Question: How long was Abdul Hamid II in power? Passage 1:Finn's first commission was as project manager for the Rice Hotel, under contract with the firm of Mauran, Russell & Crowell. The owner of the new hotel, Jesse H. Jones, soon after established a collaboration with Finn which would change the face of Downtown Houston. Finn designed two buildings for Jones across the way from the Rice Hotel: the Foster Building, aka the Houston Chronicle Building, in 1914, and the Rusk Building in 1916. The corner of Texas and Travis was dominated by buildings built by Finn and Jones. In 1926, Finn designed a new seventeen-story wing for the Rice Hotel on behalf of Jones. Finn did architectural work for other commercial clients in the 1920s. He completed State National Bank Building (NHRP-listed) at 412 Main Street in 1923. Jones contracted with Finn to build the Lamar Hotel, where Jones established his new residence. The Jones apartment consumed the whole top floor, though he hired John F. Staub for the interior design. Jones also promised a venue for the 1928 Democratic National Convention without consulting the city of Houston, pledging $200,000 of his own capital. He engaged Finn and Kenneth Franzheim to design and erect the Sam Houston Hall in just four months. The Sam Houston Hall, ostensibly built to be a temporary structure, was larger than Madison Square Garden, and equipped with heavy-duty fans and apertures between the roof and the walls to facilitate air flow. Jones contracted with Finn on another project in downtown Houston, this time with in collaboration with Franzheim and J.E.R. Carpenter, to finish the 37-story, art deco Gulf Building in 1929 at that time the tallest building in Texas.
 Passage 2:In the spring of 1902, Bulgaria, an Ottoman vassal state which was interested in acquiring Macedonia, signed a military convention with Russia. Late in the fall, Russia, supported by the United Kingdom and France, proposed to the Ottomans political reforms for the Macedonian vilayets. On 8 December, the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II, signed a decree implementing most of the reforms. In February 1903, the new Russian foreign minister, Vladimir Lamsdorf, visited Vienna and signed the so-called "Vienna Program" on Macedonian reforms. The program was substantially the same as the Ottoman decree of December. The immediate provocation of a new agreement at Mürzsteg was the Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising that broke out on 2 August. With its quick suppression, the Vienna Program lay dead. In September Tsar Nicholas II of Russia visited the Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria-Hungary at the latter's castle in Mürzsteg, Austria. The two rulers put their signatures to a new memorandum, substantially identical to the Vienna Program, which called for the appointment of one Russian and one Austro-Hungarian civil agent to oversee the reform of the administration, judiciary and local gendarmerie in the Macedonian vilayets. In all these institutions Christians were to take part. After Abdul Hamid accepted the proposal in November, Russia appointed one N. Demerik as its agent, and Austria chose one G. Müller. They began their work under Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha, the Inspector-General of Macedonia, in early 1904. Under the Mürzsteg program, each Great Power appointed an advisory official to the Ottoman official in charge of reforming the gendarmerie in each province. Austria-Hungary appointed an advisor to the sanjak of Üsküp, Russia to the sanjak of Thessaloniki, France to the sanjak of Siroz and Britain to the sanjak of Drama.
 Passage 3:Crimea: The Last Crusade is a panoramic history of the Crimean War of 1853–56. Drawing extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British archives, it combines military, diplomatic, political and cultural history, examining how the war left a lasting mark on the national consciousness of Britain, France, Russia and Turkey. Figes sets the war in the context of the Eastern Question, the diplomatic and political problems caused by the decay of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, he emphasises the importance of the religious struggle between Russia as the defender of the Orthodox and France as the protector of the Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. He frames the war within a longer history of religious conflict between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans, southern Russia and the Caucasus that continues to this day. Figes stresses the religious motive of the Tsar Nicholas I in his bold decision to go to war, arguing that Nicholas was swayed by the ideas of the Pan-Slavs to invade Moldavia and Wallachia and encourage Slav revolts against the Ottomans, despite his earlier adherence to the Legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance. He also shows how France and Britain were drawn into the war by popular ideas of Russophobia that swept across Europe in the wake of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. As one reviewer wrote, Figes shows "how the cold war of the Soviet era froze over fundamental fault lines that had opened up in the 19th century."

Output: 2