No Sympathy". Tosh went on to a solo career, releasing albums with CBS Records and Rolling Stones Records.
=== Solo career ===
Tosh's debut solo album, Legalize It, was recorded in 1975–6 at Treasure Isle. It was released in June 1976 on CBS Records. The title track soon became popular among endorsers of cannabis legalization, reggae music lovers and Rastafari all over the world, and was a favourite at Tosh's concerts. Also in 1976, Tosh organised a backing band, Word, Sound and Power, who were to accompany him on tour for the next few years, and many of whom performed on his albums of this period. Tosh's second album, Equal Rights, was released in 1977. It featured his recording of a song co-written with Marley, "Get Up, Stand Up", and a cover of "Stepping Razor" that would also appear on the soundtrack to the film Rockers.
In 1978, the Rolling Stones' record label, Rolling Stones Records, contracted with Tosh, on which the album Bush Doctor was released, introducing Tosh to a larger audience. The album featured Rolling Stones frontmen Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and the lead single – a cover version of the Temptations song "Don't Look Back" – was performed as a duet with Jagger. In April, Tosh performed at the Jamaican One Love Peace Concert of 1978. Tosh lit a marijuana spliff and lectured about legalising cannabis, lambasting attending dignitaries Michael Manley and Edward Seaga for their failure to enact such legislation. According to The Gleaner, Tosh became regular target for the police after the concert. In September, he was arrested by police at Half Way Tree square, on the grounds of smoking marijuana and attacking a police officer. He reported being beaten severely while in police custody – resulting in a broken hand and head injuries requiring stitches.
Mystic Man (1979) and Wanted Dread and Alive (1981) followed, both released on Rolling Stones Records. Tosh tried to gain some mainstream success while keeping his militant views, but was only moderately successful, especially when compared to Marley's achievements.
In September 1979, a controversy sparked after his performance at the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden, where he wore Palestinian clothing (thawb and keffiyeh) and openly smoked marijuana. Tosh's appearance was considered a provocation towards the Jewish community in New York City, as the concerts took place during the Jewish New Year holiday. Despite his performance being advertised to appear in the accompanying film and on the triple live album, Tosh was removed from both releases. The Palestinian dress remained a trademark performance outfit in the following years.
In 1984, after the release of 1983's album Mama Africa, Tosh went into self-imposed exile, seeking the spiritual advice of traditional medicine men in Africa, and trying to free himself from recording agreements that distributed his records in South Africa. Tosh had been at odds for several years with his label, EMI, over a perceived lack of promotion for his music.
Tosh also participated in the international opposition to South African apartheid by appearing at anti-apartheid concerts and by conveying his opinion in various songs like "Apartheid" (1977, re-recorded 1987), "Equal Rights" (1977), "Fight On" (1979), and "Not Gonna Give It Up" (1983). In 1987, Peter Tosh seemed to be having a career revival. He was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Performance in 1987 for No Nuclear War, his last record.
== Personal life ==
=== Religion ===
Along with Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer during the late 1960s, Peter Tosh became a devotee of Rastafari. One of the beliefs of the Rastas is that Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, was either an embodiment of God or a messenger of God, leading the three friends to be baptized in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
=== Unicycling ===
At some point after his departure from the Wailers, Tosh developed an interest in unicycles and became a unicycle rider, being able to ride forwards and backwards and hop. He often amused his audiences by riding onto the stage on his unicycle for his shows.
=== Family ===
Tosh's girlfriend Evonne was killed in a car crash in 1973. Tosh was in a relationship with his future wife Marlene Brown for about five years from 1982; she was 21 at the start of the relationship. Tosh had ten children including Carlos Andrew (1967), Gamal "Tosh 1" Jawara McIntosh (1980-2020) (mother Melody Cunningham), Aldrina Michelle and his youngest, Niambe, who has since 2009 been the administrator of her late father's estate. The others are his sons Horace David, Stephen, and Nabii; and his daughters Sheba, Camille Erone, and Tobi.
== Murder ==
On 11 September 1987, after Tosh returned to his home in Jamaica, a three-man gang came to his house on motorcycles demanding money. Tosh replied that he did not have any with him, but the gang did not believe him. They remained at his residence for several hours and tortured Tosh in an attempt to extort money from him. Over the hours, as various associates of Tosh arrived to visit him, they were also taken hostage by the gunmen. The gunmen included chief thug Dennis "Leppo" Lobban, a man whom Tosh had previously befriended and tried to help find work after Lobban's release from a lengthy jail sentence.
Tosh said he did not have any money in the house, after which Lobban and the fellow gunmen opened fire in a reckless manner. Tosh was shot twice in the head and killed. Herbalist Wilton "Doc" Brown and disc jockey Jeff 'Free I' Dixon also died as a result of wounds sustained during the robbery. Several others in the house were wounded, including Tosh's common-law wife Andrea Marlene Brown, Free I's wife Yvonne ("Joy"), Tosh's drummer Carlton "Santa" Davis, and musician Michael Robinson.
According to Police Commissioner Herman Ricketts, Lobban surrendered and two other men were interrogated but not publicly named. Lobban pled innocent during his trial, telling the court he had been drinking with friends. The trial was held in a closed court due to the involvement of illegal firearms. Lobban was ultimately found guilty by a jury of eight women and four men and sentenced to death by hanging.
In 1995, Lobban's sentence was commuted and he remained in jail. Another suspect was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. The other two gunmen were never identified by name.
== Instruments ==
In 1983, at the Los Angeles stop on Tosh's Mama Africa tour, local musician Bruno Coon went to the hotel at which Tosh was staying, with a gift for him: a custom-built guitar in the shape of an M16 rifle. Tosh accepted the gift personally. The guitar was subsequently lost by the airlines when the tour went to Europe but was recovered when Tosh's public relations agent placed an article about its loss in Der Spiegel. Tosh went on to perform on stage with the guitar.
The promoters of the Flashpoint Film Festival announced in 2006 that Tosh's common-law wife Andrea "Marlene" Brown would auction it on eBay. Tosh's sons, Andrew Tosh, and Jawara McIntosh, prevented the sale, claiming ownership of the guitar. In 2011 Andrew Tosh said that the guitar was in the custody of a close friend, awaiting the opening of a museum dedicated to Peter Tosh.
== Legacy ==
In 1979, a 1964 photograph of Tosh in sunglasses and a suit, also featuring Bob Marley and the Wailers, was the inspiration for the logo of 2 Tone Records. The label released albums from ska bands such as The Specials. The logo featured a stylized man in a suit based on the photo of Tosh, although the figure was called "Walt Jabsco". The logo in turn was the inspiration for a character in a Webdings font designed by Vincent Connare in 1997 ("Man in Business Suit Levitating emoji" in the Emoji system). Connare changed the design to facing forward and floating. Tosh's children Andrew Tosh and Niambe McIntosh both praised the emoji in a 2021 BBC interview, with Andrew stating that "[Peter Tosh] wanted [people] to dance to their own (political) awakening".
In 1993, Stepping Razor: Red X was released, a documentary film chronicling Tosh's life, music and untimely death. It was directed by Canadian filmmaker Nicholas Campbell, produced by Wayne Jobson and based upon a series of spoken-word recordings made by Peter Tosh. The film was released on DVD in 2002.
A monument to Tosh is maintained by his family in Belmont,Westmoreland, which is open to the public. His birthday is celebrated there annually with live reggae music.
In October 2012, Tosh was posthumously awarded Jamaica's fourth highest honour, the Order of Merit.
In 2015, Tosh's daughter – the administrator of the Peter Tosh Estate – deemed that April 20 should be celebrated as International Peter Tosh Day, in honour of his "philosophy of responsible cannabis consumption for medicinal and spiritual health benefits".
A square on Trafalgar Road in Kingston, Jamaica, was renamed Peter Tosh Square. The square is home to the Peter Tosh Museum, opened on Peter Tosh's 72nd birthday on 19 October 2016. Among the artifacts on display is Tosh's M16 guitar. There was a benefit concert for the grand opening, on the 22nd, featuring Chronixx, Luciano and Andrew Tosh.
The annual Peter Tosh Gala Awards event was inaugurated in 2017.
In October 2019, a commemorative blue plaque dedicated by the Nubian Jak Community Trust honoring Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer was placed at the former site of Basing Street Studios in London, where Catch a Fire and Burnin' were completed.
In 2023, he was posthumously bestowed with the Order of the Companions of O. R. Tambo.
== Discography ==
=== Studio albums ===
=== Live albums ===
Captured Live (1984)
Live at the One Love Peace Concert (JAD) (2000)
Live & Dangerous: Boston 1976 (2001)
Live at the Jamaica World Music Festival 1982 (JAD) (2002)
Complete Captured Live (2002)
Live at My Father's Place 1978 (2014)
=== Compilations ===
Listed are compilations containing material previously unreleased outside of Jamaica.
The Toughest (Capitol) (1988)
Honorary Citizen (1997)
Scrolls of the Prophet: The Best of Peter Tosh (1999)
Arise Black Man (1999)
Black Dignity (Early Works of the Stepping Razor) (2001)
I Am That I Am (JAD) (2001)
The Best of Peter Tosh 1977–1987 (2003)
Can't Blame the Youth (JAD) (2004)
Black Dignity (2004)
Talking Revolution (2005)
The Ultimate Peter Tosh Experience (2009)
=== Appears on ===
The Wailing Wailers (1965)
Negril (Eric Gale, 1975)
Rastafari Dub (Ras Michael & The Sons of Negus, 1975)
Blackheart Man (Bunny Wailer, 1976)
Word Sound and Power (Chris Hinze, 1980)
=== Singles ===
1975 — Legalize It / Legalize It (Version) — Intel/Diplo PT-177 (JAM)
1975 — Brand New Second Hand / Brand New Second Hand (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1976 — Legalize It / Brand New Second Hand — Virgin VS-140 or Island WIP-6323 (UK)
1976 — Legalize It / Why Must I Cry // Till Your Well Runs Dry — Columbia AE7 1109 (USA)
1976 — Ketchy Shubby / Iration — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1976 — Babylon Queendom / Iration — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1976 — Vampire / Dracula— Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1977 — African / African (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1977 — Stepping Razor / Stepping Razor (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1977 — African / Stepping Razor — Virgin VS-179 (UK)
1977 — Get Up, Stand Up (Mono) / Get Up, Stand Up (Stereo)— Columbia ASF 310 (USA)
1977 — Equal Rights / Equal Rights (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1977 — Anti-Apartheid / Solidarity — Solomonic BW-0078 (JAM)
1978 — (You Gotta Walk) Don't Look Back / Soon Come — Intel/Diplo (JAM), Rolling Stones Records RS 19308 (US), EMI 2859 (UK)
1978 — I Am the Toughest / Toughest Version — Studio One CD-1033 (JAM), Rolling Stones Records RSR 103 (UK)
1979 — Bush Doctor / Bush Doctor (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1979 — Buckingham Palace / Buckingham Palace (Version) (7") — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1979 — Buk-In-Hamm Palace // Dubbing In Buk-In-Hamm / The Day the Dollar Die (12") — Intel/Diplo (JAM), Rolling Stones Records 12YRSR 104 (UK)
1979 — Buk-In-Hamm Palace / The Day the Dollar Die (7") — Rolling Stones Records RSR 104 (UK)
1979 — Buk-In-Hamm Palace / Buk-In-Hamm Palace (Dance Mix) // The Day the Dollar Die / Buk-In-Hamm Palace (Dub) — Rolling Stones Records 12RSR 104 (UK)
1979 — Buk-In-Hamm Palace / Recruiting Soldiers (7") — Rolling Stones Records RS 20000 (USA)
1979 — Buk-In-Hamm Palace // Crystal Ball / Dubbing In Buk-In-Hamm (12") — Rolling Stones Records/Atlantic DSKO 193
1979 — Stepping Razor / Legalise It — Virgin VS-304 (UK)
1980 — Can't Blame the Youth / Hammer — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1980 — Jah Man / Hammer — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1981 — Oh Bumbo Klaat / Oh Bumbo Klaat (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1981 — Nothing But Love / Cold Blood — Rolling Stones Records RSR 107 (UK)
1981 — Nothing But Love // Cold Blood / Oh Bumbo Klaat — Rolling Stones Records 12RSR 107 (UK)
1981 — Nothing But Love / Oh Bumbo Klaat — EMI 8083 (USA)
1981 — Coming In Hot / Reggae-Mylitis — EMI 8094 (USA)
1982 — Rock with Me / Rock with Me (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1982 — Peace Treaty / Glass House — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1982 — Glass House / Glass House (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1983 — Johnny B. Goode / Johnny B. Goode (Version) — Intel/Diplo (JAM)
1983 — Johnny B. Goode / Peace Treaty (7" e 10") — EMI RIC 115 (UK), EMI B-8159 (USA)
1983 — Johnny B. Goode / Glass House (12") — EMI 7807-1 e 7807-2 (USA)
1983 — Johnny B. Goode (Long) / Johnny B. Goode (Short) (12") — EMI SPRO-9912 e SPRO-9913 (USA)
1983 — Where You Gonna Run / Stop That Train (7" e 10") — EMI RIC 116 (UK), EMI B-8175 (7" USA), SPRO-9993 e SPRO-9994 (12" USA)
1983 — Mama Africa / Not Gonna Give It Up (7" e 10") — EMI RIC 117 (UK)
1987 — In My Song / Come Together (7") — Parlophone R 6156 (UK)
1987 — In My Song // Come Together / Nah Goa Jail (12") — Parlophone 12R 6156 (UK) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_(album) | 1989 (album) | 1989 is the fifth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was released on October 27, 2014, through Big Machine Records. Titled after Swift's birth year as a symbolic rebirth, the album recalibrated her artistic identity from country music to pop.
Swift produced 1989 with Max Martin, Shellback, Jack Antonoff, Ryan Tedder, Nathan Chapman, and Imogen Heap. Its 1980s-inspired synth-pop production incorporates dense synthesizers, programmed drum machines, and processed electronic backing vocals, abandoning the acoustic arrangements that had characterized Swift's past albums. The songs chronicle the aftermath of a failed relationship with lyrics that expand on Swift's autobiographical details; they depict heartbreak, recovery, and self-discovery from lighthearted, wistful, and nostalgic perspectives.
1989 was promoted with the 1989 World Tour, the highest-grossing concert tour of 2015. Seven singles supported the album, including the Billboard Hot 100 number-ones "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", and "Bad Blood", and the top-ten entries "Style" and "Wildest Dreams". In the United States, 1989 spent 11 weeks atop the Billboard 200 and was certified 14-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. It has sold 14 million copies worldwide and received platinum certifications in countries across Europe, the Americas, and Asia–Pacific. Swift and Big Machine withheld the album from free streaming services for nearly three years, which prompted an industry discourse on the impact of streaming on record sales.
Initial reviews of 1989 generally praised its production as catchy and Swift's songwriting, although some critics argued that the synth-pop production undermined her singer-songwriter identity—a criticism that has been retrospectively regarded as rockist. 1989 won Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2016 Grammy Awards, and Rolling Stone listed it among their "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. Regarded by critics as a modern pop music classic, 1989 transformed Swift's status to a pop icon and promoted poptimism. The heightened fame intensified media scrutiny on Swift's public and private lives. Following a 2019 dispute regarding the ownership of Swift's back catalog, she released the re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor's Version) in 2023, and later acquired the original album's master recording in 2025.
== Background ==
Taylor Swift had identified as a country musician up until her fourth studio album, Red, released on October 22, 2012. Promoted by Big Machine Records to country radio and awards shows, Red incorporates pop and rock styles in addition to the country pop sound that had characterized her discography, leading to many critics regarding it as a pop or rock album as much as a country one. Its two most commercially successful singles—"We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "I Knew You Were Trouble"—are pop songs with electronic productions that solidified Swift's popularity in mainstream pop music. The media questioned her status as a country artist, to which she responded in a 2013 interview in The Wall Street Journal that it was not her concern to label herself with a specific genre.
Swift's rising fame was accompanied by media scrutiny on her love life. Her relationship with the English singer Harry Styles that lasted for several months in 2013 received extensive tabloid coverage. This and multiple previous short-lived romances blemished her "America's Sweetheart" image: they overshadowed Swift's artistic considerations and turned her into a target of slut-shaming. In March 2014, she relocated from Nashville, Tennessee to New York City. To reclaim narrative on her public image, Swift stayed single and went out in public with her female celebrity friends in a New York street style: bob cut, midriff-showing high-cut outfits, miniskirts, and high heels. The geographical pivot, media scrutiny, and single status informed the songwriting for her next album.
== Concept and development ==
Swift began writing her fifth studio album in mid-2013 while on the Red Tour. According to her, Red was an album where she pursued both pop and country, and she wanted its follow-up album to be both "sonically cohesive" and "blatant pop", believing that "if you chase two rabbits, you lose them both". She considered Red's single "I Knew You Were Trouble", which spent seven weeks atop the Pop Songs chart, her "signal flare" to do so.
To realize her vision, Swift took inspirations from the experimental nature of synth-pop from the 1980s decade, when musicians abandoned the once-popular drums and guitar instrumentation for synthesizers, drum pads, and manipulated vocals. Annie Lennox and Peter Gabriel were formative influences: Swift was inspired by the former's "intense" ways of conveying thoughts and emotions and the latter's atmospheric synth-pop sounds. Naming her fifth studio album 1989 after her birth year, she both referenced the influence of 1980s synth-pop and signified a symbolic artistic rebirth.
Swift enlisted Max Martin and Shellback, who had produced "I Knew You Were Trouble", as key collaborators, crediting the former as co-executive producer for helping her create a coherent album and providing uncredited production credits on several tracks. Martin and Shellback produced seven tracks for 1989's standard edition and two additional tracks for its deluxe edition. Ryan Tedder, contacted by Swift via an iPhone voice memo, co-wrote and co-produced "Welcome to New York" and "I Know Places". He used a Juno-106 synthesizer to create four demos for the former, and Swift chose the first demo and reworked on it as the final version. For the latter, Swift played what she had written on piano and elaborated to Tedder the specific melody she wanted, and the two finished recording the track after one day.
Jack Antonoff, who shared mutual interests in 1980s music, had worked with Swift on her new wave-influenced single "Sweeter than Fiction" (2013). His productions on two tracks for the standard edition and one for the deluxe edition are characterized by the Juno-6 synthesizer, which he thought to have both "a sadness" and "a glory". "Out of the Woods" and "I Wish You Would" started as instrumental tracks. Antonoff built the former on the Yamaha DX7 and Minimoog Voyager synthesizers and sent the track to Swift while she was on a plane, and she wrote the melody and lyrics based on it; the whole process took 30 minutes. The latter began as Antonoff's sampling of the snare drums on Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy" (1988). He played the track to Swift on his iPhone and sent it to her to re-record, and the final track is a remix that retains the snare drum sounds.
Swift approached Imogen Heap to collaborate on "Clean". Swift had written the lyrics and melody, and Heap helped complete the track with her instruments and backing vocals. The recording completed after two takes in one day at Heap's Hideaway Studio in London. Nathan Chapman, who had produced Swift's country pop albums, co-produced "This Love", which is the only 1989 song that Swift wrote by herself. The standard edition contains 13 tracks, and the deluxe edition features three bonus songs. Recorded at studios in Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom, 1989 was mastered by Tom Coyne in two days at Sterling Sound Studio in New York City. Several tracks were completed by November 2013, and the album was finalized after the conclusion of the Red Tour in mid-2014. After listening to 1989, Big Machine's president Scott Borchetta asked Swift if she could include several country tracks with instruments such as fiddle, but she rejected his request. Borchetta agreed with her to not promote the album to country radio, which had been formative in driving Swift's career.
== Composition ==
=== Music ===
A homage to 1980s pop music, 1989 is a synth-pop album whose electronic arrangements incorporate synthesizers, programmed drum machines, and pulsating basslines, abandoning the acoustic textures that had defined Swift's past albums. The songs are characterized by mid-tempo rhythms and memorable melodies, hooks, and refrains, constituting a consistent palette that stays faithful to 1980s synth-pop without overt influences of contemporary, popular hip-hop or R&B. Several reviews opined that the album also incorporates 1980s styles of rock, namely pop rock, synth-rock, and new wave. In this regard, critics generally considered the music of 1989 old-fashioned and retro. Carl Wilson, in his review for Slate, disagreed and argued that while Swift's 1980s framing of the album establishes the overall aesthetic, its musical influences can be traced back to the 1970s, 1990s, or 2000s decades.
In addition to the overall synth-pop palette, many tracks incorporate stylings that evoke retro or contemporary styles such as hip-hop, dance, and electronic dance music. "Style" incorporates elements of funk, 1970s disco, and R&B in its electric guitar riff and groove. The opening sounds of a manipulated tape recorder in "All You Had to Do Was Stay" resemble sound effects used in psychedelic music. The percussions, bass drums, and synthesizers of "Blank Space", "Shake It Off", "Bad Blood", "Wonderland", and "I Know Places" evoke hip-hop, with the lattermost track further evoking drum and bass, trap, and reggae with its build-up, breakbeats, and syncopated snare and bass drums. Elements of soft rock are demonstrated on "This Love", an atmospheric, slow-paced ballad absent of the heavily programmed percussions of other tracks; and "Clean", a minimalist track composed of sparse percussions and programmed keyboards.
Swift's vocals on 1989, mostly sung in her alto range, are electronically processed, an effect that she first used on Red's pop singles. Manipulated with multitracking, synthesizer tweaking, and looping, her vocals are blended with the electronic instrumentation to create a unified texture, particularly in "Welcome to New York", "Out of the Woods", and "Bad Blood". The musicologist James E. Perone wrote that the vocal processing evokes 1980s pop sounds as much as it does 21st century Auto-Tune effects, creating a retro but also contemporary listening experience. For Wilson and NPR's Ann Powers, this synthetic rendering is a stark contrast to the naturalistic vocals of country music, but it helps Swift expand her emotional delivery through her versatile timbre and varied expressions.
=== Lyrics and themes ===
1989 is primarily about lost love, a theme that had been familiar in Swift's songs, but it depicts her different mindset on it. While her past albums situate her narrators as victims of ill-fated romance with vindictive and antagonistic attitudes, 1989 explores failed relationships through wistful and nostalgic perspectives. Inspired by her disenchantment with a "happily ever after" romance, she became aware of the "gray areas" of real-life situations and realized she could feel content with a failed relationship. According to Swift, the 1989 songs altogether constitute a story line; its liner notes include 13 one-sentence "secret messages" for the songs, and they collectively narrate a past love that leaves Swift's narrator going through heartbreak, recovery, and self-discovery. Molly Lambert, in her review for Grantland, opined that the central narrative revolves around a strong yet fragile sexual and intimate connection, with murky distinctions between love and lust.
Expanding on Swift's autobiographical songwriting, the lyrics of 1989 were influenced by and contain references to her personal life. They address romantic regrets caused by bad decisions and irreversible pain, but Swift's narrator remains empowered and unwaveringly hopeful that things will work in her favor. Several reviewers opined that the songs showcased her jaded outlook on romance after the dramatic heartbreaks depicted in past albums, with Swift saying that she became more pragmatic. Sex and intimacy, which she had explored obliquely on Red, are more explicitly depicted here, particularly on "Style" and "Wildest Dreams". "Blank Space", "Style", "Shake It Off", and "All You Had to Do Was Stay" showcase self-assurance and self-awareness, while "I Wish You Would" and "How You Get the Girl" demonstrate her starry-eyed visions of a lasting romance. For Lambert, 1989 depicts a transformation in Swift's persona, "between her fairy-tale idealizations of love and her recently acquired cynicism".
Although Swift's lyrics retain the storytelling aspect that had been nurtured by her country music background, they show a strong influence of pop music songwriting: they are less detailed and more ambiguous, and contain more repetitions of the track titles to create memorable hooks. Perone argued that the lyrics were less biographical and more metaphorical, allowing for wider interpretations. According to the musicologist Nate Sloan, 1989 abandons the "Time-Shift paradigm" that had informed Swift's previous works. While her country songs tell stories with their verses detailing the different stages and final refrains detailing the resolutions, the 1989 songs have all of their refrains repeating the same phrases and use a "frozen-in-time song structure", symbolizing an emotional intensity lingering in the present without any progress or conclusion.
=== Songs ===
"Welcome to New York" is about forgetting past heartbreaks to reinvent oneself while enjoying the bright lights and new sounds of New York City; its synth-pop production incorporates pulsing synthesizers and programmed drum machines that create clapping-like rhythms. In "Blank Space", Swift satirizes her public image as a woman having multiple romantic attachments but failing to maintain any lasting relationship: the narrator is a seductive but emotionally unstable woman whose romantic flings end up in disasters. With a minimalist electropop sound, it features Swift speak-singing the verses and using her upper register in the refrains. "Style" is about an on-again, off-again relationship that the narrator cannot escape because she and her lover are "never out of style" akin to timeless fashion staples. Built on an electric guitar riff, "Style" evokes influences of both 1980s and contemporary styles, namely synth-pop, new wave, and outrun.
"Out of the Woods" details a fragile relationship that instills great anxiety; its bridge depicts a snowmobile accident as a metaphor for how the relationship ended: the ex-boyfriend hit the brakes and injured himself, leading to a hospital visit that required twenty stitches. Its insistent production is driven by loud, echoing drums, multitracked vocals, and undulating synthesizers that build up towards the conclusion. In "All You Had to Do Was Stay", inspired by Swift's dream that she shouted "stay" multiple times to an ex-boyfriend, her narrator determines to move on from a past relationship despite the ex-boyfriend wanting to reconcile with her, although she admits feelings of hurt, grief, and longing. The vocal hook includes repetitions of the word "stay" sung in Swift's high-pitched vocals. "Shake It Off" is about Swift's indifference to her detractors and their negative remarks, and its beat is driven by handclaps, a repeating Mellotron-based saxophone played by Shellback, and stomping sounds that Martin and Shellback created by banging their feet on a wooden floor.
In "I Wish You Would", Swift's narrator pines for an ex-boyfriend, hoping he knows that she would never forget him. The track incorporates an electric guitar riff, and its refrains include erupting synthesizers, snare drums, and layered vocals. "Bad Blood", with lyrics about a fallen friendship, was inspired by a fellow female musician who made Swift feel betrayed. Its hip-hop-influenced production features cheerleading-like chanting rhythms and booming drums. "Wildest Dreams" describes a powerful romantic and sexual connection that Swift's narrator knows will ultimately end; she pleads with her lover to remember her and their fond memories while it lasts. Its atmospheric synth-pop production incorporates a heartbeat-like rhythm, thick, insistent synthesizers and strings. Described by Swift as a "tutorial" for men who want to rekindle broken relationships, "How You Get the Girl" sees her narrator instructing an ex-boyfriend with how to win her heart back over acoustic guitar strums and beatboxing rhythms.
"This Love", a pensive ballad that started as a poem in Swift's journal, is about her letting go of a relationship that no longer served her, knowing that the timing was not right; it uses ocean imagery to describe a love affair that comes back and disappears like waves, and her vocals are multitracked to create a haunting atmosphere. In "I Know Places", which is instrumented by sparse piano, stuttering vocals, and drum-and-bass beats, the narrator vows to protect a fragile love, comparing herself and her partner to animals being hunted down. Swift was inspired to write the standard album's closing track "Clean" after spending two weeks in London and realizing that she no longer missed an ex-boyfriend who lived there. With a sparse, minimalist arrangement, the track details the narrator's journey towards recovery after a heartbreak: she compares getting over a broken relationship to an addiction that leaves her in deep pain, to the point that healing makes little sense, and after a destructive yet transformative torrential storm, the narrator becomes "finally clean".
The three bonus songs for 1989's deluxe edition have varied themes. "Wonderland" references Lewis Carroll's fantasy book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to describe a dangerous, intense, and alluring romantic relationship that leaves the narrator falling "down the rabbit hole". While the couple fantasizes about staying in their "Wonderland" forever, this relationship's ending is foreshadowed by their curiosity and others' scrutiny on them. The aggressive bass drum instrumentation of "Wonderland" evokes hip-hop and alternative rock. Inspired by Antonoff and Lena Dunham's relationship, the ballad "You Are in Love" recounts the ups and downs of a stable relationship through mundane daily activities over a soft electropop production. "New Romantics", whose title references the New Romantic cultural movement of the 1970s and 1980s decades, finds Swift's narrator reclaiming her broken heart and celebrating the pain that she has endured with a euphoric new wave, synth-pop, and indie electronic sound.
== Artwork and packaging ==
Swift served as the creative director for 1989's packaging, which includes photographs taken with a Polaroid instant film camera, a photographic method popular in the 1980s decade. The photographic duo Lowfield shot over 400 Polaroid photographs, and they digitally mixed them to mimic those found in an old album. The cover is a portrait of Swift's face cut off at the eyes, which she thought to evoke a mysterious atmosphere that concealed "the emotional DNA of the album" because she did not want the audience to immediately identify whether 1989 was a "happy" or a "breakup" record. In the cover, she wears red lipstick and a lavender sweatshirt embroidered with flying seagulls. Her initials are written with black marker on the bottom left, and the title 1989 on the bottom right. Billboard in 2023 included the 1989 cover at number 50 in their list "100 Best Album Covers of All Time", deeming it one of Swift's most identifiable works.
Each CD copy of 1989 includes a packet, one of five available sets, of 13 random Polaroid photos, made up from 65 different photos. The pictures portray Swift in different settings such as backdrops of New York City and recording sessions with the producers. The photos are out-of-focus, off-framed, with a sepia-tinged treatment, and feature the 1989 songs' lyrics written with black marker on the bottom. Perone thought that this photo package appeared as though it were Swift's personal gift to album buyers. Polaroid's chief executive Scott Hardy reported that 1989 propelled a revival in instant film, especially among the hipster subculture who valued the "nostalgia and retro element of what [their] company stands for".
== Release ==
=== Marketing ===
Swift marketed 1989 as her first "official pop" album and, with her label Big Machine, implemented an extensive promotional campaign through product endorsements, media appearances, and fan engagements. Swift announced 1989 via a Yahoo live streaming sponsored by ABC News on August 18, 2014. She frequently posted on social media platforms to engage fans; based on their interactions with her posts, she selected the most engaged ones and invited them to "1989 Secret Sessions" album listening parties prior to its release. These listening sessions were also attended by journalists and critics selected by Swift, and they were held at her properties in Los Angeles, New York City, Nashville, Rhode Island, and London throughout September–October 2014.
Swift appeared on many terrestrial broadcast platforms to promote 1989: television talk shows (Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Late Show with David Letterman, Good Morning America, The Talk), awards ceremonies (2014 MTV Video Music Awards), and radio (NPR, American Top 40, Sirius XM Town Hall). Her product tie-ins included partnerships with Subway, Keds, and Diet Coke. Big Machine released "Shake It Off" to contemporary hit radio in the United States as the lead single from 1989 on August 18, 2014, and "Out of the Woods" and "Welcome to New York" for download via the iTunes Store as promotional singles on October 15 and 21. "Shake It Off" peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and set the record for the highest debuts on the Pop Songs and Adult Pop Songs charts.
Throughout 2014–2015, 1989 was supported by four further singles, with two reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100—"Blank Space" and "Bad Blood", and two peaking in the top 10—"Style" and "Wildest Dreams". The single release of "Bad Blood" was supported by a remix featuring Kendrick Lamar. "Out of the Woods" and "New Romantics" were released as the two last singles in 2016. All singles were accompanied by music videos that featured Swift's new persona and styles: whereas the videos for her country singles had incorporated linear narratives and everyday fashion, those for the 1989 singles featured fragmented storylines and elaborate mise-en-scène that evoke fantasy-like environments, Hollywood cinema productions, and lavish lifestyles.
There has been commentary on the effects of 1989's marketing. The popular culture academic Keith Nainby argued that the music videos created Swift's "pop" and "rarefied" persona that contrasted with the earnest, everyday, down-to-earth personae in her country music videos. Maryn Wilkinson, a scholar in media studies, described Swift's 1989 persona as "zany": she deliberately showcased that her "pop" persona was a construct of hard work, implying that her "real" persona existed beneath her "pop" performances in videos and interviews. In doing so, Swift reminded her audience that she still retained her authentic self from her country beginnings. Wilkinson considered Swift's "zany" persona a means for her to both abandon country for pop, and retain fans from her country days, while Randy Lewis of the Los Angeles Times thought that she did so via the intimate bonds with fans thanks to her social media usage and the "Secret Sessions".
=== Distribution and streaming ===
Big Machine Records released 1989 on October 27, 2014; the digital album was available for a discounted price via a Microsoft partnership. Big Machine released the deluxe edition on CD exclusively via Target stores in the United States. This edition includes three voice memos recorded on Swift's phone, containing her discussions of the songwriting process and unfinished demos for three songs: "I Know Places" (piano/vocal), "I Wish You Would" (track/vocal), and "Blank Space" (guitar/vocal). For Perone, these voice memos personalized 1989 by providing an insider's view of her creative process. According to Myles McNutt, a scholar in communications and the arts, Swift used the voice memos to claim authorship of 1989, defying pop music's "gendered hierarchy" which had seen a dominance of male songwriters and producers. While McNutt considered Swift's approach feminist, he argued that it was promotional rather than activist, and thus its impact on the music industry at large was limited.
On November 3, 2014, Big Machine removed Swift's discography from Spotify, the largest on-demand music streaming service at the time. Swift argued that their ad-supported, free service undermined the premium service that provided higher royalties for songwriters and artists. She had written an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in July 2014, expressing her concerns over the decline of the album as an economic entity following the rise of free music streaming, and reinstated her stance in a November 2014 interview with Time. Big Machine kept 1989 only on paid, subscription-required streaming platforms like Rhapsody and Beats Music. This move prompted an industry-wide debate over the impact of streaming on declining record sales during the digital era and a response from Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek, who defended the platform's royalty model.
The deluxe edition bonus tracks were released onto the iTunes Store in February 2015. In an open letter published via Tumblr on June 21, 2015, Swift stated that 1989 would not be available on Apple Music, criticizing its non-payment of royalties to artists during their three-month free trial period. The following day, head of Apple Music Eddy Cue announced that they would reverse their initial decision and pay artists royalties during the free trial period, directly addressing Swift's open letter. Swift agreed to put 1989 on Apple Music when it launched on June 30 and she later appeared in commercials for the service. In June 2017, Big Machine reinstated Swift's catalogue on Spotify and all major streaming services, citing the milestone of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certifying 100 million song units across her discography.
=== Touring ===
Swift announced the 1989 World Tour on November 3, 2014, via her Twitter account. Spanning 85 dates and visiting 53 cities, it kicked off on May 5, in Tokyo, Japan, and concluded on December 12, in Sydney, Australia. The 1989 World Tour was the highest-grossing tour of 2015, earning over $250 million at the box office. In North America alone, the tour grossed $181.5 million, breaking the records for the highest-grossing US tour by a woman and the highest-grossing US tour by any act, surpassing the Rolling Stones' record in 2005. A documentary and concert film, The 1989 World Tour Live, was released for streaming exclusively via Apple Music on December 20, 2015.
On various dates of the 1989 World Tour, Swift invited special guests on stage with her. While Swift had invited fellow musicians to perform with her on the Red Tour, the guest list of the 1989 World Tour was more random. There were 78 such guest stars; they were unannounced and included actors, singers, models, and athletes. A specific group of female celebrities, consisting of mostly singers and models, was referred to by the media as Swift's "squad". Kirsty Fairclough, an academic in the arts, considered the celebrity guest stars on the 1989 World Tour a means for Swift to showcase her star power and keep her name constantly in the news cycle, giving the impression of a self-centric and inauthentic pop star. Commenting on the female "squad", Fairclough said that it was a visual representation of Swift's newfound feminist identity, but its members of wealthy and conventionally attractive celebrities undermined the "underdog" relatability that she had curated during her career beginnings.
== Commercial performance ==
In the United States, record sales had declined sharply in the 2010s decade due to the rise of download and streaming, but Swift's albums had achieved strong sales: her last two, Speak Now (2010) and Red (2012), each sold over one million copies within one week. 1989's sales were subject to projections by music-industry publications, considering her withdrawal from country music, which had been formative in driving her career, and free streaming services. During the week prior to the album's release, publications predicted that it would sell short of one million copies, with estimations from 600,000–750,000 to 800,000–900,000. After its release, Billboard closely monitored its sales and raised the first-week prediction from 900,000 to one million within 24 hours, 1.2 million within 48 hours, and 1.3 million after six days.
Through November 2, 2014, the album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 1.287 million, according to data for the chart dated November 15, 2014. Swift became the first artist to have three albums each sell one million copies within the first week, and 1989 was the first 2014 album to sell one million. It spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 and one full year in the top 10. With 6.215 million copies sold by the end of 2019, it was the third-best-selling album of the 2010s decade in the United States. As of May 2025, 1989 had accumulated 14.6 million album-equivalent units in the United States. The RIAA certified the album 14-times platinum in September 2025.
1989 reached number one on charts and was certified multi-platinum in Australia (eleven-times platinum), Canada (six-times platinum), Mexico (three-times platinum+gold), New Zealand (ten-times platinum), Norway (triple platinum), and the United Kingdom (six-times platinum). In other countries across the Americas, Europe, and Asia–Pacific, 1989 reached the top five on charts in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, and Brazil. It was certified platinum in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, and Switzerland; double diamond in Brazil; triple platinum in Austria, Denmark, Poland, and Singapore; and four-times platinum in Belgium. In China, it had sold over one million units as of August 2019 to become one of the best-selling digital albums.
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 1989 was the second-best-selling album of 2014 and third-best-selling of 2015. By November 2022, the album was Swift's best-selling worldwide, having sold 14 million copies. After Swift embarked on the Eras Tour, a career retrospective world tour, in March 2023, sales and streams of her discography resurged. 1989 reached new peaks on charts in Greece (number one), Austria (number four), and Sweden (number 17), and it appeared on new charts of Argentina (number one), Uruguay (number seven), and Iceland (number 25).
== Critical reception ==
Initial reviews of 1989 were generally positive, although not universally so. Based on reviews in mainstream publications, Metacritic assigns 1989 a weighted average score of 76 out of 100 based on 29 reviews, and AnyDecentMusic? gives the album a score of 7.4 out of 10 based on 28 reviews.
Positive reviews generally complimented Swift's songwriting, highlighting the multifaceted lyrics exploring lighthearted and bittersweet sentiments of failed romance that various critics found mature and absent of the naivete portrayed in her past songs. Critics felt that compared to her previous albums, 1989 was more playful but still retained a deep emotional engagement. Pitchfork's Vrinda Jagoda deemed Swift's persona of 1989 more self-reliant and confidant without dwelling too much on past pain, while Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield characterized the album as a "deeply weird, feverishly emotional, wildly enthusiastic" record that explored her feelings to extremes.
Critics considered Swift's embrace of 1980s synth-pop experimental but were divided on its outcome. Many reviews praised the production as catchy; Robert Christgau thought that the "treated hooks and doctored vocals" made Swift sound "at home" despite her intention to abandon her old sound. Powers contended that the electronic processing of Swift's vocals brought forth new shades of expressions and emotions, resulting in a pleasurable listening experience. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times and Alexis Petridis of The Guardian lauded 1989 as a faithful homage to 1980s pop, elevating Swift's status as a timeless musician ahead of her peers; the latter attributed this success to her artistic vision despite the multiple collaborators and producers.
Multiple reviews otherwise lamented that the synth-based musical approach eroded Swift's songwriting authenticity because they opined that its "capitalist" nature contrasted with country music's supposedly authentic values. Several reviews criticized the heavy synth production that undermined the lyrical details and came off as generic. In his review for Grantland, Steven Hyden contended that 1989 showcased consistent songcraft but felt the 1980s synth-pop palette repetitive and made Swift lose her distinctive voice. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine summed up the album as "a sparkling soundtrack to an aspirational lifestyle" desperate to cater to mainstream tastes. Kitty Empire of The Observer thought that 1989 played to Swift's strengths as a songwriter but was not as "unequivocally great" as her single "I Knew You Were Trouble".
== Awards and rankings ==
In 2015, 1989 won Favorite Pop/Rock Album at the American Music Awards and Album of the Year (Western) at the Japan Gold Disc Awards, and it received nominations for Best International Pop/Rock Album at the Echo Music Prize in Germany, International Album of the Year at the Juno Awards in Canada, and Best International Album at the Los Premios 40 Principales in Spain. It won Album of the Year at the 2016 iHeartRadio Music Awards. At the 58th Annual Grammy Awards in 2016, 1989 won Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album. Swift became the first female solo artist to win Album of the Year twice—her first win was for Fearless (2008) in 2010.
Many publications ranked 1989 among the best albums of 2014. Those who placed the album within their top 10 included Billboard (first), Drowned in Sound (3rd), American Songwriter (4th), Time (4th), The Daily Telegraph (5th), The Music (5th), Complex (8th), and Rolling Stone (10th). Other publications that featured 1989 in their lists were The Guardian, The A.V. Club, PopMatters, Pitchfork, and MusicOMH. The album ranked 7th on The Village Voice's 2014 Pazz & Jop mass critics' poll and featured in individual critics' lists by Jon Caramanica for The New York Times (7th), Ken Tucker for NPR (3rd), and Brian Mansfield for USA Today (1st).
== Legacy ==
=== Cultural influence ===
1989 transformed Swift's image from a country singer to a pop icon, a status that has endured into the 2020s. It was the second album after Katy Perry's Teenage Dream (2010) to have at least five top-10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 2010s decade. With Fearless and 1989, Swift became the second woman after Janet Jackson to have two albums each have at least five top-10 hits. Its singles received heavy rotation on United States radio airplay for more than 1.5 years during 2014–2016, which Billboard described as a rare "cultural omnipresence" for a 2010s album. The widespread popularity of 1989 put Swift "at the cutting edge of postmillennial pop", wrote Shaun Cullen, a scholar in the humanities. Its synth-pop sound laid the musical groundwork to her subsequent albums, namely Reputation (2017), Lover (2019), Midnights (2022), and The Tortured Poets Department (2024). Antonoff worked with Swift on those albums, and he credited Swift as the first person who recognized him a producer, leading to his collaborations with other artists in mainstream pop.
Many journalists credited 1989 with inspiring other artists to experiment with new sounds without being confined by a specific genre. Artists who cited 1989 as an influence included the singer-songwriter Conan Gray, the actor and musician Jared Leto, and the pop band Vamps, who was inspired by the album to compose Wake Up (2015). Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, an actress and director, cited 1989 as an inspiration for her feature film directorial debut, Someone Great (2019). The singer-songwriter Ryan Adams released his track-by-track cover album of 1989 in September 2015. Finding it a "joyful" record, he listened to the album frequently to cope with his divorce from Mandy Moore in late 2014. On his rendition, Adams incorporated acoustic arrangements of strings and percussions, embracing styles of alternative country and indie rock. Swift was delighted with Adams' cover and told him, "What you did with my album was like actors changing emphasis."
Swift's success was accompanied by heightened media scrutiny on her public image. During promotion of 1989, she identified as a feminist after having avoided discussing this issue in the past. Her public appearances with her "squad" and the routinely documented 1989 World Tour led to a media overexposure, and the public was getting weary of her public persona that appeared too calculated and aspirational, as opposed to the down-to-earth image she had curated in country music. In 2015–2016, Swift's online disputes with other musicians like Nicki Minaj and Kanye West blemished her carefully curated image, feminist identity, and sense of authenticity. Swift announced a prolonged hiatus in 2016 thinking that "people might need a break from [her]". 1989's follow-up album, Reputation, was influenced by the media commotion surrounding her celebrity.
=== Critical reappraisal ===
After Adams released his 1989 cover in 2015, Pitchfork attracted criticism from several fellow publications when it reviewed his rendition but not Swift's. Multiple reviews praised Adams for transforming Swift's 1989 from a trivial or cheesy album to a more serious and authentic one. The philosopher Alison Stone argued that this critical reaction was a result of both rockism and sexism. According to Stone, music journalism assumed that Swift's pop music had its "feminine" qualities of "superficiality and triviality", which it deemed inferior to Adams's indie-rock singer-songwriter identity that supposedly embodied authenticity and meaningfulness. Stone and Slate's Forrest Wickman added that this was due to rock-music critics' preference of male-oriented, "edgy" musicians to "mainstream" acts, while Vox's Emily St. James argued that Swift's 1989 already embraced complex emotions like sadness and anger underneath its upbeat pop sounds, and that the emphasis on Adams's "authenticity" and "sincerity" was a result of music criticism's favoritism of certain genres like rock or acoustic singer-songwriter.
Retrospective reviews have considered 1989 an artistically accomplished album. Many have deemed it a masterpiece and a modern classic, upholding its 1980s synth-pop authenticity as an attribute of its timeless and nostalgic qualities. According to The Ringer's Nora Princiotti, by deliberately avoiding popular musical styles of the day, Swift situated 1989 within the history of pop music itself, on par with classic pop albums like Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982) and the Beatles' Abbey Road (1969). 1989 was listed among the most significant albums of the 21st century by British GQ and The Guardian, and Rolling Stone ranked it at number 72 on their 2025 list "The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far". The Guardian's Ian Gormely wrote that it made Swift the catalyst for poptimism—a critical reassessment of "mainstream" pop music that had been largely dismissed by "indie" music audiences. 1989 has been placed first in rankings of Swift's 11-albums discography by NME and The Irish Times, and second in rankings by the Alternative Press, Spin, Slant Magazine, and the Star Tribune.
Many publications ranked 1989 among their best albums of the 2010s decade, with The A.V. Club and Slant Magazine placing in their top 10. The album featured in the top 50 on lists by Billboard, Consequence, NME, Paste, Rolling Stone, and Uproxx. Consequence additionally ranked it sixth on their list of the best 2010s-decade pop albums, and Variety's Chris Willman ranked it first on his personal list. The Times's Ed Potton dubbed it the "album of the century". On Pitchfork's readers' poll for the 2010s decade, it ranked 44th. 1989 placed at number 393 on Rolling Stone's revision of their list "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" (2023), and number 39 on Consequence's "100 Greatest Albums of All Time" (2022).
=== Re-recording ===
In November 2020, after a dispute over the ownership of Swift's back catalog, she began re-recording her first six studio albums that had been released by Big Machine. By re-recording them, Swift had the full ownership of the masters, which granted her full authorization of using her music for commercial purposes and therefore substituted the Big Machine-owned masters. Swift released the re-recording of 1989, 1989 (Taylor's Version), on October 27, 2023, nine years after the original release of 1989. 1989 (Taylor's Version)'s standard track-list contains re-recorded versions of all tracks on the deluxe 1989 edition and five previously unreleased "From the Vault" tracks. After the announcement of 1989 (Taylor's Version), the original album re-entered the top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart dated August 26, 2023. The ownership of the original 1989 master was sold back to Swift on May 30, 2025, alongside the masters of the other five albums.
== Track listing ==
=== Notes ===
^a signifies a vocal producer
^b signifies an additional producer
== Personnel ==
Production
Instruments
Art
Taylor Swift – creative director
Sarah Barlow – photography
Stephen Schofield – photography
Josh & Bethany Newman – art direction
Austin Hale – design
Amy Fucci – design
Joseph Cassell – wardrobe stylist
== Charts ==
=== Decade-end charts ===
=== All-time charts ===
== Certifications and sales == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_How_I_Met_Your_Mother_episodes#Season_3_(2007%E2%80%9308) | List of How I Met Your Mother episodes#Season 3 (2007–08) | How I Met Your Mother is an American sitcom which ran for nine seasons on CBS from 2005 through 2014. It was created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. Set in New York City, the series follows the social and romantic lives of Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and his four best friends, Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), and Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), as Ted seeks out his future wife. The titular mother is unseen until the season eight finale, "Something New", in which she is portrayed by Cristin Milioti. Milioti was promoted to series regular for the ninth season. The show tells this story through the framing device of "future" Ted (Bob Saget) as an unreliable narrator who is recounting to his son and daughter the events that led him to their mother.
Over the course of the series, 208 episodes aired. The series premiere aired on September 19, 2005, with the season one finale airing on May 15, 2006. Season two was broadcast from September 18, through May 14, 2007. The third season aired from September 24 through May 19, 2008. The series was renewed for a fourth season on May 14, 2008. Season four aired September 22, through May 18, 2009. On May 19, a fifth season, which was mandated by a syndication deal, was ordered; it ran from September 21, through May 24, 2010. In January 2010, the series was given an early renewal. Season six began on September 20 and finished on May 16, 2011. On May 7, the seventh and eighth seasons were ordered, with the series being renewed through the 2012–2013 television season. Season seven ran from September 19 through May 14, 2012. The eighth season premiered on September 24 and concluded on May 13, 2013. During the eighth season, Segal stated that he planned to depart the series when his contract expired at the end of the season. As a result, the fate of the series was unknown. However, in late January 2013, a ninth and final season was officially ordered by CBS with Segel remaining on board. The ninth season began on September 23 with the series finale airing on March 31, 2014.
How I Met Your Mother premiered to 10.94 million viewers, peaking with 12.3 million viewers for season one's tenth episode, "The Pineapple Incident". The record set by "The Pineapple Incident" was not broken until the series finale aired to a series high of 13.13 million viewers. The first few seasons maintained generally steady though declining viewership. However, its audience grew starting with season four. The first season averaged 9.5 million viewers, in comparison, the final season averaged 10.5 million. Having a larger audience at the conclusion of a series compared to the start is fairly uncommon for long running television shows. In 2014, due to the success of the series, a pilot for a spinoff starring Greta Gerwig, titled "How I Met Your Dad", was produced but not picked up. In 2022, a series titled How I Met Your Father premiered on Hulu. It starred Hilary Duff and was cancelled after two seasons.
== Series overview ==
== Episodes ==
=== Season 1 (2005–06) ===
=== Season 2 (2006–07) ===
=== Season 3 (2007–08) ===
=== Season 4 (2008–09) ===
=== Season 5 (2009–10) ===
=== Season 6 (2010–11) ===
=== Season 7 (2011–12) ===
=== Season 8 (2012–13) ===
=== Season 9 (2013–14) ===
== Ratings ==
=== Season 1–3 ===
=== Season 4–6 ===
=== Season 7–9 === |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Asian_countries_by_area | List of Asian countries by area | Below is the list of countries in Asia by area. Russia is the largest country in Asia and the world, even after excluding its European portion. Maldives is the smallest country in Asia. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_%C3%81lamo | Roberto Álamo | Roberto Martínez Felipe (born 1 January 1970), better known as Roberto Álamo, is a Spanish actor who has appeared in more than fifty films since 1996. Álamo won the Goya Award for Best Actor for his performance as Javier Alfaro in May God Save Us (2016).
== Life and career ==
Roberto Martínez Felipe was born in Madrid in 1970. He developed an interest in cinema at a young age after watching Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses. He trained at the Cristina Rota acting school and was a member of theatre company Animalario. He made his feature film debut in The Ugliest Woman in the World (1999).
The theatre play Urtain marked a turning point in his career. Álamo starred from 2008 to 2010 in the aforementioned play as the Basque boxer José Manuel Urtain, winning a Max Award for Best Actor for his performance.
His portrayal of Alfaro, a violent police inspector under the spotlight of their superiors and colleagues chasing a rapist and murderer of elderly women, in Rodrigo Sorogoyen's thriller film May God Save Us (2016) won him the Goya Award for Best Actor.
== Selected filmography ==
=== Television ===
== Accolades == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Shefler | Yuri Shefler | Yuri Shefler (Russian: Юрий Викторович Шефлер; born 10 September 1967) is a Russian-born businessman. He is the owner of SPI Group, an international consortium that sells alcohol in 160 countries, most notably the Stolichnaya vodka brand. As of July 2025, his net worth was estimated at US$1.1 billion.
== Business career ==
Shefler left the Soviet Army in September 1987 and embarked on a career in business, which saw him running one of Moscow's leading shopping malls and Vnukovo Airlines.
He used to own one of the largest yachts in the world, Serene, with a length of 133.9 m (439 ft 4 in). In 2015 he sold Serene to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for a reported $550 million. In March 2017 he bought Tulchan Estate on Speyside, Scotland's most expensive sporting estate.
On 17 February 2022, Brad Pitt said that Angelina Jolie sold to Shefler's wine group Tenute del Mondo, which is a subsidiary of Shefler's Stoli Group, her interest in the Château Miraval at Correns in Provence, France, which Pitt and Jolie purchased in 2008 for $28.4 million.
=== SPI Group ===
SPI Group produces and sells alcohol under 380 brands in 160 countries, most notably Stolichnaya vodka. SPI Group also owns Louisiana Spirits Company, Fabrica de Tequilas Finos in Mexico and Achaval Ferrer in Argentina. A subsidiary of SPI Group, Luxembourg-based Amber Beverage Group Holding S.à r.l. owns Latvian-based SIA Amber Beverage Group, which in turn owns Latvijas Balzams which manufactures Riga Black Balsam.
Shefler's SPI Group has been involved in a decades-long legal dispute with the Russian state-owned company FKP Sojuzplodoimport (FKP) over ownership of the Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya trademarks. In 2020, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the rights belonged to Russia and ordered SPI Group to stop selling its products in Benelux.
In 2022, Shefler was ordered to pay a former UK executive over £1.6 million after sacking him when he complained about pay cuts.
== Personal life ==
Shefler was born to a Russian Jewish family in Oryol. He has citizenship in the United Kingdom and Israel.
He was formerly married to Tatiana Kovylina, a Russian model who previously worked for Victoria's Secret; they separated in 2021. They have four children together, and lived together in Geneva, Switzerland.
He has since been linked to Ksenia Sukhinova, who was Miss Russia 2007, and Miss World 2008.
As reported by Forbes in March 2022, Shefler had an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rushmore#History | Mount Rushmore#History | The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a national memorial centered on a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore (Lakota: Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, or Six Grandfathers) in the Black Hills near Keystone, South Dakota, United States. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, named it the Shrine of Democracy, and oversaw the execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features 60-foot-tall (18 m) depictions of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively chosen to represent the nation's foundation, expansion, development, and preservation. Mount Rushmore attracts more than two million visitors annually to the memorial park which covers 1,278 acres (2.00 sq mi; 517 hectares). The mountain's elevation is 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level.
Borglum chose Mount Rushmore in part because it faces southeast for maximum sun exposure. The carving was the idea of Doane Robinson, South Dakota's state historian. Robinson originally wanted the sculpture to feature American West heroes, such as Lewis and Clark, their expedition guide Sacagawea, Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse. Borglum, arguing that the sculpture should be national in scope rather than regional, convinced them to choose the four presidents instead.
Peter Norbeck, U.S. senator from South Dakota, sponsored the project and secured federal funding. Construction began in 1927 and the presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. After Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, his son Lincoln took over as leader of the construction project. Each president was originally to be depicted from head to waist, but lack of funding forced construction to end on October 31, 1941, and only Washington's sculpture includes any detail below chin level.
The sculpture at Mount Rushmore was built on land that was taken from the Sioux Nation in the 1870s. The Sioux continue to demand return of the land, and in 1980 the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the taking of the Black Hills required just compensation, and awarded the tribe $102 million. The Sioux have refused the money, and demand the return of the land. This conflict continues, leading some critics of the monument to refer to it as a "Shrine of Hypocrisy".
== History ==
=== "Six Grandfathers" to "Mount Rushmore" ===
Mount Rushmore and the surrounding Black Hills (Pahá Sápa) are considered sacred by Plains Indians such as the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota Sioux, who used the area for centuries as a place to pray and gather food, building materials, and medicine.
The Lakota called the mountain "Six Grandfathers" (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe), symbolizing ancestral deities personified as the six directions: north, south, east, west, above (sky), and below (earth).
In the latter half of the 19th century, expansion by the United States into the Black Hills led to the Sioux Wars. In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the U.S. government granted exclusive use of all of the Black Hills, including Six Grandfathers, to the Sioux in perpetuity.
Six Grandfathers was a significant part of the spiritual journey taken in the early 1870s by Lakota leader Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa, also known as "The Sixth Grandfather") that culminated at the nearby Black Elk Peak (Hiŋháŋ Káǧa, "Making of Owls"). U.S. general George Armstrong Custer summited Black Elk Peak a few years later in 1874 during the Black Hills Expedition, which triggered the Black Hills Gold Rush and Great Sioux War of 1876.
In 1877, the U.S. broke the Treaty of Fort Laramie and asserted control over the area, leading to an influx of settlers and prospectors.
Among those prospectors was New York mining promoter James Wilson, who organized the Harney Peak Tin Company, and hired New York attorney Charles E. Rushmore to visit the Black Hills and confirm the company's land claims. Rushmore visited the area on three or four trips over the span of 1884 and 1885. During one of these visits, Rushmore was traveling near the base of the peak and, impressed with it, asked his guide, Bill Challis, the mountain's name; Challis replied that the mountain did not have a name, but that it would henceforth be named after Rushmore. The name "Mount Rushmore" continued to be used locally, and was officially recognized by the United States Board of Geographic Names in June 1930.
=== Concept, design and funding ===
By the 1920s, South Dakota had become a U.S. state, and was a popular destination for road trippers visiting the Black Hills National Forest, Wind Cave National Park, and Needles Highway.
In 1923, the Secretary of the South Dakota State Historical Society, Doane Robinson, who would come to be known as the "Father of Mount Rushmore", learned about the "Shrine to the Confederacy", a project to carve the likenesses of Confederate generals into the side of Stone Mountain, Georgia, that had been underway since 1915.
Seeking to boost tourism to South Dakota, Robinson began promoting the idea of a similar monument in the Black Hills. Robinson initially approached sculptor Lorado Taft, but Taft was ill at the time and uninterested in Robinson's project. Robinson next sought the help of then-U.S. Senator Peter Norbeck, who had established Custer State Park when he was Governor in 1919. Norbeck cautiously supported Robinson's plan, and Robinson began campaigning for it publicly. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader was also an early proponent of Robinson's plan.
Robinson's plan had some support in South Dakota, but it also faced opposition, with opposition being particularly vehement in the Black Hills area. Many people there opposed the project on conservationist grounds, wishing to leave the appearance of the area unaltered. Many others opposed it because they did not want an influx of tourism to the area. Cora Babbitt Johnson, editor of the Hot Springs, South Dakota newspaper, the Hot Springs Star, was particularly outspoken in her opposition to the planned sculptures. Others opposed to the plan included the Black Hills Federation of Women's Clubs and the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan. Through 1924, predominant opinion in South Dakota was either opposed or indifferent to the memorial project, and it was only through considerable lobbying on the part of Robinson and Borglum that the project began to gain support in early 1925. South Dakota Governor Carl Gunderson also leaned toward opposition to the project, but informed Senator Norbeck that he would not actively oppose it.
Although many Lakota and other Native Americans would come to oppose the Mount Rushmore statues as a desecration of their sacred land during the modern era of Native American civil rights movement, Native groups did not openly protest the monument during the time of its planning and construction. Indeed, Black Elk would visit the site in 1936 while it was still under construction.
On August 20, 1924, Robinson wrote to Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of "Shrine to the Confederacy", asking him to travel to the Black Hills region to determine whether the carving could be accomplished.
Borglum, who had involved himself with the Ku Klux Klan, one of the Stone Mountain memorial's funders, had been having disagreements with the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, and on September 24, 1924, travelled to South Dakota to meet Robinson. The press reported a later, March 7, 1925, conference between Norbeck and Borglum, with specific mention of the Washington-Lincoln design and the use of Black Elk Peak (Mount Harney). Borglum was formally offered the project, but said he would withhold his decision until conflicts with the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving were settled.
Borglum's original plan was to make the carvings in 490-foot-high (150 m) granite pillars known as "The Needles" (Hiŋháŋ Káǧa). The Needles were an established area landmark, being a centerpiece of Custer State Park and the scenic Needles Highway. The proposal to turn the Needles into sculptures had aroused some of the strongest opposition to the project, and the idea was abandoned in order to assuage opposition. (It was later noted that the Needles would have been too small and unstable to support carving on the scale that Borglum wished to carry out.) On August 14, 1925, Borglum summited Black Elk Peak while scouting alternative locations, and reportedly said upon seeing Mount Rushmore, "America will march along that skyline." He chose Mount Rushmore, a grander location, partly because it faced southeast and enjoyed maximum exposure to sunlight.
Borglum rejected Robinson's original plan of depicting characters from the Old West, such as Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud, Sacagawea, John C. Fremont, and Crazy Horse, and instead decided to depict four American presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
The four presidential faces were said to be carved into the granite with the intention of symbolizing "an accomplishment born, planned, and created in the minds and by the hands of Americans for Americans".
Senator Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson of South Dakota introduced bills in early 1925 for permission to use federal land, which passed easily. South Dakota legislation had less support, only passing narrowly on its third attempt, which Governor Gunderson signed into law on March 5, 1925. The approval came without any allocated funds, however, leaving the project to be financed by private sources. Private funding came slowly and Borglum invited President Calvin Coolidge to the dedication ceremony, at which he promised federal funding. The dedication ceremony was held on August 10, 1927, and carving of the sculpture got underway in October 4. The Mount Rushmore National Memorial Act, which authorized up to $250,000 in matching funds, was introduced to Congress in 1928 and signed into law by Coolidge on February 25, 1929, just before leaving office. The 1929 presidential transition to Herbert Hoover delayed funding until an initial federal match of $54,670.56 was acquired.
=== Construction ===
Between October 4, 1927, and October 31, 1941, Gutzon Borglum and 400 workers sculpted the colossal 60-foot-high (18 m) carvings of United States Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln to represent the first 150 years of American history. These presidents were selected by Borglum because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory. The carving of Mount Rushmore involved the use of dynamite, followed by the process of "honeycombing", where workers drill holes close together, allowing small pieces to be removed by hand. In total, about 450,000 short tons (410,000 t) of rock were blasted off the mountainside. The project was completed without a single fatality. The image of Thomas Jefferson was originally intended to appear in the area at Washington's right, but after the work there was begun, the rock was found to be unsuitable, so the work on Jefferson's figure was dynamited, and a new figure was sculpted to Washington's left.
The chief carver of the mountain was Luigi Del Bianco, an artisan and stonemason who emigrated to the U.S. from Friuli in Italy and was chosen to work on this project because of his understanding of sculptural language and ability to imbue emotion in the carved portraits.
In 1933, the National Park Service took Mount Rushmore under its jurisdiction. Julian Spotts helped with the project by improving its infrastructure. For example, he had the tram upgraded so it could reach the top of Mount Rushmore for the ease of workers. By July 4, 1934, Washington's face had been completed and was dedicated. The face of Thomas Jefferson was dedicated in 1936, and Abraham Lincoln's on September 17, 1937. In 1937, a bill was introduced in Congress to add the head of civil-rights leader Susan B. Anthony, but a rider was passed on an appropriations bill requiring federal funds be used to finish only those heads that had already been started at that time. In 1939, the face of Theodore Roosevelt was dedicated.
The Sculptor's Studio – a display of unique plaster models and tools related to the sculpting – was built in 1939 under the direction of Borglum. Borglum died from an embolism in March 1941. His son, Lincoln Borglum, continued the project. Originally, it was planned that the figures would be carved from head to waist, but insufficient funding forced the carving to end. Borglum had also planned a massive panel in the shape of the Louisiana Purchase commemorating in eight-foot-tall (2.4 m) gilded letters the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, Louisiana Purchase, and seven other territorial acquisitions from the Alaska Purchase to the Panama Canal Zone. In total, the entire project cost US$989,992.32 (equivalent to $21.7 million in 2025).
Nick Clifford, the last remaining carver, died in November 2019 at age 98.
=== Later developments ===
Harold Spitznagel and Cecil Doty designed the original visitor center, finished in 1957, as part of the Mission 66 effort to improve visitors' facilities at national parks and monuments across the country. Ten years of redevelopment work culminated with the completion of extensive visitor facilities and sidewalks in 1998, such as a Visitor Center, the Lincoln Borglum Museum, and the Presidential Trail.
On October 15, 1966, Mount Rushmore was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A 500-word essay giving the history of the United States by Nebraska student William Andrew Burkett was selected as the college-age group winner in a 1934 competition, and that essay was placed on the Entablature on a bronze plate in 1973.
Members of the American Indian Movement led an occupation of the monument in 1971, naming it "Mount Crazy Horse", and Lakota holy man John Fire Lame Deer planted a prayer staff on top of the mountain. Lame Deer said that the staff formed a symbolic shroud over the presidents' faces "which shall remain dirty until the treaties concerning the Black Hills are fulfilled."
In 1991, President George H. W. Bush officially dedicated Mount Rushmore National Memorial. In 2004, Gerard Baker was appointed superintendent of the park, the first and so far only Native American in that role. Baker stated that he will open up more "avenues of interpretation", and that the four presidents are "only one avenue and only one focus."
=== Proposals to add additional faces ===
In 1937, when the sculpture was not yet complete, a bill in Congress supporting the addition of women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony failed. When the sculpture was completed in 1941, the sculptors said that the remaining rock was not suitable for additional carvings. This stance was shared by RESPEC, an engineering firm charged with monitoring the stability of the rock in 1989. Proposals of additional sculptures include John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963, and Ronald Reagan in 1985 and 1999 – the latter proposal receiving a debate in Congress at the time. Barack Obama was asked about his own potential addition in 2008 and he joked that his ears were too large.
Donald Trump has expressed interest in his own addition to the mountain. During a 2017 rally in Ohio, Trump said, "I'd ask whether or not you some day think I will be on Mount Rushmore ... If I did it joking, totally joking, having fun, the fake news media will say, 'He believes he should be on Mount Rushmore.' So I won't say it." South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem described the potential addition as Trump's "dream" in 2018. On January 28, 2025, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) introduced a bill, H.R. 792, in the House of Representatives to add Trump's likeness to the monument.
=== Black Hills land dispute ===
The Black Hills, in which Mount Rushmore is situated, is the subject of a land claim by the Lakota people that both precedes the construction of the memorial and is ongoing. The Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) had granted the Black Hills to the Lakota in perpetuity, but the United States took the area from the tribe after the Great Sioux War of 1876. The 1980 United States Supreme Court decision United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians ruled that the Sioux had not received just compensation for their land in the Black Hills. The court proposed $102 million as compensation for the loss of the Black Hills. However, the tribe has refused the settlement, arguing that this would amount to payment for land they never agreed to sell.
=== Crazy Horse Memorial ===
Construction on the Crazy Horse Memorial began in 1940 elsewhere in the Black Hills. Ostensibly to commemorate the Native American leader and as a response to Mount Rushmore, if completed it would be larger than Mount Rushmore. The Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has rejected offers of federal funds. Its construction has the support of some Lakota chiefs, but it is the subject of controversy, even among Native American tribes.
== National Memorial site description ==
The 1,278-acre (517-hectare) site of Mount Rushmore National Memorial extends northward from the sculptures to include the entirety of Mount Rushmore and half of Old Baldy Mountain, and southward to Grizzly Bear Creek, where it borders on the Black Elk Wilderness and has a trail connection to the South Dakota Centennial Trail. The main road through the park is South Dakota Highway 244, which branches off of U.S. Route 16A near the eastern entrance to the park, beyond which lies the town of Keystone. The National Memorial is bounded by Black Hills National Forest on all sides.
Mount Rushmore National Memorial is centered on the monumental sculptures, which are faced by a building and terrace complex that is designed to optimize viewing of the sculptures. A broad walkway known as Avenue of Flags is situated between the main parking lot, the park shops, and the Grand View Terrace. The walkway was added during the 1976 United States Bicentennial and is lined with the flags of all 50 current states, as well as the District of Columbia, three territories, and two commonwealths, arranged in alphabetical order.
At the end of the Avenue of Flags lies the Grand View Terrace (added in 1998, along with the amphitheater), which is designed to offer a prime vantage point for the sculptures. The terrace is built atop the Lincoln Borglum Visitor Center, which serves as a museum housing exhibits on the history of Mount Rushmore and its construction and on the presidents depicted in the sculpture. A large amphitheater extends below the museum and terrace and offers a place for seated viewing of the sculptures, as well as ranger talks, and is the central point for the memorial's evening program.
The Presidential Trail is a 0.6-mile (1 km) loop trail that begins at and returns to the Visitor Center, and includes close views of the sculpture from the edge of Mount Rushmore's talus slope, as well as access to the Sculptor's Studio. The studio is connected to the Visitor Center by a series of long stairways (160 and 262 steps, respectively) with the Borglum Viewing Terrace between the two. The Sculptor's Studio, built in 1939, was Gutzon Borglum's second on-site studio. It was kept intact after the 1941 opening of the memorial to showcase Borglum's models, tools, and working effects and to house exhibits on the techniques used in build the sculptures.
An additional scenic viewpoint can be found farther away from the main memorial complex, to the west, along Highway 244. The spot is known as Profile View, and as the name suggests, offers a profile view of the sculptures. U.S. Route 16A, known locally as Iron Mountain Road, routes through the hills east of the park and offers more distant viewpoints at several key points along its route, such as the Doane Robinson Tunnel and Norbeck Overlook.
=== Hall of Records ===
Borglum originally envisioned a grand Hall of Records where America's greatest historical documents and artifacts, including the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence, could be protected and exhibited for visitors. The Hall of Records was to be located in a vault that was cut into the interior of the mountain, with an entrance near the top, behind the presidential heads. Borglum envisioned the construction of a long series of stairways that would lead up the side of Mount Rushmore to the vault's entrance.
Borglum and his workers managed to start the project, beginning a vault high on Mount Rushmore, in a crag behind the Abraham Lincoln figure. However, they only managed to cut about 70 feet (21 m) into the rock, before work stopped in 1939 to focus on the heads. No further work on the Hall of Records was carried out after completion of the statues in 1941. No trail was ever built to the uncompleted vault and because of the general policy of keeping visitors away from the mountaintop, the vault has been off-limits to the public, except for a few individuals who have been allowed to document the site while accompanied by park rangers.
In 1998, a stone time capsule was constructed inside the mouth of the cave housing 16 enamel panels with biographical and historical information about Mount Rushmore, as well as the texts of the documents Borglum wanted to preserve there. The repository consists of a teakwood box inside of a titanium vault placed in the ground with an engraved granite capstone. The capstone is typically covered by a wooden lid to further protect it from the elements.
== Monument conservation ==
The ongoing conservation of the site is overseen by the National Park Service. Maintenance of the memorial requires mountain climbers to monitor and seal cracks annually. Due to budget constraints, the memorial is not regularly cleaned to remove lichens. However, in 2005 Alfred Kärcher, a German manufacturer of pressure washing and steam cleaning machines, conducted a free cleanup operation which lasted several weeks, using pressurized water at over 200 °F (93 °C). Other efforts to conserve the monument have included replacement of the sealant applied originally to cracks in the stone by Gutzon Borglum, which had proved ineffective at providing water resistance. The components of Borglum's sealant included linseed oil, granite dust, and white lead, but a modern silicone replacement for the cracks is now used, disguised with granite dust.
In 1998, electronic monitoring devices were installed to track movement in the topology of the sculpture to an accuracy of 0.12 inches (3 mm). The site was digitally recorded in 2009 using a terrestrial laser scanning method as part of the international Scottish Ten project, providing a high-resolution record to aid the conservation of the site. This data was made publicly accessible online.
== Geology ==
Mount Rushmore is largely composed of granite. The memorial is carved on the northwest margin of the Black Elk Peak granite batholith in the Black Hills of South Dakota, so the geologic formations of the heart of the Black Hills region are also evident at Mount Rushmore. The batholith magma intruded into the pre-existing mica schist rocks during the Proterozoic, 1.6 billion years ago. Coarse grained pegmatite dikes are associated with the granite intrusion of Black Elk Peak and are visibly lighter in color, thus explaining the light-colored streaks on the foreheads of the presidents.
The Black Hills granites were exposed to erosion during the Neoproterozoic, but were later buried by sandstone and other sediments during the Cambrian. Remaining buried throughout the Paleozoic, they were re-exposed again during the Laramide orogeny around 70 million years ago. The Black Hills area was uplifted as an elongated geologic dome. Subsequent erosion stripped the granite of the overlying sediments and the softer adjacent schist. Some schist does remain and can be seen as the darker material just below the sculpture of Washington.
The tallest mountain in the region is Black Elk Peak (7,242 ft or 2,207 m). Borglum selected Mount Rushmore as the site for several reasons. The rock of the mountain is composed of smooth, fine-grained granite. The durable granite erodes only 1 inch (25 mm) every 10,000 years, thus was more than sturdy enough to support the sculpture and its long-term exposure. The mountain's height of 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level made it suitable, and because it faces the southeast, the workers also had the advantage of sunlight for most of the day.
=== Soils and hydrology ===
The Mount Rushmore area is underlain by well drained alfisol soils of very gravelly loam (Mocmount) to silt loam (Buska) texture, brown to dark grayish brown.
The area receives about 18 inches (460 mm) of precipitation on average per year, enough to support abundant animal and plant life. Trees and other plants help to control surface runoff. Dikes, seeps, and springs help to dam up water that is flowing downhill, providing watering spots for animals. In addition, stones like sandstone and limestone help to hold groundwater, creating aquifers.
== Climate ==
Mount Rushmore has a dry-winter humid continental climate (Dwb in the Köppen climate classification). The two wettest months of the year are May and June. Orographic lift causes brief but strong afternoon thunderstorms during the summer.
== Biodiversity and ecology ==
Mount Rushmore falls within the EPA ecoregion of the Black Hills Plateau (17b), an extension of the Middle Rockies ecoregion (17) that is entirely surrounded by the Northwestern Great Plains ecoregion (43).
=== Flora and fauna ===
The flora and fauna of Mount Rushmore are similar to those of the rest of the Black Hills region of South Dakota. The forested areas of the park are largely composed of ponderosa pine, with the majority of it consisting of old-growth stands. Other tree species are found individually or in small groves and include quaking aspen, bur oak, white spruce, and paper birch. Nine species of shrubs grow near Mount Rushmore. There are also a wide variety of wildflowers, including common blanketflower, common sunflower, purple coneflower, upright prairie coneflower, pale agoseris, sawsepal penstemon, Lewis flax, purple prairie clover, wild bergamot, and hoary vervain. Towards higher elevations, plant life becomes sparser.
Avibase lists 154 species of birds as occurring within the park. Common birds include turkey vultures, red-tailed hawks, red-naped sapsuckers, white-breasted nuthatches, mountain bluebirds, and dark-eyed juncos. Herps found in the park include western chorus frogs and northern leopard frogs, along with several species of snake. Grizzly Bear Creek and Starling Basin Creek, the two streams in the memorial, support fish such as longnose dace and brook trout.
Mountain goats are a common sight in the park, but are not native fauna. They are descendants of a herd that the Canadian government gifted to Custer State Park in 1924, which later escaped and are now widespread through the Black Hills. Common native terrestrial mammals include mule deer, yellow-bellied marmots, American red squirrels, least chipmunks, and eastern and white-footed deer mice. Coyotes and northern flying squirrels are also occasionally seen. The monument is also an important habitat for bats, and 11 species of bats have been reported from the park, including silver-haired and hoary bats and the endangered northern myotis. The fungus causing white-nose syndrome in bats has not been detected in the park, but has been detected at the nearby Badlands National Park.
=== Forest ecology ===
A 2007 study found that almost two-thirds of the park's acreage (850 acres (344 hectares)) consisted of old-growth ponderosa pine forest, and of this 44% had no history of logging at all. This is unusual in the Black Hills, which has been heavily logged in the years since Euroamerican settlement, and represents one of the largest contiguous area of old-growth forest in the Black Hills, second only to Custer State Park. Forest fires occur in the ponderosa forests surrounding Mount Rushmore with a mean interval of every 27 years, as indicated by dendrochronology studies of local trees. Large fires are not common. Most events have been ground fires that serve to clear forest debris.
A 2010 article by a National Park Service fire ecologist notes that due to historical fire suppression policies in and around the park, much of the park's forested area had become overgrown with small understory trees that could serve as fuel for a large forest fire. The article recommended a regime of mechanical thinning and woodchipping followed by prescribed burning to mitigate the fire hazard, as well as to make the forest more resilient against pine beetle infestation and to restore the natural stand structure in these woodlands.
=== Environmental issues ===
A 2016 investigation by the U.S. Geological Survey found unusually high concentrations of perchlorate in the surface water and groundwater of the area. A sample collected from a stream had a maximum perchlorate concentration of 54 micrograms per liter, roughly 270 times higher than samples taken from locations outside the area. The report concluded the probable cause of the contamination was the aerial fireworks displays that had taken place on Independence Days from 1998 to 2009. The National Park Service also reported that at least 27 forest fires around Mount Rushmore in that same period (1998 to 2009) have been caused by fireworks displays. Nevertheless, an environmental impact assessment issued in 2020 left room for the possibility of returning fireworks to the memorial in the future.
== Recreation ==
The centerpiece of the park is the monument and viewing the monument and associated activities is the main attraction of the National Memorial. However, the larger 1,278-acre (517-hectare) park includes natural areas beyond the memorial itself.
Rock climbing and bouldering are popular activities within the park and nearby areas, though climbing anywhere close to the statues is prohibited and carries legal penalties. However, areas to the north of the memorial are popular climbing areas, and include the face of Mount Rushmore opposite the statues and the neighboring peak Old Baldy Mountain, as well as numerous other needles, peaks, and boulders. Noted climbers Jan and Herb Conn pioneered many climbing routes in this area in the 1940s and eventually came to make their home in the Black Hills in 1949. The area has over 800 climbing routes today, most requiring a high degree of technical skill.
The best-known walking trail in the park is the Presidential Trail, near to the main memorial complex. However, there are also two hiking trails that are found in more remote areas of the park. The Blackberry Trail extends from just across from the main parking lot through the southern part of the park and into the Black Elk Wilderness, connecting to the Centennial Trail about 0.8 miles (1.3 km) from the trailhead. There is also a trail to the top of Old Baldy Mountain at the northern edge of the park. The trail begins at the Wrinkled Rock trailhead, just outside of the west entrance to the park and most of its course is outside of the boundaries of the National Memorial. It leads to the summit of Old Baldy after 1.5 miles (2.4 km), where there is a panoramic view of the Black Hills from the summit. However, only the backside of Mount Rushmore is in the line of sight from the summit and the statues cannot be seen.
Camping is not allowed within the boundaries of the National Memorial, however, there are public and private campgrounds and dispersed camping in the neighboring Black Hills National Forest.
== Tourism ==
Tourism is South Dakota's second-largest industry, and Mount Rushmore is the state's top tourist attraction. A total of 2,440,449 people visited the park in 2022.
The popularity of the location, as with many other national monuments, derives from its immediate recognizability; "there are no substitutes for iconic resources such as the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, or Mount Rushmore. These locations are one of a kind places".
In the 1950s and 1960s, local Lakota Sioux elder Benjamin Black Elk (son of medicine man Black Elk, who had been present at the Battle of the Little Bighorn) was known as the "Fifth Face of Mount Rushmore", posing for photographs with thousands of tourists daily in his native attire. The South Dakota State Historical Society notes that he was one of the most photographed people in the world over that 20-year period.
== Legacy and commemoration ==
Borglum titled his sculpture at Mount Rushmore as the Shrine of Democracy, but the illegal seizure of the Black Hills where the memorial is located has led to some critics to refer to it as the "Shrine of Hypocrisy".
On August 11, 1952, the U.S. Post Office issued the Mount Rushmore Memorial 3-cent commemorative stamp on the 25th anniversary of the dedication of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. On January 2, 1974, a 26-cent airmail stamp depicting the monument was also issued. In 1991 the United States Mint released commemorative silver dollar, half-dollar, and five-dollar coins celebrating the 50th anniversary of the monument's dedication, and the sculpture was the main subject of the 2006 South Dakota state quarter.
In music, American composer Michael Daugherty's 2010 piece for chorus and orchestra, "Mount Rushmore", depicts each of the four presidents in separate movements. The piece sets texts by George Washington, William Billings, Thomas Jefferson, Maria Cosway, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. By contrast, the song, "Little Snakes", by Protest The Hero, "addresses the violent colonial history involved in the sculpting of Mount Rushmore", critiquing the monument as a symbol of colonialism, referencing the genocide of indigenous peoples and the ownership of slaves by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
The Washington Nationals baseball club uses large foam rubber depictions of the "Rushmore Four" in both their marketing campaigns and in a series of in-stadium promotions such as the Presidents Race.
== In popular culture ==
Mount Rushmore has been depicted in multiple films, comic books, and television series. Its functions vary from settings for action scenes to the site of hidden locations. Its most famous appearance is as the location of the final chase scene in the 1959 film North by Northwest. It is used as a secret base of operations by the protagonists in the 2004 film Team America: World Police, and the secret underground city of Cíbola is located there in the 2007 film National Treasure: Book of Secrets. In the Phineas and Ferb episode Candace Loses Her Head, both Phineas and Ferb sculpt Candace's face on the monument for her 15th birthday. In some films, the presidential faces are replaced with others; examples include the 1980 film Superman II and the 1996 film Mars Attacks! where the villains add their faces to the monument, and the 2003 film Head of State where the newly elected president's face is added. In works showing attacks on landmarks to signify the scope of a threat, Mount Rushmore is a common target; examples include the aforementioned facial replacements in Superman II and Mars Attacks! as well as natural disasters in works like the 2006 miniseries 10.5: Apocalypse and terrorist attacks as in the 1997 film The Peacekeeper. An atypical representation of the monument appears in the 2013 film Nebraska, where instead of being treated with reverence it is criticized for being unfinished. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions | List of Apollo missions | The Apollo program was a United States human spaceflight program carried out from 1961 to 1972 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which landed the first astronauts on the Moon. The program used the Saturn IB and Saturn V launch vehicles to lift the Command/Service Module (CSM) and Lunar Module (LM) spacecraft into space, and the Little Joe II rocket to test a launch escape system which was expected to carry the astronauts to safety in the event of a Saturn failure. Uncrewed test flights beginning in 1966 demonstrated the safety of the launch vehicles and spacecraft to carry astronauts, and four crewed flights beginning in October 1968 demonstrated the ability of the spacecraft to carry out a lunar landing mission.
Apollo achieved the first crewed lunar landing on the Apollo 11 mission, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their LM Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility and walked on the lunar surface, while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the CSM Columbia, and all three landed safely on Earth on July 24, 1969. Five subsequent missions landed astronauts on various lunar sites, ending in December 1972 with 12 men having walked on the Moon and 842 pounds (382 kg) of lunar rocks and soil samples returned to Earth, greatly contributing to the understanding of the Moon's composition and geological history.
Two Apollo missions were failures: a 1967 cabin fire killed the entire Apollo 1 crew during a ground test in preparation for what was to be the first crewed flight; and the third landing attempt on Apollo 13 was aborted by an oxygen tank explosion en route to the Moon, which disabled the CSM Odyssey's electrical power and life support systems, and made the propulsion system unsafe to use. The crew circled the Moon and were returned safely to Earth using the LM Aquarius as a "lifeboat" for these functions.
== Uncrewed test flights ==
From 1961 through 1967, Saturn launch vehicles and Apollo spacecraft components were tested in uncrewed flights.
=== Saturn I ===
The Saturn I launch vehicle was originally planned to carry crewed Command Module flights into low Earth orbit, but its 20,000-pound (9,100 kg) payload capacity limit could not lift even a partially fueled Service Module, which would have required building a lightweight retrorocket module for deorbit. These plans were eventually scrapped in favor of using the uprated Saturn IB to launch the Command Module with a half-fueled Service Module for crewed Earth orbit tests. This limited Saturn I flights to Saturn launch vehicle development, CSM boilerplate testing, and three Pegasus micrometeoroid satellite missions in support of Apollo.
There was some incongruity in the numbering and naming of the first three uncrewed Apollo-Saturn (AS) or Apollo flights. This is due to AS-204 being renamed to Apollo 1 posthumously. This crewed flight was to have followed the first three uncrewed flights. After the fire which killed the AS-204 crew on the pad during a test and training exercise, uncrewed Apollo flights resumed to test the Saturn V launch vehicle and the Lunar Module; these were designated Apollo 4, 5 and 6. The first crewed Apollo mission was thus Apollo 7. Simple "Apollo" numbers were never assigned to the first three uncrewed flights, although renaming AS-201, AS-202, and AS-203 as Apollo 1-A, Apollo 2 and Apollo 3, had been briefly considered.
=== Saturn IB ===
The Saturn I was converted to the Uprated Saturn I, eventually designated Saturn IB, by replacing the S-IV second stage with the S-IVB, which would also be used as the third stage of the Saturn V with the addition of on-orbit restart capability. This increased the payload capacity to 46,000 pounds (21,000 kg), enough to orbit a Command Module with a half-fueled Service Module, and more than enough to orbit a fully fueled Lunar Module.
Two suborbital tests of the Apollo Block I Command and Service Module, one S-IVB development test, and one Lunar Module test were conducted. Success of the LM test led to cancellation of a planned second uncrewed flight.
=== Launch escape system tests ===
From August 1963 to January 1966, a number of tests were conducted at the White Sands Missile Range for development of the launch escape system (LES). These included simulated "pad aborts", which might occur while the Apollo-Saturn space vehicle was still on the launch pad, and flights on the Little Joe II rocket to simulate Mode I aborts which might occur while the vehicle was in the air.
=== Saturn V ===
Prior to George Mueller's tenure as NASA's Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight starting in 1963, it was assumed that 20 Saturn Vs, with at least 10 unpiloted test flights, would be required to achieve a crewed Moon landing, using the conservative one-stage-at-a-time testing philosophy used for the Saturn I. But Mueller introduced the "all-up" testing philosophy of using three live stages plus the Apollo spacecraft on every test flight. This achieved development of the Saturn V with far fewer uncrewed tests, enabling a Moon landing by the 1969 goal. The size of the Saturn V production lot was reduced from 20 to 15 units.
Three uncrewed test flights were planned to human-rate the super heavy-lift Saturn V which would take crewed Apollo flights to the Moon. Success of the first flight and qualified success of the second led to the decision to cancel the third uncrewed test.
== Alphabetical mission types ==
The Apollo program required sequential testing of several major mission elements in the runup to a crewed lunar landing. An alphabetical list of major mission types was proposed by Owen Maynard in September 1967. Two "A-type" missions performed uncrewed tests of the CSM and the Saturn V, and one B-type mission performed an uncrewed test of the LM. The C-type mission, the first crewed flight of the CSM in Earth orbit, was performed by Apollo 7.
The list was revised upon George Low's proposal to commit a mission to lunar orbit ahead of schedule, an idea influenced by the status of the CSM as a proven craft and production delays of the LM. Apollo 8 was reclassified from its original assignment as a D-type mission, a test of the complete CSM/LM spacecraft in Earth orbit, to a "C-prime" mission which would fly humans to the Moon. Once complete, it eliminated the need for the E-type objective of a medium Earth orbital test. The D-type mission was instead performed by Apollo 9; the F-type mission, Apollo 10, flew the CSM/LM spacecraft to the Moon for final testing, without landing. The G-type mission, Apollo 11, performed the first lunar landing, the central goal of the program.
The initial A–G list was expanded to include later mission types: H-type missions—Apollo 12, 13 (planned) and 14—would perform precision landings, and J-type missions—Apollo 15, 16 and 17—would perform thorough scientific investigation. The I-type objective, which called for extended lunar orbital surveillance of the Moon, was incorporated into the J-type missions.
== Crewed missions ==
The Block I CSM spacecraft did not have capability to fly with the LM, and the three crew positions were designated Command Pilot, Senior Pilot, and Pilot, based on U.S. Air Force pilot ratings. The Block II spacecraft was designed to fly with the Lunar Module, so the corresponding crew positions were designated Commander, Command Module Pilot, and Lunar Module Pilot regardless of whether a Lunar Module was present or not on any mission.
Seven of the missions involved extravehicular activity (EVA), spacewalks or moonwalks outside of the spacecraft. These were of three types: testing the lunar EVA suit in Earth orbit (Apollo 9), exploring the lunar surface, and retrieving film canisters from the Scientific Instrument Module stored in the Service Module.
=== Canceled missions ===
Several planned missions of the Apollo program were canceled for a variety of reasons, including changes in technical direction, the Apollo 1 fire, hardware delays, and budget limitations.
Before the Apollo 1 fire, two crewed Block I spacecraft missions were planned, but then it was decided that the second one would give no more information about the spacecraft performance not obtained from the first, and could not carry out extra activities such as EVA, and was canceled.
The Saturn V's all-up testing strategy and relatively good success rate accomplished the first Moon landing on the sixth flight, leaving ten available for Moon landings through Apollo 20, but waning public interest in the program led to decreased Congressional funding, forcing NASA to economize. First, Apollo 20 was cut to make a Saturn V available to launch the Skylab space station whole instead of building it on-orbit using multiple Saturn IB launches. Eight months later, Apollo 18 and 19 were also cut to further economize, and because of fears of increased chance of failure with a large number of lunar flights. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_Women_Writers_Conference | Kentucky Women Writers Conference | The Kentucky Women Writers Conference had its beginnings in 1979 as a celebration of women writers at the University of Kentucky (UK). That first year featured Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Ruth Stone, Alice Walker, and Ruth Whitman. Since then, it has become the longest-running annual festival of women writers in the US.
UK History faculty Nancy Dye had suggested using surplus funds from Undergraduate Studies to bring women writers to campus. A 16-member committee from the departments of English, Honors, Undergraduate Studies, and Special Collections, along with members of the Lexington community, produced the conference. In 1984–1985 the conference was directed by UK English faculty Jane Gentry Vance, who later served as Kentucky's Poet Laureate.
In 1985–1993, the conference was affiliated with Continuing Education for Women/University Extension and directed by Betty Gabehart. In 1994–1996, the conference was affiliated with the Women's Studies Program and directed by Jan Oaks, faculty in English and Gender and Women's Studies. In 1997, former Conference assistant Patti DeYoung served as director.
In 1998, the conference lost university funding when it was unable to find a sponsoring department, and its advisory board established itself as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Its new home became the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in downtown Lexington, and it was renamed the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Its director during those years, 1998–2002, was Jan Isenhour, also director of the Carnegie Center, and its work was carried out by a volunteer board.
In 2002, President Lee Todd reinstated support for the conference to demonstrate the university's commitment to women's programming and community events. Since then, the Conference leadership has continued cultivating wide community support through many partnerships and the committed efforts of its board and volunteers. UK provides staff salaries, office space, and the majority of KWWC's operating expenses. Financial support from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, LexArts, the Kentucky Arts Council, the Kentucky Humanities Council, businesses, and individual patrons remains critical to our ability to attract writers of the highest caliber.
Directors since then have been Brenda Weber (2003) and Rebecca Gayle Howell (2004–2006). Howell launched several free community events that have become signature offerings of the conference, including the Gypsy Slam, the Sonia Sanchez Series, and the Hardwick/Jones keynote reading on mentorship and collaboration. In 2007, Julie Kuzneski Wrinn became Conference director. The 38th annual conference was held September 15–16, 2017 in Lexington, Kentucky. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring | Hermann Göring | Hermann Wilhelm Göring (or Goering; German: [ˈhɛʁman ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈɡøːʁɪŋ] ; 12 January 1893 – 15 October 1946) was a German politician, aviator, military leader, and convicted war criminal. He was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945. He also served as Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe (Supreme Commander of the Air Force), a position he held until the final days of the regime.
He was born in Rosenheim, Bavaria. A veteran World War I fighter pilot ace, Göring was a recipient of the Pour le Mérite. He served as the last commander of Jagdgeschwader 1 (JG I), the fighter wing once led by Manfred von Richthofen. An early member of the Nazi Party, Göring was among those wounded in Adolf Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. While receiving treatment for his injuries, he developed an addiction to morphine that persisted until the last year of his life. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Göring was named as minister without portfolio in the new government. One of his first acts as a cabinet minister was to oversee the creation of the Gestapo, which he ceded to Heinrich Himmler in 1934.
Following the establishment of the Nazi state, Göring amassed power and political capital to become the second most powerful man in Germany. Upon being named Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan in 1936, Göring was entrusted with the task of mobilising all sectors of the economy for war, an assignment which brought numerous government agencies under his control. In September 1939, Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag designating him as his successor. After the Fall of France in 1940, he was bestowed the specially created rank of Reichsmarschall, which gave him seniority over all officers in Germany's armed forces.
By 1941, Göring was at the peak of his power and influence. As the Second World War progressed, Göring's standing with Hitler and the German public declined after the Luftwaffe proved incapable of preventing the Allied bombing of Germany's cities and resupplying surrounded Axis forces in Stalingrad. Around that time, Göring increasingly withdrew from military and political affairs to devote his attention to collecting property and artwork, much of which was stolen from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Informed on 22 April 1945 that Hitler intended to commit suicide, Göring sent a telegram to Hitler requesting his permission to assume leadership of the Reich. Considering his request an act of treason, Hitler removed Göring from all his positions, expelled him from the party and ordered his arrest.
After the war, Göring was convicted of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He requested at trial an execution by firing squad, but was denied; instead he was sentenced to death by hanging. He died of suicide by ingesting cyanide the night before his scheduled execution.
== Early life ==
Hermann Wilhelm Göring was born on 12 January 1893 at the Marienbad Sanatorium in Rosenheim, Bavaria. His father, Heinrich Ernst Göring (31 October 1839 – 7 December 1913), a former cavalry officer, had been the first governor-general of German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia). Heinrich had three children from a previous marriage. Göring was the fourth of five children by Heinrich's second wife, Franziska Tiefenbrunn (1859–15 July 1943), a Bavarian peasant. Göring's elder siblings were Karl, Olga, and Paula; his younger brother was Albert. At the time that Göring was born, his father was serving as consul general in Haiti, and his mother had returned home briefly to give birth. She left the six-week-old baby with a friend in Bavaria and did not see the child again for three years, when she and Heinrich returned to Germany.
Göring's godfather was Hermann Epenstein, a wealthy Jewish physician and businessman his father had met in Africa. Epenstein provided the Göring family, who were surviving on Heinrich's pension, first with a family home in Berlin-Friedenau, and then a small castle called Burg Veldenstein, near Nuremberg. Göring's mother became Epenstein's mistress around this time and remained so for some fifteen years. Epenstein acquired the minor title of Ritter (knight) von Epenstein through service and donations to the Crown.
Interested in a career as a soldier from a very early age, Göring enjoyed playing with toy soldiers and dressing up in a Boer uniform his father had given him. He was sent to boarding school at age eleven, where the food was poor and discipline harsh. He sold a violin to pay for his train ticket home and then took to his bed, feigning illness, until he was told he would not have to return. He continued to enjoy war games, pretending to lay siege to the castle Veldenstein and studying Teutonic legends and sagas. He became a mountain climber, scaling peaks in Germany, at the Mont Blanc massif and in the Austrian Alps. At age 16, he was sent to a military academy in Berlin-Lichterfelde, from which he graduated with distinction.
Göring joined the Prince Wilhelm Regiment (112th Infantry, Garrison: Mülhausen) of the Prussian Army in 1912. The next year his mother had a falling-out with Epenstein. The family was forced to leave Veldenstein and moved to Munich; Göring's father died shortly afterwards. It was in Bavaria where Göring developed his "romantic sense of Germanness" that further evolved under Nazism. When World War I began in August 1914, Göring was stationed at Mülhausen with his regiment.
== World War I ==
During the first year of World War I, Göring served with his infantry regiment in the area of Mülhausen, a garrison town less than 2 km from the French frontier. He was hospitalised with rheumatism, a result of the damp of trench warfare. While he was recovering, his friend Bruno Loerzer convinced him to transfer to what would become, by October 1916, the Luftstreitkräfte (transl. air combat forces) of the German army, but his request was turned down. Later that year, Göring flew as Loerzer's observer in Feldflieger Abteilung 25 (FFA 25); Göring had informally transferred himself. He was discovered and sentenced to three weeks' confinement to barracks, but the sentence was never carried out. By the time it was supposed to be imposed, Göring's association with Loerzer had been made official. They were assigned as a team to FFA 25 in the Crown Prince's Fifth Army. They flew reconnaissance and bombing missions, for which the crown prince invested both Göring and Loerzer with the Iron Cross, first class.
After completing the pilot's training course, Göring was assigned to Jagdstaffel 5. Seriously wounded in the hip in aerial combat, he took nearly a year to recover. He then was transferred to Jagdstaffel 26, commanded by Loerzer, in February 1917. He steadily scored air victories until May, when he was assigned to command Jagdstaffel 27. Serving with Jastas 5, 26 and 27, he continued to win victories. In addition to his Iron Crosses (1st and 2nd Class), he received the Zähringer Lion with swords, the Friedrich Order, the House Order of Hohenzollern with swords third class and, finally, in May 1918, the coveted Pour le Mérite. According to Hermann Dahlmann, who knew both men, Göring had Loerzer lobby for the award. He finished the war with 22 victories. A thorough post-war examination of Allied loss records showed that only two of his awarded victories were doubtful. Three were possible and 17 were certain, or highly likely.
On 7 July 1918, following the death of Wilhelm Reinhard, successor to Manfred von Richthofen, Göring was made commander of the "Flying Circus", Jagdgeschwader 1. His arrogance made him unpopular with the men of his squadron. In one incident, pilot Willi Gabriel took off against Göring's orders and shot down several enemy planes. When he returned to base, Göring ordered him grounded.
In the last days of the war, Göring was repeatedly ordered to withdraw his squadron, first to Tellancourt airdrome, then to Darmstadt. At one point, he was ordered to surrender the aircraft to the Allies; he refused. Many of his pilots intentionally crash-landed their planes to keep them from falling into enemy hands.
Like many other German veterans, Göring was a proponent of the stab-in-the-back myth, the belief which held that the German Army had not really lost the war, but instead was betrayed by the civilian leadership: Marxists, Jews and especially the republicans, who had overthrown the German monarchy. Atop the frustration of military defeat, Göring also experienced the personal disappointment of being snubbed by his fiancée's upper-class family, who broke off the engagement when he returned penniless from the front.
== After World War I ==
Göring remained in aviation after the war. He tried barnstorming and briefly worked at Fokker. After spending most of 1919 living in Denmark, he moved to Sweden and joined Svensk Lufttrafik, a Swedish airline. Göring was often hired for private flights. During the winter of 1920–1921, he was hired by Count Eric von Rosen to fly him to his castle from Stockholm. Invited to spend the night, Göring may at this time have first seen the swastika emblem, which Rosen had set in the chimney piece as a family badge.
This was also the first time that Göring saw his future wife; the count introduced his sister-in-law, Baroness Carin von Kantzow (née Freiin von Fock). Estranged from her husband of 10 years, she had an eight-year-old son. Göring was immediately infatuated and asked her to meet him in Stockholm. They arranged a visit at the home of her parents and spent much time together through 1921, when Göring left to study political science at the University of Munich. Carin obtained a divorce, followed Göring to Munich and married him on 3 February 1922. Their first home together was a hunting lodge at Hochkreuth in the Bavarian Alps, near Bayrischzell, some 80 kilometres (50 mi) from Munich. Later in 1922, they moved to Obermenzing, a suburb of Munich.
== Early Nazi career ==
Göring joined the Nazi Party in 1922 after hearing a speech by Adolf Hitler. He was given command of the Sturmabteilung (SA) as the Oberster SA-Führer on 1 March 1923, succeeding Hans Ulrich Klintzsch, and headed the organisation until it was banned in November 1923.
Through the early years, Carin—who liked Hitler—often played hostess to meetings of leading Nazis, including her husband as well as Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg and Ernst Röhm. Hitler later recalled his early association with Göring:
I liked him. I made him the head of my SA. He is the only one of its heads that ran the SA properly. I gave him a dishevelled rabble. In a very short time he had organised a division of 11,000 men.
Hitler and the Nazi Party held mass meetings and rallies in Munich and elsewhere during the early 1920s, attempting to gain supporters in a bid for political power. Inspired by Benito Mussolini's March on Rome, the Nazis attempted to seize power on 8–9 November 1923 in a failed coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Göring, who was with Hitler leading the march to the War Ministry, was shot in the groin. Fourteen Nazis and four policemen were killed; many top Nazis, including Hitler, were arrested. With Carin's help, Göring was smuggled to Innsbruck, where he received surgery and was given morphine for the pain. He remained in hospital until 24 December. This was the beginning of his morphine addiction, which lasted until his imprisonment at Nuremberg. Meanwhile, the authorities in Munich declared Göring a wanted man. The Görings—acutely short of funds and reliant on the good will of Nazi sympathisers abroad—moved from Austria to Venice. In May 1924 they visited Rome, via Florence and Siena. Sometime in 1924, Göring met Mussolini through his contacts with members of Italy's Fascist Party; Mussolini had also expressed an interest in meeting Hitler, who was by then in prison. Hitler penned Mein Kampf while incarcerated, before being released in December 1924.
Meanwhile, personal problems continued to multiply for Göring. By 1925, Carin's mother was ill. The Görings—with difficulty—raised the money in the spring of 1925 for a journey to Sweden via Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Danzig (now Gdańsk). Göring had become a violent morphine addict; Carin's family were shocked by his deterioration. Carin, who was ill with epilepsy and a weak heart, had to allow the doctors to take charge of Göring; her son was taken by his father. Göring was certified a dangerous drug addict and was placed in Långbro Asylum on 1 September 1925 after he had violently attacked a nurse who had refused his request for morphine. He was violent to the point where he had to be confined in a straitjacket, but his psychiatrist felt he was sane; the condition was caused solely by the morphine. Weaned off the drug, he left the facility briefly, but had to return for further treatment. He returned to Germany when an amnesty was declared in 1927 and resumed working in the aircraft industry. Carin Göring, ill with epilepsy and tuberculosis, died of heart failure on 17 October 1931.
Meanwhile, the Nazi Party was in a period of rebuilding and waiting. The economy had recovered, which meant fewer opportunities for the Nazis to agitate. The SA was reorganised, but with Franz Pfeffer von Salomon as its head rather than Göring, and the Schutzstaffel (SS) was founded in 1925, initially as a bodyguard for Hitler. Membership in the party increased from 27,000 in 1925 to 108,000 in 1928 and 178,000 in 1929. In the May 1928 elections the Nazi Party only obtained 12 seats out of an available 491 in the Reichstag. Göring was elected as a representative from Bavaria. Having secured a seat in the Reichstag, Göring gained a more prominent place in the Nazi movement, since Hitler saw him as a public relations officer for Nazism in this capacity. Göring continued to be elected to the Reichstag in all subsequent elections during the Weimar and Nazi regimes. Electoral success also afforded Göring with access to powerful sympathisers to the Nazi cause, such as Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia and the conservative-minded businessmen, Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht. The Great Depression led to a disastrous downturn in the German economy, and in the 1930 election, the Nazi Party won 6,409,600 votes and 107 seats. In May 1931, Hitler sent Göring on a mission to the Vatican, where he met the future Pope Pius XII. He was appointed an SA-Gruppenführer on 18 December 1931. On 1 January 1933, he was among the first to be promoted to the recently created rank of SA-Obergruppenführer and he held this rank on the SA rolls until 1945.
In the July 1932 election, the Nazis won 230 seats to become far and away the largest party in the Reichstag. By longstanding tradition, the Nazis were thus entitled to select the President of the Reichstag, and elected Göring to the post. He would retain this position until 23 April 1945.
== Reichstag fire ==
The Reichstag fire occurred on the night of 27 February 1933. Göring was one of the first to arrive on the scene. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Communist radical, was arrested and claimed sole responsibility for the fire. Göring immediately called for a crackdown on Communists.
The Nazis took full advantage of the fire to advance their own aims at consolidating political power. The Reichstag Fire Decree, passed the next day on Hitler's urging, suspended basic rights and allowed state detention without habeas corpus. Activities of the German Communist Party were suppressed, and some 4,000 Party members arrested. Göring demanded that the prisoners should be shot, but Rudolf Diels, head of the Prussian political police, ignored the order. Although the consensus amongst historians is that van der Lubbe set the fire, a few accuse the Nazis of staging a false flag attack. At the Nuremberg trials, General Franz Halder testified that Göring admitted responsibility for starting the fire at a luncheon held on Hitler's birthday in 1942. In his own Nuremberg testimony, Göring denied this story.
== Second marriage ==
During the early 1930s, Göring was often in the company of Emmy Sonnemann, an actress from Hamburg. They were married on 10 April 1935, in Berlin. The wedding was celebrated on a huge scale. A large reception was held the night before at the Berlin Opera House. Fighter aircraft flew overhead on the night of the reception and the day of the ceremony, at which Hitler was best man. Göring's daughter, Edda, was born on 2 June 1938.
== Nazi potentate ==
When Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Göring was appointed as Reichsminister without portfolio and Reichskommissar of Aviation. This was followed on 11 April 1933 by his appointment as Minister-President of Prussia, Prussian interior minister and chief of the Prussian police. On 25 April 1933, Hitler also delegated his powers as Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) of Prussia to Göring. On 18 May 1933, Göring secured passage of an enabling act through the Landtag of Prussia that conferred all legislative powers on the cabinet.
Using this authority, on 8 July 1933 Göring enacted a law abolishing the Prussian State Council, the second chamber of the Prussian legislature that represented the interests of the Prussian provinces. In its place, he created a revised non-legislative Prussian State Council to serve merely as a body of advisors to him. Göring would serve as President of the council. It would consist, ex officio, of the Prussian cabinet ministers and state secretaries, as well as hand-picked Nazi Party officials and other industry and society leaders selected solely by Göring. In October 1933, Göring was made a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law at its inaugural meeting. In July 1934, he was appointed Reichforstmeister, with the rank of a Reichsminister, as the head of the newly created Reich Forestry Office.
Wilhelm Frick, the Reich interior minister, and the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, hoped to create a unified police force for all of Germany, but Göring on 26 April 1933 established a special Prussian police force, with Rudolf Diels at its head. The force was called the Geheime Staatspolizei (transl. Secret State Police), or Gestapo. Göring, thinking that Diels was not ruthless enough to use the Gestapo effectively to counteract the power of the SA, handed over control of the Gestapo to Himmler on 20 April 1934. By this time, the SA numbered over two million men.
Hitler was deeply concerned that Ernst Röhm, the chief of the SA, was planning a coup. Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich plotted with Göring to use the Gestapo and SS to crush the SA. Members of the SA got wind of the proposed action and thousands of them took to the streets in violent demonstrations on the night of 29 June 1934. Enraged, Hitler ordered the arrest of the SA leadership. Röhm was shot dead in his cell when he refused to commit suicide; Göring personally went over the lists of prisoners—numbering in the thousands—and determined who else should be shot. At least 85 people were killed in the period of 30 June to 2 July, which is now known as the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler admitted in the Reichstag on 13 July that the killings had been entirely illegal but claimed a plot had been under way to overthrow the Reich. A retroactive law was passed making the action legal. Any criticism was met with arrests.
One of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which had been in place since the end of World War I, stated that Germany was not allowed to maintain an air force. After the 1928 signing of the Kellogg–Briand Pact, police aircraft were permitted. Göring was appointed Air Traffic Minister in May 1933. Germany began to accumulate aircraft in violation of the Treaty, and in 1935 the existence of the Luftwaffe was formally acknowledged, with Göring as Reich Aviation Minister.
During a cabinet meeting in September 1936, Göring and Hitler announced that the German rearmament programme must be sped up. On 18 October, Hitler named Göring as Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan to undertake this task. Göring created a new organisation to administer the Plan and drew the ministries of labour and agriculture under its umbrella. He bypassed the Economics Ministry in his policy-making decisions, to the chagrin of Hjalmar Schacht, the minister in charge. Huge expenditures were made on rearmament, in spite of growing deficits. Schacht resigned on 26 November 1937, and Göring took over the Economics Ministry on an interim basis until January 1938. He then managed to install Walther Funk in the position, who also took control of the Reichsbank when Schacht was forced out of that post as well in January 1939. In this way, both of these institutions effectively were brought under Göring's control under the auspices of the Four Year Plan. In July 1937, the Reichswerke Hermann Göring was established under state ownership – though led by Göring – with the aim of boosting steel production beyond the level which private enterprise could economically provide.
In 1938, Göring was involved in the Blomberg–Fritsch Affair, which led to the resignations of the War Minister, Generalfeldmarschall Werner von Blomberg, and the army commander, General Werner von Fritsch. Göring had acted as witness at Blomberg's wedding to Margarethe Gruhn, a 26-year-old typist, on 12 January 1938. Information received from the police showed that the young bride was a prostitute. Göring felt obligated to tell Hitler, but also saw this event as an opportunity to dispose of Blomberg. Blomberg was forced to resign. Göring did not want Fritsch to be appointed to that position and thus be his superior. Several days later, Heydrich revealed a file on Fritsch that contained allegations of homosexual activity and blackmail. The charges were later proven to be false, but Fritsch had lost Hitler's trust and was forced to resign. Hitler used the dismissals as an opportunity to reshuffle the leadership of the military. Göring asked for the post of War Minister but was turned down; he was appointed to the rank of Generalfeldmarschall. Hitler took over as supreme commander of the armed forces and created subordinate posts to head the three main branches of service.
As minister in charge of the Four-Year Plan, Göring became concerned with the lack of natural resources in Germany and began pushing for Austria to be incorporated into the Reich. The province of Styria had rich iron ore deposits, and the country as a whole was home to many skilled labourers who would also be useful. Hitler had always been in favour of a takeover of Austria, his native country. He met the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg on 12 February 1938, threatening invasion if peaceful unification was not forthcoming. The Nazi Party was made legal in Austria to gain a power base, and a referendum on reunification was scheduled for March. When Hitler did not approve of the wording of the plebiscite, Göring telephoned Schuschnigg and Austrian head of state Wilhelm Miklas to demand Schuschnigg's resignation, threatening invasion by German troops and civil unrest by the Austrian Nazi Party members. Schuschnigg resigned on 11 March and the plebiscite was cancelled. By 5:30 the next morning, German troops that had been massing on the border marched into Austria, meeting no resistance.
Although Joachim von Ribbentrop had been named Foreign Minister in February 1938, Göring continued to involve himself in foreign affairs. That July, he contacted the British government with the idea that he should make an official visit to discuss Germany's intentions for Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain was in favour of a meeting and there was talk of a pact being signed between Britain and Germany. In February 1938, Göring visited Warsaw to quell rumours about the upcoming invasion of Poland. He had conversations with the Hungarian government that summer as well, discussing their potential role in an invasion of Czechoslovakia. At the Nuremberg Rally that September, Göring and other speakers denounced the Czechs as an inferior race that must be conquered. Chamberlain and Hitler had a series of meetings that led to the signing of the Munich Agreement (29 September 1938), which turned over control of the Sudetenland to Germany. In March 1939, Göring threatened Czechoslovak president Emil Hácha with the bombing of Prague. Hácha then agreed to sign a communique accepting the German occupation of the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia.
Although many in the party disliked him, before the war Göring enjoyed widespread personal popularity among the German public because of his perceived sociability, colour and humour. As the Nazi leader most responsible for economic matters, he presented himself as a champion of national interests over allegedly corrupt big business and the old German elite. The Nazi press was on Göring's side. Other leaders, such as Hess and Ribbentrop, were envious of his popularity. In Britain and the United States, some viewed Göring as more acceptable than the other Nazis and as a possible mediator between the western democracies and Hitler.
== World War II ==
=== Success on all fronts ===
Göring and other senior officers were concerned that Germany was not yet ready for war, but Hitler insisted on pushing ahead as soon as possible. On 30 August 1939, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler appointed Göring as the chairman of a new six-person Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich which was set up to operate as a war cabinet. The invasion of Poland, the opening action of World War II, began at dawn on 1 September 1939. Later in the day, speaking to the Reichstag, Hitler designated Göring as his successor as Führer of all Germany, "If anything should befall me", with Hess as the second alternate. Major German victories followed one after the other in quick succession. With the help of the Luftwaffe, the Polish Air Force was defeated within a week. The Fallschirmjäger seized vital airfields in Norway (Operation Weserübung) and captured Fort Eben-Emael in Belgium on 10 May 1940, the first day of the Battle of France. Göring's Luftwaffe played critical roles in the Battles of the Netherlands, of Belgium and of France in May 1940.
After the Fall of France, Hitler awarded Göring the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross for his successful leadership. During the 1940 Field Marshal Ceremony, Hitler promoted Göring to the rank of Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches (transl. Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich), a specially created rank which made him senior to all field marshals in the military. As a result of this promotion, he was the highest-ranking soldier in Germany until the end of the war. Göring had already received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 30 September 1939 as Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe.
The UK had declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, the third day of the invasion of Poland. In July 1940, Hitler began preparations for an invasion of Britain. As part of the plan, the Royal Air Force (RAF) had to be neutralised. Bombing raids commenced on British air installations and on cities and centres of industry. Göring had by then already announced in a radio speech, "If as much as a single enemy aircraft flies over German soil, my name is Meier!", something that would return to haunt him, when the RAF began bombing German cities on 11 May 1940. Though he was confident the Luftwaffe could defeat the RAF within days, Göring, like Admiral Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine (navy), was pessimistic about the chance of success of the planned invasion (codenamed Operation Sea Lion). Göring hoped that a victory in the air would be enough to force peace without an invasion. The campaign failed and Sea Lion was postponed indefinitely on 17 September 1940. After their defeat in the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe attempted to defeat Britain via strategic bombing. On 12 October 1940 Hitler cancelled Sea Lion due to the onset of winter. By the end of the year, it was clear that British morale was not being shaken by the Blitz, though the bombings continued through May 1941.
=== Defeat on all fronts ===
In spite of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, signed in 1939, Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—on 22 June 1941. Initially, the Luftwaffe was at an advantage, destroying thousands of Soviet aircraft in the first month of fighting. Hitler and his top staff were sure that the campaign would be over by Christmas, and no provisions were made for reserves of men or equipment. However, by July, the Germans had only 1,000 planes remaining in operation and their troop losses were over 213,000 men. The choice was made to concentrate the attack on only one part of the vast front; efforts would be directed at capturing Moscow. After the long, but successful, Battle of Smolensk, Hitler ordered Army Group Centre to halt its advance to Moscow and temporarily diverted its Panzer groups north and south to aid in the encirclement of Leningrad and Kiev. The pause provided the Red Army with an opportunity to mobilise fresh reserves; historian Russel Stolfi considers it to be one of the major factors that caused the failure of the Moscow offensive, which was resumed in October 1941 with the Battle of Moscow. Poor weather conditions, fuel shortages, a delay in building aircraft bases in Eastern Europe and overstretched supply lines were also factors. Hitler did not give permission for even a partial retreat until mid-January 1942; by this time the losses were comparable to those of the French invasion of Russia in 1812.
In late October or early November 1941, Hitler and Göring decided on the mass deportation of Soviet prisoners of war—and a larger number of Soviet civilians—to Germany for forced labor, but epidemics soon caused the halting of prisoner-of-war transports. Those who were deported to Germany faced conditions not necessarily any better than existed in the occupied Soviet Union. By the end of the war, at least 1.3 million Soviet prisoners of war had been deported to Germany or its annexed territories. Of these, 400,000 did not survive and most of these deaths occurred in the winter of 1941/1942.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Göring, along with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Admiral Erich Raeder, urged Hitler to immediately declare war on the United States.
Hitler decided that the summer 1942 campaign would be concentrated in the south; efforts would be made to capture the oilfields in the Caucasus. The Battle of Stalingrad, a major turning point of the war, began on 23 August 1942 with a bombing campaign by the Luftwaffe. The German Sixth Army entered the city, but because of its location on the front line, it was still possible for the Soviets to encircle and trap it there without reinforcements or supplies. When the Sixth Army was surrounded by the end of November in Operation Uranus, Göring promised that the Luftwaffe would be able to deliver a minimum of 300 tons of supplies to the trapped men every day. On the basis of these assurances, Hitler demanded that there be no retreat; they were to fight to the last man. Though some airlifts were able to get through, supplies delivered never exceeded 120 tons per day. The remnants of the Sixth Army—some 91,000 men out of an army of 285,000—surrendered in early February 1943; only 5,000 of these captives survived the Soviet prisoner of war camps to see Germany again.
=== War over Germany ===
Meanwhile, the strength of the US and British bomber fleets had increased. Based in Britain, they began operations against German targets. The first thousand-bomber raid was staged on Cologne on 30 May 1942. Air raids continued on targets farther from England after auxiliary fuel tanks were installed on US fighter aircraft. Göring refused to believe reports that American fighters had been shot down as far east as Aachen in winter 1942–1943. His reputation began to decline.
The American P-51 Mustang, with a combat radius of over 1,800 miles (2,900 km) when using underwing drop tanks, began to escort the bombers in large formations to and from the target area in early 1944. From that point onwards, the Luftwaffe began to suffer casualties in aircrews it could not sufficiently replace. By targeting oil refineries and rail communications, Allied bombers crippled the German war effort by late 1944. German civilians blamed Göring for his failure to protect the homeland. Hitler began excluding him from conferences but retained him in his positions at the head of the Luftwaffe and as plenipotentiary of the Four-Year Plan. As he lost Hitler's trust, Göring began to spend more time at his various residences. On D-Day (6 June 1944), the Luftwaffe only had some 300 fighters and a small number of bombers in the area of the landings; the Allies had a total strength of 11,000 aircraft.
=== End of the war ===
As the Soviets approached Berlin, Hitler's efforts to organise the defence of the city became ever more meaningless and futile. His last birthday, celebrated at the Führerbunker in Berlin on 20 April 1945, was the occasion for leave-taking by many top Nazis, Göring included. By this time, Göring's hunting lodge Carinhall had been evacuated, the building destroyed, and its art treasures moved to Berchtesgaden and elsewhere. Göring arrived at his estate at Obersalzberg on 22 April, the same day that Hitler, in a lengthy diatribe against his generals, first publicly admitted that the war was lost and that he intended to remain in Berlin to the end and then commit suicide. Göring also stated that he was in a better position to negotiate a peace settlement.
OKW operations chief Alfred Jodl was present for Hitler's rant and notified Göring's chief of staff, Karl Koller, at a meeting a few hours later. Sensing its implications, Koller immediately flew to Berchtesgaden to notify Göring of this development. A week after the start of the Soviet invasion, Hitler had issued a decree naming Göring his successor in the event of his death, thus codifying the declaration he had made soon after the beginning of the war. The decree also gave Göring full authority to act as Hitler's deputy if Hitler ever lost his freedom of action.
Göring feared being branded a traitor if he tried to take power, but also feared being accused of dereliction of duty if he did nothing. After some hesitation, Göring reviewed his copy of the 1941 decree naming him Hitler's successor. After conferring with Koller and Hans Lammers (the state secretary of the Reich Chancellery), Göring concluded that by remaining in Berlin to face certain death, Hitler had incapacitated himself from governing. All agreed that under the terms of the decree, it was incumbent upon Göring to take power in Hitler's stead. He was also motivated by fears that his rival, Martin Bormann, would seize power upon Hitler's death and would have him killed as a traitor. With this in mind, Göring sent a carefully worded telegram asking Hitler for permission to take over as the leader of Germany, stressing that he would be acting as Hitler's deputy. He added that, if Hitler did not reply by 22:00 that night (23 April), he would assume that Hitler had indeed lost his freedom of action and would assume leadership of the Reich.
The telegram was intercepted by Bormann, who convinced Hitler that Göring was attempting a coup. Bormann argued that Göring's telegram was not a request for permission to act as Hitler's deputy, but a demand to resign or be overthrown. Bormann also intercepted another telegram in which Göring directed Ribbentrop to report to him if there was no further communication from Hitler or Göring before midnight. Hitler sent a reply to Göring—prepared with Bormann's help—rescinding the 1941 decree and threatening him with execution for high treason unless he immediately resigned from all of his offices. Realising his situation was untenable, Göring duly resigned. Afterwards, Hitler (or Bormann, depending on the source) ordered the SS to place Göring, his staff and Lammers under house arrest at Obersalzberg. Bormann made an announcement over the radio that Göring had resigned for health reasons.
By 26 April, the complex at Obersalzberg was under attack by the Allies, so Göring was moved to his castle at Mauterndorf. In his last will and testament, Hitler expelled Göring from the party, formally rescinded the decree making him his successor and upbraided Göring for "illegally attempting to seize control of the state". He then appointed Karl Dönitz, the Navy's commander-in-chief, as president of the Reich and supreme commander of the armed forces. Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide on 30 April 1945, a few hours after a hastily arranged wedding. Göring was freed on 5 May by a passing Luftwaffe unit and made his way to the U.S. lines in hopes of surrendering to them rather than to the Soviets. He was taken into custody near Radstadt on 9 May by elements of the 36th Infantry Division of the US Army. This move likely saved Göring's life; Bormann had ordered him executed if Berlin had fallen. On 10 May, US Air Forces commander Carl Spaatz, along with Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg and Spaatz's special consultant Bruce Campbell Hopper, conducted an interrogation of Göring at the Ritter School in Augsburg, Germany.
== Trial and death ==
Göring was flown to Camp Ashcan, a temporary prisoner-of-war camp housed in the Palace Hotel at Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg. Here he was weaned off dihydrocodeine (a mild morphine derivative)—he had been taking the equivalent of three or four grains (260 to 320 mg) of morphine a day—and was put on a strict diet; he lost 60 pounds (27 kg). His IQ was tested while in custody and found to be 138. Top Nazi officials were transferred in September to Nuremberg, which was to be the location of a series of military tribunals beginning in November. At Nuremberg, Göring was examined by Chief Medical Officer Lt. Col. Rene Juchli, who reported that Göring was "still suffering from heart disease and excess fat, both due to glandular disturbance."
Göring was the second highest-ranking official tried at Nuremberg, behind Reich President (former Admiral) Karl Dönitz. The prosecution levelled an indictment of four charges, including a charge of conspiracy; waging a war of aggression; war crimes, including the plundering and removal to Germany of works of art and other property; and crimes against humanity, including the disappearance of political and other opponents under the Nacht und Nebel (transl. Night and Fog) decree; the torture and ill treatment of prisoners of war; and the murder and enslavement of civilians, including what was at the time estimated to be 5,700,000 Jews. When asked for his plea, Göring attempted to read a lengthy statement to the court, but was rebuked by presiding judge Sir Geoffrey Lawrence and instructed to simply plead either "guilty" or "not guilty"; Göring then declared himself to be "in the sense of the indictment, not guilty".
The trial lasted 218 days. The prosecution presented its case from November to March, and Göring's defence—the first to be presented—lasted from 8 to 22 March. The sentences were read on 30 September 1946. Göring, forced to remain silent while seated in the dock, communicated his opinions about the proceedings using gestures, shaking his head, or laughing. He constantly took notes, whispered with the other defendants and tried to control the erratic behaviour of Hess, who was seated beside him. During breaks in the proceedings, Göring tried to dominate the other defendants, and he was eventually placed in solitary confinement when he attempted to influence their testimony. Göring told American psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn that the court was "stupid" to try "little fellows" like Funk and Kaltenbrunner instead of letting Göring take all the blame on himself. He also claimed that he had never heard of most of the other defendants before the trial.
On several occasions over the course of the trial, the prosecution showed films of the concentration camps and other atrocities. Everyone present, including Göring, found the contents of the films shocking; he said that the films must have been faked. Witnesses, including Paul Körner and Erhard Milch, tried to portray Göring as a peaceful moderate. Milch stated that it had been impossible to oppose Hitler or disobey his orders; to do so would likely have meant death for oneself and one's family. When testifying on his own behalf, Göring emphasised his loyalty to Hitler and claimed to know nothing about what had happened in the concentration camps, which were under Himmler's control. He provided evasive, convoluted answers to direct questions and had plausible excuses for all of his actions during the war. He used the witness stand as a venue to expound at great length on his own role in the Reich, attempting to present himself as a peacemaker and diplomat before the outbreak of the war. During cross-examination, chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson read the minutes of a meeting that had been held shortly after Kristallnacht, a major pogrom in November 1938. At the meeting, Göring had plotted to confiscate Jewish property in the wake of the pogrom. Later, David Maxwell-Fyfe presented evidence that Göring must have known about the killing of 50 airmen who had been recaptured after escaping from Stalag Luft III and could have saved them. He also presented evidence that Göring knew about the extermination of the Hungarian Jews.
Göring was found guilty on all four counts and was sentenced to death by hanging. The judgment stated:
There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Göring was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and as military leader; he was the director of the slave labour programme and the creator of the oppressive programme against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad. All of these crimes he has frankly admitted. On some specific cases there may be conflict of testimony, but in terms of the broad outline, his own admissions are more than sufficiently wide to be conclusive of his guilt. His guilt is unique in its enormity. The record discloses no excuses for this man.
Göring made an appeal asking to be shot as a soldier instead of hanged as a common criminal, but the court refused.
The night before he was to be hanged, however, Göring committed suicide with a potassium cyanide capsule. Since he was guarded around the clock, it was not clear how Göring obtained the poison. At the time, speculation centered on whether he had access to a jar of his hair cream where another cyanide capsule was later found. Decades later, another theory focused on a U.S. Army lieutenant, Jack G. Wheelis, who had been stationed at the trials but who had since died. Göring had given Wheelis his gold watch, pen and cigarette case, and so it was theorised that Wheelis had retrieved the capsules from their hiding place among Göring's confiscated personal effects and then passed them along.
In 2005, former U.S. Army private Herbert Lee Stivers, who served in the 1st Infantry Division's 26th Infantry Regiment—the honour guard for the Nuremberg Trials—claimed he gave Göring "medicine" hidden inside a fountain pen that a young German woman, Mona, had asked him to smuggle into the prison. In explaining his decision to speak out 60 years later, Stivers said that he was convinced to come forward by his daughter. He wanted to set the record straight: he thought that he was just offering medicine; he said that he did not know what was in the pill until after Göring's suicide.
Göring's body, as with those of the ten men who were executed, was displayed at the execution ground for witnesses. The bodies were cremated at Ostfriedhof, Munich, and the ashes scattered in the Isar River.
== Personal properties ==
Göring's name is closely associated with the Nazi plunder of Jewish property. His name appears 135 times on the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) Red Flag Names List compiled by US Army intelligence in 1945–46 and declassified in 1997.
The confiscation of Jewish property gave Göring the opportunity to amass a personal fortune. Some properties he seized himself or acquired for a nominal price. In other cases, he collected bribes for allowing others to steal Jewish property. He took kickbacks from industrialists for favourable decisions as Four-Year Plan director and money for supplying arms to the Spanish Republicans in the Spanish Civil War via Pyrkal in Greece (although Germany was supporting Franco and the Nationalists).
Göring was appointed Reich Master of the Hunt in 1933 and Master of the German Forests in 1934. He instituted reforms to the forestry laws and acted to protect endangered species. Around this time, he became interested in Schorfheide Forest, where he set aside 100,000 acres (400 km2) as a state park, which is still extant. There he built an elaborate hunting lodge, Carinhall, in memory of his first wife, Carin. By 1934, her body had been transported to the site and placed in a vault on the estate. Through most of the 1930s, Göring kept pet lion cubs, borrowed from the Berlin Zoo, both at Carinhall and at his house at Obersalzberg. The main lodge at Carinhall had a large art gallery where Göring displayed works that had been plundered from private collections and museums around Europe from 1939 onward. Göring worked closely with the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (transl. Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce), an organisation tasked with the looting of artwork and cultural material from Jewish collections, libraries and museums throughout Europe. Headed by Alfred Rosenberg, the task force set up a collection centre and headquarters in Paris. Some 26,000 railroad cars full of art treasures, furniture and other looted items were sent to Germany from France alone. Göring repeatedly visited the Paris headquarters to review the incoming stolen goods and to select items to be sent on a special train to Carinhall and his other homes. The estimated value of his collection, which numbered some 1,500 pieces, was $200 million.
Göring was known for his extravagant tastes and garish clothing. He had various special uniforms made for the many posts he held; his Reichsmarschall uniform included a jewel-encrusted baton. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the top Stuka pilot of the war, recalled twice meeting Göring dressed in outlandish costumes: first, a medieval hunting costume, practicing archery with his doctor; and second, dressed in a red toga fastened with a golden clasp, smoking an unusually large pipe. Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano once noted Göring wearing a fur coat that looked like what "a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera". He threw lavish housewarming parties each time a round of construction was completed at Carinhall and changed costumes several times throughout the evenings.
Göring was noted for his patronage of music, especially opera. He entertained frequently and sumptuously and hosted elaborate birthday parties for himself. Armaments minister Albert Speer recalled that guests brought expensive gifts, such as gold bars, Dutch cigars and valuable artwork. For his birthday in 1944, Speer gave Göring an oversized marble bust of Hitler. As a member of the Prussian Council of State, Speer was required to donate a considerable portion of his salary towards the council's birthday gift to Göring without even being asked. Generalfeldmarschall Milch told Speer that similar donations were required out of the Air Ministry's general fund. For his birthday in 1940, Ciano decorated Göring with the coveted Collar of Annunziata. The award reduced him to tears.
The design of the Reichsmarschall standard, on a light blue field, featured a gold German eagle grasping a wreath surmounted by two batons overlaid with a swastika. The reverse side of the flag had the Großkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes (transl. Grand Cross of the Iron Cross) surrounded by a wreath between four Luftwaffe eagles. The flag was carried by a personal standard-bearer at all public occasions.
Though he liked to be called "der Eiserne" (transl. the Iron Man), the former fighter pilot had become corpulent. He was one of the few Nazi leaders who did not take offence at hearing jokes about himself, "no matter how rude", taking them as a sign of his popularity among the masses. One such German joke poked fun at Göring by stating that he would wear an admiral's uniform with rubber medals to take a bath. His obesity was also a target, it being joked that "he sits down on his stomach". Another joke claimed that he had sent a wire to Hitler after his visit to the Vatican: "Mission accomplished. Pope unfrocked. Tiara and pontifical vestments are a perfect fit."
== Role in the Holocaust ==
Joseph Goebbels and Himmler were far more antisemitic than Göring, who mainly adopted that attitude because party politics required him to do so. His deputy Erhard Milch had a Jewish parent. However, Göring supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and later initiated economic measures unfavourable to Jews. He required the registration of all Jewish property as part of the Four-Year Plan, and at a meeting held after Kristallnacht was livid that the financial burden for the Jewish losses would have to be made good by German-owned insurance companies. He proposed that the Jews be fined one billion marks.
At the same meeting, options for the disposition of the Jews and their property were discussed. Jews would be segregated into ghettos or encouraged to emigrate, and their property would be seized in a programme of Aryanisation. Compensation for seized property would be low, if any was given at all. Detailed minutes of this meeting and other documents were read out at the Nuremberg trial, proving his knowledge of and complicity with the persecution of the Jews.
On 24 January 1939, Göring established in Berlin the head office of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, modelled on the similar organisation established in Vienna in August 1938. Under the direction of Heydrich, it was tasked with using any means necessary to prompt Jews to leave the Reich, and with creating a Jewish organisation that would co-ordinate emigration from the Jewish side.
In July 1941, Göring issued a memo to Heydrich ordering him to organise the practical details of the Final Solution to the "Jewish Question". By the time that this letter was written, many Jews and others had already been killed in Poland, Russia and elsewhere. At the Wannsee Conference, held six months later, Heydrich formally announced that genocide of the Jews was now official Reich policy. Göring did not attend the conference, but he was present at other meetings where the number of people killed was discussed.
Göring directed anti-partisan operations by Luftwaffe security battalions in the Białowieża Forest between 1942 and 1944 that resulted in the murder of thousands of Jews and Polish civilians.
At the Nuremberg trial, Göring told first lieutenant and U.S. Army psychologist Gustave Gilbert that he would never have supported the anti-Jewish measures if he had known what was going to happen. "I only thought we would eliminate Jews from positions in big business and government", he claimed.
== Decorations and awards ==
=== German ===
Kingdom of Prussia:
Iron Cross 2nd Class (15 September 1914)
Iron Cross 1st Class (22 March 1915)
Royal House Order of Hohenzollern, Knights Cross with Swords
Order Pour le Mérite (2 June 1918)
Grand Duchy of Baden:
Military Karl-Friedrich Merit Order, Knights Cross
Order of the Zähringer Lion, Knights Cross 2nd Class with Swords
Nazi Germany:
1939 Clasp to the Iron Cross 2nd Class (30 September 1939)
1939 Clasp to the Iron Cross 1st Class (30 September 1939)
Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross (30 September 1939)
Grand Cross of the Iron Cross for "the victories of the Luftwaffe in 1940 during the French campaign" (the only award of this decoration during World War II – 19 August 1940)
Golden Party Badge
Blood Order (Commemorative Medal of 9 November 1923)
Danzig Cross, 1st and 2nd class
=== Foreign ===
Kingdom of Bulgaria: Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, Knight
Kingdom of Denmark: Order of the Dannebrog, Grand Cross with Breast Star in Diamonds (25 July 1938)
Finland:
Order of the White Rose of Finland
Grand Cross (6 March 1935)
Grand Cross with Collar (21 April 1941)
Order of the Cross of Liberty, Grand Cross with Swords (25 March 1942)
Kingdom of Hungary: Order of St Stephen, Grand Cross
Kingdom of Italy: Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, Knight (12 January 1940)
Kingdom of Sweden: Order of the Sword Commander Grand Cross with Collar (1939)
Empire of Japan: Order of the Rising Sun, Grand Cordon with Paulownia Flowers (4 October 1943) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Zealand_Test_cricket_records#Most_career_runs | List of New Zealand Test cricket records#Most career runs | Test cricket is the oldest form of cricket played at international level. A Test match is scheduled to take place over a period of five days, and is played by teams representing full member nations of the International Cricket Council (ICC).
The following is a list of records by the New Zealand Test cricket team. It is based on the List of Test cricket records, but concentrates solely on records dealing with the New Zealand Test cricket team, and any cricketers who have played for that team.
New Zealand took part in their first recognised Test cricket match against England in the 1929/30 season, and the records listed here date from that time.
New Zealand won the inaugural ICC World Test Championship, beating India in the final by 8 wickets. They are ranked number two in Tests, number one in ODIs and number four in T20Is.
== Key ==
The top five records are listed for each category, except for the team wins, losses, draws and ties and the partnership records. Tied records for fifth place are also included. Explanations of the general symbols and cricketing terms used in the list are given below. Specific details are provided in each category where appropriate. All records include matches played for New Zealand only, and are correct as of November 2021.
== Team records ==
=== Overall record ===
=== Team wins, losses, draws and ties ===
As of August 2025, New Zealand have played 480 Test matches resulting in 121 victories, 189 defeats and 170 draws, a draw counts as 0.5 wins
=== First Test series wins ===
=== First Test match wins ===
=== Team scoring records ===
==== Most runs in an innings ====
The highest innings score by the Blackcaps is 715/6d in first Test of the 2018–19 series against Bangladesh 2019.
==== Highest successful run chases ====
New Zealand's highest fourth innings total is 451 all out in an unsuccessful run chase against England at Christchurch in March 2002. England had set a target of 549. New Zealand's highest successful run chase occurred against Pakistan at Christchurch in 1994. Pakistan had set New Zealand a target of 324.
==== Fewest runs in an innings ====
The lowest innings total scored in Test cricket came in the second Test of England's tour of New Zealand in March 1955. Trailing England by 46, New Zealand was bowled out in their second innings for 26 runs.
==== Most runs conceded in an innings ====
The highest innings total scored against New Zealand is by West Indies when they scored 660/5d in the second Test of the West Indies tour of New Zealand in 1995 at Basin Reserve.
==== Fewest runs conceded in an innings ====
The lowest innings total scored against New Zealand is 46 by India where New Zealand tour of India in 2024
=== Result records ===
A Test match is won when one side has scored more runs than the total runs scored by the opposing side during their two innings. If both sides have completed both their allocated innings and the side that fielded last has the higher aggregate of runs, it is known as a win by runs. This indicates the number of runs that they had scored more than the opposing side. If one side scores more runs in a single innings than the total runs scored by the other side in both their innings, it is known as a win by innings and runs. If the side batting last wins the match, it is known as a win by wickets, indicating the number of wickets that were still to fall.
==== Greatest win margins (by innings) ====
The fifth Test of the 1938 Ashes series at The Oval saw England win by an innings and 579 runs, the largest victory by an innings in Test cricket history. The largest victory for New Zealand, which is the 3rd largest, is their win against Zimbabwe in the second Test of the 2025 tour at Bulawayo, where the tourists won by an innings and 359 runs.
==== Greatest win margins (by runs) ====
The greatest winning margin by runs in Test cricket was England's victory over Australia by 675 runs in the first Test of the 1928–29 Ashes series. The largest victory recorded by New Zealand, which is the 8th largest victory, was recorded against Sri Lanka in the second and final Test of the 2018-19 tour at the Hagley Oval, where the hosts won by 423 runs.
==== Greatest win margins (by 10 wickets) ====
New Zealand have won a Test match by a margin of 10 wickets on 5 occasions.
==== Narrowest win margins (by runs) ====
New Zealand's narrowest win was by 1 run (the second such victory in Test history, after West Indies), against England in a match in February 2023. England made 435 runs in first innings. In response, New Zealand were dismissed for 209 and were asked to follow-on. In the second innings, New Zealand scored 483 runs to set a target of 257 runs to win for England, which they fell one run short of.
==== Narrowest win margins (by wickets) ====
New Zealand's narrowest win by wickets came in the first Test of the West Indies cricket team in New Zealand in 1979-80 in February 1980. Played at the Carisbrook, the hosts won the match by a margin of one wicket, one of only fourteen one-wicket victories in Test cricket.
==== Greatest loss margins (by innings) ====
The Oval in London played host the greatest defeat by an innings in Test cricket. The final Test of the 1938 Ashes saw England defeat the tourists by an innings and 579 runs, to the draw the series at one match all. New Zealand's biggest defeat came during the Pakistan tour in 2002 when they lost by an innings and 324 runs at Lahore Stadium, Lahore.
==== Greatest loss margins (by runs) ====
The first Test of the 1928–29 Ashes series saw Australia defeated by England by 675 runs, the greatest losing margin by runs in Test cricket. New Zealand's biggest defeat by runs was against South Africa in the first Test of the 2007 tour at New Wanderers Stadium.
==== Greatest loss margins (by 10 wickets) ====
New Zealand have lost a Test match by a margin of 10 wickets on 13 occasions with most recent being during the 2nd test of the New Zealand cricket team in the West Indies in 2014.
==== Narrowest loss margins (by runs) ====
The narrowest loss of New Zealand in terms of runs is by 30 runs against South Africa in the first test of the New Zealand's tour of South Africa in 1961.
==== Narrowest loss margins (by wickets) ====
The narrowest loss of New Zealand in terms of wickets is by 3 wickets against Australia in the third test of New Zealand cricket team in Australia in 2015–16.
== Batting records ==
=== Most career runs ===
A run is the basic means of scoring in cricket. A run is scored when the batsman hits the ball with his bat and with his partner runs the length of 22 yards (20 m) of the pitch.
India's Sachin Tendulkar has scored the most runs in Test cricket with 15,921. Second is Joe Root of England with about 14,000 ahead of Ricky Ponting from Australia in third with 13,378.
=== Fastest runs getter ===
=== Most runs in each batting position ===
=== Most runs against each team ===
=== Highest individual score ===
The second test of the Indian cricket team in New Zealand in 2013–14 saw Brendon McCullum score his first and New Zealand's only triple century and record New Zealand's highest Individual score.
=== Highest individual score – progression of record ===
=== Highest individual score against each team ===
=== Highest career average ===
A batsman's batting average is the total number of runs they have scored divided by the number of times they have been dismissed.
=== Highest average in each batting position ===
=== Most half-centuries ===
A half-century is a score of between 50 and 99 runs. Statistically, once a batsman's score reaches 100, it is no longer considered a half-century but a century.
Sachin Tendulkar of India has scored the most half-centuries in Test cricket with 68. He is followed by the West Indies' Shivnarine Chanderpaul on 66, India's Rahul Dravid and Allan Border of Australia on 63 and in fifth with 62 fifties to his name, Australia's Ricky Ponting.
=== Most centuries ===
A century is a score of 100 or more runs in a single innings.
Tendulkar has also scored the most centuries in Test cricket with 51. South Africa's Jacques Kallis is next on 45 and Ricky Ponting with 41 hundreds is in third.
=== Most double centuries ===
A double century is a score of 200 or more runs in a single innings.
Bradman holds the Test record for the most double centuries scored with twelve, one ahead of Sri Lanka's Kumar Sangakkara who finished his career with eleven. In third is Brian Lara of the West Indies with nine. England's Wally Hammond, Mahela Jayawardene of Sri Lanka and Virat Kohli of India scored seven double centuries.
=== Most triple centuries ===
A triple century is a score of 300 or more runs in a single innings.
India's Virender Sehwag, Australia's Don Bradman and West Indies's Chris Gayle and Brian Lara have each scored two triple centuries. Brendon McCullum is the only New Zealand Player who has scored a single Test triple century as of September 2020.
=== Most Sixes ===
=== Most Fours ===
=== Most runs in a series ===
The 1930 Ashes series in England saw Don Bradman set the record for the most runs scored in a single series, falling just 26 short of 1,000 runs. He is followed by Wally Hammond with 905 runs scored in the 1928–29 Ashes series. Glenn Turner with 672 in the 1972 tour of West Indies is the highest New Zealander on the list.
=== Most ducks ===
A duck refers to a batsman being dismissed without scoring a run. Chris Martin has scored the second-highest number of ducks in Test cricket behind Courtney Walsh.
=== Highest partnerships by wicket ===
In cricket, two batsmen are always present at the crease batting together in a partnership. This partnership will continue until one of them is dismissed, retires or the innings comes to a close.
A wicket partnership describes the number of runs scored before each wicket falls. The first wicket partnership is between the opening batsmen and continues until the first wicket falls. The second wicket partnership then commences between the not out batsman and the number three batsman. This partnership continues until the second wicket falls. The third wicket partnership then commences between the not out batsman and the new batsman. This continues down to the tenth wicket partnership. When the tenth wicket has fallen, there is no batsman left to partner so the innings is closed.
=== Highest partnerships by runs ===
The highest Test partnership by runs for any wicket is held by the Sri Lankan pairing of Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene who put together a third wicket partnership of 624 runs during the first Test against South Africa in July 2006. This broke the record of 576 runs set by their compatriots Sanath Jayasuriya and Roshan Mahanama against India in 1997. New Zealand's Andrew Jones and Martin Crowe hold the third highest Test partnership with 467 made in 1991 against Sri Lanka.
=== Highest overall partnership runs by a pair ===
== Bowling records ==
=== Most career wickets ===
A bowler takes the wicket of a batsman when the form of dismissal is bowled, caught, leg before wicket, stumped or hit wicket. If the batsman is dismissed by run out, obstructing the field, handling the ball, hitting the ball twice or timed out the bowler does not receive credit.
Shane Warne held the record for the most Test wickets with 708 until December 2007 when Sri Lankan bowler Muttiah Muralitharan passed Warne's milestone. Muralitharan, who continued to play until 2010, finished with 800 wickets to his name. James Anderson of England is third on the list with 704 wickets, which is the record for most wickets by a fast bowler in Test cricket. New Zealand's Richard Hadlee is the highest ranked New Zealand bowler taking 431 wickets.
=== Most career wickets against each team ===
=== Fastest wicket taker ===
=== Best figures in an innings ===
Bowling figures refers to the number of the wickets a bowler has taken and the number of runs conceded.
There have been three occasions in Test cricket where a bowler has taken all ten wickets in a single innings – Jim Laker of England took 10/53 against Australia in 1956, India's Anil Kumble in 1999 returned figures of 10/74 against Pakistan and New Zealand's Ajaz Patel in 2021, returning figures of 10/119 against India. Richard Hadlee is one of 15 bowlers who have taken nine wickets in a Test match innings.
=== Best figures in an innings against each team ===
=== Best figures in a match ===
A bowler's bowling figures in a match is the sum of the wickets taken and the runs conceded over both innings.
No bowler in the history of Test cricket has taken all 20 wickets in a match. The closest to do so was English spin bowler Jim Laker. During the fourth Test of the 1956 Ashes series, Laker took 9/37 in the first innings and 10/53 in the second to finish with match figures of 19/90. Richard Hadlee's figures of 15/123 taken during the first match of the New Zealand tour of Australia in 1985, is the 10th best in Test cricket history.
=== Best career average ===
A bowler's bowling average is the total number of runs they have conceded divided by the number of wickets they have taken.
Nineteenth century English medium pacer George Lohmann holds the record for the best career average in Test cricket with 10.75. J. J. Ferris, one of fifteen cricketers to have played Test cricket for more than one team, is second behind Lohmann with an overall career average of 12.70 runs per wicket.
=== Best career economy rate ===
A bowler's economy rate is the total number of runs they have conceded divided by the number of overs they have bowled.
English bowler William Attewell, who played 10 matches for England between 1884 and 1892, holds the Test record for the best career economy rate with 1.31. New Zealand's Jeremy Coney, with a rate of 2.04 runs per over conceded over his 52-match Test career, is 43rd on the list.
=== Best career strike rate ===
A bowler's strike rate is the total number of balls they have bowled divided by the number of wickets they have taken.
As with the career average above, the top bowler with the best Test career strike rate is George Lohmann with strike rate of 34.1 balls per wicket. New Zealand's Shane Bond is at third position in this list.
=== Most five-wicket hauls in an innings ===
A five-wicket haul refers to a bowler taking five wickets in a single innings.
Richard Hadlee is third on the list of most five-wicket hauls behind Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan and Australia's Shane Warne in Test cricket.
=== Most ten-wicket hauls in a match ===
A ten-wicket haul refers to a bowler taking ten or more wickets in a match over two innings.
Richard Hadlee is third on the all-time list of the most ten-wicket hauls in Test cricket, having taken the most of any fast bowler with 9 ten-wicket hauls. Only spin bowlers Muralitharan and Warne have taken more with 22 and 10 respectively.
=== Worst figures in an innings ===
The worst figures in a single innings in Test cricket came in the third Test between the West Indies at home to Pakistan in 1958. Pakistan's Khan Mohammad returned figures of 0/259 from his 54 overs in the second innings of the match.
The worst figures by a New Zealander is 0/181 that came off the bowling of Matthew Hart in the second test of the West Indies tour of New Zealand in 1995.
=== Worst figures in a match ===
The worst figures in a match in Test cricket were taken by South Africa's Imran Tahir in the second Test against Australia at the Adelaide Oval in November 2012. He returned figures of 0/180 from his 23 overs in the first innings and 0/80 off 14 in the third innings for a total of 0/260 from 37 overs. He claimed the record in his final over when two runs came from it – enough for him to pass the previous record of 0/259, set 54 years prior.
The worst figures by a New Zealander is by Matthew Hart in the second test of the West Indies tour of New Zealand in 1995.
=== Most wickets in a series ===
England's seventh Test tour of South Africa in 1913–14 saw the record set for the most wickets taken by a bowler in a Test series. English paceman Sydney Barnes played in four of the five matches and achieved a total of 49 wickets to his name.
=== Hat-trick ===
In cricket, a hat-trick occurs when a bowler takes three wickets with consecutive deliveries. The deliveries may be interrupted by an over bowled by another bowler from the other end of the pitch or the other team's innings, but must be three consecutive deliveries by the individual bowler in the same match. Only wickets attributed to the bowler count towards a hat-trick; run outs do not count.
In Test cricket history there have been just 44 hat-tricks, the first achieved by Fred Spofforth for Australia against England in 1879. In 1912, Australian Jimmy Matthews achieved the feat twice in one game against South Africa. The only other players to achieve two hat-tricks are Australia's Hugh Trumble, against England in 1902 and 1904, Pakistan's Wasim Akram, in separate games against Sri Lanka in 1999, and England's Stuart Broad.
== Wicket-keeping records ==
The wicket-keeper is a specialist fielder who stands behind the stumps being guarded by the batsman on strike and is the only member of the fielding side allowed to wear gloves and leg pads.
=== Most career dismissals ===
A wicket-keeper can be credited with the dismissal of a batsman in two ways, caught or stumped. A fair catch is taken when the ball is caught fully within the field of play without it bouncing after the ball has touched the striker's bat or glove holding the bat, while a stumping occurs when the wicket-keeper puts down the wicket while the batsman is out of his ground and not attempting a run.
New Zealand's BJ Watling is the highest New Zealander in taking most dismissals in Test cricket as a designated wicket-keeper.
=== Most career catches ===
Watling is seventh in taking most catches in Test cricket as a designated wicket-keeper.
=== Most career stumpings ===
Bert Oldfield, Australia's fifth-most capped wicket-keeper, holds the record for the most stumpings in Test cricket with 52. New Zealand wicket-keeper Tom Blundell is equal 26th on 16.
=== Most dismissals in an innings ===
Four wicket-keepers have taken seven dismissals in a single innings in a Test match—Wasim Bari of Pakistan in 1979, Englishman Bob Taylor in 1980, New Zealand's Ian Smith in 1991 and most recently West Indian gloveman Ridley Jacobs against Australia in 2000.
The feat of taking 6 dismissals in an innings has been achieved by 24 wicket-keepers on 32 occasions with Watling being the only New Zealander.
=== Most dismissals in a match ===
Three wicket-keepers have made 11 dismissals in a Test match, Englishman Jack Russell in 1995, South African AB de Villiers in 2013 and most recently India's Rishabh Pant against Australia in 2018.
The feat of making 10 dismissals in a match has been achieved by 4 wicket-keepers on 4 occasions.
The most dismissals made by New Zealand wicket-keeper is nine, once by Brendon McCullum in 2009 and twice by BJ Watling in 2014 and 2015.
=== Most dismissals in a series ===
Brad Haddin holds the Test cricket record for the most dismissals taken by a wicket-keeper in a series. He took 29 catches during the 2013 Ashes series. New Zealand's record is held by Artie Dick when he made 23 dismissals during the New Zealand cricket team in South Africa in 1961–62.
== Fielding records ==
=== Most career catches ===
Caught is one of the nine methods a batsman can be dismissed in cricket. The majority of catches are caught in the slips, located behind the batsman, next to the wicket-keeper, on the off side of the field. Most slip fielders are top order batsmen.
India's Rahul Dravid holds the record for the most catches in Test cricket by a non-wicket-keeper with 210, followed by Mahela Jayawardene of Sri Lanka on 205 and South African Jacques Kallis with 200. Stephen Fleming is the highest ranked New Zealander in seventh, securing 171 catches in his Test career.
=== Most catches in a series ===
The 1920–21 Ashes series, in which Australia whitewashed England 5–0 for the first time, saw the record set for the most catches taken by a non-wicket-keeper in a Test series. Australian all-rounder Jack Gregory took 15 catches in the series as well as 23 wickets. Greg Chappell, a fellow Australian all-rounder, and India's K. L. Rahul are equal second behind Gregory with 14 catches taken during the 1974–75 Ashes series and during the 2018 Indian tour of England respectively. Four players have taken 13 catches in a series on six occasions with both Bob Simpson and Brian Lara having done so twice and Rahul Dravid and Alastair Cook once. Stephen Fleming is the highest ranked New Zealander in this list.
== All-round records ==
=== 1000 runs and 100 wickets ===
A total of 71 players have achieved the double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in their Test career.
=== 250 runs and 20 wickets in a series ===
A total of 18 players on 24 occasions have achieved the double of 250 runs and 20 wickets in a series.
== Other records ==
=== Most career matches ===
India's Sachin Tendulkar holds the record for the most Test matches played with 200, with former captains Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh being joint second with each having represented Australia on 168 occasions. Daniel Vettori and Ross Taylor are the highest ranked New Zealanders in this list.
=== Most consecutive career matches ===
Former English captain Alastair Cook holds the record for the most consecutive Test matches played with 159. He broke Allan Border's long standing record of 153 matches in June 2018. The recently retired New Zealand wicket-keeper-batsman Brendon McCullum, who is fifth on the list with 101 matches, is the highest ranked cricketer who never missed a Test match during his playing career.
=== Most matches as captain ===
Graeme Smith, who led the South African cricket team from 2003 to 2014, holds the record for the most matches played as captain in Test cricket with 109.Stephen Fleming who led the side for nine years from 1997 to 2006 is third on the list with 80 matches.
=== Most matches won as a captain ===
=== Most man of the match awards ===
=== Most man of the series awards ===
=== Youngest players on debut ===
The youngest player to play in a Test match is claimed to be Hasan Raza at the age of 14 years and 227 days. Making his debut for Pakistan against Zimbabwe on 24 October 1996, there is some doubt as to the validity of Raza's age at the time. The youngest New Zealander to play Test cricket was Daniel Vettori who at the age of 18 years and 10 days debuted in the second Test of the series against England in February 1997.
=== Oldest players on debut ===
England left-arm slow bowler James Southerton is the oldest player to appear in a Test match. Playing in the very first inaugural test against Australia in 1876 at Melbourne Cricket Ground, in Melbourne, Australia, he was aged 49 years and 119 days. Herb McGirr is the oldest New Zealand Test debutant when he made his debut during the 1930 England series at the Eden Park.
=== Oldest players ===
England all-rounder Wilfred Rhodes is the oldest player to appear in a Test match. Playing in the fourth Test against the West Indies in 1930 at Sabina Park, in Kingston, Jamaica, he was aged 52 years and 165 days on the final day's play. The oldest New Zealand Test player is Jack Alabaster who was aged 41 years and 242 days when he represented New Zealand for the final time in the 1972 tour of West Indies at the Queen's Park Oval.
== Umpiring records ==
=== Most matches umpired ===
An umpire in cricket is a person who officiates the match according to the Laws of Cricket. Two umpires adjudicate the match on the field, whilst a third umpire has access to video replays, and a fourth umpire looks after the match balls and other duties. The records below are only for on-field umpires.
Aleem Dar of Pakistan holds the record for the most Test matches umpired with 130. The current active Dar set the record in December 2019 overtaking Steve Bucknor from the West Indies mark of 128 matches. They are followed by South Africa's Rudi Koertzen who officiated in 108. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee | Sea of Galilee | The Sea of Galilee (Hebrew: יָם כִּנֶּרֶת, Judeo-Aramaic: יַמּא דטבריא, גִּנֵּיסַר, Arabic: بحيرة طبريا), also called Lake Tiberias, Genezareth Lake or Kinneret, is a freshwater lake in Israel. It is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth and the second-lowest lake in the world (after the Dead Sea, a salt lake), with its elevation fluctuating between 215 and 209 metres (705 and 686 ft) below sea level (depending on rainfall). It is approximately 53 km (33 mi) in circumference, about 21 km (13 mi) long, and 13 km (8 mi) wide. Its area is 166.7 km2 (64.4 sq mi) at its fullest, and its maximum depth is approximately 43 metres (141 ft). The lake is fed partly by underground springs, but its main source is the Jordan River, which flows through it from north to south with the outflow controlled by the Degania Dam.
== Geography ==
The Sea of Galilee is situated in northeast Israel, between the Golan Heights and the Galilee region, in the Jordan Rift Valley, formed by the relative motion of the African and Arabian plates. Consequently, the area is subject to earthquakes, and in the past, volcanic activity. This is evident from the abundant basalt and other igneous rocks that define the geology of Galilee.
== Names ==
The lake has been called by different names throughout its history, usually depending on the dominant settlement on its shores. With the changing fate of the towns, the lake's name also changed.
The modern Hebrew name Kineret comes from the Hebrew Bible, where it appears as the "sea of Kineret" in Numbers 34:11 and Joshua 13:27, and spelled כנרות "Kinerot" in Hebrew in Joshua 11:2. This name was also found in the scripts of Ugarit, in the Aqhat Epic. As the name of a city, Kinneret was listed among the "fenced cities" in Joshua 19:35. A persistent, though likely erroneous, popular etymology presumes that the name Kinneret may originate from the Hebrew word kinnor ("harp" or "lyre"), because of the shape of the lake. The scholarly consensus, however, is that the origin of the name is derived from the important Bronze and Iron Age city of Kinneret, excavated at Tell el-'Oreimeh. The city of Kinneret may have been named after the body of water rather than vice versa, and there is no evidence for the origin of the town's name.
All Old and New Testament writers use the term "sea" (Hebrew יָם yam, Greek θάλασσα), with the exception of Luke, who calls it "the Lake of Gennesaret" (Luke 5:1), from the Greek λίμνη Γεννησαρέτ (limnē Gennēsaret), the "Grecized form of Chinnereth". The Babylonian Talmud as well as Flavius Josephus mention the sea by the name "Sea of Ginosar" after the small fertile plain of Ginosar that lies on its western side. Ginosar is yet another name derived from "Kinneret".
The word Galilee comes from the Hebrew Haggalil (הַגָלִיל), which literally means "The District", a compressed form of Gelil Haggoyim "The District of Nations" (Isaiah 8:23). Toward the end of the 1st century CE, the Sea of Galilee became widely known as the Sea of Tiberias after the city of Tiberias founded on its western shore in honour of the second Roman emperor, Tiberius. In the New Testament, the term "sea of Galilee" (Greek: θάλασσαν τῆς Γαλιλαίας, thalassan tēs Galilaias) is used in the Gospel of Matthew 4:18; 15:29, the Gospel of Mark 1:16; 7:31, and in the Gospel of John 6:1 as "the sea of Galilee, which is [the sea] of Tiberias" (θαλάσσης τῆς Γαλιλαίας τῆς Τιβεριάδος, thalassēs tēs Galilaias tēs Tiberiados), the late 1st century CE name. Sea of Tiberias is also the name mentioned in Roman texts and in the Jerusalem Talmud, and it was adopted into Arabic as (بحيرة طبريا), "Lake Tiberias". Some writers use the spelling "Gallilee", for example Selah Merrill in a nineteenth century journal article.
From the Umayyad through the Mamluk period, the lake was known in Arabic as Bahr al-Minya, the "Sea of Minya", after the Umayyad qasr complex, whose ruins are still visible at Khirbat al-Minya. This is the name used by the medieval Persian and Arab scholars Al-Baladhuri, Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir.
== History ==
=== Prehistory ===
In 1989, remains of a hunter-gatherer site were found under the water at the southern end. Remains of mud huts were found in Ohalo. Nahal Ein Gev, located about three kilometres (two miles) east of the lake, contains a village from the late Natufian period. The site is considered one of the first permanent human settlements in the world from a time predating the Neolithic Revolution.
=== Early Iron Age ===
According to Sugimoto (2015), the Iron Age IB (1150–1000 BCE) cities in the northeastern region of the Sea of Galilee likely reflect the activities of the Kingdom of Geshur, mentioned in the Bible. Also, the later Iron Age IIA–B cities here are linked with the southern expansion of the Aram-Damascus kingdom. Among these Galilean cities are Tel Dover, Tel 'En Gev, Tel Hadar, Tel Bethsaida, and Tel Kinrot.
=== Hellenistic and Roman periods ===
The Sea of Galilee lies on the ancient Via Maris, which linked Egypt with the northern empires. The Greeks, Hasmoneans, and Romans founded flourishing towns and settlements on the lake including Hippos and Tiberias. Contemporary Roman–Jewish historian Flavius Josephus was so impressed by the area that he wrote, "One may call this place the ambition of Nature"; he also reports a thriving fishing industry at this time, with 230 boats regularly working in the lake. Archaeologists discovered one such boat, nicknamed the Jesus Boat, in 1986.
In the New Testament, much of the ministry of Jesus occurs on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In those days, there was a continuous ribbon development of settlements and villages around the lake and plenty of trade and ferrying by boat. The Synoptic Gospels of Mark 1:14–20), Matthew 4:18–22), and Luke 5:1–11) describe how Jesus recruited four of his apostles from the shores of the Kinneret: the fishermen Simon and his brother Andrew and the brothers John and James. One of Jesus' famous teaching episodes, the Sermon on the Mount, is supposed to have been given on a hill overlooking the Kinneret. Many of his miracles are also said to have occurred here including his walking on water, calming the storm, the disciples and the miraculous catch of fish, and his feeding five thousand people (in Tabgha). In John's Gospel the sea provides the setting for Jesus' third post-resurrection appearance to his disciples (John 21).
In 135 CE, Bar Kokhba's revolt was put down which was part of the Jewish–Roman wars. The Romans responded by banning all Jews from Jerusalem. The center of Jewish culture and learning shifted to the region of Galilee and the Kinneret, particularly Tiberias. It was in this region that the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled.
=== Middle Ages ===
The Sea of Galilee's importance declined when the Byzantine Empire lost control, and the area came under the control of the Umayyad Caliphate and subsequent Islamic empires. The palace of Minya was built by the lake during the reign of al-Walid I (705–715 CE). Apart from Tiberias, the major towns and cities in the area were gradually abandoned. In 1187, Sultan Saladin defeated the armies of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin, largely because he was able to cut the Crusaders off from the valuable fresh water of the Sea of Galilee.
The lake had little importance within the early Ottoman Empire. Tiberias did see a significant revival of its Jewish community in the 16th century but had gradually declined until the city was destroyed in 1660. In the early 18th century, Tiberias was rebuilt by Daher al-Umar, becoming the center of his rule over Galilee, and seeing also a revival of its Jewish community.
=== Early 20th century ===
In 1908, Jewish pioneers established the Kinneret Farm at the same time as and next to Moshavat Kinneret in the immediate vicinity of the lake. The farm trained Jewish immigrants in modern farming. One group of youth from the training farm established Kvutzat Degania in 1909–1910, popularly considered as the first kibbutz, another group founded Kvutzat Kinneret in 1913, and yet another the first proper kibbutz, Ein Harod, in 1921, the same year when the first moshav, Nahalal, was established by a group trained at the farm. The Jewish settlements around Kinneret Farm are considered the cradle of the kibbutz culture of early Zionism; Kvutzat Kinneret is the birthplace of Naomi Shemer, buried at the Kinneret Cemetery next to Rachel—two prominent national poets.
In 1917, the British defeated Ottoman Turkish forces and took control of Palestine, while France took control of Syria. In the carve-up of the Ottoman territories between Britain and France, it was agreed that Britain would retain control of Palestine while France would control Syria. This required the allies to fix the border between the Mandatory Palestine and the French Mandate of Syria. The boundary was defined in broad terms by the Franco-British Boundary Agreement of December 1920, which drew it across the middle of the lake. However, the commission established by the 1920 treaty redrew the boundary. The High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, had sought full control of the Sea of Galilee. The negotiations led to the inclusion into the Palestine territory of the whole Sea of Galilee, both sides of the River Jordan, Lake Hula, Dan spring, and part of the Yarmouk. The final border approved in 1923 followed a 10-meter wide strip along the lake's northeastern shore, cutting Mandatory Syria (State of Damascus) off from the lake. Geographer Gideon Biger suggests that the three factors determining the position of these boundaries were (1) "biblical-historical", (2) Zionist pressure to include as many water resources as possible in Mandatory Palestine, and (3) the human and physical landscape.
The British and French Agreement provided that existing rights over the use of the waters of the River Jordan by the inhabitants of Syria would be maintained; the government of Syria would have the right to erect a new pier at Semakh on Lake Tiberias or jointly use the existing pier; persons or goods passing between the landing-stage on the Lake of Tiberias and Semakh would not be subject to customs regulations, and the Syrian government would have access to the said landing-stage; the inhabitants of Syria and Lebanon would have the same fishing and navigation rights on Lakes Huleh, Tiberias and River Jordan, while the government of Palestine would be responsible for policing of lakes.
=== State of Israel ===
On 15 May 1948, Syria invaded the newborn state of Israel, capturing territory along the Sea of Galilee. Under the 1949 armistice agreement between Israel and Syria, Syria occupied the northeast shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. The agreement stated that the armistice line was "not to be interpreted as having any relation whatsoever to ultimate territorial arrangements." Syria remained in possession of the lake's northeast shoreline until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
In the 1950s, Israel formulated a plan to link the Kinneret with the rest of the country's water infrastructure via the National Water Carrier, in order to supply the water demand of the growing country. The carrier was completed in 1964. The Israeli plan, which the Arab League opposed while endorsing its own plan to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River, sparked political and sometimes even armed confrontations over the Jordan basin.
In October 2025, Israel began pumping desalinated water into the Sea of Galilee, in a world first.
== Geology ==
The lake lies in the center of the Jordan Valley, in the northern part of the Syrian-African rift. Several directions of tectonic movements characterize the region, mirroring the patterns typical of the entire Syrian-African rift: north–south movements, which started about 20 million years ago; stretching movements in the east–west direction, which began later, at the beginning of the Pleistocene (about 1.8 million years ago), and caused the subsidence of the lake area.
As a result of horizontal shifts in the north–south direction and subsidence of the area, a lake was formed, with an asymmetrical bottom—steeper in the east and a gentler in the west. In the southern part an underwater cliff is present, covered by the lake's sediments. The cliff is distinct in the western part and less so in the east.
The Sea of Galilee in its current form was preceded by Lake Lisan, which extended from the northern Sea of Galilee to Hatzeva in the south, more than 200 km (120 mi) from the present southernmost point of the lake. Lake Lisan was preceded by Lake Ovadia, a much smaller fresh water lake. Lake Kinneret was formed in its current form less than 20,000 years ago, as a result of tectonic subsidence and the shrinking up of Lake Lisan.
== Archaeology ==
In 1986 the Ancient Galilee Boat, also known as the Jesus Boat, was discovered on the northwest shore during a drought when water levels receded. It is an ancient fishing boat from the 1st century AD, and although there is no evidence directly linking the boat to Jesus and his disciples, it nevertheless is an example of the kind of boat that Jesus and his disciples, some of whom were fishermen, may have used.
During a routine sonar scan in 2003 (finding published in 2013), archaeologists discovered an enormous conical stone structure. The structure, which has a diameter of around 230 feet (70 m), is made of boulders and stones. The ruins are estimated to be between 2,000 and 12,000 years old and are about 10 metres (33 ft) underwater. The estimated weight of the monument is over 60,000 tons. Researchers explain that the site resembles early burial sites in Europe and was likely built in the early Bronze Age.
In February 2018, archaeologists discovered seven intact mosaics with Greek inscriptions. One inscription, at five meters one of the longest found to date in western Galilee, gives the names of donors and the names and positions of church officials, including Irenaeus, bishop of Tyre in 445. Another mosaic mentions a woman as a donor to the church's construction. This inscription is the first in the region to mention a female donor.
== Water level ==
The water level is monitored and regulated. There are three levels at which the alarm is rung:
The upper red line, 208.9 m (685 ft) below sea level (BSL), where facilities on the shore start being flooded.
The lower red line, 213.2 m (699 ft) BSL, where pumping should stop.
The black (low-level) line, 214.4 m (703 ft) BSL, where irreversible damage occurs.
Daily monitoring of the Sea of Galilee's water level began in 1969, and the lowest level recorded since then was November 2001, which today constitutes the "black line" of 214.87 meters below sea level (although it is believed that in the first half of the 20th century, the water level had fallen lower than the current black line at times of drought). The Israeli government monitors water levels and publishes the results daily. Increasing water demand in Israel, Lebanon and Jordan, as well as dry winters, have resulted in stress on the lake and a decreasing water line to dangerously low levels at times. The Sea of Galilee is at risk of becoming irreversibly salinized by the salt water springs under the lake, which are held in check by the weight of the freshwater on top of them.
After five years of drought up to 2018, the Sea of Galilee was expected to drop near the black line. In February 2018, the city of Tiberias requested a desalination plant to treat the water coming from the Sea of Galilee and demanded a new water source for the city. March 2018 was the lowest point in water income to the lake since 1927. In September 2018 the Israeli energy and water office announced a project to pour desalinated water from the Mediterranean Sea into the Sea of Galilee using a tunnel. The tunnel is expected to be the largest of its kind in Israel and will transfer half of the Mediterranean desalted water and will move 300 to 500 million cubic meters of water per year. The plan is said to cost five billion shekels.
Since the beginning of the 2018–19 rainy season, the Sea of Galilee has risen considerably. From being near the ecologically dangerous black line of −214.4 m, the level has risen by April 2020 to just 16 cm (6.3 in) below the upper red line, a result of strong rains and a radical decrease in pumping. During the entire 2018–19 rainy season the water level rose by a historical record of 3.47 meters (11.4 ft), while the 2019–20 winter brought a 2.82 meters (9 ft 3 in) rise. The Water Authority dug a new canal in order to let 5 billion liters (1.1×109 imp gal; 1.3×109 U.S. gal) of water flow from the lake directly into the Jordan River, bypassing the existing dams system for technical and financial reasons.
Due to the low water levels of the lake, in October 2025 Israel began pumping desalinated water into the Sea of Galilee, an unprecedented step globally, as it marks the first attempt to top up a freshwater lake with processed water. The project is expected to raise the lake's level by around 0.5 centimeters per month.
== Water use ==
The National Water Carrier of Israel, completed in 1964, transports water from the lake to the population centers of Israel, and in the past supplied most of the country's drinking water. In 2016 the lake supplied approximately 10% of Israel's drinking water needs.
In 1964, Syria attempted construction of a Headwater Diversion Plan that would have blocked the flow of water into the Sea of Galilee, sharply reducing the water flow into the lake. This project and Israel's attempt to block these efforts in 1965 were factors which played into regional tensions culminating in the 1967 Six-Day War. During the war, Israel captured the Golan Heights, which contain some of the sources of water for the Sea of Galilee.
Up until the mid-2010s, about 400 million m3 (14 billion cu ft) of water was pumped through the National Water Carrier each year. Under the terms of the Israel–Jordan peace treaty, Israel also supplies 50 million m3 (1.8 billion cu ft) of water annually from the lake to Jordan. In recent years the Israeli government has made extensive investments in water conservation, reclamation and desalination infrastructure in the country. This has allowed it to significantly reduce the amount of water pumped from the lake annually in an effort to restore and improve its ecological environment, as well as respond to some of the most extreme drought conditions in hundreds of years affecting the lake's intake basin since 1998. Therefore, it was expected that in 2016 only about 25 million m3 (880 million cu ft) of water would be drawn from the lake for Israeli domestic consumption, a small fraction of the amount typically drawn from the lake over the previous decades.
== Tourism ==
Tourism around the Sea of Galilee is an important economic segment. Historical and religious sites in the region draw both local and foreign tourists. The Sea of Galilee is an attraction for Christian pilgrims who visit Israel to see the places where Jesus performed miracles according to the New Testament. Alonzo Ketcham Parker, a 19th-century American traveler, called visiting the Sea of Galilee "a 'fifth gospel' which one read devoutly, his heart overflowing with quiet joy".
In April 2011, Israel unveiled a 40-mile (64 km) hiking trail in Galilee for Christian pilgrims, called the "Jesus Trail". It includes a network of footpaths, roads and bicycle paths linking sites central to the lives of Jesus and his disciples. It ends at Capernaum on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus expounded his teachings. Another key attraction is the site where the Sea of Galilee's water flows into the Jordan River, to which thousands of pilgrims from all over the world come to be baptized every year.
Israel's most well-known open water swim race, the Kinneret Crossing, is held every year in September, drawing thousands of open water swimmers to participate in competitive and noncompetitive events. Tourists also partake in the building of rafts on Lavnun Beach, called Rafsodia. Here many different age groups work together to build a raft with their bare hands and then sail that raft across the sea. Other economic activities include fishing in the lake and agriculture, particularly bananas, dates, mangoes, grapes and olives in the fertile belt of land surrounding it.
The Turkish Aviators Monument, erected during the Ottoman era, stands near Kibbutz Ha'on on the lakeshore, commemorating the Turkish pilots whose monoplanes crashed en route to Jerusalem.
== Ecology ==
The warm waters of the Sea of Galilee support various flora and fauna, which have supported a significant commercial fishery for more than two millennia. Local flora include various reeds along most of the shoreline as well as phytoplankton. Fauna include zooplankton, benthos and a number of fish species such as Mirogrex terraesanctae. The Fishing and Agricultural Division of the Ministry of Water and Agriculture of Israel lists 10 families of fish living in the lake, with a total of 27 species – 19 native and 8 introduced species. Local fishermen talk of four types of fish: "مشط musht" (tilapia); sardin (the Kinneret bleak, Mirogrex terraesanctae); "بني biny" or Jordan barbel, Luciobarbus longiceps (barb-like); and North African sharptooth catfish (Clarias gariepinus). The tilapia species include the Galilean tilapia (Sarotherodon galilaeus), the blue tilapia (Oreochromis aureus), and the redbelly tilapia (Tilapia zillii). Fish caught commercially include Tristramella simonis and the Galilean tilapia, locally called "St. Peter's fish". In 2005, 270 tonnes (300 short tons) of tilapia were caught by local fishermen. This dropped to seven tonnes (eight short tons) in 2009 because of overfishing. A fish species that is unique to the lake, Tristramella sacra, used to spawn in the marsh and has not been seen since the 1990s droughts. Conservationists fear this species may have become extinct.
Low water levels in drought years have stressed the lake's ecology. This may have been aggravated by over-extraction of water for either the National Water Carrier to supply other parts of Israel or, since 1994, for the supply of water to Jordan. Droughts of the early and mid-1990s dried out the marshy northern margin of the lake. It is hoped that drastic reductions in the amount of water pumped through the National Water Carrier will help restore the lake's ecology over the span of several years.
The lake, with its immediate surrounds, has been recognised as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International because it supports populations of black francolins and non-breeding griffon vultures as well as many wintering waterbirds, including marbled teals, great crested grebes, grey herons, great white egrets, great cormorants and black-headed gulls. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darin_Erstad | Darin Erstad | Darin Charles Erstad (; born June 4, 1974) is an American former professional baseball player and former head coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Erstad spent most of his playing career with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim franchise (1996–2006) before signing with the Chicago White Sox in 2007. Erstad batted and threw left-handed. He was a two-time MLB All-Star and a three-time Gold Glove Award winner. He was the first overall pick in the 1995 Major League Baseball draft.
== Early life ==
=== High school ===
Erstad graduated in 1992 from Jamestown High School in Jamestown, North Dakota. He was a placekicker and punter on the school football team, logging a school-record 50-yard field goal. Erstad also played hockey (36 goals and 24 assists in 26 games) and participated in track and field (winning state titles in 110 and 300-meter hurdles).
Erstad played American Legion Baseball (Jamestown had no high school baseball team) and hit .492 with 18 home runs and 86 RBI for Jamestown in 1992. He was also 10–2 with a 2.18 ERA as a pitcher, and was named AP North Dakota Athlete of the Year in 1992.
=== College ===
Erstad attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, playing baseball there for three years and held the school record for career hits with 261. In his final year there, Erstad hit .410 with 19 home runs and 79 RBIs, earning First-Team All-American status and was a finalist for the 1995 Golden Spikes Award.
Darin started his junior campaign on a tear and never stopped hitting. He was at his best against the conference's top team, Oklahoma. In five games with the first-place Sooners, he batted .429 and blasted three home runs. Oklahoma lefty Mark Redman—with whom Darin would share conference Player of the Year honors—was among his biggest victims. The Huskers finished 35–23, and Darin led the Big Eight with a .410 average. He was the only batter in the conference to surpass 100 hits, and also led all players with seven triples. Named a First Team All-American by Collegiate Baseball, Darin set career highs with 19 homers and 76 RBIs.
In 1993 and 1994, Erstad played collegiate summer baseball with the Falmouth Commodores of the Cape Cod Baseball League (CCBL). He was named league MVP in 1994 and in 2001 was inducted into the CCBL Hall of Fame.
Erstad was also the starting punter on the Cornhuskers football team and was part of their 1994 National Championship squad, averaging 42.6 yards per punt, the 14th best mark in the country that year.
== Professional career ==
In his 14-season career, Erstad compiled a .282 batting average with 124 home runs and 699 RBIs in 1654 games. His career .9955 fielding percentage as an outfielder is second all-time through 2019 behind Jon Jay. He was selected to the American League All-Star team twice (1998, 2000) and had eight game-ending walk-off RBI in his career.
=== Angels ===
==== 1995–2000 ====
The then California Angels chose Erstad as the first pick overall in the 1995 Major League Baseball draft from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He made his major league debut the next year, batting .284 over 57 games. Erstad played his first full season in 1997, batting .299 with 16 home runs and 99 runs scored. Posting similarly solid statistics the next year, Erstad made his first of two All-Star appearances before having a disappointing season in 1999.
Erstad had a career season in 2000, when he finished eighth in the American League in MVP voting. That year, he led the American League in hits (240), singles (170) and at-bats (676); he was second in total bases (366) and third in runs (121). Erstad also hit .355, finishing second in the batting race behind Nomar Garciaparra (.372), became the first player in Major League history to record 100 RBIs as a leadoff hitter, and won the AL Silver Slugger Award. Erstad's 240 hits in 2000 remain the most in a single-season for any player in the 21st century not including Ichiro Suzuki (who did it twice, hitting 242 in 2001 and an MLB record 262 in 2004).
On June 10, 2000, Erstad hit a double in the Angels' 10–3 win over Arizona. With a major league-leading 100 hits in 61 games, he became the fastest to reach the 100-hit mark since Hall of Famer Heinie Manush did it in 60 games for the 1934 Washington Senators. With three hits on August 29, 2000, he reached 200 hits faster than any player in 65 years. Erstad was just 26 years old at the end of the season, an age at which many players enter their prime, leading many to believe more superstar seasons were ahead of him.
Erstad is one of only five batters, through August 2009, to have hit both a leadoff and walk-off home run in the same game (having done so in 2000), the others being Billy Hamilton (1893), Victor Power (1957), Reed Johnson (2003), and Ian Kinsler (2009).
==== 2001–2006 ====
Although Erstad never hit .300 again after the 2000 season, he was a vital part of the 2002 World Series Champion Angels. After batting .421 in the American League Division Series against the New York Yankees and .364 in the American League Championship Series against the Minnesota Twins, Erstad batted .300 in the seven-game series vs. the National League Champion San Francisco Giants. He hit a key home run in Game 6 of the series with the Angels trailing, 5–3, in the eighth inning and facing elimination, and he also caught the final out of Game 7 hit by Kenny Lofton off Troy Percival into center field. When the Angels won the World Series in 2002, Erstad became the second player hailing from North Dakota to be on a World Series winning roster. Roger Maris was the first with the 1961 Yankees and 1967 Cardinals.
Throughout Erstad's Angels career, his defense remained exceptionally strong. He led all major league center fielders in range factor (3.39) in 2002. Erstad won Gold Glove awards in 2000, 2002, and 2004, when he made a transition from the outfield to first base. He is the only player in MLB history to have won Gold Gloves as an infielder and as an outfielder. He was also the first to win the award at different positions (though all outfield Gold Gloves are voted on together) until Plácido Polanco won an NL Gold Glove as a third baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies in 2011 after having won two Gold Gloves as a second baseman, thus both being infield awards.
Though he compiled a career high 21 game hit streak in 2005, he only played in 40 games in 2006, his last season with the Angels. In 11 years with the franchise, Erstad compiled a .286 batting average and a cumulative .339 postseason average over three seasons. He currently ranks near the top of several franchise records.
=== White Sox and Astros ===
Having signed a $750,000 contract in the off-season, Erstad hit a home run in his first at-bat as a member of the Chicago White Sox on opening day 2007 off CC Sabathia. He finished the season having batted .248 with a .650 OPS over 87 games. He played the following two seasons with the Houston Astros. Erstad found success in the first season, batting .276, but struggled near the end of the second season as a role player, ending the season with a .194 batting average. When catcher Chris Coste joined Erstad on the Astros roster in July 2009, they became the first two players born in North Dakota to play together on the same team in major league history.
On June 17, 2010, when asked if he would continue playing baseball, Erstad said that he was "done".
Erstad was on the 2015 ballot to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Erstad received one vote and fell off the ballot.
== Coaching career ==
On July 5, 2010, the Lincoln Journal Star reported that Erstad accepted a position to become a volunteer coach for the Nebraska baseball team. On July 8, Nebraska head baseball coach Mike Anderson revealed Erstad as the college team's next hitting coach. On June 2, 2011, after Anderson was fired, Erstad was hired as Nebraska's head baseball coach. Erstad was named the 23rd head coach of the Nebraska baseball program.
During his eight years as head coach, the Huskers made four NCAA tournament appearances and qualified for the Big Ten Tournament seven times. He had a coaching record of 267-193-1, which was the fourth-best in Nebraska baseball history for a head coach.
Erstad was named Big Ten Coach of the Year in 2017 after leading the Huskers to the conference championship during the regular season. Six times, Nebraska finished in the top four of the conference standings, including four times in the top two. Three times, Nebraska finished second in the Big Ten Tournament.
Erstad resigned as coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers after eight seasons on June 3, 2019.
=== Head coaching record ===
== Personal and hometown ==
Erstad has three children with his wife, Jessica: a daughter, Jordan Elizabeth, and two sons, Zack and Adam.
During Erstad's tenure with the Angels, his hometown carried all Angels games over the radio; most North Dakota stations only carry Minnesota Twins games. As of July 2009, he ranked second to Travis Hafner in all-time home runs hit by a player born in North Dakota. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men:_The_Animated_Series | X-Men: The Animated Series | X-Men: The Animated Series, also known as X-Men, is an animated superhero television series, based on the Marvel Comics superhero team of the same name. The series aired in the United States for five seasons from October 31, 1992, to September 20, 1997, on Fox's Fox Kids programming block. It was produced by Marvel Entertainment and Saban Entertainment, and animated principally by AKOM.
It was Marvel Comics' second attempt at an animated X-Men television series after the pilot X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men was not picked up. Set in the same fictional universe as Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1994–1998), Earth-92131, it was followed by a revival, X-Men '97, which began airing on March 20, 2024, on Disney+ to critical acclaim.
The series is currently owned and distributed by The Walt Disney Company (Marvel's parent company), which acquired all Fox Kids-related properties from News Corporation and Saban in 2001.
== Synopsis ==
The show features a team similar to that of the early 1990s X-Men comics by Jim Lee, specifically the Blue Team established early on in X-Men (vol. 2). It consists of Cyclops, Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, Beast, Gambit, Jubilee, Jean Grey, and Professor X, as well as original character Morph, who is based on Changeling. All 76 episodes were directed by Larry Houston.
The series deals with social issues, including divorce ("Proteus"), religion ("Nightcrawler" and "Bloodlines"), the Holocaust ("Enter Magneto", "Deadly Reunions", "Days of Future Past" and "The Phalanx Covenant"), AIDS hysteria ("Time Fugitives"), and loneliness ("No Mutant Is an Island"). It satirizes television in the episodes "Mojovision" and "Longshot".
It crossed over with Spider-Man: The Animated Series when Spider-Man seeks the X-Men's help to stop his progressing mutation. In the abbreviated form of the Secret Wars storyline, the Beyonder and Madame Web select Spider-Man to lead a team of heroes against a group of villains. An earlier draft of "Secret Wars" involved all the X-Men, but transporting the voice cast from Canada to Los Angeles, where production for the Spider-Man animated series was based, had been too costly in previous crossovers, so the episode was rewritten to feature only Storm, whose actress, Iona Morris, lived in Los Angeles.
In the first season, the X-Men come into conflict with human conspirators building Sentinel robots to kill mutants, Magneto's plan to instigate a human-mutant war, and the powerful mutant Apocalypse's plan to eradicate the weak. Other storylines include Morph's death at the hands of the Sentinels, Beast's incarceration, and Apocalypse's minions attempting to assassinate Senator Robert Kelly to turn humans against mutants.
In the second season, Cyclops and Jean are married and targeted by Mister Sinister, who seeks to use the genetically perfect combination of their DNA to create an army of obedient mutants. Morph returns, having been rescued by Sinister and brainwashed into forcing the X-Men apart. Over time, a rift grows between humans and mutants, with the Friends of Humanity, an anti-mutant group, leading their persecution. Apocalypse returns, developing a deadly plague that he plans to blame on mutants to fuel hatred against them. It features a parallel narrative of Professor X and Magneto being lost in the Savage Land.
The third season involves the Phoenix Force, a cosmic force that merges with Jean Grey and turns her into the Dark Phoenix. It introduces the Shi'ar Empire, which includes Lilandra Neramani and Gladiator, and seeks to stop the Dark Phoenix. Other storylines include the introduction of Wolverine's former lover turned mercenary, Lady Deathstrike, former X-Men member Iceman, and the villainous Shadow King.
Volume 5 of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe lists X-Men: The Animated Series as Earth-92131 in the Marvel Comics multiverse. Additionally, the plague-infested future that Bishop tries to prevent in Season 2 is listed as Earth-13393, while Cable's release of the cure is listed as Earth-121893.
== Episodes ==
== Voice cast and characters ==
The series' voice acting was recorded in Toronto, with Dan Hennessey serving as voice director. Toronto voice actors had also been used in the 1960s Marvel Comics cartoons. Catherine Disher had originally auditioned for the part of Storm before she was cast as Jean Grey. Chris Potter was cast in the role of Gambit during filming for Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1993-1997) which was helpful since his co-star David Carradine, a big fan of the comics, helped as he was unfamiliar. Alyson Court and Cal Dodd were neighbors when Court was a child and Dodd was a well-known actor in Canada long before voicing both Jubilee and Wolverine respectively, attributing their characters' chemistry to being previously acquainted with one another. Another voice actor originally had been cast as Jubilee, but Court was cast when the original voice was deemed too sweet and innocent for the role.
=== Principal cast ===
George Buza: Dr. Hank McCoy / Beast, Jack the Ripper
Alyson Court: Jubilation Lee / Jubilee
Tony Daniels: Remy LeBeau / Gambit (1997), Bobby LeBeau, Toad, Watchdog
Catherine Disher: Jean Grey / Marvel Girl, Rebecca Grey
Cal Dodd: Logan / Wolverine
Iona Morris: Ororo Munroe / Storm (1992–1993)
Chris Potter: Remy LeBeau / Gambit (1992–1996)
Cedric Smith: Professor Charles Xavier / Professor X, Cerebro, Red Skull, James Xavier
Alison Sealy-Smith: Ororo Munroe / Storm (1993–1997)
Norm Spencer: Scott Summers / Cyclops, Caliban
Lenore Zann: Rogue
=== Additional cast ===
== Production ==
In March 1990, Margaret Loesch (who had previously worked as president and chief executive officer at Marvel Productions) became head of Fox Children's Network. Having championed the Pryde of the X-Men pilot in 1989, she ordered 13 episodes of X-Men. Saban Entertainment was contracted to produce the show and hired a small studio, Graz Entertainment, to produce episodes because, at the time, they lacked sufficient staff to handle in-house production. Mark Edward Edens and Eric Lewald were to write the show, with the two dividing the job between Edens as head writer and Lewald as story editor. The voice work was done through Canadian studios, and South Korean studio AKOM was hired to animate episodes. X-Men was initially set to premiere over Labor Day weekend in September; however, due to production delays, it was delayed to the end of October. When AKOM turned in the first episode, it contained several animation errors, which they refused to fix. Because of time constraints, the episode was aired unfinished; when Fox re-aired the pilot in early 1993, the errors were corrected. The second episode was submitted just before the deadline, with 50 scenes missing and a single day reserved for editing. The two-part episode "Night of the Sentinels" originally aired as a "sneak preview" on October 31.
Because of the production delays and animation errors, Fox threatened to sever AKOM's contracts. The series earned top ratings throughout its first season, and was renewed for a second season of 13 episodes. Throughout its run, producers had to deal with quality control issues, including attempts to cut costs and requests to change the tone of the series to more child-friendly and integrated toys.
The show was originally planned to run for 65 episodes, but as a result of its success, Saban funded eleven more episodes, albeit with a reduced budget due to Marvel's bankruptcy.
The series is currently owned and distributed by The Walt Disney Company (Marvel's parent company), which acquired all Fox Kids-related properties from News Corporation and Saban International in 2001.
The series was added to streaming service Disney+ following its launch on November 12, 2019, with a revival, X-Men '97, subsequently announced to be in development. The series premiered on March 20, 2024.
== Other versions ==
The original opening sequence, used throughout the first four seasons, features the X-Men demonstrating their mutant abilities to an instrumental theme written by Ron Wasserman and composed by Haim Saban and Shuki Levy. A modified version is introduced in the fifth season. When UPN began airing reruns on Sunday mornings, an alternate credits sequence was used: a high-quality Japanese-animated version of the original opening. This modified version occasionally appears in the digital streaming release of the show, which was used for re-runs on Toon Disney.
In Italy, where the series began airing in 1994 on Canale 5, the intro and outro sequences were replaced by a new sequence and theme song: "Insuperabili X-Men", sung by Marco Destro and Pietro Ubaldi.
X-Men originally aired on TV Tokyo from 1994 to 1995. For the TV Tokyo dub of the series, the intro was replaced with a new, Japanese-animated sequence and a new theme: "Rising" by Ambience. Starting with episode 42, a second intro was used, featuring the song "Dakishimetai Dare Yori Mo" (抱きしめたい誰よりも; "I want to embrace you more than anyone else"). The end credits sequence was also changed: it featured shots of American X-Men comic books set to the song "Back to You", also by Ambience.
The TV Tokyo dub was directed by Yoshikazu Iwanami and featured scripts rewritten to include a more humorous, self-satirical tone with an emphasis on comical adlibbing, a hallmark of his dubbing style. Episodes were edited for time so that new segments could be added to the end to promote X-Men: Children of the Atom, which featured the dub actors pretending to play the game as their characters. A second dub was made in the early 2000s for broadcast on Toon Disney (Japan) that is more faithful to the original English scripts and does not cut episodes for time. This version used the original American intro and end credits rather than the unique ones created for the TV Tokyo version.
Two versions of the episode "No Mutant is an Island" exist, each with a different animation. The first version was aired for Toon Disney reruns, can be seen on digital streaming services such as Amazon Video, aired on Fox Kids in the United States, and uses the remixed intro theme from Season 5. The second version is available on Region 1 DVD, aired on Fox Kids overseas, and uses the default intro theme from Seasons 1–4.
== Viewership ==
In its prime, X-Men garnered very high ratings for a Saturday morning cartoon and received praise for adapting many different storylines from the comics. Haim Saban credits the success of the series in assisting him to sell his next project to Fox: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
X-Men reached a viewership of over 23 million households.
== Legacy ==
=== X-Men '97 ===
By 2019, there were ongoing talks with Disney+ to revive the series. In November 2021, it was revealed that a revival titled X-Men '97 was in development which will continue the plot of the series. X-Men '97 eventually premiered on March 20, 2024. Beau DeMayo served as head writer for the first two seasons, with most of the surviving cast members of the original series reprising their roles, including Dodd, Zann, Buza, Disher, Potter, Sealy-Smith, Hough, and Britton. They were joined by Jennifer Hale, Ray Chase, Matthew Waterson, JP Karliak, Holly Chou, Jeff Bennett, and A.J. LoCascio. Alyson Court did not reprise her role as Jubilee, requesting that Jubilee be voiced by an Asian actress. She instead returned to voice an alternate version of the character named Abscissa. The series is produced by Marvel Studios Animation, but does not take place within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
=== Comics ===
==== X-Men Adventures ====
X-Men Adventures was a comic book spin-off of the animated series. Beginning in November 1992, it adapted the first three seasons of the show; in April 1996, it became Adventures of the X-Men, which contained original stories set within the same continuity. The comic book lasted until March 1997, shortly after the show's cancellation by the Fox Network.
Bibliography
X-Men Adventures vol. 1 (1992–94) (15 issues)
X-Men Adventures vol. 2 (1994–95) (13 issues)
X-Men Adventures vol. 3 (1995–96) (13 issues)
Adventures of the X-Men (1996–97) (12 issues)
Additionally, stories featuring the same characters were printed through the 19 issues of Spider-Man Magazine, published between March 1994 and March 1997, alongside stories inspired by the animated series Spider-Man.
==== X-Men '92 ====
The comic book series X-Men '92 was first released as one of the many tie-in titles for Marvel's 2015 Secret Wars event, and continued in its second volume as a regular series in early 2016, starring characters of the TV show's reality.
In January 2022, Marvel announced a new series inspired by the cartoon, X-Men '92: House of XCII. Published in April of that same year, the series explores an alternate universe where the events of Jonathan Hickman's House of X and Powers of X happened decades earlier, in the '90s of the original show.
=== Manga ===
=== Books ===
==== Previously on X-Men ====
In 2017, series developer and showrunner Eric Lewald released the book Previously on X-Men: The Making of an Animated Series, which features his interviews with 36 of the staff and voice cast behind the TV series, as well as Lewald's personal experiences on the series' development and production.
==== X-Men: The Art and Making of The Animated Series ====
In 2020, Eric Lewald and Julia Lewald released the book X-Men: The Art and Making of The Animated Series, which features previously unseen concept art, storyboards, character models, background layouts, animation cels, and other production/promotional materials, along with new interviews with the series principal artists and production staff.
=== Video games ===
X-Men Cartoon Maker: a recreational software package that allows the user to create limited animations from a library of backdrops, animations, and sound effects from the show. Wolverine and Storm appear as tutors.
Capcom's VS. Series: the characters in the series were licensed by Capcom and were the inspiration for the video game X-Men: Children of the Atom, which in turn would be the basis for the Marvel vs. Capcom sub-series of video games. Most of the voice actors who did the voices in the series reprised their roles for the video game. Capcom would continue to use these characters long after the show was canceled, before eventually losing the rights to create Marvel-based games to Electronic Arts in 2001. Capcom, however, would reacquire the rights in 2008 and released Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds / Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 in 2011.
=== In film ===
The series was credited for being responsible for the beginning development of the 2000 X-Men film. Fox Kids owner 20th Century Fox was impressed by the success of the TV show, and producer Lauren Shuler Donner purchased the film rights for them in 1994. The film's success led to a film franchise, which includes a series of sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, for two decades up to 2020, when the series came to an end due to Disney's acquisition of Fox, with the character rights reverting to Marvel Studios. Potter revealed that he once auditioned for the role of Cyclops in the 2000 film before losing it to James Marsden, while Buza would appear in the film proper as a truck driver.
In the 2022 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, produced by Marvel Studios, the theme song from the TV series (orchestrated by Danny Elfman and credited as X-Men '97 Theme) is played when Charles Xavier (portrayed by Patrick Stewart) first appears; in the film, unlike his previous performances as the character in Fox's X-Men franchise, Stewart's Xavier is visually redesigned to match his animated counterpart, complete with his iconic green suit, blue and black tie, and yellow hoverchair.
=== In television ===
In the Ms. Marvel episode "No Normal", set in the MCU, the theme song from the X-Men animated series is played when Kamala Khan discovers that she is a "mutant".
== Lawsuit ==
On October 9, 2019, Hungarian immigrant Zoltán Krisko, manager of the estate of György Vukán, filed a lawsuit against Marvel Entertainment Group, Warner Chappell Music, Haim Saban, Shuki Levy, Ron Wasserman, UMG Recordings (the current distributor of Disney Music Group) and Fox Corporation. He claims the theme music was plagiarized from the theme song to the 1984–1991 Hungarian action-adventure television series Linda, which was composed by Vukán. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otago | Otago | Otago is a region of New Zealand located in the southern half of the South Island and administered by the Otago Regional Council. It has an area of approximately 32,000 square kilometres (12,000 sq mi), making it the country's second largest local government region. Its population was 253,900 in June 2025.
The name "Otago" is the local southern Māori dialect pronunciation of "Ōtākou", the name of the Māori village near the entrance to Otago Harbour. The exact meaning of the term is disputed, with common translations being "isolated village" and "place of red earth", the latter referring to the reddish-ochre clay that is common in the area around Dunedin. "Otago" is also the old name of the European settlement on the harbour, established by the Weller Brothers in 1831, which lies close to Otakou. The upper harbour later became the focus of the Otago Association, an offshoot of the Free Church of Scotland, notable for its adoption of the principle that ordinary people, not the landowner, should choose the ministers.
Major centres include Dunedin (the principal city), Oamaru, Balclutha, Alexandra, and the major tourist centres Queenstown and Wānaka. Kaitangata in South Otago is a prominent source of coal. The Clutha river provides much of the country's hydroelectric power. Vineyards and wineries have been developed in the Central Otago wine region. Some parts of the area originally covered by Otago Province are now in either Canterbury Regional Council or Southland Regional Council.
== History ==
Like the rest of New Zealand, Otago was first settled by the Māori people. Most of the Māori settlement in the region was on the coast and centred around the Otago Peninsula.
The European Otago settlement, an offshoot of the Free Church of Scotland, was founded in March 1848 with the arrival of the first two immigrant ships from Greenock on the Firth of Clyde—the John Wickliffe and the Philip Laing. Captain William Cargill, a veteran of the Peninsular War, was the secular leader. Otago citizens elected him to the office of provincial superintendent after the New Zealand provinces were created in 1853. The Otago Province covered the whole of New Zealand from the Waitaki River south, including Stewart Island and the sub-Antarctic islands. It included the territory of the later Southland Province and also the much more extensive lands of the modern Southland Region.
Initial settlement was concentrated on the port and city, then expanded, notably to the south-west, where the fertile Taieri Plains offered good farmland. The 1860s saw rapid commercial expansion after Gabriel Read discovered gold at Gabriel's Gully near Lawrence in 1861, and the Otago gold rush ensued. Veterans of goldfields in California and Australia, plus many other fortune-seekers from Europe, North America and China, poured into the Province of Otago, eroding its Scottish Presbyterian character. Further gold discoveries at Clyde and on the Arrow River around Arrowtown led to a boom, and Otago became for a period the cultural and economic centre of New Zealand. New Zealand's first daily newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, originally edited by Julius Vogel, dates from this period.
New Zealand's first university, the University of Otago, was founded in 1869 as the provincial university in Dunedin.
The Province of Southland separated from Otago Province and set up its own Provincial Council at Invercargill in 1861. After difficulties ensued, Otago re-absorbed it in 1870. Its territory is included in the southern region of the old Otago Province which is named after it and is now the territory of the Southland region. The provincial governments were abolished in 1876 when the Abolition of the Provinces Act came into force on 1 November 1876, and were replaced by other forms of local authority, including counties. Two in Otago were named after the Scottish independence heroes Wallace and Bruce. From this time the national limelight gradually shifted northwards.
Otago's flag was chosen from a 2004 competition. It was designed by Gregor Macaulay.
== Geography ==
Beginning in the west, the geography of Otago consists of high alpine mountains. The highest peak in Otago (and highest outside the Aoraki / Mount Cook area) is Mount Aspiring / Tititea, which is on the Main Divide. From the high mountains the rivers discharge into large glacial lakes. In this part of Otago glacial activity – both recent and very old – dominates the landscape, with large U-shaped valleys and rivers which have high sediment loads. River flows also vary dramatically, with large flood flows occurring after heavy rain. Lakes Wakatipu, Wānaka, and Hāwea form the sources of the Clutha River / Mata-Au, the largest river (by discharge) in New Zealand. The Clutha flows generally to the southeast through Otago and discharges near Balclutha. The river has been used for hydroelectric power generation, with large dams at Clyde and Roxburgh.
The country's fourth-longest river, the Taieri, also has both its source and outflow in Otago, rising from rough hill country and following a broad horseshoe-shaped path, north, then east, and finally southeast, before reaching the Pacific Ocean. Along its course it forms two notable geographic features – the broad high valley of the Strath-Taieri in its upper reaches, and the fertile Taieri Plains as it approaches the ocean.
Travelling east from the mountains, the Central Otago drylands predominate. These are Canterbury–Otago tussock grasslands dominated by the block mountains, upthrust schist mountains. In contrast to Canterbury, where the Northwest winds blow across the plains without interruption, in Otago the block mountains impede and dilute the effects of the Nor'wester.
The main Central Otago centres, such as Alexandra and Cromwell, are found in the intermontane basins between the block mountains. The schist bedrock influence extends to the eastern part of Otago, where remnant volcanics mark its edge. The remains of the most spectacular of these are the Miocene volcanics centred on Otago Harbour. Elsewhere, basalt outcrops can be found along the coast and at other sites.
Comparatively similar terrain exists in the high plateau land of the Maniototo Plain, which lies to the east of Central Otago, close to the upper reaches of the Taieri River. This area is sparsely populated, but of historical note for its importance during the Otago gold rush of the 1860s. The townships of Ranfurly and Naseby also lie in this area.
In the southeastern corner of Otago lies The Catlins, an area of rough hill country which geologically forms part of the Murihiku terrane, an accretion which extends inland through the Hokonui Hills in the Southland region. This itself forms part of a larger system known as the Southland Syncline, which links to similar formations in Nelson (offset by the Alpine Fault) and even in New Caledonia, 3,500 km (2,200 mi) away.
The Catlins ranges are strike ridges composed of Triassic and Jurassic sandstones, mudstones and other related sedimentary rocks, often with a high incidence of feldspar. Fossils of the late and middle Triassic Warepan and Kaihikuan stages are found in the area.
== Climate ==
Weather conditions vary enormously across Otago, but can be broken into two broad types: the coastal climate of the coastal regions and the more continental climate of the interior.
Coastal regions of Otago are subject to the alternating warm and dry/cool and wet weather patterns common to the interannual Southern oscillation. The Southern Hemisphere storm track produces an irregular short cycle of weather which repeats roughly every week, with three or four days of fine weather followed by three or four days of cooler, damp conditions. Drier conditions are often the result of the northwesterly föhn wind, which dries as it crosses the Southern Alps. Wetter air is the result of approaching low-pressure systems which sweep fronts over the country from the southwest. A common variant in this pattern is the centring of a stationary low-pressure zone to the southeast of the country, resulting in long-lasting cool, wet conditions. These have been responsible for several notable historical floods, such as the "hundred year floods" of October 1878 and October 1978.
Typically, winters are cool and wet in the extreme south areas and snow can fall and settle to sea level in winter, especially in the hills and plains of South Otago. More Central and Northern Coastal areas winter is sunnier and drier. Summers, by contrast, tend to be warm and dry, with temperatures often reaching the high 20s and low 30s Celsius.
In Central Otago cold frosty winters are succeeded by hot dry summers. Central Otago's climate is the closest approximation to a continental climate anywhere in New Zealand. This climate is part of the reason why Central Otago vineyards are successful in this region. This inland region is one of the driest regions in the country, sheltered from prevailing rain-bearing weather conditions by the high mountains to the west and hills of the south. Summers can be hot, with temperatures often approaching or exceeding 30 °C (86 °F); winters, by contrast, are often bitterly cold – the township of Ranfurly in Central Otago holds the New Zealand record for lowest temperature with a reading of −25.6 °C (−14.1 °F) on 18 July 1903.
== Population ==
Otago Region covers 31,186.16 km2 (12,041.04 sq mi). The population is 253,900 as of June 2025, which is approximately 4.8 percent of New Zealand's total population of 5.3 million. The population density is 8.1 people per km2. About 41.0 percent of the population resides in the Dunedin urban area—the region's main city and the country's sixth largest urban area. For historical and geographical reasons, Dunedin is usually regarded as one of New Zealand's four main centres. Unlike other southern centres, Dunedin's population has not declined since the 1970s, largely due to the presence of the University of Otago – and especially its medical school – which attracts students from all over New Zealand and overseas.
Other significant urban centres in Otago with populations over 1,000 include: Queenstown, Oamaru, Wānaka, Port Chalmers, Cromwell, Alexandra, Balclutha, Milton and Mosgiel. Between 1996 and 2006, the population of the Queenstown-Lakes District grew by 60% due to the region's booming tourism industry.
Otago had a population of 240,900 in the 2023 New Zealand census, an increase of 15,714 people (7.0%) since the 2018 census, and an increase of 38,430 people (19.0%) since the 2013 census. There were 118,524 males, 121,185 females and 1,188 people of other genders in 94,425 dwellings. 4.3% of people identified as LGBTIQ+. The median age was 38.4 years (compared with 38.1 years nationally). There were 37,749 people (15.7%) aged under 15 years, 53,532 (22.2%) aged 15 to 29, 106,926 (44.4%) aged 30 to 64, and 42,690 (17.7%) aged 65 or older.
People could identify as more than one ethnicity. The results were 85.2% European (Pākehā); 9.9% Māori; 3.4% Pasifika; 8.5% Asian; 2.2% Middle Eastern, Latin American and African New Zealanders (MELAA); and 2.7% other, which includes people giving their ethnicity as "New Zealander". English was spoken by 97.5%, Māori language by 1.9%, Samoan by 0.6% and other languages by 11.9%. No language could be spoken by 1.7% (e.g. too young to talk). New Zealand Sign Language was known by 0.5%. The percentage of people born overseas was 23.8, compared with 28.8% nationally.
Religious affiliations were 28.4% Christian, 1.0% Hindu, 0.8% Islam, 0.2% Māori religious beliefs, 0.7% Buddhist, 0.5% New Age, 0.1% Jewish, and 1.4% other religions. People who answered that they had no religion were 60.3%, and 6.6% of people did not answer the census question.
Of those at least 15 years old, 40,458 (19.9%) people had a bachelor's or higher degree, 106,080 (52.2%) had a post-high school certificate or diploma, and 43,974 (21.6%) people exclusively held high school qualifications. The median income was $39,100, compared with $41,500 nationally. 19,692 people (9.7%) earned over $100,000 compared to 12.1% nationally. The employment status of those at least 15 was that 101,514 (50.0%) people were employed full-time, 31,086 (15.3%) were part-time, and 4,848 (2.4%) were unemployed.
The majority of the population of European lineage is of Scottish stock—the descendants of early Scottish settlers from the early 19th century. Other well-represented European groups include those of English, Irish, and Dutch descent. A large proportion of the Māori population are from the Ngāi Tahu iwi or tribe. Other significant ethnic minorities include Asians, Pacific Islanders, Africans, Latin Americans and Middle Easterners. Otago's early waves of settlement, especially during and immediately after the gold rush of the 1860s, included a substantial minority of southern (Guangdong) Chinese settlers, and a smaller but also prominent number of people from Lebanon. The region's Jewish population also experienced a small influx at this time. The early and middle years of the twentieth century saw smaller influxes of immigrants from several mainland European countries, most notably the Netherlands.
In line with the region's Scottish heritage, Presbyterianism is the largest Christian denomination with 17.1 percent affiliating, while Catholicism is the second-largest denomination with 11.5 percent affiliating.
== Politics ==
=== Local government ===
The seat of the Otago Regional Council is in Dunedin. The council is chaired by Andrew Noone as of July 2021.
There are five territorial authorities in Otago:
Queenstown-Lakes District
Central Otago District
Dunedin City
Clutha District
Waitaki District
=== Parliamentary representation ===
Otago is represented by four parliamentary electorates. Dunedin and nearby towns are represented by the Dunedin electorate, held by Rachel Brooking, and the Taieri electorate, occupied by Ingrid Leary. Both MPs are members of the Labour Party, and Dunedin has traditionally been a Labour stronghold. Since 2008 the rest of Otago has been divided between the large rural electorates of Waitaki, which also includes some of the neighbouring Canterbury Region, and Clutha-Southland, which also includes most of the rural part of the neighbouring Southland Region. The Waitaki electorate has traditionally been a National Party stronghold and is currently held by Miles Anderson. The Southland electorate, also a National Party stronghold, is currently represented by Joseph Mooney. The earlier Otago electorate existed from 1978 to 2008, when it was split and merged into Waitaki and Clutha-Southland.
Two list MPs are based in Dunedin – Michael Woodhouse of the National Party and Rachel Brooking of the Labour Party. One-time Labour Party Deputy Leader David Parker is a former MP for the Otago electorate and currently a list MP.
Under the Māori electorates system, Otago is also part of the large Te Tai Tonga electorate, which covers the entire South Island and surrounding islands, and is currently held by Te Pāti Māori Party MP Tākuta Ferris.
=== Ngāi Tahu governance ===
Three of the 18 Ngāi Tahu Rūnanga (councils) are based in the Otago Region. Each one is centred on a coastal marae, namely Ōtākou, Moeraki and Puketeraki at Karitane. There is also the Arai Te Uru Marae in Dunedin.
== Economy ==
The subnational gross domestic product (GDP) of Otago was estimated at NZ$14.18 billion in the year to March 2020, 4.38% of New Zealand's national GDP. The regional GDP per capita was estimated at $58,353 in the same period. In the year to March 2018, primary industries contributed $1.25 billion (9.8%) to the regional GDP, goods-producing industries contributed $2.38 billion (18.6%), service industries contributed $8.05 billion (63.0%), and taxes and duties contributed $1.10 billion (8.6%).
Otago has a mixed economy. Dunedin is home to manufacturing, publishing and technology-based industries. Rural economies have been reinvigorated in the 1990s and 2000s: in Clutha district, farms have been converted from sheep to more lucrative dairying. Vineyard planting and production remained modest until the middle of the 1990s when the New Zealand wine industry began to expand rapidly. The Central Otago wine region produces wine made from varieties such as the Pinot noir, Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, Merlot and Riesling grapes. It has an increasing reputation as New Zealand's leading Pinot noir region.
The two main airports in the region are Dunedin Airport and Queenstown Airport.
== Education ==
Otago has numerous rural primary schools, several small town primary and secondary schools, and some larger schools in Dunedin. Most are state schools which do not charge tuition, except for international students. Some are state integrated schools, former private schools with a special character based on a religious or philosophical belief that has been integrated into the state system, but still charge "attendance dues" to cover the building and maintenance of school buildings. These schools are not owned by the government, but otherwise they like state schools cannot charge fees for tuition of domestic students but may request a donation. As Dunedin was founded by Presbyterian Scottish settlers there are a Presbyterian girls' and boys' school in the city. Unlike other major cities in New Zealand, Dunedin does not have any private intermediate or high schools, as all remaining private intermediate and high schools have been integrated into the state system. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Reid_(tennis) | Gordon Reid (tennis) | Gordon James Reid (born 2 October 1991) is a British professional wheelchair tennis player. He has been ranked world No. 1 in singles and in doubles. Reid has won two Paralympic gold medals, two silver medals, and one bronze medal, as well as a two major singles titles and a record 27 major doubles titles.
Reid's first appearance for Great Britain at the Summer Paralympics was when he was age sixteen at Beijing 2008. He later reached the quarterfinals in the singles in London 2012 as well as the quarterfinals in doubles. He won Paralympic gold in the men's singles event at Rio 2016 and silver in the doubles event with partner Alfie Hewett, whom he beat in the singles final. At Tokyo 2020, Reid won bronze in the singles and silver in the doubles with Hewett. The pair later went on to complete a calendar year Grand Slam, winning all four majors in 2021. At Paris 2024 he won his second gold medal, again partnering Hewett in the men's doubles. He currently holds the record for most doubles slam titles won by a wheelchair player in any division (men's, women's, and quads), with 27.
Reid was born able-bodied, and enjoyed a wide variety of sports as a child, including football and tennis. However, at the age of 12, he contracted a rare neurological condition called transverse myelitis which left him paralyzed from the waist down.
== Early life ==
Reid was born in Alexandria, West Dunbartonshire, on 2 October 1991. He comes from a tennis-playing family and started playing tennis at the age of six, alongside his two brothers and sister at Helensburgh Lawn Tennis Club, where he was a good junior player, before contracting rare spinal condition, transverse myelitis in 2004. He was paralysed from the waist down for over a decade but then gradually regained limited ability to stand and walk.
He first began playing wheelchair tennis in 2005, when he was introduced to the sport at Scotstoun Leisure Centre in Glasgow. He was acknowledged for his sporting credentials in 2006, when he was among the 10 shortlisted finalists for the BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year.
In 2007, Reid became Britain's youngest men's Singles National Champion and he was also part of Great Britain's winning junior team at the 2007 World Team Cup. He feels his greatest achievement was representing ParalympicsGB at the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games when he was 16 years old.
When he was younger, Reid combined his training commitments with his studies and in 2009 he passed Highers in Maths, English and Biology after attending Hermitage Academy in Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute. He is a lifelong supporter of Rangers FC and regularly attends their home matches.
== Tennis career ==
Reid won his first wheelchair tennis title in April 2005, six weeks after coming out of hospital, when he won the B Division Singles at the Glasgow Wheelchair Tennis Tournament. He became Britain's youngest National champion at the age of 15 in 2007 and the youngest British men's No 1 shortly before his 18th birthday at the end of September 2008.
At the 2006 British Open he won both the Men's Second Draw Singles and Boys' Junior Singles and ended the year among the 10 shortlisted finalists for the 2006 BBC Young Sports Person of the Year.
In 2007 he won the boys' doubles at the Junior Masters in Tarbes, France and shortly afterwards won the men's singles at the 2007 North West Challenge in Preston to collect his first senior international NEC Wheelchair Tennis Tour singles title. He was undefeated as a member of the winning GB Junior team in the Junior event at the 2007 Invacare World Team Cup (Davis and Fed Cups of wheelchair tennis). In 2008 and 2009 he won both the boys' singles and boys' doubles at the Junior Masters in Tarbes, France and in January 2009 became world No 1 junior in the boys' singles rankings, a position he maintained throughout his final season as a junior. He helped Great Britain to win men's World Group 2 at the 2008 Invacare World Team Cup, to finish fifth in World Group 1 in 2009 and to finish fourth in Turkey in 2010, which was Britain's best Invacare World Team Cup result in the men's event since 2002.
Reid was named Tennis Scotland Junior Male Player of the Year in 2009 and Tennis Scotland Disabled Player of the Year in 2010. As a doubles player, he qualified for the year-end Doubles Masters for the first time in 2009, where he and his Hungarian partner Laszlo Farkas finished fifth of the eight partnerships. Reid also played in the men's wheelchair doubles at Wimbledon in 2008.
Reid ended 2010 having beaten three world top ranked players on his way to winning three NEC Tour singles titles during the season, as well as winning four doubles titles during the year. He beat Austrian world No 9 Martin Legner to win his last tournament of the season in December, the Prague Cup Czech Indoor.
In January 2016, Reid won his first ever Grand Slam singles wheelchair title at the Australian Open. In July 2016, Reid followed up with his second Grand Slam victory in the inaugural singles wheelchair championships at Wimbledon. At the 2016 Summer Paralympics Reid won the gold medal for the men's wheelchair singles tennis, beating fellow Briton Alfie Hewett in straight sets, 6–2, 6–1. He ended the year as world number one in singles.
He competed in wheelchair tennis at the 2020 Summer Paralympics, where he won silver in the doubles with Hewett and bronze in the singles.
After 2016, Reid's grand slam success continued primarily with his accolades in the doubles alongside Hewett. Together, they were the first men's wheelchair tennis pair to win the calendar year grand slam, which they completed in 2021. Their title at the Australian Open in 2022 marked their 9th consecutive victory in a slam, overtaking Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver's record for most consecutive slam titles.
Reid kicked off 2024 by winning a fifth Australian Open doubles title in a row with Hewett. In May 2024 Reid was part of the Great Britain team which won the World Team Cup for a second successive year beating Spain 2–0 in the final of the event held in Turkey. It was the team's fourth win in the competition since 2015. Reid and Hewett won a fifth straight French Open in June with a 6-1 6–4 victory over second-seeded Japanese duo Takuya Miki and Tokito Oda in the final. At the 2024 Wimbledon Championships, Reid and Hewett won the doubles title for a sixth time, defeating Takuya Miki and Tokito Oda in the final, 6–4, 7–6(7–2). Reid gained his second paralympic gold medal at Paris 2024, winning in the doubles with Alfie Hewett. This marked his achievement of a career golden slam in the doubles, having won all four majors and the Paralympic gold medal.
== Personal life ==
Reid was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to wheelchair tennis. After giving him his MBE, Queen Elizabeth II referred to him as a "charming young man". Reid was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to tennis.
Reid enjoys playing wheelchair basketball recreationally. Himself and his doubles partner Alfie Hewett currently play for the Surrey 89ers wheelchair basketball team.
== Career statistics ==
=== Grand Slam performance timelines ===
==== Wheelchair singles ====
==== Wheelchair doubles ====
=== Finals ===
==== Wheelchair singles: 7 (2 titles, 5 runner-ups) ====
==== Wheelchair doubles: 36 (25 titles, 11 runner-ups) ==== |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wham! | Wham! | Wham! were an English pop duo formed in Bushey in 1981 consisting of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. They were one of the most successful pop acts during the 1980s, selling more than 30 million certified records worldwide from 1982 to 1986. Associated with the MTV-driven Second British Invasion of the US, the singles "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", "Careless Whisper", and "Everything She Wants" all topped the US Billboard Hot 100. Their 1984 Christmas track "Last Christmas" has become a staple of the holiday season since its release, with all proceeds from the single going to charity.
Influenced by funk and soul music and presenting themselves as disaffected youth, Wham!'s 1983 debut album, Fantastic, addressed the United Kingdom's unemployment problem and teen angst over adulthood. Their second studio album, Make It Big, in 1984 was a worldwide success, charting at number one in both the UK and the United States. In 1985, Wham! made a highly publicised ten-day visit to China, the first by a Western pop group. The event was seen as a major watershed moment in increasing friendly bilateral relations between China and the West.
In 1986, Wham! disbanded. Michael was keen to create music targeted at a more adult market rather than the duo's primarily teenage audience. Before going their separate ways, they released a farewell single, "The Edge of Heaven", and a greatest-hits album titled The Final, along with a farewell concert entitled the Final.
== History ==
=== Formation ===
In 1975, Michael and Ridgeley met at Bushey Meads School in Bushey near the town of Watford in Hertfordshire. The two at first performed in a short-lived ska band called the Executive, alongside former school friends David Mortimer (later known as David Austin), Andrew Leaver, Tony Bywaters, Jamie Gould and Paul Ridgeley. The band were spotted by talent scout Michael Burdett, who was working for a publishing company called Sparta Florida Music Group. Having heard rehearsal tapes, Sparta Florida passed on the band. Burdett then booked the band into a recording studio near St Albans, Hertfordshire to record their first demo tape, which featured "Rude Boy" – the first Michael–Ridgeley composition – as well as a ska rendition of "Für Elise".
When the Executive split, Michael and Ridgeley eventually formed Wham!. Ridgeley explained that the name originated from a need for "something that captured the essence of what set us apart—our energy and our friendship—and then it came to us: Wham! Wham! was snappy, immediate, fun and boisterous too." British graphic design studio Stylorouge was credited with adding the exclamation mark to the name of the band.
Ridgeley and Michael worked persistently to get a foot in the door with recording executives. Ridgeley would frequently run into Mark Dean from Innervision Records at the Three Crowns Public House in Bushey Heath Hertfordshire, and hand him the band's demo tape. In February 1982, Dean met with Michael and Ridgeley and offered them a recording deal. "I'm going to offer Wham! a deal with my new label Innervision," Dean said. "It's not a huge thing, I'm taking a punt. I'd like you to have a crack at recording a single or two and we'll see what happens from there."
Initially the pair wrote songs such as "Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)" and "Club Tropicana" together, but part way through the recording of their debut album, Fantastic, the pair agreed that Michael was the stronger songwriter, and would take creative control. Still teenagers, they promoted themselves as hedonistic youngsters, proud to live a carefree life without work or commitment. This was reflected in their earliest singles which, part-parody, part-social comment, briefly earned Wham! a reputation as a dance protest group. The debut record to be released by the band was "Wham Rap!" in June 1982. The song charted at only No. 105. In September 1982, "Young Guns (Go for It)" was issued. Initially, it also stalled outside the UK Top 40 but the band got lucky when the BBC programme Top of the Pops scheduled them after another act unexpectedly pulled out of the show.
=== Increasing success and legal disputes with Innervision ===
Wham!'s first manager was Bryan Morrison. The effect of Wham! on the public was felt from the moment they finished their debut performance of "Young Guns (Go for It)" on Top of the Pops. Michael and Ridgeley wore white espadrilles sockless, an open suede jacket and polo shirt, and rolled-up denim jeans. Ridgeley stood behind him, flanked by backing singers Dee C. Lee and Shirlie Holliman. Afterwards, the song shot into the Top 40 at No. 24 and peaked at No. 3 in December. The following year, Dee C. Lee began her work with Paul Weller in the Style Council, and was replaced by Helen 'Pepsi' DeMacque. Holliman and DeMacque would later record as Pepsi & Shirlie. Wham! followed up "Young Guns (Go for It)" with a reissue of "Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)", "Bad Boys" and "Club Tropicana". By the end of 1983, Wham! were competing against pop rivals Culture Club and Duran Duran as one of Britain's biggest pop acts. Their debut album, Fantastic, spent two weeks at No. 1 in the UK album charts in 1983, but the album achieved only modest success in the US.
Soon after this, Ridgeley became conscious of legal problems with their initial contract at Innervision. While the legal battle raged, Innervision released a medley of non-single album tracks from Fantastic, entitled "Club Fantastic Megamix". Wham! publicly denounced the release. After all the legal wrangling, Innervision settled out of court.
=== Switch to Epic and continued success ===
After the settlement, Innervision's distributor, CBS Records, took over Wham!'s contract, placing them on the Columbia label in the U.S. and on Epic worldwide. Wham! returned in 1984 with a new album and an updated pop image. These changes helped to propel Wham!'s next single, "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", into the top ten of several countries around the world. It became their first U.S. and UK No. 1 single, accompanied by a video of the duo with Pepsi and Shirlie, all wearing Katharine Hamnett T-shirts with the slogans "CHOOSE LIFE" and "GO GO".
The next single was "Careless Whisper", featuring only Michael in the music video. In certain markets, including the U.S., the single was promoted as "Wham! featuring George Michael", while most other markets it was credited to Michael as a solo act despite being written by both Michael and Ridgeley. The song was a ballad, marking a departure from previous releases. It reached No. 1, selling over 1.3 million copies in the UK.
"Careless Whisper" marked a new phase in Michael's career, as his labels began to somewhat distance him from the group Wham!'s playboy image. The next single was "Freedom" and was simply promoted as a Wham! single. Wham! used a video edited together from footage of their tour in China for "Freedom"'s single release in the US, which was in July 1985. Their second album, Make It Big, climbed to No. 1 on the album charts and the band set off on an arena tour at the end of 1984.
The double A-side single "Last Christmas" / "Everything She Wants" became the highest-selling single ever to peak at No. 2 in the UK charts. It stayed at No. 2 for five weeks and, as of February 2020, was the 10th best-selling single of all time in the United Kingdom, selling over 1.9 million copies in the UK. Wham! donated all their royalties from the single to the Ethiopian famine appeal to coincide with the fund-raising intentions of Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?", the song which kept them out of the top spot. Nevertheless, Band Aid's success meant that Michael had achieved No. 1 status in the UK within three separate entities in 1984—as a solo artist, as one half of a duo, and as part of a charity ensemble. At the end of 1985, the US Billboard charts listed "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" as the No. 3 song and "Careless Whisper" as the No. 1 song of the year.
=== China (1985) ===
In March 1985, Wham! took a break from recording to embark on a lengthy world tour, including a ground-breaking 10-day visit to China, the first by a Western pop group. The China excursion was a publicity scheme devised by Simon Napier-Bell (one of their two managers; Jazz Summers being the other). It began with a concert at the Peoples' Gymnasium in Beijing in front of 12,000 people. They also played a concert in front of 5,000 in Canton. The two concerts were played without compensation. Wham!'s visit to China attracted huge media attention across the world. Napier-Bell later admitted that he used cunning tactics to sabotage the efforts of rock band Queen to be the first to play in China: he made two brochures for the Chinese authorities; one featuring Wham! fans as pleasant middle-class youngsters and one portraying Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in typically flamboyant poses. The Chinese opted for Wham!.
British director Lindsay Anderson was engaged to accompany Wham! to China and make a documentary film about the visit. Anderson called his one-hour and 18 minute film If You Were There. In the final stages of editing, Anderson was dismissed by Wham!'s management, the editing team quit, and the film was re-edited, renamed and released as Wham! in China: Foreign Skies. According to a 2006 interview with The Independent, Andy Stephens, manager for Michael, said that the film [Anderson's version] was simply not good enough to be shown in public: "It's a dreadful film ... It's 20 years old and it's rubbish. Why on earth should we allow it to be shown?" However, after viewing it in 2008, critic and journalist John Harris described it as "a rich, poetic, panoramic portrait of China's strangeness to the eyes of outsiders".
=== Live Aid (1985) ===
Sporting a beard, Michael appeared with Ridgeley onstage at Live Aid on 13 July 1985 (although they did not perform as Wham!). Michael sang "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" with Elton John, while Ridgeley joined Kiki Dee in the row of backing singers. In November, Wham! released the single "I'm Your Man" which went to No. 1 in the UK charts.
Around this time, Ridgeley began a relationship with Keren Woodward of Bananarama, and also took up the hobby of rally driving. "Last Christmas" was re-issued for the festive season and again made the UK Top 10, peaking at No. 6, while Michael took up offers he was starting to receive to add his voice to other artists' songs. He performed backing vocals for David Cassidy ("The Last Kiss"), and also for Elton John on his successful singles "Nikita" (UK No. 3) and "Wrap Her Up" (UK No. 12), on which he sang co-lead vocals.
=== Break-up (1986) ===
Michael was keen to create music targeted at a more adult market rather than the duo's primarily teenage audience, and therefore, he and Ridgeley officially announced the break-up of Wham! in the spring of 1986. Before going their separate ways, a farewell single "The Edge of Heaven", and a greatest hits double album titled The Final would be forthcoming, along with a farewell concert at London's Wembley Stadium also entitled The Final. Announcing the break-up, Michael said: "I think it should be the most amicable split in pop history."
The farewell single reached No. 1 in June 1986. "Where Did Your Heart Go?" was the group's final single in the United States. The song was a cover of a Was (Not Was) song.
While The Final was the duo's last album release, it was not released in North America, Instead, Columbia released a pared down album called Music from the Edge of Heaven with some alternate tracks from The Final.
At Wembley Stadium on 28 June 1986, Wham! bid goodbye to their fans and each other with an emotional embrace at the end of its final concert. 72,000 people attended the eight-hour event, which included support artists, on a scorching hot day in London. The duo had been together for five years, selling over 28 million records and 15 million singles. Foreign Skies, the documentary of their tour of China, received its world premiere as part of the festivities.
=== Post-Wham! and Michael's death ===
In January 1991, Ridgeley joined Michael on stage for a few songs at the encore of his performance at the Rock in Rio event at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Sony Music, the owners of CBS Records, released a greatest hits compilation in 1997 called The Best of Wham!: If You Were There.... Sony released another compilation in 2023 called The Singles: Echoes from the Edge of Heaven.
On 21 November 2009, there was a Wham!-themed night on television's The X Factor in the UK. Michael later appeared on the show's final episode, performing a duet of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" with finalist and eventual winner Joe McElderry.
In 2012, Michael said that there was no truth in speculation that he and Ridgeley were set for a Wham! reunion to mark the 30th anniversary of the group's first album.
Michael died from heart and liver disease at his home in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire on Christmas Day 2016, at the age of 53. Upon hearing of Michael's death, Ridgeley paid his respects on Twitter, saying, "Heartbroken at the loss of my beloved friend Yog." Michael was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in November 2023, with Ridgeley as the induction presenter.
== Discography ==
Fantastic (1983)
Make It Big (1984)
Music from the Edge of Heaven (1986)
== Filmography ==
Wham! in China: Foreign Skies (1986)
Wham! (2023)
Wham!: Last Christmas Unwrapped (2024)
Wham! 10 Days in China (TBA)
== Tours or shows ==
Club Fantastic Tour (1983)
The Big Tour (1984–1985)
Whamamerica! (1985)
The Final (1986) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlington_F.C. | Darlington F.C. | Darlington Football Club is an association football club based in Darlington, County Durham, England. As of the 2025–26 season, the team competes in the National League North, at the sixth level of English football.
The club was founded in 1883, and played its matches at Feethams. The club originally played in regionally organised leagues, and was one of the founding members of the Northern League in 1889. They were first admitted to the Football League when the Third Division North was formed in 1921. They won the Third Division North title in 1925, and their 15th place in the Second Division in 1926 remains their highest ever league finish. After their admission to the League, they spent most of their history in the bottom tier. They won the Third Division North Cup in 1934, their first victory in nationally organised cup competition. They reached the last 16 of the FA Cup twice, and the quarter-final of the League Cup once, in 1968. In the early 1990s they won successive titles, in the Conference National in 1990 and the Fourth Division in 1991. In 2011 they won the FA Trophy, defeating Mansfield Town 1–0 at Wembley Stadium.
Darlington moved to the all-seater, 25,000-capacity Darlington Arena in 2003. The cost of the stadium was a major factor in driving the club into administration in 2003, 2009, and 2012. As the fan owned club was unable to agree a creditors voluntary agreement it was expelled from the Football Association (FA). A new club was immediately formed and moved to Blackwell Meadows stadium but the FA ruled that, as a new club, it must have a different playing name from the expelled club. The name chosen was Darlington 1883, and that club was placed in the Northern League Division One, the ninth tier of English football, for the 2012–13 season. They won three promotions in four seasons before the FA approved their request to change to the traditional Darlington FC name.
The club have at times worn strips of black and white shirts, black shorts and black and white socks. The club's crest depicts Locomotion No. 1, referring to the town's railway history; as well as a stylised Quaker hat, referring to the religious movement that had a historic influence on the town, and which was the source of the team's nickname, the Quakers. The club's main rivals historically are Hartlepool United.
== History ==
=== Founding and pre-war ===
In July 1883, a meeting was called in Darlington Grammar School to address concerns that so few Darlington-based football clubs were entering the major competition in the region, the Durham Challenge Cup. The meeting agreed with the view expressed by the Darlington & Stockton Times newspaper, that there was "no club, urban or rural, sufficiently powerful to worthily represent Darlington", decided to form a new club, and elected one Charles Samuel Craven, a local engineer, as secretary. Darlington Football Club duly entered the Durham Challenge Cup, reached the final in their first season, and won the trophy in 1885. The following season Darlington entered the FA Cup for the first time, only to lose 8–0 to Grimsby Town. Craven was instrumental in the formation of the Northern League in 1889. Darlington were one of the founder members, and went on to win the league title in 1896 and 1900; they reached the semi-final of the FA Amateur Cup in the same two seasons.
The club turned professional in 1908 and joined the North Eastern League. The 1910–11 season saw Darlington reach the last 16 of the FA Cup, progressing through five qualifying rounds to lose to Swindon Town in the third round proper, and two years later they won the North Eastern League. Ground improvements begun before the First World War left the club in financial difficulty during it; the chairman of Darlington Forge Albion financed the completion of the East Stand and cleared the debts, allowing them to continue to compete. When competitive football resumed after the war, Darlington finished second in the North Eastern League, and were champions for a second time the following year. This victory was well timed, as it coincided with the formation of the Northern Section of the Football League's Third Division, which Darlington were invited to join.
Their first season in the Third Division was a successful one and they ended up in second place. Three years later, in 1924–25, they were champions and won promotion to the Football League Second Division. The 15th-place finish in 1926 remains Darlington's best League performance, but they were relegated back to the Third Division in 1927, where they remained until the Second World War put an end to competitive football. They came as high as third in 1929–30, but twice had to apply for re-election to the League, in 1932–33 and 1936–37, after finishing in last place in the section. In 1934, they enjoyed their first success in a nationally organised cup competition, defeating Stockport County 4–3 at Old Trafford to win the Football League Third Division North Cup, and reached the final again two years later, this time losing 2–1 at home to Chester.
=== Post-war ===
Soon after the Football Association gave permission for competitive matches to be played under floodlights, Darlington beat Carlisle United 3–1 in the first floodlit FA Cup match between Football League clubs, a replay held at St James' Park, Newcastle United's ground, in November 1955.[B] The 1957–58 season saw the club equal their previous best FA Cup run, reaching the last 16 by defeating Chelsea, Football League champions only three years earlier, in the fourth round. After letting slip a three-goal lead at Stamford Bridge, Darlington won the replay 4–1 after extra time, described as "a most meritorious win, earned by a combination of sound tactics and an enthusiasm that Chelsea never equalled" by The Times' correspondent, who felt it "surprising that extra time was necessary, for Darlington always seemed to have the match well in hand". In the League, Darlington's fourth place in 1948–49 was their only top-half finish in the first twelve seasons after the war, and when the regional sections of the Third Division were merged, they were allocated to the new Fourth Division.
The Supporters' Club raised £20,000 to pay for a roof at one end of the Feethams ground and for floodlights, which were first used on 19 September 1960. Later that night, the West Stand burned down due to an electrical fault. Darlington's attendance record, of 21,023 against Bolton Wanderers in the League Cup fourth round, was set two months later. Under the management of Lol Morgan, they won promotion to the Third Division in 1966. A crowd of 16,000 watched the draw against Torquay United on the last day of the season which ensured they finished as runners-up, but they were relegated the following year.
Darlington reached the quarter-finals of the 1968 League Cup; drawn away to Brian Clough's Derby County, they took the lead, only to lose 5–4. During the 1970s the club had to apply for re-election to the League five times, and by 1982 they were facing a financial crisis which they survived thanks to fundraising efforts in the town. Three years later they won promotion by finishing third in the league under manager Cyril Knowles. Darlington spent two seasons in the Third Division; the 13th-place finish in 1986 was the highest position they achieved in the Football League since the introduction of the four-division structure in 1958, but they were relegated the following season.
Though Brian Little's appointment as manager in February 1989 was too late to stave off relegation to the Conference, he went on to lead them to successive promotions. An immediate return to the Football League as Conference champions preceded the Fourth Division title in 1990–91, but Little's departure for Leicester City was followed by relegation and a succession of short-term managers. They came close to a return to the Third Division via the play-offs in 1996; on their first visit to Wembley, against Plymouth Argyle, they were beaten by a Ronnie Mauge goal.
=== New stadium, administration and decline ===
The 1999–2000 season, the first under George Reynolds' chairmanship, was marked by Darlington becoming the first team to lose an FA Cup tie and still qualify for the next round. Manchester United's involvement in the FIFA Club World Championship meant they did not enter the FA Cup. To decide who took their place, a "lucky losers" draw was held from the 20 teams knocked out in the second round; Darlington were selected, and lost their third-round tie 2–1 to Aston Villa at Villa Park. Their second Wembley appearance came later that season, facing Peterborough United in the play-off final after automatic promotion had seemed certain earlier in the season. After a 3–0 aggregate semi-final win over Hartlepool United, Quakers missed numerous chances and were again undone by a single goal, this time from Andy Clarke.
In 2002, Darlington made unsuccessful approaches to sign international stars Paul Gascoigne and Faustino Asprilla, and moved into their new stadium, named the Reynolds Arena, in summer 2003. Reynolds had paid the club's debts when he took over, but the cost of the stadium, partly financed with high-interest loans and built without realistic expectation of filling it, drove the club into administration six months later. Reynolds resigned as a director in January 2004 with the club under threat of imminent closure. A benefit match, featuring footballers such as Gascoigne, Bryan Robson and Kenny Dalglish, played in front of a crowd of over 14,000, raised £100,000 to help ensure survival in the short term. Despite the off-field problems, David Hodgson, in his third spell as manager, and his players produced some fine performances as the team avoided relegation.
At the end of the season, Reynolds was obliged to hand over control to the Sterling Consortium to bring the club out of administration, Stewart Davies taking over as chairman. He and his staff adopted a fan-friendly approach, in contrast to the abrasive Reynolds, before in 2006, the club was sold to property developer George Houghton. For four consecutive seasons, under Hodgson, sacked in 2006, and then under successor Dave Penney, the Quakers finished in the top half of the table, reaching the play-off semi-final in 2008 only to lose to Rochdale on penalties. In February 2009, Darlington again went into administration, triggering an automatic 10-point deduction, without which they would have again reached the play-offs. Fundraising efforts kept the club going, but when no buyer was found for the club by a May deadline, the administrators made the majority of the first-team squad available for transfer and cut staff numbers to a minimum. On 20 May, Houghton returned to the club as chairman, appointed former Middlesbrough boss Colin Todd as manager, and brokered an agreement which led to the club coming out of administration and ownership passing to local businessman Raj Singh and enabling it to compete in the 2009–10 season without any points deduction. Todd left the club after losing seven of his first nine games and was replaced by former Republic of Ireland manager Steve Staunton, who only won four of 23 league games.
The club were eventually relegated to the Conference, and suffered more managerial turmoil during the summer when Simon Davey and successor Ryan Kidd both left within 11 days, to leave Mark Cooper in charge. He led the club to victory in the 2011 FA Trophy final at Wembley Stadium, defeating Mansfield Town 1–0 with a goal from Chris Senior in the last minute of extra time. Following a succession of poor performances at the start of the 2011–12 season, Cooper and his assistant Richard Dryden were sacked by the club in October. A little more than two months later, Singh placed the club into administration for the third time in less than a decade. A number of players were released and allowed to join other clubs for nominal fees in January before interim manager Craig Liddle and the remaining playing staff had their contracts terminated by Darlington's administrator. Two days later, the club was spared from liquidation after a last-minute injection of funding by supporters' groups. Enough funds were raised for Darlington to complete the season, but relegation was confirmed with three matches remaining.
=== Darlington 1883 ===
On 3 May 2012, the club was taken over by DFC 1883 Ltd with the intention of moving into community ownership. Because it failed to agree a creditors voluntary agreement, the club was expelled from the Football Association and was eventually wound up in the High Court. DFC 1883 Limited immediately formed a new club. Because the club proposed to play at a ground without the required grading for the Northern Premier League, the new club was placed in the Northern League Division One, by the Football Association. Martin Gray was appointed manager. An appeal against the new club not being treated as a continuation of the old club was rejected, confirming that the club was to be treated as a new club and would not be able to play under the name Darlington F.C. The new owners opted to name the new club Darlington 1883.
In February 2013, the club became 100% fan- and community-owned after the Darlington Football Club Community Interest Company (DFC CIC), representing around 800 members, had taken a 52% stake; the Supporters' Club held 15%, and individual fans held the remaining 33%. The new ownership were committed to paying off debts incurred under the previous owners; five months later, the club made a final payment on tax owed to HMRC.
On the pitch, Darlington were crowned Northern League Division One champions in 2012–13 with a club record haul of 122 points, having scored 145 goals in the process, thus gaining promotion to the Northern Premier League Division One North for the 2013–14 season. The season saw them finish as Division One North runners-up, before losing in the play-off semi-final to Ramsbottom United. In 2014–15, Darlington again finished second, and this time won the play-off final 2–0 against Bamber Bridge, earning promotion to the Premier Division. Darlington clinched their second successive promotion and the 2015–16 Northern Premier League Premier Division title on 21 April 2016 after beating Whitby Town 7–1. However, the club were unable to make it three promotions in a row, as despite finishing in the National League North play-off positions in 2016–17, ground grading issues prevented their participation.
=== Return to Darlington F.C. ===
In April 2017, the FA approved the club's request to change to the traditional name of Darlington F.C. for the 2017–18 season.
In the summer of 2017, it was reported through the club website that work had begun on a new playing area and a new seated stand, following the addition of more fundraising.
In October 2017, Gray resigned as manager to join rivals York City. He was succeeded by former player Tommy Wright, with another former player Alan White as his assistant. Wright led Darlington to a 12th and 16th-place finish respectively during the two seasons he was in charge before leaving by mutual consent in April 2019.
In May 2019, Wright was succeeded by another former player Alun Armstrong who joined from Blyth Spartans. Assistant Manager Alan White also left the club in July 2019 before replacing him with another former player Darren Holloway a week later.
In Armstrong's first season as manager, Darlington qualified for the first round of the FA Cup for the first time since they were reformed in 2012, including wins all away from home against Trafford, Leamington and Tamworth. In the first round, they played away again against League Two side Walsall and the match finished 2–2 with midfielder Joe Wheatley getting a 97th-minute equaliser to get a replay at Blackwell Meadows. Darlington did then lose the first round replay 1–0 in a record crowd since their first game at Blackwell Meadows with the attendance of 3,106, which was shown in front of the BT Sport cameras.
After a 10th-place finish in the 2019–20 season, the 2020-21 campaign was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Darlington finished 13th in 2021–22 and after being top of the league in January 2023, fell to 10th in the 2022–23 season. The poor run continued into the 2023–24 season, and Armstrong was dismissed on 6 September 2023. Josh Gowling replaced Armstrong, but only lasted three months before he was dismissed after only winning three out of sixteen games during his tenure and left the club second bottom in the league. Steve Watson replaced Gowling and brought Terry Mitchell from Workington with him as his assistant manager. They guided Darlington to a 16th-place finish after being 9 points adrift from safety at one stage of the season and winning 10 out of the last 15 games of the season, completing "The Great Escape".
== Colours and badge ==
In 1888, Darlington's kit consisted of a shirt with black and white vertical stripes, black shorts and black socks. Apart from a period between the 1910s and 1936, when blue shorts were worn, the basic colours of the home kit have remained black and white. The shirt design has varied, from the 1888 vertical stripes, through hoops, plain white, and back to hoops again in the 1990s. Sponsors' names have appeared on Darlington's shirts since the 1980s. A table of kit manufacturers (since the 1970s) and shirt sponsors appears on the right.
The club badge is in the form of a shield, divided diagonally into two parts; the smaller section, to the upper right, is in the club's home colour of white, the larger is red, their traditional away colour. In the white section is a stylised Quaker hat, emblematic of the major role played by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the history of the town. The larger section depicts George Stephenson's Locomotion No 1, the steam locomotive that hauled the first train on the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, representing the importance of the railway industry to the area. Across the bottom of the shield is a ribbon bearing the club's nickname, The Quakers, and the whole rests on a bed of oak leaves, symbolic of strength and endurance.
== Stadiums ==
Feethams was originally used by Darlington Cricket Club, but began to be used for football in the 1860s. Darlington F.C. began playing there when they formed in 1883. With growing crowd figures, the ground was expanded with the construction of the West stand at the turn of the century and the Polam Lane end in 1905. In 1913, a pair of towers were built at the entrance to the ground, and in 1920, offices and changing rooms were built underneath the East stand. Floodlights were installed in September 1960, but after their first use an electrical fault gutted the West stand in a fire, prompting its rebuilding. In 1997, the East stand was demolished and rebuilt as an all-seater stand, but its cost had a major negative effect on the club's finances. George Reynolds came in to the club, paid its debts and initiated construction of a new stadium. The last match played at Feethams was a 2–2 draw with Leyton Orient on 3 May 2003. Following the closure of the ground, the floodlights were sold to Workington A.F.C. and the stadium demolished. A housing estate was planned for the cleared site.
The 25,000-seat Reynolds Arena was opened in 2003, at a cost of £18 million. The first match at the new stadium was a 2–0 loss to Kidderminster Harriers on 16 August 2003. The attendance of 11,600 still stands as a record for the ground. After Reynolds left the club, the stadium had a variety of sponsored names, but it is generally known as the Darlington Arena. The capacity was restricted to just 10,000 because of county and local planning regulations,[A] but attendances rarely reached 3,000, and in 2011, the club's receivers put it up for sale. In May 2012, Darlington confirmed they would no longer play at the Arena. Later that year, it was bought by Darlington Mowden Park R.F.C.
Before the stadium was sold, there was interest by the local council to build a new railway station next to the stadium as part of the Tees Valley Metro scheme to improve public access to D.F.C matches. The scheme also included better services to Darlington and Saltburn, new rollingstock, as well as possible street running to Darlington town centre. However, the rail scheme was eventually abandoned by 2011, and unlike other proposed stations in the project, Darlington Arena never received a station.
Plans had originally been laid down to groundshare with Shildon, but arrangements were eventually for Darlington to share Bishop Auckland's Heritage Park ground from the start of the 2012/13 season. In December 2013, it was confirmed that a deal had been reached in principle for the football team to share Darlington RFC's ground at Blackwell Meadows ground, and thus return to the town of Darlington. In March 2016, it was confirmed that Darlington aimed to relocate by the start of the 2016/17 season, with expansion plans in place to increase the capacity to 3,000, as required for promotion to the National League. In the event, they played their first match at Blackwell Meadows on 26 December 2016, a 3–2 National League North win against F.C. Halifax Town in front of 3,000 spectators. Darlington expanded the seated stand at Blackwell Meadows to seat 588 in 2018, after a successful funding drive by their fans, allowing for the club to be promoted to the National League. This was built following the 2016–17 season, where Darlington finished the season in the playoff, but were disqualified from playing due to the inadequate number of seats at Blackwell Meadows. The club continues to explore further ways to improve Blackwell Meadows, including a stand at the currently empty west end of the ground.
As of 2025, Darlington FC are attempting to lock down a site for a new ground, so they can enjoy increased revenue and continue to kick on.
== Supporters and rivalries ==
Darlington's supporters consider Hartlepool United their main rivals. The feeling is reciprocated: in a 2008 survey, 95% of supporters of both clubs named the other as their bitterest rivals. They have fierce competition each time they come up against each other. The clubs, based 25 miles (40 km) apart, had met 147 times in the Football League, as of 2009–10, of which Hartlepool won 60 to Darlington's 57. The meeting between the two clubs in 2007 attracted a crowd of 10,121 to the Darlington Arena, the largest attendance for that League fixture for 50 years, though the average League attendance at the stadium declined from over 5,000 in its opening season to 2,744 in 2009–10.
In the 2012–13 season, Darlington's first season as a renamed club, its main rivals were Spennymoor Town owing to the hotly contested title for the Northern League. Spennymoor Town had won the league for the three previous years, but had not applied for promotion until the 2012–13 season when Darlington entered the league. Spennymoor Town were the only club to contend with Darlington for the title towards the end of the season. To a lesser extent, landlords Bishop Auckland were also rivals owing to their shared home ground. In the 2014–15 season, Darlington once again locked horns with Spennymoor Town after they achieved promotion from the Northern League in 2014. Again, they contested Darlington for promotion in a semi-final playoff match that Darlington won 3–2. The rivalry with Spennymoor was re-ignited in 2017–18 when Spennymoor booked their place in the National League North, with the first game ending all square 1–1 at Blackwell Meadows on 28 August 2017.
The team's mascots included Mr Q, "a flat-looking cartoon man with a very big hat", Darlo Dog, a Dalmatian who was once ejected from the ground for climbing on the advertising boards in front of television cameras, and a panda named Feethams. Fanzines included Mission Impossible, first published in the early 1990s, and Where's The Money Gone, whose teenage editor, along with the editor of the Darlo Uncovered website, were among several supporters banned from the ground by chairman George Reynolds for criticising the running of the club. Since 2013, a fan-run internet radio station, Darlo Fans Radio, has provided commentary on Darlington matches both home and away.
Darlington had an official supporters' club and an away supporters group, known as Darlington Away Far Travelling Supporters (DAFTS), who represented Darlington supporters from places elsewhere in the country. A supporters' trust was founded in 2002; it established a Disabled Supporters Group, tried to maintain a working relationship between club and supporters, and, together with the Darlington Camera Club, staged a "Farewell to Feethams" exhibition in celebration of the club's longtime home. Together with the supporters' club, the trust was actively involved in fund-raising particularly during the club's periods of administration.
== Players ==
=== Current squad ===
As of 14 March 2026
Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules; some limited exceptions apply. Players may hold more than one non-FIFA nationality.
=== Out on loan ===
Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules; some limited exceptions apply. Players may hold more than one non-FIFA nationality.
== Staff ==
As of 1 July 2024
=== Boardroom ===
=== Football ===
== Reserve team ==
In October 2016, it was announced that Horden Colliery Welfare would move 30 miles to Darlington to become the reserve team of Darlington; they will change their name to Darlington 1883 Reserves and play on the 4G surface at Eastbourne Sports Complex. Horden chairman Norman Stephens said "If the move had not have happened, Horden would have been dead by Xmas". Stephens and some of the playing staff were retained by Darlington who took Horden's place in the Wearside League. They played their first game under the new name on 6 October in a 1–0 away defeat to Boldon C.A.
In June 2024, Darlington announced that they would be forming an Under 23s team. The team would be a continuation of Grant Cuthbertson and John Walters' U18s team, that won 3 successive county cups, and would be entering the Wearside League Division Three. Numerous players completed the step up between the teams during the 2024-25 season, including Matthew Kirokiro and Will Maddison
== Honours ==
Honours achieved by Darlington since their foundation in 1883 include the following:
League
Third Division North (level 3)
Champions: 1924–25
Runners-up: 1921–22
Fourth Division (level 4)
Champions: 1990–91
Runners-up: 1965–66
Promoted: 1984–85
Football Conference (level 5)
Champions: 1989–90
Northern Premier League Premier Division (level 7)
Champions: 2015–16
Northern Premier League Division One North (level 8)
Runners-up and play-off winners: 2014–15
Runners-up: 2013–14
Northern League
Champions: 1895–96, 1899–1900, 2012–13
Runners-up: 1896–97, 1898–99
North Eastern League
Champions: 1912–13, 1920–21
Runners-up: 1919–20
Cup
FA Trophy
Winners: 2010–11
Football League Third Division North Cup
Winners: 1933–34
Runners-up: 1935–36
Durham Challenge Cup
Winners: 1884–85, 1890–91, 1892–93, 1896–97, 1919–20, 1999–2000
== Records ==
Darlington's highest league finish was fifteenth in the Football League Second Division, during the 1925–26 season. The club's best performance in the FA Cup has been two appearances in the last 16 of the competition. This first was in 1910–11, when they lost to Swindon Town in the third round. The second was in the 1957–58 season, when they beat Chelsea 4–1 in a replay to reach the fifth round, in which they lost 6–1 to Wolverhampton Wanderers. The club's best League Cup performance was reaching the quarter-final in the 1967–68 season.
The Quakers' biggest home win was a 13–1 defeat of Scarborough in the FA Cup on 24 October 1891. Their best away win in the Football League was on 22 October 1921, when they beat Durham City 7–3 in the Third Division North. They achieved 7–1 wins in the Northern League Division One against Billingham Town in October 2012 and Hebburn Town in February 2013, and in the Northern Premier League against Whitby Town in April 2016.
The player with the most league appearances for Darlington is Ron Greener with 439 between 1955 and 1967. He made a total of 490 senior appearances for the club. Alan Walsh scored a club-record 87 league goals between 1978 and 1984, and scored 100 goals for Darlington overall. The most league goals scored for the club by a single player in a season is 39, by David Brown in the 1924–25 season. Franz Burgmeier has the most senior international appearances while a Darlington player, with seven caps for Liechtenstein in the 2008–09 season.
=== Dream team ===
As part of the 2003 "Farewell to Feethams" celebrations, a competition in the club programme selected the following all-time "Dream Team": Mark Prudhoe, Ron Greener, Craig Liddle, Kevan Smith, John Peverell, Andy Toman, David McLean, Alan Sproates, Alan Walsh, Marco Gabbiadini and Colin Sinclair. Gabbiadini, scorer of 53 goals in his two seasons at Darlington, was voted greatest ever player. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofi_Oksanen | Sofi Oksanen | Sofi-Elina Oksanen (born 7 January 1977) is a Finnish writer and playwright. Oksanen has published six novels, of which "Purge" has gained the widest recognition. She has received several international and domestic awards for her literary work. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than two million copies. Oksanen has been called "Finnish-Estonian Charles Dickens" and her work has often been compared to Margaret Atwood's novels. Oksanen is actively involved in public debate in Finland and comments on current issues in her columns and various talk shows.
== Early years and education ==
Sofi-Elina Oksanen was born in Jyväskylä in central Finland, where she grew up in the Halssila district. Her father is a Finnish electrician. Her mother is an Estonian engineer who grew up in Estonia during the Soviet occupation and through marriage was able to move to Finland in the 1970s. Oksanen studied literature at the University of Jyväskylä and University of Helsinki and later drama at the Finnish Theatre Academy in Helsinki.
== Career ==
Oksanen's first play "Purge" (Puhdistus) was staged at the Finnish National Theatre in 2007. From out of the play grew Oksanen's third novel "Purge" (2008). It ranked number 1 on the bestseller list for fiction in Finland when it was published and has received numerous awards, both in Finland and abroad.
The play "Purge'" had its American première at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, in New York City, on 10 February 2011. The text was translated by Eva Buchwald and the production was directed by Zishan Ugurlu.
From October 2011, the play was produced in 15 countries, with productions in Norway, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Iceland, Lithuania, Germany, Ukraine, and Hungary. It premiered in London at the Arcola Theatre from 22 February to 24 March with a new production directed by Elgiva Field. In Canada it premiered in 2021.
The novel has been adapted into a film – see "Purge" (2012) – directed by Antti Jokinen, selected as the Finnish entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards.
"Purge" was adapted into an opera, composed by Jüri Reinvere, and it premiered at Finnish National Opera in 2012.
Her novel "Baby Jane" has also been adapted into an opera "Baby Jane". The composer is Markus Kärki. Helsingin Sanomat called it an opera event of the season.
In 2012, Oksanen published a map of Soviet Gulag prison camps, drawn by Niilo Koljonen, in the National Audiovisual Archive.
Her fourth novel "When the Doves Disappeared" (Kun kyyhkyset katosivat) was published on 31 August 2012 and it was the most sold Finnish novel of the year. The title refers to German soldiers catching and eating all the pigeons in Tallinn during the Nazi German occupation of Estonia during World War II.
The book was translated into English by Lola Rogers: "When the Doves Disappeared: A novel". (Knopf, 2015. ISBN 978-0-385-35017-4.)
Oksanen wrote a libretto for Kaija Saariaho's opera "Innocence." The world premiere was scheduled for 2020 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London, but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The opera had its world premiere on 3 July 2021 at the Grand Théâtre de Provence as part of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. The opera was called a "triumph" and a "masterpiece" in the press, and its international reception was overwhelmingly positive. Le Monde said it already has a place in the history of opera. Oksanen's libretto was described masterly, innovative, palpitating and thrilling. Les Echos reviewed the libretto perfect for stage and said: "From the libretto to the staging, everything promises this dark and strong work a great future in the biggest international theatres." The magazine "Transfuge" praised Oksanen's libretto for it remarkable format and chilling efficiency: "Each character has its identity, its language, its drama, its specter." After the world premiere the opera will travel to Finland's National Opera, Dutch National Opera, Royal Opera House (Covent Garden) and San Francisco Opera House.
Oksanen has also written numerous articles published in international newspapers. The topics are often related to freedom of speech, women's rights, Russian politics, information war, immigration and Finlandization. In 2014, Die Welt published her article about information war from the point of view of former Eastern Bloc countries.
Her novel, "Norma", translated by Owen F. Witesman, was published in English by Knopf in the US, Atlantic in the UK and House of Anansi in Canada.
Oksanen's novel "The Dog Park" came out in English in 2021 published by Knopf in the US, Atlantic in the UK and House of Anansi in Canada. The translator was Owen F. Witesman.
Two of her novels have been adapted into movies, "Purge" and "Baby Jane". The movie rights for "When the Doves Disappeared" and "Stalin's Cows" have been acquired.
== Personal life ==
Sofi Oksanen and her husband, Juha Korhonen, were married in 2011 in Helsinki.
== Works ==
Novels
Stalin's Cows (original title Stalinin lehmät, published in Finnish 2003)
Baby Jane (original title Baby Jane, published in Finnish 2005)
Purge (original title Puhdistus, published in Finnish 2008)
When the Doves Disappeared (original title Kun Kyyhkyset katosivat, published in Finnish 2012)
Norma (original title Norma, published in Finnish 2015)
The Dog Park (original title Koirapuisto, published in Finnish 2019)
Plays
The Blue-cheeked girls (original title Siniposkiset tytöt, 2005)
Purge (original title Puhdistus, the world premiere at the Finnish National Theatre, 2007)
When the Doves Disappeared (original title Kun kyyhkyset katosivat, the world premiere at the Finnish National Theatre, 2013)
I love you already (original title Rakastan sinua jo nyt, 2017)
Lyrics/Poems
Too short skirt – tales from the kitchen (original title Liian lyhyt hame - kertomuksia keittiöstä, 2011)
Libretto
Innocence – opera by Kaija Saariaho, world premiere 2021 at the festival Aix-en-Provence
Essays in English
A Lion in a Cage, Eurozine, 19.5.2015
What's it like to write about Russia, 14.6.2016, UpNorth
Your silence will not protect you, 28.2.2018, UpNorth
My family knew all about iron curtain: it's vital to protect our right to speak out, The Guardian, 30.5.2018
A Soviet shadow looms over the Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki, The Guardian, 11.7.2018
Social media can work as life insurance for Navalny, Found Me, 5.2.2021
== Awards ==
Finlandia Prize, Finland, 2008
The Kristiina of the year, Kristiina-institute, Finland, 2008
The Mika Waltari Award, Finland, 2008
The Great Finnish Book Club Prize, Finland, 2008
The SSKK Recognition Award, Finland, 2008
The Kalevi Jäntti Award, Finland, 2008
Runeberg Prize, Finland, 2009
The Person of the Year, Postimees, Estonia, 2009
The Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, Estonia, 2010
Nordic Council Literature Prize (2010) for Puhdistus
The Prix Femina Ètranger, France, 2010
The Prix du Roman FNAC, France, 2010
The European Book Prize, EU, 2010
The French Booksellers Prize, France, 2012
The Order of the Lion of Finland, the Pro Finlandia, Finland, 2012
The Budapest Grand Prize, Hungary, 2013
The Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, Sweden, 2013
Wolmar Schildt Award, Finland, 2015
Premio Salerno Libro d'Europa, Italy, 2015
Chevalier Medal of Honour by Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 2018
Nominations
The Helsingin Sanomat Prize for the best debutant novel, Finland, 2003
Runeberg Prize, Finland, 2004
Prix Médicis, France, 2010
The Dublin International Literary Award (IMPAC), Ireland, 2012
The Dublin International Literary Award (IMPAC), Ireland, 2017
The Ambassador of Finnish Culture (The Culture Gala of the Century), Finland, 2017
The New Academy Prize in Literature, Sweden, 2018
Fedora Opera Prize, 2021 |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_Bebop:_Knockin%27_on_Heaven%27s_Door | Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door | |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gearbox_Software | Gearbox Software | Gearbox Software, L.L.C. is an American video game development company based in Frisco, Texas. It was established as a limited liability company in February 1999 by five developers formerly of Rebel Boat Rocker. Randy Pitchford, one of the founders, serves as president and chief executive officer. Gearbox initially created expansions for the Valve game Half-Life, then ported that game and others to console platforms. In 2005, Gearbox launched its first independent set of games, Brothers in Arms, on console and mobile devices. It became their flagship franchise and spun off a comic book series, television documentary, books, and action figures. Their second original game series, Borderlands, commenced in 2009, and by 2015 had sold over 26 million copies. The company also owns the intellectual property of Duke Nukem and Homeworld.
Gearbox expanded into publishing with the creation of Gearbox Publishing in 2015. A parent company, The Gearbox Entertainment Company, was established for Gearbox Software and Gearbox Publishing in 2019. Gearbox Entertainment was acquired by the Embracer Group in April 2021, becoming its seventh major label. A third division, Gearbox Studios, focusing on television and film productions, was established in October 2021. Due to major restructuring following a failed investment, Embracer announced plans to divest Gearbox to Take-Two Interactive, who had previously published several of Gearbox's games under its 2K label, in March 2024. Take-Two Interactive closed the Gearbox Software acquisition on June 12, 2024.
== History ==
=== Formation and initial growth (1999–2008) ===
Gearbox Software was founded on February 16, 1999, by Randy Pitchford, Brian Martel, Stephen Bahl, Landon Montgomery and Rob Heironimus, five developers formerly of Rebel Boat Rocker. Before Rebel Boat Rocker, Pitchford and Martel previously worked together at 3D Realms, and Montgomery previously worked at Bethesda Softworks. By 2000, the company employed 15 people.
They started with developing expansions to Valve's Half-Life. Porting Half-Life to console platforms (each with new game content) followed, building the company's experience in console game-making, in addition to enhancing and building upon the successful Counter-Strike branch of the Half-Life franchise. Prior to Half-Life 2, they had developed or helped develop every Half-Life expansion game or port, including Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Half-Life for the Sony PlayStation 2 (including Half-Life: Decay), and Half-Life for the Sega Dreamcast (including Blue Shift). Branching out to other publishers, they pursued additional port work, each game being released with additional content, but this time from console to PC. These projects included their first non-first-person shooter, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, and Halo: Combat Evolved, forging new publisher relationships with Activision and Microsoft Game Studios respectively. Additional new development, in the form of a PC game in the James Bond franchise (James Bond 007: Nightfire) for Electronic Arts, also occurred during the company's initial 5-year period.
In 2005, they launched an original property of their creation, Brothers in Arms, with the release of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 on the Xbox, PC and PlayStation 2. Later that year a sequel, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, was launched. In 2008, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway was released.
2007 brought announcements of new projects based on licensed film intellectual properties, including the crime drama Heat and the science-fiction classic Aliens. In the September 2007 issue of Game Informer, Pitchford stated that development on the Heat game had not yet begun, as the planned development partner for the project had gone under. This was followed by an announcement by Sega that they would be helming a new version of rhythm game Samba de Amigo for the Wii, a departure from their signature first-person shooter titles.
=== Borderlands and studio expansion (2009–2015) ===
Work on a new intellectual property, Borderlands, began around 2005 and was first announced in 2007. Pitchford likened the game as a combination of computer role-playing games such as Diablo and NetHack, and first-person shooters like Duke Nukem. Defining features of Borderlands was its outlined graphical style and its procedurally-generated loot system that was capable of generating millions of different guns and other gear items. Borderlands was released in October 2009, published by 2K, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive. By August 2011, had sold over 4.5 million copies, making it a critical success for Gearbox and allowing them to expand the studio and budgets for subsequent games. Subsequently, Gearbox developed two additional games in the video game series, Borderlands 2 (2012) and Borderlands 3 (2019), as well as the spin-off title Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (2022), and the series has spawn additional games from other studios under 2K/Take-Two or through license, including Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel by 2K Australia, and Tales from the Borderlands from Telltale Games. Gearbox and Take-Two have also partnered with Lionsgate to develop a live-action Borderlands film, which was released on August 9, 2024.
In July 2013, Gearbox announced plans to rerelease Homeworld and Homeworld 2 in high definition for modern PC platforms, in addition to making it available through digital distributors.
In July 2014, Randy Pitchford formally contested the Aliens: Colonial Marines class action lawsuit stating the game had cost them millions of their own money and the advertising was solely the fault of the publisher.
In December 2015, Gearbox opened a second development studio in Quebec City, Canada. The studio is run by Sebastien Caisse and former Activision art director Pierre-Andre Dery. The team consists of over 100 members and is contributing to the development of original AAA titles.
=== Restructuring and acquisition by Embracer Group (2015–2024) ===
Gearbox established Gearbox Publishing in 2015, first announced to the public in December 2016, as to publish third-party games, starting with the remastered version of Bulletstorm from People Can Fly. Pitchford said that they wanted to start expanding into other areas of capital growth beyond games that Gearbox was traditionally known for, and planned to use Gearbox Publishing as a starting point. Later, in May 2019, Gearbox established The Gearbox Entertainment Company, Inc. (Gearbox Entertainment) as a parent company for both Gearbox Software and Gearbox Publishing.
Co-founder Landon Montgomery, who had left the company around 2007, died on March 25, 2020.
In April 2021, Gearbox Entertainment was wholly acquired by the Embracer Group for precisely $363 million rising to $1,378 million should they reach specific operational targets. This addition would be the company's seventh major publishing group. Pitchford stated that while they were looking to raise capital from 2016, they came to meet with Embracer, and saw that their decentralized studio model would work well for Gearbox. 2K remained on Gearbox's board and continued to publish the Borderlands series.
Gearbox Entertainment opened a second Canadian studio, Gearbox Studio Montreal, in August 2021, to support 250 new staff, bringing the total size of Gearbox to around 850 employees.
Gearbox announced the formation of Gearbox Studios as a third company under the Gearbox Entertainment Company on October 6, 2021, to oversee television and film productions, with Pitchford serving as Gearbox Studios president alongside as president and CEO of the parent company. Former CTO Steve Jones was named as president of Gearbox Software in Pitchford's place. Embracer announced it intent to acquire Perfect World Entertainment in December 2021 and placing the group, including its publishing arm and Cryptic Studios, under the Gearbox Entertainment operating group. Following its acquisition in April 2022, Perfect World Entertainment was rebranded as Gearbox Publishing San Francisco, with the naming to be applied retroactively to past games published under Perfect World.
In April 2022, Gearbox Entertainment announced it will acquire Lost Boys Interactive, which had supported Gearbox in Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. Later that November, Gearbox acquired the Risk of Rain IP from Hopoo Games, while Embracer transferred ownership of Volition to Gearbox Entertainment from Deep Silver following poor reception to its Saint's Row reboot. The studio would later shut down the following year due to the restructuring of Embracer Group. That same month, Eidos Shanghai, another studio under the Embracer Group, was transferred to Gearbox Publishing San Francisco and rebranded as Gearbox Studio Shanghai.
Gearbox Entertainment acquired Captured Dimensions, a 3D modeling company from Texas, in January 2023. Later in the month, Gearbox laid off a sizeable portion of the staff at Lost Boys Interactive. According to a Washington state WARN notice, 125 employees lost their jobs.
=== Acquisition by Take-Two Interactive (2024–present) ===
Take-Two Interactive announced its plans to acquire Gearbox Entertainment and its intellectual properties from Embracer Group for $460 million on March 28, 2024, to be added under the 2K label. The acquisition also includes Gearbox Software with its satellite studios and Gearbox Publishing. Embracer will retain Gearbox San Francisco, Gearbox Shanghai, Lost Boys Interactive, Captured Dimensions, and Cryptic Studios, along with publishing rights to Remnant, Hyper Light Breaker, and other unannounced titles. Less than a day after the announcement, it was reported that an unknown number of employees were laid off from Gearbox. On June 12, 2024, Take-Two Interactive closed the Gearbox Software transaction.
== Company structure ==
Following the acquisition, The Gearbox Entertainment Company operates as a studio within 2K.
Gearbox Software has two additional studios in addition to their main studios in Frisco, Texas; Gearbox Studio Montreal, and Gearbox Studio Québec. After the company was bought by Take-Two, many assets were retained by Embracer such as Lost Boys, Captured Dimensions and the San Francisco publishing division which was rebranded as Arc Games alongside several titles. The Gearbox Publishing division handled by The Gearbox Entertainment Company was later absorbed into 2K following Take-Two's buyout of Gearbox.
The Gearbox Entertainment Company
Gearbox Properties
Gearbox Software
Gearbox Studio Montréal
Gearbox Studio Québec
Gearbox Studios
== Games ==
=== Half-Life ===
Gearbox has developed a total of six games in the Half-Life series: the expansion packs Opposing Force and Blue Shift; ports of Half-Life for Dreamcast (which included Blue Shift) and Half-Life for PlayStation 2 (which included Half-Life: Decay); they also did a large amount of work on both the retail release of Counter-Strike and the main portion of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero.
=== Brothers in Arms ===
During their fourth year, Gearbox began working on their first independently owned game: Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. Developed for PC and Microsoft's Xbox console, and built with the Unreal Engine 2, it was released in March 2005. The sequel, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, followed seven months later. The series was published by Ubisoft, who supported both games with PlayStation 2 versions, and later worked with them to develop Brothers in Arms games for portable systems (mobile phones, PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS) and the Wii home console.
In 2005, Gearbox licensed the Unreal Engine 3 from Epic Games, to replace the Unreal Engine 2 technology used in previous games, and grew its internal development teams to handle the demands of next-generation technology and content. Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway was the first new title to be announced, continuing the company's flagship franchise.
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway was launched in September 2008. By 2008, the franchise also spun off a comic book series, a two-part television documentary, a line of action figures, and a novelization and non-fiction history book.
=== Borderlands series ===
After the completion of Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, Gearbox began working on their second original game, Borderlands. The game was envisioned by Pitchford as a combination of the roguelike genre with action role-playing games like Diablo in a first-person shooter. Set on the fictional planet Pandora, players control a Vault Hunter as they fight off the planet's hostile wildlife and human forces while seeking a fabled Vault that is claimed to be filled with riches. Part of Borderlands' features is the use of procedural generation to create the weapons and other gear that drop from defeating enemies or completing missions, with the first game featuring more than 15 million possible variations, according to Gearbox. Borderlands also features a cell-shaded-like art style giving the game a comic-book appearance.
Borderlands was released in 2009, and became an unexpected success for Gearbox, selling around three to four million copies by 2011. This has launched several followup games, including the direct sequels Borderlands 2 (2012), Borderlands 3 (2019), and Borderlands 4 (2025), the prequel Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (2015) and the spinoff title Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (2023), all that expand on the series' mechanics. In addition, two interactive fiction games, Tales from the Borderlands (2014) and New Tales from the Borderlands (2022) have been released. A feature film, Borderlands (2024) has also been released.
=== Duke Nukem series ===
Duke Nukem Forever had been a project with a troubled development history at 3D Realms, who had created the Duke Nukem series, since sometime prior to 2000. Due to financial difficulties in 2009, 3D Realms was forced to downsize and ultimately lay off most of the development staff. Take-Two Interactive sued 3D Realms for failing to deliver Duke Nukem Forever.
Pitchford, who had prior industry relations with many 3D Realms staff including George Broussard, learned that many of the 3D Realms team were still eager to develop Duke Nukem Forever, working out of their homes on what they could. Pitchford negotiated with Take-Two to bring many of the former 3D Realms staff into a new studio called Triptych Games, housed at Gearbox's headquarters, to continue working on Duke Nukem Forever following 3D Realms' closure in 2009. As a result, 3D Realms sold the rights to Duke Nukem and the existing work on Duke Nukem Forever to Gearbox around February 2010. Take-Two and Gearbox subsequently announced in September 2010 that Gearbox would finish production of Duke Nukem Forever. Duke Nukem Forever was released in June 2011, and received negative critical reception on release, with most of the criticism directed towards the unfinished, rushed state of the game. Despite the criticism, the game topped the charts on release and made a profit.
3D Realms had initially sued Gearbox in June 2013 for unpaid royalties over Duke Nukem Forever, but dropped the suit by September 2013, with 3D Realms' founder Scott Miller stating that it was a misunderstanding on their part.
3D Realms was eventually acquired in part by Interceptor Entertainment, and in 2014, Interceptor announced plans to make a new Duke Nukem game, Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction. Gearbox filed suit against 3D Realms and Interceptor based on the fact that Gearbox now owned the rights to the Duke Nukem franchise. The case was settled out of court in August 2015, with 3D Realms and Interceptor acknowledging that Gearbox has full rights to the Duke Nukem series. Following the settlement, Gearbox released Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary Edition World Tour in September 2016. The game included new levels developed in conjunction with some of the original developers, re-recorded lines by original Duke voice actor Jon St. John, and new music from original composer Lee Jackson. It was released on October 11, 2016.
=== Aliens: Colonial Marines ===
Aliens: Colonial Marines was a result of Gearbox's exploration into working on licensed film properties in 2007, and was developed under license from 20th Century Fox, who held the film rights, and Sega, who held the game publishing rights to the franchise. Aliens: Colonial Marines was planned as a first-person shooter, both single-player and multiplayer, with players as members of human squads facing the franchises titular xenomorphs in settings based on the films. Gearbox did initial development on the game, but as the studio started working on Borderlands and Duke Nukem Forever, they drew developers off Aliens though still collected full payments from Sega. Sega and 2K discovered the discrepancy on Gearbox's allocation of its staff on its projects, which lead to a round of layoffs in 2008.
After Gearbox released Borderlands to critical acclaim in 2009, it began work on its sequel rather than re-allocating developers to Aliens. Instead, the studio outsourced the work to third parties, including Demiurge Studios, Nerve Software, and TimeGate Studios. By 2012, Gearbox took over full development of the game as it neared its planned release in February 2013, but due to the heavily outsourced process, the game's state was haphazard, forcing Gearbox to cancel a planned beta period and rush the game through the final stages of production, certification, and distribution. On release, the game suffered from performance issues even on target hardware specifications, and shipped with a software bug that hampered the artificial intelligence of the xenomorphs in the game, making the game far less challenging than promised; it was discovered in 2019 that this bug was result of a typographic error in a configuration file shipped with the game. The game's poor performance led Sega to cancel planned releases for the Wii U.
A class action lawsuit filed in April 2013 by Roger Damion Perrine and John Locke alleged that Gearbox and Sega falsely advertised Aliens: Colonial Marines by showing demos at trade shows that did not accurately represent the final product. Sega and the plaintiffs reached a settlement in late 2014, wherein Sega agreed to pay $1.25 million to the class. The plaintiffs dropped Gearbox from the suit in May 2015.
=== Battleborn ===
Released in May 2016, Battleborn was a cooperative first-person shooter video game with multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) elements. Battleborn takes place in a space fantasy setting where multiple races contest possession of the universe's last star. Players select one of multiple pre-defined heroes, customized with passive abilities gained through end-of-mission loot, to complete both player-vs-player and player-vs-environment events. During such events, characters are leveled up through their "Helix tree", granting one of two abilities at each level. While Battleborn was well received by critics, it was released within a month of Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch, a hero shooter with similar concepts, and which quickly overshadowed Battleborn. The title went free-to-play in June 2017 and was shut down in January 2021.
=== Homeworld series ===
After 10 years without any new releases to the series, Gearbox acquired the rights to the Homeworld series from THQ in 2013. Shortly after that the Homeworld Remastered Collection was released in 2015, containing updated High-Definition versions of Homeworld and Homeworld 2 compatible with modern Windows and Mac OS X systems.
In September 2013, Gearbox announced a partnership with Blackbird Interactive and licensing the Homeworld-IP for their then-named Hardware: Shipbreakers game. This game later became Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak and was released on January 20, 2016 as a prequel to the original Homeworld game of 1999.
On August 30, 2019, Gearbox announced Homeworld 3 which was developed by Blackbird Interactive. The game's development was at least partially funded through a crowdfunding campaign on the Fig platform, and was released May 13, 2024.
== Other media ==
A Borderlands film was released by Gearbox and Lionsgate in 2024, with Eli Roth as director. The film received negative reviews from critics and poor reception from fans.
In April 2020, Gearbox announced it was developing a television series based on its Brothers in Arms series.
== Technology ==
In 2006, they partnered with Dell and Intel to provide development computer systems and technology for their studio.
In June 2007, they purchased a Moven motion capture system that uses non-optical inertia technology, to augment their existing Vicon optical motion capture system becoming one of the few independent developers with two in-house motion capture capabilities.
In February 2008, it was announced that they had licensed NaturalMotion's Morpheme software.
== List of video games ==
=== Games developed ===
=== Games published ===
==== Gearbox Publishing ====
==== Gearbox Publishing San Francisco ==== |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llandudno,_Western_Cape | Llandudno, Western Cape | Llandudno is a seaside suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, located in the Atlantic Seaboard region. There are no street lights, shops or commercial activities, and the town has some of the most expensive residential property in South Africa.
Llandudno Beach is one of the Cape's most naturally diverse beaches, surrounded by large granite boulders and overlooked by mountains. It is a popular surfing spot, but the swimming can be treacherous, with rough seas and extremely cold water. Llandudno has lifeguards on duty during the summer season, operated by the Llandudno Surf Lifesaving club. It is also the access point for the walk to Sandy Bay, an isolated beach still popular with nudists.
On 26 September 1903 the valley was declared a township and named Llandudno after the North Wales seaside resort of Llandudno, which means "Parish of Saint Tudno" in the Welsh language. The striking similarities between Kleinkommetjie Bay in which the valley resides and Llandudno in Wales were noted as reasons for choosing this name. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Housewives_of_New_York_City | The Real Housewives of New York City | The Real Housewives of New York City, abbreviated RHONY, is an American reality television series that premiered on Bravo on March 4, 2008. Developed as the second installment of The Real Housewives franchise, it has aired fifteen seasons and focuses on the personal and professional lives of several women residing in New York City.
The cast of the first season consisted of Bethenny Frankel, Luann de Lesseps, Alex McCord, Ramona Singer, and Jill Zarin. Other housewives that starred in multiple of the first thirteen seasons include Kelly Killoren Bensimon, Sonja Morgan, Cindy Barshop, Carole Radziwill, Heather Thomson, Kristen Taekman, Jules Wainstein, Dorinda Medley and Tinsley Mortimer. The series was rebooted in its fourteenth season, making it the first series in the franchise to be completely recast. The cast of the most recent fifteenth season consisted of Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Lichy, Jenna Lyons, Jessel Taank, Brynn Whitfield and Racquel Chevremont, with Rebecca Minkoff serving as a "friend of the housewives".
The success of the show has resulted in three spin-offs: Bethenny Ever After, Bethenny & Fredrik and Luann & Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake.
== Production ==
=== 2008–2021: Original series ===
While in pre-production, the show was initially titled Manhattan Moms. It was later rebranded to become the second installment of the then-new Real Housewives franchise. The first season premiered on March 4, 2008, and starred Bethenny Frankel, Luann de Lesseps, Alex McCord, Ramona Singer and Jill Zarin. Cast members were paid for their appearances on the series. Bethenny Frankel, for example, was paid $7,250 for the season. Kelly Killoren Bensimon was added to the cast for the second season, which premiered on February 17, 2009. The third season premiered March 4, 2010 and saw the addition of Sonja Morgan as a main cast member, along with Jennifer Gilbert in a recurring capacity. In August 2010, Frankel left the show in order to expand her Skinnygirl product line. Cindy Barshop replaced Frankel for the show's fourth season, which premiered on April 7, 2011. After the fourth season, McCord, Zarin, Killoren Bensimon and Barshop were effectively let go from the show.
In April 2012, Bravo announced a revamp to the cast for its fifth season, integrating Aviva Drescher, Carole Radziwill, and Heather Thomson into the main cast. The season premiered on June 4, 2012. Production for the sixth season was set to begin on May 8, 2013, but the cast instead chose to go into salary negotiations with Bravo, effectively delaying shooting. Drescher, Morgan, Radziwill, Singer, and Thomson renewed their contract in May 2013, while de Lesseps was demoted to a recurring role. The sixth season premiered on March 11, 2014, a year later than planned with Kristen Taekman as the latest housewife. Drescher was dismissed after the sixth season.
The seventh season premiered on April 7, 2015, featuring the return of Frankel and addition of Dorinda Medley, while de Lesseps returned in a full-time role. Taekman and Thomson exited the series after the season ended. For the eighth season, which premiered on April 6, 2016, Jules Wainstein was added to the cast, while Thomson returned in a guest appearance, Taekman did not return. Wainstein left the show in September 2016 for personal reasons. The ninth season premiered on April 5, 2017. Tinsley Mortimer joined the cast, while former housewives Thomson and Zarin appeared as guests. The tenth season premiered on April 4, 2018, with the cast of the ninth season returning. Drescher, Killoren Bensimon, Thomson and Zarin all appeared as guests. It served as Radziwill's final appearance on the show.
The eleventh season premiered on March 6, 2019. Barbara Kavovit joined as a friend of the housewives, and Zarin appeared as a guest. Frankel departed the series after the season for a second time. The twelfth season featured Leah McSweeney joining the cast, which premiered on April 2, 2020. Zarin and Thomson appeared as guests in the twelfth season. Mortimer and Medley announced their departure from the series in June 2020 and August 2020 respectively. Mortimer coincided her announcement with her relocation to Chicago, to pursue her romantic relationship with Scott Kluth, while Medley later stated she was fired from the show. The thirteenth season premiered on May 4, 2021, with Eboni K. Williams joining the series, in addition to Heather Thomson and Bershan Shaw appearing as friends of the housewives. In September 2021, it was confirmed by Bravo that the thirteenth season reunion was officially cancelled.
=== 2022–present: Rebooted series ===
On March 23, 2022, it was announced that following the thirteenth season's negative reception, the showrunners had made the decision to "most likely" recast the show from scratch for the fourteenth season, and create a second version of the show following some of the show's original housewives, referred to as RHONY: Legacy or RHONY: Throwback. Although the series has partially shifted its cast before, this marked the first time that the network had decided to completely replace the cast. As a result, the series’s fourteenth season was billed as a series reboot, with little to no connections to the original cast of the series. It was later announced that de Lesseps and Morgan would star in their own spin-off series titled Luann & Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake. Filming for the spin-off began in July 2022 in the small town of Benton, Illinois. The series premiered on July 9, 2023. The fifth season of The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, a spin-off featuring various women from The Real Housewives franchise, being billed as RHONY Legacy premiered in December 2023 on Peacock. Taking place in Saint Barthélemy in the same villa that was featured in the fifth season, the cast includes Killoren Bensimon, de Lesseps, Medley, Morgan, Singer and Taekman.
Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Lichy, Jenna Lyons, Lizzy Savetsky, Jessel Taank and Brynn Whitfield were announced as the cast of the rebooted fourteenth season on October 16, 2022. Savetsky exited the series midway into filming the season on November 16, alleging that she had received anti-Semitic hate across her social media accounts. The fourteenth season premiered on July 16, 2023. In March 2024, Bravo announced that the show was renewed for a fifteenth season, with all six housewives from the fourteenth season returning. In April 2024, it was announced that Rebecca Minkoff would be joining the series in a friend of capacity. In June 2024, it was announced that Racquel Chevremont would also be joining the fifteenth season of the series as a full-time housewife. The fifteenth season premiered on October 1, 2024. In February 2025, ahead of the conclusion of the fifteenth season reunion, it was announced Minkoff would be exiting the series after one season.
In May 2025, a spokesperson for Bravo told Us Weekly speculated reports of the franchise's cancelation were untrue. This was in response to a report published by Page Six suggesting the franchise had been canceled by the network, with "hopes" to revive it in the future; in response to the Page Six article, Frankel made claim on her TikTok that the franchise had indeed been canceled. De Silva responded to the cancelation as "fake news" on her social media pages, while Cohen supported claims that "nothing has happened" with the franchise. Cohen further addressed the report on his Sirius XM radio show, stating, "We are between seasons", revealing producers had met with ten potential new housewives to join the franchise. The following month, Whitfield announced her departure, citing her decision to step away from reality television. Summer House co-stars Paige DeSorbo and Lindsay Hubbard, as well as makeup artist Daisy Toye have been named as potential new housewives.
During BravoCon in November 2025, Cohen revealed information regarding the sixteenth season and its cast would be announced "soon". That same month, Lyons announced her exit; she disclosed that despite being invited back in a "friend of" capacity, due to her unwillingness to film her personal life, and ultimately decided to depart.
On March 2, 2026, Bravo revealed the cast for the sixteenth season. Returning housewives from the previous season include Lichy, De Silva, and Taank. New housewives joining the show are Hailey Glassman, Hammond, and Toye, while Radziwill will return in a "friend of" role. Production is set to begin the week of March 2.
== Cast ==
=== Timeline of cast members ===
== Episodes ==
== Critical reception ==
Then-current cast member Frankel stated in 2017 that she would like to see the series "represent New York more." Writing for The New York Times in October 2019, author Tracie Egan Morrissey posed the question, "If less than half of the city is white, why is 100 percent of the cast of The Real Housewives of New York City white?" Former cast member Heather Thomson also stated that during her time on the series she had pitched several women of color to the show's producers to diversify its cast members due to her concerns about the issue. The women also received backlash for highlighting the class divide in America through the ignorance and mistreatment of staff featured on the show.
The announcements of both the reboot and new cast of the show's fourteenth season have been criticized by some long-time viewers of the series, who argued that these were rash and poor decisions on Bravo's part. The reboot's cast has been deemed unappealing by these viewers, many of whom appreciated the franchise's specific focus on established spheres of older, upper-class New York socialites, labeling the choice to fill the new cast with "influencers" as a deviation from the show's original subject matter. The decision has been labeled as another move in Bravo's larger attempt to appeal the network to a younger and more social media-oriented audience.
In 2022, the Jewish Journal named Frankel and Zarin as two of "The Top 10 Jewish Reality TV Stars of All Time."
== Broadcast history ==
The Real Housewives of New York City airs regularly on Bravo in the United States; most episodes are approximately forty-two minutes in length, and are broadcast in standard definition and high definition. Since its premiere, the series has alternated airing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings and has been frequently shifted between the 8:00, 9:00, and 10:00 PM timeslots.
== Other media ==
In July 2012, Bravo released a social networking video game version of The Real Housewives of New York City titled as Real Housewives: The Game. Following weekly new episodes, a new game was available based on the story.
In 2016, On Location Tours hosted an official The Real Housewives of New York-themed tour in New York City. The tour is centered around giving passengers an almost four-hour trip to visit numerous places where current and former housewives "have dined, shopped, dated or had a fight or two," and is described as the "ultimate, one-of-a-kind Real Housewives experience."
On February 3, 2026, it was announced that several alumni from the franchise would appear in a new series. Produced by E! under the working title The Golden Life, the series will follow the lives of alum Bensimon, de Lesseps, Morgan, Singer, and Zarin as they navigate their "golden" years together in Palm Beach, Florida. Production for the ten episodes of the series is scheduled to begin in early 2026. Seven days later, Zarin was fired from the series, following racist posts made on social media concerning the Super Bowl LX halftime show and its headliner, Bad Bunny. Medley was named as Zarin's replacement. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Music_Group | Warner Music Group | Warner Music Group Corp., commonly abbreviated as WMG, is an American multinational entertainment and record label conglomerate headquartered in New York City. It is one of the "Big Three" recording companies and the third-largest in the global music industry, after Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
Formerly owned by Time Warner, the company sold WMG in 2004 to a group of private investors led by Edgar Bronfman Jr., in a move to alleviate Time Warner's debt load related to its merger with AOL. WMG was publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange from 2005 until 2011, when it announced its privatization and sale to Access Industries. It later had its second IPO on Nasdaq in 2020, once again becoming a public company. As of 2025, Access Industries remains the company's largest shareholder, owning 72% of the equity and controlling 98% of the voting power. With a multibillion-dollar annual turnover, WMG employs more than 4,500 people and has operations in more than 50 countries throughout the world. The company owns and operates some of the largest and most successful record labels in the world, including Elektra, Reprise, Sire, Warner (formerly known as Warner Bros.), Parlophone (formerly owned by EMI), and Atlantic. WMG also owns Warner Chappell Music, one of the world's largest music publishers.
== History ==
=== 1950s and 1960s ===
The film studio Warner Bros. had no record label division at the time one of its contracted actors, Tab Hunter, scored a No. 1 hit song in 1957 for Dot Records, a division of rival Paramount Pictures. In order to prevent any repetition of its actors recording for rival companies, and to also capitalize on the music business, Warner Bros. Records was created in 1958; its original office was located above the film studio's machine shop on 3701 Warner Boulevard in Burbank, California. In 1963, Warner purchased Reprise Records, which had been founded by Frank Sinatra three years earlier so that he could have more creative control over his recordings. With the Reprise acquisition, Warner gained the services of Mo Ostin, who was mainly responsible for the success of Warner/Reprise.
After Warner Bros. was sold to Seven Arts Productions in 1967 (forming Warner Bros.-Seven Arts), it purchased Atlantic Records, founded in 1947 and WMG's oldest label (until WMG completed its acquisition of Parlophone in 2013), as well as its subsidiary Atco Records. This acquisition brought Neil Young into the company fold, initially as a member of Buffalo Springfield. Young became one of Warner's longest-established artists, recording both as a solo artist and with groups under the Warner-owned Atlantic, Atco, and Reprise labels. Young also recorded five albums for Geffen Records during that label's period of Warner distribution. The Geffen catalogue, now owned by Universal Music Group, represents Young's only major recordings not under WMG ownership.
Atlantic, its subsidiary Atco Records, and its affiliate Stax Records paved the way for Warner's rise to industry prominence. The purchase brought in Atlantic's lucrative back catalogue, which included classic recordings by Ray Charles, the Drifters, the Coasters, and many more. In the mid-1960s, Atlantic/Stax released a string of landmark soul music recordings by artists including Booker T & the MGs, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Ben E. King, and Aretha Franklin. Ultimately, the sale led to Stax leaving Atlantic because Seven Arts Productions insisted on keeping the rights to Stax recordings. Atlantic moved decisively into rock and pop in the late 1960s and 1970s, signing major British and American acts including Led Zeppelin, Cream, Crosby Stills & Nash, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Average White Band, Dr. John, King Crimson, Bette Midler, Roxy Music, and Foreigner.
An earlier attempt by Warner Bros. Records to create an in-house distribution arm in 1958 did not materialize. So in 1969, Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman approached Atlantic's Jerry Wexler with the idea of setting up a joint distribution network for Warner, Elektra, and Atlantic. An experimental branch was established in Southern California as a possible prototype for an expanded operation.
==== Atlantic exerts autonomy ====
It was soon apparent in 1969 that Atlantic/Atco president Ahmet Ertegun viewed Warner/Reprise president Mike Maitland as a rival. Maitland believed that, as vice-president in charge of the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts music division, he should have final say over all recording operations, and he further angered Ertegun by proposing that most of Atlantic's back-office functions (such as marketing and distribution) be combined with the existing departments at Warner/Reprise. In retrospect Ertegun clearly feared that Maitland would ultimately have more power than him, and so he moved rapidly to secure his own position and remove Maitland.
Maitland had put off renegotiating the contracts of Joe Smith and Mo Ostin, the presidents of the Warner Bros. and Reprise labels, and this provided Ertegun with an effective means of undermining Maitland. When Wexler—now a major shareholder—found out about the contract issue he and Ertegun began pressuring Eliot Hyman to get Smith and Ostin under contract, ostensibly because they were worried that the two executives might move to rival labels—and in fact Ostin had received overtures from both MGM Records and ABC Records.
In 1969, the wisdom of Hyman's investments was proved when Kinney National Company purchased Warner Bros.-Seven Arts for $400 million, more than eight times what Hyman had paid for Warner/Reprise and Atlantic combined. Several months later, Kinney National Company reverted Warner Bros.-Seven Arts to its original name of "Warner Bros". From the base of his family's funeral parlour business, Kinney president Steve Ross had rapidly built the Kinney company into a profitable conglomerate with interests that included comic publishing, the Ashley-Famous talent agency, parking lots and cleaning services. Following the takeover, Warners' music group briefly adopted the 'umbrella' name Kinney Music, because U.S. anti-trust laws at the time prevented the three labels from trading as one.
Ross was primarily focused on rebuilding the company's ailing movie division and was happy to defer to the advice of the managers of the company's record labels, since he knew that they were generating most of the group's profits. Ertegun's campaign against Maitland began in earnest that summer. Atlantic had agreed to help Warner Bros. in its efforts to establish its labels overseas, beginning with its soon-to-be-established Warner Bros. subsidiary in Australia, but when Warner executive Phil Rose arrived in Australia, he discovered that just one week earlier Atlantic had signed a new four-year distribution deal with a rival local label, Festival Records (owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Limited). Mike Maitland complained bitterly to Kinney executive Ted Ashley, but to no avail – by this time Ertegun was poised to make his move against Maitland.
As he had with Hyman, Ertegun urged Steve Ross to extend Mo Ostin and Joe Smith's contracts, a recommendation Ross was happy to accept. Ostin however had received overtures from other companies (including the aforementioned offers from MGM and ABC) and when he met with Ertegun in January 1970 and was offered Maitland's job, he was unwilling to re-sign immediately. In response, Ertegun broadly hinted that Maitland's days were numbered and that he, Ertegun, was about to take over the recording division.
Unlike the Warner/Reprise executives, Atlantic's execs the Ertegun brothers (Ahmet and Neshui) and Wexler owned stock in Kinney.
Ostin was understandably concerned that, if he accepted the position, the Warner Bros. staff would feel that he had stabbed Maitland in the back, but his attorney convinced him that Maitland's departure was inevitable, regardless of whether or not he accepted the post (succinctly advising him, "Don't be a schmuck"). On Sunday January 25, Ted Ashley went to Maitland's house to tell him he had been dismissed, and Maitland declined the offer of a job at the movie studio. One week later, Mo Ostin was named as the new President of Warner Bros. Records, with Joe Smith as his executive vice-president. Ertegun nominally remained the head of Atlantic, but since both Ostin and Smith owed their new positions to him, Ertegun was now the de facto head of the Warner music division. Ertegun was given the formal title of executive vice-president-Music Group. Maitland moved to MCA Records later that year and successfully consolidated MCA's labels, which he couldn't do at Warner.
=== 1970s ===
During the 1970s, the Kinney group built up a commanding position in the music industry. In 1970, Kinney bought Elektra Records and its sister label Nonesuch Records (founded by Jac Holzman in 1950) for $10 million, bringing in leading rock acts, including the Doors, Tim Buckley, and Love, and its historically significant folk archive, along with the successful budget Western classical-music label Nonesuch Records.
The purchase of Elektra-Nonesuch brought a rich back catalogue of folk music as well as the renowned Nonesuch catalogue of classical and world music. Elektra founder Jac Holzman ran the label under Warners for two years, but by that time, he was by his own admission "burnt out" after twenty years in the business. Kinney president Steve Ross subsequently appointed Holzman as part of a seven-person "brain trust" tasked with investigating opportunities presented by new technologies, a role Holzman was eager to accept. The same year, the group established its first overseas offices in Canada and Australia. By that time the "Seven Arts" moniker was dropped from the Warner Bros. name. Warner Bros. also founded the Casablanca Records subsidiary, headed by Neil Bogart; but several years later Casablanca became independent from Warner Bros.
==== Warner-Elektra-Atlantic and worldwide distribution ====
With the Elektra acquisition, the next step was forming an in-house distribution arm for the co-owned labels. By this time, Warner-Reprise's frustrations with its current distributors had reached breaking point; Joe Smith (then executive vice-president of Warner Bros.) recalled that the Grateful Dead were becoming a major act but the distributor was constantly out of stock of their albums. These circumstances facilitated the full establishment of the group's in-house distribution arm, initially called Kinney Record Group International. By late 1972, US anti-trust laws had changed and the company was renamed Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, WEA for short, which was renamed Warner Music in 1991 (the word "group" was added after the formation of AOL Time Warner in 2001).
WEA was an early champion of heavy metal rock music. Several such bands, including three major British pioneers Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, were all signed to WEA's labels, at least in the United States. Among the earliest American metal acts to be signed to WEA were Alice Cooper, Montrose, and Van Halen.
Up to this point the Kinney-owned record companies had relied on licensing deals with overseas record labels to manufacture, distribute and promote its products in other countries; concurrent with the establishment of its new distribution arm, the company now began establishing subsidiaries in the other major markets, beginning with the creation of Warner Bros. Records Australia in 1970, soon followed by branch offices in the UK, Europe and Japan. In July 1971, the new in-house distribution company was incorporated as Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Distributing Corp. (WEA) and branch offices were established in eight major US cities; Joel Friedman a one-time Billboard writer who had been the head of Warner's advertising/merchandising division in its early years, was appointed to head WEA's US domestic division, and Ahmet Ertegun's brother Nesuhi was appointed to oversee its international operations. Neshui Ertegun, originally a Turkish native like his brother, displayed a global perspective and independence from its U.S. counterpart by successfully promoting international acts in their target markets worldwide. Ertegun headed WEA International until his retirement in 1987. A de facto committee of three senior marketing executives—Dave Glew from Atlantic, Ed Rosenblatt from Warner Bros. and Mel Posner from Elektra—oversaw the integration of each label's marketing and distribution through the new division, but each label continued to operate totally independently in A&R matters and also applied their own expertise in marketing and advertising.
On July 1, 1971, following the pattern set by similar joint ventures in Canada and Australia, the Warner labels entered into a partnership with the British arm of CBS Records to press and distribute Warner-Reprise product in the United Kingdom, although this was undertaken as a cooperative venture rather than a formally incorporated business partnership. The Billboard article that reported the new arrangement also noted that, despite their intense competition in the US market, CBS continued to press Warner-Reprise recordings in the US. However the new UK arrangement was a major blow to Warner's previous British manufacturer Pye Records, for whom Warner-Reprise had been their largest account. With the scheduled addition of the UK rights to the Atlantic catalogue, which would revert to Kinney in early 1972, Billboard predicted that the Warner-CBS partnership would have a 25–30% share of the UK music market.
In April 1971, thanks mainly to the influence of Ahmet Ertegun, the Kinney group announced a major coup with its acquisition of the worldwide rights to the Rolling Stones' new label Rolling Stones Records, following the expiration of the band's contract with British Decca (then separate from the American label) and the acrimonious end to their business relationship with their former manager Allen Klein. Under the terms of the deal, Atlantic subsidiary Atco would distribute the Stones' recordings in the US, with other territories mainly handled by Warner Bros. international divisions.
One of Kinney's wisest investments was Fleetwood Mac. The band signed with Reprise in the early 1970s after relocating to the US, and the label supported the group through numerous lineup changes and several lean years during which the band's records sold relatively poorly, although they remained a popular concert attraction. Ironically, after the group's transfer to Warner Bros. in 1975 and the recruitment of new members Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the group scored a major international hit with the single "Rhiannon" and consolidated with the best selling albums Fleetwood Mac, Rumours and Tusk.
==== Warner Communications (1972–1990) ====
Due to a financial scandal involving price fixing in its parking operations, Kinney National spun off its non-entertainment assets in 1972 (as National Kinney Corporation) and changed its name to Warner Communications Inc.
In 1972, the Warner group acquired another rich prize, David Geffen's Asylum Records. The $7 million purchase brought in several acts that proved crucial to WEA's subsequent success, including Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and later Warren Zevon. On the downside, however, it was rumored that Warner was soon concerned about its possible liability under the California State Labor Code because of Geffen's questionable status as both the manager of most of the Asylum acts and the head of the record label to which they were signed. The sale included the Asylum Records label and its recordings, as well as Geffen's lucrative music publishing assets and the interests in the royalties of some of the artists managed by Geffen and partner Elliot Roberts. Geffen accepted a five-year contract with WCI and turned over his 75% share in the Geffen-Roberts management company to Roberts and Warner paid Geffen and Roberts 121,952 common shares worth $4,750,000 at the time of the sale, plus $400,000 in cash and a further $1.6 million in promissory notes convertible to common stock.
Although it seemed a lucrative deal at the time, Geffen soon had reason to regret it. Uncharacteristically, he had greatly underestimated the value of his assets—within Asylum's first year as a Warner subsidiary, albums by Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles alone had earned more than the entire value of the Asylum sale. Geffen's discomfort was compounded by the fact that, within six months of the sale, the value of his volatile Warner shares had plummeted from $4.5 million to just $800,000. He appealed to Steve Ross to intervene, and as part of a make-good deal, Ross agreed to pay him the difference in the share value over five years. Acting on Jac Holzman's suggestion that Kinney should take Asylum from Atlantic and merge it with Elektra, Ross then appointed Geffen to run the new combined label.
In 1977, Warner Bros. Music, led by president Ed Silvers, formed Pacific Records for their composers and distributed (appropriately) by Atlantic Records. Alan O'Day was the first artist signed to the label, and the first release was "Undercover Angel". The song, which he described as a "nocturnal novelette", was released in February 1977. Within a few months it had become No. 1 in the country, and has sold approximately two million copies. It was also a hit in Australia, reaching No. 9 on the Australian Singles Chart. "Undercover Angel" also landed O'Day in an exclusive club as one of only a handful of writers/performers to pen a No. 1 hit for themselves and a No. 1 for another artist.
New signings in the late 1970s placed WEA in a strong position for the 1980s. A deal with Seymour Stein's Sire Records label (which Warner Bros. Records later took over) brought in several major punk rock and new wave acts including the Pretenders, the Ramones and Talking Heads and, most importantly, rising star Madonna; Elektra signed the Cars and Warner Bros. signed Prince, giving WEA several of the biggest-selling acts of the decade.
WEA's labels also distributed a number of otherwise independent labels. For example, Warner Bros. distributed Straight Records, DiscReet Records, Bizarre Records, Bearsville Records, and Geffen Records (the latter was sold to MCA in 1990). Atlantic Records distributed Swan Song Records. In 1975, WEA scored a major coup by signing a distribution agreement with Island Records, which only covered the United States and select other countries. For the next 14 years (initially with Warner Bros. until 1982, then with Atlantic afterward), WEA would distribute such artists as Bob Marley, U2, Robert Palmer, Anthrax, and Tom Waits. This relationship ended when Island was sold to PolyGram in 1989.
=== 1980s ===
A name-only unit appearing exclusively next to copyright statements, WEA International Inc., was created in early 1982, to handle distribution of all Warner Bros., Elektra, and Atlantic (all these namings accounting for the initials in the title "WEA") releases for international countries.
A proposed 1983 international merger between PolyGram and WEA was forbidden by both the US Federal Trade Commission and West Germany's cartel office, so PolyGram's half-owner Philips then purchased a further 40% of the company from its partner Siemens, and bought the remaining shares in 1987. The same year, PolyGram divested its film and publishing operations, closed PolyGram Pictures and sold Chappell Music to Warner for US$275 million.
In 1976, Warner gained a brief early lead in digital media when it purchased the Atari computer company. WCI also blazed the trail in visual music with MTV, which it created and co-owned in partnership with American Express as Warner-Amex (which also ran the company's cable television systems, including the interactive TV experiment QUBE, which MTV spun-off from). By 1984, however, Warner rapidly divested many of these recent acquisitions, including Atari, The Franklin Mint, Panavision, MTV Networks and a cosmetics business; this was due in large part to the 1983 video game crash, which Atari had played a central role in, and the resulting loss of profits and investor confidence (Warner-Amex's cable system expansion also contributed to Warner's financial downturn).
WEA formed WEA Manufacturing in 1986. In 1988 WEA took over the German classical label Teldec and the British Magnet label.
In 1989, it was announced that Warner Communications was to merge with Time Inc. to form Time Warner, a transaction that was completed in 1990. Following the merger, WEA continued acquiring independent labels, buying CGD Records (Italy) and MMG Records (Japan) in 1989.
=== 1990s ===
Through the 1990s, Time Warner was the largest media company in the world, with assets in excess of US$20 billion and annual revenues in the billions of dollars; by 1991, Warner's music labels were generating sales valued at more than US$3 billion, with operating profits of $550 million, and by 1995, its music division dominated the US music industry with a 22% share of the domestic market. Acquisitions and corporate changes within the Warner group of labels continued after the Time Warner merger in 1990, WEA purchased French label Carrere Records, in 1992 it bought the leading French classical label Erato, and in 1993, it bought the Spanish DRO Records, Hungary's Magneoton label, the Swedish Telegram Records, Brazil's Continental Records and Finnish label Fazer Musiikki. WEA was renamed Warner Music in 1991. Time Warner became Time Warner Entertainment in 1992.
Atlantic launched two new subsidiary labels in the early 1990s: East West Records and Interscope Records. In 1995, East West absorbed Atco Records and was eventually folded into Elektra Records. In 1996, after causing much controversy, Interscope was purchased by MCA Music Entertainment.
During 1992, Warner Music faced one of the most serious public-relations crises in its history when a major controversy erupted over the provocative Warner Bros. recording "Cop Killer" from the self-titled album by Body Count, a heavy metal/rap fusion band led by Ice-T. Unfortunately for Warner, the song (which mentioned the Rodney King case) was issued just before the controversial acquittal of the police charged with King's beating, which sparked the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the confluence of events put the song under the national spotlight. Complaints escalated over the summer—conservative police associations called for a boycott of Time Warner products, politicians including President George H. W. Bush denounced the label for releasing the song, Warner executives received death threats, Time Warner stockholders threatened to pull out of the company and the New Zealand police commissioner unsuccessfully tried to have the record banned there. Although Ice-T later voluntarily reissued Body Count without "Cop Killer", the furor seriously rattled Warner Music and in January 1993 the label made an undisclosed deal releasing Ice-T from his contract and returning the Body Count master tapes to him.
Also in 1992, the Rhino Records label signed a distribution agreement with Atlantic Records and Time Warner Entertainment bought a 50% stake in the Rhino Records label. The distribution agreement allowed Rhino to begin reissuing recordings from Atlantic's back catalogue.
In 1994, Canadian beverage giant Seagram bought a 14.5% stake in Time Warner, and the Warner publishing division — now called Warner/Chappell Music – acquired CPP/Belwin, becoming the world's largest owner of song copyrights and the world's largest publisher of printed music. In 1996, Time Warner Entertainment made another dramatic expansion of its media holdings, taking over the Turner Broadcasting System, which by then included the Turner cable TV network, CNN and the screen production houses Castle Rock Entertainment and New Line Cinema, acquisitions that brought huge profits into the Warner Group thanks to content assets like Seinfeld and the highly successful The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
By the early 1990s, senior Warner staff like Ostin and Waronker had remained in their positions for several decades—a highly unusual situation in the American music industry—but the death of Steve Ross destabilized the Time Warner hierarchy, and over the next few years the music group was increasingly disrupted by internal power struggles, leading to a string of major executive upheavals in 1994–95, which The New York Times described as "a virtual civil war".
The central conflict was between Mo Ostin and Warner Music Group chairman Robert Morgado, who had joined the Warner group in the late 1980s. Because of his political background (he had been the chief-of-staff to former New York governor Hugh L. Carey) and his lack of music industry experience — especially compared to the widely revered Ostin—Morgado was viewed as an outsider at Warner. Nevertheless, he gained favour with Ross and Levin and was promoted in 1985 to oversee the Warner international music division after helping the company slash costs in its computer game sector.
Since his appointment as head of WBR, Ostin had always reported directly to Steve Ross and his successor Gerald Levin, but in late 1993, when Ostin's contract came up for renewal, Morgado asserted his authority, insisting that Ostin should now report directly to him. The tensions between them reached boiling point in July 1994 when Morgado appointed former Atlantic chief Doug Morris to head the Warner Music Group in the US, a decision that many saw as a deliberate move to hasten the departure of Ostin and Elektra head Robert Krasnow. Morgado's new structure was announced in August 1994 and Bob Krasnow resigned from Elektra the next day. Within days, after more than 30 years with the Warner music group and more than 20 years as president and chairman of Warner Bros. Records, Ostin announced he would not renew his current contract and would leave Warners when it expired on December 31, 1994. There was more negative publicity the following month, when leading Elektra act Metallica launched a lawsuit against the label, seeking a release from their contract and ownership of their master tapes, and claiming that Morgado had refused to honor a deal they had worked out with Krasnow before he quit.
Ostin's departure marked a seismic shift in the corporate culture at WBR and the news was greeted with dismay by industry insiders and the many artists whose careers he had helped to nurture. Lenny Waronker had agreed to take over as WBR chairman and CEO but in October 1994 he announced that he would not be taking up the position; he initially said that he would remain as President of WBR, but by this time there was already widespread speculation that he would leave, and he did so soon afterwards. The following year he re-joined Ostin and son Michael as joint head of the newly launched DreamWorks label.
Beginning in August 1994, Morgado alienated Morris by his clumsy handling of Warner's relationship with Interscope Records, the successful label founded by Ted Field and Jimmy Iovine and part-owned by Warner. Morgado had resisted making a decision about increasing the Warner stake in Interscope, which encouraged other companies to make overtures to the label; in response, Morgado threatened to send cease-and-desist notices to executives at several record companies, demanding that they stop approaching Interscope with buyout offers, a move that reportedly infuriated Iovine.
By late 1994, Morris was gaining the upper hand over his rival and media reports claimed that Morris had moved to settle with Metallica, offering a deal that was reportedly even more generous than the one they had worked out with Krasnow. Morgado now faced a showdown with Morris, who felt he was not being allowed to run WMG as he saw fit. In October 1994, Morris and 11 other Warner executives "staged an unprecedented insurrection that nearly paralyzed the world's largest record company". This led to a climactic meeting between Morris and Gerald Levin in late October, at which Morris reportedly threatened to quit if he had to continue to report to Morgado.
Morgado gave in to the demand that Morris be granted autonomy to run the North American operations and he was forced to upgrade Morris's position from chief operating officer to Chief Executive of Warner Music Group (US); Morris promptly named Danny Goldberg, former president of Atlantic Records, to run WBR in defiance of Morgado, who had a different candidate in mind and Levin also reduced Morgado's power to oversee Warner's mail-order record club division and its international operations. Morris then brought in Sylvia Rhone and Seymour Stein to stabilize Elektra, settled the Metallica lawsuit and persuaded Levin to purchase an additional 25% of Interscope, although this initiative proved short-lived.
The power struggle between Morgado and Morris reached a dramatic climax in May 1995 when Morgado was asked to resign by Gerald Levin, following a welter of complaints from executives at the three major Warner Music labels, who said that Morgado was undermining Morris's authority and damaging Warner's reputation among performers. Morgado was immediately replaced by HBO chairman Michael J. Fuchs, but the corporate upheavals did not end there; in late June 1995 Fuchs abruptly dismissed Doug Morris, saying that Morris had been "leading a campaign to destabilize Warner Music in an effort to seize control of the company". As Morris's strongest ally, Danny Goldberg was also under threat; he was initially told that he could stay on as President of WBR as long as he refrained from office politics and concentrate on the day-to-day management of the label, but he resigned as President of Warner Bros. Records soon after to pursue "other interests", and was replaced by WBR vice-chairman Russ Thyret.
That August saw yet another resignation, that of Mel Lewinter, then president and COO of Warner Music's domestic music operations; while Lewinter being an ally of Morris played a role in the former's ouster, speculation ran rampant about it also having to do with an internal investigation into improper sales practices (involving tens of thousands of CDs being stolen from Atlantic by sales manager Nick Maria, then being secretly resold to retailers; the profits were divided between the retailers and the Atlantic employees involved), which had earlier caused 10 executives (including Maria) to lose their jobs amid the investigation. Lewinter subsequently sued Warner Music for wrongful termination.
Despite early success with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, and Morris's decision to increase Warner's stake to 50%, by the mid-1990s Interscope Records was being seen as a liability for the Warner group. Time Warner's board and investors had already been bruised by the damaging 1992 "Cop Killer" controversy and now they were faced with renewed criticism about the gangsta rap genre, in which Interscope's associate imprint Death Row Records was a key label. In mid-1995, Time Warner refused to distribute the Interscope album Dogg Food by Tha Dogg Pound, forcing the label to seek outside distribution, and late in the year TW sold its stake in Death Row back to co-owners Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field and soon after it sold off its share in Interscope to MCA Music Entertainment.
The upheaval at Warner was beneficial to its rivals, who picked up valuable executives who had left Warner. Goldberg moved over to Mercury Records; Morris joined MCA Music Entertainment Group and led its reorganization into Universal Music Group, now the world's largest record company. In November 1995, Fuchs was himself sacked by Levin, leaving the company with a reported US$60 million "golden parachute", and Time Warner co-chairmen Robert A. Daly and Terry Semel took over the running of the music division.
In 1998, Seagram boss Edgar Bronfman Jr. held talks aimed at merging Seagram's Universal Music, headed by Morris, with the venerable British recording company EMI, but the discussions came to nothing; Bronfman then oversaw Universal's takeover by Vivendi. WEA meanwhile continued to expand its publishing empire, buying a 90% stake in the Italian recording and music publishing group Nuova Fonit Cetra.
Also in 1998, Time Warner Entertainment bought the remaining 50% of the Rhino Records label they did not own. The Rhino Records retail store in Los Angeles was not included. Rhino then began reissuing the back catalogues of the Warner/Reprise and Elektra/Asylum labels. In 1999, Rhino launched Rhino Handmade, which released limited-edition reissues of lesser-known but still-significant recordings from the WEA labels.
=== 2000s ===
In 2000, Time Warner Entertainment merged with leading American internet service provider AOL to create AOL Time Warner, a new business entity. The new conglomerate again tried (and failed) to acquire EMI, and subsequent discussions about the takeover of BMG stalled, with Bertelsmann eventually offloading BMG into a joint venture with Sony. In 2002, AOL Time Warner further consolidated its hold over the publishing industry, buying 50% of music publisher Deston Songs from Edel AG. By the early 2000s, however, the effects of the dot-com crash had eroded AOL's profits and stock value, and with expected synergies between AOL and Time Warner never materializing, the Time Warner board sidelined its under-performing partner by dropping AOL from its business name and reverting to TimeWarner.
As a result of the CD price fixing issue, a settlement was reached in 2002 involving the music publishers and distributors Sony Music, WMG, Bertelsmann Music Group, EMI Music, and Universal Music. In restitution for price fixing they agreed to pay a $67.4 million fine and distribute $75.7 million in CDs to public and non-profit groups but admitted no wrongdoing.
Looking to reduce its debt load from the AOL merger, Time Warner — the corporate successor to the original Time Warner Entertainment— sold Warner Music Group in 2004 to a group of investors led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. for US$2.6 billion. This spinoff was completed on February 27, 2004. In the 2004 transition to independent ownership, WMG hired record industry heavyweight Lyor Cohen from Universal Music Group (the result of the merger between the PolyGram and MCA label families) to attempt to reduce cost and increase performance. Time Warner (now Warner Bros. Discovery) no longer retains any ownership in WMG, though it had the option to reacquire up to 20% of WMG for three years following the closing of the transaction. WMG did, however, have a royalty-free license to use the Warner Bros. shield for 15 years, as well as the old Warner Communications logo as WMG's main logo. With the expiration of the royalty-free license in May 2019, Warner Bros. Records (which became separate from the eponymous film studio after the spinoff) was renamed Warner Records and a new logo was introduced to replace the WB shield.
No longer a subsidiary of Time Warner, WMG began cutting costs by offloading loss-making or low-earning divisions. Like its rival EMI, Warner reacted to the growth of the digital music market by making a historic change, moving out of record production by closing or selling off disc-pressing plants, particularly in territories such as the US and the Netherlands, where production costs are high. The US manufacturing operations were sold to Cinram in 2003, before the purchase from Time Warner.
In 2005, the Miami-based Warner Bros. Publications, which printed and distributed a broad selection of sheet music, books, educational material, orchestrations, arrangements and tutorials, was sold to Alfred Music Publishing, although the sale excluded the print music business of WMG's Word Music (church hymnals, choral music and associated instrumental music).
On May 3, 2006, WMG apparently rejected a buyout offer from EMI. Then WMG offered to buy EMI and it also rejected the offer. In August 2007, EMI was purchased by Terra Firma Capital Partners. Talk of a possible WMG acquisition of EMI was fanned once again in 2009 after WMG executed a bond offering for $1.1 billion, which brought to light WMG's relatively strong financial position, which was contrasted with the weakened and debt-laden state of EMI. The same year WMG acquired Rykodisc and Roadrunner Records.
In September 2006, after pulling its content from the service earlier in the year, WMG entered into a new licensing deal with the video streaming service YouTube. Under the deal, WMG would be able to handle advertising sales for its artists' music videos on the service (as well as monetize user-created videos that include WMG-owned recordings) and partake in revenue sharing with YouTube, and also collaborate with YouTube on building a "premium" user experience for its content and associated channels.
On December 27, 2007, Warner announced that it would sell digital music without digital rights management through AmazonMP3, making it the third major label to do so. In 2008, The New York Times reported that WMG's Atlantic Records became the first major record label to generate more than half of its music sales in the U.S. from digital products. In 2010, Fast Company magazine detailed the company's transformation efforts in its recorded music division, where it has redefined the relationships it has with artists and diversified its revenue streams through its expansion into growing areas of the music business.
In 2008, WMG and several other major labels made investments in the new music streaming service Spotify.
Due to licensing deal negotiations between Google and WMG in 2008, music video content licensed by WMG was removed from YouTube. In 2009, it was announced that the companies had reached a deal, and videos would be re-added to YouTube. As of 2017, WMG had extended its deal with YouTube.
In 2009, Warner Music took over its South-East Asian and Korean distribution of EMI audio and video products, including newer domestic releases, which was announced in September 2008. The two companies already enjoyed a successful partnership in India, the Middle East and North Africa, where EMI marketed and distributed Warner Music's physical product from 2005.
=== 2010s ===
WMG formed a partnership with MTV Networks in June 2010 that allowed MTVN to exclusively sell ads on WMG's premium content; in turn, views of WMG videos would be counted as views for MTVN.
In May 2011, WMG announced its sale to Access Industries, a conglomerate controlled by Soviet-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, for US$3.3 billion in cash. The price represented $8.25 a share; a 34% premium over the six-month-before average price, and a 4% premium over the day-before price. Overall, this was a drop of over 70% since 2007. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal ended a three-month sale process in which as many as 10 bidders, including Los Angeles-based brothers Tom and Alec Gores, and Sony Corp. vied for the company. Blavatnik was a shareholder and former board member of WMG at the time of the purchase announcement. The purchase was completed on July 20, 2011, and the company became private. In August 2011, Stephen Cooper became CEO of Warner Music Group replacing Edgar Bronfman Jr., who became chairman of the company. Bronfman Jr. stepped down as chairman of the company on January 31, 2012.
==== EMI label purchase and divestment ====
In 2013, Warner acquired longtime EMI division Parlophone, along with EMI Classics and some regional EMI operations, from UMG for £487 million (around $764.54 million US). This news came after reports that WMG was in talks to acquire EMI's recorded music business, which was eventually bought by Universal. The European Commission approved the sale in May 2013, and Warner closed the acquisition on July 1. The EMI Classics roster was absorbed into Warner Classics and the Virgin Classics roster was absorbed into the revived Erato Records. In November 2013, WMG paid Universal an additional €30 million for Parlophone, following an arbitration process in respect to the original sale price.
In order to accommodate a deal made with IMPALA and the Merlin Network when it acquired Parlophone, WMG agreed to offload over $200 million worth in catalogues to various independent labels. The labels had until February 28, 2014, to inform Warner Music of which artist catalogues they were interested in acquiring, and said artists had to approve of the divestments. By March 2015, over 140 independent labels had placed bids on over 11,000 Warner Music artists valuing $6 billion, far higher than expectations. In March 2016, Curb Records acquired Warner Music's 80% share of Word Entertainment, though WMG would continue to distribute the label. In April 2016, the first confirmed sale of a Warner Music artist was the back catalogue of English band Radiohead to XL Recordings. As of the end of May 2016, WMG had sold the catalogue of Chrysalis Records to Blue Raincoat Music, as well as the catalogues of ten other artists, including Everything But the Girl, Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, and Lucinda Williams. In September 2016, Nettwerk acquired the rights to albums by Guster and Airbourne from Warner Music.
In April 2017, Warner Music agreed to sell the independent distributor Zebralution back to its founders. On June 1, 2017, WMG divested additional artists, including the catalogues of Hot Chip and Buzzcocks to Domino Recording Company; Tom Waits to Anti-; and Howard Jones, Dinosaur Jr., and Kim Wilde to Cherry Red Records. Cosmos Music Group acquired the rights to Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson, while Neil Finn's catalogue moved to his Lester Records label. On July 6, 2017, Because Music acquired 10 French artists, most of London Records' back catalogue, and The Beta Band, while Concord Music acquired albums by Jewel, Sérgio Mendes, R.E.M., the Traveling Wilburys, and several rock, blues, and jazz artists. In August 2017, The Lemonheads and The Groundhogs were transferred to Fire Records. In October 2017, Strut Records acquired albums by Patrice Rushen and Miriam Makeba.
In November 2017, T.I.'s catalogue was sold to Cinq Music Group. Woah Dad! (and later Round Hill Music) acquired over 20 catalogues, including those of Ziggy Marley, Estelle, and several Swedish artists. while Believe Digital acquired the rights to EMF and several French artists. In April 2018, RT Industries acquired seven catalogues from WMG, including Sugar Ray and Fat Joe. In May 2018, New State Music acquired the catalogues of Paul Oakenfold and Dirty Vegas. Other winning bidders included The Echo Label (Thomas Dolby, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Supergrass), Nature Sounds (Roy Ayers), The state51 Conspiracy (Donovan), PIAS Recordings (Failure), Evolution Music Group (Mr. Big), Playground Music Scandinavia (Olle Adolphson), Metal Blade Records (King Diamond), Snapper Music (Mansun) and its sublabel Kscope (Porcupine Tree), Phoenix Music International (Lulu), Kobalt Label Services (HIM), and Tommy Boy Music (which reclaimed its pre-2002 catalogue and the rights to Brand Nubian, Handsome Boy Modeling School's White People, Grand Puba, and Club Nouveau). All the labels had to complete their deals by September 30, 2017; though a few announcements came after that date.
==== Expansion ====
In October 2012, WMG became one of the last major labels to sign with Google's music service. It was also one of the last labels to reach an agreement with Spotify.
In June 2013, WMG expanded into Russia by acquiring Gala Records, best known as the longtime distributor of EMI. Later that year, Warner Music Russia agreed to locally distribute releases by Disney Music Group and Sony Music. Later that year, WMG closed a deal with Clear Channel Media that saw its artists paid for terrestrial radio play for the first time. Clear Channel would get preferential rates for streaming songs through its iHeartRadio service and other online platforms. It was believed that the agreement would put pressure on other big labels, including Sony and Universal, to reach similar deals.
In 2017, WMG formed a TV and film division, Warner Music Entertainment, led by former MGM executive Charlie Cohen. In March 2020, it hired Kate Shepherd, the former head of entertainment at Ridley Scott Creative Group. This division paired with Imagine Entertainment on a Nat Geo limited series Genius: Aretha, which led to a co-producing and co-financing agreement for a music slate in July 2020.
In February 2022, Warner announced acquisition of controlling interest in a South India based distribution label Divo Music.
==== International labels ====
On November 14, 2013, it was determined that Warner Music's releases in the Middle East would be distributed by Universal Music as a result of the integration of EMI's branch in said region. Sony Music India would assume distribution of WMG in India, Sri Lanka, and rest of SAARC countries except Bangladesh. In December 2013, Warner Music began operating the wholly owned South African subsidiary after acquiring the Gallo's stakes that it did not own. In April 2014, WMG announced that it had acquired Chinese record label Gold Typhoon.
In April 2016, WMG agreed to distribute most of BMG Rights Management's catalogue worldwide through Warner's ADA division, though a few frontline releases would remain distributed by other labels.
Around the end of May 2016, WMG acquired the Indonesian label PT Indo Semar Sakti. Warner Music UK launched The Firepit in May 2016, a creative content division, innovation centre and recording studio located at their United Kingdom headquarters in London. On June 2, 2016, Warner Music acquired Swedish compilation label X5 Music Group.
In September 2017, one week after acquiring American rock label Artery Recordings, WMG acquired the Dutch EDM label Spinnin' Records. In February 2018, Warner Music launched a division in the Middle East, based in Beirut, Lebanon. Warner Music Middle East will cover 17 markets across North Africa and the Middle East.
In January 2019, WMG signed a Turkish distribution deal with Doğan Media Group, which will represent the record company for physical and digital releases.
In May 2019, Warner Music Finland acquired the hip-hop label Monsp Records. In July 2019, Warner Music Slovakia acquired Forza Music, which owned the former state-owned label Opus Records. In February 2021, WMG purchased a minority stake in the Saudi Arabian record label Rotana Records.
==== Elektra Music Group and further investments ====
In July 2017, Warner Music acquired the concert discovery website Songkick. In May, news media reported that Warner Music led an investment round in Hooch, a popular subscription-lifestyle application including blockchain-based payment technology.
Announced on June 18, 2018, but effective on October 1, 2018, Warner Music Group launched Elektra Music Group as a stand-alone staffed music company with the labels Elektra Records, Fueled By Ramen, Low Country Sound, Black Cement, and Roadrunner Records. A handful of major artists would transfer from Atlantic. This returned the group back to the Warner-Elektra-Atlantic (WEA) triad that had marked the original company organization for decades.
On August 2, 2018, Warner Music announced that it acquired Uproxx Media Group and its properties (except for BroBible, which will continue to publish independently) for an undisclosed sum, although Uproxx has raised around $43m (£33m) from previous investment, which provides some sense of the firm's valuation. In September 2018, WMG acquired German merchandise retailer EMP Merchandising from Sycamore Partners for $180 million.
In October 2018, Warner Music Group announced the launch of the WMG Boost seed venture fund. Several labels of Warner Music moved into the Los Angeles Arts District in 2019 where the company had purchased a former Ford Motor Company assembly plant.
=== 2020s ===
On March 9, 2020, WMG expanded to India, creating the Warner Music India unit based in Mumbai and handling business in other countries for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Jay Mehta (former executive of Sony Music India) would take change of the unit as the managing director in April. Before the division's foundation, Warner's releases were distributed in the country by EMI/Virgin Records (India) Pvt., and by Sony Music India since EMI's breakup.
In August 2020, Warner Music acquired Tel Aviv- and New York-based IMGN Media in a deal worth approximately $100 million. In September 2020, WMG acquired the online hip-hop magazine HipHopDX. In 2021, WMG invested an eight figure sum into global multiplayer gaming platform Roblox. This followed WMG artist Ava Max's live performance on the platform the previous year.
Warner Music Group had planned an IPO of current investors' stock in March 2020, but withdrew its IPO just before the March 2 kick off due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On June 3, 2020, it completed its IPO on Nasdaq, raising almost $2 billion with a valuation of $12.75 billion, making WMG once again a publicly traded company after previously going private in 2011. On June 12, 2020, Tencent announced that it had purchased 10.4% of Warner Music's Class A shares, or 1.6% of the company. Tencent already owns 10% of shares of WMG's largest competitor, Universal Music Group, which it acquired from Vivendi in March. Also, this makes Sony Music the only major music company not directly owned in any percentage by a Chinese company (it is wholly owned by the Japanese conglomerate Sony).
In December 2020, WMG signed a partnership deal with TikTok to provide music to their platform for users to use for their content.
On March 8, 2022, WMG suspended all its operations in Russia following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In January 2023, Stephen Cooper was succeeded by Robert Kyncl as CEO of WMG.
In July 2023, Warner Music Group formed a partnership with Canva, the graphic design platform, to add commercial music to Canva's asset library and enable its customers to insert music clips to their designs. Also in July 2023, WMG made a music-licensing deal with TikTok which included licensing the Warner Recorded Music and Warner Chappell Music to the app, TikTok Music and TikTok's Commercial Music Library.
In September 2023, WMG opened a new creative hub in Berlin. Later in October 2023, Warner Music Group launched a new creative hub in Amsterdam to house Benelux units and Spinnin' Records.
In September 2025, the "No Music For Genocide" boycott initiative urged Warner Music Group to suspend all of its operations in Israel in protest of the genocide in Gaza.
In November 2025, WMG launched a joint venture with artificial intelligence music venture, Suno. As part of the settlement agreement struck between the two firms, Warner will let users create AI-generated music on Suno using the voices, names and likeness of artists who opt-in to the programme.
== Arts Music ==
On June 6, 2017, Warner Music Group launched a new division, Arts Music, Inc., which transcends the pop mainstream and consists of labels for classical, jazz, children's music, and music scores from films/movies and musical theaters. The division was placed under president Kevin Gore, who reported to Eliah Seton, President of ADA Worldwide, WMG's independent distribution and services arm. At the same time, Warner Classics, including the Erato label, while remaining based in Paris and continuing under president Alain Lanceron, were transferred into the new division. Also, a joint venture with Sh-K-Boom/Ghostlight Records, the theatrical music company, was formed, with founder/president Kurt Deutsch being named as senior vice president of theatrical and catalog development for Warner/Chappell Music.
In November 2018, Arts Music signed a multi-year deal with Sesame Workshop to revive the Sesame Street Records label starting early 2019. In June 2019, WMG purchased First Night Record, a musical-theater cast recording company, and placed the company within Arts Music. On June 24, 2019, the division launched the licensed Cloudco Entertainment label with the release of the current Holly Hobbie theme song as a part of a multi-season deal. Build-A-Bear Workshop teamed up with Arts Music and Warner Chappell Music in July 2019 to partner on the Build-A-Bear label, with Patrick Hughes and Harvey Russell.
On May 1, 2020, toy manufacturer and entertainment company, Mattel, struck an agreement with Arts Music to become the exclusive distributor of its music catalogue. The agreement at the time was to make available hundreds of "never-before-released" and newly-released albums and singles for existing Mattel properties/brands for digital distribution, beginning with the launch of Thomas & Friends' birthday album a week later on May 8. As a result, the soundtrack album to Monster High: Boo York, Boo York and other Mattel albums previously released under Universal Music Group through its film distribution agreement with Universal Pictures would be re-released under the pseudonym label: Mattel–Arts Music by ADA Worldwide.
== Music publishing ==
Warner Chappell Music dates back to 1811 and the creation of Chappell & Company, a sheet music and instrument merchant in London. In 1929, Jack L. Warner, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Inc., founded Music Publishers Holding Company (MPHC) to acquire music copyrights as a means of providing inexpensive music for films and, in 1987, Warner Bros.' corporate parent, Warner Communications, acquired Chappell & Company from PolyGram. Its printed music operation, Warner Bros. Publications, was sold to Alfred Music on June 1, 2005.
Among the historic compositions of which the publishing rights are controlled by WMG are the works of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. In the 1930s and 1940s, Chappell Music also ran a profitable orchestration division for Broadway musicals, with house arrangers of the caliber of Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Ted Royal and Hans Spialek. Between them they had orchestrated about 90% of the productions seen up to late 1941. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr | Niels Bohr | Niels Henrik David Bohr (; Danish: [ˈne̝ls ˈpoɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. He was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.
Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. The notion of complementarity dominated Bohr's thinking in both science and philosophy.
Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, which opened in 1920. Bohr mentored and collaborated with physicists including Hans Kramers, Oskar Klein, George de Hevesy, and Werner Heisenberg. He predicted the properties of a new zirconium-like element, which was named hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen, where it was discovered. Later, the synthetic element bohrium was named after him because of his groundbreaking work on the structure of atoms.
During the 1930s, Bohr helped refugees from Nazism. After Denmark was occupied by the Germans, he met with Heisenberg, who had become the head of the German nuclear weapon project. In September 1943 word reached Bohr that he was about to be arrested by the Germans, so he fled to Sweden. From there, he was flown to Britain, where he joined the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons project, and was part of the British mission to the Manhattan Project. After the war, Bohr called for international cooperation on nuclear energy. He was involved with the establishment of CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission and became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957. In 1999, he was named the fourth greatest physicist of all time.
== Early life and education ==
Niels Henrik David Bohr was born on 7 October 1885 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the second of three children of Christian Bohr, Professor of Physiology at the University of Copenhagen, and Ellen Adler, the daughter of Danish Jewish banker David Baruch Adler. He had an elder sister, Jenny, and a younger brother Harald. Jenny became a teacher, while Harald became a mathematician and footballer who played for the Danish national team at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London. Niels was a passionate footballer as well, and the two brothers played several matches for the Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub (Academic Football Club), with Niels as goalkeeper.
Bohr was educated at Gammelholm Latin School, starting when he was seven. In 1903, Bohr enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Copenhagen. His major was physics, which he studied under Christian Christiansen, the university's only professor of physics at that time. He also studied astronomy and mathematics under Thorvald Thiele, and philosophy under Harald Høffding, a friend of his father.
In 1905, a gold medal competition was sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters to investigate a method for measuring the surface tension of liquids that had been proposed by Lord Rayleigh in 1879. This involved measuring the frequency of oscillation of the radius of a water jet. Bohr conducted a series of experiments using his father's laboratory in the university; the university itself had no physics laboratory. To complete his experiments, he had to make his own glassware, creating test tubes with the required elliptical cross-sections. He went beyond the original task, incorporating improvements into both Rayleigh's theory and his method, by taking into account the viscosity of the water, and by working with finite amplitudes instead of just infinitesimal ones. His essay, which he submitted at the last minute, won the prize. He later submitted an improved version of the paper to the Royal Society in London for publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Harald became the first of the two Bohr brothers to earn a master's degree, which he earned for mathematics in April 1909. Niels took another 9 months to earn his for the electron theory of metals, a topic assigned by his supervisor, Christiansen. Bohr subsequently elaborated his master's thesis into his much-larger Ph.D. thesis. He surveyed the literature on the subject, settling on a model developed by Paul Drude and elaborated by Hendrik Lorentz, in which the electrons in a metal are considered to behave like a gas. Bohr extended Lorentz's model, but was still unable to account for phenomena like the Hall effect, and concluded that electron theory could not fully explain the magnetic properties of metals. The thesis was accepted in April 1911, and Bohr conducted his formal defence on 13 May. Harald had received his doctorate the previous year. Bohr's thesis was groundbreaking, but attracted little interest outside Scandinavia because it was written in Danish, a Copenhagen University requirement at the time. In 1921, the Dutch physicist Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen would independently derive a theorem in Bohr's thesis that is today known as the Bohr–Van Leeuwen theorem.
== Physics ==
=== Bohr model ===
In September 1911, Bohr, supported by a fellowship from the Carlsberg Foundation, travelled to England, where most of the theoretical work on the structure of atoms and molecules was being done. He met J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory and Trinity College, Cambridge. He attended lectures on electromagnetism given by James Jeans and Joseph Larmor, and did some research on cathode rays, but failed to impress Thomson. He had more success with younger physicists like the Australian William Lawrence Bragg, and New Zealand's Ernest Rutherford, whose 1911 small central nucleus Rutherford model of the atom had challenged Thomson's 1904 plum pudding model. Bohr received an invitation from Rutherford to conduct post-doctoral work at Victoria University of Manchester, where Bohr met George de Hevesy and Charles Galton Darwin (whom Bohr referred to as "the grandson of the real Darwin").
Bohr returned to Denmark in July 1912 for his wedding, and travelled around England and Scotland on his honeymoon. On his return, he became a Privatdocent at the University of Copenhagen, giving lectures on thermodynamics. Martin Knudsen put Bohr's name forward for a docent, which was approved in July 1913, and Bohr then began teaching medical students. His three papers, which later became famous as "the trilogy", were published in Philosophical Magazine in July, September and November of that year. He adapted Rutherford's nuclear structure to Max Planck's quantum theory and so created his Bohr model of the atom.
Planetary models of atoms were not new, but Bohr's treatment was. Taking the 1912 paper by Darwin on the role of electrons in the interaction of alpha particles with a nucleus as his starting point, he advanced the theory of electrons travelling in orbits of quantised "stationary states" around the atom's nucleus in order to stabilise the atom, but it wasn't until his 1921 paper that he showed that the chemical properties of each element were largely determined by the number of electrons in the outer orbits of its atoms. He introduced the idea that an electron could drop from a higher-energy orbit to a lower one, in the process emitting a quantum of discrete energy. This became a basis for what is now known as the old quantum theory.
In 1885, Johann Balmer had come up with his Balmer series to describe the visible spectral lines of a hydrogen atom:
1
λ
=
R
H
(
1
2
2
−
1
n
2
)
for
n
=
3
,
4
,
5
,
.
.
.
{\displaystyle {\frac {1}{\lambda }}=R_{\mathrm {H} }\left({\frac {1}{2^{2}}}-{\frac {1}{n^{2}}}\right)\quad {\text{for}}\ n=3,4,5,...}
where λ is the wavelength of the absorbed or emitted light and RH is the Rydberg constant. Balmer's formula was corroborated by the discovery of additional spectral lines, but for thirty years, no one could explain why it worked. In the first paper of his trilogy, Bohr was able to derive it from his model:
R
Z
=
2
π
2
m
e
Z
2
e
4
h
3
{\displaystyle R_{Z}={2\pi ^{2}m_{e}Z^{2}e^{4} \over h^{3}}}
where me is the electron's mass, e is its charge, h is the Planck constant and Z is the atom's atomic number (1 for hydrogen).
The model's first hurdle was the Pickering series, lines that did not fit Balmer's formula. When challenged on this by Alfred Fowler, Bohr replied that they were caused by ionised helium, helium atoms with only one electron. The Bohr model was found to work for such ions. Many older physicists, like Thomson, Rayleigh and Hendrik Lorentz, did not like the trilogy, but the younger generation, including Rutherford, David Hilbert, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Max Born and Arnold Sommerfeld saw it as a breakthrough. Einstein called Bohr's model "the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought." The trilogy's acceptance was entirely due to its ability to explain phenomena that stymied other models, and to predict results that were subsequently verified by experiments. Today, the Bohr model of the atom has been superseded, but is still the best known model of the atom, as it often appears in high school physics and chemistry texts.
Bohr did not enjoy teaching medical students. He later admitted that he was not a good lecturer, because he needed a balance between clarity and truth, between "Klarheit und Wahrheit". He decided to return to Manchester, where Rutherford had offered him a job as a reader in place of Darwin, whose tenure had expired. Bohr accepted. He took a leave of absence from the University of Copenhagen, which he started by taking a holiday in Tyrol with his brother Harald and aunt Hanna Adler. There, he visited the University of Göttingen and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he met Sommerfeld and conducted seminars on the trilogy. The First World War broke out while they were in Tyrol, greatly complicating the trip back to Denmark and Bohr's subsequent voyage with Margrethe to England, where he arrived in October 1914. They stayed until July 1916, by which time he had been appointed to the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, a position created especially for him. His docentship was abolished at the same time, so he still had to teach physics to medical students. New professors were formally introduced to King Christian X, who expressed his delight at meeting such a famous football player.
=== Institute of Theoretical Physics ===
In April 1917, Bohr began a campaign to establish an Institute of Theoretical Physics. He gained the support of the Danish government and the Carlsberg Foundation, and sizeable contributions were also made by industry and private donors, many of them Jewish. Legislation establishing the institute was passed in November 1918. Now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, it opened on 3 March 1921, with Bohr as its director. His family moved into an apartment on the first floor. Bohr's institute served as a focal point for researchers into quantum mechanics and related subjects in the 1920s and 1930s, when most of the world's best-known theoretical physicists spent some time in his company. Early arrivals included Hans Kramers from the Netherlands, Oskar Klein from Sweden, George de Hevesy from Hungary, Wojciech Rubinowicz from Poland, and Svein Rosseland from Norway. Bohr became widely appreciated as their congenial host and eminent colleague. Klein and Rosseland produced the institute's first publication even before it opened.
The Bohr model worked well for hydrogen and ionized single-electron helium, which impressed Einstein but could not explain more complex elements. By 1919, Bohr was moving away from the idea that electrons orbited the nucleus and developed heuristics to describe them. The rare-earth elements posed a particular classification problem for chemists because they were so chemically similar. An important development came in 1924 with Wolfgang Pauli's discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle, which put Bohr's models on a firm theoretical footing. Bohr was then able to declare that the as-yet-undiscovered element 72 was not a rare-earth element but an element with chemical properties similar to those of zirconium. (Elements had been predicted and discovered since 1871 by chemical properties), and Bohr was immediately challenged by the French chemist Georges Urbain, who claimed to have discovered a rare-earth element 72, which he called "celtium". At the Institute in Copenhagen, Dirk Coster and George de Hevesy took up the challenge of proving Bohr right and Urbain wrong. Starting with a clear idea of the chemical properties of the unknown element greatly simplified the search process. They went through samples from Copenhagen's Museum of Mineralogy looking for a zirconium-like element and soon found it. The element, which they named hafnium (hafnia being the Latin name for Copenhagen), turned out to be more common than gold.
The Bohr Festival (German: Bohrfestspiele) was a series of seven lectures given by Bohr from 12 to 22 June 1922 at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Göttingen. These were the Wolfskehl Lectures, funded by the Wolfskehl Foundation. Taking place in the fortnight leading up to the Göttingen International Handel Festival, it became known as the Bohr Festival. In 1991, Friedrich Hund suggested that James Franck was responsible for the comparison. In the lectures, Bohr outlined the current development of the Bohr-Sommerfeld theory, remarking "how incomplete and uncertain everything still is".
In 1922, Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them". The award thus recognised both the trilogy and his early leading work in the emerging field of quantum mechanics. For his Nobel lecture, Bohr gave his audience a comprehensive survey of what was then known about the structure of the atom, including the correspondence principle, which he had formulated. This states that the behaviour of systems described by quantum theory reproduces classical physics in the limit of large quantum numbers.
The discovery of Compton scattering by Arthur Holly Compton in 1923 convinced most physicists that light was composed of photons and that energy and momentum were conserved in collisions between electrons and photons. In 1924, Bohr, Kramers, and John C. Slater, an American physicist working at the Institute in Copenhagen, proposed the Bohr–Kramers–Slater theory (BKS). It was more of a program than a full physical theory, as the ideas it developed were not worked out quantitatively. The BKS theory became the final attempt at understanding the interaction of matter and electromagnetic radiation on the basis of the old quantum theory, in which quantum phenomena were treated by imposing quantum restrictions on a classical wave description of the electromagnetic field.
Modelling atomic behaviour under incident electromagnetic radiation using "virtual oscillators" at the absorption and emission frequencies, rather than the (different) apparent frequencies of the Bohr orbits, led Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Kramers to explore different mathematical models. They led to the development of matrix mechanics, the first form of modern quantum mechanics. The BKS theory also generated discussion of, and renewed attention to, difficulties in the foundations of the old quantum theory. The most provocative element of BKS – that momentum and energy would not necessarily be conserved in each interaction, but only statistically – was soon shown to be in conflict with experiments conducted by Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger. In light of these results, Bohr informed Darwin that "there is nothing else to do than to give our revolutionary efforts as honourable a funeral as possible".
=== Quantum mechanics ===
The introduction of spin by George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit in November 1925 was a milestone. The next month, Bohr travelled to Leiden to attend celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Hendrick Lorentz receiving his doctorate. When his train stopped in Hamburg, he was met by Wolfgang Pauli and Otto Stern, who asked for his opinion of the spin theory. Bohr pointed out that he had concerns about the interaction between electrons and magnetic fields. When he arrived in Leiden, Paul Ehrenfest and Albert Einstein informed Bohr that Einstein had resolved this problem using relativity. Bohr then had Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit incorporate this into their paper. Thus, when he met Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan in Göttingen on the way back, he had become, in his own words, "a prophet of the electron magnet gospel".
Heisenberg first came to Copenhagen in 1924, then returned to Göttingen in June 1925, shortly thereafter developing the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. When he showed his results to Max Born in Göttingen, Born realised that they could best be expressed using matrices. This work attracted the attention of the British physicist Paul Dirac, who came to Copenhagen for six months in September 1926. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger also visited in 1926. His attempt at explaining quantum physics in classical terms using wave mechanics impressed Bohr, who believed it contributed "so much to mathematical clarity and simplicity that it represents a gigantic advance over all previous forms of quantum mechanics".
When Kramers left the institute in 1926 to take up a chair as professor of theoretical physics at the Utrecht University, Bohr arranged for Heisenberg to return and take Kramers's place as a lektor at the University of Copenhagen. Heisenberg worked in Copenhagen as a university lecturer and assistant to Bohr from 1926 to 1927.
Bohr became convinced that light behaved like both waves and particles and, in 1927, experiments confirmed the de Broglie hypothesis that matter (like electrons) also behaved like waves. He conceived the philosophical principle of complementarity: that items could have apparently mutually exclusive properties, such as being a wave or a stream of particles, depending on the experimental framework. He felt that it was not fully understood by professional philosophers.
In February 1927, Heisenberg developed the first version of the uncertainty principle, presenting it using a thought experiment where an electron was observed through a gamma-ray microscope. Bohr was dissatisfied with Heisenberg's argument, since it required only that a measurement disturb properties that already existed, rather than the more radical idea that the electron's properties could not be discussed at all apart from the context they were measured in. In a paper presented at the Como Conference in September 1927, Bohr emphasised that Heisenberg's uncertainty relations could be derived from classical considerations about the resolving power of optical instruments. Understanding the true meaning of complementarity would, Bohr believed, require "closer investigation". Einstein preferred the determinism of classical physics over the probabilistic new quantum physics to which he himself had contributed. Philosophical issues that arose from the novel aspects of quantum mechanics became widely celebrated subjects of discussion. Einstein and Bohr had good-natured arguments over such issues throughout their lives.
In 1914, Carl Jacobsen, the heir to Carlsberg breweries, bequeathed his mansion (the Carlsberg Honorary Residence, currently known as Carlsberg Academy) to be used for life by the Dane who had made the most prominent contribution to science, literature or the arts, as an honorary residence (Danish: Æresbolig). Harald Høffding had been the first occupant, and upon his death in July 1931, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters gave Bohr occupancy. He and his family moved there in 1932. He was elected president of the Academy on 17 March 1939.
By 1929, the phenomenon of beta decay prompted Bohr to again suggest that the law of conservation of energy be abandoned, but Wolfgang Pauli's hypothetical neutrino and the subsequent 1932 discovery of the neutron provided another explanation. This prompted Bohr to create a new theory of the compound nucleus in 1936, which explained how neutrons could be captured by the nucleus. In this model, the nucleus could be deformed like a drop of liquid. He worked on this with a new collaborator, the Danish physicist Fritz Kalckar, who died suddenly in 1938.
The discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn in December 1938 (and its theoretical explanation by Lise Meitner) generated intense interest among physicists. Bohr brought the news to the United States where he opened the fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics with Fermi on 26 January 1939. When Bohr told George Placzek that this resolved all the mysteries of transuranic elements, Placzek told him that one remained: the neutron capture energies of uranium did not match those of its decay. Bohr thought about it for a few minutes and then announced to Placzek, Léon Rosenfeld and John Wheeler that "I have understood everything." Based on his liquid drop model of the nucleus, Bohr concluded that it was the uranium-235 isotope and not the more abundant uranium-238 that was primarily responsible for fission with thermal neutrons. In April 1940, John R. Dunning demonstrated that Bohr was correct. In the meantime, Bohr and Wheeler developed a theoretical treatment, which they published in a September 1939 paper on "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission".
== Philosophy ==
Heisenberg said of Bohr that he was "primarily a philosopher, not a physicist". Bohr read the 19th-century Danish Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Richard Rhodes argued in The Making of the Atomic Bomb that Bohr was influenced by Kierkegaard through Høffding. In 1909, Bohr sent his brother Kierkegaard's Stages on Life's Way as a birthday gift. In the enclosed letter, Bohr wrote, "It is the only thing I have to send home; but I do not believe that it would be very easy to find anything better ... I even think it is one of the most delightful things I have ever read." Bohr enjoyed Kierkegaard's language and literary style, but mentioned that he had some disagreement with Kierkegaard's philosophy. Some of Bohr's biographers suggested that this disagreement stemmed from Kierkegaard's advocacy of Christianity, while Bohr was an atheist.
There has been some dispute over the extent to which Kierkegaard influenced Bohr's philosophy and science. David Favrholdt argued that Kierkegaard had minimal influence over Bohr's work, taking Bohr's statement about disagreeing with Kierkegaard at face value, while Jan Faye argued that one can disagree with the content of a theory while accepting its general premises and structure.
Bohr sat on the Board of Editors of the book series World Perspectives which published a variety of books on philosophy.
=== Quantum physics ===
There has been much subsequent debate and discussion about Bohr's views and philosophy of quantum mechanics. Regarding his ontological interpretation of the quantum world, Bohr has been seen as an anti-realist, an instrumentalist, a phenomenological realist or some other kind of realist. Furthermore, though some have seen Bohr as being a subjectivist or a positivist, most philosophers agree that this is a misunderstanding of Bohr as he never argued for verificationism or for the idea that the subject had a direct impact on the outcome of a measurement.
Bohr has often been quoted saying that there is "no quantum world" but only an "abstract quantum physical description". This was not publicly said by Bohr, but rather a private statement attributed to Bohr by Aage Petersen in a reminiscence after his death. N. David Mermin recalled Victor Weisskopf declaring that Bohr wouldn't have said anything of the sort and exclaiming, "Shame on Aage Petersen for putting those ridiculous words in Bohr's mouth!"
Numerous scholars have argued that the philosophy of Immanuel Kant had a strong influence on Bohr. Like Kant, Bohr thought distinguishing between the subject's experience and the object was an important condition for attaining knowledge. This can only be done through the use of causal and spatial-temporal concepts to describe the subject's experience. Thus, according to Jan Faye, Bohr thought that it is because of "classical" concepts like "space", "position", "time", "causation", and "momentum" that one can talk about objects and their objective existence. Bohr held that basic concepts like "time" are built in to our ordinary language and that the concepts of classical physics are merely a refinement of them. Therefore, for Bohr, classical concepts need to be used to describe experiments that deal with the quantum world. Bohr writes:
[T]he account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is simply that by the word 'experiment' we refer to a situation where we can tell to others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics (APHK, p. 39).
According to Faye, there are various explanations for why Bohr believed that classical concepts were necessary for describing quantum phenomena. Faye groups explanations into five frameworks: empiricism (i.e. logical positivism); Kantianism (or Neo-Kantian models of epistemology); Pragmatism (which focus on how human beings experientially interact with atomic systems according to their needs and interests); Darwinianism (i.e. we are adapted to use classical type concepts, which Léon Rosenfeld said that we evolved to use); and Experimentalism (which focuses strictly on the function and outcome of experiments that thus must be described classically). These explanations are not mutually exclusive, and at times Bohr seems to emphasise some of these aspects while at other times he focuses on other elements.
According to Faye "Bohr thought of the atom as real. Atoms are neither heuristic nor logical constructions." However, according to Faye, he did not believe "that the quantum mechanical formalism was true in the sense that it gave us a literal ('pictorial') rather than a symbolic representation of the quantum world." Therefore, Bohr's theory of complementarity "is first and foremost a semantic and epistemological reading of quantum mechanics that carries certain ontological implications". As Faye explains, Bohr's indefinability thesis is that
[T]he truth conditions of sentences ascribing a certain kinematic or dynamic value to an atomic object are dependent on the apparatus involved, in such a way that these truth conditions have to include reference to the experimental setup as well as the actual outcome of the experiment.
Faye notes that Bohr's interpretation makes no reference to a "collapse of the wave function during measurements" (and indeed, he never mentioned this idea). Instead, Bohr "accepted the Born statistical interpretation because he believed that the ψ-function has only a symbolic meaning and does not represent anything real". Since for Bohr, the ψ-function is not a literal pictorial representation of reality, there can be no real collapse of the wavefunction.
A much debated point in recent literature is what Bohr believed about atoms and their reality and whether they are something else than what they seem to be. Some like Henry Folse argue that Bohr saw a distinction between observed phenomena and a transcendental reality. Jan Faye disagrees with this position and holds that for Bohr, the quantum formalism and complementarity was the only thing we could say about the quantum world and that "there is no further evidence in Bohr's writings indicating that Bohr would attribute intrinsic and measurement-independent state properties to atomic objects [...] in addition to the classical ones being manifested in measurement."
== World War II ==
=== Assistance to refugee scholars ===
The rise of Nazism in Germany prompted many scholars to flee their countries, either because they were Jewish or because they were political opponents of the Nazi regime. In 1933, the Rockefeller Foundation created a fund to help support refugee academics, and Bohr discussed this programme with the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Mason, in May 1933 during a visit to the United States. Bohr offered the refugees temporary jobs at the institute, provided them with financial support, arranged for them to be awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, and ultimately found them places at institutions around the world. Those that he helped included Guido Beck, Felix Bloch, James Franck, George de Hevesy, Otto Frisch, Hilde Levi, Lise Meitner, George Placzek, Eugene Rabinowitch, Stefan Rozental, Erich Ernst Schneider, Edward Teller, Arthur von Hippel and Victor Weisskopf.
In April 1940, early in the Second World War, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Denmark. To prevent the Germans from discovering Max von Laue's and James Franck's gold Nobel medals, Bohr had de Hevesy dissolve them in aqua regia. In this form, they were stored on a shelf at the Institute until after the war, when the gold was precipitated and the medals re-struck by the Nobel Foundation. Bohr's own medal had been donated to an auction to the Finnish Relief Fund, and was auctioned off in March 1940, along with the medal of August Krogh. The buyer later donated the two medals to the Danish Historical Museum in Frederiksborg Castle, where they are still kept, although Bohr's medal temporarily went to space with Andreas Mogensen on ISS Expedition 70 in 2023–2024.
Bohr kept the Institute running, but all the foreign scholars departed.
=== Meeting with Heisenberg ===
Bohr was aware of the possibility of using uranium-235 to construct an atomic bomb, referring to it in lectures in Britain and Denmark shortly before and after the war started, but he did not believe that it was technically feasible to extract a sufficient quantity of uranium-235. In September 1941, Heisenberg, who had become head of the German nuclear energy project, visited Bohr in Copenhagen. During this meeting the two men took a private moment outside, the content of which has caused much speculation, as both gave differing accounts.
According to Heisenberg, he began to address nuclear energy, morality and the war, to which Bohr seems to have reacted by terminating the conversation abruptly while not giving Heisenberg hints about his own opinions. Ivan Supek, one of Heisenberg's students and friends, claimed that the main subject of the meeting was Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who had proposed trying to persuade Bohr to mediate peace between Britain and Germany.
In 1957, Heisenberg wrote to Robert Jungk, who was then working on the book Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. Heisenberg explained that he had visited Copenhagen to communicate to Bohr the views of several German scientists, that production of a nuclear weapon was possible with great efforts, and this raised enormous responsibilities on the world's scientists on both sides. When Bohr saw Jungk's depiction in the Danish translation of the book, he drafted (but never sent) a letter to Heisenberg, stating that he deeply disagreed with Heisenberg's account of the meeting, that he recalled Heisenberg's visit as being to encourage cooperation with the inevitably victorious Nazis and that he was shocked that Germany was pursuing nuclear weapons under Heisenberg's leadership.
Michael Frayn's 1998 play Copenhagen explores what might have happened at the 1941 meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr. A television film version of the play by the BBC was first screened on 26 September 2002, with Stephen Rea as Bohr. With the subsequent release of Bohr's letters, the play has been criticised by historians as being a "grotesque oversimplification and perversion of the actual moral balance" due to adopting a pro-Heisenberg perspective.
The same meeting had previously been dramatised by the BBC's Horizon science documentary series in 1992, with Anthony Bate as Bohr, and Philip Anthony as Heisenberg. The meeting is also dramatised in the Norwegian/Danish/British miniseries The Heavy Water War.
=== Manhattan Project ===
In September 1943, word reached Bohr and his brother Harald that the Nazis considered their family to be Jewish, since their mother was Jewish, and that they were therefore in danger of being arrested. The Danish resistance helped Bohr and his wife escape by sea to Sweden on 29 September. The next day, Bohr persuaded King Gustaf V of Sweden to make public Sweden's willingness to provide asylum to Jewish refugees. On 2 October 1943, Swedish radio broadcast that Sweden was ready to offer asylum, and the mass rescue of the Danish Jews by their countrymen followed swiftly thereafter. Some historians claim that Bohr's actions led directly to the mass rescue, while others say that, though Bohr did all that he could for his countrymen, his actions were not a decisive influence on the wider events. Eventually, over 7,000 Danish Jews escaped to Sweden.
When the news of Bohr's escape reached Britain, Lord Cherwell sent a telegram to Bohr asking him to come to Britain. Bohr arrived in Scotland on 6 October in a de Havilland Mosquito operated by the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). The Mosquitos were unarmed high-speed bomber aircraft that had been converted to carry small, valuable cargoes or important passengers. By flying at high speed and high altitude, they could cross German-occupied Norway, and yet avoid German fighters. Bohr, equipped with parachute, flying suit and oxygen mask, spent the three-hour flight lying on a mattress in the aircraft's bomb bay. During the flight, Bohr did not wear his flying helmet as it was too small, and consequently did not hear the pilot's intercom instruction to turn on his oxygen supply when the aircraft climbed to high altitude to overfly Norway. He passed out from oxygen starvation and only revived when the aircraft descended to lower altitude over the North Sea. Bohr's son Aage followed his father to Britain on another flight a week later, and became his personal assistant.
Bohr was warmly received by James Chadwick and Sir John Anderson, but for security reasons Bohr was kept out of sight. He was given an apartment at St James's Palace and an office with the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons development team. Bohr was astonished at the amount of progress that had been made. Chadwick arranged for Bohr to visit the United States as a Tube Alloys consultant, with Aage as his assistant. On 8 December 1943, Bohr arrived in Washington, D.C., where he met with the director of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr. He visited Einstein and Pauli at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and went to Los Alamos in New Mexico, where the nuclear weapons were being designed. For security reasons, he went under the name of "Nicholas Baker" in the United States, while Aage became "James Baker". In May 1944 the Danish resistance newspaper De frie Danske reported that they had learned that 'the famous son of Denmark Professor Niels Bohr' in October the previous year had fled his country via Sweden to London and from there travelled to Moscow from where he could be assumed to support the war effort.
Bohr did not remain at Los Alamos, but paid a series of extended visits over the course of the next two years. Robert Oppenheimer credited Bohr with acting "as a scientific father figure to the younger men", most notably Richard Feynman. Bohr is quoted as saying, "They didn't need my help in making the atom bomb." Oppenheimer gave Bohr credit for an important contribution to the work on modulated neutron initiators. "This device remained a stubborn puzzle", Oppenheimer noted, "but in early February 1945 Niels Bohr clarified what had to be done".
Bohr recognised early that nuclear weapons would change international relations. In April 1944, he received a letter from Peter Kapitza, written some months before when Bohr was in Sweden, inviting him to come to the Soviet Union. The letter convinced Bohr that the Soviets were aware of the Anglo-American project, and would strive to catch up. He sent Kapitza a non-committal response, which he showed to the authorities in Britain before posting. Bohr met Churchill on 16 May 1944, but found that "we did not speak the same language". Churchill disagreed with the idea of openness towards the Russians to the point that he wrote in a letter: "It seems to me Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes."
Oppenheimer suggested that Bohr visit President Franklin D. Roosevelt to convince him that the Manhattan Project should be shared with the Soviets in the hope of speeding up its results. Bohr's friend, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, informed President Roosevelt about Bohr's opinions, and a meeting between them took place on 26 August 1944. Roosevelt suggested that Bohr return to the United Kingdom to try to win British approval. When Churchill and Roosevelt met at Hyde Park on 19 September 1944, they rejected the idea of informing the world about the project, and the aide-mémoire of their conversation contained a rider that "enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians".
In June 1950, Bohr addressed an "Open Letter" to the United Nations calling for international cooperation on nuclear energy. In the 1950s, after the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon test in 1949, the International Atomic Energy Agency was created along the lines of Bohr's suggestion. In 1957, he received the first ever Atoms for Peace Award.
== Later life ==
Following the ending of the war, Bohr returned to Copenhagen on 25 August 1945, and was re-elected President of the Royal Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences on 21 September. At a memorial meeting of the Academy on 17 October 1947 for King Christian X, who had died in April, the new king, Frederik IX, announced that he was conferring the Order of the Elephant on Bohr. This award was normally awarded only to royalty and heads of state, but the king said that it honoured not just Bohr personally, but Danish science. Bohr designed his own coat of arms, which featured a taijitu (symbol of yin and yang) and a motto in Latin: contraria sunt complementa, "opposites are complementary".
The Second World War demonstrated that science, and physics in particular, now required considerable financial and material resources. To avoid a brain drain to the United States, twelve European countries banded together to create CERN, a research organisation along the lines of the national laboratories in the United States, designed to undertake Big Science projects beyond the resources of any one of them alone. Questions soon arose regarding the best location for the facilities. Bohr and Kramers felt that the Institute in Copenhagen would be the ideal site. Pierre Auger, who organised the preliminary discussions, disagreed; he felt that both Bohr and his Institute were past their prime, and that Bohr's presence would overshadow others. After a long debate, Bohr pledged his support to CERN in February 1952, and Geneva was chosen as the site in October. The CERN Theory Group was based in Copenhagen until their new accommodation in Geneva was ready in 1957. Victor Weisskopf, who later became the Director General of CERN, summed up Bohr's role, saying that "there were other personalities who started and conceived the idea of CERN. The enthusiasm and ideas of the other people would not have been enough, however, if a man of his stature had not supported it."
Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries formed the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957, with Bohr as its chairman. He was also involved with the founding of the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission, and served as its first chairman from February 1956.
Bohr died of heart failure on 18 November 1962 at his home in Carlsberg, Copenhagen. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in the family plot in the Assistens Cemetery in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen, along with those of his parents, his brother Harald, and his son Christian. Years later, his wife's ashes were also interred there. On 7 October 1965, on what would have been his 80th birthday, the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen was officially renamed to what it had been called unofficially for many years: the Niels Bohr Institute.
== Family ==
In 1910, Bohr met Margrethe Nørlund, the sister of mathematician Niels Erik Nørlund. Bohr resigned his membership in the Church of Denmark on 16 April 1912, and he and Margrethe were married in a civil ceremony at the town hall in Slagelse on 1 August. Years later, his brother, Harald, similarly left the church before getting married. Bohr and Margrethe had six sons. The eldest, Christian, died in a boating accident in 1934. Another son, Harald, was severely mentally disabled, and was placed in an institution away from his family's home at the age of 4 and died of childhood meningitis six years later. Aage Bohr became a successful physicist, and in 1975 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, like his father. A son of Aage, Vilhelm A. Bohr, is a scientist affiliated with the University of Copenhagen and the National Institute on Aging in the U.S. Hans became a physician; Erik, a chemical engineer; and Ernest, a lawyer. Like his uncle Harald, Ernest Bohr became an Olympic athlete, playing field hockey for Denmark at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London.
== Recognition ==
=== Awards ===
=== Memberships ===
== Commemoration ==
The Bohr model's semicentennial was commemorated in Denmark on 21 November 1963 with a postage stamp depicting Bohr, the hydrogen atom and the formula for the difference of any two hydrogen energy levels:
h
ν
=
ϵ
2
−
ϵ
1
{\displaystyle h\nu =\epsilon _{2}-\epsilon _{1}}
. Several other countries have also issued postage stamps depicting Bohr. In 1997, the Danish National Bank began circulating the 500-krone banknote with the portrait of Bohr smoking a pipe. On 7 October 2012, Bohr's birthday was celebrated in a Google Doodle depicting the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom. An asteroid, 3948 Bohr, was named after him, as was the Bohr lunar crater, and bohrium, the chemical element with atomic number 107, in acknowledgement of his work on the structure of atoms. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_received_by_Matthew_McConaughey | List of awards and nominations received by Matthew McConaughey | Matthew McConaughey is an American actor and producer who rose to prominence with his role in the 1993 ensemble comedy film Dazed and Confused. The film was well received by critics. Since then, McConaughey has received various awards and nominations, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, two Critics' Choice Awards, an MTV Movie Award and a People’s Choice Award. He has also been nominated for five Teen Choice Awards and two Emmys.
Three years after his role in Dazed and Confused, in 1996, McConaughey played the lead role of a lawyer in the movie A Time to Kill, for which he won the MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. His next appearances—in the science fiction drama Contact (1997), alongside Jodie Foster, and the war film U-571 (2000)—garnered him two Blockbuster Entertainment Award nominations. In the early 2000s, he starred in multiple romantic comedies, including The Wedding Planner (2001) and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), for which he received four Teen Choice Award nominations. He received two more nominations and the People's Choice Award for Favorite Male Action Star for his role in the 2005 action-comedy film Sahara.
McConaughey received the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Bernie (2011) and Magic Mike (2012) and was also awarded the Critics' Choice Movie Award in the same category for the latter. He played the role of a hit man in the black comedy crime film Killer Joe (2011) for which he was awarded the Saturn Award for Best Actor. In the same year, McConaughey starred in Mud (2012), which earned him the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award. The following year, McConaughey played lead role of Ron Woodroof, a real life AIDS patient in the 1980s, in the biopic drama Dallas Buyers Club to critical acclaim. He won the Academy Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award, Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his role in the film. In 2014, he starred in the epic sci-fi Interstellar for which he received a Saturn Award for Best Actor nomination. In November of the same year, he was inducted to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. McConaughey co-produced and acted in the crime anthology television series True Detective, which earned him Lead Actor nominations for a Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics' Choice Television Award and a Golden Globe. He also received two Primetime Emmy nominations, one for his role as an actor and other for his role as an executive producer as well as a Producers Guild of America Award nomination. For his roles in the war film Free State of Jones and Gold (both 2016), he was nominated for the Women Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and the Saturn Award for Best Actor, respectively.
== Awards and nominations ==
== Other honors == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Dawn | Breaking Dawn | Breaking Dawn (stylized as breaking dawn) is the 2008 fourth novel in The Twilight Saga by American author Stephenie Meyer. Divided into three parts, the first and third sections are written from Bella Swan's perspective, and the second is written from the perspective of Jacob Black. The novel directly follows the events of the previous novel, Eclipse, as Bella and Edward Cullen get married, leaving behind a heartbroken Jacob. When Bella faces unexpected and life-threatening situations, she willingly risks her human life and possible vampire immortality.
Meyer finished an outline of the book in 2003, but developed and changed it as she wrote New Moon and Eclipse, though the main and most significant storylines remained unchanged. Little, Brown and Company took certain measures to prevent the book's contents from leaking, such as closing forums and message boards on several fansites and providing a special e-mail address for fans to send in links to leaks and spoilers online.
Breaking Dawn was released on August 2, 2008 at midnight release parties in over 4,000 bookstores throughout the US. From its initial print run of 3.7 million copies, over 1.3 million were sold in the US and 20,000 in the UK in the first 24 hours of the book's release, setting a record in first-day sales performance for the Hachette Book Group USA. The book was highly successful, selling over 6 million copies in 2008, and was the third best-selling novel of 2008 behind Twilight and New Moon.
Unlike the series' previous three entries, Breaking Dawn received mixed reviews from critics. It is also the most controversial book of the series, as adult themes and concepts are explored more directly than in its predecessors. However, the novel was awarded the British Book Award for "Children's Book of the Year". It was translated in 38 languages with rights sold to over 50 countries. The book has been adapted into a two-part movie, with the first part released on November 18, 2011, and the second part released on November 16, 2012.
== Plot summary ==
After Bella's marriage with Edward, they spend their honeymoon on Isle Esme, a private island off the coast of Brazil that Carlisle owns. Two weeks into their honeymoon, Edward and Bella have sex for the first time, and Bella becomes pregnant. Because the fetus is part-vampire, her pregnancy progresses at an accelerated rate, causing Bella severe physical and emotional distress. Bella and Edward return home to Forks, Washington.
Knowing of Bella's wish to become a vampire, Jacob is suspicious when she returns from her honeymoon and the Cullens keep her father, Charlie, from seeing her. Believing the Cullens broke their treaty not to bite another human, he advances on their home intending to kill Edward. Jacob visits the Cullen residence and seeing the state Bella is in due to her pregnancy, begs Bella to abort the fetus to save her own life, as neither Carlisle, a doctor, nor Alice who can see the future, are optimistic about Bella's prognosis.
Despite concerns that her pregnancy will be fatal, Bella refuses to terminate it, believing she can survive long enough to give birth and then be transformed into a vampire. As the wolves are telepathic, they hear Jacob's thoughts about Bella. Fearing Bella will give birth to an uncontrollable, bloodthirsty child, they decide to kill her and the fetus. Jacob accepts his bloodline as the true pack leader to break free from the alpha, Sam's control. He goes to warn the Cullens that the wolf pack plans to kill Bella. En route, Seth Clearwater, a younger pack member, also breaks away and joins Jacob. Having formed their own pack, the two discover they can no longer hear the other wolves' thoughts. They begin patrolling the Cullens' property before Leah, Seth's older sister and the lone female wolf, joins them.
Bella goes into labor and the baby begins fighting its way out of her body, inflicting life threatening injuries on Bella. In an attempt to save Bella's life Edward performs an emergency cesarean section. As Bella is dying, Edward injects his venom into her heart. Jacob, believing Bella is dead, blames her baby, Renesmee. He goes to kill Renesmee but instead imprints (an involuntary response in which a shape-shifter finds his soul mate) on her.
After her painful transformation, Bella wakes to find herself changed into a vampire. Fully recovered, she enjoys her new life and vampire abilities. Renesmee grows rapidly into a toddler and is spotted at a distance by Irina, a vampire from the Alaskan coven. Misidentifying her as an "immortal child," a human child who is turned into an uncontrollable vampire, Irina presents her allegations to the Volturi who outlawed the creation of such creatures. As the largest and most powerful vampire coven, the Volturi see Renesmee and the Cullens as a threat and plot to destroy them. Foreseeing their arrival, the Cullens gather other vampire clans from around the world to stand as witnesses and prove that Renesmee is not an immortal child upon Alice's request. Jacob's imprinting on Renesmee forged an unbreakable bond and mutual protective pact between the Cullens and the Quileute, ending the hatred between them. As local and foreign vampires arrive, the Cullen house becomes the headquarters and training ground for the assorted vampires and the Quileute wolf packs. Bella learns that she is a 'shield', meaning the gifts of other vampires do not work on her, which is why Edward and Aro cannot read her mind. Bella works with the other vampires to improve her skill and shield people other than herself.
Upon confronting the gathered Cullen allies and witnesses, the Volturi discover that they were misinformed on Renesmee's identity. The Volturi execute Irina in an attempt to instigate a full battle but are unsuccessful. They bring up the Cullens' pact with the Quileute wolves and the uncertainty of Renesmee's future in an effort to further provoke hostilities, naming her as a threat to the secret existence of vampires. Alice and Jasper, who left prior to the gathering of the Cullen's allies, return with a Mapuche called Nahuel, a 150-year-old vampire-human hybrid like Renesmee. Alongside him is his biological aunt, Huilen, who explains that her sister fell in love with a vampire and became pregnant with his child, but died in childbirth. When Nahuel was born, he bit Huilen, turning her into a vampire. With Nahuel having proved that hybrids pose no threat to the existence of vampires, the Volturi agree to leave the Cullens alone. The Cullens and their allies leave in peace, realizing that the Volturi may one day return. While alone with Edward, Bella lowers her mental shield, allowing Edward to read her mind for the first time, sharing her thoughts and feelings for him.
== Background ==
=== Development ===
Originally, Meyer wrote a book titled Forever Dawn, which was a direct sequel to Twilight. While the basic storyline remained the same, Forever Dawn was narrated completely from Bella's point of view, the werewolves and Jacob were "only sketchily developed", Victoria and Laurent were both alive, and there was an epilogue. Meyer went on to say that she "may post some extras someday if I ever have time to go back through the Forever Dawn manuscript—it's just as long as Breaking Dawn."
The part that took Meyer the longest time to write in Breaking Dawn was the half-chapter describing the 3 months after Bella's transformation into a vampire because "the amount of time per word put into that section was probably ten times what it was in any other part of the book" and Meyer liked to write minute by minute, but didn't think it would be exciting.
Meyer decided to include the pregnancy in her story while she was researching vampires, early in 2003 and came across the legend of the incubus, a demon who could father children. Bella's insistence to not let her child die was inspired by Meyer's reaction when asked if she would let one of her children die so she could live, which was to deliver the child no matter what the consequences were. Meyer said in an interview with Shannon Hale, published in The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide, that the birth scene published is a little less grotesque than the one she wrote before editing due to her editor, agent and publisher's requests to "tone down the violence a little". She stated that Bella's pregnancy and childbirth, for her, were "a way to kind of explore that concept of what childbirth used to be" in the past and acknowledged that they were "taking Bella in a new direction that wasn't [as] relatable for a lot of people." Concerning the subject of the relatability of Bella, Meyer admitted that she lost some of her relatability to the character when she became a vampire and said, "every point up until that point in the story [the transformation] I would say I could step into this story right here and I could do everything she could do which made it really fun." Meyer wanted to experience Bella's vampiric experiences and "enjoyed very much" writing about them and wanted to end the book from her perspective, but still thought it was "a little bit harder" as she couldn't step in into the story anymore.
In regard to Renesmee's unique name, Meyer wrote that she "couldn't call her Jennifer or Ashley. What do you name the most unique baby in the world? I looked through a lot of baby name websites. Eventually I realized that there was no human name that was going to work for me, so I surrendered to necessity and made up my own."
Meyer states in regard to ending the series:
The Twilight Saga is really Bella's story, and this was the natural place for her story to wind up. She overcame the major obstacles in her path and fought her way to the place she wanted to be. I suppose I could try to prolong her story unnaturally, but it wouldn't be interesting enough to keep me writing. Stories need conflict, and the conflicts that are Bella-centric are resolved.
=== Influences ===
The plays The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare both influenced Breaking Dawn. Meyer decided that Alice would write her instruction to Bella on a page from The Merchant of Venice to give a clue that the final confrontation at the end of the book would be a mental one—not a physical battle—like the one at the end of the play. It also hints that the novel would have a happy ending for the couples, as in The Merchant of Venice. Originally it was the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë that Alice tore a page from, but Jane Eyre had nothing to do with the story, so Meyer changed it.
The idea of imprinting, which existed in Forever Dawn, was inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream. Meyer described it as "the magic of setting things right—which doesn't happen in the real world, which is absolutely fantasy", and decided to introduce it earlier–in Eclipse–so she wouldn't have to explain it later.
=== Cover art ===
Meyer described the cover as "extremely meaningful" and said that she was "really happy with how it turned out". The cover is a metaphor for Bella's progression throughout the entire series; she began as the physically weakest player on the board, the pawn, but at the end she becomes the strongest, the queen. The chessboard also hints at the conclusion of the novel "where the battle with the Volturi is one of wits and strategy, not physical violence."
=== Title ===
The title, Breaking Dawn, is a reference to the beginning of Bella's life as a newborn vampire. Wanting to add a "sense of disaster" to the title to match the novel's mood, she called it Breaking Dawn. Another reason for giving the book this particular title is that it matches the book's plot, which centers on "a new awakening and a new day and there's also a lot of problems inherent in it".
== Release ==
=== Marketing ===
Entertainment Weekly magazine released an excerpt of Breaking Dawn on May 30, 2008. Stephenie Meyer also revealed a 'Quote of the Day' from Breaking Dawn for about three weeks prior to its August 2, 2008 release. The first quote was released on Meyer's website on July 12, 2008. The first chapter of Breaking Dawn, "Engaged", was released in the special edition of Eclipse. Breaking Dawn was officially released on August 2, 2008 through midnight release parties in over 4,000 bookstores, most of which involved costume and trivia contests, crafts, and face painting.
Godiva also made a Twilight-themed chocolate bar, which was released in Barnes & Noble book stores at the release parties. A four-city Breaking Dawn Concert Series, featuring Stephenie Meyer and Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld, coincided with the novel's release. The concert series sold out three of its four locations on the day that tickets went on sale, selling out in under an hour in one city.
=== Publication ===
Prior to the novel's release, the first three Twilight books had already sold 8.5 million copies throughout the US and over 2 million copies in the UK. Breaking Dawn was one of the most anticipated books of 2008 with The Guardian noting, "Teenagers across the world are anxiously awaiting the next instalment of author Stephenie Meyer's vampiric series of novels." To meet the high demand, Little, Brown Books added a printing of 500,000 additional copies just prior to publication of the title, bringing the initial print run to 3.7 million.
The book sold 1.3 million copies in the US and 20,000 copies in the UK in its first 24 hours of release, as well as 100,000 copies in Canada during its first weekend. Breaking Dawn debuted at #1 on USA Today's top 150 best sellers list and has gone on to spend over 58 weeks on the list. It was also the biggest-selling children's book of 2008 with over 6 million copies sold.
A special edition of Breaking Dawn was released on August 4, 2009, containing a DVD of the Breaking Dawn Concert Series and an interview with Meyer.
== Reception ==
Critical reception of Breaking Dawn was mixed. Lev Grossman wrote, "First, since there's a lot of one-star reviews up on Amazon, let me say up front: I loved Breaking Dawn." Cara von Wrangel Kinsey of School Library Journal responded with a positive review, describing the book as "captivating" and noting, "While this novel is darker and more mature than the earlier titles, Meyer's twists and turns are not out of character." The Charlotte Observer agreed and called the book "pretty darned good", but criticized the book's length saying, "I wish [Stephenie Meyer] hadn't felt compelled to pack so much into one volume. It should have been two books." Mary Harris Russell of the Chicago Tribune also responded with a positive review and hailed the book as a "fun read", noting that Stephenie Meyer "continues to produce witty writing about families, teenagers and popular culture", while Time called the book "a wild but satisfying finish to the ballad of Bella and Edward" and gave it a rating of A−. An article in The Daily News Tribune said of Breaking Dawn, "Some of the dialog is a bit stilted,... but, if you stay close to Meyer's rich and prodigious narrative, you too might fall in love with its suspense and moving sensitivity".
Publishers Weekly stated that the main problem with Breaking Dawn was that, "Essentially, everyone gets everything they want, even if their desires necessitate an about-face in characterization or the messy introduction of some back story. Nobody has to renounce anything or suffer more than temporarily—in other words, grandeur is out." In an article by The Associated Press, journalist Sara Rose wrote on NewsOK.com that fans of the series would love "engaging characters, great humor, a distracting obsession with beauty, focus on the minutiae of emotions"; however "casual readers may be disappointed with a lot of build-up and little action." The Independent called the book, "shockingly, tackily, sick-makingly sexist" and said that "Bella Swan lives to serve men and suffer." Entertainment Weekly graded Breaking Dawn with a D, criticizing the birth scene and Bella's "unwavering passion for Edward" and having no other goals. The Washington Post also responded with a negative review, making comments such as, "Meyer has put a stake through the heart of her own beloved creation," and "Breaking Dawn has a childbirth sequence that may promote lifelong abstinence in sensitive types."
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Meyer responded to the negative response of many fans to the book and called it the "Rob Effect"; she said that the fans need time to accept the ending of Breaking Dawn, just as they needed time to accept Robert Pattinson playing the role of Edward in the Twilight movie.
=== Awards and honors ===
Breaking Dawn was the recipient of a British Book Award for "Children's Book of the Year". In the 2009 "Children's Choice Book Awards", the novel was chosen as "Teen Choice Book of the Year" and Meyer won the "Author of the Year" award.
== Film adaptations ==
Summit Entertainment announced in November 2008 that they had obtained the rights to the fourth book in Stephenie Meyer's series, Breaking Dawn. The studio greenlit an adaptation of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn in April 2010. The film was split into two parts; the first part of the film was released on November 18, 2011, and the second part was released on November 16, 2012.
Bill Condon directed both parts; Stephenie Meyer co-produced the film along with Karen Rosenfelt and Wyck Godfrey. In July 2010, Summit announced that the film would be shot in Vancouver, Canada, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Maggie Grace plays the part of Irina in the film, while Mackenzie Foy plays Renesmee, Edward and Bella's half-vampire, half-human child.
The infant Renesmee was portrayed by a robot. It was filmed at the Canadian Motion Picture Park Studios (CMPP).
The film did not follow the book strictly, as many of the scenes were created from scratch to add tension to the narrative. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992 | 1992 | 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1992nd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 992nd year of the 2nd millennium, the 92nd year of the 20th century, and the 3rd year of the 1990s decade.
1992 was designated as International Space Year by the United Nations.
== Events ==
=== January ===
January 1 – Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt replaces Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru as United Nations Secretary-General.
January 6
The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is proclaimed by the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.
1991–92 Georgian coup d'état: President of Georgia Zviad Gamsakhurdia flees the country as a result of the military coup.
January 7 – 1992 European Community Monitor Mission helicopter downing: A Yugoslav Air Force Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 attacks two Italian Army Agusta-Bell AB-206L LongRanger helicopters carrying observers from the European Community Monitor Mission. One crashes, killing five people on board. The other helicopter crash-lands, but its occupants survive.
January 9
Bosnian Serbs declare their own republic within Bosnia and Herzegovina, in protest at the decision by Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats to seek recognition by the European Communities.
First confirmed detection of exoplanets with announcement of the discovery of several terrestrial-mass planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12, by radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail working in the United States.
January 15 – The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia begins to break up; Slovenia and Croatia gain independence and international recognition in some Western countries.
January 16 – El Salvador officials and rebel leaders sign the Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City, ending the 12-year Salvadoran Civil War that claimed at least 75,000 lives.
January 19
In the Bulgarian presidential election, the first held by direct vote, Zhelyu Zhelev, leader of the Union of Democratic Forces, retains office.
Paramount Leader of China Deng Xiaoping speaks in Shenzhen during his southern tour, a move that would return China on its right-wing march towards free market economics.
January 20 – Air Inter Flight 148, an Airbus A320-111, crashes in the Vosges Mountains near Barr, France, while circling to land at Strasbourg, France, killing 87 of the 96 people on board. Facing tough competition from French high-speed TGV trains, Air Inter had encouraged its pilots to fly at high speeds at low altitudes, and had not installed ground proximity warning systems on its airliners because such systems generated too many nuisance alarms during high-speed, low-altitude flight.
January 22 – Rebel forces occupy Zaire's national radio station in Kinshasa and broadcast a demand for the government's resignation.
January 24 – China and Israel establish diplomatic relations.
January 26
Boris Yeltsin announces that Russia will stop targeting cities of the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons. In return President George H. W. Bush announces that the United States and its allies will stop targeting Russia and the remaining communist states with nuclear weapons.
In Mauritania, security forces open fire on violent extremist opponents of President of Mauritania Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya, allegedly killing at least four people.
January 27 – First Nagorno-Karabakh War: in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, fighting between Armenians and Azeris leaves at least 60 people dead.
January 30 – North Korea signs an accord with the International Atomic Energy Agency allowing for international inspections of North Korea's nuclear power plants.
=== February ===
February 1 – President of the United States George Bush meets with President of Russia Boris Yeltsin at Camp David, where they formally declare that the Cold War is over.
February 3 – South African State President F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, African National Congress leader, are jointly awarded the Felix Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
February 4 – In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez leads an unsuccessful coup attempt against President of Venezuela Carlos Andrés Pérez.
February 6 – The Ruby Jubilee of Elizabeth II commemorates 40 years since the accession of Elizabeth II as Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms.
February 7 – The Maastricht Treaty is signed, founding the European Union.
February 8 – The opening ceremony for the 1992 Winter Olympics is held in Albertville, France.
February 9 – Algerian Civil War: The government of Algeria declares a state of emergency and begins a crackdown on the Islamic Salvation Front.
February 14 – Ukraine and four other nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States reject Russia's proposal to maintain unified armed forces. Ukraine, Moldova and Azerbaijan announce they will go ahead with plans to create their own military forces.
February 16 – In Lebanon, Israeli helicopter gunships assassinate Abbas al-Musawi, the leader of Hezbollah, and his son, in retaliation for a February 14 raid that killed three Israeli soldiers.
February 18 – Iraq disarmament crisis: The Executive Chairman of UNSCOM details Iraq's refusal to abide by UN Security Council disarmament resolutions.
February 21 – The United Nations Security Council approves Resolution 743 to send a UNPROFOR peacekeeping force to Yugoslavia.
February 25–26 – 613 Azerbaijani civilians are massacred in Khojaly.
February 26 – The Supreme Court of Ireland rules that a 14-year-old rape victim may travel to the United Kingdom to have an abortion.
February 28 – Ownership of the port town of Walvis Bay is transferred from South Africa to Namibia.
=== March ===
March 1 – The first victims of the Bosnian War are a Serb bridegroom's father and an Orthodox priest in a Sarajevo shooting. In the Bosnian independence referendum, held from February 29 to March 1 and boycotted by Bosnian Serbs, the majority of the Bosniak and Bosnian Croat communities have voted for Bosnia-Herzegovina's independence.
March 2 – In Dubăsari, Moldova, escalating tensions turn into open hostilities and the beginning of the Transnistria War.
March 4 – The Supreme Court of Algeria bans the Islamic Salvation Front, which is poised to win control of the Parliament of Algeria in runoff elections.
March 12 – Mauritius becomes a republic while remaining a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.
March 13 – The 6.7 Mw Erzincan earthquake affects eastern Turkey with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe), killing 498–652 and injuring around 2,000.
March 18 – White South Africans vote in favour of political reforms which will end the apartheid regime and create a power-sharing multi-racial government.
March 22
In French regional elections, the conservative Rally for the Republic and the centre-right Union for French Democracy win in a landslide, capturing 20 of 22 metropolitan regional presidencies.
STS-45: Space Shuttle Atlantis takes off from Cape Canaveral carrying instruments designed to study global warming.
March 24 – The Treaty on Open Skies is signed in Helsinki, Finland, to establish a program of unarmed surveillance flights over the 34 member states. It went into effect on January 1, 2002.
March 25 – The International Atomic Energy Agency orders Iraq to destroy an industrial complex at Al Atheer that is being used to manufacture nuclear weapons.
March 31 – The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act of Singapore comes into force.
=== April ===
April 5
The Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina (without the presence of Serb political delegates) proclaims independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Bosnian War: Serb troops, following a mass rebellion of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Bosnian declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, besiege the city of Sarajevo.
President of Peru Alberto Fujimori issues Decree Law 25418, dissolving the Congress of the Republic of Peru, imposing censorship and having opposition politicians arrested, setting off the 1992 Peruvian constitutional crisis.
April 6 – The Republic of Ilirida is proclaimed by Albanian Macedonian activists in Struga, Republic of Macedonia.
Windows 3.1 is released to manufacturing by Microsoft.
April 7 – The United States recognizes the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The European Communities also recognizes Bosnia and Herzegovina.
April 9
A jury in Miami, Florida, convicts former Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega of assisting Colombia's cocaine cartel.
In the United Kingdom general election the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister of the United Kingdom John Major narrowly retains power.
April 10
First Nagorno-Karabakh War: Maraga massacre – At least 43 Armenian civilians are killed as their village of Maraga, Azerbaijan, is captured and destroyed by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces.
A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at the Baltic Exchange in the City of London; three are killed, 91 injured.
April 13 – The 5.3 Mw Roermond earthquake affects the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VII (Very strong).
April 15 – The National Assembly of Vietnam adopts the 1992 Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
April 16 – President of Afghanistan Mohammad Najibullah is ousted and detained by Muslim rebels moving towards Kabul, setting the stage for the civil war in Afghanistan (1992–96).
April 20 – The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, held at Wembley Stadium, London, is televised live to over one billion people and raises millions of dollars for AIDS research.
April 21 – The death of Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich of Russia results in a succession dispute between Nicholas Romanov, Prince of Russia and Vladimir's daughter Maria for the leadership of the Imperial Family of Russia.
April 22 – Fuel leaking into a sewer causes a series of explosions in Guadalajara, Mexico; 215 are killed, 1,500 injured.
April 27 – Betty Boothroyd becomes the first woman elected Speaker of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.
April 28 – The two remaining constituent republics of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – Serbia and Montenegro – form a new state, named the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (which in 2003 becomes Serbia and Montenegro), bringing to an end the official state union of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Bosniaks and Macedonians that has existed since 1918 (with the exception of a brief occupation period during World War II).
April 29
Los Angeles riots: The acquittal of four policemen in the Rodney King beating criminal trial triggers massive rioting in Los Angeles. The riots will last for six days resulting in 63 deaths and over $1 billion in damages before order is restored by the military.
In Sierra Leone, a group of young soldiers launch a military coup that sends president Joseph Saidu Momoh into exile in Guinea, and the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) is established with 25-year-old Captain Valentine Strasser as its chairman and Head of State of the country.
April 30 – Brčko bridge massacre: around 100 Croat and Bosniak civilians are blown up while crossing the bridge across the Sava in Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
=== May ===
May 1 – Lithuania introduces a new temporary currency, the talonas.
May 5
Russian leaders in Crimea declare their separation from Ukraine as a new republic. They withdraw the secession on May 10.
Armand Césari Stadium disaster in Bastia on Corsica: 18 people are killed and 2,300 are injured when one of the terraces collapses before a football match between SC Bastia and Olympique de Marseille.
May 7
STS-49: Space Shuttle Endeavour makes its maiden flight, as a replacement for Space Shuttle Challenger.
In the Sydney River McDonald's murders in Nova Scotia, Canada, three McDonald's employees are killed and a fourth is left permanently disabled during a botched robbery.
May 9
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is adopted in New York.
The Westray Mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, explodes, killing all 26 miners working the night shift.
May 10 – Sweden wins the Ice Hockey World Championships in Czechoslovakia defeating Finland, 5–2, in the final game in Prague.
May 13 – Falun Gong is introduced by Li Hongzhi in China.
May 15 – The Collective Security Treaty Organization is established by six post-Soviet states belonging to the Commonwealth of Independent States (effective April 20, 1994).
May 16–17 – Bosnian War: U.N. peacekeepers withdraw from Sarajevo.
May 17 – Protests begin in Bangkok, Thailand, against the government of General Suchinda Kraprayoon, sparking a bloody crackdown.
May 23 – Capaci bombing: A Mafia bomb on the autostrada in Sicily kills five people, including Italian anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.
May 24
In Thailand, Suchinda Kraprayoon agrees to resign.
Parliamentary election held in Burkina Faso, for the first time since 1978.
May 30 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 757 imposes economic sanctions on Yugoslavia in an effort to end its attacks on Bosnia and Herzegovina.
=== June ===
June 2 – In a national referendum Denmark rejects the Maastricht Treaty by a narrow margin.
June 3–14 – The Earth Summit is held in Rio de Janeiro.
June 8 – The first World Oceans Day is celebrated, coinciding with the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
June 10–26 – Sweden hosts the UEFA Euro 1992 football tournament, which is won by Denmark.
June 16 – A "Joint Understanding" agreement on arms reduction is signed by U.S. president George H. W. Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin (this is later codified in START II).
June 17
Two German relief workers held since 1989, Thomas Kemptner and Heinrich Struebig, are handed over to the German authorities after their release; they are the last Western hostages in Lebanon.
Violence breaks out between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party in Boipatong, South Africa, leaving 45 dead.
June 18 – Ireland votes for the Eleventh Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland to accept the Maastricht Treaty with a popular vote of over 69%.
June 20
Estonia adopts the kroon as currency, becoming the first former Soviet Republic to replace the Soviet rouble.
In Paraguay the National Constituent Assembly approves the new Constitution of Paraguay.
June 21 – Nelson Mandela announces that the African National Congress will halt negotiations with the government of South Africa following the Boipatong massacre of June 17.
June 23 – The Israeli legislative election is won by the Israeli Labor Party under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin, ousting a Likud government.
June 25 – The Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) is founded.
June 26 – Denmark beats Germany 2–0 in the final to win the 1992 UEFA European Football Championship at Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, Sweden.
June 28 – Estonia holds a referendum on its constitution, which will come into effect on July 3.
=== July ===
July 6–8 – The 18th G7 summit is held in Munich.
July 6–29 – Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraq refuses a UN inspection team access to the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. UNSCOM claims that it has reliable information that the site contains archives related to illegal weapons activities. UN inspectors stage a 17-day "sit-in" outside of the building, but leave when their safety is threatened by Iraqi soldiers.
July 10
In Miami, former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is sentenced to 40 years in prison for participating in the illegal drug trade and racketeering.
The Giotto spacecraft flies past Comet 26P/Grigg–Skjellerup, gathering measurements about the comet.
July 13 – Yitzhak Rabin becomes prime minister of Israel.
July 16 – At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton accepts his party's presidential nomination on behalf of the "forgotten middle class".
July 17 – The Slovak National Council declares Slovakia an independent country, signaling the breakup of Czechoslovakia.
July 19
Via D'Amelio bombing: A car bomb placed by the Sicilian Mafia (with the collaboration of Italian intelligence) kills judge Paolo Borsellino and five members of his police escort.
The Cabinet of Israel approves a freeze on new Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, a move expected to reinvigorate the Middle East Peace Process.
July 20 – Václav Havel resigns as president of Czechoslovakia.
July 21 – The Transnistria War ends with a ceasefire.
July 22 – Near Medellín, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escapes from his luxury prison, fearing extradition to the United States.
July 23 – Abkhazia declares independence from Georgia.
July 25–August 9 – The 1992 Summer Olympics are held in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
July 26 – Iraq agrees to allow UN weapons inspectors to search the Iraqi Agricultural Ministry building in Baghdad. When inspectors arrive on July 28 and 29, they find nothing and voice suspicions that Iraqi records have been removed.
July 31
Georgia becomes the 179th member of the United Nations after seceding from the Soviet Union the previous year.
Thai Airways International Flight 311, an Airbus A310-300, crashes into a mountain north of Kathmandu, Nepal killing all 113 people on board.
China General Aviation Flight 7552 bound for Xiamen crashes soon after taking off from Nanjing Dajiaochang Airport, killing 108 of the 116 people on board.
=== August ===
August 3–4 – Millions of black South Africans participate in a general strike called by the African National Congress to protest the lack of progress in negotiations with the government of State President of South Africa F. W. de Klerk.
August 12 – Canada, Mexico and the United States announce that a deal has been reached on the North American Free Trade Agreement; this will be formally signed on December 17.
August 18 – Prime Minister of the United Kingdom John Major announces the creation of Iraqi no-fly zones (→ Operation Southern Watch).
August 24
Concordia University massacre: Valery Fabrikant murders four colleagues and seriously wounds another in a shooting at Concordia University, in Montreal, Quebec.
China and South Korea establish diplomatic relations.
August 24–28 – Hurricane Andrew hits south Florida and Louisiana and dissipates over the Tennessee valley when it merges with a storm system; 23 are killed.
August 29 – In Rostock, Germany, tens of thousands rally to protest neo-Nazi attacks on refugees and immigrants begun on August 22.
=== September ===
September 1 – In Beijing, police arrest Shen Tong for his role in organizing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
September 2 – The 7.7 Mw Nicaragua earthquake affects the west coast of Nicaragua. With a Ms –Mw disparity of half a unit, this tsunami earthquake triggers a tsunami that causes most of the damage and casualties, with at least 116 killed. Average runup heights are 3–8 meters (9.8–26.2 ft).
September 7
In Ciskei, members of the Ciskei Defence Force loyal to dictator Oupa Gqozo open fire into a crowd of anti-Gqozo protestors organized by the African National Congress, killing at least 28 people and wounding nearly 200.
President of Tajikistan Rahmon Nabiyev is forced to resign following weeks of clan and religious warfare that have left nearly 2,000 people dead.
September 12 – In Peru, police arrest Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the Shining Path guerilla movement, who has evaded capture for 12 years.
September 16 – Black Wednesday: The pound sterling and the Italian lira are forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
September 20 – French voters narrowly approve the Maastricht Treaty in the French Maastricht Treaty referendum.
September 21 – Mexico establishes diplomatic relations with Vatican City, ending a break that has lasted over 130 years.
September 28
Law enforcement officials in the United States, Colombia and Italy announce that they have arrested more than 165 people on money laundering charges related to cocaine trafficking.
Pakistan International Airlines Flight 268 crashes into a mountain while on approach to Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Nepal. All 167 occupants on board were killed. The crash of PIA Flight 268 occurred just 2 months after Thai Airways International Flight 311 crashed into a mountain near Kathmandu under similar circumstances, killing all 113 occupants on board.
September 29 – The Chamber of Deputies of Brazil votes to impeach President of Brazil Fernando Collor, the country's first democratically elected leader in 29 years. Vice President Itamar Franco becomes acting president.
=== October ===
October 1 – Cartoon Network, a 24/7 children's television channel, is launched in the United States.
October 2 – A riot breaks out in the Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo, Brazil, resulting in the Carandiru massacre.
October 3 – After performing a song protesting against alleged Catholic Church child sexual abuse, Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor rips up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on the US television programme Saturday Night Live, causing huge controversy.
October 4
The government of Mozambique signs the Rome General Peace Accords with leaders of RENAMO, ending the 16-year-old Mozambican Civil War.
Israeli cargo plane El Al Flight 1862 crashes into residential buildings in Amsterdam's Bijlmermeer, Netherlands, after taking off from Schiphol Airport and losing two engines, killing all 4 people on board and 39 on the ground.
October 6 – Lennart Meri becomes the first President of Estonia after regaining independence. The Estonian Government in Exile resigns on the next day.
October 7 – In Peru, Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán is convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison.
October 11 – The Catechism of the Catholic Church is promulgated by Pope John Paul II with his apostolic constitution, Fidei depositum.
October 12
In the Dominican Republic, Pope John Paul II celebrates the 500th anniversary of the meeting of two cultures.
The 5.8 mb Cairo earthquake affects the city with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe), leaving 545 dead and 6,512 injured.
October 19 – The Chinese Communist Party promotes several market-oriented reformers to the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, signaling a defeat for hard-line ideologues.
October 20 – The last Yugoslav Army troops leave Croatia.
October 21 – 150,000 coal miners march in London to protest government plans to close coal mines and reduce the number of miners.
October 23 – Emperor of Japan Akihito begins the first imperial visit to China, telling a Beijing audience he feels deep sorrow for the suffering of the Chinese people during World War II.
October 25 – Lithuania holds a referendum on its first constitution after declaring independence from the Soviet Union in 1990.
October 26 – In a national referendum, voters in Canada reject the Charlottetown Accord.
October 28 – Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein threatens to dissolve the Landtag of Liechtenstein and dismiss the government over disagreements regarding a referendum on Liechtenstein's accession to the European Economic Area.
October 31 – Pope John Paul II issues an apology and lifts the 1633 edict of the Inquisition against Galileo Galilei.
=== November ===
November 3 – In the 1992 United States presidential election, Democratic Arkansas governor Bill Clinton defeats Republican president George H. W. Bush and Independent Ross Perot.
November 8 – More than 350,000 people rally in Berlin to protest right-wing violence against immigrants; stones and eggs are thrown at President of Germany Richard von Weizsäcker and Chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl.
November 11 – The Church of England votes to allow women to become priests.
November 13
The government of Peru announces it has arrested a small group of army officers who were plotting the assassination of President Alberto Fujimori.
A report by the World Meteorological Organization reports an unprecedented level of ozone depletion in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
November 14 – In poor conditions caused by Cyclone Forrest, Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 crashes near Nha Trang, killing 30.
November 15 – The Lithuanian parliamentary election sees the Communists of the Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania, led by Algirdas Brazauskas, return to power.
November 18 – Russian president Boris Yeltsin releases the flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) of Korean Air Flight 007, which was shot down by the Soviets in 1983.
November 24 – In China, China Southern Airlines Flight 3943, a China Southern Airlines domestic flight, crashes, killing all 141 people on board.
November 25
The Czechoslovak Federal Assembly votes to split the country into two separate states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, to take effect on January 1, 1993.
In a national referendum related to abortion, voters in Ireland reject the proposed Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution Bill 1992 but approve the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland and the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland.
November 27 – The government of Venezuela puts down a coup attempt by a group of Air Force officers who have bombed the presidential palace.
=== December ===
December 1 – South Korea and South Africa reestablish diplomatic relations. South Korea previously had diplomatic relations with South Africa from 1961 to 1978, when they were severed by the former due to the latter's policy of apartheid.
December 3 – UN Security Council Resolution 794 is unanimously passed, approving a coalition of United Nations peacekeepers led by the United States to form UNITAF, tasked with ensuring that humanitarian aid gets distributed and establishing peace in Somalia.
December 4 – US President George Bush announces the deployment of US troops to Africa as part of the United Task Force (UNITAF); UNITAF troops land at Mogadishu on 9 December.
December 6 – Demolition of Babri Masjid: Extremist Hindu activists in India demolish Babri Masjid – a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya which has been used as a temple since 1949 – leading to widespread communal violence, including the Bombay riots, in all killing over 1,500 people.
December 12 – The 7.8 Mw Flores earthquake affects the Lesser Sunda Islands in Indonesia with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe) leaving at least 2,500 dead. A destructive tsunami with wave heights of 25 m (82 ft) follows.
December 16 – The Czech National Council adopts the Constitution of the Czech Republic.
December 18 – The South Korean presidential election is won by Kim Young-sam, the first non-military candidate elected since 1961.
December 21 – In Yugoslavia, President of Serbia Slobodan Milošević defeats Milan Panić in the Serbian presidential election.
December 22 – The Archives of Terror are discovered by Martín Almada in Asunción, detailing the fates of thousands of Latin Americans who have been secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in Operation Condor.
December 28 – Actress Daniella Perez is murdered in Rio de Janeiro, after being stabbed 18 times with scissors by actor Guilherme de Pádua and his then-wife Paula Thomaz. The crime shocked Brazil, due to both the victim and the murderer being romantic partners in the telenovela De Corpo e Alma, which aired on TV Globo.
December 29 – Brazil's president Fernando Collor de Mello is found guilty on charges that he stole more than $32 million from the government, preventing him from holding any elected office for eight years. Collor resigns the presidency hours before the sentence to be passed by the Supreme Federal Court.
== Births and deaths ==
== Nobel Prizes ==
Physics – Georges Charpak
Chemistry – Rudolph A. Marcus
Medicine – Edmond H. Fischer, Edwin G. Krebs
Literature – Derek Walcott
Peace – Rigoberta Menchú
Economics – Gary Becker |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Anderssen | Adolf Anderssen | Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen (6 July 1818 – 13 March 1879) was a German chess master. He won the great international tournaments of 1851 and 1862, but lost matches to Paul Morphy in 1858, and to Wilhelm Steinitz in 1866. Accordingly, he is generally regarded as having been the world's leading chess player from 1851 to 1858, and leading active player from 1862 to 1866, although the title of World Chess Champion did not yet exist.
Anderssen became the most successful tournament player in Europe, winning over half the events he entered, including the very strong Baden-Baden 1870 chess tournament. He achieved most of these successes when he was over the age of 50.
Anderssen is famous today for his brilliant sacrificial attacking play, particularly in the Immortal Game (1851) and the Evergreen Game (1852). He was an important figure in the development of chess problems, driving forward the transition from the "Old School" of problem composition to the elegance and complexity of modern compositions. He was also one of the most likeable of chess masters and became an elder statesman of the game, to whom others turned for advice or arbitration.
== Background and early life ==
Anderssen was born in Breslau (now called Wrocław, Poland), in the Prussian Province of Silesia, in 1818. He lived there for most of his life, sharing a house with and supporting his widowed mother and his unmarried sister. Anderssen never married. He graduated from the public gymnasium (high school) in Breslau and then attended university, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. After graduating in 1847 at the age of 29, he took a position at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Breslau as an instructor and later as professor of Mathematics. Anderssen lived a quiet, stable, responsible, respectable middle-class life. His career was teaching mathematics, while his hobby and passion was playing chess.
When Anderssen was nine years old, his father taught him how to play chess. Anderssen said that as a boy, he learned the strategy of the game from a copy of William Lewis' book Fifty Games Between Labourdonnais and McDonnell (1835).
== Chess career ==
=== First steps ===
Anderssen first came to the attention of the chess world when he published Aufgabe für Schachspieler ("Task for chess players"), a collection of 60 chess problems, in 1842. He continued to publish problems for many years, both in magazines and as a second collection in 1852. These brought him to the attention of the "Berlin Pleiades" group, which included some of the strongest players of the time, and he played matches against some of them. Anderssen's development as a player was relatively slow, largely because he could spare neither the time nor the money to play many matches against strong players. Nevertheless, by 1846 he was able to put up a good fight against another Pleiades member, Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa, who may have been the world's strongest player at the time. In 1846, he became the editor of the magazine Schachzeitung der Berliner Schachgesellschaft (later called Deutsche Schachzeitung) when its founder Ludwig Bledow, one of the Berlin Pleiades, died. Anderssen held this post until 1865.
=== London 1851 ===
In 1848, Anderssen drew a match with the professional player Daniel Harrwitz. On the basis of this match and his general chess reputation, he was invited to represent German chess at the first international chess tournament, to be held in London in 1851. Anderssen was reluctant to accept the invitation, as he was deterred by the travel costs. However, the tournament's principal organizer, Howard Staunton, offered to pay Anderssen's travel expenses out of his own pocket if necessary, should Anderssen fail to win a tournament prize. Anderssen accepted this generous offer.
Anderssen's preparations for the 1851 London International Tournament produced a surge in his playing strength: he played over 100 games in early 1851 against strong opponents including Carl Mayet, Ernst Falkbeer, Max Lange and Jean Dufresne. The 1851 International Tournament was a knock-out event in which pairs of competitors played short matches, and Anderssen won it by beating Lionel Kieseritzky, József Szén, Staunton and Marmaduke Wyvill – by margins of at least two games in every case. His prize was two-thirds of the total prize fund of £500, i.e. about £335; that is equivalent to about £240,000 ($370,200) in 2006's money. When Anderssen and Szén found they were to play each other, they agreed that, if either won the tournament, the other would receive one-third of the prize; this does not appear to have been considered in any way unethical.
Although most chess books regard Wilhelm Steinitz as the first true world champion, one of the organizers of the 1851 London International Tournament had said the contest was for "the baton of the World's Chess Champion". In fact Anderssen was not described as "the world champion", but the tournament established Anderssen as the world's leading chess player. The London Chess Club, which had fallen out with Staunton and his colleagues, organised a tournament that was played a month later and included several players who had competed in the International Tournament. The result was the same – Anderssen won.
=== Morphy match, 1858 ===
Opportunities for tournament play remained rare, and Anderssen was reluctant to travel far because of the expense. In his one recorded tournament between 1851 and 1862, a one-game-per-round knock-out tournament at Manchester in 1857, he was eliminated in the second round. Then in late 1858, he was beaten 8–3 by the American champion Paul Morphy in a famous match held in Paris, France (two wins, two draws, seven losses). Although Anderssen knew as well as anyone how to attack, Morphy understood much better when to attack and how to prepare an attack. Morphy had recently scored equally convincing wins in matches against other top-class players: Johann Löwenthal, the Rev. John Owen and Daniel Harrwitz. Morphy returned to the United States in 1859, however, and soon afterwards announced his retirement from serious chess, making Anderssen once again the strongest active player.
Anderssen played the curious opening move 1.a3 in three games of his match against Morphy, and broke even with it (one loss, one draw, one win). This opening move, now referred to as Anderssen's Opening, has never been popular in serious competition.
=== Other games 1851–1862 ===
Shortly after the 1851 London International Tournament, Anderssen played his two most famous games, both casual encounters which he won by combinations that involved several sacrifices. In the first, as White against Lionel Kieseritzky in London on 21 June 1851, just after the International Tournament (1851) and now called the "Immortal Game", he sacrificed a bishop, both rooks and finally his queen. In the second, played in Berlin in 1852 as White against Jean Dufresne and now called the "Evergreen Game", the total sacrifice was more modest, but still exceeded a queen and a minor piece.
After the match with Morphy, Anderssen played two matches against Ignác Kolisch, one of the leading players of the time, who later became a wealthy banker and patron of chess. Anderssen drew their match in 1860 and narrowly won in 1861 (5/9; won four, drew two, lost three; Kolisch was ahead at the half-way stage).
=== London 1862 ===
Anderssen won the London 1862 chess tournament, the first international round-robin tournament (in which each participant plays a game against each of the others) with a score of twelve wins out of thirteen games. He lost only one game, to the Rev. John Owen, and finished two points ahead of Louis Paulsen, who had the best playing record in the early 1860s. Morphy had retired from chess at this time, so Anderssen was again generally regarded as the world's leading active player.
Shortly after the tournament, he played a match against tournament runner-up Paulsen, ending in a draw (3 wins, 3 losses, 2 draws). In 1864, he drew another match (3 wins, 3 losses, and 2 draws) against Berthold Suhle, who was a strong player and respected chess writer.
=== Steinitz match, 1866 ===
In 1866, Anderssen lost a close match with 30-year-old Wilhelm Steinitz (six wins, eight losses, and no draws; Steinitz won the last two games). Although Steinitz is now known for inventing the positional approach to chess and demonstrating its superiority, the 1866 match was played in the attack-at-all-costs style of the 1850s and 1860s. This is generally seen as the point at which Steinitz succeeded Anderssen as the world's leading active player. Although ideas of a contest for the world championship had been floating around since the 1840s, the 1866 Anderssen–Steinitz match was not defined as being for the world championship, and many were opposed to the claim of such a title while Morphy was retired from chess and still alive. Furthermore, Anderssen remained dominant both in top tournaments and in personal matches against Zukertort until 1871.
=== 1866–1879 ===
By this time tournaments were becoming more frequent, and the round-robin format was adopted. At the same time, Anderssen, after losing the match to Morphy in 1858 and to Steinitz in 1866, rededicated himself to chess, particularly studying both endgames and positional play. The result was that Anderssen, in his early fifties, was playing the finest chess of his career. As a result, Anderssen compiled a very successful tournament record in the late stages of his career: five first places, two second places, two third places; and a sixth place in the final year of his life, when his health was failing. One of his first places was ahead of Steinitz, Gustav Neumann, Joseph Henry Blackburne, Louis Paulsen and several other very strong players at the Baden-Baden 1870 chess tournament. In terms of the number of leading players present, this could be regarded as one of the top 20 tournaments ever. One of Anderssen's third places was at the strong Vienna 1873 tournament, when he was 55. About half of Anderssen's tournament successes came at championships of the different regional German Chess Federations; but these were open to all nationalities, and most of them had a few top ten or even top five competitors. Anderssen usually beat Zukertort in matches, but his dominance came to an end in 1871.
The Leipzig 1877 tournament was organised in his honour and named the "Anderssen-Feier" (Anderssen Celebration); Anderssen finished second in the tournament behind Louis Paulsen.
Still at Leipzig, Anderssen lost a match against tournament winner Louis Paulsen (three wins, one draw, and five losses). Matches were Anderssen's relative weakness; his only match win in this period was in 1868, against the 26-year-old Johann Zukertort (eight wins, one draw, and three losses).
== Assessment ==
=== Playing strength and style ===
Anderssen was very successful in European tournaments from 1851 to early 1878, taking first prize in over half of the events in which he played. His only recorded tournament failures were a one-game-per-round knock-out event in 1857 and sixth place at Paris 1878 when his health was failing and he had only about a year to live. His match record was much weaker: out of the 12 that he played, he won only two, drew four and lost six.
Although outclassed by Morphy, and to a lesser extent by Steinitz, Anderssen has been called the first modern chess master.
Arpad Elo, inventor of the Elo rating system, retroactively calculated ratings through history, and estimated that Anderssen was the first player with a rating over 2600. Chessmetrics ranks Anderssen as one of the top two players for most of the period from 1859 to 1873, and as the strongest player in the world seven months distributed between 1860 and 1870.
Steinitz rated Anderssen as one of the two greatest attacking players of his time: "We all may learn from Morphy and Anderssen how to conduct a king's-side attack, and perhaps I myself may not have learnt enough." Although Anderssen is regarded as a member of the "heroic" attacking school, he was not in favour of mindless aggression, for example he said: "Move that one of your pieces, which is in the worst plight, unless you can satisfy yourself that you can derive immediate advantage by an attack", a principle more recently labelled "Makogonov's rule". According to Fine, his approach to development was haphazard and he totally failed to understand why Morphy won.
Anderssen's home town was so proud of him that in 1865 Breslau University awarded him an honorary doctorate.
=== Influence on chess ===
Due to the perceived beauty of its attacking style, some of Anderssen's games, such as the Immortal Game and the Evergreen Game, are among the most famous in chess history.
The "heroic" attacking school of play to which Anderssen belonged was eclipsed by Steinitz' positional approach – by 1894 it was generally acknowledged that the only way to beat Steinitz was to apply Steinitz' principles.
Anderssen has had a more enduring influence on chess problem composition. He started composing in the last years of the "Old School", whose compositions were fairly similar to realistic over-the-board positions and featured spectacular key moves, multiple sacrifices and few variations. He was one of the most skillful composers of his time, and his work forms an early stage of the "Transition Period", between the mid-1840s and the early 1860s, when many of the basic problem ideas were discovered, the requirement for game-like positions was abandoned and the introduction of composing competitions (the first of which was in 1854) forced judges to decide on what features were the most desirable in a problem.
Outside the field of chess problems, Anderssen was not a prolific author. He edited the magazine Schachzeitung der Berliner Schachgesellschaft (later called Deutsche Schachzeitung) from 1846 to 1865, however, and was co-editor with Gustav Neumann of Neue Berliner Schachzeitung from 1864 to 1867.
=== Personality ===
Steinitz wrote: "Anderssen was honest and honourable to the core. Without fear or favour he straightforwardly gave his opinion, and his sincere disinterestedness became so patent....that his word alone was usually sufficient to quell disputes...for he had often given his decision in favour of a rival..." On the other hand, Reuben Fine, a 20th-century player, wrote, "There is a curious contrast between his over-the-board brilliance and his uninspired safety-first attitude in everyday affairs."
== Death ==
Anderssen died on 13 March 1879, in his home town. The Deutsche Schachzeitung noted his death in 1879 with a nineteen-page obituary. His cause of death was a heart attack. Bombing raids during World War II damaged his grave in Breslau. After the war, the city became part of Poland and is now known under its Polish name Wrocław. In 1957, the Polish Chess Federation decided to re-bury Anderssen in a new grave at the Osobowice Cemetery.
== Tournament results ==
== Match results == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proboscidea | Proboscidea | Proboscidea (; from Latin proboscis, from Ancient Greek προβοσκίς (proboskís) 'elephant's trunk') is a taxonomic order of Afrotheria paenungulate mammals described by J. Illiger in 1811. It encompasses the elephants (family Elephantidae) and their extinct relatives. Three living species of elephant are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant.
Extinct members of Proboscidea include the deinotheres, mastodons, gomphotheres, amebelodonts and stegodonts. The family Elephantidae also contains several extinct groups, including mammoths and Palaeoloxodon. Proboscideans include some of the largest known land mammals, with the elephant Palaeoloxodon namadicus and mastodon "Mammut" borsoni suggested to have body masses surpassing 16 tonnes (35,000 lb), rivalling or exceeding paraceratheres, the otherwise largest known land mammals in size. The largest living proboscidean is the African bush elephant, with a recorded maximum size of 4 meters (13.1 feet) at the shoulder and a weight of 10.4 tonnes (11.5 short tons). In addition to their enormous size, later proboscideans are distinguished by tusks and long, muscular trunks, which were less developed or absent in early proboscideans.
== Evolution ==
Over 180 extinct members of Proboscidea have been described. The earliest members of Proboscidea like Eritherium are known from the Paleocene of Africa, around 60 million years ago, the earliest proboscideans were much smaller than living elephants, with Eritherium having a body mass of around 3–8 kilograms (6.6–17.6 lb). By the late Eocene, some members of Proboscidea like Barytherium had reached considerable size, with an estimated mass of around 2 tonnes, while others like Moeritherium are suggested to have been semi-aquatic.
A major event in proboscidean evolution was the collision of Afro-Arabia with Eurasia, during the Early Miocene, around 18-19 million years ago allowing proboscideans to disperse from their African homeland across Eurasia, and later, around 16-15 million years ago into North America across the Bering Land Bridge. Proboscidean groups prominent during the Miocene include the deinotheres, along with the more advanced elephantimorphs, including mammutids (mastodons), gomphotheres, amebelodontids (which includes the "shovel tuskers" like Platybelodon), choerolophodontids and stegodontids. Around 10 million years ago, the earliest members of the family Elephantidae emerged in Africa, having originated from gomphotheres. The Late Miocene saw major climatic changes, which resulted in the decline and extinction of many proboscidean groups such as amebelodontids and choerolophodontids. The earliest members of modern genera of Elephantidae appeared during the latest Miocene-early Pliocene around 6-5 million years ago. The elephantid genera Elephas (which includes the living Asian elephant) and Mammuthus (mammoths) migrated out of Africa during the late Pliocene, around 3.6 to 3.2 million years ago.
Over the course of the Early Pleistocene, all non-elephantid probobscideans outside of the Americas became extinct (including mammutids, gomphotheres and deinotheres), with the exception of Stegodon. Gomphotheres dispersed into South America during this era as part of the Great American interchange, and mammoths migrating into North America around 1.5 million years ago. At the end of the Early Pleistocene, around 800,000 years ago the elephantid genus Palaeoloxodon dispersed outside of Africa, becoming widely distributed in Eurasia. By the beginning of the Late Pleistocene, proboscideans were represented by around 23 species. Proboscideans underwent a dramatic decline during the Late Pleistocene as part of the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, with all remaining non-elephantid proboscideans (including Stegodon, mastodons, and the American gomphotheres Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon) and Palaeoloxodon becoming extinct, with mammoths only surviving in relict populations on islands around the Bering Strait into the Holocene, with their latest survival being on Wrangel Island around 4,000 years ago.
The following cladogram is based on endocasts.
== Morphology ==
Over the course of their evolution, proboscideans experienced a significant increase in body size. Some members of the families Deinotheriidae, Mammutidae, Stegodontidae and Elephantidae are thought to have exceeded modern elephants in size, with shoulder heights over 4 metres (13 ft) and masses over 10 tonnes (22,000 lb), with average fully grown males of the mammutid "Mammut" borsoni having an estimated body mass of 16 tonnes (35,000 lb), making it one the largest and perhaps the largest land mammal ever, with a fragmentary specimen of the Indian elephant species Palaeoloxodon namadicus only known from a partial femur being speculatively estimated in the same study to have possibly reached a body mass of 22 tonnes (49,000 lb). As with other megaherbivores, including the extinct sauropod dinosaurs, the large size of proboscideans likely developed to allow them to survive on vegetation with low nutritional value. Their limbs grew longer and the feet shorter and broader. The feet were originally plantigrade and developed into a digitigrade stance with cushion pads and the sesamoid bone providing support, with this change developing around the common ancestor of Deinotheriidae and Elephantiformes. Members of Elephantiformes and Deinotheriidae have retracted nasal regions of the skull indicating the development of a trunk.
The skull grew larger, especially the cranium, while the neck shortened to provide better support for the skull. The increase in size led to the development and elongation of the mobile trunk to provide reach. The number of premolars, incisors and canines decreased. The cheek teeth (molars and premolars) became larger and more specialised. In Elephantiformes, the second upper incisor and lower incisor were transformed into ever growing tusks on the upper and lower jaws, while in Deinotheriidae there are only tusks on the lower jaw. The tusks are proportionally heavy for their size, being primarily composed of dentine. In primitive proboscideans, a band of enamel covers part of the tusk surface, though in many later groups including modern elephants the band is lost, with elephants only having enamel on the tusk tips of juveniles. The upper tusks were initially modest in size, but from the Late Miocene onwards proboscideans developed increasingly large tusks, with the longest ever recorded tusk being 5.02 metres (16.5 ft) long belonging to the mammutid "Mammut" borsoni found in Greece, with some mammoth tusks likely weighing over 200 kilograms (440 lb). The lower tusks are generally smaller than the upper tusks, but could grow to large sizes in some species, like in Deinotherium (which lacks upper tusks), where they could grow over 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) long, the amebelodontid Konobelodon has lower tusks 1.61 metres (5.3 ft) long, with the longest lower tusks ever recorded being from the primitive elephantid Stegotetrabelodon which are around 2.2 metres (7.2 ft) long.
The molar teeth changed from being replaced vertically as in other mammals to being replaced horizontally in the clade Elephantimorpha. While early Elephantimorpha generally had lower jaws with an elongated mandibular symphysis at the front of the jaw with well developed lower tusks/incisors, from the Late Miocene onwards, many groups convergently developed brevirostrine (shortened) lower jaws with vestigial or no lower tusks. Elephantids are distinguished from other proboscideans by a major shift in the molar morphology to parallel lophs rather than the cusps of earlier proboscideans, allowing them to become higher crowned (hypsodont) and more efficient in consuming grass.
=== Dwarfism ===
Several species of proboscideans lived on islands and experienced insular dwarfism. This occurred primarily during the Pleistocene, when some elephant populations became isolated by fluctuating sea levels, although dwarf elephants did exist earlier in the Pliocene. These elephants likely grew smaller on islands due to a lack of large or viable predator populations and limited resources. By contrast, small mammals such as rodents develop gigantism in these conditions. Dwarf proboscideans are known to have lived in Indonesia, the Channel Islands of California, and several islands of the Mediterranean.
Elephas celebensis of Sulawesi is believed to have descended from Elephas planifrons. Elephas falconeri of Malta and Sicily was only 1 m (3 ft), and had probably evolved from the straight-tusked elephant. Other descendants of the straight-tusked elephant existed in Cyprus. Dwarf elephants of uncertain descent lived in Crete, Cyclades and Dodecanese, while dwarf mammoths are known to have lived in Sardinia. The Columbian mammoth colonised the Channel Islands and evolved into the pygmy mammoth. This species reached a height of 1.2–1.8 m (4–6 ft) and weighed 200–2,000 kg (440–4,410 lb). A population of small woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island as recently as 4,000 years ago. After their discovery in 1993, they were considered dwarf mammoths. This classification has been re-evaluated and since the Second International Mammoth Conference in 1999, these animals are no longer considered to be true "dwarf mammoths".
== Ecology ==
It has been suggested that members of Elephantimorpha, including mammutids, gomphotheres, and stegodontids, lived in herds like modern elephants. Analysis of remains of the American mastodon (Mammut americanum) suggest that like modern elephants, that herds consisted of females and juveniles and that adult males lived solitarily or in small groups, and that adult males periodically engaged in fights with other males during periods similar to musth found in living elephants. These traits are suggested to be inherited from the last common ancestor of elephantimorphs, with musth-like behaviour also suggested to have occurred in gomphotheres. All elephantimorphs are suggested to have been capable of communication via infrasound, as found in living elephants. Deinotheres may have also lived in herds, based on tracks found in the Late Miocene of Romania. Over the course of the Neogene and Pleistocene, various members of Elephantida shifted from a browse-dominated diet towards mixed feeding or grazing.
== Classification ==
Below is a taxonomy of proboscidean genera as of 2019.
Order Proboscidea Illiger, 1811
†Eritherium Gheerbrant, 2009
†Moeritherium Andrews, 1901
†Saloumia Tabuce et al., 2019
†Family Numidotheriidae Shoshani & Tassy, 1992
†Phosphatherium Gheerbrant et al., 1996
†Arcanotherium Delmer, 2009
†Daouitherium Gheerbrant & Sudre, 2002
†Numidotherium Mahboubi et al., 1986
†Family Barytheriidae Andrews, 1906
†Omanitherium Seiffert et al., 2012
†Barytherium Andrews, 1901
†Family Deinotheriidae Bonaparte, 1845
†Chilgatherium Sanders et al., 2004
†Prodeinotherium Ehik, 1930
†Deinotherium Kaup, 1829
Suborder Elephantiformes Tassy, 1988
†Eritreum Shoshani et al., 2006
†Hemimastodon Pilgrim, 1912
†Palaeomastodon Andrews, 1901
†Phiomia Andrews & Beadnell, 1902
Infraorder Elephantimorpha Tassy & Shoshani, 1997
†Family Mammutidae Hay, 1922
†Losodokodon Rasmussen & Gutierrez, 2009
†Eozygodon Tassy & Pickford, 1983
†Zygolophodon Vacek, 1877
†Sinomammut Mothé et al., 2016
†Mammut Blumenbach, 1799
Parvorder Elephantida Tassy & Shoshani, 1997
†Family Choerolophodontidae Gaziry, 1976
†Afrochoerodon Pickford, 2001
†Choerolophodon Schlesinger, 1917
†Family Amebelodontidae Barbour, 1927
†Afromastodon Pickford, 2003
†Progomphotherium Pickford, 2003
†Eurybelodon Lambert, 2016
†Serbelodon Frick, 1933
†Archaeobelodon Tassy, 1984
†Protanancus Arambourg, 1945
†Amebelodon Barbour, 1927
†Konobelodon Lambert, 1990
†Torynobelodon Barbour, 1929
†Aphanobelodon Wang et al., 2016
†Platybelodon Borissiak, 1928
†Family Gomphotheriidae Hay, 1922 (paraphyletic)
†Gomphotherium Burmeister, 1837
†Blancotherium May, 2019
†Gnathabelodon Barbour & Sternberg, 1935
†Eubelodon Barbour, 1914
†Megabelodon Barbour, 1914
†Stegomastodon Pohlig, 1912
†Sinomastodon Tobien et al., 1986
†Notiomastodon Cabrera, 1929
†Rhynchotherium Falconer, 1868
†Cuvieronius Osborn, 1923
Superfamily Elephantoidea Gray, 1821
"tetralophodont gomphotheres"
†Anancus Aymard, 1855
†Paratetralophodon Tassy, 1983
†Pediolophodon Lambert, 2007
†Tetralophodon Falconer, 1857
†Family Stegodontidae Osborn, 1918
†Stegolophodon Schlesinger, 1917
†Stegodon Falconer, 1857
Family Elephantidae Gray, 1821
†Stegodibelodon Coppens, 1972
†Stegotetrabelodon Petrocchi, 1941
†Selenotherium Mackaye, Brunet & Tassy, 2005
†Primelephas Maglio, 1970
Loxodonta Anonymous, 1827
†Palaeoloxodon Matsumoto, 1924
†Mammuthus Brookes, 1828
Elephas Linnaeus, 1758 |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Pacheco_M%C3%A9ndez | Rodrigo Pacheco Méndez | Rodrigo Pacheco Méndez (born 25 April 2005) is a Mexican professional tennis player. He has a career-high ATP singles ranking of world No. 196 achieved on 22 September 2025 and a doubles ranking of No. 132 achieved on 2 March 2026. He is currently the No. 1 singles player from Mexico.
Pacheco Méndez reached an ITF junior combined ranking of No. 1 on 29 May 2023.
== Career ==
=== 2022: Turned Pro, ATP debut ===
Pacheco reached the quarterfinals of the Junior Australian Open and the Junior French Open in 2022.
Pacheco made his ATP debut at the 2022 Los Cabos Open in the main singles draw.
=== 2023: Juniors: French Open doubles champion, world No. 1 ===
Pacheco Méndez received a wildcard for the main draw of the 2023 Abierto Mexicano Telcel in Acapulco. He also received a wildcard for the inaugural 2023 edition of the Challenger in Mexico City.
He reached a career high junior ranking of No. 1 on 29 May 2023. Rodrigo Pacheco won the Junior 2023 French Open in doubles.
=== 2024-2025: First ATP quarterfinal, Top 250 debut ===
For a third consecutive year, he received a wildcard for the main draw of the 2024 Los Cabos Open where he lost in the first round to the No. 72 ranked Australian Aleksandar Vukic in straight sets with two tiebreaks. He again received a wildcard for the main draw of the 2024 Abierto Mexicano Telcel but lost to the No. 55 ranked Serbian Dušan Lajović.
On 22 April 2024, he reached the top 600 at world No. 589, following a quarterfinal showing at the 2024 GNP Seguros Tennis Open Challenger in Acapulco with wins over second seed Michael Mmoh and Nicolás Mejía.
In May, ranked No. 585, he won the biggest title of his career defeating Bernard Tomic in the final of the M25 Xalapa in Mexico. He reached the top 500 on 20 May 2024, climbing more than 120 positions up in the rankings, following another final showing as a wildcard, at the M15 Villahermosa also in Mexico.
Ranked No. 356, Pacheco received a main draw wildcard for the ATP 500 2025 Abierto Mexicano Telcel, where he defeated world No. 66 Aleksandar Vukic recording the biggest win of his career. He became the youngest Mexican man to win an ATP Tour match since 1996 (Alejandro Hernandez in Santiago). Next Pacheco Mendez reached his first ATP Tour quarterfinal and first at the 500-level after getting a walkover from second seed Casper Ruud and moved 124 positions up in the rankings into the top 250 on 3 March 2025. Pacheco Mendez became the first Mexican tour-level quarterfinalist since 1998, when Hernandez reached the last eight on Mexico City’s clay courts.
== Performance timeline ==
=== Singles ===
== ATP Challenger Tour finals ==
=== Doubles: 4 (3 titles, 1 runner-up) ===
== ITF World Tennis Tour finals ==
=== Singles: 5 (3 titles, 2 runner-ups) ===
=== Doubles: 3 (1 title, 2 runner-ups) ===
== Junior Grand Slam finals ==
=== Doubles: 1 (title) === |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Carling | Will Carling | William David Charles Carling (born 12 December 1965) is an English former rugby union player. He was England's youngest captain, aged 22, and won 72 caps from 1988 to 1996, captaining England 59 times. Under his captaincy, England won Five Nations Grand Slams in 1991, 1992 and 1995, and reached the 1991 World Cup final.
He played for Rosslyn Park and Harlequins at club level. In the 1992 New Year Honours, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
Since retiring, Carling has pursued interests including corporate speaking and punditry. In 2018 he joined the England coaching staff of Eddie Jones as a leadership mentor.
== Early life and education ==
The son of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Carling, an officer in the Royal Regiment of Wales, Carling was born in Bradford-on-Avon and educated at Terra Nova School in Cheshire and then Sedbergh School, on an army scholarship. He disliked being sent to prep school but showed an aptitude for rugby and played above his age group, arriving at Sedbergh – a "big rugby school" – with a reputation as a serious talent.
On 2 April 1983 he made his debut for England Schools in a 16–0 victory over Ireland. He narrowly missed out on a junior Grand Slam, with an England Schools side that included Kevin Simms, Victor Ubogu and Carling's future Durham and Harlequins teammate Andy Mullins, losing 13–12 to Wales. Carling was made captain of the rugby 1st XV in his final year at school, albeit for Lent term only. Having also shown some talent for cricket, he sought the additional captaincy of the cricket team, but lost out to Mark Alban.
=== University ===
Having decided for a career in the British Army like his father, Carling – after a gap year – took an in-service degree in Psychology at Durham University. This meant the "occasional weekend exercise", but otherwise military activities were rather limited. He was an undergraduate student at Hatfield College, Durham (which had built a strong sporting reputation post-war), and was reunited with Mullins. Carling did not enjoy the transition from school to university rugby, and claimed to have "stagnated" in terms of development. Playing his first year at fullback, he had to accept a style of rugby that offered less creative freedom than he was used to.
"Caution was the watchword and it was not something I was used to. Instead of running everything, as you are encouraged to do in the idealistic world of schoolboy rugby, I was coached to kick, to play safety-first rugby."
Carling strongly considered giving up rugby after failing to enjoy his first year on the pitch at Durham, but found himself rejuvenated during an old boys' match at Sedbergh; and this reignited a desire to succeed in the sport. By his own admission he did not take his studies seriously and was often absent for lectures. He left with an ordinary pass degree in 1988. In January that year, Carling, still an undergraduate, made his debut for England against France at the Parc des Princes. In May he was invited to tour with England abroad, but the start date clashed with his final exams. Consequently, he took his exams two days early, and to safeguard examination security, was driven straight to Newcastle Airport.
Despite a less than stellar academic record, Carling had the opportunity to continue his education at the University of Cambridge and represent Cambridge University R.U.F.C., who had already recruited his Durham colleague Chris Oti. Carling did not follow up the invitation, believing it would be unethical to accept a place he had not earned.
== Career ==
=== Early career, 1987–1991 ===
The England rugby team were in a period of transition following failure at the 1987 Rugby World Cup. There was a new manager, Geoff Cooke, and a new coach, Roger Uttley, replacing Mike Weston and Martin Green. England's recent record was one of considerable underachievement, described by one writer as a "sprawling desert of failure, stretching back as far as 1963" — they had only won a single Five Nations Championship since then, in 1980. The new season offered good prospects for younger players, as league rugby was introduced for the first time, establishing a "proper system which rewarded progress"; Divisional Championships, which brought the best club players into regional teams, would not necessarily be the main method of selection in future.
In February 1987 Carling made his debut for Harlequins against the Metropolitan Police. He soon played for England B in a 22–9 win over France B. Carling sensed he had a chance of earning his first senior England cap when Kevin Simms, a former England Schoolboys teammate, was selected to play against Romania. As Carling knew the strengths and weaknesses of Simms and "wasn't in awe of him", expectation that he might match this achievement grew.
"...Simmsy was one of us. He unpicked the myth and also provided the motivation. If he could do it, then so could I. Maybe those blokes in the England side weren't so special after all."
Around Christmas 1987, Carling took part in an England trial for the upcoming Five Nations Championship. Initially he and Simms were set to be part of a junior team set to test more experienced "probables" including Simon Halliday of Bath and John Buckton of Saracens; but both Halliday and Buckton pulled hamstrings, which saw Carling and Simms "bumped up". The team list was officially published the following Monday, and after some uncertainty, Carling realised he'd earned his first callup when a university friend phoned to congratulate him. His debut against France on 16 January was a defeat, with England losing 10–9 in Paris due to a late French score. Later comparing the atmosphere in the dressing room afterwards to a "morgue", Carling was nonetheless pleased with his own performance. Carling started the remaining games against Wales, Scotland and Ireland, with England winning the latter two to finish third in that years Five Nations Championship.
Though still expected to pursue a military career, Carling abandoned these plans. He has stated that, contrary to media suggestions, he was never "fully commissioned". By Carling's own account, he was due to attend Sandhurst for the full officer training course in August 1988, but his status as an England international meant the army would not be able to accommodate his rugby ambitions. As a result, Carling opted to "buy himself out" of the army for £8,000. As rugby was an amateur game at this point, he accepted an executive post with Mobil Oil to make ends meet.
=== 1991–1995 ===
Under Carling England started to challenge and beat the established rugby union powers such as New Zealand and Australia, and their success helped to make rugby union a more popular sport in England. English victories over New Zealand and South Africa in 1993 were perhaps the peak of England's performance under Carling.
Carling's career included the 1993 British Lions tour to New Zealand. He underachieved on that tour, a pattern attributed by coach Ian McGeechan and manager Geoff Cooke as at least partly due to his failing to secure the captaincy (this instead going to Gavin Hastings of Scotland) but also due to the ascendency in the centre of both Jeremy Guscott and Scott Gibbs of Wales. McGeechan and Cooke disclosed that Carling came close to voluntarily withdrawing from the squad; he did regain his test place and played a notable role in the third test. McGeechan commented in his autobiography that Carling's failure to rise to the occasion as a Lion (in contrast to Guscott) may be seen by some as the difference between his legacy as a good player and a great player.
Also in 1993, he became the second captain after John Pullin to lead and beat all of the “Big Three” Southern Hemisphere sides: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, after beating the All Blacks 15–9. He had earlier led England to wins against Australia in November 1988, and South Africa in November 1992. As captain, he had 2 wins against Australia, 1 against New Zealand, and 2 against South Africa.
=== 1995 World Cup ===
In the run-up to the 1995 World Cup, after England returned to form with their third Grand Slam in five years, Carling described the Rugby Football Union general committee as "57 old farts" which led to his sacking as captain. The incident had been provoked by administrator Dudley Wood's comments about England players' alleged desire to cheat by breaking the amateur ethic. He was quickly reinstated due to public pressure and following a public apology was able to go to the 1995 Rugby World Cup. After a slow start, England found form and subsequently won all their group games, then knocked out Australia in the quarter-final 25–22, thanks to a last-minute drop-goal from Rob Andrew. They were well beaten by New Zealand in the semi-final, largely thanks to four tries from Jonah Lomu. Although Carling himself scored two tries towards the end of that game, and set up two more for Rory Underwood, England lost 45–29. The subsequent loss in the third place play-off, against France, was England's first loss to the French in seven years.
Following his resignation from the England captaincy, he continued to be selected as an outside centre, usually with Guscott or Phil de Glanville; the latter succeeded him as captain.
== Life after rugby ==
After his rugby career ended he became a TV pundit on rugby union. He has also worked as a motivational speaker and in 2001 founded Will Carling Management Ltd, a corporate hospitality company which is also involved in the rugby social networking website 'Rucku'.
== Personal life ==
Carling is married to his second wife Lisa, the ex-wife of David Cooke; the couple have two children. Carling was married to the television presenter Julia Carling (née Smith) from 1994 to 1996. Prior to their divorce, he was romantically linked by some members of the press with Diana, Princess of Wales, the then-wife of Prince Charles. Carling has denied any such relationship.
Carling, whose mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when he was an infant and later died from the disease, is a patron of the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer.
== Politics ==
In August 2014, Carling was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.
== Matches as captain ==
=== Honours as captain ===
Rugby World Cup
Runner-up: 1991
Five Nations Championship
Champions: 1991 (Grand Slam and Triple Crown), 1992 (Grand Slam and Triple Crown), 1995 (Grand Slam and Triple Crown), 1996 (Triple Crown)
Runners-up: 1989, 1990, 1994
Calcutta Cup
Winners: 1989, 1991–1996
Runners-up: 1990
Millennium Trophy
Winners: 1989–1992, 1995–1996
Runners-up: 1993–1994
== Honours ==
In 2021, World Rugby inducted Carling into its World Rugby Hall of Fame, alongside Osea Kolinisau, Humphrey Kayange, Huriana Manuel, Cheryl McAfee and Jim Telfer. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Minghella | Anthony Minghella | Anthony Minghella (6 January 1954 – 18 March 2008) was a British playwright and filmmaker. He was chairman of the board of Governors at the British Film Institute between 2003 and 2007. He directed Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), The English Patient (1996), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Cold Mountain (2003), and produced Iris (2001).
He received the Academy Award for Best Director for The English Patient. In addition, he received three more Academy Award nominations; he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for both The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, and was posthumously nominated for Best Picture for The Reader (2008), as a producer.
== Early life and education ==
Minghella was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. His family are well known on the island, where they ran a café in Ryde until the 1980s and have run an eponymous business making and selling Italian-style ice cream since the 1950s. His parents were Edoardo Minghella (an Italian immigrant) and Leeds-born Gloria Alberta (née Arcari). His mother's ancestors originally came from Valvori, a small village in southern Lazio, Italy. He was one of five children, his sisters Gioia Minghella-Giddens, Edana Minghella and Loretta Minghella, and a brother Dominic Minghella who also became a screenwriter and producer.
Minghella attended St. Mary's Catholic Primary School, Ryde, Sandown Grammar School, and St John's College, Portsmouth. Early interests suggested a possible career as a musician, with Minghella playing keyboards with local bands Earthlight and Dancer. The latter recorded an album titled Tales of the Riverbank in 1972, although it was not released until 2001.
He attended the University of Hull, studying drama. As an undergraduate he had arrived at university with an EMI contract for the band, in which he sang and played keyboards; while at university he wrote words and music for an adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper (1975).
Minghella graduated after three years and stayed on to pursue a PhD. He also taught at the university for several years, on Samuel Beckett and on the medieval theatre. Ultimately, he abandoned his pursuit of a PhD to work for the BBC.
== Career ==
Minghella's debut work was a stage adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper (1975) and it was his Whale Music (1985) that brought him notice. His double bill of Samuel Beckett's Play and Happy Days was his directorial debut and debut feature film as a director was A Little Like Drowning (1978). During the 1980s, he worked in television, starting as a runner on Magpie before moving into script editing the children's drama series Grange Hill for the BBC and later writing The Storyteller series for Jim Henson. He wrote three episodes of the ITV detective drama Inspector Morse and an episode of long-running ITV drama Boon. Made in Bangkok (1986) found mainstream success in the West End.
Radio success followed with a Giles Cooper Award for the radio drama Cigarettes and Chocolate first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1988. It was revived on 3 May 2008 as a tribute to its author director following his death. His production starred Juliet Stevenson, Bill Nighy and Jenny Howe. His first radio play Hang Up, starring Anton Lesser and Juliet Stevenson, was revived on 10 May 2008 as part of the BBC Radio 4 Minghella season.
Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), a feature drama written and directed for the BBC's Screen Two anthology strand, bypassed TV broadcast and instead had a cinema release. He turned down an offer to direct another Inspector Morse to do the project, even though he believed that the Morse episode would have been a much higher-profile assignment. The English Patient (1996) brought him two Academy Awards nominations, Best Director (which he won) and Adapted Screenplay. He also received an Adapted Screenplay nomination for The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).
His adaptation of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which he co-wrote and directed, was broadcast posthumously on BBC One (23 March 2008) as a TV movie; watched by 6.3 million viewers. He vocally supported I Know I'm Not Alone, a film of musician Michael Franti's peacemaking excursions into Iraq, Palestine and Israel. He directed a party election broadcast for the Labour Party in 2005. The short film depicted Tony Blair and Gordon Brown working together and was criticised for being insincere: "The Anthony Minghella party political broadcast last year was full of body language fibs", said Peter Collett, a psychologist at the University of Oxford. "When you are talking to me, I'll give you my full attention only if I think you are very high status or if I love you. On that party political broadcast, they are staring at each other like lovers. It is completely false."
With Samuel Beckett's 100th birthday celebrations, he returned to radio on BBC Radio 3 with Eyes Down Looking (2006), with: Jude Law, Juliet Stevenson and David Threlfall. An operatic directorial debut came with Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Premiered at the English National Opera (London, 2005), then at the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre (Vilnius, March 2006) and at the Metropolitan Opera (New York City, September 2006). The latter was transmitted live into cinemas worldwide (7 March 2009) as part of the Met's HD series and is now available on DVD. The ENO work was to have led to other operatic projects, directing again at English National Opera and collaborating with Osvaldo Golijov on a new opera for the Met and ENO, writing the libretto and directing the production.
He was honoured with the naming of The Anthony Minghella Theatre at the Quay Arts Centre (Isle of Wight). He made an appearance in the 2007 film Atonement as a television host interviewing the novelist central to the story.
His last work was the screenplay of the film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical Nine (1982); Arthur Kopit (book) and Maury Yeston (score). It is based on the film 8½. He shared credit with Michael Tolkin on the screenplay.
The department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, opened in 2012, was named in his honour.
== Personal life and death ==
Minghella met his first wife, Yvonne Millar, when they were students. They had one daughter, and later divorced. In 1985 Minghella married Hong Kong–born choreographer and dancer Carolyn Jane Choa. They had one son, Max.
Minghella's younger brother, Dominic Minghella, is the creator of the television series Robin Hood and Doc Martin. His sister, Loretta Minghella, is Master of Clare College, Cambridge.
Minghella was a fan of Portsmouth F.C., and appeared in the Channel 4 documentary, Hallowed Be Thy Game. His home had two double bedrooms dedicated to the display of Portsmouth memorabilia dating back to the club's founding in 1898.
Minghella died of a haemorrhage on 18 March 2008 in Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith, following an operation the previous week to remove cancer of the tonsils and neck.
== Memorial plaques ==
A memorial plaque to Minghella was unveiled on 2 March 2016 by Jude Law, at Western Gardens, Ryde, Isle of Wight.
He is commemorated with a green plaque on The Avenues, Kingston upon Hull. The 2009 film Nine is dedicated in his memory.
== Works and credits ==
=== Film ===
Executive producer
Iris (2001)
The Quiet American (2002)
The Interpreter (2005)
Michael Clayton (2007)
Margaret (2011)
Producer
Heaven (2002)
Catch a Fire (2006)
Breaking and Entering (2006)
The Reader (2008)
Love You More (2008)
Acting roles
=== Short film ===
=== Television ===
=== Theatre ===
Selected plays
Whale Music (New End Theatre, Hampstead, June 1981); revived for radio, BBC Radio 4, 10 May 2008
Two Planks and a Passion (Greenwich Theatre, November 1984)
A Little Like Drowning (Hampstead Theatre, July 1984)
Made in Bangkok (West End debut as a playwright, Aldwych Theatre. 18 March 1986, director Michael Blakemore)
Hang Up (radio play for BBC Radio 4,1987)
Cigarettes and Chocolate (60-minute radio play for BBC Radio 4, 1988)
Eyes Down Looking (Beckett 100th Birthday tribute, radio play for BBC Radio 3, 1 April 2006)
== Accolades == |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Awards | Eagle Awards | The Eagle Awards were a series of British awards for comic book titles and creators. They were awarded by UK fans voting for work produced during the previous year. Named after the UK's seminal boys' comic Eagle, the awards were launched in 1977 for comics released in 1976.
"[S]et up and financed by a group of dealers and fanzine editors" with the intention of including "people with... diverse interests... to make the poll as impartial as possible," the Eagles were described as "the first independent [in the UK], nationally organised comic art awards poll." The hope was that the Eagle Awards would "become a regular annual fandom event," and indeed, they were the preeminent British comics award in the 1980s and the 2000s (being mostly dormant in the 1990s), variously described as the country's comics equivalent of the Oscars or the BAFTAs. The Eagle Awards were usually presented in a ceremony at a British comic book convention; venues over the years included the British Comic Art Convention, UKCAC, Comic Festival, Comic Expo, and the London MCM Expo. Hosts for the ceremonies included such notables as Simon Pegg, Norman Lovett, Fraser Ayres, Billy West, and Anthony Stewart Head.
Initially the Eagle Award itself was a certificate; eventually the award became an engraved trophy.
Notable repeat Eagle Award winners included Alan Moore, who won the Favourite Comicbook Writer award an impressive eleven times (including sweeping the U.K. and U.S. categories in the period 1985–1987); Terry Austin, who won the Favourite Inker award nine times; Alex Ross, who won the Favourite Comics Artist (Fully Painted Artwork) seven times in ten possible years; and Laura DePuy Martin, who won the Favourite Colourist award six straight times. 2000 AD won the Favourite (Colour) Comic award 12 times, while The Walking Dead won Favourite Black & White Comicbook seven straight times. Batman was voted Favourite Comicbook Character 12 times and Judge Dredd won the award seven times; while the X-Men dominated the Favourite Comicbook Group or Team category, winning it eight times in the span of 11 years. Wolverine won the Favourite Comicbook Character category three times, the Favourite Supporting Character award three times, and the Character Most Worthy of Own Title twice.
In 2014, in connection with Stan Lee, the Eagle Awards were renamed, and presented as, the True Believer Comic Awards. They have not returned since then.
== History ==
=== 1977: conception and debut ===
The Eagle Awards were set up by prominent British comics enthusiasts Mike Conroy, Nick Landau, Colin Campbell, Phil Clarke, and Richard Burton. Because the Eagle logo was perceived (as described by Burton) as "a standard of quality ... seldom reached" in early 1977, the Eagle Awards were named "with official blessing from IPC" (Eagle's former publisher).
The Eagle Awards were launched at the British Comic Art Convention, the earliest British fan convention devoted entirely to comics (and usually known by the moniker Comicon). The first awards ceremony was held on 3 September 1977 at the Bloomsbury Centre Hotel, London. The 1978 and 1979 awards were also presented at the British Comic Art Convention. Almost from the beginning, the awards included separate UK and US sections.
=== The 1980s: a Golden Age ===
The 1980 Eagle Awards (for comics published in 1979) were sponsored by Burton, Conroy, Colin Campbell, Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, Steve Dillon, Forbidden Planet, Forever People, Nostalgia & Comics, Bob Smart, and Valhalla Books; and organised by Burton and Conroy. The 1981 edition was again organised by Burton and Conroy, and sponsored by Burton, Conroy, Colin Campbell, Forbidden Planet, Nostalgia & Comics, Bob Smart, and Comics Showcase. Marvel's X-Men comic and creators dominated the 1981 Eagles, winning Favourite Comic Book, Artist (John Byrne), Writer (Chris Claremont), Inker (Terry Austin), Character (Wolverine), Single Comic Book Story (X-Men #137, "The Fate of the Phoenix"), Continued Comic Book Story ("The Dark Phoenix Saga," X-Men #135–137), and Cover (X-Men #136, by Byrne and Austin). The 1981 awards were organised by Burton and Conroy, and sponsored by Burton, Conroy, Colin Campbell, Bob Smart, and four UK comics retailers: Forbidden Planet, Forever People, Nostalgia & Comics, and Comics Showcase.
After a hiatus in 1982, the Eagle Awards returned in 1983, presented at the London Comic Mart by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
The 1984 Eagle Award nominations were announced in May with Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! dominating the nominations – Favourite Penciler, Inker, Writer, Comic, Character (Reuben Flagg), Supporting Character (Raul the cat), New Comic, Single or Continued Story, and two nominations for Favourite Cover – and winning seven of them. The 1984 awards presentation was at the Birmingham Comic Art Show.
By the mid-1980s the work of British authors often dominated both the UK and US categories. In 1985 Alan Moore won favorite writer in both categories, and in 1986 (presented on 1 June at the Birmingham Comic Art Show), the awards "proved to be a virtual clean sweep ... by Alan Moore," who not only again won "favourite writer in both the US and UK categories," but had his work win for favourite comic book, supporting character and new title in the US, and character, continuing story and "character worthy of own title" in the UK (in which last category his works held all top three spots).
The awards became almost fully annual in 1987, in conjunction with the United Kingdom Comic Art Convention (UKCAC); they were held at the UKCAC in 1987, 1988, and 1990.
=== The 1990s: a fallow period ===
The Eagle Awards went dormant during most of the 1990s, as organizer Mike Conroy focused on his freelance writing (including becoming an editor of Comics International). From 1990 to 1997, the Eagles were replaced by the UK Comic Art Awards, and then from 1997 until 2003 (with the exception of the year 2000) were supplanted by the National Comics Awards.
=== The 2000s: a return to (hesitant) prominence ===
In 2000, on the 50th anniversary of the birth of Eagle, the Eagle Awards returned. The ceremony was held on 22 April 2000, at the Bristol Comic Festival (known as "Comics 2000"); this time MC'd by actor/comedian Simon Pegg. There were no Eagle Awards distributed in 2001; voting for comics published in 2000 ended in October 2001 and the winners were announced in June 2002 (at the Comic Festival, which had replaced UKCAC), so news reports announced these variously as the 2000, 2001, or 2002 Eagle Awards. The Eagles again went dormant in 2003 (replaced by the National Comics Awards).
The Eagle Awards returned in 2004 (sponsored by the retailer Ace Comics) and were presented at the inaugural Comic Expo, held on 6–7 November at the Ramada City Inn in Bristol; the Eagles were again not presented in 2005.
The 2006–2008 awards presentations were held at the Comic Expo in Bristol, with the 2008 awards being notable for accusations of ballot-stuffing.
Management of the Eagle Awards was transferred from co-founder Mike Conroy to his teenage daughter Cassandra Conroy in 2009 (although Mike Conroy stayed on as advisor). The previous years' venue the Bristol Comic Expo scaled back that year, and was not available for the evening awards ceremony. After attempting to go forward with the Eagle Awards as an online-only process, the Conroys were forced to cancel the 2009 awards due to a "lack of nominations."
=== 2010–2014: rifts, name changes, and demise ===
The 2010–2012 awards were presented at the London MCM Expo. At the 2012 awards it was announced that the award would in future be called the MCM Award. The announcement prompted a public rift between MCM and the Conroys; as a result no Eagles were awarded in 2013.
The Conroys decided to continue the awards separate from MCM, and in April 2014 it was announced that the award would be presented at the London Film and Comic Con (LFCC) and be named The Stan Lee Eagle Award, with the backing of Stan Lee in his last European convention appearance. In June 2014, however, it was announced that the new award would be called the True Believer Comic Awards. The inaugural True Believer Comics Awards were presented on 12 July 2014 at the LFCC, with host Anthony Stewart Head and a special appearance by Stan Lee. They have not been awarded since.
== Dates and locations ==
== Nominations and voting ==
At the outset of the Eagle Award, ballots were made available to "most dealers, shops and fanzines." The initial method of casting votes was designed to be inclusive and straightforward, with completed forms able to be returned to the same place, rather than a centralised location. An initial ballot formed a list of nominees, from which the voting ballot was created and disseminated in the same manner.
The awards for 1983 used an open voting system, with no pre-selected nominees. In 1984, the Eagles introduced a new nomination system composed of "prominent British fans, publishers, dealers, and artists," which put forward three names in each category.
The 1986 Eagles saw the introduction of a "free vote . . . rather than pre-selected nominees," creating a "fairer reflection of fans' opinions – and some anomalous results, especially in the Roll of Honor category."
The 2004 awards saw online voting for the first time; over 13,000 voting forms were "received via post, email and website counting centres."
For the 2007 awards, nominations were made by the general comics-reading public via the Eagle Awards website; the five most popular became nominees for the awards.
== Categories ==
Over the course of their existence, the Eagle Awards were eventually awarded in more than 30 categories.
The first ballot had nominations in 19 categories:
The next year's ballot, 1978, had 21 categories, dropping Favourite British Fan Personality and Favourite Comic Publication "All Time," and adding categories for Inker, Villain, and Supporting Character. The 1979 ballot dropped categories for Favourite Comic – Dramatic and Favourite Comic – Humour and added categories for Cover and Character Most Worthy of Own Title.
The nominations for Favourite Single Comicbook Story and Favorite Continued Comicbook Story were separate from 1977 to 1980 and then again from 2011 to 2014; they were merged as one category from 2000 to 2010. Similarly, the Favourite Cover category was only divided into British and American sections from 1984 to 1990.
Reflecting an interest in long-form comics, the Best Original Graphic Novel category was added in 1986. The Favourite Team category was dropped after 1990.
With the revival of the Eagles in 2000, categories for Favourite Writer and Favourite Artist were no longer separated into UK and US sections, and a host of new categories were added:
Favourite Comics Artist – Fully Painted Artwork
Favourite Colourist
Favourite Comics Editor
Favourite Black & White Comicbook
Favourite British Small Press Title
Favourite Trade Paperback/Reprint Collection
Favourite Comic Strip/Newspaper Strip
Favourite Comics-Based Movie or TV
Favourite Comics Related Website
Favourite Comics Related Website (fan-organised)
Favourite Comics E-Zine
The Favourite Comics Related Website (Fan-Organized) category was dropped in 2002, but five more award categories were added:
Favourite Comics Writer/Artist
Favourite Manga Comic
Favourite European Comic
Favourite Comics-Related Book
Favourite Web-based Comic
The 2004 Eagles dropped awards for the long-running categories Supporting Character and Character Most Worthy of Own Title, as well as the relatively new categories of British Small Press Title, Comic Strip/Newspaper Strip, and Comics E-Zine. It added a Favourite Letterer category as well as the one-off category Favourite Comics-Related Merchandise.
The 2006 Eagles saw the addition of a Favourite Publisher award, and the 2008 Eagle Awards added categories for Favourite Newcomer: Writer and Favourite Newcomer: Artist while dropping the long-running categories Favourite Character/Hero and Favourite Villain.
The final set of awards, in 2014, were given in 28 categories.
The following is a comprehensive list of the Eagle Award categories and the years they were presented, many of which were divided into British sections and (North) American sections. These categories included:
Favourite Writer (1977–2014)
Favourite Artist/Penciler (1977–2014)
Favourite Comic/Colour Comicbook (1977–2014)
Favourite Black & White Comicbook (2000–2014)
Favourite New Title (1977–2014)
Favourite Single or Continued Story (1977–2014) – divided into separate categories for Single and Continued 1977–1980, and 2011–2014
Best Original Graphic Novel (1986–2014)
Favourite Comic Strip/Newspaper Strip (2000–2004)
Favourite Cover (1979–2014)
Favourite Character/Hero (1977–2008)
Favourite Villain (1978–2008)
Favourite Supporting Character (1978–2004)
Character Most Worthy of Own Title (1979–2004)
Favourite Specialist Comics Publication/Magazine About Comics (1977–2014)
General categories not divided into U.K. and U.S. sections were:
Favourite Comics Writer/Artist (2002–2012)
Favourite Inker (1978–2014)
Favourite Comics Artist – Fully Painted Artwork (2000–2014)
Favourite Colourist (2000–2014)
Favourite Comics Letterer (2004–2014)
Favourite Comics Editor (2000–2014)
Favourite Publisher (2006–2014)
Favourite Newcomer (1997)
Favourite Newcomer: Writer (2008–2014)
Favourite Newcomer: Artist (2008–2014)
Favourite Comic: Dramatic (1977–1978)
Favourite Comic: Humour (1977–1978)
Favourite Black & White Comicbook - Humour (1977–1980)
Favourite Comics Magazine (1977–1980)
Favourite British Small Press Title (2000–2004) – specific to the U.K.
Favourite Manga Comic (2002–2014)
Favourite European Comic (2002–2014)
Favourite Team (1977–1990) – divided into U.K./U.S. in 1985 only
Favourite Trade Paperback/Reprint Collection (2000–2014)
Favourite Comics-Related Book (2002–2014)
Favourite Comics-Based Movie or TV (2000–2014)
Favourite Comics Related Website (2000–2014)
Favourite Comics E-Zine (2000–2004)
Favourite Web-based Comic (2002–2014)
Roll of Honour (1977–2014) – originally called "Favourite Comics Creator All Time"
Finally, there were a few one-off awards:
Favourite British Fan Personality (1977)
Favourite Comic Excluding North American and UK titles (2000) – became separate awards for Favourite Manga and Favourite European Comic
Favourite Comics Related Website (fan-organised) (2000)
Favourite Comics-Related Merchandise (2004)
30th Anniversary Award for Outstanding Achievements in British Comics (2006)
== Past winners ==
Listed by year presented
=== People ===
==== Favourite Comicbook Writer ====
Alan Moore won this award an impressive eleven times (including sweeping the U.K. and U.S. categories in the period 1985–1987), with Chris Claremont winning it four times (all in the span 1977–1981).
1977
U.K.: Chris Claremont
U.S.: Roy Thomas
1978
U.K.: Martin Lock
U.S.: Steve Englehart
1979
U.K.: T.B. Grover (pseudonym of John Wagner)
U.S.: Chris Claremont
1980
U.K.: John Howard
U.S.: Chris Claremont
1981
U.K.: T.B. Grover
U.S. Chris Claremont
1983
U.K.: Alan Moore
U.S.: Frank Miller
1984
U.K.: Pat Mills
U.S.: Howard Chaykin
1985 (U.K. and U.S.) Alan Moore
1986 (U.K. and U.S.) Alan Moore
1987 (U.K. and U.S.) Alan Moore
1988
U.K.: Pat Mills
U.S.: Alan Moore
1989
U.S.: Neil Gaiman (for The Sandman)
1990
U.K.: Grant Morrison
U.S.: Neil Gaiman, Sandman (DC)
2000 Alan Moore
2002 Alan Moore
2004 J. Michael Straczynski
2006 Grant Morrison
2007 Warren Ellis
2008 Alan Moore
2010 Warren Ellis
2011 Grant Morrison
2012 Scott Snyder
2014 Matt Fraction
==== Favourite Comics Writer/Artist ====
Mike Mignola won this award three times while Frank Miller won it twice.
2002 Frank Miller
2004 Mike Mignola
2006 Howard Chaykin
2007 Mike Mignola
2008 Alan Davis
2010 Darwyn Cooke
2011 Mike Mignola
2012 Frank Miller
==== Favourite Comicbook Artist/Penciler ====
Multiple winners of this award included John Byrne, Brian Bolland, and Alan Davis with three wins; and Neal Adams, John Bolton, George Pérez, Bill Sienkiewicz, Frank Miller, Brian Talbot, Frank Quitely, and J. H. Williams III with two awards apiece.
1977
U.K.: Frank Bellamy
U.S.: Neal Adams
1978
U.K.: John Bolton
U.S.: Neal Adams
1979
U.K.: John Bolton
U.S.: John Byrne
1980
U.K.: Brian Bolland
U.S.: John Byrne
1981
U.K.: Brian Bolland
U.S.: John Byrne
1983
U.K.: Brian Bolland
U.S.: Frank Miller
1984
U.S.: Howard Chaykin
1985
U.K.: Alan Davis
U.S. Bill Sienkiewicz
1986
U.K.: Alan Davis
U.S.: George Pérez
1987
U.K.: Alan Davis
U.S.: Frank Miller
1988
U.K.: Bryan Talbot
U.S.: Bill Sienkiewicz
1989
U.K.: Bryan Talbot (for The Adventures of Luther Arkwright)
1990
U.K.: Simon Bisley
U.S.: Todd McFarlane
2000 George Pérez
2002 Frank Quitely
2004 Jim Lee
2006 Bryan Hitch
2007 John Cassaday
2008 Frank Cho
2010 Frank Quitely
2011 J. H. Williams III
2012 J. H. Williams III
2014 Fiona Staples
==== Favourite Inker ====
Terry Austin won this award nine times in an eleven-year span (from 1978 to 1988).
1978 Terry Austin
1979 Terry Austin
1980:
U.K.: Brian Bolland
U.S.: Terry Austin
1981 Terry Austin
1983 Terry Austin
1984 Howard Chaykin
1985 Terry Austin
1986 Terry Austin
1987 Terry Austin
1988 Terry Austin
1990 Paul Neary
2000 Jimmy Palmiotti
2002 Mark Farmer
2004 Scott Williams
2006 Jimmy Palmiotti
2007 Paul Neary
2008 D'Israeli (Matt Brooker)
2010 Kevin O'Neill
2011 Mike Mignola
2012 Scott Williams
2014 Becky Cloonan
==== Favourite Comics Artist (Fully Painted Artwork) ====
Alex Ross dominated this award, winning it seven times in 10 possible years.
2000 Alex Ross
2002 Alex Ross
2004 Alex Ross
2006 Alex Ross
2007 Alex Ross
2008 Alex Ross
2010 J. H. Williams III
2011 J. H. Williams III
2012 Alex Ross
2014 Fiona Staples
==== Favourite Colourist ====
Laura DePuy Martin won this award six straight times from 2000 to 2008.
2000 Laura DePuy
2002 Laura Depuy
2004 Laura Martin
2006 Laura Martin
2007 Laura Martin
2008 Laura Martin
2010 Ben Templesmith
2011 Dave Stewart
2012 Dave Stewart
2014 Matt Hollingsworth
==== Favourite Letterer ====
2006 Todd Klein
2007 Chris Eliopoulos
2008 Dave Gibbons
2010 Todd Klein
2011 Richard Starkings
2012 Richard Starkings/Comicraft
2014 Annie Parkhouse
==== Favourite Comics Editor ====
2000 AD's Tharg the Mighty won this award four times (with three of those awards going to Matt Smith); Axel Alonso also won the award three times.
2000 Dennis O'Neil
2002 Andy Diggle (Mighty Tharg: 2000 AD)
2004 Axel Alonso (Marvel Comics)
2006 Axel Alonso
2007 Matt Smith
2008 Tharg (Matt Smith)
2010 Axel Alonso
2011 Matt Smith/Tharg
2012 Karen Berger
2014 Chris Ryall
==== Best Newcomer ====
1997 Alex Ronald
==== Award for Favourite Newcomer Writer/Rising Star ====
2008 Matt Fraction
2010 Jonathan Hickman
2011 Paul Cornell
2012 Jeff Lemire
2014 Matt Fraction
==== Award for Favourite Newcomer Artist/Rising Star ====
1978 Marshall Rogers
2008 David Aja
2010 Jamie McKelvie
2011 Sara Pichelli
2012 Francesco Francavilla
2014 Fiona Staples
=== Works ===
==== Favourite (Colour) Comic ====
2000 AD was dominant in this category, winning 12 times; X-Men was in second place with six wins (five of them in the period 1977–1981).
1977 X-Men
1978 X-Men
1979
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: X-Men
1980
U.K.: 2000 A.D.
U.S.: X-Men
1981
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: X-Men
1983
U.K.: Warrior
U.S.: Daredevil
1984
U.K.: The Daredevils
U.S.: American Flagg!
1985
U.K.: Warrior, edited by Dez Skinn (Quality Communications)
U.S.: Swamp Thing
1986
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: Swamp Thing
1987
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: Watchmen
1988
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: Watchmen
1990
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: Uncanny X-Men
2000
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: Preacher, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
2002
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: JSA
2004
U.K.: Warhammer Monthly (Black Library)
U.S.: Fantastic Four (Marvel Comics)
2006
U.K.: Judge Dredd Megazine (Rebellion)
U.S.: The Ultimates Volume 2 (Marvel Comics)
2007
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: All-Star Superman
2008
U.K.: The Spectacular Spider-Man
U.S.: Hellboy: Darkness Calls
2010
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: Batman and Robin
2011
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: Batman and Robin
2012
U.K.: Doctor Who Magazine
U.S.: Batman
2014
U.K.: 2000 AD
U.S.: Saga
==== Favourite Comic Magazine ====
Savage Sword of Conan prevailed in this category three times in the five years it was awarded.
1977 Savage Sword of Conan
1978 Savage Sword of Conan
1979 Savage Sword of Conan
1980
U.K.: 2000 AD Summer Special
U.S.: Howard the Duck
1981 Epic Illustrated
==== Favourite Comicbook - Humour ====
1977 Howard the Duck
1978 Howard the Duck
==== Favourite Black & White Comicbook - Humour ====
1977 Mad magazine
==== Favourite Black & White Comicbook ====
The Walking Dead won this category seven straight times.
2000 Hell and Back (A Sin City Love Story), by Frank Miller
2002 Liberty Meadows, by Frank Cho
2004 Bone (Cartoon Books)
2006 The Walking Dead (Image Comics)
2007 The Walking Dead
2008 The Walking Dead
2010 The Walking Dead
2011 The Walking Dead
2012 The Walking Dead
2014 The Walking Dead
==== Favourite UK Small Press Title/Black and White Comicbook ====
2000 Kane by Paul Grist
2002 Jack Staff by Paul Grist (Dancing Elephant Press)
2004 Thrud the Barbarian (Carl Critchlow)
2006 Springheeled Jack (Black Boar Press)
2007 Hero Killers (Moonface Press)
2008 How to Date a Girl in Ten Days by Tom Humberstone
2010 Whatever Happened to The World's Fastest Man? by Dave West and Marleen Lowe
2011 Commando (D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd)
2012 Viz (Dennis Publishing)
2014 Good Cop Bad Cop by Jim Alexander
==== Favourite Comic Album/Graphic Novel/Original Graphic Novel ====
1986
U.K.: Nemesis Book III by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill
U.S.: American Flagg!: Hard Times by Howard Chaykin
1987
U.K.: D.R. & Quinch's Totally Awesome Guide to Life by Alan Moore and Alan Davis
U.S.: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson
1988
U.K.: Violent Cases by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
U.S.: Daredevil: Love and War by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz
1989 Violent Cases by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
1990
U.K.: Sláine: The Horned God Book I by Pat Mills and Simon Bisley
U.S.: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean
2000 JLA: Earth 2 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
2002 Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco
2004 Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place by Brian Azzarello and Joe Kubert
2006 Top 10: The Forty-Niners by Alan Moore and Gene Ha
2007 Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
2008 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
2010 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
2011 Scott Pilgrim, Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley
2012 Batman: Noël by Lee Bermejo
2014 Avengers: Endless Wartime by Warren Ellis, et al.
==== Favourite Trade Paperback/Reprint Collection ====
2000 From Hell: To Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
2002 The Authority: Under New Management by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch
2004 The Chronicles of Conan (Dark Horse)
2006 Absolute Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
2007 Absolute Sandman Volume 1 by Neil Gaiman
2008 Absolute Sandman Volume 2 by Neil Gaiman
2010 Captain Britain by Alan Moore and Alan Davis Omnibus
2011 Absolute All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
2012 Thor Omnibus by Walt Simonson
2014 Hawkeye Volume 1 Oversized HC by Matt Fraction, et al.
==== Favourite New Comic Title ====
1977 Howard the Duck
1978 John Carter, Warlord of Mars
1979 Micronauts
1980
U.K.: Doctor Who Weekly
U.S.: Howard the Duck
1981 The New Teen Titans
1983
U.K.: Warrior
U.S.: Camelot 3000
1984
U.S.: American Flagg!
1985
U.K.: Captain Britain
U.S.: Power Pack, written by Louise Simonson (Marvel Comics)
1986
U.K.: Captain Britain
U.S. Miracleman
1987
U.K.: Redfox
U.S.: Watchmen
1988
U.K.: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
U.S.: Marshal Law
1989
U.K.: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
1990
U.K.: The Bogie Man
U.S.: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight
2000 Top 10, by Alan Moore and Gene Ha
2002 Ultimate Spider-Man
2004 Conan (Dark Horse)
2006 All-Star Superman (DC) by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
2007 Nextwave
2008 Thor
2010 Batman and Robin
2011 Daytripper
2012 Batman
2014 Guardians of the Galaxy
==== Favourite Single or Continued Comicbook Story ====
1977
Single: Howard the Duck #3: "Four Feathers of Death" (Steve Gerber/John Buscema)
Continued: Master of Kung Fu #48-51 (Doug Moench/Paul Gulacy)
1978
Single: Avengers Annual #7 – The Final Threat (Jim Starlin)
Continued: Avengers Annual #7/Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2 (Jim Starlin)
1979
Single: X-Men #111 – Mindgames (Chris Claremont/John Byrne)
Continued: The Avengers #167, 168, 170-177 (Jim Shooter/George Pérez, Sal Buscema, David Wenzel)
1980
U.K.:
Single: Hulk Weekly #2 (Night Raven)
Continued: Hulk Weekly 1–30, 42, 43 (Black Knight)
U.S.:
Single: Iron Man #128 – Demon in a Bottle (David Michelinie, Bob Layton/John Romita Jr.)
Continued: X-Men #125-128 (Chris Claremont/John Byrne)
1981
U.K.
Single: "Terror Tube," 2000 AD #167
Continued: "The Judge Child," 2000 AD #156–181
U.S.
Single: X-Men #137 "The Fate of the Phoenix"
Continued: X-Men #135–137, "The Dark Phoenix Saga"
1983
U.K.: Marvelman (Warrior #1-3, 5, & 6)
U.S.: Wolverine #1-4 (limited series)
1984
U.S.: American Flagg! #1–2, "Hard Times"
1985
U.K.: 2000 AD #355–359
U.S.: Superman #400
1986
U.K.: Halo Jones Book Two (2000 AD #406-415)
U.S.: Crisis on Infinite Earths #1-9
1987
U.K.: Halo Jones Book Three
U.S.: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
1988
U.K.: Zenith (2000 AD #535-550)
U.S.: Batman #404-407: Year One
1990
U.K.: Sláine: The Horned God Book I (2000 AD #626-635)
U.S.: Skreemer (limited series)
2000 Daredevil (#1-8), by Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada
2002 The Authority: The Nativity
2004 Daredevil #46-50: Hardcore (Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev)
2006 The Ultimates volume 2 #1-9 (Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch, and Paul Neary)
2007 Nextwave #1-6
2008 Captain America #25-30: The Death of Captain America
2010
Single: Phonogram: The Singles Club #4: "Konichiwa Bitches"
Continued: The Walking Dead #61-65: "Fear The Hunters"
2011
Single: Daytripper #8
Continued: The Walking Dead #73-79: "Too Far Gone"
2012
Single: Doctor Who #12
Continued: Walking Dead #79-84: "No Way Out"
2014
Single: "Pizza is my Business," Hawkeye #11
Continued: Saga
==== Favourite Cover ====
1979 Master of Kung Fu #67 (Paul Gulacy)
1980
U.K.: 2000 AD 144
U.S.: The Avengers #185 (George Pérez)
1981
U.K.: 2000 AD #173 (Brian Bolland)
U.S.: X-Men #136 (John Byrne/Terry Austin)
1983
U.K.: Warrior #7 (Mick Austin)
U.S.: Doctor Strange #55 (Michael Golden)
1985
U.K.: Warrior #19 (David Lloyd/Garry Leach)
U.S.: New Mutants #22 (Bill Sienkiewicz)
1986
U.K.: Captain Britain #6 (Alan Davis)
U.S.: Swamp Thing #34 (John Totleben)
1987
U.K.: 2000 AD #500 (multiple artists)
U.S.: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns #1 (Frank Miller/Klaus Janson)
1988
U.K.: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright #1 (Bryan Talbot)
U.S.: Wonder Woman #10 (George Pérez)
1989
U.K.: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright (Bryan Talbot)
1990
U.K.: 2000 AD Prog 626 (Simon Bisley)
U.S.: Aliens #1 (Denis Beauvais)
2000 Batman: Harley Quinn (Alex Ross)
2002 Ultimate Spider-Man #1 (Joe Quesada)
2004 JLA: Liberty and Justice (Alex Ross)
2006 All-Star Superman #1 (Frank Quitely)
2007 Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall (James Jean)
2008 World War Hulk 1A (David Finch)
2010 Batman and Robin #4 (Frank Quitely)
2011 Batwoman #0 (J.H. Williams III)
2012 Batwoman #1 (J.H. Williams III)
2014 Hawkeye #9 (David Aja)
==== Favourite Comic (excluding North American and UK titles) ====
1990 Akira (Japan)
2000 Bacchus, by Eddie Campbell (Australia)
==== Favourite Manga Comic ====
2002 Lone Wolf and Cub
2004 Blade of the Immortal (Dark Horse)
2006 Blade of the Immortal (Dark Horse)
2007 Blade of the Immortal
2008 Death Note
2010 Fullmetal Alchemist
2011 Fullmetal Alchemist
2012 20th Century Boys
==== Favourite European Comic ====
2002 Metabarons (Les Humanoïdes Associés, France)
2004 Tex (Sergio Bonelli Editore, Italy)
2006 Asterix and the Falling Sky (Albert Rene Editions, France)
2007 Asterix and the Vikings (France)
2008 Requiem, Vampire Knight (Nickel Editions, France)
2010 Requiem Chevalier Vampire (France)
2011 Blacksad (Dargaud, France)
2012 Dylan Dog (Sergio Bonelli Editore, Italy)
==== Favourite Newspaper Strip ====
2000 Peanuts
2002 Liberty Meadows
2004 Mutts (Patrick McDonnell)
==== Favourite Comic Strip in a UK Comic or Magazine ====
2000 Judge Dredd (2000 AD/Judge Dredd Megazine)
2002 Nikolai Dante (2000 AD)
2004 Judge Dredd (2000 AD/Judge Dredd Megazine – Rebellion)
==== Favourite Web-Based Comic ====
2000 Astounding Space Thrills by Steve Conley
2002 Sluggy Freelance by Pete Abrams
2004 PvP by Scott Kurtz
2006 Supernatural Law by Batton Lash
2007 Penny Arcade by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
2008 The Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew
2010 FreakAngels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield
2011 Axe Cop by Malachai Nicolle and Ethan Nicolle
2012 Freakangels
2014 Aces Weekly by David Lloyd, et al. (www.acesweekly.co.uk)
==== Favourite Publisher ====
2006 DC Comics
2007 Marvel Comics
2008 Marvel Comics
2010 DC Comics/Vertigo Comics
2011 DC Comics/Vertigo/WildStorm
2012 DC Comics/Vertigo
2014 IDW Publishing
=== Characters ===
==== Favourite Comicbook Character ====
Batman won this category 12 times; Judge Dredd won seven times, and Wolverine won it three times.
1977
U.K.: Captain Britain
U.S.: Conan the Barbarian
1978
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Batman
1979
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Batman
1980
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Wolverine
1981
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Wolverine
1983
U.K.: Marvelman
U.S.: Wolverine
1985
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Reuben Flagg
1986
U.K.: Halo Jones
U.S.: Batman
1987
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Batman
1988
U.K.: Luther Arkwright
U.S.: Batman
1989
U.K.: Luther Arkwright
1990
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Batman
2000 Batman
2002 Batman
2004 Batman
2006 Batman
2007 Batman
2008 Batman
==== Favourite Villain ====
DC's The Joker won this category five times, 2000 AD's Torquemada won four times, and Marvel's Magneto came away with three wins.
1978 Thanos
1979 Magneto
1980
U.K.: Judge Cal
U.S.: Magneto
1981
U.K.: Judge Death
U.S.: Magneto
1983
U.K.: Kid Marvelman
U.S.: Darkseid
1985
U.K.: Torquemada, from Nemesis the Warlock (2000 AD), by Pat Mills and Brian Talbot (Fleetway)
U.S.: Doctor Doom
1986
U.K.: Torquemada
U.S.: Anti-Monitor
1987
U.K.: Torquemada
U.S.: The Joker
1988
U.K.: Torquemada
U.S.: The Joker
1990
U.K.: Judge Death
U.S.: The Joker
2000 Herr Starr (Preacher)
2002 Lex Luthor (Superman)
2004 Doctor Doom (Fantastic Four – Marvel Comics)
2006 The Joker
2007 Dirk Anger (Nextwave: Marvel Comics|)
2008 The Joker
==== Favourite Supporting Character ====
1978 Pip the Troll
1979 Wolverine
1980
U.K.: Ro-Jaws
U.S.: Wolverine
1981
U.K.: Hoagy (Robo-Hunter)
U.S.: Wolverine
1983
U.K.: Zirk (Warrior)
U.S.: Elektra
1984
U.S.: Raul the cat (American Flagg!)
1985
U.K.: Evey (V for Vendetta)
U.S.: Raul the cat (American Flagg!)
1986
U.K.: Meggan (Captain Britain)
U.S.: John Constantine (Swamp Thing)
1987
U.K.: Ukko the Dwarf (Sláine)
U.S.: John Constantine
1988
U.K.: Ukko the Dwarf
U.S.: Abigail Arcane Cable
1990
U.K.: Middenface McNulty (Strontium Dog)
2000 Oracle/Barbara Gordon (Batman/Birds of Prey)
2002 Commissioner James Gordon (Batman)
2004 Mary Jane Watson (Spider-Man – Marvel Comics)
==== Character Most Worthy of Own Title ====
1978 Silver Surfer
1979 Silver Surfer
1980
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Warlock
1981
U.K.: Judge Dredd
U.S.: Silver Surfer
1983
U.K.: Judge Anderson
U.S.: The Spectre
1985
U.K.: D.R. & Quinch
U.S.: The Spectre
1986
U.K.: Halo Jones
U.S.: Wolverine
1987
U.K.: Captain Britain
U.S.: Wolverine
1988
U.K.: Halo Jones
U.S.: Rorschach
1990
U.K.: Captain Britain
2000 Luther Arkwright (Heart of Empire)
2002 Elijah Snow (Planetary)
2004 Doctor Strange (Marvel Comics)
==== Favourite Comicbook Group or Team ====
The X-Men dominated this category, winning it eight times in the span of 11 years.
1977 X-Men
1978 X-Men
1979 X-Men
1980
U.K.: Ro-Busters
U.S.: X-Men
1981 X-Men
1983 X-Men
1985
U.K.: Mega City Judges
U.S.: Teen Titans
1986 X-Men
1987 X-Men
1988 Justice League International
1990 Doom Patrol
=== Comics Press & Media ===
==== Favourite Specialist Comics Publication/Trade Publication ====
Multiple award-winners in this category included Wizard with six wins, Fantagraphics Books with its publications Amazing Heroes and The Comics Journal racking up seven wins in total, and the British publication Speakeasy with four wins.
1977
Pro: House of Hammer
Fan: Comic Media News
1978
Pro: Starburst
Fan: Comic Media News
1980
U.K. (fan): BEM
U.S. (fan): The Comics Journal
1981
U.K.: BEM
U.S.: The Comics Journal
1985
U.K.: Fantasy Advertiser
U.S.: Amazing Heroes
1986
U.K.: Speakeasy
U.S.: Amazing Heroes
1987
U.K.: Speakeasy
U.S.: Amazing Heroes
1988
U.K.: Speakeasy
U.S.: Amazing Heroes
1990
U.K.: Speakeasy
U.S.: Marvel Age
2000 Wizard
2002 Wizard
2004 The Comics Journal (Fantagraphics Books)
2006 The Comics Journal (Fantagraphics Books)
2007 Wizard
2008 Wizard
2010 Wizard
2011 Wizard
2012 DC Comics Super Hero Collection
2014 Bleeding Cool
==== Favourite Comics-Related Book ====
2002 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
2004 Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross by Chip Kidd with Geoff Spear
2006 Eisner/Miller (edited by Charles Brownstein & Diana Schutz)
2007 Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud (HarperCollins)
2008 Our Gods Wear Spandex by Christopher Knowles
2010 The Insider's Guide to Creating Comics and Graphic Novels by Andy Schmidt
2011 75 Years of DC Comics by Paul Levitz (Taschen)
2012 Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero by Grant Morrison
2014 The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire by Blake Bell and Michael J. Vassallo
==== Favourite Comics Related Website (professional) ====
Comic Book Resources was a repeat winner in this category, with five wins in 14 years.
2000 Comic Book Resources
2002 Comic Book Resources
2004 Comicon.com
2006 Silver Bullet Comic Books
2007 Newsarama
2008 Marvel.com
2010 Comic Book Resources
2011 Comic Book Resources
2012 Bleeding Cool
2014 Comic Book Resources
==== Favourite Comics Related Website (fan-organised) ====
2000 Sequential Tart
==== Favourite Comics E-Zine ====
2002 Comic Book Electronic Magazine
2004 Newsarama
==== Favourite Comics-based Film or TV Series ====
2000 Batman Beyond
2004 X2 (Bryan Singer, director)
2006 Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, director)
2007 Heroes
2008 300
2010 Watchmen
2011 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2012 The Big Bang Theory
2014 Iron Man 3
==== Favourite British Fan Personality ====
1977 Martin Lock
==== Favourite Comics-Related Merchandise ====
2004 Kingdom Come action figures (DC Select; second series)
=== Special awards ===
==== Favourite Comic Publication "All Time" ====
1977 Fantastic Four
==== Roll of Honour ====
1977 Stan Lee
1978 Steve Englehart
1979 Jack Kirby
1980 Roy Thomas
1981 Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
1982 Mick Austin
1983 Will Eisner
1985 Steve Ditko
1986 Alan Moore
1987 Frank Miller
1988 Pat Mills
1990 2000 AD
2000 Gil Kane
2002 Joe Quesada
2004 Neil Gaiman
2006 Grant Morrison
2007 Warren Ellis
2008 Mike Mignola
2010 Brian Bolland
2011 Dave Gibbons
2012 Frank Quitely
2014 Gail Simone |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Glove_Award | Gold Glove Award | The Rawlings Gold Glove Award, usually referred to as simply the Gold Glove, is the award given annually to the Major League Baseball (MLB) players judged to have exhibited superior individual fielding performances. It is awarded at each fielding position in both the National League (NL) and the American League (AL). The Gold Glove is widely considered one of the most prestigious defensive awards in baseball.
Winners for position awards are determined from voting by the managers and coaches in each league, who are not permitted to vote for their own players. Additionally, a sabermetric component provided by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) accounts for about 25 percent of the vote. For the utility player awards, the sabermetric component and other defensive statistics are exclusively used to select the winners, without any voting by coaches.
In 1957, the baseball glove manufacturer Rawlings created the Gold Glove Award to commemorate the best fielding performance at each position. Winners receive a glove made from gold lamé-tanned leather and affixed to a walnut base. In the inaugural year, one Gold Glove was awarded to the top fielder at each position in MLB; since 1958, separate awards have been given to the top fielders in each league. In 2020, Rawlings began issuing a Gold Glove Award for team defense, with one recipient each in the American and National Leagues. Starting in 2022, a Gold Glove Award in each league has been awarded to a utility player.
For 2016–2019, a Gold Glove was also awarded each year to one fastpitch softball player in the National Pro Fastpitch league.
== History ==
For the first four seasons of the award (1957 to 1960), individual awards were presented to left fielders, center fielders, and right fielders. From 1961 through 2010, the phrase "at each position" was no longer strictly accurate, since the prize was presented to three outfielders irrespective of their specific position. Any combination of outfielders, often three center fielders, could win the award in the same year. Critics called for awarding a single Gold Glove for each individual outfield position, arguing that the three outfield positions are not equivalent defensively. Starting in 2011, separate awards for each outfield position were once again presented. In the 1985 American League voting, a tie for third-place resulted in the presentation of Gold Glove Awards to four outfielders (Dwayne Murphy, Gary Pettis, Dwight Evans and Dave Winfield); this scenario was repeated in the National League in 2007 (Andruw Jones, Carlos Beltrán, Aaron Rowand, and Jeff Francoeur).
=== Criticism ===
Before the involvement of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in the voting process in 2013, The Boston Globe writer Peter Abraham argued the Fielding Bible Awards "are far more accurate (and accountable)" than the Gold Glove awards since statistics are used along with the opinions of an expert panel. The Gold Gloves are selected by managers and coaches who may have seen a player as few as six times during the season. Naturally, statistics can be contentious, and there is still no universally agreed system of fielding stats (even with advanced metrics) in 2024; moreover, a manager gets to see each team in their league during a season, and can indeed form an opinion over that span of whom they felt was the best fielder at each position.
Bill Chuck of Comcast SportsNet New England claimed that Gold Glove voters frequently counted only errors to determine winners. Geoff Baker of The Seattle Times maintained the votes for the Gold Gloves rely largely on a player's past reputation. The Associated Press proposed that "some fans have viewed the Gold Gloves as mostly a popularity contest, even suggesting that a player's performance at the plate helped draw extra attention to his glove." After winning the AL Gold Glove at first base in both 1997 and 1998, Rafael Palmeiro won again in 1999 with the Texas Rangers while only appearing in 28 games as a first baseman; he played in 128 games as a designated hitter that season, resulting in a controversy. Derek Jeter, winner of five Gold Gloves, believes that many defensive factors cannot be quantified. In 2013, Rawlings collaborated on the Gold Glove Award with SABR, who provided the SABR Defensive Index (SDI) to add a sabermetric component to the selection process. The index accounted for 25 percent of the vote, while managers and coaches continued to provide the majority. Afterwards, Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated wrote that the Gold Gloves "appear to have significantly closed the gap on their more statistically driven counterparts." SABR and FiveThirtyEight believed that the impact to the voting results by SDI, which is also included on the voters' ballots, went beyond its own 25% weight and also influenced the managers' and coaches' voting.
=== Multiple winners ===
The most Gold Gloves ever won by one player is 18 by pitcher Greg Maddux. He won 13 consecutive awards from 1990 to 2002, all in the National League. Brooks Robinson has the most wins for a position player, with 16 Gold Gloves, all at third base, and is tied for the second-highest total overall with pitcher Jim Kaat; both players won their 16 awards consecutively. Iván Rodríguez has won the most Gold Gloves as a catcher, with 13 career awards in the American League. Ozzie Smith has 13 wins at shortstop; he and Rodríguez are tied for the fourth-highest total among all winners. Among outfielders, Roberto Clemente and Willie Mays, who played primarily right field and center field, respectively, are tied for the lead with 12 Gold Gloves. Keith Hernandez, the leader at first base, has won 11 times, and Roberto Alomar leads second basemen with 10 wins. Other players with 10 or more wins include shortstop Omar Vizquel (11), catcher Johnny Bench (10), third basemen Mike Schmidt (10), and Nolan Arenado (10) and outfielders Ken Griffey Jr., Ichiro Suzuki, Andruw Jones, and Al Kaline (10 each).
The only player to win Gold Gloves as an infielder and outfielder is Darin Erstad, who won Gold Gloves as an outfielder in 2000 and 2002 and as a first baseman in 2004, all with the Los Angeles Angels. The only other player to win Gold Gloves at multiple positions is Plácido Polanco, who won at second base (2007, 2009 AL) and third base (2011 NL). Family pairs to win Gold Gloves include brothers Ken and Clete Boyer (third base), brothers Sandy Alomar Jr. (catcher) and Roberto Alomar (second base), Bengie and Yadier Molina (catcher), father and son Bobby and Barry Bonds (outfield), and father and son Bob (catcher) and Bret Boone (second base).
The 2021 St. Louis Cardinals hold the record for most Gold Gloves by a single team in a single season with five. They also won the team Gold Glove for the National League in the same year. The St. Louis Cardinals are the first team to win 100 total Gold Gloves.
== Winners by year ==
=== American League ===
=== National League ===
^LF won as a left fielder
^CF won as a center fielder
^RF won as a right fielder
== All-time Gold Glove Team ==
On February 20, 2007, Major League Baseball and Rawlings announced that an all-time Gold Glove Team would be named during the 50th anniversary of the first Gold Glove Awards. Rawlings asked 70 baseball reporters, former players, and former managers to select 50 names for the ballot, from an initial selection of 250 names. The team was selected by fans, who voted at the Rawlings Gold Glove website, at United States Postal Service offices, and at sporting goods stores. The results were announced at the 2007 Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
== Teammates ==
=== Middle infield duos ===
In the history of the Gold Glove Award, there have been twelve double-play combinations, or pairs of middle infielders, that have won awards in the same year. Shortstops and second basemen depend upon each other for the majority of double plays. The most common type of double play occurs with a runner on first base and a ground ball hit towards the middle of the infield. The player fielding the ball (generally the shortstop or second baseman) throws to the fielder covering second base, who steps on the base before the runner from first arrives to force that runner out, and then throws the ball to the first baseman to force out the batter for the second out. Mark Belanger won four Gold Gloves with the Baltimore Orioles alongside winning partner Bobby Grich, and Joe Morgan paired with Dave Concepción for four combination wins with the Cincinnati Reds. The most recent teammates to accomplish the feat are Dansby Swanson and Nico Hoerner, who won with the Chicago Cubs in 2023.
† = Hall of Fame
=== Batteries ===
Since 1957, there have been six Gold Glove batteries. The pitcher and catcher, collectively known as the battery, are the only two players on the field involved in every pitch. In particular, the pitcher and catcher control the running game with tools such as pickoffs or the strength of the catcher's throwing arm. The first pitcher and catcher on the same team to win Gold Gloves in the same year were Jim Kaat and Earl Battey, with the Minnesota Twins in 1962. Only two pairs of batterymates have won Gold Gloves together more than once: Iván Rodríguez and Kenny Rogers won with the Texas Rangers in 2000, and again with the Detroit Tigers in 2006. Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright matched the feat, winning in both 2009 and 2013.
== Platinum Glove Award ==
In 2011, Rawlings added an annual Platinum Glove Award awarded to the best defensive player in each league, as selected by fans from the year's Gold Glove winners. Numbers after a player's name indicate that he has won the award multiple times.
== National Pro Fastpitch ==
In 2016, Rawlings announced it would begin awarding a gold glove annually to a female fastpitch softball player in the National Pro Fastpitch (NPF) league.
NPF coaches and managers vote for a winner (excluding those on their respective teams). This award is in addition to the collegiate and high school awards added in 2007, the 50th anniversary of the inaugural Gold Glove Awards. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi | Shogi | Shogi (将棋, shōgi; English: , Japanese: [ɕo̞ːɡʲi]), also known as Japanese chess, is an abstract strategy board game for two players. It is one of the most popular board games in Japan and is in the same family of games as Western chess, chaturanga, xiangqi, Indian chess, Makruk, and janggi. Shōgi means general's (shō 将) board game (gi 棋). The term shōgi is most commonly used to describe hon-shōgi ("standard shogi"), a term used to distinguish the most popular form of the game (with an 81-square board and 40 pieces) from other forms like ko-shogi (ancient shogi variants like chu shogi), modern shogi variants, and related games.
A distinctive feature of Shogi is that after a player has captured an opponent's piece, they retain these as "pieces in hand" (mochigoma), which can be dropped back into the game in a future turn. Shogi was the earliest historical chess-like game with this game mechanic. This drop rule is speculated to have been invented in the 15th century and possibly connected to the practice of 15th-century mercenary samurai switching loyalties when captured in battle. Due to the larger board and the drop rule, modern shogi has a significantly higher game tree complexity than FIDE chess, estimated at approximately 10226 compared to 10123 for chess. Another key feature of Shogi is its decisiveness, as draws are very rare, occurring at a rate of 2-3% in professional games compared to a FIDE chess rate of over 50%. Furthermore, the first turn advantage in shogi is smaller than in chess, even when games are played by the strongest shogi engines.
The earliest predecessor of the game, chaturanga, originated in India in the 6th century, and the game was likely transmitted to Japan via China or Korea sometime after the Nara period. Shogi in its present form was played as early as the 15th century, while a direct ancestor without the drop rule was recorded from 1210 in a historical document Nichūreki, which is an edited copy of Shōchūreki and Kaichūreki from the late Heian period (c. 1120).
== Equipment ==
Two players face each other across a board composed of rectangles in a grid of 9 ranks (rows, 段) by 9 files (columns, 筋) yielding an 81-square board. In Japanese they are called Sente (先手; "earlier move") and Gote (後手; "later move"), but in English they are conventionally referred to as Black and White, with Black being the first player.
The board is nearly always rectangular, and the rectangles are undifferentiated by marking or color. Pairs of dots mark the players' promotion zones.
Each player has a set of 20 flat wedge-shaped pentagonal pieces of slightly different sizes. Except for the king, opposing pieces are undifferentiated by marking or color. Pieces face forward by having the pointed side of each piece oriented toward the opponent's side – this shows who controls the piece during play. The pieces from largest (most important) to smallest (least important) are:
1 king
1 rook
1 bishop
2 gold generals
2 silver generals
2 knights
2 lances
9 pawns
Several of these names were chosen to correspond to their rough equivalents in international chess, and not as literal translations of the Japanese names.
Each piece has its name written on its surface in the form of two kanji (Chinese characters used as syllabograms or as logograms to record texts in Old Japanese), usually in black ink. On the reverse side of each piece, other than the king and gold general, are one or two other characters, in amateur sets often in a different color (usually red); this side is turned face up during play to indicate that the piece has been promoted.
In some cases, the backsides of the King pieces (the narrow side which faces back toward the player during normal play) will display kanji containing additional information about the piece manufacturers.
The following is a table of the pieces with their Japanese representations and English equivalents. The abbreviations are used for game notation and often when referring to the pieces in speech in Japanese.
English speakers sometimes refer to promoted bishops as horses and promoted rooks as dragons, after their Japanese names, and generally use the Japanese term tokin for promoted pawns. Silver generals and gold generals are commonly referred to simply as silvers and golds, respectively.
The characters inscribed on the reverse sides of the pieces to indicate promotion may be in red ink, and are usually cursive. The characters on the backs of the pieces that promote to gold generals are cursive variants of 金 'gold', becoming more cursive (more abbreviated) as the value of the original piece decreases. These cursive forms have these equivalents in print: 全 for promoted silver, 今 for promoted knight, 仝 for promoted lance, and 个 for promoted pawn (tokin). Another typographic convention has abbreviated versions of the original values, with a reduced number of strokes: 圭 for a promoted knight (桂), 杏 for a promoted lance (香), and the 全 as above for a promoted silver, but と (a hiragana symbol for the syllable "to") for tokin.
The suggestion that the Japanese characters have deterred Western players from learning shogi has led to the development of different "Westernized" or "international" pieces which use more recognizable western style chess symbols instead of characters. Other piece designs include representations of the piece movements along with the kanji. Most players soon learn to recognize the characters, however, partially because the traditional pieces are already iconic by size, with more powerful pieces being larger. Bilingual pieces with both Japanese characters and English captions or letters have also been developed as have pieces with animal cartoons.
== Setup and gameplay ==
In a regular game, each player sets up friendly pieces facing forward (toward the opponent).
In the rank nearest the player:
The king is placed in the center file;
The two gold generals are placed in files adjacent to the king;
The two silver generals are placed adjacent to each gold general;
The two knights are placed adjacent to each silver general;
The two lances are placed in the corners, adjacent to each knight.
That is, the first rank is
Or
In the second rank, each player places:
The bishop in the same file as the left knight;
The rook in the same file as the right knight.
In the third rank, the nine pawns are placed one per file.
The arrangement differs in a handicap game depending on how many pieces are given up.
A furigoma 振り駒 'piece toss' is used to decide who moves first. One of the players tosses five pawns. If the number of tokins (promoted pawns, と) facing up is higher than unpromoted pawns (歩), then the player who tossed the pawns plays gote 後手 'white' (that is, getting the second move).
After the piece toss furigoma, the game proceeds. If multiple games are played, then players alternate turns for who goes first in subsequent games. (The terms "Black" and "White" are used to differentiate sides although there is no difference in the color of the pieces.) For each turn, a player may either move a piece that is currently on the board (and potentially promote it, capture an opposing piece, or both) or else drop a piece that has been previously captured onto a square of the board. These options are explained below.
== Rules ==
=== Objective ===
The goal of the game is for one player to checkmate the other player's king, winning the game.
=== Movement ===
Most shogi pieces can move only to an adjacent square. A few may move across the board, and one jumps over intervening pieces. The "influence" (kiki) of a piece refers to the range over which its power extends on the board, corresponding to the squares to which it can move or on which it can attack.
The lance, bishop, and rook are ranging pieces: They can move any number of squares along a straight line limited only by intervening pieces and the edge of the board. If an opposing piece intervenes, it may be captured by removing it from the board and replacing it with the moving piece. If a friendly piece intervenes, the moving piece must stop short of that square; if the friendly piece is adjacent, the moving piece may not move in that direction at all.
A king (玉/王) moves one square in any direction, orthogonal or diagonal.
A rook (飛) moves any number of squares in an orthogonal direction.
A bishop (角) moves any number of squares in a diagonal direction. Because they cannot move orthogonally, the players' unpromoted bishops can reach only half the squares of the board, unless one is captured and then dropped.
A gold general (金) moves one square orthogonally, or one square diagonally forward, giving it six possible destinations. It cannot move diagonally backwards.
A silver general (銀) moves one square diagonally, or one square straight forward, giving it five possible destinations. Because an unpromoted silver can retreat more easily than a promoted one, it is common to leave a silver unpromoted at the far side of the board. (See Promotion).
A knight (桂) jumps at an angle intermediate to orthogonal and diagonal, amounting to one square straight forward plus one square diagonally forward, in a single move. Thus the knight has two possible forward destinations. Unlike international chess knights, shogi knights cannot move to the sides or in a backwards direction. The knight is the only piece that ignores intervening pieces on the way to its destination. It is not blocked from moving if the square in front of it is occupied, but neither can it capture a piece on that square. It is often useful to leave a knight unpromoted at the far side of the board. A knight must promote, however, if it reaches either of the two furthest ranks. (See Promotion.)
A lance (香) moves just like the rook except it cannot move backwards or to the sides. It is often useful to leave a lance unpromoted at the far side of the board. A lance must promote, however, if it reaches the furthest rank. (See Promotion.)
A pawn (歩) moves one square straight forward. It cannot retreat. Unlike international chess pawns, shogi pawns capture the same way as they move. A pawn must promote if it arrives at the furthest rank. (See Promotion.) In practice, however, a pawn is usually promoted whenever possible. There are two restrictions on where a pawn may be dropped. (See Drops.)
All pieces but the knight move either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. These directions cannot be combined in a single move; one direction must be chosen.
Every piece blocks the movement of all other non-jumping pieces through the square it occupies.
If a piece occupies a legal destination for an opposing piece, it may be captured by removing it from the board and replacing it with the opposing piece. The capturing piece may not continue beyond that square on that turn. Shogi pieces capture the same as they move.
Normally, when moving a piece, a player snaps it to the board with the ends of the fingers of the same hand. This makes a sudden sound effect, bringing the piece to the attention of the opponent. This is also true for capturing and dropping pieces. On a traditional shogi-ban, the pitch of the snap is deeper, delivering a subtler effect.
=== Promotion ===
A player's promotion zone consists of the furthest one-third of the board – the three ranks occupied by the opponent's pieces at setup. The zone is typically delineated on shogi boards by two inscribed dots. When a piece is moved, if part of the piece's path lies within the promotion zone (that is, if the piece moves into, out of, or wholly within the zone; but not if it is dropped into the zone – see Drops), then the player has the option to promote the piece at the end of the turn. Promotion is indicated by turning the piece over after it moves, revealing the character of the promoted piece.
Promoting a piece is usually not compulsory; however, if a pawn or lance is moved to the furthest rank, or a knight is moved to either of the two furthest ranks, that piece must promote (otherwise, it would have no legal move on subsequent turns). A silver general is never required to promote, and it is often advantageous to keep a silver general unpromoted (it is easier, for example, to extract an unpromoted silver from behind enemy lines: a promoted silver, with only one line of retreat, can be easily blocked.) Rooks, bishops and pawns are almost always promoted, as these pieces do not lose any of their powers upon promotion.
Promoting a piece changes the way it moves. The various pieces promote as follows:
A silver general, knight, lance, or pawn has its normal power of movement replaced by that of a gold general.
A rook or bishop keeps its original movement and gains the power to move one square in any direction (like a king). For a promoted bishop, this means it is able to reach any square on the board, given enough moves.
A king or a gold general does not promote; nor can a piece that is already promoted.
When captured, a piece loses its promoted status. Otherwise promotion is permanent.
A promoted rook (literally dragon king (龍王 (ryūō)); shortended forms: 龍 (ryū) and 竜 (ryū)) moves as a rook and as a king. It is commonly referred to as dragon.
A promoted bishop (literally dragon horse (龍馬 (ryūma)); shortened form 馬 (uma)) moves as a bishop and as a king. It is commonly referred to as horse.
A promoted silver (成銀 narigin; alternate forms: 全, cursive 金), a promoted knight (成桂 narikei; alternate forms: 圭, 今, cursive 金), a promoted lance (成香 narikyō; alternate forms: 杏, 仝, cursive 金) and a promoted pawn (と金 tokin; alternate forms: と, 个) all move the same way as a gold general. The promoted pawn is often called by its Japanese name tokin, even by non-Japanese players.
=== Drops ===
Captured pieces are retained in hand and can be brought back into play under the capturing player's control. The Japanese term for piece(s) in hand is either 持ち駒 mochigoma or 手駒 tegoma. On any turn, instead of moving a piece on the board, a player may select a piece in hand and place it – unpromoted side up and facing the opposing side – on any empty square. The piece is then one of that player's active pieces on the board and can be moved accordingly. This is called dropping the piece, or simply, a drop. A drop counts as a complete move.
A drop cannot capture a piece, nor does dropping within the promotion zone result in immediate promotion. Capture and/or promotion may occur normally, however, on subsequent moves of the piece.
There are three restrictions on dropping pieces; the last two of these apply only to pawns.
Piece with No Moves (Japanese: 行き所のない駒 ikidokorononaikoma): Pawns, lances and knights may not be dropped onto the last (9th) rank, and knights may not be dropped onto the penultimate (8th) rank; this is because such dropped pieces would have no legal moves on subsequent turns (as they can only move in the forward direction).
Two Pawns (Japanese: 二歩 nifu): A pawn may not be dropped onto a file (column) containing another unpromoted pawn of the same player (promoted pawns do not count).
Drop Pawn Mate (Japanese: 打ち歩詰め uchifuzume): A pawn may not be dropped to give an immediate checkmate. (This rule only applies specifically to pawns, drops and checkmates − to clarify, a player may deliver an immediate checkmate by dropping a non-pawn piece, a player may checkmate a king with a pawn that is already on the board, and a pawn may be dropped to give an immediate check as long as it does not also result in checkmate.)
A corollary of the second restriction is that a player with an unpromoted pawn on every file is unable to drop a pawn anywhere. For this reason, it is common to sacrifice a pawn in order to gain flexibility for drops.
Captured pieces are typically kept on a wooden stand (駒台 komadai) which is traditionally placed so that its bottom-left corner aligns with the bottom-right corner of the board from the perspective of each player. It is not permissible to hide pieces from full view.
It is common for players to swap bishops, which oppose each other across the board, early in the game. This leaves each player with a bishop in hand to be dropped later. The ability for drops in shogi gives the game tactical richness and complexity. The fact that no piece ever goes entirely out of play accounts for the rarity of draws.
=== Check ===
When a player's move threatens to capture the opposing king on the next turn, the move is said to give check to the king and the king is said to be in check. If a player's king is in check, that player's responding move must remove the check. Ways to remove a check include moving the king away from the threat, capturing the threatening piece, or placing another interposing piece between the king and the threatening piece.
To announce check in Japanese, one can say ōte (王手), however, this is an influence of international chess and is not required, even as a courtesy. It may be common to announce ōte in beginner matches or for local rules to dictate that you have to announce it. Announcing a check vocally is unheard of in competitive tournaments.
=== End of the game ===
The usual way for shogi games to end is for one side to checkmate the other side's king, after which the losing player will be given the opportunity to admit defeat. Unlike western chess or xiangqi, checkmate is almost always the result in shogi since pieces never retire from play, which gives the players a sufficient number of pieces to deliver checkmate. That said, there are three other possible ways for a game to end: repetition (千日手 sennichite), impasse (持将棋 jishōgi), and an illegal move (反則手 hansokute). The first two – repetition and impasse – are particularly uncommon. Illegal moves are also uncommon in professional games although this may not be true with amateur players (especially beginners).
Unlike western chess, there is no tradition of offering a mutual draw by agreement.
==== Checkmate ====
If the king is in check and there is no possible move which could protect the king, the move is said to checkmate (tsumi 詰み) the king. Checkmate effectively means that the opponent wins the game as the player would have no remaining legal moves. (See also: tsumeshogi, hisshi.)
==== Resignation ====
The losing player will usually resign when the situation is thought to be hopeless and may declare the resignation at any time during their turn. Although a player may resign just after they are checkmated, playing up to the checkmate point rarely occurs in practice as players normally resign as soon as a loss is deemed inevitable. Similarly, if a player were to lose in an Entering King situation (see section below) by having less than 24 points (or by any of the other Impasse rules used by amateurs), then the player will usually resign before that point.
In traditional tournament play, a formal resignation is required – that is, a checkmate is not a sufficient condition for winning. The resignation is indicated by bowing and/or saying 'I lost' (負けました makemashita) and/or placing the right hand over the piece stands. Placing the hand over the piece stand is a vestige of an older practice of gently dropping one's pieces in hand over the board in order to indicate resignation. In western practice, a handshake may be used.
==== Infractions ====
In professional and serious (tournament) amateur games, a player who makes an infraction, such as an illegal move, loses immediately. This rule also includes other types of infractions besides illegal moves. The loss stands even if play continued and the move was discovered later in game. However, if neither the opponent nor a third party points out the illegal move and the opponent later resigned, the resignation stands as the result.
According to the Game Regulations set down in the General Meeting of Professional Players of the Japan Shogi Association held in 2024, the infractions leading to immediate game loss are the following:
Violating the Two Pawns (nifu) restriction (See §Drops above.)
Violating the Drop Pawn Mate (uchifuzume) restriction
Dropping or moving a piece to position where it cannot move (such as dropping a knight to an opponent's last two ranks, etc.)
Dropping a piece with its promoted value
Playing out of turn, e.g. making more than one move or white moving first instead of moving second or moving twice in succession.
Making perpetual check four times (cf. sennichite)
Leaving one's king in check, or moving one's king into check
Moving a piece contrary to how its movements are defined (for example, moving a gold like a silver, or moving an unpromoted bishop off its legal diagonal)
Taking back a move after its completion (matta)
Time forfeiture (failing to complete a move within the allotted main time or countdown).
Stopping the clock before completing a move.
Receiving advice from another person or analyzing the game on another board.
Any other move impossible under the rules of shogi.
Failure to comply with the arbiter’s ruling.
In friendly amateur games, this rule is sometimes relaxed, and the player may be able to take back the illegal move and replay a new legal move.
In particular, the Two Pawn violation is the most common illegal move played by professional players. The Two Pawn violation played by Takahiro Toyokawa (against Kōsuke Tamura) in the 2004 NHK Cup is infamous since it was broadcast on television. On the 109th move, Toyokawa (playing as Black) dropped a pawn to the 29 square while he already had a pawn in play on the board on the 23 square and, thus, lost the game.
==== Repetition (draw) ====
If the same game position occurs four times with the same player to move and the same pieces in hand for each player, then the game ends in a repetition draw (千日手 sennichite, lit. "moves for a thousand days"), as long as the positions are not due to perpetual check. Perpetual check (連続王手の千日手) is an illegal move (see above), which ends the game in a loss in tournament play.
In professional shogi, a repetition draw outcome is not a final result as draws essentially do not count. Each game can only end in either a win or loss. In the case of a repetition draw, professional shogi players will have to immediately play a subsequent game (or as many games as necessary) with sides reversed in order to obtain a true win outcome. (That is, the player who was White becomes Black, and vice versa.) Also, depending on the tournament, professional players play the subsequent game in the remainder of the allowed game time.
Thus, aiming for a repetition draw may be a possible professional strategy for the White player in order to play the second replay game as Black, which has a slight statistical advantage and/or greater initiative. For instance, Bishop Exchange Fourth File Rook is a passive strategy for White with the goal of a repetition draw (as it requires two tempo losses – swinging the rook and trading the bishops) while it is a very aggressive strategy if played by Black.
Repetition draws are rare in professional shogi occurring in about 1–2% of games and even rarer in amateur games. In professional shogi, repetition draws usually occur in the opening as certain positions are reached that are theoretically disadvantaged for both sides (reciprocal zugzwang). In amateur shogi, repetition draws tend to occur in the middle or endgame as a result of player errors.
==== Impasse ====
The game reaches an Impasse or Deadlock (持将棋 jishōgi) if both kings have advanced into their respective promotion zones – a situation known as 相入玉 (ai-nyū gyoku "double entering kings") – and neither player can hope to mate the other or to gain any further material. An Impasse can result in either a win or a draw. If an Impasse happens, the winner is decided as follows: each player agrees to an Impasse, then each rook or bishop, promoted or not, scores 5 points for the owning player, and all other pieces except kings score 1 point each. A player scoring fewer than 24 points loses. (Note that in the start position, both players have 27 points each.) If neither player has fewer than 24, the game is no contest – a draw. In professional shogi, an Impasse result is always a draw since a player that cannot obtain the 24 points will simply resign. Jishōgi is considered an outcome in its own right rather than no contest, but there is no practical difference. As an Impasse needs to be agreed on for the rule to be invoked, a player may refuse to do so and attempt to win the game in future moves. If that happens, there is no official rule about the verdict of the game.
However, in amateur shogi, there are different practices most of which force a win resolution to the Impasse in order to avoid a draw result.
The first draw by Impasse occurred in 1731 in a bishop handicap game between the seventh Lifetime Meijin, Sōkan Itō II, and his brother, Sōkei Ōhashi.
===== Entering King =====
As a practical matter, when an opponent's king has entered a player's own territory especially with supporting defending pieces, the opponent's king is often very difficult to mate given the forward attacking nature of most shogi pieces. This state is referred to as entering king (入玉 nyū gyoku). If both players' kings are in entering king states, the game becomes more likely to result in an impasse.
In the adjacent diagram example, although White's king is in a strong Bear-in-the-hole castle, Black's king has entered White's territory making it very difficult to mate. Therefore, this position favors Black.
An example of Entering King occurred in the fourth game of the 60th Ōi title match between Masayuki Toyoshima and Kazuki Kimura held on August 20–21, 2019. After being unsuccessful in attacking Kimura and also in defending his own king within his camp, Toyoshima (playing as White) moved his king away from Kimura's attacking pieces by fleeing up the second file, ultimately entering his king into Kimura's camp by move 150. Although Toyoshima had achieved Entering King, he still had only 23 points—one point shy of the required 24 points for an Impasse draw—while Kimura (Black) had 31 points. Toyoshima then spent the next 134 moves trying to bring his point total, which fluctuated between 17 and 23, up to the necessary 24. By the 231st move, the game had reached a Double Entering Kings state, and by move 285 Kimura had successfully kept Toyoshima's point total at bay. Here, Toyoshima with 20 points (and Kimura at 34 points) resigned. Incidentally, this game broke the record of longest game in a title match.
===== Amateur resolutions =====
For amateur games, there are various guidances with little standardization. Fairbairn reports a practice in the 1980s (considered a rule by the now defunct Shogi Association for The West) where the dispute is resolved by either player moving all friendly pieces into the promotion zone and then the game ends with points tallied.
Another resolution is the 27-Point (27点法) rule used for some amateur tournaments. One version of this is simply the player who has 27 or more points is the winner of the Impasse. Another version is a 27-Point Declaration rule. For instance, the Declaration rule on the online shogi site, 81Dojo, is that the player who wants to declare an Impasse win must (i) declare an intention to win via Impasse, (ii) have the king in the enemy camp (the promotion zone for that player), (iii) 10 other pieces must be in the promotion zone, (iv) not be in check, (v) have time remaining, and (vi) must have 28 points if Black or 27 points if White. If all of these conditions are met, then the Impasse declarer will win the game regardless of whether the opponent objects.
Yet another resolution to Impasse is the so-called Try Rule (トライルール torairūru). In this case, after both kings have entered their corresponding promotion zones, then the player who first moves the king to the opponent's king's start square (51 for Black, 59 for White) first will be the winner. As an example, the popular 将棋ウォーズ (Shogi Wars) app by HEROZ Inc. used the Try Rule up until 2014. (Now the app uses a variant of the 27-Point Declaration Rule – although it differs from the variant used on the 81Dojo site.) The idea of the "Try Rule" was taken from rugby football (see Try (rugby)).
==== Draws in tournaments ====
In professional tournaments, the rules typically require drawn games to be replayed with sides reversed, possibly with reduced time limits. They are rare compared to chess and xiangqi, occurring at a rate of 2 to 3%.
The 1982 Meijin title match between Makoto Nakahara and Hifumi Katoh was unusual in this regard with an impasse draw in the first (Double Fortress or Double Yagura) game on April 13–14 (only the fifth draw in the then 40-year history of the tournament). This game (with Katoh as Black) lasted for 223 moves with 114 minutes spent pondering a single move. One of the reasons for the length of this game was that White (Nakahara) was very close to falling below the minimum of 24 points required for a draw. Thus, the end of the endgame was strategically about trying to keep White's points above the 24-point threshold. In this match, sennichite occurred in the sixth and eighth games. Thus, this best-of-seven match lasted eight games and took over three months to finish; Black did not lose a single game and the eventual victor was Katoh at 4–3.
=== Time control ===
Professional games are timed as in international chess, but professional shogi players are almost never expected to keep time in their games. Instead a timekeeper is assigned, typically an apprentice professional. Time limits are much longer than in international chess (9 hours a side plus extra time in the prestigious Meijin title match), and in addition byōyomi (literally "second counting") is employed. This means that when the ordinary time has run out, the player will from that point on have a certain amount of time to complete every move (a byōyomi period), typically upwards of one minute. The final ten seconds are counted down, and if the time expires the player to move loses the game immediately. Amateurs often play with electronic clocks that beep out the final ten seconds of a byōyomi period, with a prolonged beep for the last five.
== Player rank and handicaps ==
Amateur players are ranked from 15 kyū to 1 kyū and then from 1 dan to 8 dan. Amateur 8 dan was previously only honorarily given to famous people. While it is now possible to win amateur 8 dan by actual strength (winning amateur Ryu-oh 3 times), this has yet to be achieved.
Professional players operate with their own scale, from 6 kyū to 3 dan for pro-aspiring players and professional 4 dan to 9 dan for formal professional players. Amateur and professional ranks are offset (with amateur 4 dan being equivalent to professional 6 kyū).
=== Handicaps ===
Shogi has a handicap system (like go) in which games between players of disparate strengths are adjusted so that the stronger player is put in a more disadvantageous position in order to compensate for the difference in playing levels. In a handicap game, one or more of White's pieces are removed from the setup, and instead White plays first. In handicap games, the stronger handicapped player is called uwate (upper player), and the other is called shitate (lower player). The upper player moves first.
Depending on the difference in strength, handicap setups range from removing one or two pieces up to a ten-piece handicap, in which the Rook and Bishop are removed in addition to Golds, Silvers, Knights, and Lances. The imbalance created by this method of handicapping is not as strong as it is in western chess because material advantage is not as decisive in shogi.
== Notation ==
There are two common systems used to notate piece movements in shogi game records. One is used in Japanese language texts while a second was created for western players by George Hodges and Glyndon Townhill in the English language. This system was updated by Hosking to be closer to the Japanese standard (two numerals). Other systems are used to notate shogi board positions. Unlike chess, the origin (11 square) is at the top right of a printed position rather than the bottom left.
In western piece movement notation, the format is the piece initial followed by the type of movement and finally the file and rank where the piece moved to. The piece initials are K (King), R (Rook), B (Bishop), G (Gold), S (Silver), N (Knight), L (Lance), and P (Pawn). Simple movement is indicated with -, captures with x, and piece drops with *. The files are indicated with numerals 1–9. The older Hodges standard used letters a–i for ranks, and the newer Hosking standard also uses numerals 1–9 for the ranks. Thus, Rx24 indicates 'rook captures on 24'. Promoted pieces are notated with + prefixed to the piece initial (e.g. +Rx24). Piece promotion is also indicated with + (e.g. S-21+) while unpromotion is indicated with = (e.g. S-21=). Piece ambiguity is resolved by notating which square a piece is moving from (e.g. N65-53+ means 'knight from 65 moves to 53 and promotes,' which distinguishes it from N45-53+).
The Japanese notation system uses Japanese characters for pieces and promotion indication and uses Japanese numerals instead of letters for ranks. Movement type aside from drops is not indicated, and the conventions for resolving ambiguity are quite different from the western system. As examples, the western Rx24 would be 2四飛 in Japanese notation, +Rx24 would be 2四龍, S-21+ would be 2一銀成, S-21= would be 2一銀不成, and N65-53+ would be 5三桂左成 showing that the leftmost knight jumped (implicitly from the 65 square), which distinguishes it from 5三桂右成 in which the rightmost knight jumped. However, it is becoming common to use Arabic numerals for both files and ranks, for example 24飛 or 21銀成.
Although not strictly part of the notational calculus for games, game results are indicated in Japanese newspapers, websites, etc. with wins indicated by a white circle and losses indicated by a black circle.
== Strategy and tactics ==
Like chess, a shogi game can be divided into the opening, middle game and endgame, each requiring a different strategy. While they share names, these three phases are significantly different than in FIDE chess.
=== Opening ===
The opening (jōban) consists of arranging one's defenses, usually in a castle and positioning for attack. This phase ends when the armies begin to engage. There are numerous formations and strategies (senpō) that have been devised over time. For each strategy, several move sequences (jōseki) and their variations have been studied. Basic shogi strategy is also often taught with shogi proverbs or maxims, short phrases that communicate basic strategic theme and advice. When it comes to the opening, some examples of common proverbs include:
Avoid a Sitting King: the king must either be moved from its starting square into a defensive formation or a structure must be erected around the king to protect it.
Don't Put King and Rook Close Together: position the king away from the rook (a key offensive piece), otherwise, the king will be in the center of the battle and both pieces may be forked, pinned or skewered.
Don't Put the King on the Bishop's Diagonal: Since the bishop is a major offensive piece, placing one's king on the bishop's diagonal opens it up to future attack.
Opening strategies often divide the board into left and right sectors, constructing an attacking formation on one side and a defensive formation on the other. The basic distinction between shogi openings is based on the rook's position. In Static Rook (ibisha) strategies, the rook is kept on the right side which becomes the attacking side of the board, while the king is moved to the defending left side. In Ranging Rook (furibisha) strategies, the rook is moved to the left side or the center of the board for attack, while the right side is retained for defense. If both players chose the same type of strategy, then the games are usually called Double Static Rook (aiibisha) or Double Ranging Rook (aifuribisha). If different strategy types are chosen, then the games are categories as either Static Rook vs Ranging Rook (ibisha tai furibisha) or Ranging Rook vs Static Rook (furibisha tai ibisha). Whatever the case, most strategies aim to establish a formation centered on the major pieces (rook and bishop) on the attacking side in order to break through the opponent’s defense. Meanwhile on the defensive side, the king is moved to the flank on the opposite side of the rook, and a castle is constructed using generals and other minor pieces not employed in the attack. These basic guidelines are not fixed however, and other strategies intentionally depart from them.
In the adjacent diagram, sente ("black" at the bottom of the board) has chosen a Ranging Rook position (specifically Fourth File Rook) where the rook has been moved leftward away from its starting position. Additionally, sente is using a Mino castle (silver crown castle), which is a type of fortification structure constructed with one silver and two gold pieces and the king moved inside of the fortification (the silver crown name comes from the silver being positioned directly above the king's head on the 27 square as if it were a crown). In the diagram, gote ("white") has chosen a Static Rook position, in which the rook remains on its starting square. This Static Rook position is specifically a type of Counter-Ranging Rook position known as Anaguma Static Rook that uses an Anaguma castle. The Anaguma (badger) castle has the king moved all the way into very edge corner of the board on the 11 square as if it were a badger in a hole with a silver moved to the 22 square in order to close up the hole and additional reinforcing golds on 31 and 32 squares. This board position required 33 moves (or 12 move pairs as counted in western chess) to construct.
=== Middle game ===
The middle game (chūban) lasts from the beginning of direct engagement until the defensive structure (castle) of one side begins to collapse. Strategies focus on attempting to break through the opposing defenses and penetrate the enemy camp while maintaining one's own defenses. Since accumulating pieces in hand is essential for checkmating, capturing pieces and establishing a foothold within the enemy territory are the key aims of the middle game. Some classic proverbs for going on the offensive include:
Begin your attack with a sacrifice Pawn push: many attacks begin with a pawn sacrifice, which allows further piece development and counterattacks.
If there is an unprotected piece, you won't be stuck for a move: look for undefended pieces (ukigome) or hanging pieces
Attack with Rook, Bishop, Silver and Knight: these are the standard pieces used for the offensive
The knight that jumps far falls prey to a pawn: unlike in chess, the shogi knight cannot move backwards, so one must be very careful in launching deep attacks with it, lest it be easily taken by the enemy.
Drop the Lance on the back rank: When dropping a lance, it makes more sense to drop it as far back as possible, this maximizes its coverage.
A silver at the head of the (opponent's) Knight is the standard move (joseki): refers to how dropping a silver right in front of a knight is a powerful move.
As for the defense, it is important to prevent the opponent from infiltrating one’s castle or defensive structure. One proverb states: "defend against major pieces by drawing them closer". This proverb states that a good way to defend against a major piece is to drop or move a piece in the way of its attack and draw it closer to your forces, where it can then be more easily attacked. The degree to which a player emphasizes attack or defense is reflected in their unique playing style. Since exchanges are common, calculating the balance of captured pieces in hand is important.
In some cases, intense play aimed directly at the kings begins before the forming of castles and formations has been completed. In these cases, one may consider the middle game as having been skipped altogether. Alternatively, a decisive imbalance may arise during the middle game, which may lead an experienced player to calculate their position as hopeless and thus to resign before entering the endgame.
=== Endgame ===
The endgame (shūban) starts when one side's defenses have been compromised and their castle or defensive structure begins to collapse. Players then attack the opponent’s king with the objective of achieving checkmate (tsumi), usually with a series of piece drops, checks (ōte) and mating threats (tsumero). A sequence leading to checkmate is called a yose (mating attack). While calculation of material is central to the middle game, it becomes less important in the endgame, which is focused on calculating the possibility of mate. Skill in the calculation of mating sequences is cultivated through regular tsumeshogi (checkmate problem) practice.
There are various traditional shogi aphorisms related to checkmating, including:
In the endgame, speed is more important than material: While gaining material is the key element of the middle game, in the endgame, how fast one can approach the king to deliver mate is the most important element.
The check is to chase: This warns against carelessly checking the king without proper calculation, since a king might be driven away towards a safe spot and one will then lose a chance to checkmate.
Approach the King by Surrounding him: Instead of carelessly checking the enemy king, one is advised to gradually gain control of the squares around the king and restrict its mobility until an "inevitable mate" situation (hisshi) arises or at least a yose near mate position.
Drive the King to the Back Rank: Since shogi pieces tend to favor forward movement, it is easier to attack the king from the front. Furthermore, a cornered king has fewer squares to escape to.
Drop a Silver at the King's belly and Drop a Silver behind the King: While these drops do not directly attack the king, they pave the way for mate by blocking the king's escape routes.
If a serious imbalance arose in the middle game, such as one side having broken the opponent's defenses and gained a superior set of pieces in hand, the endgame may be one sided. However, a decisive reversal may occur in the endgame if the opponent can mount a decisive counterattack. In situations where one is subjected to a one-sided attack, another possible option is to aim for "entering king", seeking to penetrate into the opponent’s camp with one’s own king, where he will become more difficult to mate.
== Etiquette ==
Shogi players are expected to follow etiquette in addition to rules explicitly described. Commonly accepted etiquette include the following:
Greetings to the opponent both before and after the game. Common greetings include bowing and the phrase "yoroshiku onegaishimasu" (lit. "please treat me well", a common Japanese greeting). After the game, one usually says "arigatou gozaimasu" ("thank you for your cooperation").
Acknowledging the difference in strength between the higher-ranked and lower-ranked player. Usually the higher strength player will sit at the top of the table, prepare the pieces and clean them up afterwards. The higher ranked player uses the oshō 王 (king) while the gyokushō 玉 (jewel king) is used by the lower ranked player. In titleholder system games, the current titleholder takes the king piece as the higher. Furthermore, the higher ranked player performs the piece toss to determine who goes first.
Arranging and placing the pieces so they fit inside the squares in a neat fashion instead of in a messy way.
Not changing one's move or taking it back
Fair withdrawal without any disruption, such as scattering pieces on the board to demonstrate frustration
Announcing one's resignation, often with the phrase "makemashita" ("I lost") or "arimasen" ("there is nothing I can do"). The game is not considered over until the phrase is uttered. The winning side usually responds with "thank you very much" (arigatou gozaimashita).
Shogi does not have a touch-move rule as in western chess tournament play or chu shogi. However, in professional games, a piece is considered to be permanently placed when the moved piece has been let go of. In both amateur and professional play, any piece may be touched in order to adjust its centralization within its square (to look tidy). Immediately taking back moves (待った matta) in professional games is prohibited. However, in friendly amateur games in Japan, it is often permitted by agreement.
Professional players are required to follow further rules of etiquette such as kneeling exactly 15 centimeters from the shogi board, sitting in the formal seiza position on a zabuton cushion, setting up the pieces in the traditional orders (see below), using a traditional way to grasp and place the pieces on the board, etc.
Another element of shogi etiquette is taking part in a post-game discussion, the "kansōsen" (感想戦), where players politely analyze the game together.
=== Game setup ===
Traditionally, the order of placing the pieces on the board is determined. There are two commonly used orders, the Ōhashi order 大橋流 and the Itō order 伊藤流. Placement sets pieces with multiples (generals, knights, lances) from left to right in all cases, and follows the order:
King
Gold generals
Silver generals
Knights
In ito, the player now places:
Pawns (left to right starting from the leftmost file)
Lances
Bishop
Rook
In ohashi, the player now places:
Lances
Bishop
Rook
Pawns (starting from center file, then alternating left to right one file at a time)
=== Furigoma ===
Among amateur tournaments, the higher-ranked player or defending champion performs the piece toss. In professional games, the furigoma is done on the behalf of the higher-ranked player/champion by the timekeeper who kneels by the side of the higher-ranked player and tosses the pawn pieces onto a silk cloth. In friendly amateur games, a player will ask the opponent to toss the pawns out of politeness. Otherwise, the person who tosses the pawns can be determined by Rock–paper–scissors.
== History ==
Shogi is derived from the Indian chaturanga (which has been dated to the seventh century CE). Chaturanga spread throughout Eurasia, developing into various related games in different regions, such as xiangqi in China, and makruk in Thailand. It is not clear when chess was brought to Japan. The earliest generally accepted mention of shogi is Shin Saru Gakuki (新猿楽記) (1058–1064) by Fujiwara Akihira. The oldest archaeological evidence is a group of 16 shogi pieces excavated from the grounds of Kōfuku-ji in Nara Prefecture. As it was physically associated with a wooden tablet written on in the sixth year of Tengi (1058), the pieces are thought to date from that period. These simple pieces were cut from a writing plaque in the same five-sided shape as modern pieces, with the names of the pieces written on them.
There are various theories concerning how games of the chaturanga lineage were transmitted to Japan, and debates among Japanese scholars continue. Kōichi Masukawa argues for a period of transmission occuring between the 10th and 11th centuries, while Yoshinori Kimura argues for an earlier period (a theory lacking archeological evidence). Furthermore, Kimura argues for a Chinese route of transmission, while Masukawa favors a Southeast Asian route (meaning that shogi would be derived from an ancient makruk type game). The earliest excavated pieces are frequently found at temple sites, suggesting the involvement of Buddhist monks in the transmission of the game.
The Nichūreki (二中歴) (c. 1210–1221), an encyclopedia of folk culture, describes two forms of shogi, large (dai) shogi and small (shō) shogi. These are now called Heian shogi (or Heian small shogi) and Heian dai shogi. Heian small shogi is the version on which modern shogi is based, but the Nichūreki states that one wins if one's opponent is reduced to a single king, indicating that drops had not yet been introduced. According to Yasuji Shimizu, chief researcher at the Archaeological Institute of Kashihara, Nara Prefecture, the names of the Heian shogi pieces keep those of chaturanga (general, elephant, horse, chariot and soldier), and add to them five treasures of Buddhism (jade, gold, silver, cassia bark, and incense).
Around the 13th century the game of dai shogi developed, created by increasing the number of pieces in Heian shogi, as was sho shogi, which added the rook, bishop, and drunken elephant from dai shogi to Heian shogi. The drunken elephant steps one square in any direction except directly backward, and promotes to the prince, which acts as a second king and must also be captured along with the original king for the other player to win. Around the 15th century, the rules of dai shogi were simplified, creating the game of chu shogi. Chu shogi, like its parent dai shogi, contains many distinct pieces, such as the queen (identical with Western chess) and the lion (which moves like a king, but twice per turn, potentially being able to capture twice, among other idiosyncrasies). The popularity of dai shogi soon waned in favour of chu shogi, until it stopped being played commonly. Chu shogi rivalled sho shogi in popularity until the introduction of drops in the latter, upon which standard shogi became ascendant, although chu shogi was still commonly played until about World War II, especially in Kyoto.
It is thought that the rules of standard shogi were fixed in the 16th century, when the drunken elephant was removed from the set of pieces present in sho shogi. There is no clear record of when drops were introduced, however.
In the Edo period, many large shogi variants were invented, including tenjiku shogi, dai dai shogi, maka dai dai shogi, tai shogi, and taikyoku shogi. However, it is thought that these were played to only a very limited extent. Both standard shogi and go were promoted by the Tokugawa shogunate which granted stipends to masters such as Ōhashi Sōkei and Hon’inbō Sansa, making shogi and go officially recognized arts. Successors of the masters assumed the titles Shogidokoro and Godokoro. During the Edo period, the shogi iemoto system was adopted, and the three main shogi houses were the Ōhashi house, its branch family, and the Itō house. Although these houses used hereditary succession, high playing strength was required to maintain authority, and strong disciples were often adopted to inherit the house. During the reign of the eighth shōgun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, castle shogi tournaments were held once a year on the 17th day of Kannazuki, corresponding to November 17, which is known as "Shogi Day" in Japan. Famous players from the mid-Edo period include Itō Kanju (author of Shōgi Zukō), Ōhashi Sōei and the "Kisei" Amano Sōho.
The title of meijin became hereditary in the Ōhashi and Itō families until the fall of the shogunate, when it came to be passed by recommendation. After the fall of the shogunate, stipends ceased, and the iemoto system weakened. Today the meijin title is used for the winner of the Meijin-sen competition, the first modern title match. From around 1899, newspapers began to publish records of shogi matches, and high-ranking players formed alliances with the aim of having their games published. In 1909, the Shogi Association (将棋同盟社) was formed, and in 1924, the Tokyo Shogi Association (東京将棋連盟) was formed. This was an early incarnation of the modern Japan Shogi Association (日本将棋連盟, nihon shōgi renmei), or JSA, and 1924 is considered by the JSA to be the date it was founded.
In 1935, meijin Kinjirō Sekine stepped down, and the rank of meijin came to be awarded to the winner of a Meijin title match (名人戦, meijin-sen). Yoshio Kimura (木村義雄) became the first Meijin under this system in 1937. This was the start of the shogi title matches (see titleholder system). After the war other tournaments were promoted to title matches, culminating with the Ryūō title match (竜王戦, ryūō-sen) in 1988 for the modern line-up of seven. About 200 professional shogi players compete. Each year, the title holder defends the title against a challenger chosen from knockout or round matches.
After the Second World War, SCAP (occupational government mainly led by US) tried to eliminate all "feudal" factors from Japanese society and shogi was included in the possible list of items to be banned along with Bushido (philosophy of samurai) and other things. SCAP's reason for banning shogi was that the game uniquely utilized captured pieces. SCAP insisted that this could lead to the idea of prisoner abuse. Kōzō Masuda, then one of the top professional shogi players, when summoned to the SCAP headquarters for an investigation, criticized such understanding of shogi, instead insisting that it was chess that potentially contained the idea of prisoner abuse, because opposing pieces are removed permanently, while shogi gives prisoners the chance to get back into the game. Masuda also argued that chess contradicts the ideal of gender equality in western society because the king shields himself behind the queen and runs away. Masuda later claimed his arguments eventually led to the exemption of shogi from the list of items to be banned.
Modern shogi features a highly developed theory, education system and literatur. There are numerous major title matches along with small amateur tournaments. Women professionals also emerged, and women’s title tournaments began in 1974.
Computer shogi developed from the 1960s onward, becoming important study tools for professionals by the 2000s. By 2017, the program Ponanza defeated Meijin Satō Amahiko, demonstrating machine superiority over a reigning champion.
Internet shogi platforms like 81Dojo proliferated from the 1990s onward.
== Professional Japanese shogi ==
There are two organizations for shogi professional players in Japan: the Japan Shogi Association (JSA) and the Ladies Professional Shogi-players' Association of Japan (LSPA). The JSA is the primary organization for men and women's professional shogi while the LPSA is a group of women professionals who broke away from the JSA in 2007 to establish their own independent organization. Both organize tournaments for their members and have reached an agreement to cooperate with each other to promote shogi through events and other activities. Top professional players are fairly well-paid from tournament earnings. In 2025, Sōta Fujii earned more than JPY 200 million in prize money and game fee earnings.
The JSA recognizes two categories of shogi professionals: professional (棋士 (kishi)) and women's professional (女流棋士 (joryūkishi)). Sometimes kishi are addressed as "regular professionals" (正棋士 (seikishi)), a term from Go used to distinguish kishi from other classes of players. JSA professional ranks and women's professional ranks are not equivalent and each has their own promotion criteria and ranking system. In 2006, the JSA officially granted women "professional status". This is not equivalent, however, to the more traditional way of "gaining professional status", i.e., being promoted from the apprentice professional (奨励会 (shōreikai)) system: leagues of strong amateur players aspiring to become a professional. Rather, it is a separate system especially designed for women's professionals. Qualified amateurs, regardless of gender, may apply for the apprentice professional and all those who successfully "graduate" are granted kishi status. As of October 2025, however, no woman has yet to accomplish this feat although three—Kana Satomi, Tomoka Nishiyama, and Nanami Naka— did reach the apprentice professional 3-dan League before officially switching to women's professional status. So, in common practice, kishi is only used to refer to male shogi professionals.
The JSA is the only body which can organize tournaments for professionals, e.g., the eight major tournaments in the titleholder system and other professional tournaments. The eight major professional championship titles in the men’s league, known as the “8 Crowns”, are the Meijin, Ryūō, Ōshō, Ōza, Kisei, Kiō, and Eiō. In 1996, Yoshiharu Habu became the first person to hold seven major titles at the same time. In 2023, Sōta Fujii became the first player to hold all eight major titles at the same time. For women's professionals, both the JSA and LPSA organize tournaments, either jointly or separately. Tournaments for amateurs may be organized by the JSA and LPSA as well as local clubs, newspapers, private corporations, educational institutions, or municipal governments for cities or prefectures under the guidance of the JSA or LPSA.
== International shogi ==
Shogi has been introduced abroad since at least the late 16th century, though it remains limited in popularity. In 1966 5th dan Trevor Leggett published Shogi: Japan’s Game of Strategy, one of the earliest such publications in English. In 1975 George F. Hodges founded The Shogi Association in the United Kingdom, and began publishing SHOGI magazine in 1976, which reached 70 issues. The Federation of European Shogi Associations (FESA) was established in 1985.
European shogi tournaments vary in format, including both individual and team competitions. Major events are typically held annually, attracting players of all skill levels. The tournaments often feature different time controls, ranging from classical formats to faster-paced variants like blitz shogi. Notable tournaments include the European Shogi Championship and various national championships. As of November 2017, there were over 1,200 active players in Europe.
There are also shogi clubs in the United States, especially in the west coast cities. North American shogi championships have been held since the 1980s under the auspices of the United States Shogi Federation. One of the strongest American players of the 20th century is Chess GM Larry Kaufman, who took numerous trips to Japan to study shogi there with professional and amateur players, reaching the rank of 5 dan.
The rise of personal computing also led to a growth in online shogi play. One influential figure in this regard is the Japanese player Tomohide Kawasaki. He is known for the creation of a popular series of shogi videos on youtube (under the name Hidetchi) and for translating shogi books into English. He is also known for programming and maintining the 81dojo shogi website, which has become a key place for international shogi players to play online and organize tournaments. Since 2013, 81dojo has been officially sponsored by the Japan Shogi Association.
Since the 1990s, shogi has grown in popularity outside Japan, particularly in the People's Republic of China, and especially in Shanghai. The January 2006 edition of Kindai Shogi (近代将棋) stated that there were 120,000 shogi players in Shanghai. The spread of the game to countries where Chinese characters are not in common use, however, has been slower.
== Computer shogi ==
Shogi has the highest game complexity of all popular chess variants. Computers have steadily improved in playing shogi since the 1970s. In 2007, champion Yoshiharu Habu estimated the strength of the 2006 world computer shogi champion Bonanza at the level of two-dan shoreikai.
The JSA prohibits its professionals from playing computers in public without prior permission, with the reason of promoting shogi and monetizing the computer–human events.
On October 12, 2010, after some 35 years of development, a computer finally beat a professional player, when the top ranked female champion Ichiyo Shimizu was beaten by the Akara2010 system in a game lasting just over 6 hours.
On July 24, 2011, computer shogi programs Bonanza and Akara crushed the amateur team of Kosaku and Shinoda in two games. The allotted time for the amateurs was one hour and then three minutes per move. The allotted time for the computer was 25 minutes and then 10 seconds per move.
On April 20, 2013, GPS Shogi defeated 8-dan professional shogi player Hiroyuki Miura in a 102-move game which lasted over 8 hours.
On December 13, 2015, the highest rated player on Shogi Club 24 was computer program Ponanza, rated 3455.
On April 10, 2016, Ponanza defeated Takayuki Yamasaki, 8-dan in 85 moves. Takayuki used 7 hours 9 minutes.
In October 2017, DeepMind claimed that its program AlphaZero, after a full nine hours of training, defeated Elmo in a 100-game match, winning 90, losing 8, and drawing two.
From a computational complexity point of view, generalized shogi is EXPTIME-complete.
== Video games ==
Hundreds of video games were released exclusively in Japan for several consoles.
Clubhouse Games: 42 All-Time Classics was released by Nintendo internationally for the Nintendo DS, and offered Shogi as one of the games in its Board Games category. Its sequel, Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, for the Nintendo Switch console, offers both Shogi and mini Shogi variants using either traditional or bilingual pieces.
== Culture ==
According to professional player Yoshiharu Habu, in Japan shogi is viewed as not merely a game as entertainment or a mind sport but is instead an art that is a part of traditional Japanese culture along with haiku, tanka, noh, ikebana, and the Japanese tea ceremony. Its elevated status was established by the iemoto system supported by the historical shogunate.
The backwards uma (shogi horse symbol) is often featured on merchandise (such as on large decorative shogi piece sculptures, keychains, and other keepsakes) available for sale in Tendō. It also serves as a symbol of good luck. (Cf. Rabbit's foot.) There are multiple theories on its origin. One is that uma (うま ) spelled in the Japanese syllabary backwards is まう mau (舞う), which means (to) dance and dancing horses are a good luck omen.
Airing in 2025 on Netflix, a TV series titled Miss King featured shogi as a focal point of the drama series.
== Comparison to chess ==
While both shogi and chess evolved from the same Indian game of chaturanga, they have significant differences. Shogi's drop rule is perhaps the central mechanic that separates shogi from chess, making it a more complex game overall. Shogi's game tree complexity of 10226 is twice as large as that of FIDE chess (10123). The use of drops, greater number of pieces, and larger board size contribute to this increased complexity.
In comparison, shogi games average about 140 (half-)moves per game (or 70 chess move-pairs) whereas chess games average about 80 moves per game (or 40 chess move-pairs) and minishogi averages about 40 moves per game (or 20 chess move-pairs).
The rarity of draws in shogi (2-3%) is also another feature that sets the game apart from classic chess.
Chess is characterized by numerous long-range pieces (sliders), while most shogi pieces have short range moves that have a bias for forward movement. This short range movement is balanced by the drop rule, which allows shogi moves to cover the board in a different manner. Furthermore, shogi pieces never go out of play, while chess pieces do. Thus, material advantage and piece exchanges are more important in chess than in shogi. Likewise, shogi endgames are not characterized by a diminished number of pieces on the board as they are in chess. Positional play in shogi is also very different due to the forward capture of shogi pawns, which means there are no pawn chains in shogi like in chess. Instead, pawns are useful as tools for sacrifices and drops (which can be used to repair pawn formations). Regarding castling, in shogi this refers to a sequence of invidual moves that achieves a specific defensive formation, not a special move like in FIDE chess. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_wrestling | Greco-Roman wrestling | Greco-Roman (American English), Graeco-Roman (British English), or classic wrestling (Euro English) is a style of wrestling that is practiced worldwide. Greco-Roman wrestling was included in the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 and has been part of every summer Olympic held since 1904. It is one of the two forms of wrestling contested at the Olympics, the other being freestyle wrestling.
Greco-Roman wrestling forbids holds below the waist, which is the main feature that differentiates it from freestyle wrestling. This restriction results in an emphasis on throws, because a wrestler cannot use trips to bring an opponent to the ground or hook/grab the opponent's leg to avoid being thrown.
Greco-Roman wrestling is one of several forms of amateur competitive wrestling practiced internationally. Other wrestling disciplines sanctioned by United World Wrestling include men's freestyle wrestling, women's freestyle wrestling, grappling (submission wrestling), pankration, Alysh (belt wrestling), Pahlavani wrestling, and beach wrestling.
== History ==
The name "Greco-Roman" applied to this style of wrestling as a way of purporting it to be similar to the wrestling formerly found in the ancient civilizations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea especially at the ancient Greek Olympics. At that time, the athletes initially wore skintight shorts but later wrestled each other naked.
It is speculated that many styles of European folk wrestling may have spurred the origins of Greco-Roman wrestling. According to United World Wrestling, a Napoleonic soldier named Jean Exbrayat first developed the style. Exbrayat performed in fairs and called his style of wrestling "flat hand wrestling" to distinguish it from other forms of hand-to-hand combat that allowed striking. In 1848, Exbrayat established the rule that no holds below the waist were to be allowed; neither were painful holds or torsions that would hurt the opponent. "Flat hand wrestling" or "French wrestling" (as the style became known) developed all throughout Europe and became a popular sport. The Italian wrestler Basilio Bartoletti first coined the term "Greco-Roman" for the sport to underline the interest in "ancient values."
Many others in the 18th and 20th centuries sought to add value to their contemporary athletic practices by finding some connections with ancient counterparts. The 18th century work Gymnastics for Youth by Johann Friedrich Guts Muths described a form of schoolboy wrestling called "orthopale" (used by Plato to describe the standing part of wrestling) that did not mention any lower-body holds. Real ancient wrestling was quite different; see Greek wrestling.
The British never really enjoyed Greco-Roman wrestling in comparison to its less restrictive counterpart, freestyle wrestling, and neither did the Americans, despite the efforts of William Muldoon (a successful New York barroom freestyle wrestler who served in the Franco-Prussian War and learned the style in France) to promote it in the United States after the Civil War. However, on the continent of Europe, the style was highly promoted. Almost all the continental European capital cities hosted international Greco-Roman tournaments in the 19th century, with much prize money given to the place winners. For example, the Czar of Russia paid 500 francs for wrestlers to train and compete in his tournament, with 5,000 francs awarded as a prize to the tournament winner. Greco-Roman wrestling soon became prestigious in continental Europe. It was the first style registered at the modern Olympic Games, beginning in Athens in 1896 with one heavyweight bout, and grew in popularity during the 20th century. It has always been featured in the Olympic Games, except during the Paris Olympic Games in 1900 and the St. Louis Olympic Games of 1904, when freestyle first emerged as an Olympic sport.
Perhaps the most well-known of Greco-Roman wrestlers in the 19th century was Georg Hackenschmidt born in Dorpat, Russian Empire, and nicknamed "The Russian Lion". Hackenschmidt in 1898 at the age of 21 and with 15 months of training defeated the experienced Paul Pons in a match in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 1900, he won professional tournaments in Moscow and St. Petersburg and a series of international tournaments after that. After defeating Tom Jenkins (from the United States) in both freestyle and Greco-Roman matches in England, Georg Hackenschmidt wrestled exclusively freestyle in order to compete better against English, Australian, and American opponents. Winning more than 2,000 victories in Greco-Roman and freestyle, Hackenschmidt served as the physical education adviser to the House of Lords after his retirement.
Professional matches in Greco-Roman wrestling were known for their great brutality. Body slams, choke-holds, and head-butting was allowed, and even caustic substances were used to weaken the opponent. By the end of the 19th century, gouging with the nails, punching, and violently slamming the arms together around the opponent's stomach were forbidden. Greco-Roman matches were also famous for their length. Professionally, it was not uncommon for there to be matches lasting two or three hours. William Muldoon's bout with Clarence Whistler at the Terrace Garden Theater in New York lasted eight hours before ending in a draw. Even in the 1912 Olympics, a match between Martin Klein of Russia (Estonia) and Alfred Asikainen of Finland lasted for eleven hours and forty minutes before Martin Klein won. He received the silver medal because he was too tired to compete in final match next day. That record was later published at Guinness World Records. The International Amateur Wrestling Federation (IAWF) took over the regulation of Greco-Roman wrestling in 1921. Since then matches have been dramatically cut short, and today all movements that put the life or limb of the wrestler in jeopardy are forbidden. Professional wrestler Lou Thesz, who initially trained extensively in Greco-Roman, popularised the Greco-Roman backdrop during early televised professional matches.
In Olympic competition, countries of the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Turkey, South Korea, Romania, Japan, Sweden, and Finland have had great success. Carl Westergren of Sweden won three Greco-Roman gold medals in 1920, 1924, and 1932, and was the first Greco-Roman wrestler to do so. Alexander Karelin did the same in 1988, 1992, and 1996. Ivar Johansson of Sweden won gold medals in Greco-Roman in 1932 and 1936 and also a gold medal in freestyle in 1932. The United States Olympic delegation (exclusively wrestling freestyle before) first entered Greco-Roman wrestling in 1952 and has taken three gold medals, won by Steve Fraser and Jeffrey Blatnick in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, and by Rulon Gardner at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia.
== Weight classes ==
Currently, international Greco-Roman wrestling is divided into five main age categories: U15, U17 (Cadets), U20 (Juniors), Seniors U23, or Seniors. For men, there is also a special category for some Greco-Roman competitions, "Veterans", for men ages 35 and older, presumably featuring the same weight classes as seniors. Also, all of the men's age categories and weight classes can be applied to freestyle wrestling. Wrestlers after weigh-in may only wrestle in their own weight class. Wrestlers in the senior age category may wrestle up a weight class except for the heavyweight division (which starts at a weight more than 96 kg for the men). Different nations may have different weight classes and different age categories for their levels of Greco-Roman competition.
== Structure of tournament ==
A typical international wrestling tournament takes place by direct elimination with an ideal number of wrestlers (4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.) in each weight class and age category competing for placement. The competition in each weight class takes place in one day. The day before the wrestling in a scheduled weight class and age category takes place, all the applicable wrestlers are examined by a physician and weighed-in. Each wrestler after being weighed on the scale then draws a token randomly that gives a certain number.
If an ideal number is not reached to begin elimination rounds, a qualification round will take place to eliminate the excess number of wrestlers. For example, 22 wrestlers may weigh-in over the ideal number of 16 wrestlers. The six wrestlers who drew the highest numbers after 16 and the six wrestlers who drew the six numbers immediately before 17 would then wrestle in six matches in the qualification round. The winners of those matches would then go on to the elimination round.
In the "elimination round", the ideal number of wrestlers then pair off and compete in matches until two victors emerge who will compete in the finals for first and second place. All of the wrestlers who lost to the two finals then have the chance to wrestle in a "repechage round". The repechage round begins with the wrestlers who lost to the two finalists at the lowest level of competition in the elimination round. The matches are paired off by the wrestlers who lost to one finalist and the wrestlers who lost to the other. The two wrestlers who win after every level of competition are the victors of the repechage round.
In the "finals", the two victors of the elimination round compete for first and second place.
In all rounds of the tournament, the wrestlers compete in matches paired off in the order of the numbers they drew after the weigh-in.
After the finals match, the awards ceremony will take place. The first place and second place wrestlers will receive a gold and silver medal, respectively. (At the FILA World Championships, the first place wrestler will receive the World Championship Belt.) The two repechage round winners will each be awarded third place with a bronze medal. The two wrestlers who lost in the finals for the third place are awarded fifth place. From seventh place down, the wrestlers are ranked according to the classification points earned for their victories or losses. If there is a tie among wrestlers for classification points, the ranking is determined in this order from the highest to the lowest:
Most victories earned by fall
Most matches won by technical superiority
Most periods won by technical superiority
Most technical points scored in the tournament
Least technical points scored in the tournament
Wrestlers who remained tied after that will be awarded placements ex aequo. Wrestlers classified from the fifth to the 10th place will receive a special diploma. The wrestling tournaments in the Olympic Games and the Senior and Junior World Championships are designed to take place over three days on three mats.
== Layout of the mat ==
The match takes place on a thick rubber circular mat that is shock-absorbing to ensure safety. For the Olympic Games, all World Championships, and World Cups, the mat has to be new. The main wrestling area has a nine-meter diameter and is surrounded by a 1.5 meter border of the same thickness known as the "protection area". Inside the nine meter in diameter circle is a red band of one meter in width that is on the outer edge of the circle and is known as the "red zone". The red zone is used to help indicate passivity on the part of a wrestler; thus, it is also known as the "passivity zone". Inside the red zone is the "central wrestling area" which is seven meters in diameter. In the middle of the central wrestling area is the "central circle", which is one meter in diameter. The central circle is surrounded by a band 10 centimeters wide and is divided in half by a red line eight centimeters in width. The diagonally opposite corners of the mat are marked with the wrestlers' colors, red and blue.
For competition in the Olympic Games, the World Championships, and the Continental Championships, the mat is installed on a platform no greater than 1.1 meters in height. If the mat lies on a podium and the protection margin (covering and free space around the mat) does not reach two meters, then the sides of the podium are covered with 45° (degree) inclined panels. In all cases, the color of the protection area is different from the color of the mat.
== Equipment ==
A "singlet" is a one-piece wrestling garment made of spandex that should provide a tight and comfortable fit for the wrestler. It is made from nylon or lycra and prevents an opponent from using anything on the wrestler as leverage. One wrestler usually competes in a red singlet and the other in a blue singlet.
A special pair of "shoes" is worn by the wrestler to increase his mobility and flexibility. Wrestling shoes are light and flexible in order to provide maximum comfort and movement. Usually made with rubber soles, they help give the wrestler's feet a better grip on the mat.
A "handkerchief", also called a "bloodrag", is carried in the singlet. In the event of bleeding, the wrestler will remove the cloth from his singlet and attempt to stop the bleeding or clean up any bodily fluids that may have gotten onto the mat.
"Headgear", equipment worn around the ears to protect the wrestler, is optional in Greco-Roman. Headgear is omitted at the participant's own risk, as there is the potential to develop cauliflower ear.
== The match ==
A match is a competition between two individual wrestlers of the same weight class. In Greco-Roman wrestling, a jury (or team) of three officials (referees) is used. The referee controls the action in the center, blowing the whistle to start and stop the action, and supervises the scoring of holds and infractions. The judge sits at the side of the mat, keeps score, and occasionally gives his approval when needed by the referee for various decisions. The mat chairman sits at the scoring table, keeps time, is responsible for declaring technical superiority, and supervises the work of the referee and judge. To call a fall, two of the three officials must agree (usually, the referee and either the judge or the mat chairman).
=== Modern format ===
In modern Greco-Roman wrestling, matches are contested over two three-minute halves with the winner being decided by fall, technical superiority or cumulative points across both periods (decision). The modern format emphasizes wrestling on the feet instead of mat wrestling (par terre); in contrast to the older format, par terre now only occurs as a result of a takedown/throw or when a wrestler commits an infraction (eg: passivity).
Before each match, each wrestler's name is called, and the wrestler takes his place at the corner of the mat assigned to his color. The referee then calls them to his side at the center of the mat, shakes hands with them, inspects their apparel, and checks for any perspiration, oily or greasy substances, and any other infractions. The two wrestlers then greet each other, shake hands, and the referee blows his whistle to start the period. Upon conclusion of the match, the referee stands at the center of the mat facing the officials' table. Both wrestlers then shake hands, and stand on either side of the referee to await the decision. The referee then proclaims the winner by raising the winner's hand. Each wrestler then shakes hands with the referee and their opponent's coach.
=== Old format ===
Prior to recent rule changes, a wrestler wins the match when he has won the majority of periods. For example, if one competitor were to win the first period 1–0 and the second period 1–0, the match would be over. However, if the other competitor were to win the second period, then a third and deciding period would result. Only a fall, injury default, or disqualification terminates the match; all other modes of victory result only in period termination. One side effect of this format is that it is possible for the losing wrestler to outscore the winner. For example, periods may be scored 3–2, 0–4, 1–0, leading to a total score of 4–6 but a win for the wrestler scoring fewer points. This format was changed
Each Greco-Roman period is broken up into a phase for wrestling from the neutral position and a maximum of two par terre (ground wrestling) phases. During the wrestling phase from the neutral position, both wrestlers compete for takedowns and points for 60 seconds as usual. At the end of the first minute, in general, the wrestler who has scored the most points will receive the advantage in an Olympic lift from an open par terre position on the other wrestler. This position is known as "par terre". If neither wrestler at this point has any points, the referee will toss a colored disk, with a red-colored side and a blue-colored side. The wrestler who won the colored disk toss will receive the advantage in the Olympic lift.
The wrestler who lost the colored disk toss then places his hands and knees in the center circle, with the hands and knees at least 20 centimeters apart and the distance between the hands a maximum of 30 centimeters. The arms of that wrestler would be stretched out, the feet would not be crossed, and the thighs would be stretched out forming a 90-degree angle with the mat. The wrestler who won the colored disk toss would then be allowed to step beside the wrestler on the bottom, not touching him with his legs. If the wrestler who won the colored disk toss wished, he could place one knee on the mat. The top wrestler would then wrap his hands and arms around the bottom wrestler's waist and execute the Olympic lift (called an upside-down belt hold) at the beginning of the first 30 seconds. The bottom wrestler could then attempt to defend himself.
At the end of first thirty seconds, the clinch position is reversed with the other wrestler receiving the Olympic lift, and the period continuing for the remaining 30 seconds. The period is decided by who accumulated the most points during both standing and ground phases. During each ground phase, if the top wrestler cannot score, the other wrestler is awarded one point. In the case of no scoring moves being executed during either ground phase the score will be 1–1, and in this case generally the wrestler to score last will be awarded the period.
=== Scoring ===
In Greco-Roman wrestling, as well as in freestyle wrestling, points are awarded mostly on the basis of explosive action and risk. For example, when one wrestler performs a grand amplitude throw that brings his opponent into the danger position, he is awarded the greatest number of points that can be scored in one instance. Also, a wrestler who takes the risk to briefly roll on the mat (with his shoulders in contact with the mat) could give a certain number of points to his opponent. Scoring can be accomplished in the following ways:
Takedown (2 to 5 points): A wrestler is awarded points for a takedown when the wrestler gains control over his opponent on the mat from a neutral position (when the wrestler is on his feet). At least three points of contact have to be controlled on the mat (e.g. two arms and one knee; two knees and one arm or the head; or two arms and the head).
Five points are awarded for a takedown brought about by a throw of grand amplitude (a throw in which a wrestler brings his opponent off of the mat and controls him so that his feet go directly above his head) either from the standing or par terre position into a direct and immediate danger position.
Four points are generally awarded for a takedown brought about by a grand amplitude throw that does not bring his opponent in a direct and immediate danger position or for a takedown in which a wrestler's opponent is taken from his feet or his stomach to his back or side (a throw of short amplitude) so that he is in the danger position.
Two points are awarded for a takedown brought about by a wrestler taking his opponent from his feet to his stomach or side such that his back or shoulders are not exposed to the mat.
Reversal (1 point): A wrestler is awarded one point for a reversal when the wrestler gains control over his opponent from a defensive position (when the wrestler is being controlled by his opponent).
Exposure, also called the "Danger Position" (2 points): A wrestler is awarded points for exposure when the wrestler exposes his opponent's back to the mat for several seconds. Points for exposure are also awarded if a wrestler's back is to the mat but the wrestler is not pinned. Criteria for exposure or the danger position is met when 1) a wrestler's opponent is in a bridge position to avoid being pinned, 2) a wrestler's opponent is on one or both elbows with his back to the mat and avoids getting pinned, 3) a wrestler holds one of his opponent's shoulders to the mat and the other shoulder at an acute angle (less than 90 degrees), 4) a wrestler's opponent is in an "instantaneous fall" position (where both of his shoulders are on the mat for less than one second), or 5) the wrestler's opponent rolls on his shoulders. A wrestler in the danger position allows his opponent to score two points. An additional "hold-down point" may be earned by maintaining the exposure continuously for five seconds.
Penalty (1 or 2 points): Under the 2004–2005 changes to the international styles, a wrestler whose opponent takes an injury time-out receives one point unless the injured wrestler is bleeding. Other infractions (e.g. fleeing a hold or the mat, striking the opponent, acting with brutality or intent to injure, and using illegal holds) are penalized by an award of either one or two points, a "caution", and a choice of position to the opponent.
Out of bounds (1 point): Whenever a wrestler places his foot in the protection area, the match is stopped, and one point is awarded to his opponent.
Classification points are also awarded in an international wrestling tournament, which give most points to the winner and in some cases, one point to the loser depending on the outcome of the match and how the victory was attained. For example, a victory by fall would give the winner five classification points and the loser no points, while a match won by technical superiority with the loser scoring technical points would award three points to the winner and one point to loser.
The full determinations for scoring are found in the UWW International Wrestling Rules
== Victory conditions ==
A match can be won in the following ways:
Win by fall: The objective of the wrestling match is to attain victory by what is known as the fall. A fall, also known as a pin, occurs when one wrestler holds both of his opponents' shoulders on the mat simultaneously. In Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling, the two shoulders of the defensive wrestler must be held long enough for the referee to "observe the total control of the fall" (usually ranging from one half-second to about one or two seconds). Then either the judge or the mat chairman concurs with the referee that a fall is made; if the referee does not indicate a fall, and the fall is valid, the judge and the mat chairman can concur together and announce the fall. A fall ends the match entirely regardless of when it occurs. In the United States, for the Kids freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling division (wrestlers ages 8 to 14) in competitions sponsored by USA Wrestling, it is specified that a fall must be held for two seconds.
Win by technical superiority (also called "technical fall"): If a fall is not secured to end the match, a wrestler can win a period simply by points. If one wrestler gains an eight-point lead over his opponent at any break in continuous action, he is declared the winner of the match by technical superiority.
Win by decision: If neither wrestler achieves either a fall or technical superiority, the wrestler who scored more points during the match is declared the winner. If the score is tied, the winner is determined by certain criteria. First, the number of cautions given to each wrestler for penalties; next, the value of points gained (that is, whether a wrestler gained points based on a two-, four-, or five-point move); and finally, the last scored technical point are taken into account to determine the winner. Generally, the wrestler who scored the last technical point will be awarded the period.
Win by default: If one wrestler is unable to continue participating for any reason, or fails to show up on the mat after his name was called three times before the match begins, his opponent is declared the winner of the match by default, forfeit, or withdrawal as the case may be.
Win by injury: If one wrestler is injured and unable to continue, the other wrestler is declared the winner. This is also referred to as a "medical forfeit" or "injury default". The term also encompasses situations where wrestlers become ill, take too many injury time-outs, or bleed uncontrollably. In the event a wrestler is injured by his opponent's illegal maneuver and cannot continue, the wrestler at fault is disqualified.
Win by disqualification: If a wrestler is assessed three "cautions" for breaking the rules, he is disqualified. Under other circumstances, such as flagrant brutality or gross disrespect for officials, the match will be ended immediately and the offending wrestler ejected from the tournament.
=== Team scoring in tournaments ===
In an international wrestling tournament, teams enter one wrestler at each weight class and score points based on the individual performances. For example, if a wrestler at the 60 kg weight class finishes in first place, then his team will receive 10 points. If he were to finish in tenth place, then the team would only receive one. At the end of the tournament, each team's score is tallied, and the teams are then placed first, second, third, etc.
=== Team competition ===
A team competition or dual meet is a meeting between (typically two) teams in which individual wrestlers at a given weight class compete against each other. A team receives one point for each victory in a weight class regardless of the outcome. The team that scores the most points at the end of the matches wins the team competition. If there are two sets of competitions with one team winning the home competition and one winning the away competition, a third competition may take place to determine the winner for ranking purposes, or the ranking may take place by assessing in order: 1) the most victories by adding the points of the two matches; 2) the most points by fall, default, forfeit, or disqualification; 3) the most matches won by technical superiority; 4) the most periods won by technical superiority; 5) the most technical points won in all the competition; 6) the least technical points won in all the competition. This works similarly when more than two teams are involved in this predicament.
== Notable Wrestlers ==
=== Olympic and world champions ===
=== Mixed martial arts ===
=== Professional wrestling === |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_great_powers | List of ancient great powers | Recognized great powers came about first in Europe during the post-Napoleonic era. The formalization of the division between small powers and great powers came with the signing of the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814. A great power is a nation or state that, through economic, political and military strength, is able to exert power and influence over not only its own region, but beyond to others.
The historical terms "Great Nation", a distinguished aggregate of people inhabiting a particular country or territory, and "Great Empire", a considerable group of states or countries under a single supreme authority, are colloquial conversations (historical jargon).
== Ancient Africa and Western Asia ==
=== Sumer and Akkad ===
Sumer (or Šumer) was one of the early civilizations of the Ancient Near East, located in the southern part of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) from the time of the earliest records in the mid 4th millennium BC until the rise of Babylonia in the late 3rd millennium BC. The term "Sumerian" applies to all speakers of the Sumerian language. Sumer (together with Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley civilization) is considered the first settled society in the world to have manifested all the features needed to qualify fully as a "civilization", eventually expanding into the first empire in history, the Akkadian Empire.
=== Hurrians ===
The Hurrians refer to a people who inhabited northern Mesopotamia beginning approximately 2500 BC. The Hurrian kingdoms of the Ancient Near East was in Northern Mesopotamia and its people lived in the adjacent regions during the Bronze Age. The largest and most influential Hurrian nation was the kingdom of Mitanni. The population of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia to a large part consisted of Hurrians, and there is significant Hurrian influence in Hittite mythology.
By the Early Iron Age, the Hurrians had been assimilated with other peoples, except perhaps in the kingdom of Urartu. The Hurrian peoples were not incredibly united, existing as quasi-feudal kingdoms. The kingdom of Mitanni was at its height towards the close of the 14th century BC. By the 13th century BC, the Hurrian kingdoms had been conquered by foreign powers, chiefly the Assyrians.
=== Babylonia ===
The profound political, social, and cultural influence imposed upon the Near East by the civilization known as the Ancient Babylonian Empire was the most pervasive in this historical period. The city itself, Babylon, positioned itself as a center of pivotal historical developments for centuries. There were 3 major Babylonian Dynasties: Amorite, Kassite, and Chaldean. This political entity was most predominate within the southern portion of Mesopotamia. It existed as an unremitting rival of the northern Assyrian Mesopotamians. Although it was assaulted and militarily overcome on several occasions, it did exist as a stalwart presence from the later 3rd millennium BC to the middle of the 6th century BC. After the fall of the Assyrian Empire in 612 BC, the Babylonian Empire was the most powerful state in the ancient world. Its capital, Babylon, was beautifully adorned by King Nebuchadnezzar, who erected several famous buildings. Even after the Babylonian Empire had been overthrown by the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, the city itself remained an important cultural center. This period would be considered the zenith of Babylon's dominance in its two-and-a-half millennium history. Ancient Babylon was officially conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the late 6th century BC.
=== Assyria ===
In early times, the term Assyria referred to a region on the Upper Tigris river, named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur. Later, as a nation and empire that came to control all of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and much of Anatolia, the term "Assyria proper" referred to roughly the northern half of Mesopotamia (the southern half being Babylonia), with Nineveh as its capital. The Assyrian homeland was located near a mountainous region, extending along the Tigris as far as the high Gordiaean or Carduchian mountain range of
Armenia, sometimes known as the "Mountains of Ashur". The Assyrian kings controlled a large kingdom at three different times in history. These are called the Old, Middle, and Neo-Assyrian kingdoms, or periods. The most powerful and best-known nation of these periods is the Neo-Assyrian Empire, 934–609 BC.
Shalmaneser III (858–823 BC) attacked and reduced Babylonia to vassalage, and defeated Aramea, Israel, Urartu, Phoenicia and the Neo-Hittite states, forcing all of these to pay tribute to Assyria. Shamshi-Adad V (822–811 BC) inherited an empire beset by civil war which he took most of his reign to quell. He was succeeded by Adad-nirari III who was merely a boy. The Empire was thus ruled by the famed queen Semiramis until 806 BC. In that year Adad-nirari III took the reins of power. After his premature death, Assyria failed to expand further during the reigns of Shalmaneser IV (782–773 BC), Ashur-dan III (772–755 BC) and Ashur-nirari V (754–746 BC).
Under Ashurbanipal (669–627 BC) its domination spanned from the Caucasus Mountains in the north to Nubia, Egypt and Arabia in the south, and from Cyprus and Antioch in the west to Persia in the east. Ashurbanipal destroyed Elam and smashed a rebellion led by his own brother Shamash-shum-ukim who was the Assyrian king of Babylon, exacting savage revenge on the Chaldeans, Nabateans, Arabs and Elamites who had supported him. Persia and Media were regarded as vassals of Ashurbanipal. He built vast libraries and initiated a surge in the building of temples and palaces.
=== Hittites ===
The Hittites were an ancient people who spoke an Indo-European language, and established a kingdom centered at Hattusa in north-central Anatolia from the 18th century BC. In the 14th century BC, the Hittite Empire was at its height, encompassing central Anatolia, northwestern Syria as far as Ugarit, and upper Mesopotamia. After 1180 BC, the empire disintegrated into several independent "Neo-Hittite" city-states, some surviving until as late as the 8th century BC.
The Hittites were also famous for their skill in building and using chariots, as the Battle of Kadesh demonstrated. The Hittites were pioneers of the Iron Age, manufacturing iron artifacts from as early as the 14th century BC, making them possibly even the first to do so. The Hittites passed much knowledge and lore from the Ancient Near East to the newly arrived Greeks in Europe.
Hittite prosperity was mostly dependent on control of the trade routes and metal sources. Because of the importance of northern Syria to the vital routes linking the Cilician Gates with Mesopotamia, defense of this area was crucial, and was soon put to the test by Egyptian expansion under Pharaoh Rameses II. The outcome of the Battle of Kadesh is uncertain, though it seems that the timely arrival of Egyptian reinforcements prevented total Hittite victory. The Egyptians forced the Hittites to take refuge in the fortress of Kadesh, but their own losses prevented them from sustaining a siege. This battle took place in the fifth year of Rameses II (c. 1274 BC by the most commonly used chronology).
=== Phoenicia ===
Phoenicia was a major power over the Mediterranean between 1200 BC and 539 BC. This ancient Semitic thalassocratic civilization was situated on the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent and centered on the coastline of modern Lebanon. All major Phoenician cities were on the coastline of the Mediterranean, some colonies reaching the Western Mediterranean. It was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550 BC to 300 BC. The Phoenicians used the galley, a man-powered sailing vessel, and are credited with the invention of the bireme. They were famed in Classical Greece and Rome as 'traders in purple', referring to their monopoly on the precious purple dye of the Murex snail, used, among other things, for royal clothing, and for the spread of their alphabets, from which almost all modern phonetic alphabets are derived.
=== Carthaginian Empire ===
The Carthaginian Empire, also known as the Carthaginian Republic (alternatively "Carthaginian hegemony", or simply "Carthage") was the Phoenician city-state of Carthage and its sphere of influence, which included much of the coast of North Africa as well as substantial parts of coastal Iberia and the islands of the western Mediterranean from 814 to 146 BC.
=== Ancient Iran ===
==== Elam ====
Elam was situated just to the east of Mesopotamia and was one of the oldest recorded civilizations. Elam was centered in the far west and southwest of modern-day Iran, stretching from the lowlands of Khuzestan and Ilam Province (which takes its name from Elam), as well as a small part of southern Iraq. In the Old Elamite period (Middle Bronze Age), Elam consisted of kingdoms on the Iranian plateau, centered in Anshan, and from the mid-2nd millennium BC, it was centered in Susa in the Khuzestan lowlands.
Elam was part of the early cities of the Ancient Near East during the Chalcolithic (Copper Age). The emergence of written records from around 3000 BC also parallels Mesopotamian history where writing was used slightly earlier. Elamite strength was based on an ability to hold various areas together under a coordinated government that permitted the maximum interchange of the natural resources unique to each region. Traditionally, this was done through a federated governmental structure.
Elamite culture played a crucial role in the Persian Empire, especially during the Achaemenid dynasty that succeeded it, when the Elamite language remained among those in official use. The Elamite language is generally treated as a language isolate. As such, the Elamite period is considered a starting point for the history of Iran.
==== Medes ====
The Median Empire was the first empire on the territory of Persia. By the 6th century BC, after having together with the Babylonians defeated the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In Greek references to "Median" people there is no clear distinction between the "Persians" and the "Medians"; in fact for a Greek to become "too closely associated with Iranian culture" was "to become medianized, not persianized". The Median kingdom was a short-lived Iranian state and the textual and archaeological sources of that period are rare and little could be known from the Median culture which nevertheless made a "profound, and lasting, contribution to the greater world of Iranian culture". The Medes were able to establish their own empire, the largest of its day, lasting for about sixty years, from the sack of Nineveh in 612 BC until 549 BC when Cyrus the Great established the Achaemenid Empire by defeating his overlord and grandfather, Astyages, king of Media.
==== Achaemenid Empire ====
550 BC–330 BC
The Achaemenid Empire was the first of the Persian Empires to become a world empire. At the height of its power, the Empire spanned over three continents, namely Europe, Asia, and Africa, and was the most powerful empire of its time. It also eventually, either quickly in its earliest days or steadily over time, incorporated the following territories: in the north and west all of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), parts of the Balkan Peninsula - Thrace, Macedon and Paeonia, and most of the Black Sea coastal regions or present day southern and eastern Bulgaria, northern Greece, and Macedonia; in the west and southwest the territories of modern Iraq, northern Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, all significant population centers of ancient Egypt and as far west as portions of Libya; in the east modern Afghanistan and beyond into central Asia, and parts of Pakistan.
Encompassing approximately 5.5 million square kilometers at its height in 500 BC, the Achaemenid Empire was territorially the largest empire of antiquity. In its time it had political power over neighboring countries, and had high cultural and economic achievements during its lengthy rule over a vast region from its picturesque capital at Persepolis.
Alexander the Great (Alexander III of Macedon) defeated the Persian armies at Granicus (334 BC), followed by Issus (333 BC), and lastly at Gaugamela (331 BC). Afterwards, he marched on Susa and Persepolis which surrendered in early 330 BC. From Persepolis, Alexander headed north to Pasargadae where he visited the tomb of Cyrus the Great.
=== Armenia ===
==== Great Armenia ====
331 BC–428 AD
The Kingdom of Armenia was one of the first Armenian Empires. At the height of its power, the Empire spanned over many parts of countries, namely the modern-day countries of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The Kingdom of Armenia has three distinct dynasties - the Orontid dynasty, the Artaxiad dynasty, and the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia. During the reign of the Orontid dynasty, Armenia became independent from the Achaemenids. During the reign of the Artaxiad dynasty, Armenia has reached the peak of its power. During the reign of the Arsacid dynasty, Armenia became the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion.
In 387, the Kingdom of Armenia was split between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire. Western Armenia first became a province of the Roman Empire under the name of Armenia Minor, and later Byzantine Armenia; Eastern Armenia remained a kingdom within Persia until, in 428, the local nobility overthrew the king, and the Sassanids installed a marzban (governor) in his place, beginning the Marzpanate period over Persian Armenia.
=== Iran ===
==== Parthian Empire ====
The Parthian Empire was the third Iranian Empire. At the height of its power, the empire ruled most of Greater Iran, Mesopotamia and Armenia. But unlike most other Iranian monarchies, the Parthian followed a vassal system, which they adopted from the Seleucids. The Arsacid culture was not a single coherent state, but instead made up of numerous tributary (but otherwise independent) kingdoms.
The Parthians largely adopted the art, architecture, religious beliefs, and royal insignia of their culturally heterogeneous empire, which encompassed Persian, Hellenistic, and regional cultures. For about the first half of its existence, the Arsacid court adopted elements of Greek culture, though it eventually saw a gradual revival of Iranian traditions. The Arsacid rulers were titled the 'King of Kings', as a claim to be the heirs to the Achaemenid Empire; indeed, they accepted many local kings as vassals where the Achaemenids would have had centrally appointed, albeit largely autonomous, satraps. The court did appoint a small number of satraps, largely outside Iran, but these satrapies were smaller and less powerful than the Achaemenid potentates. With the expansion of Arsacid power, the seat of central government shifted from Nisa, Turkmenistan to Ctesiphon along the Tigris (south of modern Baghdad, Iraq), although several other sites also served as capitals. Although the Parthian Arsacids made way for a new Iranian dynasty, the Arsacid family continued to exist through the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia, the Arsacid dynasty of Iberia, and the Arsacid Dynasty of Caucasian Albania; all eponymous branches of the Parthian Arsacids.
==== Sasanian Empire ====
The Sasanian Empire is the name used for the fourth Iranian dynasty, and the second Persian Empire (226–651). The empire's territory encompassed all of today's Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Afghanistan, eastern parts of Turkey, and parts of Syria, Pakistan, and large parts of Caucasia, Central Asia and Arabia. During Khosrow II's rule in 590–628 Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon were also briefly annexed to the Empire, as well as far west as western Asia Minor. The Sassanid era, encompassing the length of the Late Antiquity period, is considered to be one of the most important and influential historical periods in Iran. In many ways the Sassanid period witnessed the highest achievement of Persian civilization. The empire is furthermore known for being the arch-rival of the neighboring Roman–Byzantine Empire for a period of over 400 years. As the Parthians were replaced by the Sassanids, they carried on the already century long lasting Roman–Persian Wars, which would eventually become the longest conflict in human history.
The empire constituted the last great Iranian Empire before the Muslim conquest and adoption of Islam. The climactic Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 had drastically exhausted both the Byzantines as well as the Sassanids, laying the way open for an easy conquest. The Sassanids, heavily weakened, never mounted a truly effective resistance to the pressure applied by the initial Arab armies. Ctesiphon fell after a prolonged siege. Yazdegerd fled eastward from Ctesiphon, leaving behind him most of the Empire's vast treasury. The Arabs captured Ctesiphon shortly afterward, leaving the Sassanid government strapped for funds and acquiring a powerful financial resource for their own use. A number of Sassanid governors attempted to combine their forces to throw back the invaders, but the effort was crippled by the lack of a strong central authority, and the governors were defeated at the Battle of Nihawānd. The empire, with its military command structure non-existent, its non-noble troop levies decimated, its financial resources effectively destroyed, and the Asawaran knightly caste destroyed piecemeal, was utterly helpless in the face of the invaders. Upon hearing the defeat, Persian nobilities fled further inland to the eastern province of Khorasan.
=== Ancient Egypt ===
Ancient Egypt was one of the world's first civilizations, with its beginnings in the fertile Nile valley around 3150 BC. Ancient Egypt reached the zenith of its power during the New Kingdom (1570–1070 BC) under great pharaohs. Ancient Egypt was a great power to be contended with by both the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. The empire expanded far south into Nubia and held wide territories across the ancient Near East. The combination of a fertile river valley, natural borders that made an invasion unfeasible, and a military able to rise to the challenge when needed, turned Egypt into a major power. It was one of the first nations to have a system of writing and large scale construction projects. However, as neighboring civilizations developed militaries capable of crossing Egypt's natural barriers, the Egyptian armies were not always able to repel them and so by 1000 BC Egyptian influence as an independent civilization waned.
==== Early Dynastic Period ====
The Archaic or Early Dynastic Period of Egypt is the era immediately following the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt c. 3100 BC. It is generally taken to include the First and Second Dynasties, lasting from the end of the Naqada III archaeological period until about 2686 BC, or the beginning of the Old Kingdom. With the First Dynasty, the capital moved from Thinis to Memphis with a unified Egypt ruled by an Egyptian god-king. Abydos remained the major holy land in the south. The hallmarks of ancient Egyptian civilization, such as art, architecture and many aspects of religion, took shape during the Early Dynastic period. During the Early Dynastic period, the pharaohs established the earliest Central Government in the world.
==== Old Kingdom ====
The Old Kingdom is the period spanning c. 2686–2181 BC. It is also known as the "Age of the Pyramids" or the "Age of the Pyramid Builders", as it encompasses the reigns of the great pyramid builders of the Fourth Dynasty—King Sneferu perfected the art of pyramid-building and the pyramids of Giza were constructed under the kings Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. Egypt attained its first sustained peak of civilization—the first of three so-called "Kingdom" periods (followed by the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom) which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley.
During the Old Kingdom, the pyramid building in ancient Egypt began during the Third Dynasty under the rule of king Djoser when he built the Step Pyramid of Djoser (Egypt's first Pyramid) and peaked during Fourth Dynasty during the construction of the Giza Pyramids.
During the Fifth Dynasty the pyramid building declined in Egypt. The Pyramid Texts, the oldest ritual texts from ancient Egypt first appeared in the late fifth Dynasty.
==== Middle Kingdom ====
The Middle Kingdom of Egypt (also known as "The Period of Reunification") is the period in the history of ancient Egypt following a period of political division known as the First Intermediate Period. The Middle Kingdom lasted from around 2050 BC to around 1710 BC, stretching from the reunification of Egypt under the reign of Mentuhotep II of the Eleventh Dynasty to the end of the Twelfth Dynasty. The Eleventh Dynasty ruled from Thebes and the Twelfth Dynasty ruled from el-Lisht.
The middle kingdom reached its peak under the pharaohs Senusret III and Amenemhat III. Senusret III was a great pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty and is considered to be the greatest pharaoh in the middle kingdom. However, The reign of Amenemhat III was the height of Middle Kingdom economic prosperity. His reign is remarkable for the degree to which Egypt exploited its resources.
==== New Kingdom ====
Core Regions
Territorial control
The New Kingdom began around 1550 B.C when king Ahmose I became the king of Egypt, defeated the Hyksos and reunified Egypt. The pharaohs of the new kingdom established a period of unprecedented prosperity by securing their borders and strengthening diplomatic ties with their neighbors. Military campaigns waged under Tuthmosis I and his grandson Tuthmosis III extended the influence of the pharaohs to the largest empire Egypt had ever seen. Tuthmosis III is recorded to have captured 350 cities during his rule and conquered much of the Near East from the Euphrates to Nubia during seventeen known military campaigns. During the reign of Amenhotep III, Egypt entered a period of unprecedented prosperity and artistic splendour, Egypt reached the peak of its artistic and international power in his reign. Amenhotep IV ascended the throne and instituted a series of radical and chaotic reforms. Changing his name to Akhenaten, he touted the god Aten as the supreme deity, suppressed the worship of other deities, and attacked the power of the priestly establishment. Moving the capital to the new city of Akhetaten, he turned a deaf ear to foreign affairs and absorbed himself in his new religion and artistic style. After his death, the religion of the Aten was quickly abandoned, and the subsequent pharaohs erased all mention of Akhenaten's Egyptian heresy, now known as the Amarna Period.
Ramesses the Great ascended the throne, and went on to build more temples, erect more statues and obelisks, and sire more children than any other pharaoh in history. One of the greatest construction projects conducted by Ramesses was the city of Pi-Ramesses. The city covered an area of 18 km2 (as big as Rome). At its peak, The city was home to a population of 160,000-300,000. This would make Pi-Ramesses 2-4 times bigger than Yinxu (Second largest city at that time). Ramesses led his army against the Hittites in the Battle of Kadesh and, after fighting to a stalemate, finally agreed to the first recorded peace treaty. Egypt's wealth, however, made it a tempting target for invasion, particularly by the Libyans and the Sea Peoples. Initially, the military was able to repel these invasions during the reign of Ramesses III, but Egypt eventually lost control of Syria and Palestine. The impact of external threats was exacerbated by internal problems such as corruption, tomb robbery and civil unrest. The high priests at the temple of Amun in Thebes accumulated vast tracts of land and wealth, and their growing power splintered the country during the Third Intermediate Period.
==== Third Intermediate Period ====
The Third Intermediate Period of Ancient Egypt began with the death of Pharaoh Ramesses XI in 1070 BC, ending the New Kingdom, and was eventually followed by the Late Period. Various points are offered as the beginning for the latter era, though it is most often regarded as dating from the foundation of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty by Psamtik I in 664 BC.
The first Dynasty of the Ancient Egyptian Third Intermediate Period is the Twenty-first Dynasty. Its first ruler is king Smendes who ruled only in Lower Egypt. The most powerful pharaohs of the Twenty-first dynasty were psusennes I and Siamun who built extensively compared to the other pharaohs of the dynasty. The Pharaohs of the Twenty-first Dynasty transported all the old Ramesside temples, obelisks, stelae, statues and sphinxes from Pi-Ramesses to the new capital Tanis. The obelisks and statues, the largest weighing over 200 tons, were transported in one piece while major buildings were dismantled into sections and reassembled at Tanis.
The country was firmly reunited by the Twenty-Second Dynasty founded by Shoshenq I in 945 BC (or 943 BC), who descended from Meshwesh immigrants, originally from Ancient Libya. Upon unifying Egypt, king Shoshenq I started campaigning in the Levante . This brought stability to the country for well over a century and made Egypt a superpower again, but after the reign of Osorkon II, particularly, the country had effectively split into two states, with Shoshenq III of the Twenty-Second Dynasty controlling Lower Egypt by 818 BC while Takelot II and his son Osorkon (the future Osorkon III) ruled Middle and Upper Egypt.
==== Late Period ====
The Late Period of ancient Egypt refers to the last flowering of native Egyptian rulers after the Third Intermediate Period beginning with the 26th Saite Dynasty founded by Psamtik I. The 26th Dynasty of Egypt managed to regain Egypt's power for a short time before the Achaemenid conquest of Egypt lad by Cambyses II in 525 BC.
However, the Egyptians managed to gain independence from the Persians during a rebellion led by the rebel Pharaoh Amyrtaeus around 404 B.C who established the Twenty-eighth Dynasty of Egypt. Egypt remained independent during the Twenty-ninth Dynasty and Thirtieth Dynasty until the Persians invaded it again in 343 B.C. During that time, the Egyptians managed to repel several attacks from the Achaemenid Empire. The most famous attack of them occurred in around 351 BC, when Artaxerxes III embarked on a campaign to recover Egypt, which had revolted under his father, Artaxerxes II. Levying a vast army, Artaxerxes marched into Egypt, and engaged Nectanebo II the founder of the Thirtieth Dynasty of Egypt. After a year of fighting the Egyptian Pharaoh, Nectanebo inflicted a crushing defeat on the Persians with the support of mercenaries led by the Greek generals Diophantus and Lamius. Artaxerxes successfully reconquered Egypt in 340 or 339 B.C.
The Late period of ancient Egypt ends when Alexander the Great took Egypt from the Persians without war around 332 B.C.
==== Legacy ====
The many achievements of the ancient Egyptians include the quarrying, surveying and construction techniques that facilitated the building of monumental pyramids, temples, and obelisks; a system of mathematics, a practical and effective system of medicine, irrigation systems and agricultural production techniques, the first known ships, Egyptian faience and glass technology, new forms of literature, and the earliest known peace treaty. Egypt left a lasting legacy. Its art and architecture were widely copied, and its antiquities carried off to far corners of the world. Its monumental ruins have inspired the imaginations of travellers and writers for centuries. A new-found respect for antiquities and excavations in the early modern period led to the scientific investigation of Egyptian civilization and a greater appreciation of its cultural legacy, for Egypt and the world.
=== Kerma ===
The Kerma culture was an early civilization which flourished from around 2500 BC to about 1600 BC in Nubia, present day Sudan, centered at Kerma. It seems to have been one of a number of Sudanese states during the Middle Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt. In its latest phase, lasting from about 1700–1500 BC, it absorbed the Sudanese kingdom of Sai and became a sizable, populous empire rivaling Egypt. Around 1500 BC, it was absorbed into the Egyptian Empire, but rebellions continued for centuries. By the 11th century BC, the more 'Egyptianized' Kingdom of Kush emerged, apparently from Kerma, and regained the region's independence from Egypt.
=== Kush ===
The Kingdom of Kush was the earliest of the Subsaharan states in Africa as well as the first to implement iron weapons. It was heavily influenced by Egyptian colonists, but in 1070 BC it became not only independent of Egypt but a fierce rival. It successfully fought off attempts by Egypt to reconquer it, and it began to extend influence over Upper Egypt. By the end of King Kashta's reign in 752 BC, Thebes was under Kushite control.
A slew of able successors took the rest of Egypt and reigned as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt stretching Kushite control from central Sudan to modern-day Israel. The Kushites did not maintain this empire for long and were beaten back by the Assyrians in 653 BC. However, Kush remained a powerful entity in the region. It continued to meddle in Egyptian affairs and control trade resources originating in Subsaharan Africa. It waged a hard-fought campaign against the Roman Empire (27 BC - 22 BC) under the leadership of Queen Amanirenas, and achieved a more than amicable peace with the young Augustus Caesar. The two states worked as allies, with Kush lending cavalry support to Rome in its conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
The kingdom of Kush maintained its status as a regional power until its conquest by the Aksumite Empire in 350.
=== Macrobia ===
The Macrobians were an ancient people and kingdom situated in the Horn of Africa (Somalia) around the 1st millennium BC. According to Herodotus, the Macrobians practiced an elaborate form of embalming. This, in turn, suggested a knowledge on their part of anatomy and, at the very least, a grasp of the basics of chemistry. The Macrobians preserved the bodies of the dead by first extracting moisture from the corpses, then overlaying the bodies with a type of plaster, and finally decorating the exterior in vivid colors in order to imitate the deceased as realistically as possible. They then placed the body in a hollow crystal pillar, which they kept in their homes for a period of about a year. Macrobia was also noted for its gold, which was so plentiful that the Macrobians shackled their prisoners in golden chains.
The Ancient city-states located in northern Somalia, had a steady trade link with the Ancient Egyptians and exported precious natural resources such as myrrh, frankincense and gum. This trade network continued all the way into the classical era. The city states of Mossylon, Malao, Mundus and Tabae in Somalia engaged in a lucrative trade network connecting Somali merchants with Phoenicia, Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece, Parthian Persia, Saba, Nabataea and the Roman Empire. Somali sailors used the ancient Somali maritime vessel known as the 'beden' to transport their cargo.
=== Kingdom of Aksum ===
The Kingdom of Aksum was an important trading nation originating from Northern Ethiopia in northeastern Africa, growing from the proto-Aksumite period ca. 4th century BC to achieve prominence by the 1st century AD. It was a major player in the commerce between the Roman Empire and Ancient India and the Aksumite rulers facilitated trade by minting their own currency. The state established its hegemony over the declining Kingdom of Kush and regularly entered the politics of the kingdoms on the Arabian peninsula, and would eventually extend its rule over the region with the conquest of the Himyarite Kingdom. At its peak it controlled Much of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. It was considered by historians as one of the most powerful military powers in the world.
== Ancient India ==
Several Indian empires including Maurya Empire and Gupta Empire were able to expand across southern Asia, incorporating much of the region, as well as beyond. The subcontinent was conquered by the Mauryan Empire during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. Various parts of India was ruled by numerous Middle kingdoms for the next 1,500 years, among which the Gupta Empire united India in the 4th and 5th century CE . Southern India saw the rule of the Chalukyas, Cholas, Pallavas, Pandyas and Cheras. This period, witnessing a Hindu religious and intellectual resurgence, is known as the classical or "Golden Age of India". During this period, aspects of Indian civilisation, administration, culture, and religion (Hinduism and Buddhism) spread to much of Asia, while kingdoms in Southern India had maritime business links with the Roman Empire from around 77 AD.
=== Maurya Empire ===
The Mauryan Empire was the first political entity to unite India and expand into Central Asia. Its cultural influence also extended west into Egypt and Syria, and east into Thailand, China and Burma.
The Empire was founded in 322 BC by Chandragupta Maurya. Chandragupta waged a war against the nearby Greek powers and won, forcing the Greeks to surrender large amounts of land. Under the reign of Ashoka the Great, the empire turned to spreading its soft power in the form of Buddhism.
The Empire was divided into four provinces, which one of the four, look like a giant crescents. with the imperial capital at Pataliputra. From Ashokan edicts, the names of the four provincial capitals are Tosali (in the east), Ujjain in the west, Suvarnagiri (in the south), and Taxila (in the north). The head of the provincial administration was the Kumara (royal prince), who governed the provinces as king's representative. The kumara was assisted by Mahamatyas and council of ministers. This organizational structure was reflected at the imperial level with the Emperor and his Mantriparishad (Council of Ministers).
Historians theorize that the organization of the Empire was in line with the extensive bureaucracy described by Kautilya in the Arthashastra: a sophisticated civil service governed everything from municipal hygiene to international trade. According to Megasthenes, the empire wielded a military of 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, and 9,000 war elephants. A vast espionage system collected intelligence for both internal and external security purposes. Having renounced offensive warfare and expansionism, Ashoka nevertheless continued to maintain this large army, to protect the Empire and instill stability and peace across South Asia.
=== Gupta Empire ===
In the 4th and 5th centuries, the Gupta Empire unified India. This period is called the Golden Age of India and was marked by extensive achievements in science, technology, engineering, art, literature, logic, mathematics, astronomy, religion and philosophy that crystallized the elements of what is generally known as Indian culture. Chandragupta I, Samudragupta, and Chandragupta II were the most notable rulers of the Gupta dynasty.
The high points of this cultural creativity are magnificent architectures, sculptures and paintings. The Gupta period produced scholars such as Kalidasa, Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Vishnu Sharma, and Vatsyayana who made great advancements in many academic fields. Science and political administration reached new heights during the Gupta era. Strong trade ties also made the region an important cultural center and set the region up as a base that would influence nearby kingdoms and regions in Burma, Sri Lanka, Indonesian Archipelago and Indochina.
== Ancient China ==
=== Shang dynasty ===
The Shang dynasty (Chinese: 商朝; pinyin: Shāng cháo) or Yin dynasty (Chinese: 殷代; pinyin: Yīn dài), according to traditional historiography, ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium BC, succeeding the Xia dynasty and followed by the Zhou dynasty. The classic account of the Shang comes from texts such as the Classic of History, Bamboo Annals and Records of the Grand Historian. According to the traditional chronology based upon calculations made approximately 2,000 years ago by Liu Xin, the Shang ruled from 1766 BC to 1122 BC, but according to the chronology based upon the "current text" of Bamboo Annals, they ruled from 1556 BC to 1046 BC. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project dated them from c. 1600 BC to 1046 BC. At its peak 1122 BC it covered an area of 1,250,000 km2.
=== Zhou dynasty ===
The Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BC; Chinese: 周朝; pinyin: Zhōu Cháo; Wade–Giles: Chou1 Ch'ao2 [tʂóʊ tʂʰɑ̌ʊ]) was a Chinese dynasty that followed the Shang dynasty and preceded the Qin dynasty. Although the Zhou dynasty lasted longer than any other dynasty in Chinese history, the actual political and military control of China by the dynasty, surnamed Ji (Chinese: 姬), lasted only until 771 BC, a period known as the Western Zhou.
This period of Chinese history produced what many consider the zenith of Chinese bronze-ware making. The dynasty also spans the period in which the written script evolved into its modern form with the use of an archaic clerical script that emerged during the late Warring States period.
=== Qin dynasty ===
The Qin dynasty was preceded by the feudal Zhou dynasty and followed by the Han dynasty in China. The unification of China in 221 BC under the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang marked the beginning of Imperial China, a period which lasted until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912.
In 214 BC Qin Shihuang secured his boundaries to the north with a fraction (100,000 men) of his large army, and sent the majority (500,000 men) south to seize still more land. Prior to the events leading to Qin dominance over China, they had gained possession of much of Sichuan to the southwest. The Qin army was unfamiliar with the jungle terrain, and it was defeated by the southern tribes' guerrilla warfare tactics with over 100,000 men lost. However, in the defeat Qin was successful in building a canal to the south, which they used heavily for supplying and reinforcing their troops during their second attack to the south. Building on these gains, the Qin armies conquered the coastal lands surrounding Guangzhou, and took the provinces of Fuzhou and Guilin. They struck as far south as Hanoi. After these victories in the south, Qin Shihuang moved over 100,000 prisoners and exiles to colonize the newly conquered area. In terms of extending the boundaries of his empire, the First Emperor was extremely successful in the south.
Despite its military strength, the Qin dynasty did not last long. When the first emperor died in 210 BC, his son was placed on the throne by two of the previous emperor's advisers, in an attempt to influence and control the administration of the entire country through him. The advisors squabbled among themselves, however, which resulted in both their deaths and that of the second Qin emperor. Popular revolt broke out a few years later, and the weakened empire soon fell to a Chu lieutenant, who went on to found the Han dynasty. Despite its rapid end, the Qin dynasty influenced future Chinese regimes, particularly the Han, and the European name for China is derived from it.
=== Han dynasty ===
The Han dynasty (202 BC – AD 220), lasting 400 years, is commonly considered within China to be one of the greatest periods in the history of China. At its height, the Han empire extended over a vast territory of 6 million km2 and housed a population of approximately 55 million. During this time period, China became a military, economic, and cultural powerhouse. The empire extended its political and cultural influence over Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Central Asia before it finally collapsed under a combination of domestic and external pressures.
The Han Empire was divided into areas directly controlled by the central government, known as commanderies, and a number of semi-autonomous kingdoms. These kingdoms gradually lost all vestiges of their independence, particularly following the Rebellion of the Seven States. The Xiongnu, a nomadic confederation which dominated the eastern Eurasian Steppe, defeated the Han army in battle in 200 BC. Following the defeat, a political marriage alliance was negotiated in which the Han became the de facto inferior partner. When, despite the treaty, the Xiongnu continued to raid Han borders, Emperor Wu of Han (r. 141–87 BC) launched several military campaigns against them. The ultimate Han victory in these wars eventually forced the Xiongnu to accept vassal status as Han tributaries. These campaigns expanded Han sovereignty into the Tarim Basin of Central Asia and helped establish the vast trade network known as the Silk Road, which reached as far as the Mediterranean world. Han forces managed to divide the Xiongnu into two competing nations, the Southern and Northern Xiongnu, and forced the Northern Xiongnu across the Ili River. Despite these victories, the territories north of Han's borders were quickly overrun by the nomadic Xianbei confederation.
=== Jin dynasty ===
The Jin dynasty (simplified Chinese: 晋朝; traditional Chinese: 晉朝; pinyin: Jìn Cháo; Wade–Giles: Chin⁴-ch'ao², IPA: [tɕîn tʂʰɑ̌ʊ];), was a dynasty in Chinese history, lasting between the years 265 and 420 AD. There are two main divisions in the history of the dynasty, the first being Western Jin (西晉, 265–316) and the second Eastern Jin (東晉, 317–420). Western Jin was founded by Sima Yan, with its capital at Luoyang, while Eastern Jin was begun by Sima Rui, with its capital at Jiankang. The two periods are also known as Liang Jin (兩晉; literally: two Jin) and Sima Jin (司馬晉) by scholars, to distinguish this dynasty from other dynasties that use the same Chinese character, such as the Later Jin dynasty (後晉).
== Ancient Europe ==
=== Ancient Greece ===
Ancient Greece is the civilization belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. At the center of this time period is Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC, at first under Athenian leadership successfully repelling the military threat of Persian invasion. The Athenian Golden Age ends with the defeat of Athens at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC. Following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the western end of the Mediterranean Sea. Classical Greek culture had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean region and Europe, for which reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of Western civilization.
Athens, after a tyranny in the second half of the 6th century, established ancient Europe's first democracy as a radical solution to prevent the aristocracy from regaining power. A citizens' assembly (the Ecclesia), for the discussion of city policy, had existed since the reforms of Draco; all citizens were permitted to attend after the reforms of Solon, but the poorest citizens could not address the assembly or run for office. With the establishment of the democracy, the assembly became the de jure mechanism of government; all citizens had equal privileges in the assembly. However, non-citizens, foreigners living in Athens, slaves and women had no political rights at all. After the rise of the democracy in Athens, other city-states founded democracies. However, many retained more traditional forms of government. As so often in other matters, Sparta was a notable exception to the rest of Greece, ruled through the whole period by not one, but two hereditary monarchs. This was a form of diarchy.
==== Athens ====
Ancient Athens was inhabited around 3,000 years ago. Athens has one of the longest histories of any city in Europe and in the world. It became the leading city of Ancient Greece in the first millennium BC. Its cultural achievements during the 5th century BC laid the foundations of western civilization. During the Middle Ages, Athens experienced decline and then a recovery under the Byzantine Empire. Athens was relatively prosperous during the Crusades, benefiting from medieval Italian trade.
Fifth-century Athens refers to the Greek city-state Athens in the period of roughly 480 BC-404 BC. This was a period of Athenian political hegemony, economic growth and cultural flourishing known as the Golden Age of Athens or Age of Pericles. The period began in 480 BC when an Athenian-led coalition of city-states, known as the Delian League, defeated the Persians at Salamis. As the fifth century wore on, what started as an alliance of independent city-states gradually became an Athenian empire. Eventually, Athens abandoned the pretense of parity among its allies and relocated the Delian League treasury from Delos to Athens, where it funded the building of the Athenian Acropolis. With its enemies under its feet and its political fortunes guided by legendary statesman and orator Pericles, Athens as a center of literature, philosophy (see Greek philosophy) and the arts (see Greek theatre). Some of the most important figures of Western cultural and intellectual history lived in Athens during this period: the dramatists Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles, the philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.
==== Sparta ====
Sparta was a Dorian Greek military state, originally centered in Laconia. As a city-state devoted to military training, Sparta possessed the most formidable army in the Greek world, and after achieving notable victories over the Athenian and Persian Empires, regarded itself as the natural protector of Greece. Laconia or Lacedaemon (Λακεδαίμων) was the name of the wider city-state centered at the city of Sparta, though the name "Sparta" is now used for both.
Following the victories in the Messenian Wars (631 BC), Sparta's reputation as a land-fighting force was unequaled. In 480 BC a small Spartan unit under King Leonidas made a legendary last stand against a massive, invading Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae. One year later, Sparta assembled at full strength and led a Greek alliance against the Persians at Plataea. There, a decisive Greek victory put an end to the Greco-Persian War along with Persian ambition of expanding into Europe. Even though this war was won by a pan-Hellenic army, credit was given to Sparta, who, besides being the protagonist at Thermopylae and Plataea, had been the nominal leader of the entire Greek expedition.
In later Classical times, Sparta along with Athens, Thebes and Persia had been the main regional powers fighting for supremacy against each other. As a result of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta, a traditionally continental culture, became a naval power. At the peak of her power, she subdued many of the key Greek states and even managed to overpower the powerful Athenian navy. By the end of the 5th century, she stood out as a state which had defeated at war both the Persian and Athenian Empires, a period which marks the Spartan Hegemony.
Sparta was, above all, a militarist state, and emphasis on military fitness began virtually at birth.
=== Macedonia ===
Macedonia was the name of an ancient kingdom in the northernmost part of ancient Greece, bordering Epirus to the west and the ancient thracian Odrysian kingdom to the east. For a brief period it became the most powerful state in the world after Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world, including the entire Achaemenid Empire, inaugurating the Hellenistic period of Greek history.
The rise of Macedon, from a small kingdom at the periphery of Classical Greek affairs, to one which came to dominate the entire Hellenic world (and beyond), occurred in the space of just 25 years, between 359 and 336 BC. This ascendancy is largely attributable to the personality and policies of Philip II of Macedon. Philip's military skills and expansionist vision of Macedonian greatness brought him early success. He had however first to re-establish a situation which had been greatly worsened by the defeat against the Illyrians in which King Perdiccas himself had died. The Paionians and the Thracians had sacked and invaded the eastern regions of the country, while the Athenians had landed, at Methoni on the coast, a contingent under a Macedonian pretender called Argeus. Using diplomacy, Philip pushed back Paionians and Thracians promising tributes, and crushed the 3,000 Athenian hoplites (359). Momentarily free from his opponents, he concentrated on strengthening his internal position and, above all, his army. His most important innovation was doubtless the introduction of the phalanx infantry corps, armed with the famous sarissa, an exceedingly long spear, at the time the most important army corps in Macedonia.
Philip's son, Alexander the Great, managed to briefly extend Macedonian power not only over the central Greek city-states, but also to the Persian empire, including Egypt and lands as far east as the fringes of India. Alexander's adoption of the styles of government of the conquered territories was accompanied by the spread of Greek culture and learning through his vast empire. Although the empire fractured into multiple Hellenic regimes shortly after his death, his conquests left a lasting legacy, not least in the new Greek-speaking cities founded across Persia's western territories, heralding the Hellenistic period. In the partition of Alexander's empire among the Diadochi, Macedonia fell to the Antipatrid dynasty, which was overthrown by the Antigonid dynasty after only a few years.
=== Hellenistic states ===
Alexander had made no special preparations for his succession in his newly founded empire and the Apocrypha of his death state that on his death-bed he willed it to those that performed actions well and powerfully. The result was the wars of the Diadochi between his generals (the Diadochi, or 'Successors'), which lasted for forty years before a more-or-less stable arrangement was established, consisting of four major domains:
The Antigonid dynasty in Macedon and central Greece;
The Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt based at Alexandria;
The Seleucid dynasty in Syria and Mesopotamia based at Antioch;
The Attalid dynasty in Anatolia based at Pergamum.
A further two kingdoms later emerged, the so-called Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdom. Hellenistic culture thrived in its preservation of the past. The states of the Hellenistic period were deeply fixated with the past and its seemingly lost glories. Athens retained its position as the most prestigious seat of higher education, especially in the domains of philosophy and rhetoric, with considerable libraries. Alexandria was a center of Greek learning and the Library of Alexandria had 700,000 volumes. The city of Pergamon became a major center of book production, possessing a library of some 200,000 volumes, second only to Alexandria's. The island of Rhodes boasted a famous finishing school for politics and diplomacy. Antioch was founded as a metropolis and center of Greek learning which retained its status into the era of Christianity. Seleucia replaced Babylon as the metropolis of the lower Tigris.
=== Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire ===
Ancient Rome is widely known as ancient Europe's largest and most powerful civilization. After the second Punic war Rome was already one of the biggest empires on the planet but its expansion continued with the invasions of Greece, Asia Minor and later Gaul. By 27 BC Rome had control over half of Europe as well as Northern Africa and large amounts of the Middle East. Rome also had a developed culture, building on the earlier Greek culture. From the time of Augustus to the Fall of the Western Empire, Rome dominated Western Eurasia, comprising the majority of its population.
Roman expansion began long before the state was transformed into a de facto monarchy and reached its zenith under emperor Trajan with the conquest of Mesopotamia and Armenia from 113 to 117. The period of the "Five Good Emperors" saw a successions of peaceful years and the Empire was prosperous. Each emperor of this period was adopted by his predecessor. The Nerva–Antonine dynasty was a dynasty of seven consecutive Roman Emperors who ruled over the Roman Empire from 96 to 192. These Emperors are Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, and Commodus.
The last two of the "Five Good Emperors" and Commodus are also called Antonines. After his accession, Nerva, who succeeded Domitian, set a new tone: he restored much confiscated property and involved the Roman Senate in his rule. Starting in 101, Trajan undertook two military campaigns against the gold rich Dacia, which he finally conquered in 106 (see Trajan's Dacian Wars). In 112, Trajan marched on Armenia and annexed it to the Roman Empire. Then he turned south into Parthia, taking several cities before declaring Mesopotamia a new province of the empire, and lamenting that he was too old to follow in the steps of Alexander the Great. During his rule, the Roman Empire expanded to its largest extent, and would never again advance so far to the east. Hadrian's reign was marked by a general lack of major military conflicts, but he decided to defend the vast territories that Trajan had acquired.
At its territorial peak in the year 117, the Roman Empire controlled approximately 5,000,000 km2 (1,900,000 mi2) of land surface. After Trajans reign the Empire continued to grow stronger until the reign of Marcus Aurelius. After the death of Marcus Aurelius his son, Commodus would take power. The reign of Commodus marked the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire . Ancient Rome's influence upon the culture, law, technology, arts, language, religion, government, military, and architecture of Western civilization continues to this day even outside latin countries . It would fall to Odoacer in 476, but its eastern half will still be alive until it fell in 1453.
=== Thracian States ===
The Odrysian Kingdom proper was a Thracian kingdom that existed from the early 5th century BC at least until the mid-3rd century BC. It consisted mainly of present-day Bulgaria and parts of Southeastern Romania (Northern Dobruja), Northern Greece and European Turkey. Dominated by the eponymous Odrysian people, it was the largest and most powerful Thracian realm and the first larger political entity of the eastern Balkans. Before the foundation of Seuthopolis in the late 4th century it had no fixed capital.
The Odrysian kingdom was founded by king Teres I, exploiting the collapse of the Persian presence in Europe due to failed invasion of Greece in 480-79. Teres and his son Sitalces pursued a policy of expansion, making the kingdom one of the most powerful of its time. Throughout much of its early history it remained an ally of Athens and even joined the Peloponnesian War on its side. By 400 the state showed first signs of fatigue, although the skilled Cotys I initiated a brief renaissance that lasted until his murder in 360.
The Getae, a northern Thracian people located between the northeastern foothills of the Haemus range and the lower Danube and the Black Sea, had been part of the Odrysian realm since Teres I, even though it is not clear how tightly they were actually incorporated into the state. When and how the Getae became independent is not discussed in the available sources. Perhaps they became independent during the rule of Cotys I or after his death in 360. Rich funeral treasures from the second half of the 4th century, like those of Agighiol, Peretu or Borovo, attest to the increasing wealth of the Getic elite. Several artefacts seem to have originated in the Odrysian kingdom and may well have been prestige gifts.
By the middle of the 4th century, there existed a Getic kingdom that was to thrive for a century. The Getic capital was Helis, which has been identified with the archaeological site of Sboryanovo, which was founded in the 330s or early 320s and housed around 10.000 inhabitants. It seems that the Getae also became active in Muntenia north of the Danube, a region that would come to constitute a part of the "Dacia" of imperial Roman historiography. The first Getic king to appear in the sources was Cothelas, who married his daughter Meda to Philip II, thus concluding an alliance between the two states. This probably happened during or shortly after Philip's conquest of the Odrysians. The kingdom survived two wars with Lysimachus and the Celtic invasion in around 280, but eventually disintegrated a few decades later. Helis/Sboryanovo was completely destroyed by an earthquake in the middle of the 3rd century.
With Alexander's absence in Asia, the Strategoi of Thrace engaged in rebellions and failed expeditions against the Getae, greatly unsettling the country in the process. At the end of the 330s or in the mid-320s (the dating is not entirely clear), a certain Seuthes, later known as Seuthes III, instigated a Thracian rebellion. He seems to have been an Odrysian and may have been associated with the royal house of Cersebleptes, although his social background must remain speculation. Seuthes' goal seems to have been the revival of an independent Odrysian state. Seuthes ruled in the interior, what is Thrace north of the Rhodopes, but not the coastal regions of the Aegean and Black Sea. Probably after the death of Alexander in 323, he founded the capital town of Seuthopolis, on the Tonzos river, near modern Kazanlak, and named after himself.
The Dacian Kingdom reached its greatest territorial extent under Burebista's rule (82BC-44BC). During his rule, he conquered territories from Central Europe to the Balkans, reaching the Aegean Sea. He is well known by the Greek scholars as the "Celtic Slayer", because he defeated and killed many Celtic tribes from the Balkans (Scordisci) and the Central Europe (Boii & Taurisci). In 48BC Burebista tried to influence the Roman politics, during the Roman civil war by allying with Pompey Magnus against the victorious Julius Caesar. But Pompey was defeated and later killed in Ptolemaic Egypt. After all of that, Julius Caesar viewed Burebista's Empire as a threat and he planned to invade it along with the Parthian Empire. But he was assassinated in 44 BC. Burebista's state collapsed into various kingdoms. It will never be unified until Decebalus becomes the last King in 87AD.
The Thracian kingdom, also known as the Sapaean kingdom, was the continuation of the Thracian state from the middle of the 1st century BC to 46 AD. It was dominated by the Sapaean tribe, who ruled from their capital Bizye in what is now northwestern Turkey. Initially only of limited relevance, its power grew significantly after the battle of Actium in 31 BC, when Emperor Augustus installed a new dynasty that proved to be highly loyal and expansive. Conquering and ruling much of Thrace on Roman behalf, it lasted until 46 AD, when Emperor Claudius annexed the kingdom and made Thrace a Roman province.
=== Seleucid Empire ===
The Seleucid Empire was a Hellenistic empire, and the eastern remnant of the former Achaemenid Persian Empire following its breakup after Alexander the Great's invasion. The Seleucid Empire was centered in the near East. It was a center of Hellenistic culture which maintained the Greek customs and Greek-speaking Macedonian elite.
Seleucid expansion into Greece was abruptly halted after decisive defeats at the hands of the Roman army. Much of the eastern part of the empire was conquered by the Parthians under Mithridates I of Parthia in the mid-2nd century BC, yet the Seleucid kings continued to rule a rump state from Syria until the invasion by Armenian king Tigranes the Greatand their ultimate overthrow by the Roman general Pompey.
=== Ptolemaic Empire ===
The Ptolemaic dynasty, sometimes also known as the Lagids, was a Greek royal family which ruled the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt during the Hellenistic period.
Ptolemy, one of the seven somatophylakes (bodyguards) who served as Alexander the Great's generals and deputies, was appointed satrap of Egypt after Alexander's death in 323 BC. In 305 BC, he declared himself King Ptolemy I, later known as "Soter" (saviour). The Egyptians soon accepted the Ptolemies as the successors to the pharaohs of independent Egypt. Ptolemy's family ruled Egypt until the Roman conquest of 30 BC. All the male rulers of the dynasty took the name Ptolemy.
Ptolemaic Egypt began when Ptolemy I Soter declared himself Pharaoh of Egypt in 305 BC and ended with the death of queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt and the Roman conquest in 30 BC. The Ptolemaic Kingdom was a powerful Hellenistic state, extending from southern Syria in the east, to Cyrene to the west, and south to the frontier with Nubia. Alexandria became the capital city and a center of Greek culture and trade. To gain recognition by the native Egyptian populace, they named themselves as the successors to the Pharaohs. The later Ptolemies took on Egyptian traditions, had themselves portrayed on public monuments in Egyptian style and dress, and participated in Egyptian religious life. Hellenistic culture continued to thrive in Egypt well after the Muslim conquest. The Ptolemies faced rebellions of native Egyptians often caused by an unwanted regime and were involved in foreign and civil wars that led to the decline of the kingdom and its annexation by Rome.
== Ancient Eurasian Steppe ==
=== Scythia ===
The Scythians ( or ) or Scyths (, but note Scytho- () in composition) and sometimes also referred to as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people who had migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia, where they remained established from the 7th century BC until the 3rd century BC.
After the Scythians' disappearance, authors of the ancient, mediaeval, and early modern periods used their name to refer to various populations of the steppes unrelated to them.
=== Sarmatia ===
The Sarmatians (Latin: Sarmatæ or Sauromatæ, Greek: Σαρμάται, Σαυρομάται) were an Iranian people during classical antiquity, flourishing from about the 5th century BC to the 4th century AD. They spoke Scythian, an Indo-European language from the Eastern Iranian family.
Originating in Central Asia, the Sarmatians started their westward migration around the 6th century bc, coming to dominate the closely related Scythians by the 2nd century bc. The Sarmatians differed from the Scythians in their veneration of the god of fire rather than god of nature, and their women's prominent role in warfare, which possibly served as the inspiration for the Amazons. At their greatest reported extent, around the 1st century AD, these tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black and Caspian seas as well as the Caucasus to the south. Their territory, which was known as Sarmatia to Greco-Roman ethnographers, corresponded to the western part of greater Scythia (mostly modern Ukraine and Southern Russia, also to a smaller extent north eastern Balkans around Moldova). According to authors Arrowsmith, Fellowes and Graves Hansard in their book A Grammar of Ancient Geography published in 1832, Sarmatia had two parts, Sarmatia Europea and Sarmatia Asiatica covering a combined area of 503,000 sq mi or 1,302,764 km2.
=== Xiongnu ===
Xiongnu (Hsiung nu) was a nomadic empire that flourished in the central Asia. Their origin is debatable, but they probably spoke either an Iranian, Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic, or Yeniseian language. They conquered most of modern Mongolia under their leader Toumen (220–209 BC) in the 3rd century BC. During Modu's reign (209–174 BC) they defeated both the Donghu in the east and Yuezhi in the west and they began threatening Han China.
The Great Wall of China had been constructed to protect Chinese towns from the Xiongnu attacks. While the Chinese were trying to bring the Xiongnu under control, something of high significance happened: cross-cultural encounters. A large variety of people (such as traders, ambassadors, hostages, parents in cross-cultural marriages, etc.) served as helpers that passed on ideas, values, and techniques across cultural boundary lines. These encounters helped cultures learn from other cultures. The Xiongnu Empire disintegrated into two parts during the 1st century; eventually the Xiongnu fell due to their defeat in the Han–Xiongnu War.
=== Huns ===
Huns were nomadic people who were known for their hordes of mounted archers. Their language seems to be Turkic; but Mongolic, Yeniseian, Uralic etc., are also postulated. After 370 under a certain Balamber they founded an empire in the East Europe defeating Alans and Goths. They triggered the great migration which eventually caused the collapse of the West Roman Empire.
The death of Rugila in 434 left the sons of his brother Mundzuk, Attila and Bleda, in control of the united Hun tribes. Attila the Hun ruled of the Huns from 434 until his death in 453. Under his rule and leader of the Hunnic Empire, the empire stretched from Germany to the Ural River and from the Danube River to the Baltic Sea. Hunnic khagan Atilla invaded Europe. The rise of the Huns around 370 overwhelmed the Gothic kingdoms. Many of the Goths migrated into Roman territory in the Balkans, while others remained north of the Danube under Hunnic rule.
During Attila the Hun's rule, he was one of the most fearsome enemies of the Western and Eastern Roman Empire. He invaded the Balkans twice and marched through Gaul (modern France) as far as Orléans before being defeated at the Battle of Châlons, though some scholars now believe this battle resulted in a stalemate or even a Hunnish victory. He appeared in North Italy in the next year. After Attila's death in 453, the Hunnic Empire collapsed in 469. The Huns seem to have been absorbed by other ethnic groups such as the Bulgars. Kim, however, argues that the Huns continued under Ernak, becoming the Kutrigur and Utigur Hunno-Bulgars. This conclusion is still subject to some controversy. Some scholars also argue that another group identified in ancient sources as Huns, the North Caucasian Huns, were genuine Huns. The rulers of various post-Hunnic steppe peoples are known to have claimed descent from Attila in order to legitimize their right to the power, and various steppe peoples were also called "Huns" by Western and Byzantine sources from the fourth century onward. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Le_Mans_disaster | 1955 Le Mans disaster | On 11 June 1955, a multi-vehicle collision occurred during the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans in Sarthe, France, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 82 to 84 people. The disaster occurred at the Circuit de la Sarthe, when a mid-race collision sent Mercedes driver Pierre Levegh and his car into a spectator arena, causing his car to disintegrate and throwing him onto the racetrack, killing him instantly. Pieces of debris from both the car and the arena flew into the crowd, killing at least 82 people including Levegh. The exact number killed is debated, the minimum being at least 82, though some sources suggest up to 84 people died. The disaster is the deadliest event in motorsport history, prompting multiple European countries to ban motorsports entirely; Switzerland did not lift its ban until 2022.
The cause of the crash was later determined to have been due to aggressive braking from Jaguar driver Mike Hawthorn. Preparing for his pit stop, he pulled to the right side of the track in front of Austin-Healey driver Lance Macklin and abruptly braked. Macklin swerved out from behind Hawthorn into the path of Levegh, who was passing on the left in his much faster Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. Levegh rear-ended Macklin at high speed, the impact launching his own car through the air. Levegh's car skipped over a protective earthen berm at 200 km/h (125 mph) and made at least two impacts within the spectator area, the last of which caused the car to disintegrate, throwing Levegh onto the track. Large pieces of debris, including the Mercedes' engine block, radiator, front suspension, and bonnet (hood), were sent flying into the packed spectator area in front of the grandstand. The rear of Levegh's car landed on the berm and exploded into flames.
There was much debate over blame for the disaster. The official inquiry held none of the drivers specifically responsible, but criticized the layout of the 30-year-old track, which had not been designed for cars as fast as those involved in the crash.
== Before the crash ==
There was great anticipation for the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans, as Ferrari, Jaguar, and Mercedes-Benz had all won the race previously and all three automakers had arrived with new and improved cars. The Ferraris, current champions at the time, were known to be fast but fragile and prone to mechanical failure. Jaguar concentrated their racing almost exclusively on Le Mans and had an experienced driver lineup including Formula 1 Ferrari driver Mike Hawthorn.
After gaining success in F1, Mercedes-Benz had debuted its new 300 SLR in that year's World Sportscar Championship, including a record-setting win at the Mille Miglia for Stirling Moss. The 300 SLR featured a body made of an ultra-lightweight magnesium alloy called Elektron. The car lacked the more effective state-of-the-art disc brakes featured on the rival Jaguar D-Type, instead incorporating inboard drum brakes and a large air brake behind the driver that could be raised to increase drag and slow the car.
Mercedes team manager Alfred Neubauer assembled a multinational team for the race: pairing his two best drivers Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss in the lead car, 1952 race winner Karl Kling with Frenchman André Simon (both also in the current F1 team), and American John Fitch with one of the elder statesmen of French motor racing, Pierre Levegh. It had been Levegh's unprecedented solo drive in the 1952 race that failed in the last hour, which allowed Mercedes-Benz their first Le Mans victory.
Aside from two layout changes to make the circuit shorter, the Circuit de la Sarthe was largely unaltered since the inception of the race in 1923, when top speeds of cars were typically in the region of 100 km/h (60 mph). By 1955, top speeds for the leading cars were over 270 km/h (170 mph). The circuit had been resurfaced and widened after the Second World War. The pits and grandstands had been reconstructed, but there were no barriers between the pit lane and the racing line, and only a 1.2 m (4 ft) earthen bank between the track and the spectators. The cars had no seat belts; the drivers reasoned that it was preferable to be thrown clear in a collision rather than be crushed or trapped in a burning car.
The 1955 race began at 4 pm on Saturday, and the lead cars of Eugenio Castellotti (Ferrari), Hawthorn (Jaguar), and Fangio (Mercedes-Benz) were at the head of the field in the first hour. The other team cars were being kept on tighter leashes to conserve the cars, but still racing in the top ten. Going into the second hour, Castellotti started dropping back, but Hawthorn and Fangio continued the duel, swapping the lead and dropping the lap record further, lapping most of the field.
The accident happened at 6:26 pm, at the end of lap 35, when the first pit stops for the leading cars began.
== The crash ==
=== Immediate cause ===
On lap 35, Hawthorn and Fangio were still racing for the lead. The lap before, Hawthorn's pit crew had signalled for him to come in the next lap. He had just lapped Levegh, who was running sixth, after the corner Arnage, and was determined to keep Fangio at bay for as long as he could. Coming out of the Maison Blanche portion of the course, he rapidly caught Lance Macklin in his Austin Healey 100S, who had seen him and moved over to the right to let him pass. Putting another lap on Macklin coming up to the main straight, Hawthorn then raised his hand to indicate he was pitting and pulled across to the right, and using the Jaguar's advanced disc brakes, braked hard enough to rapidly slow his Jaguar from his racing speed, catching Macklin out.
=== Collision ===
There were two key factors regarding the track layout at that time. There was no designated deceleration lane for cars coming into the pits, and just before the main straight, there was a very slight right-hand kink in the road just after which Hawthorn started braking.
Macklin, who also braked hard, ran off the right-hand edge of the track, throwing up dust. Noticing that Hawthorn was slowing down, Macklin swerved left to avoid Hawthorn. As a result, Macklin's car veered across to the centre of the track, briefly out of control. This put him into the way of Levegh's Mercedes, closing in at over 200 km/h (120 mph), intent on doing another lap and in front of Fangio, who was waiting to pass. Levegh had no time to evade, and as he was about to collide, he raised his hand to warn Fangio, who squeezed through the carnage and brushed Hawthorn's then-stationary Jaguar in the pits, allowing him to pass unscathed.
Levegh's front-right wheel rode up the rear-left of Macklin's car, which acted as a ramp and launched Levegh's car into the air, flying over spectators and rolling end over end for 80 metres (260 ft). Levegh was thrown out of his tumbling car and hit the ground, crushing his skull upon impact and killing him instantly.
The critical kink in the road put the car on a direct trajectory toward the packed terraces and grandstand. The car landed on the earthen embankment between the spectators and the track, bounced, then slammed into a concrete stairwell structure and disintegrated. The momentum of the heaviest components of the car – the engine block, radiator, and front suspension – hurtled into the crowd for almost 100 metres (330 ft), crushing all in their path. The bonnet lid scythed through the air, "decapitating tightly jammed spectators like a guillotine". Spectators who had climbed onto ladders and scaffolding to get a better view of the track, and those crowding to use the underpass to get to the pits, found themselves in the way of the lethal debris.
Jaguar driver Duncan Hamilton, watching from the pit wall, recalled, "The scene on the other side of the road was indescribable. The dead and dying were everywhere; the cries of pain, anguish, and despair screamed catastrophe. I stood as if in a dream, too horrified to even think."
When the rest of Levegh's car landed on the embankment, the rear-mounted fuel tank exploded. The fuel fire raised the temperature of the remaining Elektron bodywork past its ignition temperature, which was lower than that of other metal alloys due to its high magnesium content. The alloy burst into white-hot flames, showering the track and crowd with magnesium embers, made worse by rescue workers unfamiliar with magnesium fires pouring water onto the inferno, greatly intensifying the flames. As a result, the car burned for several hours.
Meanwhile, Macklin's car, heavily damaged, rammed the left-side barrier, then veered to the right of the track into the pit lane, narrowly missing Kling's Mercedes-Benz, Roberto Mieres's Maserati, and Don Beauman's Jaguar, all of which were already in the pits refuelling before the accident. Macklin's car hit the unprotected pit-wall, just short of the Cunningham and Mercedes-Benz pits where Shell and Lockheed equipment were stationed, running down a policeman, a photographer and two officials (all seriously injured), then rebounded back across the track again and ground down the left-side fence for a second time. Macklin, having got through the incident with no injuries, jumped out of his wrecked car and over the bank.
== Aftermath ==
=== Following hours ===
Hawthorn had overshot his pits and stopped. Getting out, he was immediately ordered by his team to get back in and do another lap to get away from the total confusion and danger. When the pit stopped during the next lap, he staggered out of the car thinking that he had caused the catastrophe. Ivor Bueb and Norman Dewis, both Le Mans debutants, had to step into their respective cars for their first driver stints.
John Fitch, Levegh's American co-driver, had suited up and was ready to take over the car at the upcoming pit stop, and was standing with Levegh's wife, Denise Bouillin, both of them witnessing the catastrophe. Levegh's lifeless and severely burned body lay in full view on the pavement until a gendarme hauled down a banner to cover it. Half an hour after the crash, Fitch realised that news was likely being broadcast on the radio, and he needed to telephone his family to reassure them that he was not the driver of the crashed car. When he got to the media centre to use a telephone, he overheard a reporter filing that 48 deaths were already confirmed.
When Fitch returned to his pit, he urged the Mercedes team to withdraw from the race, as continuing to compete would be a public relations disaster for Mercedes-Benz regardless of whether they won or lost. Team manager Alfred Neubauer had already reached the same conclusion, but did not have the authority to make such a decision.
Despite expectations for the race to be red-flagged and stopped entirely, race officials, led by race director Charles Faroux, kept the race running. In the days after the disaster, several explanations were offered by Faroux for this course of action. They included:
that if the huge crowd of spectators had tried to leave en masse, they would have choked the main roads around, severely impeding access for medical and emergency crews trying to save the injured;
that firms participating in the race could have sued the race organizers for huge sums of money;
that "the rough law of sport dictates that the race shall go on", with Faroux specifically pointing to the 1952 Farnborough Airshow crash as precedent for doing so;
that he did not have the authority to stop the race at all, and that Prefect Pierre Trouille was the only individual empowered to do so, as France's onsite representative to the Ministry of the Interior.
After an emergency meeting and vote of Mercedes-Benz company directors by telephone in Stuttgart, West Germany, Neubauer got the call approving his team's withdrawal just before midnight. Waiting until 1:45 am, when many spectators had left, he stepped onto the track and quietly called his cars into the pits, at the time running first and third. Their retirement was briefly announced over the public address system. The Mercedes trucks were packed up and gone by morning. Chief engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut had gone to the Jaguar pits to ask if the Jaguar team would respond in kind, out of respect for the crash victims. Jaguar team manager "Lofty" England declined.
=== Conclusion of the race ===
Hawthorn and the Jaguar team kept racing. With the Mercedes team withdrawn and the Ferraris all out of commission, Jaguar's main competition had gone. Hawthorn and Bueb won the race by a margin of five laps from Aston Martin. The weather had closed in on Sunday morning, and there was no victory celebration. However, a press photograph showed Hawthorn smiling on the podium drinking from the victor's bottle of champagne. The French magazine L'Auto-Journal published it with the sarcastic caption, "À votre santé, Monsieur Hawthorn!" (In English, "To your health ('Cheers'), Mr. Hawthorn!")
=== After the race ===
More than 80 spectators, plus Levegh, were killed, either by flying debris or from the fire, with a further 120 to 178 injured. Other observers estimated the toll to be higher. It has remained the most fatal crash in motorsport history. A special Mass was held in the morning in the Le Mans Cathedral for the first funerals of the victims.
The death toll led to an immediate temporary ban on motorsports in France, Spain, Switzerland, West Germany, and other nations, until racetracks could be brought to a higher safety standard. In the United States, the American Automobile Association (AAA) dissolved their Contest Board that had been the primary sanctioning body for motorsport in the US, including the Indianapolis 500, since 1904. It decided that auto racing detracted from its primary goals, and the United States Automobile Club was formed to take over the race sanctioning and officiating.
Most countries lifted their racing bans within a year after the disaster. France, as the host of Le Mans, lifted their complete ban on 14 September 1955. On that date, the Ministry of the Interior released new regulations for racing events and codified the approval process that future racing events would need to follow. In contrast, Switzerland's ban persisted for more than 60 years. This forced Swiss racing promoters to organize circuit events in foreign countries including France, Italy, and West Germany. In 2003, the Federal Assembly of Switzerland started a discussion about whether this ban should be lifted. The discussion focused on traffic policy and environmental questions rather than on safety. On 10 June 2009, the Ständerat (upper house of the Swiss parliament) defeated a proposal to lift the ban for the second time. In 2015, the ban was relaxed for electric vehicles only, such as cars involved in Formula E electric racing. The ban was fully lifted in May 2022.
The next round of the World Sportscar Championship at the Nürburgring was cancelled, as was the non-championship Carrera Panamericana. The rest of the 1955 World Sportscar Championship season was completed, with the remaining two races at the British RAC Tourist Trophy and the Italian Targa Florio, although they were not run until September and October, several months after the catastrophe. Mercedes-Benz won both of these events, and was able to secure the constructors championship for the season. Following the achievement, Mercedes withdrew from motorsport.
The crash caused some drivers present, including Americans Fitch (after completing the season with Mercedes), Phil Walters, and Sherwood Johnston, to retire from racing. Macklin also decided to retire after being involved in another fatal crash, during the 1955 RAC Tourist Trophy race at Dundrod Circuit. Fangio never raced at Le Mans again. At the Circuit de la Sarthe, the audience stands at the pits were demolished.
Much recrimination was directed at Hawthorn, saying that he had suddenly cut in front of Macklin and slammed on the brakes near the entrance to the pits, forcing Macklin to take evasive action into the path of Levegh. This became the semi-official pronouncement of the Mercedes team and Macklin's story. The Jaguar team, in turn, questioned the fitness and competence of Macklin and Levegh as drivers. Initial media accounts were shown to be inaccurate by subsequent analysis of photographic evidence conducted by Road & Track editor (and 1955 second-place finisher) Paul Frère in 1975. Additional details emerged when the stills reviewed by Frère were converted to video form.
The media also speculated on the violent fire that engulfed the wreck, which intensified when fire marshals poured their water-based extinguishers on the flames. They suggested that Mercedes-Benz had tampered with the official fuel-supply with an explosive additive, but the intensity of the fire was due instead to the magnesium-alloy construction of the chassis. Neubauer got the French authorities to test residual fuel left in the wreck's fuel injection, and the result vindicated the company.
Opinions differed amongst the other drivers as to who was directly to blame for the crash, and such differences remain to this day. Macklin claimed that Hawthorn's move to the pits was sudden, causing an emergency that led him to swerve into Levegh's path. Years later, Fitch claimed, based on his own recollection and from what he heard from others, that Hawthorn had caused it. Dewis ventured the opinions that Macklin's move around Hawthorn was "careless", and that Levegh was "not competent" to meet the demands of driving at the speeds the 300SLR was capable of.
Both Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz issued official statements, mainly in self-defence against the accusations levelled against them and their drivers. Neubauer limited himself to suggesting improvements to the pit straight and making pit-stops safer.
Macklin, on reading Hawthorn's 1958 autobiography, Challenge Me the Race, objected when he found that Hawthorn now disclaimed all responsibility for the crash without identifying who had caused it, presuming that Hawthorn's implication was that Macklin had been responsible, and began a libel action. The action was still unresolved when Hawthorn was killed in a non-racing crash on the Guildford bypass in 1959 while overtaking a Mercedes-Benz in his Jaguar.
The official government inquiry into the accident called officials, drivers, and team personnel to be questioned and give evidence. The wreckage was examined, tested and returned to Mercedes-Benz nearly twelve months after the catastrophe. In the end, the enquiry ruled that no specific driver was responsible for the crash, and that it was merely a "terrible" racing incident. The death of the spectators was blamed on inadequate safety standards for the track design. Tony Rolt and other drivers had been raising concerns about the pit straight since 1953.
=== Legacy ===
Over the next year, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO) set about making extensive track improvements and infrastructure changes at the Circuit de la Sarthe—the pit straight was redesigned and widened to remove the kink just before the start-finish line, and to give room for a deceleration lane. The pits complex was pulled down and rebuilt, giving more room to the teams, but thereby limiting spaces to 52 starters rather than the previous 60. The grandstand was demolished and rebuilt with new spectator terraces and a wide ditch between them and the racetrack. Track safety technology and practices evolved slowly until F1 driver Jackie Stewart organized a campaign to advocate for better safety measures ten years later. Stewart's campaign gained momentum after the deaths of Lorenzo Bandini and Jim Clark.
American John Fitch became a major safety advocate and began active development of safer road cars and racing circuits. He invented traffic safety devices currently in use on highways, including the sand-and-air-filled Fitch barrels.
Macklin's Austin-Healey 100 was sold to several private buyers before appearing on the public auction block. In 1969, it was bought for £155 (equivalent to £2,155 in 2023). In December 2011, the car, estimated to raise £800,000 before the auction, was sold for £843,000. The car retained the original engine SPL 261-BN, but was reported to be in 'barn find' condition. It was then restored to its original condition.
Mercedes-Benz withdrew from motorsports until 1985, although the withdrawal had already been decided before the race and had not been caused by the accident. After returning to sports car racing in the mid-1980s, initially as an engine supplier, Mercedes went on to win the 1989 Le Mans race in partnership with Sauber Motorsport. Mercedes went on to compete in the championship during the 1990s as a works team before withdrawing for a second and final time in 1999, following a series of spectacular but non-fatal crashes of the Mercedes-Benz CLR. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.