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Which American-born Sinclair won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930? | The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930
Sinclair Lewis
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930
Sinclair Lewis
Prize share: 1/1
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930 was awarded to Sinclair Lewis "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters".
Photos: Copyright © The Nobel Foundation
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To cite this page
MLA style: "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 18 Jan 2017. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1930/>
| Sinclair Lewis |
Where in England was Dame Judi Dench born? | Download Sinclair Lewis - Nobel Prize in Literature, 1930 (20 books) Torrent - kickasstorrents
Lewis, Sinclair - Work of Art (Collier, 1934).pdf
5.13 MB
Description
SINCLAIR LEWIS (1885-1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."
His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H.L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds."
His first novel, OUR MR. WRENN (1914) is a gently satiric account of a meek New York clerk traveling in Europe. Lewis wrote four more novels and achieved only modest success. But MAIN STREET (1920) caused a sensation and brought him immediate fame. The book is a withering satire on the dullness and lack of culture that exist in a "typical" American small town, and the narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction of its inhabitants.
BABBITT (1922) focuses even more effectively Lewis' idea of a "typical" small city businessman, George F. Babbitt. The novel describes the futile attempt of its central character to break loose from the confining life of a "solid American citizen" -- a middle-class, middle-aged realtor, civic booster, and club joiner. Possibly no two works of literature did more to make Americans aware of the limitations of their national life and culture than did MAIN STREET and BABBITT.
With a sharp, satiric eye and a superb gift for mimicry, Lewis continued to examine other aspects of what he considered national inadequacy. ARROWSMITH (1925) describes the frustrations of an idealistic young doctor in conflict with corruption, jealousy, meanness, and prejudice. The novel won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis declined because he felt that it was not awarded for literary merit but for the best presentation of "wholesome" American life.
Lewis closed out the decade with DODSWORTH (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society. He portrayed them as leading essentially pointless lives in spite of great wealth and advantages. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1930, Lewis wrote eleven more novels. The best remembered is IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE (1935), a novel about the election of a fascist to the American presidency.
In addition to his major novels, this torrent includes a selection of Lewis' short stories (I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF) and essays (THE MAN FROM MAIN STREET), the latter of which reproduces the text of his Nobel Prize address.
The following books are in PDF or ePUB format as indicated:
* ARROWSMITH (HarperPerennial, 2012) -- ePUB
* BABBITT (Bantam Classics, 1998). Introduction by John Wickersham. -- ePUB
* BABBITT (Barnes & Noble, 2005). Introduction and Notes by Kenneth Krauss. -- ePUB
* BABBITT (HarperPerennial, 2012) -- ePUB
* BABBITT (Oxford World's Classics, 2010). Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Gordon Hutner. -- PDF
* BETHEL MERRIDAY (Jonathan Cape, 1940) -- PDF
* DODSWORTH (HarperPerennial, 2012) -- ePUB
* FREE AIR (HarperPerennial, 2012) -- ePUB
* GIDEON PLANISH (Jonathan Cape, 1943) -- PDF
* THE GOD-SEEKER (Popular Library, 1948) -- PDF
* I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF & OTHER STORIES (Dell, 1962). Selected by Mark Schorer. -- PDF
* IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE (Signet, 2014). Introduction by Michael Meyer and a New Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst. -- ePUB
* MAIN STREET (Barnes & Noble, 2003). Introduction and Notes by Brooke Allen. -- ePUB
* MAIN STREET (HarperPerennial, 2012) -- ePUB
* MAIN STREET (Modern Library, 1999). Introduction by Carol Kennicott. -- ePUB
* THE MAN FROM MAIN STREET: Selected Essays & Other Writings, 1904-1950 (Pocket Books, 1963). Edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane. -- PDF
* OUR MR. WRENN (Grosset & Dunlap, 1914) -- PDF
* PREMIUM COLLECTION: 7 Novels: Our Mr. Wrenn / The Trail of the Hawk / The Job / The Innocents / Free Air / Main Street / Babbitt (Timeless Wisdom, 2014) -- ePUB
* THE PRODIGAL PARENTS (Doubleday, 1934) -- PDF
* WORK OF ART (Collier, 1934) -- PDF
| i don't know |
In which decade did Billboard magazine first publish and American hit chart? | The US Billboard song chart
The US Billboard song chart
Search this site with Google
Song chart US Billboard
The Billboard magazine has published various music charts starting (with sheet music) in 1894, the first "Music Hit Parade" was published in 1936 , the first "Music Popularity Chart" was calculated in 1940 . These charts became less irregular until the weekly "Hot 100" was started in 1958 . The current chart combines sales, airplay and downloads.
A music collector that calls himself Bullfrog has been consolidating the complete chart from 1894 to the present day. he has published this information in a comprehenive spreadsheet (which can be obtained at bullfrogspond.com/
).
The Bullfrog data assigns each song a unique identifier, something like "1968_076" (which just happens to be the Bee Gees song "I've Gotta Get A Message To You"). This "Whitburn Number" is provided to match with the books of Joel Whitburn and consists of the year and a ranking within the year. A song that first entered the charts in December and has a long run is listed the following year. This numbering scheme means that songs which are still in the charts cannot be assigned a final id, because their ranking might change. So the definitive listing for a year cannot be final until about April. In our listing we only use songs with finalised IDs, this means that every year we have to wait until last year's entries are finalised before using them.
(Source bullfrogspond.com/ , the original version used here was 20090808 with extra data from:
the 2009 data from 20091219
the 2010 data from 20110305
the 2011 data from 20120929
the 2012 data from 20130330
the 2013 data from 20150328
The 20150328 data was the last one produced before the Billboard company forced the data to be withdrawn. As far as we know there are no more recent data sets available. This pattern of obtaining the data for a particular year in the middle of the following one comes from the way that the Bullfrog project generates the identifier for a song (what they call the "Prefix" in the spreadsheet). Recent entries are identified with keys like "2015-008" while older ones have keys like "2013_177". In the second case the underscore is significant, it indicates that this was the 177th biggest song released in 2013. Now, of course, during the year no one knows where a particular song will rank, so the underscore names can't be assigned until every song from a particular year has dropped out of the charts, so recent records are temporarily assigned a name with a dash. In about May of the following year the rankings are calculated and the final identifiers are assigned. That is why we at the Turret can only grab this data retrospectively.
Attributes
The original spreadsheet has a number of attributes, we have limited our attention to just a few of them:
134
9
The songs with the most entries on the chart were White Christmas (with 33 versions and a total of 110 weeks) and Stardust (with 19 and a total of 106 weeks).
position
The peak position that songs reached in the charts should show an smooth curve from number one down to the lowest position. This chart has more songs in the lower peak positions than one would expect. Before 1991 the profile of peak positions was exactly as you would expect, that year Billboard introduced the concept of "Recurrent" tracks, that is they removed any track from the chart which had spent more than twenty weeks in the chart and had fallen to the lower positions.
weeks
The effect of the "Recurrent" process, by which tracks are removed if they have spent at least twenty weeks in the chart and have fallen to the lower reaches, can clearly be seen in the strange spike in this attribute. This "adjustment" was intended to promote newer songs and ensure the chart does not become "stale". In fact since it was introduced in 1991 the length of long chart runs has increased, this might reflect the more conscious efforts of record companies to "game" the charts by controlling release times and promotions, or it could be that the decline in chart turnover reflects a reduced public interest in the singles charts.
When we plot the average length of a song's run for songs over the period covered it is clear that the chart has changed in the last 100 years. Except for a short period in the late 1960s and early 1970s the average length of chart run increased steadily from the 1920s to the 1990s .
This contrasts with other charts, such as the UK one where the recent trend has been for runs to get shorter. We have no good idea why this is.
yearpos & bfid
A formula is applied to each entry to assign it a ranking within the year it was released. This allows followers of the Billboard chart to use a combination of the year and position to uniquely identify every entry. This formula takes into account the total success of the song, so it cannot be finally calculated until every song released in a given year has completed it's chart run (which might be well into the following year of course). As a result the final IDs for a particular year cannot be assigned until the end of the following year. This is one of the reasons why this site does not hold much information for the current year.
No. 1 song on December 24 1936
Looking for the No. 1 song on the day I was born--December 24, 1936.
Thanks.
The charts didn't really exist in the 1930s, that's why our listing of number one records starts in 1940
25 Sep 2011
Billboard info for songs listed from 1901 - 1929
Hi, again, this is my fifth time sending message to this site...What a spectacular site. Love it!! First, the comprehensive info, then, the nitty-gritty details on every songs. Thirdly (and most importantly) the forever responsive reply. Irregardless its a meaningful questions, corrections or downright simple questions.
Some sites don't reply at all..its annoying.
Anyway, my questions is during the period from 1901 to 1929, has billboard exist yet? Do they have charts and radios doing the counting of the song rotation? I thought billboard only start in the late 50's, wasn't it? I'm a music aficionado, songs and info from the 30's is hard to find, and yet you have the effort to go beyond the 20's.. May i know where in other sites i can search for 20's music info (other than wiki)?
Arnaz
We're glad to see that you enjoy the site. Your comments encourage us to keep putting in the effort.
To answer your question:
Billboard magazine started publishing in 1894. They published their first music "hit parade" in 1936 and their first "Hot 100" in 1958. We understand that from 1936 to 1958 the charts were irregular and didn't have a consistent form. In addition the focus was on "sheet music" sales so while the chart will say, for example, that the song "Sentimental Journey" was a hit in 1945 it won't tell you if the version by the Merry Macs, Hal McIntyre or Les Brown & Doris Day was the most popular.
A US music historian called Joel Whitburn has used the information from the irregular charts, the Billboard magazine contents and other sources to retrospectively calculate the charts from 1890 to 1958. This is published as a spreadsheet by a guy calling himself "Bullfrog" (the source is listed in the chart entry).
That is the listing we base our information on.
© 2007-16, Steve Hawtin et al. Generated 15 Jan 2017 16:56 GMT. This data may be freely copied provided that first the source is acknowledged, second a link to the tsort.info site is prominently incorporated and third the version number is attached (this data is version 2.6.0013). If you cannot, or do not wish to, follow these three restrictons then you must licence the data (inquire via the contact form).
| 30s |
From which country did Angola achieve independence in 1975? | Old-Charts
History
UK
The first British singles chart was published in the November 14, 1952 edition of the New Musical Express. It was at first little more than a gimmick, a tool in the circulation war against NME's much older (and more popular) rival Melody Maker. The chart, at first a top 12, was the creation of the paper's advertising manager, Percy Dickins, who compiled it by telephoning around 20 major record stores and aggregating their sales reports. He would continue to personally oversee the compilation of the chart well into the 1960s.
The chart rapidly became one of the paper's most popular features. After only a few weeks, it started being quoted in record company advertisements and press releases. The chart also spawned imitators - Record Mirror launched its own chart in 1955 and Melody Maker in 1958.
The forerunner of today's official chart first appeared in the music trade publication Record Retailer (now Music Week) in 1960 as a Top 50, but was not immediately recognised as the definitive chart in the country. Arguably, the NME chart was still the most recognised chart, and had the advantage of widespread exposure due to its use by Radio Luxembourg. Throughout the sixties, the various different charts vied for public recognition, leading to some historical anomalies � for example, The Beatles' second single "Please Please Me" was a number one on most charts, but not in Record Retailer. To add to the confusion, the chart used by the BBC on their popular shows Pick of the Pops and Top Of The Pops was actually calculated by averaging out all the others, and so didn't agree with any of them, and was prone to tied positions.
It wasn't until 1969 that a truly reliable, official chart emerged, from an alliance between the BBC and Record Retailer. For the first time a professional polling organisation, BMRB, was commissioned to oversee the chart, and a pool of 500 record shops was used - more than twice as many as had been used for any previous chart. The new Official Top 50 was inaugurated in the week ending 12 February 1969.
In 1978, the singles chart was extended from a Top 50 to a Top 75.
In 1982, BMRB lost their contract to Gallup, who arranged for electronic data gathering to replace the old sales diary method of compilation. The first chart terminals appeared in record shops in 1984. As a result, in October 1987, it was now possible for the chart, incorporating sales up to close of business on Saturday, to be announced on Sunday afternoon, rather than being delayed until Tuesday as was previously the case.
In 1990, the chart came under the auspices of CIN (Chart Information Network), a syndicate including the BBC, Spotlight (publishers of Music Week), the BPI and BARD (British Association of Record Distributors). This was basically a formalisation of the previously-existing informal arrangement, and did not significantly affect compilation.
USA
The earliest charts probably came in late 1929.
In the 30's there were Downbeat and Metronome Charts and maybe there were others. The Billboard Charts started in 1940, Cashbox in 1944.
The Billboard charts tabulate the relative weekly popularity of songs or albums in the United States. The results are published in Billboard magazine. The two primary charts - the Hot 100 (top 100 singles) and the Top 200 (top 200 albums) factor in airplay, as well as music sales in all relevant formats. Billboard is considered the foremost worldwide authority worldwide in music charts, and the rankings have gained a following among the general public.
On January 4, 1936, Billboard magazine published its first music hitparade. The first Music Popularity Chart was calculated in July, 1940. A variety of song charts followed, which were eventually consolidated into the Hot 100 by mid-1958.
Methodology of its charts
Currently, Billboard utilizes a system called Nielsen SoundScan to track sales of singles, albums, videos and DVDs. Essentially, it's a system that registers sales when products are purchased from SoundScan-enabled stores. Billboard also uses a system called Broadcast Data Systems, or BDS, which they own as a subsidiary, to track radio airplay. Each song has an "acoustic fingerprint" which, when played on a radio station that is contracted to use BDS, is detected. These detections are added up every week among all radio stations to determine airplay points. Arbitron statistics are also factored in to give "weight" to airplay based on audience size and time-of-day.
All of Billboard's charts use this basic formula. What separates the charts is which stations and stores are used � each musical genre having a core audience or retail group. Each genre's department at Billboard is headed up by a chart manager, who makes these determinations.
For many years, a song had to be commercially available as a single to be considered for any of Billboard's charts. At the time, instead of using SoundScan or BDS, Billboard obtained its data from manual reports filled out by radio stations and stores. According to the 50th Anniversary issue of Billboard, prior to the official implementation of Nielsen SoundScan tracking in November 1991, many radio stations and retail stores removed songs from their manual reports after the associated record labels stopped promoting a particular single. Thus songs fell quickly after peaking and had shorter chart lives. In 1990, the country singles chart was the first chart to use SoundScan and BDS. They were followed by the Hot 100 and the R&B chart in 1991. Today, all of Billboard's charts use this technology.
Before September 1995, singles were allowed to chart in the week they first went on sale based on airplay points alone. The policy was changed in September 1995 to only allow a single to debut after a full week of sales on combined sales and airplay points. This allowed several tracks to debut at number one.
In December 1998, the policy was further modified to allow tracks to chart on the basis of airplay alone without a commercial release. This change was made to reflect the changing realities of the music business. Previous to this, several substantial radio and MTV hits had not appeared on the Billboard chart at all, because many major labels chose not to release them as standalone singles, hoping their unavailability would spur greater album sales. Not offering a popular song to the public as a single was unheard of before the 1970s. The genres that suffered most at the time were those that increasingly impacted pop culture, including new genres such as trip hop and grunge.
Starting in 2005, Billboard changed its methodology to allow paid digital downloads from digital music stores such as iTunes to chart with or without the help of radio airplay.
A variety of charts
Originally, Billboard had separate charts for different measures of popularity, including disk jockey playings, juke box song selection, and best selling records in retail stores. There was also a composite standing chart compiled by combining those, which gradually grew to become a top 100, the ancestor of the current Hot 100 chart. The juke box chart ceased publication after the June 17, 1957 issue, the disk jockey chart, after the July 28, 1958 issue, and the best seller chart, after the October 13, 1958 issue. The July 28, 1958 issue was also the last issue in which the composite chart was called the Top 100; the following week was the start of the Hot 100 titles.
Currently, Billboard publishes many different charts, with the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 being the most famous. In 2009 Billboard partnered with MetroLyrics to offer top 10 lyrics for each of the charts.
At year's end
At the end of each year, Billboard tallies the results of all of its charts, and the results are published in a year-end issue and heard on year-end editions of its American Top 40 and American Country Countdown radio broadcasts, in addition to being announced in the press. Between 1991 and 2006, the top single/album/artist(s) in each of those charts was/were awarded in the form of the annual Billboard Music Awards, which were annually held in December until the awards went dormant in 2007 (plans for a new version of the awards in 2008 fell through, and no awards have been held since 2007). The year-end charts cover a period from the first week of December of the previous year to the last week of November of the respective year.
AT OLD-CHARTS YEAR-END TOP 150 CHARTS BASED ON THE CHARTS FROM JANUARY - DECEMBER!! (POINT-SYSTEM NR. 1: 100 POINTS etc.)
| i don't know |
Which city does David Soul come from? | David Soul - IMDb
IMDb
Actor | Soundtrack | Director
David Soul achieved pop icon status as handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed Detective Kenneth Hutchinson on the cult "buddy cop" TV series Starsky and Hutch (1975), Soul also had a very successful singing career recording several albums, with worldwide number one hit singles including "Silver Lady" & "Don't Give Up on Us Baby". Born in Chicago, ... See full bio »
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1 win & 3 nominations. See more awards »
Known For
Starsky and Hutch Det. Ken 'Hutch' Hutchinson
(1975-1979)
2004 The Dark Lantern (TV Movie)
Storyteller
2004 Dalziel and Pascoe (TV Series)
Detective Gus D'Amato
1995 Vents contraires (TV Movie)
Quill
1994 High Tide (TV Series)
Brian Landis
1991-1993 Murder, She Wrote (TV Series)
Jordan Barnett / Wes McSorley
1990 The Young Riders (TV Series)
Jeremy Styles
1989 Prime Target (TV Movie)
Peter Armetage
1989 Deadly Nightmares (TV Series)
Cooper Halliday
1989 Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV Series)
Michael Dennison
1987 Crime Story (TV Series)
Dr. Newhouse
1987 Harry's Hong Kong (TV Movie)
Harry Petros
1986 The Fifth Missile (TV Movie)
Capt. Kevin Harris
1984 Partners in Crime (TV Series)
Harry
1983 Through Naked Eyes (TV Movie)
William Parrish
1982 World War III (TV Movie)
Col. Jake Caffey
1980 Homeward Bound (TV Movie)
Jake Seaton
1980 Swan Song (TV Movie)
Jesse Swan
1974 Medical Center (TV Series)
Walter
1974 McMillan & Wife (TV Series)
Jerry
1974 The Rookies (TV Series)
Johnny Dane
1973 Circle of Fear (TV Series)
James Barlow
1972 The F.B.I. (TV Series)
Clifford Wade
1972 Movin' On (TV Movie)
Jeff
1971 Dan August (TV Series)
Lawrence Merrill III
1967 Star Trek (TV Series)
Makora
2016 The Conjuring 2 (performer: "Don't Give Up On Us")
2013/I Filth (performer: "Silver Lady")
2011 Johnny English Reborn (courtesy: "Don't Give Up On Us") / (performer: "Don't Give Up On Us")
2010 Rabbit Hole (performer: "Don't Give Up On Us")
2007 The Hitcher (performer: "Don't Give Up on Us")
1977-1978 Top of the Pops (TV Series) (performer - 17 episodes)
- Episode dated 22 June 1978 (1978) ... (performer: "It Sure Brings Out the Love in Your Eyes")
- Episode dated 8 June 1978 (1978) ... (performer: "It Sure Brings Out the Love in Your Eyes")
| Chicago |
Who won Super Bowl XX? | David Soul - Biography - IMDb
David Soul
Jump to: Overview (3) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (5) | Trivia (24) | Personal Quotes (24)
Overview (3)
6' 0½" (1.84 m)
Mini Bio (1)
David Soul achieved pop icon status as handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed Detective Kenneth Hutchinson on the cult "buddy cop" TV series Starsky and Hutch (1975), Soul also had a very successful singing career recording several albums, with worldwide number one hit singles including "Silver Lady" & "Don't Give Up on Us Baby".
Born in Chicago, Illinois, David Soul is the son of a minister who was at one time serving as the religious affairs advisor to the U.S. High Commission in Berlin. At 24 years of age, young Soul joined a North Dakota musical revue, was noticed by a keen-eyed talent scout, and signed to a studio contract. He went on to study acting with the Irene Daly School of The Actors Company, and with the Columbia Workshop in Hollywood. He first appeared on TV in small roles in shows including I Dream of Jeannie (1965), Flipper (1964) and All in the Family (1971). Regular TV work kept coming in for Soul including making masked appearances on The Merv Griffin Show (1962), as the popular singer known only as "The Covered Man."
In 1973, Soul was fortunate enough to be cast as one of the corrupt motorcycle cops in the Clint Eastwood thriller Magnum Force (1973), where his talents came to the attention of several TV execs who were looking for someone to play one of the lead roles in the upcoming Starsky and Hutch (1975) TV series. After four seasons, the show came to an end, yet Soul's talents were still in demand. He quickly went on to appear as the meek writer turned terrified vampire hunter Ben Mears in the chilling television mini-series Salem's Lot (1979), and then as Jake in the interesting television movie Homeward Bound (1980).
Several undemanding movies and TV series appearances followed for Soul. However in 1988 he scored rave reviews for his portrayal of real life, cold-blooded cop killer Michael Lee Platt in In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders (1988). It was considered highly controversial for its intense level of violence in a made for TV production.
David Soul remained very busy throughout the 1990's and beyond, in both film and on stage productions. He has toured internationally in several theater productions, including playing the narrator in the critically-acclaimed production of Willy Russell's Blood Brothers, plus a successful UK tour performing in Ira Levin's Deathtrap. Fans of the original TV series were glad to see Soul back with Paul Michael Glaser doing a cameo appearance in the big-budget movie version of Starsky & Hutch (2004).
Throughout his life, Soul has continually championed social causes often utilizing his own funds to raise awareness on issues including the impact of the Vietnam War, the shutdowns in the US steel industry, animal welfare, world hunger and HIV education. Soul has for several years made his home in the United Kingdom, where he has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, on several British TV shows and has become a keen soccer fan supporting English club, Arsenal FC.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: firehouse44@hotmail.com
Spouse (5)
( 7 December 1963 - 1965) (divorced) (1 child)
Trivia (24)
Used to appear on The Merv Griffin Show (1962) wearing a hood and was billed as "The Covered Man" before becoming nationally known on Starsky and Hutch (1975).
Children: with Mirriam - one son; with Karen Carlson - one son; with Patti - one, as well as the two sons she previously had with Bobby Sherman ; and with Julia Nickson - one daughter, China Soul .
His brother, the Rev. Solberg, was an activist minister (Lutheran). He has joined him on more than one occasion in public protest or rally. Also, he and Paul Michael Glaser have attended Christian/Jewish benefits together at least once.
His father, Dr. Richard Solberg, served as a religious affairs advisor to the U.S. High Commission in Berlin and as senior representative for the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), refugee relief agency actively involved in the post WW-II reconstruction in Germany. Dr. Solberg's job was to administrate relief to the tens of thousands of refugees who were fleeing oppressive regimes and then try to put the fragmented families back together again in the West. These early experiences proved to be indelible ones for David as hundreds of these people streamed through the Solberg home.
Between 1977 and 1982, he recorded four albums, which included a string of major hit singles: Don't Give Up On Us, Baby; Silver Lady; and Going In with my Eyes Open. He toured extensively with his band in the USA, UK, Japan and South America.
Between 1984 and 1986, David financed, produced and directed an award-winning documentary, The Fighting Ministers, which uses the shut-down of the steel industry in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as its basis.
In 1994, David has refocused his acting and producing efforts specifically to the burgeoning international film and television markets. He starred in two films for Canadian and French television, and starred (in French) with Anne Giraudau and Line Renaud in the television mini-series, The Girls of Lido (1995) for France's TF-1.
He played the role of Narrator in the New Zealand-born/Australian production of Willy Russell's Blood Brothers (a production which moved on to Melbourne and Sydney). The play marks David's return to the stage after a fifteen years absence and his first, even experience in a musical.
He is an avid skier, tennis player and loves to go "exploring" with his children.
In Cannes in 1996, David performed songs from his friend Charles Aznavour in the Martinez Hotel.
He has 6 children - 5 sons and a daughter, China Soul .
Fluent in both German and Spanish.
During the run of Starsky and Hutch (1975), he recorded a #1 single called "Don't Give Up On Us".
Became a United Kingdom citizen in September 2004.
Romantically involved with actress/singer/composer Lynne Marta throughout the run of Starsky and Hutch (1975) but they split up after the show ended.
At the Edinburgh Festival in 2000, he directed and starred in Sam Shepard 's "Fool For Love". His production incorporated pre-shot and live on-stage video, visual effects, graphics, 3-D imaging, time-lapse footage and digital sound to heighten the visceral experience of the presentation. It was one of the first real examples of how streaming media can be effectively applied to the live theatre.
He is of Norwegian descent.
Named one of his five sons Brendan after longtime Irish friend and comedian Brendan Grace .
Appearing in the title role in "Jerry Springer: The Opera" at the Cambridge theater in London's West End. [December 2004]
(2004 - 2005) Appearing at the Cambridge Theatre London as Jerry Springer in the National Theatre production of Jerry Springer The Opera.
He is on a UK tour in the revival of the stage musical "Mack and Mabel", playing the lead role of Mack Sennett alongside Janie Dee , playing Mabel Normand . [January 2006]
He appeared in the London West End revival of the stage musical "Mack and Mabel", playing the lead role of Mack Sennett alongside Janie Dee , playing Mabel Normand . [July 2006]
He has taken over the lead role of "Jerry Springer - the Opera" at London's Cambridge Theatre. However, he has the only non-singing role. [January 2005]
Lives in London and works mostly on the stage acting and producing in England. His partner was actress Alexa Hamilton . [November 2000]
Personal Quotes (24)
[on Starsky & Hutch (2004)] In a word, I thought it sucked.
I believe that a parent's role is to provide a path or opportunity for their children.
My father was my main influence. He was a preacher, but he was also a history and political science teacher, and since he was my hero, I wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a teacher.
Nobody teaches you to be a father. Nobody teaches you to be a husband. Nobody teaches you how to be a star. You have to learn to work with the tools.
One of my beliefs is that there are certain institutions within a community which stand for the spirit and heart of that community, there's the church, the local football team, the local pub and the theatre.
Sometimes I feel an obligation to be accessible as a personality, but for me the driving force since the beginning has always been good work, taking risks, trying new things. If the door opens, go through it. Always go forwards.
I was an accidental actor. I was never formally trained.
Being on the move all the time is draining, but the rewards make up for it.
A job is a very healthy thing to do.
It's only when gravity starts to take over you begin to think about your body.
I like to eat and I love the diversity of foods.
The most important thing is story-telling. It's as singular and old-fashioned as that.
Music always came first. I never set out to be an actor.
It's important to move the theatre into the 21st Century.
If these theatres didn't exist, the tradition of British theatre would cease to exist.
I was born into a family of preachers.
Once in a while I'll get moved to do some exercise. It's something I long for but the biggest problem is bending down and putting my tennis shoes on. Once I go out I'm OK.
I went into acting because I had to make a good living. I had a child now and I had to support him any way I could... I wasn't happy, but I wasn't unhappy. I was just doing what I had to do to survive.
I was never jailed. The fact is that I was arrested, but I went into a diversion programme, and by that time I'd already begun working in what was called anger management. It was a painful and awful moment.
At only 20 years old I got married. I was still a kid myself, but in those times, if you got someone pregnant, you had no choice but to get married. So I left school and the only thing I could do was sing.
Yes, your home is your castle, but it is also your identity and your possibility to be open to others.
To deal with the stark reality of having hit or hurt a woman or child, to deal with the initial responsibility you have not to do that and the knowledge you did do it, can be incredibly hard.
People thought me a bit strange at first; a blond haired, blue-eyed Norwegian who sang Mexican folk songs, but I used it to my advantage and got a job. And so the music became my ticket to education.
Paul and I were both struggling actors. One night he would serve me in a restaurant, and the next night I would serve him. It was what out of work actors did.
See also
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Which was the first European country to abolish capital punishment? | capital punishment | law | Britannica.com
Capital punishment
Alternative Titles: death penalty, execution
Related Topics
crucifixion
Capital punishment, also called death penalty, execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction by a court of law of a criminal offense. Capital punishment should be distinguished from extrajudicial executions carried out without due process of law. The term death penalty is sometimes used interchangeably with capital punishment, though imposition of the penalty is not always followed by execution (even when it is upheld on appeal), because of the possibility of commutation to life imprisonment.
Historical considerations
Capital punishment for murder , treason , arson , and rape was widely employed in ancient Greece under the laws of Draco (fl. 7th century bce), though Plato argued that it should be used only for the incorrigible . The Romans also used it for a wide range of offenses, though citizens were exempted for a short time during the republic. It also has been sanctioned at one time or another by most of the world’s major religions. Followers of Judaism and Christianity, for example, have claimed to find justification for capital punishment in the biblical passage “Whosoever sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6). Yet capital punishment has been prescribed for many crimes not involving loss of life, including adultery and blasphemy . The ancient legal principle Lex talionis ( talion )—“an eye for an eye , a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life”—which appears in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi , was invoked in some societies to ensure that capital punishment was not disproportionately applied.
The prevalence of capital punishment in ancient times is difficult to ascertain precisely, but it seems likely that it was often avoided, sometimes by the alternative of banishment and sometimes by payment of compensation. For example, it was customary during Japan’s peaceful Heian period (794–1185) for the emperor to commute every death sentence and replace it with deportation to a remote area, though executions were reinstated once civil war broke out in the mid-11th century.
Similar Topics
workhouse
In Islamic law , as expressed in the Qurʾān , capital punishment is condoned . Although the Qurʾān prescribes the death penalty for several ḥadd (fixed) crimes—including robbery, adultery, and apostasy of Islam —murder is not among them. Instead, murder is treated as a civil crime and is covered by the law of qiṣās (retaliation), whereby the relatives of the victim decide whether the offender is punished with death by the authorities or made to pay diyah (wergild) as compensation.
Death was formerly the penalty for a large number of offenses in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, but it was never applied as widely as the law provided. As in other countries, many offenders who committed capital crimes escaped the death penalty, either because juries or courts would not convict them or because they were pardoned, usually on condition that they agreed to banishment; some were sentenced to the lesser punishment of transportation to the then American colonies and later to Australia. Beginning in the Middle Ages, it was possible for offenders guilty of capital offenses to receive benefit of clergy , by which those who could prove that they were ordained priests (clerks in Holy Orders) as well as secular clerks who assisted in divine service (or, from 1547, a peer of the realm) were allowed to go free, though it remained within the judge’s power to sentence them to prison for up to a year, or from 1717 onward to transportation for seven years. Because during medieval times the only proof of ordination was literacy, it became customary between the 15th and 18th centuries to allow anyone convicted of a felony to escape the death sentence by proving that he (the privilege was extended to women in 1629) could read. Until 1705, all he had to do was read (or recite) the first verse from Psalm 51 of the Bible—“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions”—which came to be known as the “ neck verse” (for its power to save one’s neck). To ensure that an offender could escape death only once through benefit of clergy, he was branded on the brawn of the thumb (M for murder or T for theft). Branding was abolished in 1779, and benefit of clergy ceased in 1827.
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Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent
From ancient times until well into the 19th century, many societies administered exceptionally cruel forms of capital punishment. In Rome the condemned were hurled from the Tarpeian Rock (see Tarpeia ); for parricide they were drowned in a sealed bag with a dog, cock, ape, and viper; and still others were executed by forced gladiatorial combat or by crucifixion . Executions in ancient China were carried out by many painful methods, such as sawing the condemned in half, flaying him while still alive, and boiling . Cruel forms of execution in Europe included “breaking” on the wheel, boiling in oil, burning at the stake , decapitation by the guillotine or an axe, hanging , drawing and quartering , and drowning. Although by the end of the 20th century many jurisdictions (e.g., nearly every U.S. state that employs the death penalty, Guatemala, the Philippines , Taiwan , and some Chinese provinces) had adopted lethal injection , offenders continued to be beheaded in Saudi Arabia and occasionally stoned to death (for adultery) in Iran and Sudan . Other methods of execution were electrocution , gassing, and the firing squad.
The execution of Louis XVI in 1793.
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Structures of Government: Fact or Fiction?
Historically, executions were public events, attended by large crowds, and the mutilated bodies were often displayed until they rotted. Public executions were banned in England in 1868, though they continued to take place in parts of the United States until the 1930s. In the last half of the 20th century, there was considerable debate regarding whether executions should be broadcast on television, as has occurred in Guatemala. Since the mid-1990s public executions have taken place in some 20 countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria , though the practice has been condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Committee as “incompatible with human dignity.”
In many countries death sentences are not carried out immediately after they are imposed; there is often a long period of uncertainty for the convicted while their cases are appealed. Inmates awaiting execution live on what has been called “death row”; in the United States and Japan, some prisoners have been executed more than 15 years after their convictions . The European Union regards this phenomenon as so inhumane that, on the basis of a binding ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (1989), EU countries may extradite an offender accused of a capital crime to a country that practices capital punishment only if a guarantee is given that the death penalty will not be sought.
Arguments for and against capital punishment
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Capital punishment has long engendered considerable debate about both its morality and its effect on criminal behaviour. Contemporary arguments for and against capital punishment fall under three general headings: moral , utilitarian, and practical.
Protesters demonstrating against the death penalty.
© Robert J. Daveant/Shutterstock.com
Moral arguments
Supporters of the death penalty believe that those who commit murder, because they have taken the life of another, have forfeited their own right to life. Furthermore, they believe, capital punishment is a just form of retribution , expressing and reinforcing the moral indignation not only of the victim’s relatives but of law-abiding citizens in general. By contrast, opponents of capital punishment, following the writings of Cesare Beccaria (in particular On Crimes and Punishments [1764]), argue that, by legitimizing the very behaviour that the law seeks to repress—killing—capital punishment is counterproductive in the moral message it conveys. Moreover, they urge, when it is used for lesser crimes, capital punishment is immoral because it is wholly disproportionate to the harm done. Abolitionists also claim that capital punishment violates the condemned person’s right to life and is fundamentally inhuman and degrading.
Although death was prescribed for crimes in many sacred religious documents and historically was practiced widely with the support of religious hierarchies , today there is no agreement among religious faiths, or among denominations or sects within them, on the morality of capital punishment. Beginning in the last half of the 20th century, increasing numbers of religious leaders—particularly within Judaism and Roman Catholicism—campaigned against it. Capital punishment was abolished by the state of Israel for all offenses except treason and crimes against humanity, and Pope John Paul II condemned it as “cruel and unnecessary.”
Utilitarian arguments
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Supporters of capital punishment also claim that it has a uniquely potent deterrent effect on potentially violent offenders for whom the threat of imprisonment is not a sufficient restraint. Opponents, however, point to research that generally has demonstrated that the death penalty is not a more effective deterrent than the alternative sanction of life or long-term imprisonment.
Practical arguments
There also are disputes about whether capital punishment can be administered in a manner consistent with justice . Those who support capital punishment believe that it is possible to fashion laws and procedures that ensure that only those who are really deserving of death are executed. By contrast, opponents maintain that the historical application of capital punishment shows that any attempt to single out certain kinds of crime as deserving of death will inevitably be arbitrary and discriminatory. They also point to other factors that they think preclude the possibility that capital punishment can be fairly applied, arguing that the poor and ethnic and religious minorities often do not have access to good legal assistance, that racial prejudice motivates predominantly white juries in capital cases to convict black and other nonwhite defendants in disproportionate numbers, and that, because errors are inevitable even in a well-run criminal justice system, some people will be executed for crimes they did not commit. Finally, they argue that, because the appeals process for death sentences is protracted, those condemned to death are often cruelly forced to endure long periods of uncertainty about their fate.
The abolition movement
Under the influence of the European Enlightenment , in the latter part of the 18th century there began a movement to limit the scope of capital punishment. Until that time a very wide range of offenses, including even common theft, were punishable by death—though the punishment was not always enforced, in part because juries tended to acquit defendants against the evidence in minor cases. In 1794 the U.S. state of Pennsylvania became the first jurisdiction to restrict the death penalty to first-degree murder, and in 1846 the state of Michigan abolished capital punishment for all murders and other common crimes. In 1863 Venezuela became the first country to abolish capital punishment for all crimes, including serious offenses against the state (e.g., treason and military offenses in time of war). Portugal was the first European country to abolish the death penalty, doing so in 1867; by the early 20th century several other countries, including the Netherlands, Norway , Sweden , Denmark , and Italy , had followed suit (though it was reintroduced in Italy under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini ). By the mid-1960s some 25 countries had abolished the death penalty for murder, though only about half of them also had abolished it for offenses against the state or the military code. For example, Britain abolished capital punishment for murder in 1965, but treason, piracy, and military crimes remained capital offenses until 1998.
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During the last third of the 20th century, the number of abolitionist countries increased more than threefold. These countries, together with those that are “de facto” abolitionist—i.e., those in which capital punishment is legal but not exercised—now represent more than half the countries of the world. One reason for the significant increase in the number of abolitionist states was that the abolition movement was successful in making capital punishment an international human rights issue, whereas formerly it had been regarded as solely an internal matter for the countries concerned. In 1971 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that, “in order fully to guarantee the right to life, provided for in…the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” called for restricting the number of offenses for which the death penalty could be imposed, with a view toward abolishing it altogether. This resolution was reaffirmed by the General Assembly in 1977. Optional protocols to the European Convention on Human Rights (1983) and to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1989) have been established, under which countries party to the convention and the covenant undertake not to carry out executions. The Council of Europe (1994) and the EU (1998) established as a condition of membership in their organizations the requirement that prospective member countries suspend executions and commit themselves to abolition. This decision had a remarkable impact on the countries of central and eastern Europe, prompting several of them—e.g., the Czech Republic , Hungary , Romania , Slovakia , and Slovenia—to abolish capital punishment. In the 1990s many African countries—including Angola, Djibouti, Mozambique, and Namibia—abolished capital punishment, though most African countries retained it. In South Africa , which formerly had one of the world’s highest execution rates, capital punishment was outlawed in 1995 by the Constitutional Court, which declared that it was incompatible with the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment and with “a human rights culture.”
Capital punishment in the early 21st century
Despite the movement toward abolition, many countries have retained capital punishment, and, in fact, some have extended its scope. More than 30 countries have made the importation and possession for sale of certain drugs a capital offense. Iran, Singapore , Malaysia , and the Philippines impose a mandatory death sentence for the possession of relatively small amounts of illegal drugs. In Singapore, which has by far the highest rate of execution per capita of any country, about three-fourths of persons executed in 2000 had been sentenced for drug offenses. Some 20 countries impose the death penalty for various economic crimes, including bribery and corruption of public officials, embezzlement of public funds, currency speculation, and the theft of large sums of money. Sexual offenses of various kinds are punishable by death in about two dozen countries, including most Islamic states. In the early 21st century there were more than 50 capital offenses in China .
Despite the large number of capital offenses in some countries, in most years only about 30 countries carry out executions. In the United States, where roughly three-fourths of the states and the federal government have retained the death penalty, about two-thirds of all executions since 1976 (when new death penalty laws were affirmed by the Supreme Court ) have occurred in just six states—Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. China was believed to have executed about 1,000 people annually (no reliable statistics are published) until the first decade of the 21st century, when estimates of the number of deaths dropped sharply. Although the number of executions worldwide varies from year to year, some countries—including Belarus , Congo (Kinshasa), Iran, Jordan , Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam , and Yemen—execute criminals regularly. Japan and India also have retained the death penalty and carry out executions from time to time.
In only a few countries does the law allow for the execution of persons who were minors (under the age of 18) at the time they committed their crime. Most such executions, which are prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, have occurred in the United States, which has not ratified the convention and which ratified the covenant with reservations regarding the death penalty. Beginning in the late 1990s, there was considerable debate about whether the death penalty should be imposed on the mentally impaired ; much of the controversy concerned practices in the United States, where more than a dozen such executions took place from 1990 to 2001 despite a UN injunction against the practice in 1989. In 2002 and 2005, respectively, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the execution of the mentally impaired and those under age 18 was unconstitutional, and in 2014 it held that states could not define such mental impairment as the possession of an IQ ( intelligence quotient ) score of 70 or below. The court banned the imposition of the death penalty for rape in 1977 and specifically for child rape in 2008.
In the late 1990s, following a series of cases in which persons convicted of capital crimes and awaiting execution on death row were exonerated on the basis of new evidence—including evidence based on new DNA-testing technology—some U.S. states began to consider moratoriums on the death penalty. In 2000 Illinois Gov. George Ryan ordered such a moratorium , noting that the state had executed 12 people from 1977 to 2000 but that the death sentences of 13 other people had been overturned in the same period. In 2003, on the eve of leaving office, Ryan emptied the state’s death row by pardoning 4 people and commuting the death sentences of 167 others. The state of New Jersey abolished capital punishment in 2007, as did Illinois in 2011 and Connecticut in 2012.
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What is Bruce Willis' real first name? | capital punishment | law | Britannica.com
Capital punishment
Alternative Titles: death penalty, execution
Related Topics
crucifixion
Capital punishment, also called death penalty, execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction by a court of law of a criminal offense. Capital punishment should be distinguished from extrajudicial executions carried out without due process of law. The term death penalty is sometimes used interchangeably with capital punishment, though imposition of the penalty is not always followed by execution (even when it is upheld on appeal), because of the possibility of commutation to life imprisonment.
Historical considerations
Capital punishment for murder , treason , arson , and rape was widely employed in ancient Greece under the laws of Draco (fl. 7th century bce), though Plato argued that it should be used only for the incorrigible . The Romans also used it for a wide range of offenses, though citizens were exempted for a short time during the republic. It also has been sanctioned at one time or another by most of the world’s major religions. Followers of Judaism and Christianity, for example, have claimed to find justification for capital punishment in the biblical passage “Whosoever sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6). Yet capital punishment has been prescribed for many crimes not involving loss of life, including adultery and blasphemy . The ancient legal principle Lex talionis ( talion )—“an eye for an eye , a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life”—which appears in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi , was invoked in some societies to ensure that capital punishment was not disproportionately applied.
The prevalence of capital punishment in ancient times is difficult to ascertain precisely, but it seems likely that it was often avoided, sometimes by the alternative of banishment and sometimes by payment of compensation. For example, it was customary during Japan’s peaceful Heian period (794–1185) for the emperor to commute every death sentence and replace it with deportation to a remote area, though executions were reinstated once civil war broke out in the mid-11th century.
Similar Topics
workhouse
In Islamic law , as expressed in the Qurʾān , capital punishment is condoned . Although the Qurʾān prescribes the death penalty for several ḥadd (fixed) crimes—including robbery, adultery, and apostasy of Islam —murder is not among them. Instead, murder is treated as a civil crime and is covered by the law of qiṣās (retaliation), whereby the relatives of the victim decide whether the offender is punished with death by the authorities or made to pay diyah (wergild) as compensation.
Death was formerly the penalty for a large number of offenses in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, but it was never applied as widely as the law provided. As in other countries, many offenders who committed capital crimes escaped the death penalty, either because juries or courts would not convict them or because they were pardoned, usually on condition that they agreed to banishment; some were sentenced to the lesser punishment of transportation to the then American colonies and later to Australia. Beginning in the Middle Ages, it was possible for offenders guilty of capital offenses to receive benefit of clergy , by which those who could prove that they were ordained priests (clerks in Holy Orders) as well as secular clerks who assisted in divine service (or, from 1547, a peer of the realm) were allowed to go free, though it remained within the judge’s power to sentence them to prison for up to a year, or from 1717 onward to transportation for seven years. Because during medieval times the only proof of ordination was literacy, it became customary between the 15th and 18th centuries to allow anyone convicted of a felony to escape the death sentence by proving that he (the privilege was extended to women in 1629) could read. Until 1705, all he had to do was read (or recite) the first verse from Psalm 51 of the Bible—“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions”—which came to be known as the “ neck verse” (for its power to save one’s neck). To ensure that an offender could escape death only once through benefit of clergy, he was branded on the brawn of the thumb (M for murder or T for theft). Branding was abolished in 1779, and benefit of clergy ceased in 1827.
Britannica Stories
Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent
From ancient times until well into the 19th century, many societies administered exceptionally cruel forms of capital punishment. In Rome the condemned were hurled from the Tarpeian Rock (see Tarpeia ); for parricide they were drowned in a sealed bag with a dog, cock, ape, and viper; and still others were executed by forced gladiatorial combat or by crucifixion . Executions in ancient China were carried out by many painful methods, such as sawing the condemned in half, flaying him while still alive, and boiling . Cruel forms of execution in Europe included “breaking” on the wheel, boiling in oil, burning at the stake , decapitation by the guillotine or an axe, hanging , drawing and quartering , and drowning. Although by the end of the 20th century many jurisdictions (e.g., nearly every U.S. state that employs the death penalty, Guatemala, the Philippines , Taiwan , and some Chinese provinces) had adopted lethal injection , offenders continued to be beheaded in Saudi Arabia and occasionally stoned to death (for adultery) in Iran and Sudan . Other methods of execution were electrocution , gassing, and the firing squad.
The execution of Louis XVI in 1793.
Album/Prism/Album/SuperStock
Structures of Government: Fact or Fiction?
Historically, executions were public events, attended by large crowds, and the mutilated bodies were often displayed until they rotted. Public executions were banned in England in 1868, though they continued to take place in parts of the United States until the 1930s. In the last half of the 20th century, there was considerable debate regarding whether executions should be broadcast on television, as has occurred in Guatemala. Since the mid-1990s public executions have taken place in some 20 countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria , though the practice has been condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Committee as “incompatible with human dignity.”
In many countries death sentences are not carried out immediately after they are imposed; there is often a long period of uncertainty for the convicted while their cases are appealed. Inmates awaiting execution live on what has been called “death row”; in the United States and Japan, some prisoners have been executed more than 15 years after their convictions . The European Union regards this phenomenon as so inhumane that, on the basis of a binding ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (1989), EU countries may extradite an offender accused of a capital crime to a country that practices capital punishment only if a guarantee is given that the death penalty will not be sought.
Arguments for and against capital punishment
Connect with Britannica
Capital punishment has long engendered considerable debate about both its morality and its effect on criminal behaviour. Contemporary arguments for and against capital punishment fall under three general headings: moral , utilitarian, and practical.
Protesters demonstrating against the death penalty.
© Robert J. Daveant/Shutterstock.com
Moral arguments
Supporters of the death penalty believe that those who commit murder, because they have taken the life of another, have forfeited their own right to life. Furthermore, they believe, capital punishment is a just form of retribution , expressing and reinforcing the moral indignation not only of the victim’s relatives but of law-abiding citizens in general. By contrast, opponents of capital punishment, following the writings of Cesare Beccaria (in particular On Crimes and Punishments [1764]), argue that, by legitimizing the very behaviour that the law seeks to repress—killing—capital punishment is counterproductive in the moral message it conveys. Moreover, they urge, when it is used for lesser crimes, capital punishment is immoral because it is wholly disproportionate to the harm done. Abolitionists also claim that capital punishment violates the condemned person’s right to life and is fundamentally inhuman and degrading.
Although death was prescribed for crimes in many sacred religious documents and historically was practiced widely with the support of religious hierarchies , today there is no agreement among religious faiths, or among denominations or sects within them, on the morality of capital punishment. Beginning in the last half of the 20th century, increasing numbers of religious leaders—particularly within Judaism and Roman Catholicism—campaigned against it. Capital punishment was abolished by the state of Israel for all offenses except treason and crimes against humanity, and Pope John Paul II condemned it as “cruel and unnecessary.”
Utilitarian arguments
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Supporters of capital punishment also claim that it has a uniquely potent deterrent effect on potentially violent offenders for whom the threat of imprisonment is not a sufficient restraint. Opponents, however, point to research that generally has demonstrated that the death penalty is not a more effective deterrent than the alternative sanction of life or long-term imprisonment.
Practical arguments
There also are disputes about whether capital punishment can be administered in a manner consistent with justice . Those who support capital punishment believe that it is possible to fashion laws and procedures that ensure that only those who are really deserving of death are executed. By contrast, opponents maintain that the historical application of capital punishment shows that any attempt to single out certain kinds of crime as deserving of death will inevitably be arbitrary and discriminatory. They also point to other factors that they think preclude the possibility that capital punishment can be fairly applied, arguing that the poor and ethnic and religious minorities often do not have access to good legal assistance, that racial prejudice motivates predominantly white juries in capital cases to convict black and other nonwhite defendants in disproportionate numbers, and that, because errors are inevitable even in a well-run criminal justice system, some people will be executed for crimes they did not commit. Finally, they argue that, because the appeals process for death sentences is protracted, those condemned to death are often cruelly forced to endure long periods of uncertainty about their fate.
The abolition movement
Under the influence of the European Enlightenment , in the latter part of the 18th century there began a movement to limit the scope of capital punishment. Until that time a very wide range of offenses, including even common theft, were punishable by death—though the punishment was not always enforced, in part because juries tended to acquit defendants against the evidence in minor cases. In 1794 the U.S. state of Pennsylvania became the first jurisdiction to restrict the death penalty to first-degree murder, and in 1846 the state of Michigan abolished capital punishment for all murders and other common crimes. In 1863 Venezuela became the first country to abolish capital punishment for all crimes, including serious offenses against the state (e.g., treason and military offenses in time of war). Portugal was the first European country to abolish the death penalty, doing so in 1867; by the early 20th century several other countries, including the Netherlands, Norway , Sweden , Denmark , and Italy , had followed suit (though it was reintroduced in Italy under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini ). By the mid-1960s some 25 countries had abolished the death penalty for murder, though only about half of them also had abolished it for offenses against the state or the military code. For example, Britain abolished capital punishment for murder in 1965, but treason, piracy, and military crimes remained capital offenses until 1998.
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Eyjafjallajökull volcano
During the last third of the 20th century, the number of abolitionist countries increased more than threefold. These countries, together with those that are “de facto” abolitionist—i.e., those in which capital punishment is legal but not exercised—now represent more than half the countries of the world. One reason for the significant increase in the number of abolitionist states was that the abolition movement was successful in making capital punishment an international human rights issue, whereas formerly it had been regarded as solely an internal matter for the countries concerned. In 1971 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that, “in order fully to guarantee the right to life, provided for in…the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” called for restricting the number of offenses for which the death penalty could be imposed, with a view toward abolishing it altogether. This resolution was reaffirmed by the General Assembly in 1977. Optional protocols to the European Convention on Human Rights (1983) and to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1989) have been established, under which countries party to the convention and the covenant undertake not to carry out executions. The Council of Europe (1994) and the EU (1998) established as a condition of membership in their organizations the requirement that prospective member countries suspend executions and commit themselves to abolition. This decision had a remarkable impact on the countries of central and eastern Europe, prompting several of them—e.g., the Czech Republic , Hungary , Romania , Slovakia , and Slovenia—to abolish capital punishment. In the 1990s many African countries—including Angola, Djibouti, Mozambique, and Namibia—abolished capital punishment, though most African countries retained it. In South Africa , which formerly had one of the world’s highest execution rates, capital punishment was outlawed in 1995 by the Constitutional Court, which declared that it was incompatible with the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment and with “a human rights culture.”
Capital punishment in the early 21st century
Despite the movement toward abolition, many countries have retained capital punishment, and, in fact, some have extended its scope. More than 30 countries have made the importation and possession for sale of certain drugs a capital offense. Iran, Singapore , Malaysia , and the Philippines impose a mandatory death sentence for the possession of relatively small amounts of illegal drugs. In Singapore, which has by far the highest rate of execution per capita of any country, about three-fourths of persons executed in 2000 had been sentenced for drug offenses. Some 20 countries impose the death penalty for various economic crimes, including bribery and corruption of public officials, embezzlement of public funds, currency speculation, and the theft of large sums of money. Sexual offenses of various kinds are punishable by death in about two dozen countries, including most Islamic states. In the early 21st century there were more than 50 capital offenses in China .
Despite the large number of capital offenses in some countries, in most years only about 30 countries carry out executions. In the United States, where roughly three-fourths of the states and the federal government have retained the death penalty, about two-thirds of all executions since 1976 (when new death penalty laws were affirmed by the Supreme Court ) have occurred in just six states—Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. China was believed to have executed about 1,000 people annually (no reliable statistics are published) until the first decade of the 21st century, when estimates of the number of deaths dropped sharply. Although the number of executions worldwide varies from year to year, some countries—including Belarus , Congo (Kinshasa), Iran, Jordan , Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam , and Yemen—execute criminals regularly. Japan and India also have retained the death penalty and carry out executions from time to time.
In only a few countries does the law allow for the execution of persons who were minors (under the age of 18) at the time they committed their crime. Most such executions, which are prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, have occurred in the United States, which has not ratified the convention and which ratified the covenant with reservations regarding the death penalty. Beginning in the late 1990s, there was considerable debate about whether the death penalty should be imposed on the mentally impaired ; much of the controversy concerned practices in the United States, where more than a dozen such executions took place from 1990 to 2001 despite a UN injunction against the practice in 1989. In 2002 and 2005, respectively, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the execution of the mentally impaired and those under age 18 was unconstitutional, and in 2014 it held that states could not define such mental impairment as the possession of an IQ ( intelligence quotient ) score of 70 or below. The court banned the imposition of the death penalty for rape in 1977 and specifically for child rape in 2008.
In the late 1990s, following a series of cases in which persons convicted of capital crimes and awaiting execution on death row were exonerated on the basis of new evidence—including evidence based on new DNA-testing technology—some U.S. states began to consider moratoriums on the death penalty. In 2000 Illinois Gov. George Ryan ordered such a moratorium , noting that the state had executed 12 people from 1977 to 2000 but that the death sentences of 13 other people had been overturned in the same period. In 2003, on the eve of leaving office, Ryan emptied the state’s death row by pardoning 4 people and commuting the death sentences of 167 others. The state of New Jersey abolished capital punishment in 2007, as did Illinois in 2011 and Connecticut in 2012.
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Which William wrote the novel Lord Of The Flies? | William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey | Book review | Books | The Guardian
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William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey
A diligent biography of William Golding doesn't fully capture the creative madness of its subject, finds Peter Conrad
William Golding at his Wiltshire home, 1983. Photograph: John Eggitt/ Bettmann/ Corbis
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We hear a lot about the death of the author, but William Golding is an author who was almost still-born. The man who wrote Lord of the Flies found that no one wanted to publish it. In 1953, his manuscript spent seven months being sniffily perused by publishers, who all promptly returned it. The Curtis Brown agency even declined to represent the would-be author, a dispirited schoolmaster who had written the book during classes and given his pupils, in lieu of an education, the humdrum task of totting up the number of words per page. A dead end seemed to have been reached when the Faber reader, picking through pages that were now yellow and grubby from handling, contemptuously rejected the submission as "absurd & uninteresting … rubbish & dull".
Then Charles Monteith, a former lawyer hired as an editor by Faber only a month before, retrieved the book from the bin and persuaded his colleagues to buy it for the piffling sum of £60. As a set text for schools, Lord of the Flies went on to sell millions of copies, introducing adolescents worldwide to the idea of original sin and the knowledge of their own barbarity.
My childhood reading life began, so far as I can recall, with RM Ballantyne's naively imperialist story The Coral Island; my innocence came to an end when I opened Lord of the Flies, which warps Ballantyne's tale into an allegory about the wickedness of our species and its rightful ejection from the happy garden. The novel, as the critic Lionel Trilling said, marked a mutation in culture: God may have died, but the Devil was flourishing, especially in English public schools.
Yet the man who wrote Lord of the Flies spent the rest of his life regretting that he had done so. Golding considered the book "boring and crude", its language "O-level stuff". Its classic status struck him as "a joke" and he disparaged his income from it as "Monopoly money". And what right had it to overshadow later, better books, like his evolutionary saga, The Inheritors, his medieval fable, The Spire, or his solipsistic tragedy, Pincher Martin?
Towards the end of his life, he refused to reread the manuscript (much revised, on Monteith's orders, before publication): he feared he'd be so dismayed he might do himself a mischief. Golding whispered the truth about these protests in his journal. He abominated Lord of the Flies, he confided, because "basically I despise myself and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled". Discovery, uncovery, detection and rumbling are the appointed tasks of the biographer, about which John Carey, in this authorised life of a man he "admired and respected", evidently feels uncomfortable.
Golding called himself a monster. His imagination lodged a horde of demons, buzzing like flies inside his haunted head, and his dreams rehearsed his guilt in scenarios that read like sketches for incidents in his novels, which they often were. After dark, his mother became a murderous maniac, hurling knives, shards of shattered mirror or metal pots of scalding tea at little William; a girlfriend he had cast off returned as a stiffened corpse, which he watched himself trying to bury in the garden. At his finest, Golding paid traumatised tribute to the pain of other creatures, like the hooked octopus he once saw impaled by the "vulnerable, vulvar sensitive flesh" of its pink, screaming mouth, or a rabbit he shot in Cornwall, which stared at him before it fell with "a combination of astonishment and outrage".
But pity didn't prohibit him from firing the shot. He understood the Nazis, he said, because he was "of that sort by nature". His sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl has been titillatingly leaked to publicise Carey's biography. More generally, his son-in-law testifies that Golding specialised in belittling others – if that is, he recognised them at all. As Carey notes, he chronically misspelt names because he couldn't be bothered with people and their pesky claim to exist.
Carey documents Golding's ogre-like antics, but is reluctant to speculate about their origins. "I do not know," he says, "why he thought he was a monster" and he concludes this long, loyal, conscientious book by admitting there may be a primal scene, a hidden obscenity, that still eludes him – "something I have not discovered". Should a biographer, I wonder, accept defeat with such good grace? Carey prefers to deal with the masks the monster wore in public. At times, Golding impersonated a twinkling Cornish pixie; behind the helms of his boats, he pretended to be Captain Hornblower or perhaps, when the role came closer to caricature, Cap'n Birdseye.
His worst rampages occurred when he was drunk. Once, staying at a friend's house in London, Golding awoke in panic and dismembered a Bob Dylan puppet because he thought it was Satan. Carey nervously makes light of the episode, referring to it as a '"diabolic encounter". Religion and rationality, myth and science, fight it out in Golding's books as they did in his brain; it may be that Carey is too sane or puritanical to comprehend the creative madness of his subject.
He is tactful about Golding's relations with his children, both of whom suffered psychological upsets, or with his put-upon wife, who seems to have had her revenge by interrogating him at public lectures; at a gig in Lisbon, her voice from the darkened auditorium demanded to be told why there weren't more women in his books. Carey, a battle-scarred class warrior whose books include The Intellectuals and the Masses, sympathises with the young Golding's embarrassments at Oxford, where interviewers wrote him off as "not quite a gentleman". He's strangely reticent, however, about the old man's desperation to gain admission to the establishment. Golding pestered well-placed acquaintances to nominate him for a knighthood, which he called "Kultivating my K", and when it was finally doled out he changed the name on his passport with indecent alacrity and began to take pleasure in the sycophancy of hotel managers and head waiters.
The self-contempt that Golding defined as the clue to his character pays dividends for Carey the textual scholar, who here unearths a series of early drafts for published novels or extracts from projects unjustifiably abandoned – a "magnificent" but unfinished work of Homeric science fiction, a memoir that was self-censored because too raw, a film script about a traffic jam that rehearses the Apocalypse, a first version of The Inheritors that "cries out to be published as a novel in its own right" and a segment excised from Darkness Visible that is also "a masterpiece crying out for publication".
I suspect the cry Carey hears is that of unborn infants begging him to deliver them into the light and I hope he will do so. As a biographer, he may not have uncovered Golding's darkest, deepest secrets, but at least his detective work has grubbed up these intriguing, revealing relics. The man who wrote Lord of the Flies indeed wrote better things, some of which the rest of us should be given the chance to read.
| Golding |
Which innovation for the car was developed by Prince Henry of Prussia in 1911? | Lord of the Flies: Lord of the Flies Book Summary & Study Guide | CliffsNotes
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Lord of the Flies explores the dark side of humanity, the savagery that underlies even the most civilized human beings. William Golding intended this novel as a tragic parody of children's adventure tales, illustrating humankind's intrinsic evil nature. He presents the reader with a chronology of events leading a group of young boys from hope to disaster as they attempt to survive their uncivilized, unsupervised, isolated environment until rescued.
In the midst of a nuclear war, a group of British boys find themselves stranded without adult supervision on a tropical island. The group is roughly divided into the "littluns," boys around the age of six, and the "biguns," who are between the ages of ten and twelve. Initially, the boys attempt to form a culture similar to the one they left behind. They elect a leader, Ralph , who, with the advice and support of Piggy (the intellectual of the group), strives to establish rules for housing and sanitation. Ralph also makes a signal fire the group's first priority, hoping that a passing ship will see the smoke signal and rescue them. A major challenge to Ralph's leadership is Jack , who also wants to lead. Jack commands a group of choirboys-turned-hunters who sacrifice the duty of tending the fire so that they can participate in the hunts. Jack draws the other boys slowly away from Ralph's influence because of their natural attraction to and inclination toward the adventurous hunting activities symbolizing violence and evil.
The conflict between Jack and Ralph — and the forces of savagery and civilization that they represent — is exacerbated by the boys' literal fear of a mythical beast roaming the island. One night, an aerial battle occurs above the island, and a casualty of the battle floats down with his opened parachute, ultimately coming to rest on the mountaintop. Breezes occasionally inflate the parachute, making the body appear to sit up and then sink forward again. This sight panics the boys as they mistake the dead body for the beast they fear. In a reaction to this panic, Jack forms a splinter group that is eventually joined by all but a few of the boys. The boys who join Jack are enticed by the protection Jack's ferocity seems to provide, as well as by the prospect of playing the role of savages: putting on camouflaging face paint, hunting, and performing ritualistic tribal dances. Eventually, Jack's group actually slaughters a sow and, as an offering to the beast, puts the sow's head on a stick.
Of all the boys, only the mystic Simon has the courage to discover the true identity of the beast sighted on the mountain. After witnessing the death of the sow and the gift made of her head to the beast, Simon begins to hallucinate, and the staked sow's head becomes the Lord of the Flies, imparting to Simon what he has already suspected: The beast is not an animal on the loose but is hidden in each boy's psyche. Weakened by his horrific vision, Simon loses consciousness.
Recovering later that evening, he struggles to the mountaintop and finds that the beast is only a dead pilot/soldier. Attempting to bring the news to the other boys, he stumbles into the tribal frenzy of their dance. Perceiving him as the beast, the boys beat him to death.
Soon only three of the older boys, including Piggy, are still in Ralph's camp. Jack's group steals Piggy's glasses to start its cooking fires, leaving Ralph unable to maintain his signal fire. When Ralph and his small group approach Jack's tribe to request the return of the glasses, one of Jack's hunters releases a huge boulder on Piggy, killing him. The tribe captures the other two biguns prisoners, leaving Ralph on his own.
The tribe undertakes a manhunt to track down and kill Ralph, and they start a fire to smoke him out of one of his hiding places, creating an island-wide forest fire. A passing ship sees the smoke from the fire, and a British naval officer arrives on the beach just in time to save Ralph from certain death at the hands of the schoolboys turned savages.
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How is musician William Lee Conley better known? | Big Bill Broonzy, Blues Musician from Scott Mississippi
William Lee Conley Broonzy: A Biography
By Anton Duck (SHS)
Anton Duck (SHS Researcher)
William Lee Conley Broonzy, one of the masters of country blues, was born in Scott, Mississippi, on June 26, 1893. However, one source says Broonzy had a twin sister name Lannie Broonzy, who says she has proof that she was born in 1898, on June 26. This information would have proved that Broonzy was five years younger than he pretended. Big Bill was the son of Frank Broonzy and Mittie Belcher, who had seventeen other children (Bruynoghe 9). During this time period, many black men added years to their age either to get a job or join the military, so the exact date of Broonzy’s birth is not clear (Barnwell 317).
Broonzy’s life as a child was hard because he received only minimal schooling. He had to quit school to help his sharecropping family around the house. Before he moved to Arkansas, Broonzy learned how to play the fiddle from his uncle Jerry Belcher. At the age of fourteen, he started working for tips at country dances, picnics, and he played for the church (Broonzy). During the years 1912-1917, Broonzy worked part time as a preacher and violinist.
Then Broonzy served in the US Army during World War I. After his discharge, he returned back to Arkansas. This is the time when he decided that farming was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He wanted to make his living as a guitar player and singer. In 1924, Broonzy moved to Chicago to start his music career partly because of all the racism that was happening in the South. Under the guidance of Papa Charlie Jackson, Broonzy learned how to play the guitar. In the 1930’s Broonzy became known as one of the major artists on the Chicago Blues scene. During this time he performed with other top blues artist in Chicago– like Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red, Jazz Gillum, Lonnie Johnson, and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. Also, while trying to make it in the music business, he worked as a janitor and maintenance man (Big Bill Broonzy).
In 1938 Broonzy performed at John Hammond’s famous Spiritual and Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City. This was the first time that he had ever performed in front of a white audience. After the concert, people started calling him “Big Bill” Broonzy. At this time Broonzy received newfound fame as the father of Chicago blues.(Broonzy). He was one of the best known blues players and recorded over 260 blues songs including Feelin’ Low Down, Remember Big Bill, Make Me Getaway, and Big Bill Broonzy Sings Country Blues (Brewer 15). His recording career spanned five long decades as he traveled from Mississippi to Chicago and even to Europe, where he became well-known. There are forty-two of his albums still available (Cox 113).
After the arrival of artists like Muddy Waters and the playing of the electric guitar, Broonzy’s brand of blues was pushed aside. Rather than retire, he changed his style of music to folk blues. In 1951, Broonzy toured Europe where he performed standard blues, traditional folk tunes, and spirituals to appreciative audiences. The following year Broonzy returned to Europe with pianist Blind John Davis. He opened the doors for other American blues artists to tour there as well. In 1955, with the help of writer Yannick Bruynoghe, he told the story of his life in the book Big Bill Broonzy. This book was originally published in London. Big Bill Broonzy’s book was one of the first autobiographies by a blues man (Big Bill Broonzy). In 1957, William Lee Conley Broonzy was diagnosed with throat cancer. He continued to perform, although he had with great pain, until he died of throat cancer on August 15, 1958. In 1980, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Hall of Fame (Cox 113).
1893 Born in Scott, Mississippi, on June 26
1899 learned how to play the fiddle
1905 Started playing for the church, picnics, country dances
moved to Arkansas
| Big Bill Broonzy |
How is Joan Molinsky better known? | BIG BILL BROONZY (7/22/1953) | 98.7WFMT
BIG BILL BROONZY (7/22/1953)
By WFMT | 2016-05-13T10:09:06+00:00 June 10th, 2016| Best of Studs Terkel |
The Chicago Blues Festival begins this weekend, and so this evening the BEST OF STUDS TERKEL features the legendary American bluesman, William Lee Conley Broonzy – better known as Big Bill. First heard on WFMT on July 22, 1953, this musical conversation between Studs and Big Bill Broonzy is one of the very earliest Studs Terkel Program broadcasts in our archives.
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In which branch of the arts is Patricia Neary famous? | Edward Villella - Division of Cultural Affairs - Florida Department of State
Division of Cultural Affairs
Inducted in 1997
Biography
Edward Villella is generally regarded as America's most celebrated male dancer. During his career with the New York City Ballet, his supreme artistry–marked by grace, athleticism and virility–helped popularize the role of men in dance. The great choreographer George Balanchine used him to create role after magnificent role, including perhaps his most famous in the cast of Balanchine's 1929 masterpiece, The Prodigal Son.
Villella was born in the Bayside neighborhood of Queens, New York, in 1936. At age 10, he enrolled in the School of American Ballet. But at the urging of his father, in college (the New York Maritime Academy), Villella pursued a degree in marine transportation while also lettering in baseball and becoming a championship welterweight boxer. His love of dance, however, never waned, and while in college he also became a member of the New York City Ballet.
After graduating in 1959, he rejoined the School of American Ballet, and soon was well on his way toward becoming the leading male star in American dance. As a favorite of Balanchine's, he won fame with lead roles in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Tarantella, Jewels and Prodigal Son.
Villella went on to become the first male American dancer to appear with the Royal Danish Ballet and the first American in history–male or female–to be invited to dance an encore at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. He danced for four sitting presidents, including a performance at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.
By the late 1960s, Villella had become a familiar figure in television productions, with rave reviews for performances in Brigadoon, The Nutcracker and even the Ed Sullivan Show. In the early 1970s, he appeared as himself in an episode of The Odd Couple, starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman.
In a performance for President Gerald Ford at the White House in 1975, Villella suffered an injury that ended his career as a performer. Throughout his retirement from the stage, Villella has led an energetic and creative career as artistic director to ballet companies in New Jersey, Oklahoma and elsewhere. In 1986 he became founding director for the Miami City Ballet and since then has guided the company to worldwide acclaim. He still serves as the ballet's artistic director and executive officer.
In recognition of his lifetime achievements in the arts, in 1997 President Bill Clinton awarded Villella a National Medal of Arts. In 2009, he was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame. His autobiography, Prodigal Son: Dancing for Balanchine in a World of Pain and Magic, was reissued by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1998. Villella's wife, Linda, is director of the Miami City Ballet School.
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| Ballet |
Which country is Europe's largest silk producer? | Sleek American Style From Monte Carlo - The New York Times
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Arts |Sleek American Style From Monte Carlo
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Monte Carlo is a magic name in ballet history, most of which is best forgotten when looking at Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, the 11-year-old company that made a zesty and refreshing New York debut on Tuesday night.
Whatever world-famous ballets were created by Russian choreographers in Monte Carlo in the past, the company on view has a sleek neo-classical look that is very much tune with American taste.
It was Princess Grace's wish to establish a classical ballet troupe in Monaco in the 1970's and none other than George Balanchine was tapped as potential artistic adviser. Princess Grace died before the project was completed. It was her daughter Princess Caroline who established the Ballets de Monte Carlo in 1985 and who serves as its hands-on president: Caroline and her brother, Prince Albert, attended by an army of security men, were in the audience at the opening of the troupe's weeklong run at City Center (131 West 55th Street, Manhattan). Symbolically, their American heritage had something to do with what one saw onstage.
In many ways, this is the most American of European ballet companies, largely because it understands the neo-classicism developed by Balanchine in America. Jean-Christophe Maillot, artistic director since 1993, obviously appreciates the formal value of ballet's academic idiom, both in his own choreography and in his repertory.
This first of two different programs paid homage to the company's inspiration, if not its real antecedents. Balanchine was represented by his 1946 masterpiece ''The Four Temperaments,'' danced impressively, with meticulous detail (although not the taut energy seen at the New York City Ballet). A historical nod to Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Monte Carlo's most famous resident company of the past, was embodied in a revival of Michel Fokine's ''Polovtsian Dances.''
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But even here the accent was on movement rather than storytelling, a viewpoint that Mr. Maillot displayed in the New York premiere of his ''Vers un Pays Sage,'' choreographed to John Adams's ''Fearful Symmetries.'' That Peter Martins, the City Ballet director, has choreographed very differently to the same score made Mr. Maillot's work all the more interesting.
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Even more fascinating was how the international group of dancers (mainly French and Italian) looked so at home in a pure-dance esthetic but also took to the expressive gesture of the Fokine choreography, reconstructed by Pierre Lacotte.
Among the dancers, the only familiar name is Jean-Charles Gil, who once dazzled New York as a star with Roland Petit and whose Balanchine experience in the San Francisco Ballet may explain the power, presence and desperate air he brought to the ''Melancholic'' solo in ''The Four Temperaments.'' There were also revelations: Sandrine Cassini, perfect in her classical style and partnered by an agile Chris Roelandt, in the ''Sanguinic'' section of the same ballet. Bernice Coppieters, the troupe's young Belgian ballerina, had the technique and assurance to get through the difficult ''Choleric'' variation.
Patricia Neary's supervision of this familiar work has the articulate clarity of all stagings of Balanchine. But company brought its individual touch to the work, capturing the emotional subtext behind the celebrated Hindemith score. The composer may have been interested in distilling the essence of emotions or ''humors'' of the body. But Balanchine, more abstract, responded to the music in images of his own. The cast included Raphael Coums-Marquet in the ''Phlegmatic'' solo. Bland, he received the most applause.
As for ''Polovtsian Dances'' from Borodin's opera ''Prince Igor,'' no pagan warrior chief, weaving in and out of his harem and own tribe on the steppes of City Center can hope to bring back the frisson of 1909. That was the year in which this ballet opened Serge Diaghilev's first ballet season in Paris. Rarely seen nowadays, it comes back now in vibrant pictorial terms in Mr. Lacotte's version, based on the original. Led by Francesco Nappa, the dancers were true to Fokine in their use of the entire body, not just arms and legs. Nicholas Roerich's decor has been reproduced with the requisite tents and river.
In a different world, a band of alienated couples is led with fierce attack by Ms. Coppieters and Gaetan Morlotti in Mr. Maillot's ''Vers un Pays Sage.'' Five other couples round out a cast whose swoons, embraces and acrobatic outlines look both athletic and sexy. Mr. Maillot eventually runs out of steam but he works intriguingly against the propulsive music, not with it.
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The VS-300 was a type of what? | Untitled Document
VS-300A NX 28996 in Forward flight with Igor Sikorsky at the controls
Background
Igor Sikorsky dreamed of building a helicopter from his youth. In 1931, he applied for a patent for a single main rotor helicopter which included nearly every feature that would be incorporated in the VS-300. By 1938, technology had caught up with his dream. When he was summoned to United Aircraft Headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut to be told that the Sikorsky Division which at that time was building fixed-wing aircraft was being shut down due to a lack of business, he requested that he be allowed to keep his design team together to design a helicopter. His request was granted along with an initial $30,000 budget. The VS-300 was America’s first practical helicopter. It was also the first successful helicopter in the world with a single main rotor and a torque compensating tail rotor
Sketch of a single main rotor helicopter submitted for a Patent in1931which was granted in 1935.
Some preliminary helicopter design work had already been done by Igor Sikorsky, who was the Engineering Manager, and his associates “off the clock” and they were ready to start work. The basic VS-300 helicopter looked very similar to the 1930 design.
The VS-300 was designed in the spring of 1939 and built that summer.
VS-300 under construction September 8, 1939
The first flight version of the VS-300 included a 28 foot diameter main rotor and a 75 hp Lycoming engine. A 40” single blade tail rotor and rigid 4 wheel landing gear with a full swiveling nose and tail wheels were installed. The VS-300 featured full cyclic main rotor control (pitch and roll) and a single pedal tail rotor control (yaw). Vertical control was provided by a large wheel to the right of the pilot. The first flight on September 14, 1939 by Igor Sikorsky lasted approximately 10 seconds to a height of a few inches. The helicopter was tethered to a heavy plate by four cables which allowed the helicopter to move in all directions by dragging the plate. A ground crew was always present to stabilize the helicopter if the pilot lost control to prevent a roll over. No helicopter flight training was available, so Igor Sikorsky got “On the Job” training learning with each additional flight. The design team was not familiar with the fact that a spinning rotor had gyroscopic properties (precession) which required an input 90 degrees in rotation before it became effective. The VS-300 therefore rolled left when the cyclic stick was pushed forward. The initial pilots, Igor Sikorsky and Serge Gluhareff, had no idea whether the control problems were caused by the helicopter design or pilot technique.
The VS-300 in a stable hover on November 24, 1939
Changes to the helicopter were made after every flying day by the Night Crew. Obvious changes since the first flight in the above photo are outrigger main landing gear with full swiveling wheels, the tail wheel moved aft, and dampers have been added to the flapping hinge on the main rotor
Flight of the VS-300 continued with each flight a little longer than the last as the pilots adjusted to this unruly machine until December 9, 1939 when a gust of wind tipped over the VS-300 grinding the rotors into the ground and causing major damage to the VS-300. This ended the career of the First Configuration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux8dBNX-rGM
The VS-300 was completely redesigned and rebuilt. A decision was made to abandon cyclic control of the main rotor and adapt a design suggested by I.A. Sikorsky, a draftsman and mathematician, and Michael Buivid, the Chief Engineer, which locked out cyclic control and replace it with two additional horizontal tail rotors. Collective pitch control for vertical control was left on the main rotor. Prior to flight testing of the second configuration, the helicopter was mounted on a pedestal and operated without the main rotor blades installed. This allowed fine tuning of the new control system and allowed the pilots to become comfortable with the new system before actual flight.
An early version of the VS-300 second configuration
| Helicopter |
At which university did Joseph Goebbels become a doctor of philosophy? | Untitled Document
VS-300A NX 28996 in Forward flight with Igor Sikorsky at the controls
Background
Igor Sikorsky dreamed of building a helicopter from his youth. In 1931, he applied for a patent for a single main rotor helicopter which included nearly every feature that would be incorporated in the VS-300. By 1938, technology had caught up with his dream. When he was summoned to United Aircraft Headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut to be told that the Sikorsky Division which at that time was building fixed-wing aircraft was being shut down due to a lack of business, he requested that he be allowed to keep his design team together to design a helicopter. His request was granted along with an initial $30,000 budget. The VS-300 was America’s first practical helicopter. It was also the first successful helicopter in the world with a single main rotor and a torque compensating tail rotor
Sketch of a single main rotor helicopter submitted for a Patent in1931which was granted in 1935.
Some preliminary helicopter design work had already been done by Igor Sikorsky, who was the Engineering Manager, and his associates “off the clock” and they were ready to start work. The basic VS-300 helicopter looked very similar to the 1930 design.
The VS-300 was designed in the spring of 1939 and built that summer.
VS-300 under construction September 8, 1939
The first flight version of the VS-300 included a 28 foot diameter main rotor and a 75 hp Lycoming engine. A 40” single blade tail rotor and rigid 4 wheel landing gear with a full swiveling nose and tail wheels were installed. The VS-300 featured full cyclic main rotor control (pitch and roll) and a single pedal tail rotor control (yaw). Vertical control was provided by a large wheel to the right of the pilot. The first flight on September 14, 1939 by Igor Sikorsky lasted approximately 10 seconds to a height of a few inches. The helicopter was tethered to a heavy plate by four cables which allowed the helicopter to move in all directions by dragging the plate. A ground crew was always present to stabilize the helicopter if the pilot lost control to prevent a roll over. No helicopter flight training was available, so Igor Sikorsky got “On the Job” training learning with each additional flight. The design team was not familiar with the fact that a spinning rotor had gyroscopic properties (precession) which required an input 90 degrees in rotation before it became effective. The VS-300 therefore rolled left when the cyclic stick was pushed forward. The initial pilots, Igor Sikorsky and Serge Gluhareff, had no idea whether the control problems were caused by the helicopter design or pilot technique.
The VS-300 in a stable hover on November 24, 1939
Changes to the helicopter were made after every flying day by the Night Crew. Obvious changes since the first flight in the above photo are outrigger main landing gear with full swiveling wheels, the tail wheel moved aft, and dampers have been added to the flapping hinge on the main rotor
Flight of the VS-300 continued with each flight a little longer than the last as the pilots adjusted to this unruly machine until December 9, 1939 when a gust of wind tipped over the VS-300 grinding the rotors into the ground and causing major damage to the VS-300. This ended the career of the First Configuration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux8dBNX-rGM
The VS-300 was completely redesigned and rebuilt. A decision was made to abandon cyclic control of the main rotor and adapt a design suggested by I.A. Sikorsky, a draftsman and mathematician, and Michael Buivid, the Chief Engineer, which locked out cyclic control and replace it with two additional horizontal tail rotors. Collective pitch control for vertical control was left on the main rotor. Prior to flight testing of the second configuration, the helicopter was mounted on a pedestal and operated without the main rotor blades installed. This allowed fine tuning of the new control system and allowed the pilots to become comfortable with the new system before actual flight.
An early version of the VS-300 second configuration
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Which prince is Queen Elizabeth II's youngest son? | Queen Elizabeth II is gran again - CNN.com
Queen Elizabeth II is gran again
Story Highlights
Prince Edward, the Queen Elizabeth II's youngest son, becomes father again
Child, Queen Elizabeth II's eighth grandchild, is eighth in line to the throne
Prince and wife have a daughter, Lady Louise Windsor, who was born in 2003
Next Article in World »
LONDON, England (CNN) -- The wife of Prince Edward, the Queen Elizabeth II's youngest son, gave birth to a baby boy Monday, Buckingham Palace confirmed in a statement.
The boy was delivered by caesarean section at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey and weighed 6 pounds 2 ounces, the statement said. Prince Edward was with his wife -- the Countess of Wessex -- at the birth, it added.
The baby boy, who has not yet been named, will be the Queen's eighth grandchild and is eighth in line to the throne.
Edward, 43, and his wife Sophie, 42, already have a daughter, three-year-old Lady Louise Windsor, who was born four weeks premature in 2003.
Sophie had suffered a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy in 2001 before becoming pregnant with Lady Louise.
The couple married in June 1999 after they met at a tennis event six years earlier. E-mail to a friend
| Edward |
When did the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses say the world would end? | Inside the Dynastic Struggle That Rocked Queen Elizabeth II’s Marriage | Vanity Fair
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PERFECT COUPLE Philip and Elizabeth on their honeymoon, at Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire, November 1947., Photograph FROM TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES; DIGITAL COLORIZATION BY LORNA CLARK.
There was a whole battalion of lively young men,” recalled Lady Anne Glenconner, whose family were friends and neighbors of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Sandringham, their estate in Norfolk. But Princess Elizabeth, the heiress presumptive to the British throne, “realized her destiny and luckily set her heart on Prince Philip at an early age. He was ideal—good-looking and a foreign prince.”
Her choice was in some respects traditional, because the princess and Philip were relatives, but not too close to raise eyebrows. They were third cousins, sharing the same great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Philip was in fact more royal than Elizabeth, whose mother was mere British nobility (with distant links to English and Scottish kings), while his parents were Princess Alice of Battenberg (a great-grandchild of Queen Victoria) and Prince Andrew of Greece, the descendant of a Danish prince recruited for the Greek throne in the mid-19th century. Elizabeth and Philip were both connected to most of Europe’s reigning families, where consanguinity had been common for centuries. Queen Victoria and her husband had been even closer: first cousins who shared the same grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg.
In other ways, Philip was an outlier with a decidedly unconventional background. Queen Elizabeth had made no secret of her preference for one of her daughter’s aristocratic English friends from a family similar to her own English-Scottish Strathmores—the future Dukes of Grafton, Rutland, and Buccleuch, or Henry Porchester, the future Earl of Carnarvon. Philip could boast none of their extensive landholdings, and in fact had very little money.
Although he was born on June 10, 1921, on the isle of Corfu, Philip spent scarcely a year in Greece before the entire royal family was expelled in a coup. His parents took him, along with his four older sisters, to Paris, where they lived rent-free in a house owned by wealthy relatives. A proud professional soldier with an extroverted personality and a quick wit, Prince Andrew found himself at loose ends, while Alice (properly known as Princess Andrew of Greece after her wedding) had difficulty managing a large family, not least because she was congenitally deaf.
After Philip’s parents sent him at the age of eight to Cheam, a boarding school in England, his mother had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium for several years, which precipitated his parents’ permanent separation. She eventually moved to Athens and established a Greek Orthodox order of nuns.
Prince Andrew was mostly absent from his son’s life as well, living as a “boulevardier” in Monte Carlo with a mistress, and subsisting on a small annuity, while beneficent relatives and friends paid Philip’s school fees. He left Cheam in 1933 to spend one year at Salem, a boarding school in Germany run by a progressive Jewish educator named Kurt Hahn. After the Nazis briefly detained Hahn, he fled in 1934 to the North Sea coast of Scotland and founded Gordonstoun School, where Philip soon enrolled.
Once in the United Kingdom, Philip came under the wing of his relatives there, chiefly his Battenberg grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, who lived in a grace-and-favor apartment in Kensington Palace, and his mother’s younger brother, Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, later the first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who assiduously cultivated his royal relatives.
Six feet tall, with intense blue eyes, chiseled features, and blond hair, Philip was an Adonis as well as athletic and engaging, exuding confidence and a touch of impudence. He was a resourceful and energetic self-starter, yet he was also something of a loner, with a scratchy defensiveness that sprang from emotional deprivation. “Prince Philip is a more sensitive person than you would appreciate,” said his first cousin Patricia Mountbatten, Dickie’s older daughter. “He had a tough childhood, and his life constrained him into a hard exterior in order to survive.”
As cousins, Philip and young Elizabeth had crossed paths twice, first at a family wedding in 1934 and then at the coronation of King George VI in 1937. But it wasn’t until July 22, 1939, when the King and Queen took their daughters to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, that the 13-year-old princess spent any time with 18-year-old Philip, who was a cadet in training at the school.
At the behest of Dickie Mountbatten, an officer in the Royal Navy, Philip was invited to have lunch and tea with the royal family. Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, Princess Elizabeth’s governess, observed the sparks, later writing that Lilibet, as she was called, “never took her eyes off him,” although he “did not pay her any special attention”—no surprise, since he was already a man of the world, and she only on the cusp of adolescence. While everything else in the life of Lilibet was laid out for her, she made the most important decision on her own. “She never looked at anyone else,” said Elizabeth’s cousin Margaret Rhodes.
During the war years, Philip came to visit his cousins occasionally at Windsor Castle, and he and the princess corresponded when he was at sea, serving with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Friends and relatives detected a flutter of romance between Philip and Elizabeth by December 1943, when he was on leave at Windsor for Christmas and watched Elizabeth, then 17, perform in the “Aladdin” pantomime. The King was quite taken by Philip, telling his mother the young man was “intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way.” But both the King and Queen thought that Lilibet was too young to consider a serious suitor.
Philip visited Balmoral, the royal family’s estate in the Scottish Highlands, in the summer of 1944, and he wrote Queen Elizabeth about how he savored “the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them.” That December, while Philip was away on active duty, his father died of cardiac arrest at age 62 in the room where he lived at the Hotel Metropole, in Monte Carlo. All he left his 23-year-old son were some trunks containing clothing, an ivory shaving brush, cuff links, and a signet ring that Philip would wear for the rest of his life.
While Philip was completing his deployment in the Far East, Lilibet enjoyed the freedom of the postwar period. At a party given by the Grenfell family at their Belgravia home in February 1946 to celebrate the peace, the princess impressed Laura Grenfell as “absolutely natural … she opens with a very easy and cosy joke or remark She had everyone in fits talking about a sentry who lost his hat while presenting arms.” Elizabeth “danced every dance Thoroughly enjoying herself” as the “Guardsmen in uniform queued up.”
Philip finally returned to London in March 1946. He took up residence at the Mountbatten home on Chester Street, where he relied on his uncle’s butler to keep his threadbare wardrobe in good order. He was a frequent visitor to Buckingham Palace, roaring into the side entrance in a black MG sports car to join Lilibet in her sitting room for dinner, with Crawfie acting as duenna. Lilibet’s younger sister, Margaret, was invariably on hand as well, and Philip included her in their high jinks, playing ball and tearing around the long corridors. Crawfie was taken with Philip’s breezy charm and shirtsleeve informality—a stark contrast to the fusty courtiers surrounding the monarch.
During a month-long stay at Balmoral late in the summer of 1946, Philip proposed to Elizabeth, and she accepted on the spot, without even consulting her parents. Her father consented on the condition that they keep their engagement a secret until it could be announced after her 21st birthday, the following April. Like the princess, Philip didn’t believe in public displays of affection, which made it easy to mask his feelings. But he revealed them privately in a touching letter to Queen Elizabeth in which he wondered if he deserved “all the good things which have happened to me,” especially “to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly.”
A Royal Wedding
Palace courtiers and aristocratic friends and relatives of the royal family viewed Philip suspiciously as a penniless interloper. They were irked that he seemed to lack proper deference toward his elders. But mostly they viewed him as a foreigner, specifically a “German” or, in their less gracious moments, a “Hun,” a term of deep disparagement after the bloody conflict so recently ended. Even though his mother had been born in Windsor Castle, and he had been educated in England and served admirably in the British Navy, Philip had a distinctly Continental flavor, and he lacked the clubby proclivities of the Old Etonians. What’s more, the Danish royal family that had ruled in Greece was in fact predominantly German, as was his maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg.
None of the criticisms of Philip’s German blood or cheeky attitude was of any concern to Princess Elizabeth. A man of ideas and appealing complexity, he was a breath of fresh air to the heiress presumptive. It was clear that he would not be easy, but he would certainly not be boring. He shared her commitment to duty and service, but he also had an irreverence that could help lighten her official burdens at the end of a tiring day. His life had been as unfettered as hers had been structured, and he was unencumbered by the properties and competing responsibilities of a landed British aristocrat. According to their mutual cousin, Patricia Mountbatten, the princess also saw that, behind his protective shell, “Philip had a capacity for love which was waiting to be unlocked, and Elizabeth unlocked it.”
The princess “would not have been a difficult person to love,” said Patricia Mountbatten. “She was beautiful, amusing and gay. She was fun to take dancing or to the theater.” In the seven years since their first meeting, Lilibet (which is what Philip now called her, along with “darling”) had indeed become a beauty, her appeal enhanced by being petite. She did not have classical features but rather what Time magazine described as “pin-up” charm: big bosom (taking after her mother), narrow shoulders, a small waist, and shapely legs. Her curly brown hair framed her porcelain complexion, with cheeks that the photographer Cecil Beaton described as “sugar-pink,” vivid blue eyes, an ample mouth that widened into a dazzling smile, and an infectious laugh. “She sort of expands when she laughs,” said Margaret Rhodes. “She laughs with her whole face.”
The press caught wind of the cousins’ romance as early as October 1946, at the wedding of Patricia Mountbatten to Lord Brabourne at Romsey Abbey. Philip was an usher, and when the royal family arrived, he escorted them from their car. The princess turned as she removed her fur coat, and the cameras caught them gazing at each other lovingly. But no official confirmation followed, and the couple kept up an active social life. Elizabeth’s guardsmen friends served as her escorts to restaurants and fashionable clubs, and Philip would take Elizabeth and Margaret out to a party or a play. But he was only one among many young men to dance with the heiress presumptive.
He had been working as an instructor at the Naval Staff College, in Greenwich, and with the help of Dickie Mountbatten had secured his British citizenship in February 1947, giving up his title as H.R.H. Prince Philip of Greece. Since he had no surname, Philip decided on Mountbatten, the English version of his mother’s Battenberg.
The long-delayed engagement announcement came on July 9, 1947, followed by the happy couple’s introduction at a Buckingham Palace garden party the next day. Philip’s mother retrieved a tiara from a bank vault, and he used some of the diamonds to design an engagement ring created by Philip Antrobus, Ltd., a London jeweler. Several months later Philip was confirmed in the Church of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Just before his daughter’s wedding, the King gave his future son-in-law a collection of grand titles—Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, and Baron Greenwich—and decreed that he should be addressed as “His Royal Highness.” He would be called the Duke of Edinburgh, although he would continue to be known popularly as Prince Philip and would use his Christian name for his signature.
On November 18, the King and Queen had a celebratory ball at Buckingham Palace that dramatist Noël Coward called a “sensational evening Everyone looked shiny and happy.” Elizabeth and Philip were “radiant The whole thing was pictorially, dramatically and spiritually enchanting.” As was his habit, the King led a conga line through the staterooms of the palace, and the festivities ended after midnight. Philip was in charge of distributing gifts to his fiancée’s attendants: silver compacts in the Art Deco style with a gold crown above the bride’s and groom’s entwined initials and a row of five small cabochon sapphires. With typical insouciance, “he dealt them out like playing cards,” recalled Lady Elizabeth Longman, one of the two non-family members among the eight bridesmaids.
The morning of the wedding, two days later, Philip gave up smoking, a habit that had kept his valet, John Dean, “busy refilling the cigarette boxes.” But Philip knew how anguished Elizabeth was by her father’s addiction to cigarettes, so he stopped, according to Dean, “suddenly and apparently without difficulty.” Patricia Brabourne, who was also with her cousin that morning, said that Philip wondered if he was being “very brave or very foolish” by getting married, although not because he doubted his love for Lilibet. Rather, he worried that he would be relinquishing other aspects of his life that were meaningful. “Nothing was going to change for her,” his cousin recalled. “Everything was going to change for him.”
Outside Westminster Abbey, tens of thousands of spectators gathered in freezing temperatures to welcome the princess and her father in the Irish State Coach. Two thousand guests enjoyed the splendor of the 11:30 A.M. ceremony in the abbey, an event that Winston Churchill called “a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel.” Elizabeth’s dress, which had been designed by Norman Hartnell, was of pearl-and-crystal-encrusted ivory silk satin, with a 15-foot train held by the two five-year-old pages, Prince William of Gloucester and Prince Michael of Kent, who wore Royal Stewart tartan kilts and silk shirts. Her tulle veil was embroidered with lace and secured by Queen Mary’s diamond tiara, and Philip’s naval uniform glinted with his new Order of the Garter insignia pinned to his jacket. The Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, presided, telling the young couple that they should have “patience, a ready sympathy, and forbearance.”
After the hour-long service, the bride and groom led a procession down the nave that included the crowned heads of Norway, Denmark, Romania, Greece, and Holland. Noticeably absent was the King’s brother, former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, and his wife, for whom he had abdicated the throne. The estranged Windsors were living in Paris, unwelcome in London except for periodic visits. Although their exile may have seemed harsh, George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and their advisers had seen no alternative. A king and former king living in the same country would have resulted in two rival courts.
While the bells of the abbey pealed, Elizabeth and Philip were driven to Buckingham Palace in the Glass Coach, preceded and followed by two regiments of the Household Cavalry on horseback. It was the most elaborate public display since the war, and the crowds responded with ecstatic cheers.
As a concession to Britain’s hard times, only 150 guests attended the “wedding breakfast,” which was actually luncheon in the Ball Supper Room. The “austerity” menu featured filet de sole Mountbatten, perdreau en casserole, and bombe glacée Princess Elizabeth. The tables were decorated with pink and white carnations, as well as small keepsake bouquets of myrtle and white Balmoral heather at each place setting. The bride and groom cut the wedding cake—four tiers standing nine feet high—with Philip’s Mountbatten sword.
The King didn’t subject himself to the strain of making a speech, celebrating the moment instead with a raised glass of champagne to “the bride.” After being showered with rose petals in the palace forecourt, the newlyweds were transported in an open carriage drawn by four horses—“the bride snugly ensconced in a nest of hot-water bottles”—to Waterloo Station.
They spent a week at Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire, and two weeks in snowbound seclusion at Birkhall, an early-18th-century white stone lodge on the Balmoral estate, set in the woods on the banks of the river Muick. With its Victorian décor and memories of childhood summers before her parents became King and Queen, Elizabeth could relax in a place she considered home. Dressed in army boots and a sleeveless leather jacket lined with wool, she went deerstalking with her husband, feeling “like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles,” she wrote to Margaret Rhodes.
She also sent her parents tender letters thanking them for all they had given her, and the example they had set. “I only hope that I can bring up my children in the happy atmosphere of love and fairness which Margaret and I have grown up in,” she wrote, adding that she and her new husband “behave as though we had belonged to each other for years! Philip is an angel—he is so kind and thoughtful.” Philip revealed his carefully cloaked emotions when he wrote to his mother-in-law, “Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me.” He declared that his new wife was “the only ‘thing’ in this world which is absolutely real to me and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.”
A Sailor’s Wife
The honeymooners were back in London in time for the 52nd birthday of King George VI, on December 14, ready to begin their new life. They chose to live in Clarence House, the 19th-century residence adjacent to St. James’s Palace, just down the Mall from her parents. But the house needed extensive renovations, so they moved temporarily into an apartment in Buckingham Palace. Philip had a paper-pushing job at the Admiralty, to which he would walk on weekdays. Elizabeth was kept busy by her private secretary, John “Jock” Colville.
By May 1948, Elizabeth was four months pregnant, and behind closed doors was suffering from nausea. Even so, she and Philip kept up an active social life. They went to the races at Epsom and Ascot and joined friends at restaurants, nightclubs, and dances. For a costume party at Coppins, the home of the Duchess of Kent, Elizabeth dressed “in black lace, with a large comb and mantilla, as an Infanta,” wrote diarist Chips Channon, and “danced every dance until nearly 5 A.M.” Philip “was wildly gay,” Channon observed, in a “policeman’s hat and hand-cuffs. He leapt about and jumped into the air as he greeted everybody.”
When they were with friends such as Rupert and Camilla Nevill and John and Patricia Brabourne, the royal couple showed an easy affection toward each other. During a visit to the Brabournes in Kent, John said to Philip, “I never realized what lovely skin she has.” “Yes,” Philip replied, “she’s like that all over.”
In the early evening of November 14, 1948, word went out that Princess Elizabeth had gone into labor in her second-floor bedroom at Buckingham Palace, where a hospital suite had been prepared for the baby’s arrival. Philip passed the time playing squash with three courtiers. Senior members of the household gathered in the Equerry’s Room, a ground-floor drawing room that was equipped with a well-stocked bar, and shortly afterward were told that Elizabeth had given birth to a seven-pound-six-ounce son at 9:14. They set to work writing “Prince” on telegrams and calling the Home Office, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and Winston Churchill, the leader of the opposition. “I knew she’d do it!” exclaimed Commander Richard Colville, press secretary to the King, exultant over the arrival of a male heir. “She’d never let us down.”
Sir John Weir, one of the official physicians to the royal family, confided to Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary, Major Thomas Harvey, that he’d “never been so pleased to see a male organ in all his life.” Queen Elizabeth was “beaming with happiness,” and George VI was “simply delighted by the success of everything.” Philip, still dressed in sneakers and sports clothes, joined his wife as her anesthesia wore off, presented her with a bouquet of roses and carnations, and gave her a kiss.
Elizabeth and Philip named their son Charles Philip Arthur George. “I had no idea that one could be kept so busy in bed—there seems to be something happening all the time!,” Elizabeth wrote to her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge two weeks after giving birth. “I still find it hard to believe that I really have a baby of my own!” The new mother was particularly taken with her son’s “fine, long fingers—quite unlike mine and certainly unlike his father’s,” as she described them in a letter to her former music teacher, Mabel Lander. For nearly two months the princess breast-fed her son, until she fell ill with measles—one of several childhood diseases she had missed by being tutored at home rather than going to school with classmates—and Charles had to be sent away temporarily so that he wouldn’t catch the illness.
When the family moved into Clarence House, early in the summer of 1949, Elizabeth and Philip had adjacent, connecting bedrooms. “In England the upper class always have had separate bedrooms,” explained their cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten (later Hicks). “You don’t want to be bothered with snoring, or someone flinging a leg around. Then when you are feeling cozy you share your room sometimes. It is lovely to be able to choose.”
That October, Philip resumed active service when he was appointed first lieutenant and second-in-command of the destroyer H.M.S. Chequers, based on the small island nation of Malta, in the Mediterranean, which had been part of the British Empire since 1814 and served as an important shipping center and outpost for the Mediterranean Fleet. According to John Dean, the royal couple “were advised that conditions [in Malta] were not suitable for the infant Prince.” Elizabeth could have stayed in London with her son, but she decided instead to spend as much time as possible with her husband. She had been accustomed to long parental absences while she was growing up, so her decision to leave Charles wouldn’t have raised eyebrows. She had expert nannies in charge, not to mention her own parents, who were eager to keep their grandson company. Elizabeth would visit Malta for long stretches of time, returning at intervals to Clarence House.
She left six days after Charles’s first birthday, in time to join Philip for their second wedding anniversary. Beyond minimal royal obligations, Elizabeth was given unaccustomed freedom and anonymity. “I think her happiest time was when she was a sailor’s wife in Malta,” said Margaret Rhodes. “It was as nearly an ordinary a life as she got.” She socialized with other officers’ wives, went to the hair salon, chatted over tea, carried and spent her own cash—although shopkeepers “noticed that she was slow in handling money,” according to biographer Elizabeth Longford. The royal couple lived a significant cut above the ordinary, however, in Earl Mountbatten’s Villa Guardamangia, a spacious sandstone house built into a hill at the top of a narrow road, with romantic terraces, orange trees, and gardens. Dickie Mountbatten was commanding the First Cruiser Squadron, and his wife, Edwina, accompanied Elizabeth on her first flight to Malta.
Philip and Elizabeth spent Christmas of 1949 on the island, while their son stayed with his grandparents at Sandringham. After Chequers sailed out for duty in the Red Sea at the end of December, the princess flew back to England. She stopped first for several days in London, with a detour to Hurst Park to see her steeplechaser, Monaveen, win a race, before she was re-united with Charles in Norfolk after five weeks apart.
When Philip returned from naval maneuvers, Elizabeth rejoined him in Malta at the end of March 1950 for an idyllic six weeks. Much to Uncle Dickie’s delight, he and his wife spent a lot of time with the royal couple, exploring the island’s coves by boat, sunbathing, and picnicking. They cheered the Mountbattens’ younger daughter, Pamela, when she won the ladies’ race at the riding club, and in the evenings they went to the Phoenicia Hotel for dinner and dancing.
During these weeks, Elizabeth grew closer to the uncle who had taken such a prominent role in her husband’s life. He gave her a polo pony and went riding with her, encouraging her to perfect her skills at sidesaddle, which she “loathed,” recalled Pamela, “because she felt out of touch with the horse. She felt marooned up there and much preferred to ride astride.” But in part because of Uncle Dickie’s persistence, “she was a very good sidesaddle rider.”
Also at Dickie’s urging, Philip took up polo—“a very fast, very dangerous, very exciting game.” Elizabeth shrewdly advised him how to persuade her husband: “Don’t say anything. Don’t push it. Don’t nag. Just leave it alone.”
On May 9 she flew back to London, six months pregnant and ready to resume some of her royal duties. Jock Colville had left the household the previous autumn to return to the diplomatic corps, and his replacement was 36-year-old Martin Charteris, who was enraptured by the princess on their first meeting.
Elizabeth gave birth at Clarence House on August 15, 1950, at 11:50 A.M., to her second child, Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise. Philip had returned to London two weeks earlier, which gave him time to get re-acquainted with his 21-month-old son after almost a year away. But his first command, of the frigate H.M.S. Magpie—and a promotion to lieutenant commander—sent him back to Malta in early September. As she had with Charles, Elizabeth breast-fed her daughter for several months. She celebrated Charles’s second birthday and left shortly thereafter for Malta. Yet again the family was split at Christmas, with mother and father celebrating on their own while the children were at Sandringham with their grandparents, who unabashedly doted on them. Queen Elizabeth sent regular letters to her daughter, reporting Charles “giving himself an ecstatic hug,” Anne “so pretty & neat & very feminine,” and “Everybody loves them so, and they cheer us up more than I can say.”
But the couple’s time in the Mediterranean was coming to an end. King George VI had been in declining health since 1948, increasingly plagued by pain and numbness resulting from arteriosclerosis. In March 1949 he had undergone surgery to improve circulation in his legs. He continued to carry out his duties, but his appearance was gaunt, and by May 1951 he was seriously ill with a chronic cough that did not respond to treatment.
Elizabeth came home to stand in for her father at a variety of events, and Philip returned to London in July when it became clear that the royal couple would be needed full-time to represent the sovereign. He took an open-ended leave from the navy, but in effect the 30-year-old duke was ending his military career after only 11 months of enjoying the satisfaction of his own command—“the happiest of my sailor life.” Much later Philip would say philosophically, “I thought I was going to have a career in the Navy but it became obvious there was no hope… . There was no choice. It just happened. You have to make compromises. That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.”
In September, George VI had a biopsy that revealed a malignancy, and surgeons removed his left lung in a three-hour operation. The cancer diagnosis was not openly discussed and certainly not given out to the press, but the family understood the severity of the King’s condition.
From Heiress Presumptive to Queen
Elizabeth and Philip had been scheduled to leave for a state visit to Canada and the United States, which they postponed by two weeks until they were reassured that her father was in no imminent danger. They departed at midnight on October 8, 1951, and arrived 16 hours later in Montreal—the beginning of a 35-day trek of more than 10,000 miles to the Pacific and back.
The essential public routine that the royal couple would use over the decades took shape in those long days: Elizabeth was the restrained presence, her smiles tentative and infrequent, which prompted criticism in some press accounts. “My face is aching with smiling,” she complained to Martin Charteris when she heard the reports on her dour demeanor. Philip, always at a discreet distance behind, was already providing comic relief. Once, he went over the line, committing the first of his famous “gaffes” when he jokingly observed that Canada was “a good investment”—a remark that stuck in the Canadians’ craw for its neo-imperial implication.
The scope and pace of the trip were punishing. They made more than 70 stops, and on a single day in Ontario they visited eight towns. Through it all, Elizabeth worried about the health of her father. Philip tried to keep the atmosphere light, but he clearly found the journey stressful. “He was impatient. He was restless,” recalled Martin Charteris. “He hadn’t yet defined his role He was certainly very impatient with the old-style courtiers and sometimes, I think, felt that the Princess paid more attention to them than to him. He didn’t like that. If he called her a ‘bloody fool’ now and again, it was just his way. I think others would have found it more shocking than she did.”
For much of the trip, Philip wore his naval uniform, and Elizabeth favored discreetly tailored suits and close-fitting hats, as well as fur coats and capes. During their visit to Niagara Falls, they had to wear oilskin suits on the spray-lashed observation deck. Pulling her hood tight, Elizabeth exclaimed, “This will ruin my hair!”
Several weeks later, the royal couple boarded a plane for Washington and set foot on American soil for the first time on October 31. President Harry S. Truman observed that his daughter, Margaret, who had met the princess during a visit to England, “tells me when everyone becomes acquainted with you, they immediately fall in love with you.” The 67-year-old president counted himself among them, calling Elizabeth a “fairy princess.” Elizabeth enunciated every word of her reply, her high voice a model of cut-glass precision, proclaiming that “free men everywhere look towards the United States with affection and with hope.”
At a Rose Garden ceremony, the royal couple presented the Trumans with a mirror adorned with a painting of flowers, to be hung in the refurbished Blue Room as a “welcome ornament … a mark of our friendship.” Their visit ended with a white-tie dinner in honor of the Trumans at the Canadian Embassy.
They had a rough return trip across the North Atlantic aboard the Empress of Scotland. Only Elizabeth managed to avoid seasickness and show up regularly at mealtimes, and veteran sailor Philip was furious about his own weakness. On arrival at the Liverpool dockyards three days after Prince Charles’s third birthday, they boarded the Royal Train for London’s Euston Station. Waiting on the platform were Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and Prince Charles, who had not seen his parents in more than a month.
When the princess and duke stepped off the train, Elizabeth rushed to hug her mother and kiss her on both cheeks. For tiny Charles, she simply leaned down and gave him a peck on the top of his head before turning to kiss Margaret. “Britain’s heiress presumptive puts her duty first,” explained a newsreel announcer. “Motherly love must await the privacy of Clarence House.” Prince Philip was even less demonstrative, touching his son on the shoulder to indicate they should move along to the waiting limousines. As they passed through the station, Prince Charles was again with his grandmother, while his parents walked ahead.
After Christmas, the ailing King deputed Elizabeth and Philip to represent him on a long-planned six-month tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Ceylon. The couple decided to add several days in the beginning of the trip to visit the British colony of Kenya, which had given them a retreat at the foot of Mount Kenya called Sagana Lodge as a wedding gift. After settling into the lodge, Elizabeth and Philip spent a night at Treetops Hotel, a three-bedroom cabin built among the branches of a large fig tree above an illuminated salt lick in a game preserve. Dressed in khaki trousers and a bush scarf, Elizabeth excitedly filmed the animals with her movie camera. At sunset, she and Philip spotted a herd of 30 elephants. “Look, Philip, they’re pink!” she said, not realizing that the gray pachyderms had been rolling in pink dust.
Back at Sagana on the morning of February 6, the princess’s aides learned that the 56-year-old King had died from a blood clot in his heart. Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was now Queen, at age 25. When Philip was told, he muttered that it would be “the most appalling shock” for his wife, then walked into her bedroom and broke the news to her. She shed no tears, but looked “pale and worried.”
“What are you going to call yourself?” asked Martin Charteris as Elizabeth came to grips with the loss of her father. “My own name, of course. What else?” she replied. But some clarification was necessary, since her mother had been called Queen Elizabeth. The new monarch would be Queen Elizabeth II (following her 16th-century predecessor, Elizabeth I), but she would be known as the Queen. Her mother would become Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, rather than the fustier Dowager Queen. Elizabeth II would be Queen Regnant, and her royal cypher E II R.
“It was all very sudden,” she recalled four decades later. Her task, she said, was “kind of taking it on, and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing, and accepting the fact that here you are, and it’s your fate, because I think continuity is important.”
Dressed in a simple black coat and hat, she held her composure as she arrived at the airport in London near dusk on February 7, 1952, after a 19-hour flight. Waiting on the tarmac was a small delegation led by her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She slowly shook hands with each of them, and they gave her deep bows. A Daimler bearing the sovereign’s coat of arms on its roof drove her to Clarence House, where 84-year-old Queen Mary honored her by reversing roles, curtsying and kissing her hand, although she couldn’t help adding, “Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.”
The next day, the new Queen went to St. James’s Palace, where she appeared for 20 minutes before several hundred members of the Accession Council, a ceremonial body including the Privy Council—the principal advisory group to the monarch, drawn from senior ranks of politicians, the clergy, and the judiciary—along with other prominent officials from Britain and the Commonwealth. She had been monarch since the moment of her father’s death, but the council was convened to hear her proclamation and religious oath. She would not be crowned until her coronation, in 16 months, but she was fully empowered to carry out her duties as sovereign.
The men of the council bowed to the 40th monarch since William the Conqueror took the English throne after the Battle of Hastings, in 1066. Elizabeth II declared in a clear voice that “by the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty. My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are the world over.... I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.” As her husband escorted her out, she was in tears.
By April, the royal family had moved to Buckingham Palace, and the new Queen adapted to an office schedule that has scarcely varied throughout her reign. Adjusting to his position as the Queen’s consort proved troublesome for Philip. “For a real action man, that was very hard to begin with,” said Patricia Brabourne. While everything was mapped out for Elizabeth II, he had to invent his job under the scrutiny of her courtiers, and he had no role model to follow.
Prince Philip was still considered an outsider by some senior officials of the court. “Refugee husband,” he mockingly referred to himself. “Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles,” said John Brabourne. Much of the wariness stemmed from Philip’s closeness to Dickie Mountbatten. “My father was considered pink—very progressive,” Patricia Brabourne recalled. “The worry was that Prince Philip would bring into court modern ideas and make people uncomfortable.”
The Consort’s Role
The most hurtful rebuff had occurred in the days following the King’s death, after Queen Mary heard that Dickie Mountbatten had triumphantly announced that “the House of Mountbatten now reigned.” She and her daughter-in-law the Queen Mother were angered by his presumption, and the Queen shared their view that she should honor the allegiance of her grandfather and her father to the House of Windsor by keeping the Windsor name rather than taking that of her husband. Churchill and his Cabinet agreed. Philip responded with a memo to Churchill vigorously objecting to the prime minister’s advice and pressing instead for the House of Mountbatten, which was ironic. It was his mother’s family name, since his father had given him no surname.
The Queen failed to foresee that her actions would have a profound impact on Philip, leading to strains in their marriage. “She was very young,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Churchill was elderly and experienced, and she accepted his constitutional advice. I felt that if it had been later she would have been able to say, ‘I don’t agree.’ ”
“I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” Philip fumed to friends. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.” Dickie Mountbatten was even more outspoken, blaming “that old drunk Churchill” who “forced” the Queen’s position. The prime minister mistrusted and resented Earl Mountbatten, largely because as India’s last Viceroy, appointed by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he had presided over that country’s move to independence. “Churchill never forgave my father for ‘giving away India,’ ” said Patricia Brabourne.
Behind the scenes, Dickie continued a campaign to reverse the decision, with his nephew’s acquiescence. Meanwhile, Philip resolved to support his wife while finding his own niche, which would lead in the following decades to the active patronage of more than 800 different charities embracing sports, youth, wildlife conservation, education, and environmental causes.
Within the family, Philip also took over management of all the royal estates, to “save her a lot of time,” he said. But even more significantly, as Prince Charles’s official biographer Jonathan Dimbleby wrote in 1994, the Queen “would submit entirely to the father’s will” in decisions concerning their children.
She made Philip the ultimate domestic arbiter, Dimbleby wrote, because “she was not indifferent so much as detached.” Newspaper editor and Conservative politician William Deedes saw in Elizabeth’s detachment “her struggle to be a worthy head of state, which was a heavy burden for her. The Queen in her own quiet way is immensely kind, but she had too little time to fulfill her family care. I find it totally understandable, but it led to problems.”
Following her coronation, on June 2, 1953, the Queen turned her full attention to an ambitious five-and-a-half-month world tour covering 43,000 miles, from Bermuda to the Cocos Islands, by plane and ship. It was her first extended trip as sovereign, and the first time a British monarch had circled the globe.
Five-year-old Prince Charles and three-year-old Princess Anne spoke to the Queen and Prince Philip by radiotelephone, but otherwise news of their progress came in regular letters from the Queen Mother, who had them for weekends at Royal Lodge, her house in Windsor Great Park. Just as Elizabeth and Margaret had followed their parents’ travels on maps, Prince Charles traced his parents’ route on a globe in his nursery.
The crowds everywhere were enormous and enthusiastic. Masses of welcoming boats jammed Sydney Harbor, and by one count, three-quarters of Australia’s population came out to see the Queen. At age 27 she was hailed as the “world’s sweetheart.” But the royal couple refused to let their celebrity go to their heads. “The level of adulation, you wouldn’t believe it,” Philip recalled. “It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.”
The Duke of Edinburgh also helped his wife stay on an even keel when she became frustrated after endless hours of making polite conversation. Meeting and greeting thousands of people at receptions and garden parties actually gave her a temporary facial tic. But when she was watching a performance or a parade, and her face was in repose, she looked grumpy, even formidable. As the Queen herself once ruefully acknowledged, “The trouble is that, unlike my mother, I don’t have a naturally smiley face.” From time to time, Philip would jolly his wife. “Don’t look so sad, Sausage,” he said during an event in Sydney. Or he might provoke a grin by reciting Scripture at odd moments, once inquiring sotto voce, “What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep?”
At Tobruk, in Libya, the Queen and Prince Philip transferred to Britannia, the new, 412-foot royal yacht with a gleaming deep-blue hull, which they had designed together with architect Sir Hugh Casson. For its maiden voyage, Britannia took Prince Charles and Princess Anne to be re-united with their parents in early May 1954 for the first time in nearly half a year. The Queen was pleased that she would be seeing her children earlier than she had anticipated, but she worried that they wouldn’t know their parents.
Still, when the moment came and the Queen was piped aboard, her strict control and conformity to protocol prevailed as it had when she met her son after her Canada trip. “No, not you, dear,” she said as she greeted dignitaries first, then shook the five-year-old’s extended hand. The private reunion was warm and affectionate as Charles showed his mother all around the yacht, where he had been living for more than a week. The Queen told her mother how happy she was to be with her “enchanting” children again. They had both “gravely offered us their hands,” she wrote, “partly I suppose because they were somewhat overcome by the fact that we were really there and partly because they have met so many new people recently! However the ice broke very quickly and we have been subjected to a very energetic routine and innumerable questions which have left us gasping!”
In the autumn of 1957, the royal couple set off for their second trip to the United States, a state visit hosted by the 67-year-old president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, with whom the Queen had an affectionate relationship that dated back to World War II, when he was in London as supreme allied commander. Unlike the Queen’s lightning visit in 1951, this would be a full-dress affair: six days in Washington, New York, and Jamestown, Virginia, where she would celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the first British colony in America.
After a day-long visit to Williamsburg and Jamestown on October 16, the royal couple flew to Washington on Eisenhower’s aircraft, the Columbine III, a swift and sleek propeller plane with four powerful engines. As they waited to take off, Philip immersed himself in a newspaper while Elizabeth unlocked her monogrammed leather writing case and began writing postcards to her children. “Philip?” she suddenly said. Her husband kept reading. “Philip!” she repeated. He glanced up, startled. “Which engines do they start first on a big plane like this?” Her husband looked momentarily perplexed. “Come on now,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t wait until they actually start them, Philip!” He offered a guess, which turned out to be correct. (They went in sequence, first on one wing from the inner engine to the outer, then the inner followed by the outer on the other wing.) “He was flustered,” recalled Ruth Buchanan, wife of Wiley T. Buchanan Jr., Eisenhower’s chief of protocol, who sat nearby. “It was so like what an ordinary wife would do when her husband wasn’t paying attention.”
Riding into the capital with the president and his wife, Mamie, in a bubbletop limousine, accompanied by 16 bands, they were cheered along the route into Washington by more than a million people, who were undaunted by intermittent rain showers. The royal couple spent their four nights in the most elegant guest quarters in the recently renovated White House—the Rose Suite, furnished in Federal style, for the Queen, and the Lincoln Bedroom for the Duke of Edinburgh.
Much of the visit was given over to the usual receptions, formal dinners at the White House and British Embassy (complete with gold plates flown over from Buckingham Palace), and tours of local sights. It was evident to Ruth Buchanan that the Queen was “very certain, and very comfortable in her role She was very much in control of what she did, although she did laugh at my husband’s jokes.” Once, when Buchanan was waiting for her husband to escort the royal couple to their limousine, “I could hear her guffawing. You didn’t realize she had that hearty laugh. But the minute she rounded the corner and saw us, she just straightened up.”
Vice President Richard Nixon treated the royal couple to a luncheon with 96 guests in the orchid-bedecked Old Supreme Court Chamber, in the Capitol. Elizabeth had specifically asked to see an American football “match,” so the White House arranged for her to sit in a “royal box” at the 50-yard line at the University of Maryland’s Byrd Stadium for a game against the University of North Carolina. On the way she spotted a Giant supermarket and asked if a visit might be arranged so she “could see how American housewives shop for food.”
To the cheers of 43,000 spectators, the Queen walked onto the field to chat with two opposing players. Dressed in a $15,000 mink coat given to her by the Mutation Mink Breeders Association, a group of American fur farmers, she watched the game intently but seemed “perturbed” whenever the players threw blocks. While the royal pair was being entertained at halftime, security men raced back to the supermarket to arrange for a royal visit on the fly. After Maryland’s 21–7 victory, the motorcade arrived at the Queenstown Shopping Center at five P.M., to the amazement of hundreds of shoppers. Elizabeth and Philip had never before seen a supermarket, a phenomenon then unknown in Britain.
With the curiosity of anthropologists and an informality they had not displayed publicly in Britain, they spent 15 minutes shaking hands, quizzing customers, and inspecting the contents of shopping carts. “How nice that you can bring your children along,” said Elizabeth, nodding toward the little seat in one housewife’s cart. She took a particular interest in frozen chicken pot pies, while Philip nibbled on sample crackers with cheese and joked, “Good for mice!”
An exuberant welcome awaited them in New York City. The Queen had asked specifically to see Manhattan “as it should be approached,” from the water, a vista she had been dreaming about since childhood. “Wheeeee!” she exclaimed as she caught her first glimpse of the Lower Manhattan skyline from the deck of a U.S. Army ferryboat. A crowd of 1.25 million lined the streets from Battery Park to City Hall and northward to the Waldorf-Astoria for their ticker-tape parade.
She had only 15 hours in the city to fulfill her wish list and shake some 3,000 hands. Wearing a dark-blue satin cocktail dress and close-fitting pink velvet hat, she addressed the representatives of 82 countries at the United Nations General Assembly. At the conclusion of her six-minute speech, the audience of 2,000 responded with “a thunderous standing ovation.” During a reception with delegates, Philip talked to Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko about the recently launched Sputnik satellite.
The royal couple were fêted at two meals at the Waldorf: a luncheon for 1,700 hosted by Mayor Robert Wagner and a dinner for 4,500 given by the English-Speaking Union and the Pilgrims of the United States. In between, the Queen took in the “tremendous” view from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building at twilight—another specific request. As the white-tie banquet began, in the Grand Ballroom, the punishing schedule was beginning to take its toll, even on an energetic 31-year-old Queen. The New York Times noted that her speech was the “one time during the program … when the fatigue showed through … She made no effort to force a smile … and although she stumbled over her text only once, her voice plainly showed it.”
Her final stop that night was a Royal Commonwealth ball for another 4,500 guests at the Seventh Regiment Armory, on Park Avenue. One aviator blinded in World War I tried to get up from his wheelchair to greet her. “She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and told him that he should not rise,” recalled Wiley Buchanan. “She spoke to him for several moments, then moved on.”
“You both have captivated the people of our country by your charm and graciousness,” Eisenhower wrote in his farewell letter to the royal couple.
Happy Ever Since
After a hiatus of six years, the 31-year-old monarch was keen to have more children, as was her husband. Dickie Mountbatten blamed the delay on Philip’s anger over the Queen’s rejection of his family name after the accession. But by her own account, she had postponed her dream of having a large family primarily because she wanted to concentrate on establishing herself as an effective monarch.
During a visit to Buckingham Palace in 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt met with Elizabeth for nearly an hour the day after Prince Charles had undergone a tonsillectomy. The former First Lady found her to be “just as calm and composed as if she did not have a very unhappy little boy on her mind.” Elizabeth reported that Charles had already been fed ice cream to soothe his painful throat, yet it was 6:30 in the evening, and she was compelled to entertain the widow of a former U.S. president rather than sit at the bedside of her eight-year-old son.
While the Queen certainly loved her children, she had fallen into professional habits that kept her apart from them much of the time. They benefited from nurturing nannies and a doting grandmother. But because of her dogged devotion to duty, amplified by her natural inhibitions and aversion to confrontation, Elizabeth had missed out on many maternal challenges as well as satisfactions.
In May 1959, after Philip’s return from a four-month goodwill tour aboard Britannia, Elizabeth got pregnant at last. Once she hit the six-month mark, she withdrew from her official duties. But one bit of unfinished business needed to be resolved. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited her at Sandringham in early January 1960, she told him that she needed to revisit the issue of her family name, which had been irritating her husband since she decided in 1952 to use Windsor rather than Mountbatten. “The Queen only wishes (properly enough) to do something to please her husband—with whom she is desperately in love,” the prime minister wrote in his diary. “What upsets me … is the Prince’s almost brutal attitude to the Queen over all this.” Somewhat cryptically he added, “I shall never forget what she said to me that Sunday night at Sandringham.”
Macmillan left shortly afterward for a trip to Africa, leaving the resolution of the Queen’s tricky family problem to Rab Butler, his deputy prime minister, and Lord Kilmuir, who served as the government’s legal arbiter as the lord chancellor. Butler sent a telegram to Macmillan in Johannesburg on January 27, saying that the Queen had “absolutely set her heart” on making a change for Philip’s sake. By one account, Butler confided to a friend that Elizabeth had been “in tears.”
Following discussions among her private secretaries and government ministers, a formula emerged in which the royal family would continue to be called “the House and Family of Windsor,” but the Queen’s “de-royalised” descendants—starting with any grandchildren who lacked the designation of “royal highness”—would adopt the surname “Mountbatten-Windsor.” Those in the immediate line of succession, including all of the Queen’s children, would continue to be called “Windsor.” It seemed clear-cut, but 13 years later Princess Anne, at the urging of Dickie and Prince Charles, would contravene the policy on her wedding day by signing the marriage register as “Mountbatten-Windsor.”
Elizabeth announced the compromise in a statement on February 8, 1960, saying, “The Queen has had this in mind for a long time and it is close to her heart.” On February 19, at 33, she gave birth to her second son. In a gesture of wifely devotion, Elizabeth named the boy Andrew, after the father Philip had lost 15 years earlier.
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Who found the remains of the Titanic? | The 'Titanic' Discovery: A Brief History - TIME
The Titanic Discovery
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Ralph White / CORBIS
On Sept. 1, 1985, underwater explorer Robert Ballard located the world's most famous shipwreck. The Titanic lay largely intact at a depth of 12,000 ft. off the coast of St. John's, Newfoundland
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Almost 25 years to the day after the R.M.S. Titanic was discovered two and a half miles below the surface of the Atlantic, an expedition to the ocean floor has transmitted brand new images of history's most famous shipwreck. Legendary before it was found, the Titanic became even more so after the world caught its first glance of the ghostly ship, which met its end in April 1912. After years of speculation and educated guesses that had turned up nothing but empty ocean, researchers located the deteriorating bow and debris field on Sept. 1, 1985.
Explorer Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and former Navy captain, had long wanted to find the wreck, first attempting the feat in 1977 to no avail. But it wasn't until 1985 that he would find a way to finance his research. Ballard approached the U.S. Navy for funding, which he secured on the condition of locating two sunken Navy submarines the U.S.S. Thresher and U.S.S. Scorpion, both Cold Warera nuclear submarines lost some years before. He was required to first find the submarines on the seafloor and photograph them (a secret mission that Ballard didn't reveal until 2008) before using the underwater robots to search for the Titanic. In the early hours of Sept. 1, Ballard, in conjunction with a French expedition, tracked a debris trail to the wreckage. Video and photographs were taken and later broadcast to the world.
(Read an interview with two Titanic wreck divers.)
A year after the remains of the Titanic were discovered, more oceanographers went to explore the sections of bow and stern and the extensive debris field that lay between the two. In 1993, the company RMS Titanic Inc. (formed by Premier Exhibitions, which designs museum exhibitions and maintains artifacts) was named salvor-in-possession of the wreck, gaining the rights to collect found artifacts and launch expeditions to the ship. They did so seven times between 1986 and 2004, collecting over 5,500 artifacts ranging from china dishes to leather trunks filled with preserved bank notes. A section of the debris field even became known as "hell's kitchen" for the overwhelming amount of cooking utensils found there. Through photographs taken on subsequent trips, the company was able to reconstruct images of the grand staircase, later made famous (as were all things Titanic) by James Cameron's blockbuster film.
The largest discovery was that of a 17-ton section of the hull. An attempt to raise it in 1996 failed when the hull was accidentally dropped back onto the muddy bottom. Two years later, the section was successfully taken to the surface and is now part of traveling exhibits across the country. The piece was temporarily displayed alongside a 16-ft. frozen aluminum block meant to represent an iceberg. Although observers couldn't touch the rusted metal, they were encouraged to hold onto the ice until they could no longer stand it, though "the people in the water that night didn't have that choice," John Zaller of Premier Exhibitions told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Many argue that collecting items from the wreckage violates a sacred resting ground and that all the disturbances are causing the ship to deteriorate faster than it would if left alone. Others blame the multimillion-dollar expeditions with their robots that land on deck and probe into small spaces for causing regular and unnecessary damage. But those same expeditions have dispelled some of the myths surrounding what actually happened that night almost 100 years ago. Scientists recently discovered that the compartments were flooded due to several punctures (each less than a foot tall) in the hull, not one long gash as was originally believed. Regardless, time is running out for researchers, some of whom claim the wreck will not exist 50 years from now. As such, the new photographs come courtesy of a new group that is attempting to "virtually raise" the wreck in order to build a 3-D image before the ship disintegrates entirely. Ironically, the act of discovering the Titanic may be the thing that results in its final destruction.
| Robert Ballard |
Who was the only Spice Girl not to have a middle name? | RMS Titanic is found by Dr Robert Ballad
1st September 1985
In the 1980s Dr. Robert Ballard was determined to discover the Titanic. On several occasions he tried to rally an expedition to find the most famous shipwreck of all time. To him undersea exploration was easy but the Titanic, deep on the Atlantic sea bed would push boundaries further than any deep sea diver had previously gone.
Equipment had to be specially designed to withstand the water pressures of the depths they needed to explore. The Titanic would lay at a depth over 13,000 feet.
In 1973, the submersible Alvin went through design changes. Inparticular, her steel hull was replaced with titanium alloy which could better withstand the depths involved.
Eventually funding was granted from Woods Hole and equipment was borrowed from various sources that included a side scan sonar, a deep-towed magnetometer, an LIBEC imaging system and of course underwater cameras.
The Titanic's distress signal placed the Titanic at 41°46'N, 50° 14' west. Part of the British Enquiry was to ascertain if this was exact. It concluded that the position given was slightly inaccurate as the Carpathia, who raced to the Titanic's rescue, reached the lifeboats before they should have done if the position was accurate.
Ballard's search strategy was simply: they would scan the ocean floor within a best search triangle until they found the ship.
Earlier in 1981 Jack Grimm led a team to find the ship, positive that they were searching the exact spot the ship foundered - they had not. Revised calculations suggested that the Titanic was eight miles further north than previously thought. They allowed for the speed of the lifeboats and the probable drift Titanic would have had on her way both after she had stopped and then down to the bottom of the ocean.
After reworking these calculations, a second 1981 expedition failed again. The Deep-tow passed within a mile and a half of the wreck but the sonar scanners were out of range. After three weeks of searching Grimm was convinced he had found one of Titanic's propellers. He began to tell the world that Titanic had been found.
Two years later Grimm wanted to search the area again but the expedition failed. Ballard who had followed the expeditions with great interest realised that Grimm had not spent enough time looking for the ship. It was now Ballard's turn.
Ballard had a realisation which led him to develop the Argo/Jason concept. When assembled they were a remote controlled deep towed deep sea video vessel combined with a swimming robot on a cable leash. The name of the project was derived form Greek mythology (Jason and the Argonauts).
Argo would be an unmanned submarine loaded with video cameras towed above the ocean bottom at the end of fibre-optical wires. The built in sonar could scan accurately the ocean floor for small debris.
In 1984 the US Navy agreed to fund a three week test for the following summer and Argo was built.
Aboard the Knorr, Ballard sailed to where he believed the Titanic sank. He hoped that his French colleagues had not beaten him to the wreck. However, by the end three weeks he had not found the ship and on August 6 1985 headed home.
Lateral thinking
When a ship it sinks it leaves a path of debris (objects from within the ship or objects breaking off). Depending how deep the vessel sinks this debris can be scattered over a large distance. On a shorter descent, the debris falls more or less vertically. However, as the Titanic sank 21/2 miles a huge debris field was expected.
A new search strategy was formed. This time they would first look for the debris field rather than the Titanic herself.
The logbook of the Californian enabled Ballard and his crew to estimate the speed and direction of drift of the lifeboats. The Californian was between five to ten miles away from the Titanic at the time of the disaster and reported in its log that they had experienced drift. Also Ballard knew that the Titanic had to be north of where the lifeboats were found.
On August 24 1985 Ballard returned to the vacinity of the Titanic. He had 12 days to locate the wreck. Argo was launched the next day but encountered technical problems. After another six days, the crew was fed up with the monotiny of observing sand, mud and the bottomless ocean.
But on the 1st September 1985 a strange appeared on the Video monitors. A BOILER!!!
The RMS Titanic had to be near.
New hopes were realised. Argo was launched to scan the search area for the Titanic. Eventually at an altitude of 160 feet above the bed, Argo passed over the main hull of the ship. They could see that the funnel had gone (the one which Lightoller recalled saved his life when it tore out of its fixtures moments before the ship went down).
Their first look at the Titanic lasted six minutes: she was upright and a large section of her hull was in tact. She laid 13,000 feet below the surface.
Following much the cheering and clapping, reverential silence overcame the crew of the Knorr. It was almost 2 a.m. and very close to the time when the Titanic actually sank. Argo was used to photograph the wreck during the many passages made over her.
Soon news that the Titanic had been found had reached the corners of the world. Once more the RMS Titanic was in the minds of millions of people.
EXPLORATION OF THE TITANIC
Day 1
On July 13th 1986 another Ballard expedition was underway to explore the Titanic in more detail.
Jason Junior (JJ) would be used to video the Titanic. JJ would be operated on a long cable attached to Alvin which contained three crew who would steer JJ.
Day 2
After a short lived dive due to battery failure, a second dive proved highly successful.
Apparently from nowhere, the razor sharp bow of the Titanic came into view. Both anchors were still in place. It appeared that the bow was buried more than 60 foot in the mud.
Ballard described the decaying metal as "frozen rivers of rust covering the ships' side and spread out over the ocean floor."
As Alvin moved across the forward deck, the giant bollards and capstans were clearly visible although the wires and ropes once connected to them were gone. The wooden floor had been eaten away.
The expedition continued to the severed section of the intact bow section. A sudden strong current stopped the trip and Alvin was forced to head to the surface.
Day 3
JJ traversed the Grand Staircase, which at one time had been covered by a glass dome. Whatever JJ saw, Alvin's crew saw too. A Chandelier had survived the journey to the bottom of the sea. JJ's maiden voyage was a total success.
Day 4
The team visited Captain Smith's cabin to find its outer walls collapsed to a heap on the deck. Next, JJ explored the Gym where pieces of equipment could be seen in amongst the rubble. Metal frames from the electric camel were also intact.
Day 5
The debris field spans nearly 2000 feet between the two sections of the Titanic. The debris includes lumps of coal, wrought-iron deck benches, baths, crockery and other bric-a-brac.
Another boiler was found with an iron cup sitting peacefully on top of it. A safe was found on the ocean floor proudly showing off its brass handle. Ballard tried to open the safe but the door would not open to reveal its contents.
Day 6
It was clear from the debris field that the torn-off stern section had been badly damaged during its journey to the bottom and now lay 1,970 feet from the bow section.
Ballard's next plan lead Alvin along the bottom of the ocean bed directly behind the stern section and sent JJ to examine the hull. He found that the stern section was also buried deep beneath the mud, probably to a depth of 45 feet. Both middle and starboard side propellers were under the mud.
Before leaving the wreck, Ballard placed a memorial plaque on the stern in memory of those who lost their lives on that fateful night.
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