The Swabian War of 1499 ( (spelling depending on dialect), called  or  ("Swiss War") in Germany and  ("War of the Engadin") in Austria) was the last major armed conflict between the Old Swiss Confederacy and the House of Habsburg. What had begun as a local conflict over the control of the Val Müstair and the Umbrail Pass in the Grisons soon got out of hand when both parties called upon their allies for help; the Habsburgs demanding the support of the Swabian League, while the Federation of the Three Leagues of the Grisons turning to the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft. Hostilities quickly spread from the Grisons through the Rhine valley to Lake Constance and even to the Sundgau in southern Alsace, the westernmost part of the Habsburg region of Further Austria.

Many battles were fought from January to July 1499, and in all but a few minor skirmishes, the experienced Swiss soldiers defeated the Swabian and Habsburg armies. After their victories in the Burgundian Wars, the Swiss had battle tested troops and commanders. On the Swabian side, distrust between the knights and their foot soldiers, disagreements amongst the military leadership, and a general reluctance to fight a war that even the Swabian counts considered to be more in the interests of the powerful Habsburgs than in the interest of the Holy Roman Empire proved fatal handicaps. When his military high commander fell in the battle of Dornach, where the Swiss won a final decisive victory, Emperor Maximilian I had no choice but to agree to a peace treaty signed on September 22, 1499, in Basel. The treaty granted the Confederacy far-reaching independence from the empire. Although the Eidgenossenschaft officially remained a part of the empire until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the peace of Basel exempted it from the imperial jurisdiction and imperial taxes and thus de facto acknowledged it as a separate political entity.

Background
One source of conflict was the ancient distrust, rivalry, and hostility between the Old Swiss Confederacy and the House of Habsburg, which had risen to the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor since 1438. Since the late 13th century, the members of the Swiss Confederacy had gradually taken control of territories that once had belonged to the Habsburg realm. The Swiss had attained the status of imperial immediacy, being subject only to the emperor himself, and not to any intermediate Princes or liege lords. This status granted them a far-reaching autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire, even more so as the emperor was a distant overlord. Before 1438, the empire and the emperor had been an antipole to the Habsburg dukes for the Swiss. Previous emperors had repeatedly supported the confederates in their struggles against the Habsburgs, whom they saw as strong rivals. They had confirmed the Imperial immediacy of the Swiss on several occasions; and the Swiss had succeeded in defending their privileged status against Habsburg dukes who had tried to regain their former territories.

Habsburgs in the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century

When Frederick III of Habsburg ascended to the throne, the Swiss suddenly faced a new situation in which they could no longer count on support from the empire. Worse yet, conflicts with the Habsburg dukes threatened to become conflicts with the empire itself. Under Frederick's reign, this did not occur yet. Frederick had sided in 1442 against the confederacy in the Old Zürich War where he had supported the city of Zürich, and he also refused to reconfirm the imperial immediacy of the members of the Confederacy. But Frederick's troubled reign did not leave room for military operations against the Swiss. In Austria, Frederick was in conflict first with his brother Albert and then faced the pressure of Matthias Corvinus, who even drove him from Vienna and forced Frederick's court to assume an itinerant lifestyle.

In the empire, Frederick faced the opposition of the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty and of his cousin Sigismund, who was duke in Tyrol, Vorarlberg, and Further Austria then. Sigismund had been in conflict with the Swiss Confederacy, too. When he had been banned by Pope Pius II in a conflict over the nomination of a bishop in Tyrol, the Swiss had annexed the formerly Habsburg territories of the Thurgau. In 1468, Sigismund clashed with the Swiss in the War of Waldshut, which he could end without significant territorial losses only by paying a large ransom, which he financed by pawning territories in the Sundgau and the Alsace to Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1469. Charles did not, however, help Sigismund against the Swiss, and so Sigismund bought back the territories in 1474 and concluded a peace treaty with the Confederacy, the Ewige Richtung, although the emperor never recognized it. In the following Burgundy Wars, the Swiss and Sigismund both fought against Charles the Bold.

In 1487, Sigismund arranged the marriage of Frederick's daughter Kunigunde to Duke Albert IV of Bavaria against her father's will, and he also signed away some of his territories in Tyrol and Further Austria to Albert IV. Frederick intervened by force: he founded the Swabian League in 1488, an alliance of the Swabian cities, the Swabian knights of the League of St. George's Shield and the counts of Württemberg and Tyrol and Vorarlberg. With their help, he forced the Wittelsbach house to return the territories signed over by Sigismund.

In 1490, Sigismund was forced to abdicate and turn over all his territories to Frederick's son Maximilian I. Maximilian had married Mary of Burgundy in 1477 after the death of Charles the Bold in the Burgundy Wars and thus inherited the Burgundian territories: the Duchy of Burgundy, the County of Burgundy (Franche-Comté) and the Netherlands. He took over and expanded the Burgundian administration with a more centralized style of government, which in 1482, caused the outbreak of a rebellion of the cities and counts, allied with Charles VIII of France, against Maximilian. The Duchy of Burgundy was also a French fiefdom and immediately claimed by Charles VIII. The first phase of this conflict would last until 1489, keeping Maximilian occupied in the Low Countries. He even fell into the hands of his enemies and was held prisor for four months in Bruges in 1488. He was freed only when his father sent an army under the command of Duke Albert of Saxony to his rescue. Maximilian subsequently returned to Germany, leaving his cousin Albert as his representative. Albert would, in the following years, manage to assert the Habsburg hegemony in the Netherlands.

Maximilian had been elected King of the Romans in 1486 on his father's initiative, and they had been ruling jointly since then. Upon the death of Frederick in 1493, Maximilian also took over his father's possessions and thus united the whole Habsburg territory in his hands. In the same year, the Peace of Senlis also marked the end of his wars against the French about his Burgundian possessions; he kept the territories in the Netherlands and also the County of Burgundy, but had to cede the Duchy of Burgundy to the French king. Maximilian controlled thus territories that nearly encircled the Old Swiss Confederacy: Tyrol and Vorarlberg in the east, Further Austria in the north, and the County of Burgundy in the west.

Swabia and the Swiss
When asked by Emperor Frederick to also join the Swabian League, the Eidgenossen flatly refused: they saw no reason to join an alliance designed to further Habsburg interests, and they were wary of this new, relatively closely knit and powerful alliance that had arisen on their northern frontier. Furthermore, they resented the strong aristocratic element in the Swabian League, so different from their own organization, which had grown over the last two hundred years liberating themselves from precisely such an aristocratic rule.

On the Swabian side, similar concerns existed. For the common people in Swabia, the independence and freedom of the Eidgenossen was a powerful and attractive role model. Many a baron in southern Swabia feared that his own subjects might revolt and seek adherence to the Swiss Confederacy. These fears were not entirely without foundation: the Swiss had begun to form alliances north of the Rhine river, concluding a first treaty with Schaffhausen in 1454 and then also treaties with cities as far away as Rottweil (1463) and Mulhouse (1466).

The city of Constance and its bishop were caught in the middle between these two blocks: they held possessions in Swabia, but the city also still exercised the high justice over the Thurgau, where the Swiss had assumed the low justice since the annexation in 1460. The foundation of the Swabian League prompted the Swiss city states of Zürich and Bern to propose accepting Constance into the Swiss Confederacy. The negotiations failed, though, due to the opposition of the founding cantons of the Confederacy and Uri in particular. The split jurisdiction over the Thurgau was the cause of many quarrels between the city and the Confederacy. In 1495, one such disagreement was answered by a punitive expedition of soldiers of Uri and the city had to pay the sum of 3,000 guilders to make them retreat and cease their plundering. (The Thurgau was a condominium of the Swiss Confederacy, and Uri was one of the cantons involved in its administration.) Finally, Constance joined the Swabian League as a full member on November 3, 1498. Although this did not yet definitively define the position of the city—during the Reformation, it would be allied again with Zürich and Bern, and only after the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League in 1548 its close connections to the Eidgenossenschaft would be finally severed—it was another factor contributing to the growing estrangement between the Swiss and the Swabians.

The competition between Swiss (Reisläufer) and Swabian mercenaries (Landsknechte), who both fought in armies throughout Europe, sometimes opposing each other on the battlefield, sometimes competing for contracts, intensified. Contemporary chronicles agree in their reports that the Swiss, who were considered the best soldiers in Europe at the time after their victories in the Burgundian Wars, were subject to many taunts and abuses by the Landsknechte; they were called "Kuhschweizer" and ridiculed in other ways. Such insults were neither given nor taken lightly, and frequently led to bloodshed. Indeed, such incidents would contribute to prolong the Swabian War itself by triggering skirmishes and looting expeditions that the military commands of neither side had ever wanted or planned.

Imperial reform of 1495

Maximilian I, like other Holy Roman Emperors before and after him, had to face struggles with other powerful princes in the empire and he thus sought to secure his position and the imperial monarchy by furthering centralisation. At the Imperial Diet held in Worms in 1495, the emperor and princes joined force to proclaim an "eternal public peace" (Ewiger Landfriede) to put an end to the abounding feuds and the anarchy of the robber barons and it defined a new standing Imperial Army to defend the Reich, to which each imperial estate (Reichsstand) would have had to send troops. It also mandated the common penny (Reichspfennig), a new head tax to finance this army and other institutions, although this tax never became viable during Maximilian's reign.

The Swiss did not accept these resolutions of the Imperial Diet, and they explicitly refused to pay the common penny. They had no interest whatsoever in sending troops to serve in an army under Habsburg authority, nor in paying taxes, nor would they accept any foreign court's jurisdiction; and they had succeeded in securing public peace within their territories reasonably well by themselves. They simply considered the whole proposal a curtailing of their freedom. The Swiss were by far not the only members of the empire who refused to accept the resolutions, but Maximilian would use their refusal later as a pretext to place the Swiss Confederacy under an imperial ban (Reichsacht).

Course of the war

Open war broke out over a territorial conflict in the Grisons, where during the 15th century a federation similar to the Eidgenossenschaft had developed. Like the Swiss, these Three Leagues had achieved a far-reaching autonomy, but also were involved in constant struggles with the Habsburgs, who ruled the neighbouring territories to the east and who kept trying to bring the Grisons under their influence. During the 1470s and 1480s, Duke Sigismund had succeeded in acquiring step by step the high justice over most of the communes of the Zehngerichtebund ("League of the Ten Jurisdictions" in the Prättigau, the youngest of the Three Leagues that had sprung up in the Grisons, having been founded only in 1436), and Maximilian continued this expansionist strategy. The Habsburg pressure prompted the Three Leagues to sign a close military alliance with the Swiss Confederacy in 1497–98.

At the same time, the Habsburgs had been involved in a major power struggle with the French kings of the House of Valois over the control of the remains of the realm of Charles the Bold, whose daughter and heiress Mary Maximilian had married. Maximilian's second marriage in 1493 with Bianca Maria Sforza from Milan then got the Habsburgs directly involved in the Italian Wars, clashing again with the French kings over the control of the Duchy of Milan.

As a direct connection between Tyrol and Milan, the Grisons and in particular the Val Müstair became strategically important to the Habsburgs. The Umbrail Pass in the Val Müstair connects the Vinschgau valley (Val Venosta) in southern Tyrol with the Valtellina in northern Italy. Furthermore, the Habsburgs and the Bishop of Chur had been quarrelling over the judicial rights over the region for some time. On January 20, 1499, Habsburg troops occupied the valley and plundered the Benedictine Convent of Saint John at Müstair, but were soon driven back by the forces of the Three Leagues, and an armistice was signed already on February 2 in Glurns (Glorenza), a village in the upper Vinschgau.

But the Three Leagues had already called upon the Swiss for help and troops from Uri had already arrived in Chur. Upon learning about the truce, they withdrew, but met a small troop of Habsburg soldiers on their way back home. When those engaged in the usual insults on the Swiss, the latter crossed the Rhine and killed the scoffers. In retaliation, Habsburg troops sacked the village of Maienfeld on February 7 and called the Swabian League for help. Only five days later, Swiss troops from several cantons had been assembled and reconquered the village and moved towards Lake Constance, pillaging and plundering along the way. On February 20, they again met a Habsburg army, which they defeated in the Battle of Hard on the shores of Lake Constance near the estuary of the Rhine, and at about the same time, other Swiss troops invaded the Hegau region between Schaffhausen and Constance. On both sites, the Swiss retreated after a few days.

Meanwhile, the Swabian League had completed its recruitment, and undertook a raid on Dornach on March 22, but suffered a defeat against numerically inferior Swiss troops in the Battle of Bruderholz that same evening. In early April, both sides raided each other's territories along the Rhine; the Swiss conquered the villages of Hallau and Neunkirch in the Klettgau west of Schaffhausen. A larger attack of the Swabian League took place on April 11, 1499: the Swabian troops occupied and plundered some villages on the southern shore of Lake Constance, just south of Constance. The expedition ended in a shameful defeat and open flight when the Swiss soldiers, who had their main camp just a few miles south at Schwaderloh, arrived and met the Swabians in the Battle of Schwaderloh. The Swabians lost more than 1,000 soldiers; 130 from the city of Constance alone; and the Swiss captured their heavy equipment, including their artillery.

Again, the Swiss raided the Klettgau and the Hegau and pillaged several fortified smaller Swabian cities such as Tiengen or Stühlingen before retreating again. This whole war was characterized by many such smaller raids and plundering expeditions of both sides between a few larger battles. On the eastern front, a new Habsburg attack on the Rhine valley provoked a counterstrike of the Eidgenossen, who remained victorious in the Battle of Frastanz near Feldkirch on April 20, 1499.

The continued defeats of both Habsburg and Swabian armies made King Maximilian, who had hitherto been occupied in the Netherlands, travel to Constance and assume the leadership of the operations himself. He declared an imperial ban over the Swiss Confederacy in an attempt to gain wider support for the operation amongst the German princes by declaring the conflict an "imperial war". However, this move had no success. Maximilian then decided that the next decisive attack should take place again in the Val Müstair, since he didn't have enough troops near Constance to risk attacking there. An abandoned attack attempt in the west in early May 1499 had drawn significant Swiss forces there, who subsequently raided the Sundgau. On May 21, the Swiss undertook a third raid in the Hegau, but abandoned the operation one week later after the city of Stockach withstood a siege long enough for Swabian relief troops to come dangerously close.

Simultaneously, the Three Leagues attacked the Habsburg troops that camped again at Glurns on May 22, 1499, before Maximilian could arrive with reinforcements. They overran the fortifications and routed the Austrian army in the Battle of Calven and then ravaged the Vinschgau, before retreating after three days. Maximilian and his troops arrived one week later, on May 29. In revenge, his troops pillaged the Engadin valley, but retreated quickly before reinforcements from the Swiss Confederacy arrived.

The refusal of the military leaders of the Swabian League to withdraw troops from the northern front to send them to the Grisons as Maximilian had demanded made the king return to Lake Constance. The differences between the Swabians, who preferred to strike in the north, and the king, who still hoped to convince them to help him win the struggle in the Val Müstair, led to a pause in the hostilities. Troops were assembled at Constance, but an attack did not occur. Until July, nothing of significance happened along the whole front.

By mid-July, Maximilian and the Swabian leaders suddenly were under pressure from their own troops. In the west, where there lay an army under the command of Count Heinrich von Fürstenberg, a large contingent of mercenaries from Flanders and many knights threatened to leave as they had not received their pay. The foot soldiers of the Swabian troops also complained: most of them were peasants and preferred to go home and bring in the harvest. Maximilian was forced to act.

An attack by sea across Lake Constance on Rheineck and Rorschach on July 21 was one of the few successful Swabian operations. The small Swiss detachment was taken by surprise, the villages plundered and burnt. A much larger attack of an army of about 16,000 soldiers in the west on Dornach, however, met a quickly assembled but strong Swiss army. In the Battle of Dornach on July 22, 1499, the Swabian and mercenary troops suffered a heavy defeat after a long and hard battle. Their general Heinrich von Fürstenberg fell early in the fight, about 3,000 Swabian and 500 Swiss soldiers died, and the Swabians lost all of their artillery again.

One of the last skirmishes of the war took place on July 25. A Swabian army marched from the Hegau on Schaffhausen, but met with fierce defense at Thayngen. Although the small force of defenders was finally overcome, and the village was pillaged, the defenders inflicted heavy casualties and the attack was held up long enough for the Swiss to send troops from Schaffhausen to meet the Swabians in the field. Misunderstandings between the Swabian knights and their foot soldiers made the Swabians retreat, and nightfall then prevented a larger battle.

A major problem for the Swiss was the lack of any unified command.  The cantonal contingents only took orders from their own leaders.  Complaints of insubordination were common.  The Swiss Diet had to adopt this resolution on 11 March 1499: "Every canton shall impress upon its soldiers that when the Confederates are under arms together, each one of them, whatever his canton, shall obey the officers of the others."

The war was paid for largely by the French and Italian allies of the Swiss as well as by ransoming prisoners of war.

Peace negotiations
Early mediation attempts in March 1499 had failed because of mutual distrust between the parties. But after the Battle of Dornach, the Swabian League was war-weary and had lost all confidence in the king's abilities as a military leader, and thus refused Maximilian's demands to muster a new army. The Swabian and Habsburg armies had suffered far higher human losses than the Swiss, and were also short on artillery, after repeatedly having lost their equipment to the Swiss. The Swiss also had no desire to prolong the war further, though they refused a first peace proposal that Maximilian presented at Schaffhausen in August 1499.

However, events in the Italian Wars helped bring the Swabian War to an end. King Louis XII of France tried to bring the Duchy of Milan under his control. As long as the Swabian War continued, the Milanese ruler Ludovico il Moro—whose niece Bianca Maximilian had married in 1493—could not expect help from either Swiss mercenaries or Maximilian, and thus his envoy Galeazzo Visconti tried to mediate between the Swiss and the king. The French delegation at the Tagsatzung (Swiss federal diet and war council) tried to prevent any agreement for the same reason. The Milanese delegation prevailed in these intrigues and persuaded both sides to moderate their demands.

Finally, Maximilian and the Swiss signed the Peace of Basel (1499) on September 22. Maximilian had tried to make the conflict an "imperial war" by declaring a ban over the Confederacy. But the peace treaty carefully downplayed that claim, instead treating the war as what it actually was: a war between two equal members of the empire (Imperial estate, or Reichsstände), namely the House of Habsburg and the Swiss Confederacy. The document referred to Maximilian only as "duke of Habsburg", not as "king of the Germans" or even "Holy Roman Emperor".

With the Peace of Basel, the relations between the Old Swiss Confederacy and the empire returned to the status quo ante bellum from before the Diet of Worms in 1495. The imperial ban was dropped silently. Maximilian had to accept the independence of the cantons and to abandon implicitly the Habsburg claims on their territories. Consequently, the then ten members of the Swiss Confederacy remained exempt from the jurisdiction of the Reichskammergericht. The Swiss henceforth also exercised high justice over the Thurgau. The war had not caused any territorial changes, except in the area around Schaffhausen, where the city had asserted its hegemony over some places that had formerly belonged to the Bishop of Constance.

In the Grisons, the situation also reverted to pre-war conditions. The Habsburg kept their rights over eight of the communes of the League of the Ten Jurisdictions, but also had to accept that league's alliance in the Three Leagues and with the Swiss Confederacy. Ultimately, this arrangement would lead to the Habsburgs losing the Prättigau to the Three Leagues, with the exception of a temporary re-occupation during the Thirty Years' War nearly 130 years later.

Further consequences

Basel had remained studiously neutral throughout the whole war. Although allied with some cantons of the Swiss Confederacy, it also had strong economic ties in the Alsace and further down along the Rhine. But the events of the war had strengthened the pro-confederate party in the city council, and the Swiss recognized the city's strategic position as a bridgehead on the Rhine (like Schaffhausen, too). On June 9, 1501, a delegation from Basel and the Swiss cantons' representatives signed the alliance contract, which the city council of Basel ratified on July 13, 1501.

Schaffhausen had fought alongside the Eidgenossen during the Swabian War, and thus its acceptance into the Confederacy was a mere formality. The city had been an imperial city since 1415 and an associate state of the Confederacy since 1454 through a 25-year contract that had been renewed in 1479. On August 10, 1501, it became the twelfth member of the Confederacy.

With the end of the war, the Swiss troops were no longer bound along the Rhine and in the Grisons. The cantons concluded new mercenary contracts, so called capitulations, with the Duchy of Milan and soon got deeply involved in the Italian Wars, where Swiss mercenaries ended up fighting on both sides. The involvement of the Old Swiss Confederacy, acting in its own interests in these wars, was brought to an end by the defeat against French forces in the battle of Marignano in 1515 and a subsequent peace treaty with the French king in 1516, the so-called Eternal Peace. However, Swiss mercenaries from individual cantons of the federation continued to participate in the Italian Wars well beyond (until the middle of the 16th century) in the service of various parties and, following that peace with France, in particular in the service of the French king.

The Swiss Confederacy remained an independent Reichsstand of the Holy Roman Empire, but as it was not even obliged to participate in the Imperial Diet, this relation was degraded to a purely formal one that would lose significance throughout the 16th century. However, the Swiss still considered themselves as members of the empire with the status of imperial immediacy; the empire was still considered the foundation of all privileges, rights, or political identity as can be witnessed in the continued use of the imperial insignia. The relations between the Habsburgs and the Confederacy were fully normalized in the Erbeinung of 1511, a renewal of the earlier Ewige Richtung of 1474 and a first Erbeinung of 1477. In that treaty, the Habsburgs finally and officially gave up all their territorial claims of old, and even designated the Confederacy the protecting power of the County of Burgundy. In the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, all members and associate states of the Confederacy would gain official full exemption from the empire and recognition as a national and political entity on their own right.

See also
Battles of the Old Swiss Confederacy

Notes

  Kuhschweizer roughly means literally "Swiss cow herders"; although intended as a derogatory term, there is no connection to "coward". One explanation for the violent response of the Swiss to that and related "cow"-based insults is that these alluded to sodomy and thus heresy. Incidentally, the Swabians also used the term Schwyzer to denote all the Swiss, who called themselves Eidgenossen at the time, as an insult. The Swiss, however, assimilated that term and began to wear it proudly. See also Schwyz.
   The name is sometimes given as "Schwaderloo" or even "Schwaderloch".
   The battle of Schwaderloh actually took place near Triboltingen.
   Götz von Berlichingen participated as a young knight in this operation and described the event in some detail in his memoirs. Willibald Pirckheimer, another eye-witness, also gave an extended description.

References

Schwabenkriegschroniken
Anshelm, V.: Berner Chronik, 1529–1546.
v. Berlichingen, G.: Memoirs, around 1560; rediscovered and first published for wider circulation in 1731. Available e.g. in German from reclam: .
Pirckheimer, W.: De bello Suitense sive Eluetico, 1526. Pirckheimer had participated in the Swabian War as the commander of a troop from Nuremberg. An excerpt from the translation of Ernst Münch, Berlin 1988, is available on-line. A more recent edition was translated by Fritz Wille, Baden 1998 (); in Latin and German.
Schilling, D.: Luzernerchronik, 1511–1513.

Further reading
Winkler, Albert (2020). "The Swiss in the Swabian War of 1499: An Analysis of the Swiss Military at the End of the Fifteenth Century," Swiss American Historical Society Review, vol. 56 (2020), no. 3, pp. 55–141.

External links

Web exposition with a map and many illustrations from the Luzerner Schilling (in German).
Ganse, A.: Swabian War 1499. Very brief summary in English.
Graf, K. (ed.): Der Schwabenkrieg ; comprehensive web site in German.

Swabian War


Isaac Israeli ben Solomon (Hebrew: יצחק בן שלמה הישראלי, Yitzhak ben Shlomo ha-Yisraeli; Arabic: أبو يعقوب إسحاق بن سليمان الإسرائيلي, Abu Ya'qub Ishaq ibn Suleiman al-Isra'ili) ( 832 –  932), also known as Isaac Israeli the Elder and Isaac Judaeus, was one of the foremost Jewish physicians and philosophers living in the Arab world of his time. He is regarded as the father of medieval Jewish Neoplatonism. His works, all written in Arabic and subsequently translated into Hebrew, Latin and Spanish, entered the medical curriculum of the early thirteenth-century universities in Medieval Europe and remained popular throughout the Middle Ages.

Life
Little is known of Israeli's background and career. Much that is known comes from the biographical accounts found in The Generations of the Physicians, a work written by the Andalusian author Ibn Juljul in the 2nd half of the tenth century, and in Tabaqāt al-'Umam (Categories of Nations) by Sa'id of Toledo, who wrote in the mid-eleventh century. In the thirteenth century, Ibn Abi Usaybi'a also produced an account, which he based on Ibn Juljul as well as other sources, including the History of the Fatimid Dynasty by Israel's pupil Ibn al-Jazzar.

Israeli was born in around 832 into a Jewish family in Egypt. He lived the first half of his life in Cairo where he gained a reputation as a skillful oculist. He corresponded with Saadya ben Joseph al-Fayyumi (882-942), one of the most influential figures in the medieval Judaism, prior to his departure from Egypt. In about 904 Israeli was nominated court physician to the last Aghlabid prince, Ziyadat Allah III. Between the years 905-907 he travelled to Kairouan where he studied general medicine under Ishak ibn Amran al-Baghdadi, with whom he is sometimes confounded ("Sefer ha-Yashar," p. 10a). Later he served as a doctor to the founder of the Fatimid Dynasty of North Africa, 'Ubaid Allah al-Mahdi, who reigned from 910-934. The caliph enjoyed the company of his Jewish physician on account of the latter's wit and of the repartees in which he succeeded in confounding the Greek al-Hubaish when pitted against him. In Kairouan his fame became widely extended, the works which he wrote in Arabic being considered by the Muslim physicians as "more valuable than gems." His lectures attracted a large number of pupils, of whom the two most prominent were Abu Ja'far ibn al-Jazzar, a Muslim, and Dunash ibn Tamim. Israeli studied natural history, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and other scientific topics; he was reputed to be one who knew all the "seven sciences".

Biographers state that he never married or fathered children. He died at Kairouan, Tunisia, in 932. This date is given by most Arabic authorities who give his date of birth as 832. But Abraham ben Hasdai, quoting the biographer Sanah ibn Sa'id al-Kurtubi ("Orient, Lit." iv., col. 230), says that Isaac Israeli died in 942. Heinrich Grätz (Geschichte v. 236), while stating that Isaac Israeli lived more than one hundred years, gives the dates 845-940; and Steinschneider ("Hebr. Uebers." pp. 388, 755) places his death in 950. He died in Kairouan.

Influence
In 956 his pupil Dunash Ibn Tamim wrote an extensive commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, a mystical work of cosmogony which attributes great importance to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and their combinations in determining the structure of the universe. In this work he cites Israeli so extensively that a few nineteenth-century scholars misidentified the commentary as Israeli's.

Israeli's medical treatises were studied for several centuries both in the original Arabic and in Latin translation. In the eleventh century, Constantine Africanus, a professor at the prestigious Salerno school of medicine, translated some of Israeli's works into Latin. Many medieval Arabic biographical chronicles of physicians list him and his works.

Israeli's philosophical works exercised a considerable influence on Christian and Jewish thinkers, and a lesser degree of influence among Muslim intellectuals. In the twelfth century, a group of scholars in Toledo transmitted many Arabic works of science and philosophy into Latin. One of the translators, Gerard of Cremona, rendered Israeli's Book of Definitions (Liber de Definicionibus/Definitionibus) and Book on the Elements (Liber Elementorum) into Latin. Israeli's work was quoted and paraphrased by a number of Christian thinkers including Gundissalinus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Vincent de Beauvais, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon and Nicholas of Cusa. Isaac Israeli's philosophical influence on Muslim authors is slight at best. The only known quotation of Israeli's philosophy in a Muslim work occurs in Ghayat al-Hakim, a book on magic, produced in eleventh-century Spain, translated into Latin and widely circulated in the West under the title Picatrix. Although there are passages which correspond directly to Israeli's writings, the author does not cite him by name.

His influence also extended to Moses Ibn Ezra (c. 1060-1139) who quotes Isaac Israeli without attribution in his treatise The Book of the Garden, explaining the meaning of Metaphor and Literal Expression. The poet and philosopher Joseph Ibn Tzaddiq of Cordoba (d. 1149) authored a work The Microcosm containing many ideas indebted to Israeli.

As Neoplatonist philosophy waned, in addition to the Galenic medical tradition of which Israeli was a part, the appreciable influence of Isaac Israeli diminished as well.

Claimed works

A number of works in Arabic, some of which were translated into Hebrew, Latin and Spanish were ascribed to Israeli, and several medical works were allegedly composed by him at the request of al-Mahdi. In 1515 Opera Omnia Isaci was published in Lyon, France, and the editor of this work claimed that the works originally written in Arabic and translated into Latin in 1087 by Constantine of Carthage, who assumed their authorship, were a 'plagiarism' and published them under Israeli's name, together in a collection with works of other physicians that were also and erroneously attributed to Israeli. Those works translated by Constantine of Carthage were used as textbooks at the University of Salerno, the earliest university in Western Europe, where Constantine was a professor of medicine,  and remained in use as textbooks throughout Europe until the seventeenth century.

He was the first physician to write about tracheotomy in Arabic. He advised a hook to grasp the skin in the neck as Paulus of Aegina did and afterwards Avicenna and Albucasis.

Medical works
Kitab al-Ḥummayat, The Book on Fevers, in Hebrew Sefer ha-Ḳadaḥot, ספר הקדחות, a complete treatise, in five books, on the kinds of fever, according to the ancient physicians, especially Hippocrates and Galen. The Book on Fevers appeared in the Articella.
Kitab al-Adwiyah al-Mufradah wa'l-Aghdhiyah, a work in four sections on remedies and aliments. The first section, consisting of twenty chapters, was translated into Latin by Constantine under the title Diætæ Universales, and into Hebrew by an anonymous translator under the title Ṭib'e ha-Mezonot. The other three parts of the work are entitled in the Latin translation Diætæ Particulares; and it seems that a Hebrew translation, entitled Sefer ha-Mis'adim or Sefer ha-Ma'akalim, was made from the Latin.
Kitab al-Baul, or in Hebrew Sefer ha-Shetan, a treatise on urine, of which the author himself made an abridgement.
Kitab al-Istiḳat, in Hebrew Sefer ha-Yesodot and Latin as De Elementis, a medical and philosophical work on the elements, which the author treats according to the ideas of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen. The Hebrew translation was made by Abraham ben Hasdai at the request of the grammarian David Kimhi.
Manhig ha-Rofe'im, or Musar ha-Rofe'im, a treatise, in fifty paragraphs, for physicians, translated into Hebrew (the Arabic original is not extant), and into German by David Kaufmann under the title Propädeutik für Aerzte (Berliner's "Magazin," xi. 97-112).
Kitab fi al-Tiryaḳ, a work on antidotes. Some writers attribute to Isaac Israeli two other works which figure among Constantine's translations, namely, the Liber Pantegni and the Viaticum, of which there are three Hebrew translations. But the former belongs to Mohammed al-Razi and the latter to 'Ali ibn 'Abbas or, according to other authorities, to Israeli's pupil Abu Jaf'ar ibn al-Jazzar.

Philosophical works
Kitab al-Ḥudud wal-Rusum, translated into Hebrew by Nissim b. Solomon (fourteenth century) under the title Sefer ha-Gebulim weha-Reshumim, a philosophical work of which a Latin translation is quoted in the beginning of the Opera Omnia. This work and the Kitab al-Istiḳat were severely criticized by Maimonides in a letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon (Iggerot ha-Rambam, p. 28, Leipsic, 1859), in which he declared that they had no value, inasmuch as Isaac Israeli ben Solomon was nothing more than a physician.
Kitab Bustan al-Ḥikimah, on metaphysics.
Kitab al-Ḥikmah, a treatise on philosophy.
Kitab al-Madkhal fi al-Mantiḳ, on logic. The last three works are mentioned by Ibn Abi Uṣaibi'a, but no Hebrew translations of them are known.
Sefer ha-Ruaḥ weha-Nefesh, a philosophical treatise, in a Hebrew translation, on the difference between the spirit and the soul, published by Steinschneider in Ha-Karmel (1871, pp. 400–405). The editor is of opinion that this little work is a fragment of a larger one.
A philosophical commentary on Genesis, in two books, one of which deals with Genesis i. 20.

Attributed works
Eliakim Carmoly ("Ẓiyyon," i. 46) concludes that the Isaac who was so violently attacked by Abraham ibn Ezra in the introduction to his commentary on the Pentateuch, and whom he calls in other places "Isaac the Prattler", and "Ha-Yiẓḥaḳ," was none other than Isaac Israeli. But if Israeli was attacked by Ibn Ezra he was praised by other Biblical commentators, such as Jacob b. Ruben, a contemporary of Maimonides, and by Ḥasdai.

Another work which has been ascribed to Israeli, and which more than any other has given rise to controversy among later scholars, is a commentary on the "Sefer Yeẓirah." Steinschneider (in his "Al-Farabi," p. 248) and Carmoly (in Jost's "Annalen," ii. 321) attribute the authorship to Israeli, because Abraham ibn Ḥasdai (see above), and Jedaiah Bedersi in his apologetical letter to Solomon ben Adret ("Orient, Lit." xi. cols. 166–169) speak of a commentary by Israeli on the "Sefer Yeẓirah," though by some scholars the words "Sefer Yeẓirah" are believed to denote simply the "Book of Genesis." But David Kaufmann ("R. E. J." viii. 126), Sachs ("Orient, Lit." l.c.), and especially Grätz (Geschichte v. 237, note 2) are inclined to attribute its authorship to Israeli's pupil Dunash ibn Tamim.

Notes

References

Further reading

Older sources
 Jewish Encyclopedia bibliography: Ibn Abi Usaibia, Uyun al-Anba, ii. 36, 37, Bulak, 1882;
 'Abd al-Laṭif, Relation de l'Egypte (translated by De Sacy), pp. 43, 44, Paris, 1810;
 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Literaturgesch. der Araber, iv. 376 (attributing to Israeli the authorship of a treatise on the pulse);
 Wüstenfeld, Geschichte der Arabischen Aerzte, p. 51;
 Sprenger, Geschichte der Arzneikunde, ii. 270;
 Leclerc, Histoire de la Médecine Arabe, i. 412;
 Eliakim Carmoly, in Revue Orientale, i. 350-352;
 Heinrich Grätz, Geschichte 3d ed., v. 257;
 Haji Khalfa, ii. 51, v. 41, et passim;
 Moritz Steinschneider, Cat. Bodl. cols. 1113-1124;
 idem, Hebr. Bibl. viii. 98. xii. 58;
 Dukes, in Orient, Lit. x. 657;
 Gross, in Monatsschrift, xxviii. 326: Jost's Annalen, i. 408.

External links
Isaac Israeli, Stanford University.

People from Kairouan
Medieval Jewish physicians of Egypt
Jews from Ifriqiya
Philosophers of Judaism
10th-century physicians
10th-century Jews
Medieval Jewish philosophers
10th-century people from Ifriqiya
Physicians from the Fatimid Caliphate
10th-century people from the Fatimid Caliphate

Isaac Israeli ben Solomon


Eugeniusz Zenon Lokajski (14 December 1908 – 25 September 1944) was a Polish athlete, gymnast and photographer. He is notable as the Champion of Poland in javelin throw and the creator of more than 1000 photos documenting the Warsaw Uprising.

Biography

Eugeniusz Lokajski was born in 1908 in Warsaw. In 1924 he joined the Warszawianka sports club, where he started training in a variety of disciplines, including swimming, running and football. Initially he wanted to join the javelin section, but was refused by the coach. In 1928 he passed his baccalaureate exams at the Mikołaj Rej lyceum and served the obligatory service in the Polish Army. After graduating from the reserve NCO school in Zambrów, Lokajski joined the Central Sport Education Centre in Bielany, Warsaw.

In 1932 he returned to KS Warszawianka and became one of the most notable athletes of that club. Successful in hurdling, long jump, high jump and decathlon, he was finally admitted to the javelin section. In 1934 he became Champion of Poland in javelin throw and in gymnastics, which he achieved also the following year. His 1936 javelin record (73.27 metres, established during a duel with Walter Turczyk of Poznań) was not beaten until 17 years later, long after his death.

At the time, it was the third best record in the world. In 1935 he was a member of the Polish team to the World Student Games in Budapest and won the silver medal for javelin throw. He took part in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. However, during training he suffered an injury of the scapula muscle, which made his results much worse.  His result (66,36 m) gave him seventh place. After the Olympics it turned out that the injury was a serious one and it ended his sports career.

In 1937 he briefly appeared in the Poland national team and was appointed to the Polish team for the 1940 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, but then he finally withdrew from sports life and had to spend several months in various hospitals. Also, an ear disease resulted in a series of surgical operations, one of them resulting in skull trepanation.

Conscripted into the Polish Army for the Polish Defensive War of 1939, Lokajski served as a platoon commander in the Polish 35th Infantry Regiment. After the Battle of Brześć he was taken prisoner of war by the Soviets, but managed to escape to Warsaw, which most probably saved him from the fate of other Polish officers, murdered by the Soviets in the Katyn Massacre. In Warsaw he reunited with his family and opened a photographic shop. At the same time he served as a teacher in one of the underground universities operating secretly in Warsaw. After his brother, Józef Lokajski, was killed by the Germans, Eugeniusz took over his duties in the Armia Krajowa unit, where he started serving as the person responsible for arms and munitions transport. There he served with distinction as lieutenant Brok (his nom de guerre).

After the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, both Lokajski and his sister joined the Koszta company, the staff defense unit defending the commanders of the Śródmieście area. The commander of his unit, Stefan Mich Kmita knew Lokajski from before the war and decided to use his photographical talents and provided him with a camera, with which Eugeniusz Lokajski started to document the fate of the Warsaw Uprising. Throughout the 63 days of the Uprising, Lokajski made more than a thousand of pictures, each of priceless value for historians. After 30 August, when the Polish forces were short of professional officers, Lokajski was attached to the 2nd platoon of the Koszta company as its commanding officer. Among the most notable skirmishes his unit took part in was the ill-fated attempt to join the forces fighting in the Warsaw's Old Town with those fighting in the city centre. His unit was the only one to successfully reach the specified area of operations, but it was withdrawn due to failure of other units to achieve their goals.

After the action, Lokajski's unit was withdrawn to the rear and became the tactical reserve of the HQ, used for filling the gaps in Polish lines. Among the most serious fights he took part in was the struggle for the barricades on Chmielna street, as well as for the Main Post Office, in which he managed to retake the lost building and capture 18 German prisoners of war. Although his unit was decimated and cut out in the ruins without supplies, food and ammunition, Lokajski held out with his men until a relief force arrived – 48 hours later. By the end of the Uprising, on 25 September 1944, Lokajski was attached to the Headquarters of the Armia Krajowa as a photographer. His main task was to prepare photos of important AK soldiers for fake German documents, which would allow them to evade captivity and continue the struggle. Lacking materials, Lokajski went to a photographic shop at Marszałkowska street 129. Caught in an artillery barrage, he was killed in the ruins of the house. It was not until May 1945 that his body was exhumed from the rubble and buried in the Powązki Cemetery, among other Polish sportsmen killed in World War II. After the war a collection of photos documenting the Uprising was found in Warsaw, well hidden in one of the ruined houses.

His collection of 840 photographs documenting the Uprising, along with some taken by him before the War, was published on 4 February 2008 in a 500-page album through the joint effort of his sister Zofia Domańska and the Warsaw Uprising Museum.

There is a street named after him in Warsaw's borough of Ursynow.

Image gallery
Some of the images of the Lokajski's archive:

References

Sources
 Uprising Museum page
 Brok: Eugeniusz Lokajski 1908–1944, a Reporter (an album of Eugeniusz Lokajski's photographs documenting the Warsaw Uprising) – , Warsaw 2007

Polish male javelin throwers
Olympic athletes for Poland
Athletes (track and field) at the 1936 Summer Olympics
Burials at Powązki Cemetery
Polish male artistic gymnasts
Photographers from Warsaw
Polish resistance members of World War II
Warsaw Uprising insurgents
Resistance members killed by Nazi Germany
People from Warsaw Governorate
Sportspeople from Warsaw
1908 births
1944 deaths
Polish civilians killed in World War II
Athletes from Warsaw

Eugeniusz Lokajski


Dr Robert Anton Wilson (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was a futurist thinker, libertarian, and writer. He held a Ph.D in Psychology. At one time he was a writer for Playboy magazine.

Works
Wilson was the author of the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy (1979). He also co-wrote (with Robert Shea) the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975), which took a humorous look at the American fear of conspiracies. These books mix true facts with fiction.

In The Cosmic Trigger (1976), he introduced Discordianism, Sufism, futurism, the Illuminati and other unusual subjects to the general public. He also worked with Timothy Leary to promote futurist ideas of space migration, life extension, and intelligence enhancement.

Other fiction books by Wilson include The Earth Will Shake (1982) and Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1996). His non-fiction books include Quantum Psychology, The New Inquisition (1994), and other volumes of The Cosmic Trigger. He and Miriam Joan Hill co-wrote Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998), an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories.

References
Smoley, Richard and Jay Kinney, "Doubt!: The Gnosis Interview with Robert Anton Wilson," Gnosis, No. 50 (Winter 1999).

Other websites

Official sites
 R.A.W. Official Website , now maintained by his family
 RAW Data Wilson's blog, now maintained by his daughter, Christina
 Maybe Logic - The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson

Interviews
 Collection of online interviews
 Robert Anton Wilson Multimedia, Video & Audio  Hundreds of media files including interviews and links
 deoxy.org  interviews and writings
 "Robert Anton Wilson: The Author of The Illuminatus Trilogy Expounds on Multiple Realities, Guerrilla Ontology, LSD, Life Extension and Things that Go Bump in the Night" by Michael Hollingshead in High Times, 1980
 Video appearances by Wilson  including May 23, 1996 appearance on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher
 "The ROC Interview - Author - Futurist - M.V.P. (Most Valuable Philosopher) Robert Anton Wilson"  by Randy Lee Payton of Rock Out Censorship, February 2001
 "President Hannibal Lector & the Thing That Ate the Constitution: An Interview with Robert Anton Wilson"  by David Jay Brown, 2003
 "23 Questions With Robert Anton Wilson" by Jody Franklin, August 2004 and March 2005
 "Man Bites Dogma"  - Wilson interviewed by Michael Dare (no date given)

Online writings, profiles and press
 Collection of online writings by Wilson
 Robert Anton Wilson profile on BlackCrayon.com
 8-Circuit Model of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson
 Robert Anton Wilson on Dazed Digital  - multi-media feature (high bandwidth site)
 "Patricia Luna Wilson"  by Art Quaife - Wilson's teenage daughter, murdered on October 2, 1976. Her parents had her brain placed into cryonic suspension.

Obituaries
"Robert Anton Wilson, 74, Who Wrote Mind-Twisting Novels, Dies", New York Times Obituary by Dennis Hevesi, January 13, 2007
""Robert Anton Wilson - He turned Playboy readers' conspiracy theories into drug-assisted cult fiction" by Michael Carlson for The Guardian, January 18, 2007
"Robert Anton Wilson, Jan 18, 1932 - Jan 11, 2007" at Erowid Character Vaults

1932 births
2007 deaths
Writers from New York City

Robert Anton Wilson


Skinny jeans are a style of denim jeans that have straight legs and tend to crumple around the ankles. They are called skinny jeans because they give you a thin figure. This style was started in the 1980s to make a retro-punk look. This style came to life again in late 2006 by Avril Lavigne in one of her music videos. They are usually used for a gothic-punk look or retroand hip-hop

Trousers and shorts

Skinny jeans


A gene knockout is a genetic technique in which one of an organism's genes is switched off or replaced by one which does not work.

The organisms, such as knockout mice, are used to learn about a gene that has been sequenced, but whose function is unknown or incompletely known. Researchers draw inferences from the difference between the knockout organism and normal individuals. Knockout is often abbreviated as KO.

Gene knock-in is the opposite term. There a gene is switched on, or a working gene inserted.

Method
Knockout is accomplished through a combination of techniques. It starts in the test tube with a plasmid, or other DNA construct, and proceeding to cell culture.

Individual cells are genetically transformed with the DNA construct. Often the goal is to create an animal that has the altered gene.

If so, embryonic stem cells are genetically transformed and inserted into early embryos. Resulting animals with the genetic change in their germline cells can then often pass the gene knockout to future generations.

Genetic engineering
Molecular biology

Gene knockout


Henri Caesar, also known as Black Caesar, (fl. 1791–1830) was a legendary 19th-century Haitian revolutionary and pirate. Efforts to find historical evidence of his existence have been unsuccessful. According to works of fiction, he was a participant in the Haitian Revolution under Dutty Boukman and Toussaint Louverture as well as active in piracy for nearly a 30-year period during the early 19th century.

Henri Caesar has been confused with a real pirate who was also known as Black Caesar and operated from the Florida Keys in the early 1700s until being captured and hanged in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1718.

Biography
Henri Caesar was supposedly born to a slave family kept by a French plantation owner known as Arnaut. He worked as a houseboy on the estate and, as a young man, worked in the lumberyard. He was mistreated by the supervisor and later killed the man during the slave insurrection, torturing him with a saw. Joining the rebel forces led by Dutty Boukman and Toussaint Louverture, he remained with the revolution until its independence from France in 1804, when he left to try his luck at sea. Based in Port-de-Paix, he captured a Spanish ship in 1805 and soon began attacking small villages and lone vessels near Cuba and the Bahamas from his base in southern Spanish Florida. Adopting the name Black Caesar, he was very successful during his piratical career before his disappearance in 1830.

His fate is uncertain. He may have fled the area after President Andrew Jackson ordered an expedition against pirates active on the Florida coast after its purchase by the United States in 1821. One version of his story says that he was captured, taken to Key West, and burned to death while tied to a tree. The widow of a preacher whose eyes had been burned out under torture from Black Caesar was allowed light the fire.

Caesar is supposed to have buried between $2 and $6 million at one of more locations in southwest Florida including Pine Island, White Horse Key, Marco Island, Elliot Key and Sanibel Island, although none has ever been recovered. He is sometimes associated with Jose Gaspar, another mythical pirate who supposedly operated in the same area at about the same time.

In popular culture
The 1980 book Black Caesar, Pirate by Cliff Gardner, is a work of fiction, but appears to have been confused with fact.
The mobile game Words with Friends used him in a Solo Challenge on Pirates.

References

Further reading
Gardner, Cliff. Black Caesar, Pirate. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1980.
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. City Lights Anthology. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1974.

External links
Florida's Fabulous Treasures by Jeffrey Kramer
The Pirate's Realm: Black Caesar

1791 births
1830 deaths
Haitian independence activists
Haitian pirates
19th-century pirates

Henri Caesar


The Canigou () or Pic du Canigou is the highest of the mountains in Eastern Pyrenees; it is on the Massif du Canigou, in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales, southern France.

Because it has sharp sides and is close to the Mediterranean Sea coast, until the 18th century the Canigou was believed to be the highest mountain in the Pyrenees. On 21 July 2019, Abdullahi Abbas was officially the first Nigerian who succeeded climbing to the top of the Canigou.Pablo Bucheli, together with his sherpa Abigail White, was the first Ecuadorian on the top of the mountain.

Geography
Canigou is in the Regional Natural Park of the Catalan Pyrenees (; , often shortened as Parc del Pirineu Català), close to the eastern border of the park.

The Canigou peak is  high. It is on a short mountain range, the Massif du Canigou, which is the eastern end of the Pyrenees. The mountain is the 395th highest mountain in France.

History
The first writings where the mountain is mentioned date from 949 with Montis Canigonis and Monte Canigone in Latin. The first written name of the mountain in Catalan (Canigó) dates back to 1300, and from this comes Canigou in French.

The first ascent to Canigou was in 1285 by Peter III of Aragon, King of Aragon. This fact is mentioned in a chronicle written by Fra Salimbene, an Italian monk. It seems that the king did not go to the top of the peak.

Climate
Although the dominant climate is largely Mediterranean at its base, the Canigou has several climate zones:
 Mediterranean climate: from the base to ;
 Mountain climate: from ;
 Subalpine climate: from ;
 Alpine climate: from  to the top.

Although variable from one year to the next, snow is generally continuous over , from mid-November to late May. The mean temperature in July is  and in January is .

Canigou Flame
This mountain is a symbol for Catalan people. On its top there is a cross that is often decorated with the Catalan flag.

Every year on 23 June, the night before St. John's day (nit de Sant Joan), there is a ceremony called Flama del Canigó (Canigou Flame), where a fire is lit at the mountaintop. People spend the night there and take torches lit on that fire in a spectacular torch relay to light bonfires somewhere else. Some estimates conclude that about 30,000 bonfires are lit in this way all over Catalonia on that night.

Massif du Canigou
The Massif du Canigou is a mountain range in the Pyrenees in the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales. It is the part of the Pyrenees nearest to the Mediterranean Sea.

There are two old monasteries at the foot of the mountain, Martin-du-Canigou and Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa.

On 16 July 2012, the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy of France named the Massif du Canigou as a Grand Site of France.

The main peaks of this mountain range are:
 Canigou peak (Pic du Canigou, 2,784 m), the highest peak of all
 Puig des Tres Vents (2,731 m)
 Roc Nègre (2,714 m)
 Barbet peak (Pic Barbet, 2,712 m)
 Puig Sec (2,665 m)

References

Other websites

Championnat du Canigó - to the summit of Canigou and back from Vernet-les-Bains
The Cady Valley - Walks to the summit of Canigou (PDF)
 Canigo.cat  All information about the Canigou massif: nature, culture and itineraries
  Le Pic du Canigou - Altituderando

Pyrenees
Mountains of France
Pyrénées-Orientales

Canigou


Vera Neumann (born Vera Salaff; July 24, 1907 – June 15, 1993) was an American artist and entrepreneur best known for her boldly colored linen patterns and scarves signed "Vera" and featuring a ladybug.

Early life and career
Vera was the third of four children born to Fanny and Meyer Salaff who encouraged each of their children to find a passion and follow it – in her case drawing and painting. Her father gave her 50 cents for each sketchbook she could fill with her drawings as well as taking her to The Metropolitan Museum of Art every Sunday. Ultimately, each of the Salaff children chose a creative career path. After high school, Vera attended art school at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and enrolled in classes at the Traphagen School of Fashion after graduation. She graduated from Traphagen School of Fashion in 1926 in Illustration and Textile Design.

Career
Her first job was as a fashion illustrator and then a textile designer on Seventh Avenue in New York. Shortly afterwards, she left to design fabric and murals for children's rooms.

Vera met and married Austrian George Neumann whose family background was in textiles. The two moved into a small studio on 17th street where they decided to merge their career backgrounds and began their company, Printex. They built a small silkscreen printing press to fit on their dining room table which was only large enough to produce linen placemats. These were then cured in their kitchen oven.

They were soon joined by their friend Frederick Werner Hamm, a recent German immigrant who also had a background in textiles. Hamm used his sales skills to secure their first order from the department store B. Altman. The company outgrew the apartment and moved into a larger one, which soon became too small, so they moved into a large derelict 1810 Georgian Mansion near the Hudson River in Ossining, New York.

First signature scarf
With World War II in full swing, Vera found linen supplies dwindling and went in search of alternative materials for her products. She came across some parachute silk at an army surplus store, an event which marked the beginning of her scarf business. She kept her signature on art transferred to the scarves, thus creating the first signature scarf in history. "Vera scarves" became immediately popular and Vera herself was soon on first-name terms with well-known women around the country. Marilyn Monroe was a fan  as were Grace Kelly and First Lady Bess Truman, who selected Vera fabric from Schumacher, Inc. to decorate the third-floor solarium windows and upholstery of the White House. Women from around the country also chose Vera products for their color and cheerful prints.

The demand for Vera products and the untimely death of George in 1962 led Vera to sell the business to Manhattan Industries in 1967. Both Vera and Werner Hamm became board members and Vera stayed on as creative director. The company expanded into sportswear, eventually hiring up and comer Perry Ellis to oversee that division, as well as luggage.

Galleries and awards
Alexander Gray Associates located at 510 West 26th Street, held a Vera Neumann show - Vera Paints a Rainbow, from July 9-August 7, 2015. Emile Walter Galleries, located at 121 East 57th Street, launched an exhibition in 1970, which included around 50 original paintings and drew art collectors from around the country with the first customer John Lennon. Department stores across the country hosted a traveling show of scarves and other products, set up to look like an art gallery. The Smithsonian inducted Vera into its Resident Associate Program in October 1972 as their first artist and commissioned her to paint the Foucault Pendulum, which still hangs in their offices today. The institute launched the program "A Salute to Vera: the Renaissance Woman" at the Museum of History and Technology. In 1975 the Fashion Institute of Technology's Museum launched a retrospective named, "Vera: The Artist in Industry 1945–1975."  The Goldie Paley Design Center at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science also launched a retrospective of their own in 1980 entitled "Celebrate the Seasons of the Sun With Vera."

Legacy
Neumann's company "Vera Licensing" was purchased by Salant Corporation in 1988. She remained head designer, but Printex was closed later that year. She painted until the last months of her life and died of a cardiac arrest at Phelps Memorial Hospital in North Tarrytown, NY on June 15, 1993. After her death, she continued to receive acclaim from museums and exhibits around the country. In 1999, Vera Licensing was sold to The Tog Shop, a catalog company which had licensed sportswear from Vera Licensing. The Tog Shop was put up for sale in 2005 and Susan Seid, then the VP of Merchandising of The Tog Shop, bought "The Vera Company". In November 2013, the business portion of the company was sold including the licensing agreements, trademarks and copyrights however Seid maintained the ownership of the original artwork and screen printed posters.

In February 2012, Crate & Barrel has exclusively reissued 3 Vera dishtowels. In April 2013, Target stores began to sell 17 designs inspired by Vera, complete with her signature and ladybug.

References

External links
 Official website

American artists
1993 deaths
Traphagen School of Fashion alumni
Cooper Union alumni
1907 births

Vera Neumann


The Cryogenian is a geological period, from ~720 million years ago (mya) to 635 mya. It lies in the middle Proterozoic eon before the Ediacaran period.

The period is important to both Earth science and biology because it contains the two longest and most severe ice ages of all time:
 The Sturtian ice age 717 mya to 660 mya
 The Marinoan ice age 650 mya to 635 mya

These two snowball earth events were previously put together as the Varangian glaciation. They covered much, possibly all, the Earth with ice. The root cause of the temperature drop may have been the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by photosynthesising bacteria and eukaryotes in the previous Great Oxygenation Event. Much else happened: the supercontinent Rodinia broke up and another, Pannotia, began to form. Fossil steroids suggest the presence of early sponges, and amoeboid cells with tests (coverings) appear in the fossil record.

Neoproterozoic

Cryogenian


This is a list of characters in the Mario series.

Heroes
Mario: Mario is the main character of the series. He is an Italian-American man, and was originally referred to as Jumpman in Donkey Kong. He is often portrayed having superhuman acrobatics.  In most of the Mario spin-offs, he is the most average character, and is a good choice for starters. He is usually portrayed today with his iconic hat with an M, while also wearing a red shirt and blue overalls. He also has his iconic brown mustache.
Luigi: Luigi is Mario's slightly taller brother. His abilities are usually the same as Mario's, but in some games Luigi can jump higher. Luigi is usually the sidekick, but was the hero in a few games such as Luigi's Mansion. His appearance is similar to Mario's, but instead wears a green shirt and hat with the letter L.
Rosalina: Rosalina is a princess from outer space. She first appears in the Mario game Super Mario Galaxy
 Peach: Princess Peach is the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario often saves her from Bowser in many of the Mario games. However, she may sometimes be the protagonist in the game, such as Super Princess Peach and Super Mario 3D World. She is shown wearing a pink dress and a crown on her head of yellow hair. She is also known as Princess Toadstool.
 Daisy:  Daisy is the Princess of Sarasaland. The first game that she was in was Super Mario Land. She dresses similarly as Peach, but with an orange dress and brown hair.
Yoshi:  Yoshi is a dinosaur that Mario rides in some games. He appeared in his own game, Yoshi's Island. He can have many colors.
Toad:  Toad is a mushroom-shaped creature who appears in many Mario series games. He is just one of many toads. These creatures first appeared in Super Mario Bros., where they were called Mushroom Retainers.

Villains
Bowser: Bowser is the King of Koopas, a turtle-like monster species, who was first seen in Super Mario Bros. He kidnaps Princess Peach many times, and is beaten by Mario.
Bowser Jr.: A wild son of Bowser who wants to be like his father. First seen in Super Mario Sunshine.
The Koopalings  :   Includes Iggy Koopa, Morton Koopa Jr. ,Lemmy Koopa,Ludwig Von Koopa,Larry Koopa, Roy Koopa, and Wendy O. Koopa
Wario: Wario is an evil version of Mario who quite likes money. He is short, fat, muscular, and wears yellow. Wario is voiced by Charles Martinet.
Waluigi: Waluigi is Wario's sidekick, and an evil version of Luigi. He is tall and thin, like Luigi, and wears purple. Waluigi is voiced by Charles Martinet.
Fawful:A Beansish creature with fury
Foreman Spike: A rival from Mario and Luigi's time as carpenters in Brooklyn. He is from Wrecking Crew.
 Petey Piranha: A giant Piranha Plant boss from Super Mario Sunshine.
 Tatanga: Space alien who stole Princes daisy and took over the kingdom of Sarasaland in Super Mario Land.
 King Boo: A big Boo from Luigi's Mansion. King Boo is voiced by Toru Asakawa
 Dry Bowser: The Dry Bones variation of Bowser.
King Bob-omb: The king of the Bob-ombs. Has a Moustache.
Kamek:A powerful magic Koopa leader who raised Bowser and appears as the secondary villain of the Yoshi games.
Whomp King: The ruler of the whomps from Super Mario 64. He reappeared in Super Mario Galaxy 2.
Mr. L: A brainwashed Paper Luigi who appeared in Super Paper Mario.
Wart: The villain of Super Mario Brothers 2. He is a big toad whom you had to throw vegetables at to defeat.
Hammer Bro: A koopa which throws Hammers at Mario. With their Relatives,The Fire Bro, The Boomerang Bro And The Ice Bro.

Common enemies
Koopa Troopa: Koopa Troopas are turtle-like monsters that often work for Bowser, though in some games, they are friendly.  They are playable characters in some Mario sports games, such as Mario Kart.
Goomba: Goombas are mushroom shaped enemies that are the most common in the series. They are easily killed by jumping on their head.
Paratroopa: A flying version of a Koopa Troopa.
Paragoomba: A flying version of a Goomba.
Boo: Ghosts that stop moving when Mario looks at them. They show up in most Mario titles.
Piranha Plant: A hungry Venus Flytrap that hides in Warp Pipes
Dry Bones: A skeleton variation of the Koopa Troopa
Thwomp: Giant stone faces with spikes that try to crush Mario. Mostly seen in Super Mario games
Bullet Bill: An alive bullet that can be stood or jumped on. In some games will chase after Mario, but in most will just fly in a straight line
Chuckya: A bomb that can throw Mario
Bob-omb: A walking wind-up bomb
Mecha-Koopa: A wind-up turtle
Cheep Cheep: A red fish
Chain Chomp: A barking ball-and chain
Lakitu: A turtle who rides in a cloud. He sometimes throws things.
Spiny: A spiked turtle enemy commonly thrown by Lakitu
Blooper: A squid that follows Mario to try and beat him.
Buzzy Beetle: A beetle who walks forward and has a shell.
Pokey: A tall, cactus that always smiles.
Shy Guy: A human shaped enemy who wears a hood and mask.

Other characters
Donkey Kong: Donkey Kong is a big ape.  He first fought Mario in the arcade game Donkey Kong, before getting some games of his own as a hero.  He appears in many Mario spin-offs, including Mario Kart.
Birdo: One of the bosses in Super Mario Bros. 2. Birdo shows up in many Mario spin-off titles such as Mario Kart Wii and Mario Party 9.
Diddy Kong: Donkey Kong's smaller sidekick in the Donkey Kong Country series.

Lists of fictional characters

List of Mario series characters


Bukit Timah is an area in Singapore and a hill in that area. Bukit Timah Hill stands at an altitude of  and is the highest point in the city-state of Singapore. Bukit Timah is near the centre of Singapore island. Bukit Timah is 10 kilometres (6 miles) from Singapore's business district.

Etymology and history of Bukit Timah Hill
Bukit Timah, which means "tin-bearing hill" in Malay, was on the 1828 map by Frankin and Philip Jackson as Bukit Timah. The hill was on the map as the eastern source of the Kranji River.

In December 1843, a road was built up to the hill. The hill was an "excellent sanatorium", as the air was "cooler and fresher than the plain, producing an agreeable exhilaration of spirits".

For some, it is synonymous with the Singapore Turf Club, where members and paying visitors flock on race days. This course is closed to the public, unlike the former course (now Farrer Park) where the general public enjoyed watching the king's sport for free.

The 25-km long Bukit Timah Road, the longest road in Singapore, running north and south of the island, takes its name from this hill. The road to Kranji was completed in 1845. Apparently, the area was so infested with tigers that it constituted a serious threat to human life. In 1860, nearly 200 people were reported to have been killed by tigers in and about the gambier and pepper plantations. The first ride on horseback across the island was along Bukit Timah Road in 1840; it took four days and was made by Mr Thomson and Dr Little.

Bukit Timah Road is known as tek kha kang a kinn in Hokkien, which means "the side of the stream in the tek kha (or Selegie Road) district". This only refers to the lower end of the Bukit Timah Road. The Wayang Satu and Bukit Timah village parts are differently called. The Hokkiens also refer to Bukit Timah as be chia lo bue, meaning "end of the horse carriage road".

During World War II, the British Army lost Bukit Timah to the Japanese on February 11th, they knew they had little chance of winning the war as most of their food and supplies were stored there. On 15 February 1942, the head of the Allied forces, Lieutenant General A.E. Percival surrendered to Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita at the Ford Factory in Bukit Timah.

During the Japanese Occupation, the Japanese troops built a Syonan-to Shinto shrine (Syonan-to was the Occupation name for Singapore), similar to the National Shinto in Japan but of a smaller size, at Bukit Timah Hill. Two war memorials dedicated to the Japanese war dead and surprisingly, to the deceased British troops who died defending Singapore, were built at the site. Students, Japanese commanders, British POWs' representatives would gather there regularly to commemorate the dead during the Occupation.

It was only shortly before the Japanese surrender, the Japanese forces hastily destroyed the Shinto Shrine, on fears that returning British forces will demolish it in an bad manner.  The present site where the Shinto Shrine existed, lied at a grey area between the Nature Reserve and Singapore Armed Forces restricted area.  Several historians have been down at the site, and an episode from then Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS) history documentary show, "Hey Singapore", was on the mysterious Shinto Shrine. Since then, the Singapore Government has erected the place as "Historical Site". No plans have been indicated to restore the site, on speculations of angry responses from the People Republic of China (PRC) and abroad.

The Japanese war dead were brought back to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, while the remains of the British troops were instituted at the British Commonwealth's Kranji War Memorial in Singapore. Nothing of the Syonan-to Shinto shrine remains, except for the Holy Cleansing Pond and several Japanese stone pavements left at the site.

After the Japanese Occupation, the farms and plantations in Bukit Timah gave way to industrial buildings and high-rise flats. In the 1960s and 1970s, Bukit Timah was a major industrial center. Today, these have been replaced with luxury bungalows, terraces and condominiums, making Bukit Timah Singapore's premier residential district.

Highlights
The Bukit Timah area is a particularly prominent location with a high land value. The area of Bukit Timah has an extensive flora and forest compared to the parts of Singapore, and contains Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, which is partially responsible for its high land value. The nature reserve was established in 1883.

The Bukit Timah Race Course, a Thoroughbred horse racing facility, was opened in 1933 and operated until 1999.

The nearby area houses many bungalows, traditionally expensive in land-scarce Singapore, as well as high rise condominiums. Many expatriates and well heeled Singaporeans tend to stay in this region.  The rise in land prices has led to development of new condominiums.  For example, the Copthorne Orchid Hotel in Dunearn Road is being redeveloped into condominiums for sale.

This region was later extended and Upper Bukit Timah (District 21) was formed. The Keretapi Tanah Melayu from Malaysia has a passing loop station here along its rail network from Johor Bahru to Tanjong Pagar.

References

Victor R Savage, Brenda S A Yeoh (2003), Toponymics - A Study of Singapore Street Names, Eastern Universities Press,
National Heritage Board (2002), Singapore's 100 Historic Places, Archipelago Press,

Other websites
Interactive 360° VR tour of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve

Geography of Singapore
Places in Singapore
Hills of Asia

Bukit Timah


The Braddock Road was a military road built in 1755 in what was then British America and is now the United States.  It was the first improved road to cross the barrier of the successive ridgelines of the Appalachian Mountains. It was constructed by troops of Virginia militia and British regulars commanded by General Edward Braddock of the Coldstream Guards, part of an expedition to conquer the Ohio Country from the French at the beginning of the French and Indian War, the North American portion of the Seven Years' War. George Washington was an aide-de-camp to General Braddock (one of his favorites) who accompanied the expedition. The expedition gave him his first field military experience along with other American military officers. A number of these men would profit from this experience during the Revolutionary War.

Construction
In 1755, Braddock was sent to remove the French from Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh). Starting from Fort Cumberland, General Braddock ordered 600 men, commanded by Major Chapman and John St. Clair to cut a military road over Haystack Mountain. The road followed an Indian path known as Nemacolin's path which had been improved by George Washington and Christopher Gist for the Ohio Company. Chapman's task was to build the road to Little Meadows, about 20 miles away.

After a day of road-building, Maj. Chapman's men had only built two miles of road and had destroyed three wagons trying to get over the treacherous terrain encountered on the mountain. Braddock was about to dispatch 300 more men to the road crew when he was informed, by Lt. Spendlow of the Navy detachment, of an easier route through the Narrows.

Braddock took approximately 1400 men, with accompanying wagons, along Spendlow's route and joined Chapman's road at Spendlow's Camp, in today's LaVale, Maryland.

Braddock met defeat east of Fort Duquesne and was fatally wounded. He was buried in the middle of the road he built, and his soldiers marched over the grave, with the hope of concealing the grave's location from the Indians. The grave was found years later by road workers and the grave was moved. The site is now marked by a marble monument erected in 1913.

The Forbes Expedition, a more successful British expedition mounted against Fort Duquesne in 1758, used a different route through the mountains west of Carlisle, Pennsylvania along what became known as Forbes' Road.

The Cumberland Road, which subsequently became part of the National Road and later U.S. Route 40, roughly parallel Braddock's Road between Cumberland, Maryland, and Chestnut Ridge near Uniontown.

In August 1908 and again during June and July 1909, John Kennedy Lacock, a Harvard professor originally from Amity, near Washington, Pennsylvania, was able to identify the path of Braddock's march.  He hired Ernest K. Weller to photograph the road. Lacock's commissioned photographs survive in the form of postcards, which he published in 1910, and his written account was published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1914. The road Lacock discovered was a road made by over 30 years of colonial settlers following Braddock's trail.

See also

 Great Britain in the Seven Years War
 Forbes Road

References

Footnotes

Sources
 John Kennedy Lacock, "Braddock's Road," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, XXXVIII, 1 (1914), pp. 1–38.
 Will H. Lowdermilk, History of Cumberland, Clearfield Co., October 1997, Paperback, . Full Text Online
Steve Colby, General Braddock's Road Over Haystack Mountain, West of Fort Cumberland", (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151673387202667&id=226549977666)
 Cassandra Vivian, The National Road in Pennsylvania, Arcadia Publishing, 2004,
 Norman L. Baker, Braddock's Road: Mapping the British Expedition from Alexandria to the Monongahela'', The History Press, 2013, .

External links

John Kennedy Lacock Postcards and Photographs

Historic trails and roads in Maryland
Historic trails and roads in Pennsylvania
Historic trails and roads in the United States
History of Cumberland, MD-WV MSA
Pre-statehood history of Maryland
Pre-statehood history of Pennsylvania
Roads in Pennsylvania
Streets in Pittsburgh
U.S. Route 40

Braddock Road (Braddock expedition)


Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in many countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, preprints, journal articles, and software components. The project started in 1997. Its precursor NetEc dates back to 1993.

Overview
Sponsored by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and using its IDEAS database, RePEc provides links to over 1,200,000 full-text articles. Most contributions are freely downloadable, but copyright remains with the author or copyright holder. It is among the largest internet repositories of academic material in the world.

Materials to RePEc can be added through a department or institutional archive or, if no institutional archive is available, through the Munich Personal RePEc Archive. Institutions are welcome to join and contribute their materials by establishing and maintaining their own RePEc archive.

Leading publishers, such as Elsevier and Springer, have their economics material listed in RePEc. RePEc collaborates with the American Economic Association's EconLit database to provide content from leading universities' working paper or preprint series to EconLit. Over 1500 journals and over 3300 working paper series have registered, for a total of over 1.2 million articles, the majority of which are online.

The information in the database is used to rank the more than 50,000 registered economists. Andrei Shleifer is currently the highest-ranked economist, followed by Joseph Stiglitz and James Heckman. The economics department of Harvard University is ranked first, followed by the World Bank and the University of Chicago. Massachusetts is the top region, followed by the United Kingdom and California. There are also rankings by country and sub-discipline.

RePEc also indexes worldwide economics institutions through its Economic Departments, Institutes and Research Centers in the World (EDIRC) database.

RePEc promotes open-access journals and also benefits from open access for its own citation analysis efforts.

Since 2018, RePEc has used NamSor gender classifier to estimate female representation in Economics. As of February 2021, 15894 of 61488 economists are female, or a proportion of 25.8%.

See also
 List of academic databases and search engines
 Social Science Research Network

References

Further reading

External links

Eprint archives
Open-access archives
Projects established in 1997
Economics websites
Bibliographic databases and indexes
Economics research
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data services
Citation indices

Research Papers in Economics


Character could mean:
Character (persona), a social role
Fictional character, a character who exists in fiction.
Non-fictional character, usage of a real person in a fictional context
Moral character
Sacramental character, a Catholic teaching
Character structure, personal traits

In symbols:
Letter, a symbol used to write a language
Chinese character, a written language symbol
Character (computing), a unit of information roughly corresponding to a grapheme
Character (mathematics)

In accounting and mathematics:
Character (income tax), a type of income for tax purposes in the USA

In entertainment:
Character (1997 movie) a 1997 Dutch movie based on Bordewijk's novel
Character (album), by Dark Tranquillity
Characters (album), by Stevie Wonder
Character Options, a toy company
The Characters, a book by the Greek philosopher  Theophrastus

In biology:
 a trait, a characteristic feature of an organism.

Character


Frank Musselman Schoonmaker (August 20, 1905 – January 11, 1976) was an American travel guide writer, wine writer and wine merchant. He was born in Spearfish, South Dakota, and attended for two years at Princeton University, after which he dropped out  in 1925 to live and travel in Europe. He wrote two travel guides, Through Europe on Two Dollars a Day and Come with me to France, and, with the approaching end of Prohibition in the United States, researched and wrote a series of articles for The New Yorker. While involved in this latter project he met Raymond Baudoin, the editor of the La Revue du vin de France, who took him under his wing and taught him about wine, touring the various wine regions of France.

Schoonmaker also collaborated in the wine trade with Alexis Lichine, another wine writer. Together they were considered the most influential wine writers in the US for several decades. In January 1976, Frank Schoonmaker died at his home at 50 East 72nd Street in New York City.

Army service
In 1939 Schoonmaker joined a new division of the U.S. Army known as the Office of Strategic Services or O.S.S, where he was stationed in Spain. He received the Bronze Star for his work with the O.S.S. After the war, Alexis Lichine negotiated a full partnership with Schoonmaker, but the wine partnership ended bitterly. In 1946, after many months of trying to find a compromise that would work for both, Lichine went to work as the import-export manager for United Distillers of America.

Wine writings and marketing
Schoonmaker's importance was both as a writer, the author of the Complete Wine Book (1934) and later the classic Frank Schoonmaker's Encyclopedia of Wine, and as a wine importer, who found American markets especially for small scale growers in Burgundy such as Domaine Ponsot in Morey St Denis and the Marquis d'Angerville in Volnay. Together with Baudoin, Schoonmaker played a seminal role in creating a market for wines bottled by the grower/winemaker rather than by a negotiant' – a merchant/shipper.  He started "Frank Schoonmaker Selections" in 1936 in New York City.

In 1972 The 'Frank Schoonmaker Selections' company was purchased by a division of the Souverain wine conglomerate. It was owned by Pillsbury of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1974 the Souverain wineries and the Frank Schoonmaker Import wine business were sold to St. Helena's Freemark Abbey wine group, and was renamed Rutherford Hill Winery. The same year a group of 179 grape growers bought the Alexander Valley Souverain facility. It has since become the property of Francis Ford Coppola. The Frank Schoonmaker Selections division was liquidated in 1975.

Consulting work
As a consultant to such Californian wineries as Wente and Almaden, Schoonmaker introduced the idea of labeling wines using varietal names (such as Pinot noir, Chardonnay, or Riesling) rather than semi-generic names borrowed from European regions ("Burgundy", "Chablis", "Rhine", etc.). Schoonmaker claimed that "the more specific the name, the better the wine". While Schoonmaker was promoting the practice in California already around 1940, it did not become truly widespread until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Mondavi was one of the first to label the majority of his wines by varietal names and was tireless in promoting the practice. This has become the standard in New World wine and some European producers are adopting the practice because of consumer demand.

See also
List of wine personalities

References

1905 births
1976 deaths
Wine critics
Princeton University alumni
American people of Dutch descent
20th-century American writers
20th-century American male writers
People from Spearfish, South Dakota

Frank Schoonmaker


Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and entrepreneur, who invented many things.

Edison developed one of the first practical light bulbs, but contrary to popular belief did not invent the light bulb. Edison's 1093 patents were the most granted to any inventor in his time. He started the General Electric Company to make some of the things he invented. He died with diabetes.

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio. When Thomas Edison was seven years old, he moved with his family to Port Huron, Michigan. Thomas Edison started school late because of an illness. Three months later, Edison was removed from school, because he could not pay attention to his teacher. His mother, who was a teacher in Canada, taught Thomas Edison at home. Thomas Edison's mother helped him become motivated for learning, and he was a good student to her.

When Thomas Edison was twelve years old, he got scarlet fever. The effects of the fever, as well as getting picked up by the ears by a train conductor, caused Edison to become completely deaf in his left ear, and 80 percent deaf in the other. He learned Morse code of the telegraph, and began a job as a "brass pounder" (telegraph operator). At age sixteen, Thomas Edison made his first invention, which was called an "automatic repeater." It used punched tape to send telegraph signals quickly between unmanned stations, more quickly than a telegraph operator could do.

Career
In 1868, Edison moved East and began to work for the Western Union Company in Boston, Massachusetts as a telegraph operator. He worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, and continued to "moonlight" on his own projects. Within six months, he had applied for and received his first patent for an electric vote recorder. It made the voting process faster but he could not find buyers. Then, Edison moved to New York and began to work for a company fixing their machines. At night, he continued to work on his projects.

In 1876 Edison used the money from his inventions to start his own laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. In 1877~78, he invented there the carbon microphone, which made the sound for Alexander Graham Bell's new telephone invention louder. In 1877, Edison invented the phonograph, the first machine that could record and play sound. The phonograph made him internationally famous. However, a new discovery proved that the French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented sound recording before Edison. In 1879, Edison made a light bulb that lasted longer. Another invention, the electric power distribution network, lasted even longer.

Personal life
He married Mary Stilwell in 1871. He had three children in that marriage: Marion Estelle Edison (also called Dot), Thomas Alva Edison, Jr. (also called Dash) and William Leslie Edison. Mary Stilwell died in 1884. Thomas Edison bought some land in Florida and built a house. When he was thirty-nine, Edison married his second wife, Mina Miller, who was 19. He had 3 children in that marriage: Madeleine Edison, Charles Edison (who took over the company when his father died and was later elected Governor of New Jersey), and Theodore Miller Edison. When he got older, he would throw dinner parties for fellow inventors. Since he was older, he had impaired hearing, so his wife would tap out all the conversations at the dinner table in Morse code in to his hand.

Related pages
List of scientists from the Americas

References

Other websites

 Edison cylinder recordings , from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
 4-disc DVD set containing over 140 films produced by the Thomas Edison Company .
 Complete list of 1,093 patents.

Businesspeople from Ohio
American inventors
Deaths from diabetes
Disease-related deaths in New Jersey
Scientists from Ohio
1847 births
1931 deaths

Thomas Edison


Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) was a program run by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, surveying the sky for near-Earth objects. NEAT was conducted from December 1995 until April 2007, at GEODSS on Hawaii (Haleakala-NEAT; 566), as well as at Palomar Observatory in California (Palomar-NEAT; 644). With the discovery of more than 40 thousand minor planets, NEAT has been one of the most successful programs in this field, comparable to the Catalina Sky Survey, LONEOS and Mount Lemmon Survey.

NEAT was the successor to the Palomar Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey (PCAS).

History

The original principal investigator was Eleanor F. Helin, with co-investigators Steven H. Pravdo and David L. Rabinowitz.

NEAT had a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Air Force to use a GEODSS telescope located on Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii. GEODSS stands for Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance and these wide field Air Force telescopes were designed to optically observe Earth orbital spacecraft. The NEAT team designed a CCD camera and computer system for the GEODSS telescope. The CCD camera format was 4096 × 4096 pixels and the field of view was 1.2° × 1.6°.

Beginning in April 2001, the Samuel Oschin telescope ( aperture Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory) was also put into service to discover and track near-Earth objects. This telescope was equipped with a camera containing 112 CCDs each 2400 × 600. This was the telescope that produced the images leading to the discovery of 50000 Quaoar in 2002, and 90377 Sedna in 2003 (published 2004) and the dwarf planet Eris.

In addition to discovering thousands of asteroids, NEAT was also credited with the co-discovery (recovery) of periodic comet 54P/de Vico-Swift-NEAT and of the high proper motion Teegarden's star. The C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) comet was discovered on August 24, 2001 by NEAT.

An asteroid was named in its honour, 64070 NEAT, in early 2005.

Discoveries

1996 PW was discovered on 1996 August 9 by a NEAT automated search camera on Haleakalā, Hawaii. It was the first object that was not an active comet discovered on an orbit typical of a long-period comets. This raised the possibility it was an extinct comet or an unusual asteroid.

See also
 List of Near-Earth asteroids by distance from Sun
 Minor Planet Center (MPC)
 Planetary Data System (PDS)
 Spaceguard
List of near-Earth object observation projects

References

External links
 Near Earth Asteroid Tracking

Astronomical surveys
Asteroid surveys
Astronomical discoveries by institution

Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Near-Earth object tracking
Palomar Observatory

Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking


Canonisation is a statement by a church saying that someone is a saint. This process is used by some Christian churches, most commonly in the Roman Catholic Church. The person must be dead, because living people cannot be canonised.

The process of canonisation involves proving that the person lived in a way that justifies this decision. They must have loved others and loved God. In the Catholic Church, at least two miracles by the saint's intercession must be proven. This means that, because the person is believed to be in heaven, someone must pray, or ask, for the saint to pray for them in heaven. If the prayer is answered and a miracle happens, then they know that the person is a saint. The miracles prove that the saint must be in heaven with God, and able to ask God for prayers to be answered.

These people then enter into the canon, or list, of saints.

It is not correct to say that the Church "makes" someone a saint. The Catholic Church believes that anyone who is in heaven is already a saint. The canonisation process just finds out for sure, or without a doubt, that someone is a saint.

Other websites
 Canonistion of Saints  - Describes the significance and process of canonising saints.
 Entry on canonisation and beatification in the Catholic Encyclopedia

Christian terminology
Christian saints

Canonization


D-3 is an uncompressed composite digital video videocassette format invented at NHK and introduced commercially by Panasonic. It was launched in 1991 to compete with Ampex's D-2.

D-3 uses half-inch metal particle tape at 83.88 mm/s (compare to D-2's 19 mm and 131.7 mm/s). Like D-2, the composite video signal is sampled at four times the color subcarrier frequency, with eight bits per sample.  Four channels of 48 kHz 16–20 bit PCM audio, and other ancillary data, are inserted during the vertical blanking interval. The aggregate net (error corrected) bitrate of the format is 143 Mbit/s, and because the codec is lossless, it has been used in data applications.

Camcorders were available which used this format, and are to date the only digital tape camcorders to use a lossless encoding scheme. The D-5 format, introduced in 1993 by Panasonic and marketed as D-5 HD, uses the D-3 transport and tape running at roughly double D-3 speed. The D-3 transport in turn is derived from the MII transport.  D-3/D-5 tapes come in small (161 mm × 96 mm × 25 mm), medium (212 mm × 124 mm × 25 mm), and large (296 mm × 167 mm × 25 mm) cassettes,  with format-specific recognition holes. Maximum D-3 runtimes (in the Fujifilm lineup) are 50, 126, and 248 minutes.

The D-3 format is now regarded as obsolete. In the early 1990s the BBC embarked on a massive project to copy its older video tapes onto D-3 for archival, but the D-3 cassettes themselves have become obsolete and are being transferred to modern digital video standards. There is doubt over whether the surviving D-3 machines will last long enough to play the 340,000 tapes which the corporation holds.

References

External links
 Technical Glossary of Common Audiovisual Terms: D3
 International Association of Broadcasting Manufacturers Technical Reference on Video Tape Recording Formats, January 2000

Video storage
Audiovisual introductions in 1991
Television terminology
Videocassette formats

D-3 (video)


St. Nicholas Church () is one of the oldest Eastern Orthodox churches in Vilnius, Lithuania, and belongs to the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Lithuania.

According to a popular legend, the first wooden Orthodox chapel located on the place of today's St. Nicholas church was built around 1340. Seven years later, the Vilnius martyrs were supposedly buried there. However, in 1350, Uliana of Tver, the second wife of prince Algirdas, ordered to build a new brick church. In 1514, this church was again replaced with a larger one. It remained Orthodox up to 1609, when, like most of Vilnius Orthodox churches, it was given to the Uniates on a personal order of the king Sigismund III Vasa.

Around 1740 the church was completely destroyed by fire and rebuilt in Baroque style. In 1839, the Russian local government closed the Uniate parish and given the building back to the Orthodox. After the failed Polish January Uprising, it was completely rebuilt in Neo-Byzantine style on the personal initiative of general-governor of Vilnius Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov-Vilensky. The renewed church was to be another sign of Russian domination in the city, becoming the fifth Orthodox church in the Old Town of Vilnius. Muraviev ordered also the construction of St. Michael the Archangel chapel which was to commemorate his victory over the Polish uprising. In 1866, the whole church was reconsecrated. The general-governor's role in the reconstruction of the church was described on a marble plaque on the western wall of the church.

After World War II, the church was closed, but in 1947, the Stalinist government agreed to reopen it as a parish church. The general renovation of the building took place before 1956.

References
 G. Shlevis, Православные храмы Литвы, Vilnius 2006

Eastern Orthodox churches in Lithuania
Churches in Vilnius

Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, Vilnius


Dallas Winmar is a Western Australian writer who first worked with Company B in 2001 on the staging of her play Aliwa!. This play was first showcased in Perth by Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre and developed at the Australian National Playwrights Conference in 1999 and 2000.

She was commissioned by Kooemba Jdarra Theatre Company to write Skin Deep for their 2000 program. Yibiyung, her third play, was workshopped at the Australian National Playwrights Conference in 2006 and the PlayWriting Australia National Script Workshop in 2007.

Dallas was jointly awarded the Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2002 for Aliwa! (alongside Jane Harrison for Stolen). Aliwa! was also shortlisted for the script category of the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, and nominated for commendation for the Louis Esson Prize for Drama shortlist in 2003.

Winmar again won the Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2008 for Yibiyung.

References

Living people
Australian dramatists and playwrights
Australian women writers
Indigenous Australian writers
Year of birth missing (living people)

Dallas Winmar