Abbott Lawrence Lowell (December 13, 1856 – January 6, 1943) was an American educator and legal scholar. He was President of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933.

With an "aristocratic sense of mission and self-certainty," Lowell cut a large figure in American education and to some extent in public life as well. At Harvard University his years as president saw a remarkable expansion of the university in terms of the size of its physical infrastructure, its student body, and its endowment. His reform of undergraduate education established the system of majoring in a particular discipline that became the standard in American education.

His progressive reputation in education derived principally from his insistence on integrating social classes at Harvard and preventing students of wealthy backgrounds from living apart from their less wealthy peers, a position for which he was sometimes termed "a traitor to his class." He also recognized the university's obligation to serve the surrounding community, particularly in making college courses available to and putting college degrees within the reach of local schoolteachers. He took the progressive side on certain public issues as well. He demonstrated outspoken support for academic freedom during World War I and played a prominent role in urging the public to support American participation in the League of Nations following the war.

Yet his Harvard years saw two public disputes in which he argued for compromising basic principles of justice for the sake of his own personal vision of Harvard's mission with respect to assimilating non-traditional students. In one instance, he tried to limit Jewish enrollment to 15% of the student body. In the other, he tried to ban African-American students from living in the Freshman Halls when all of Harvard's new students were required to room there. In both cases the Harvard Board of Overseers insisted on the consistent application of liberal principles and overruled him.

One historian summarized his complex personality and legacy with these words: "He played many characters—the rich man of simple tastes, the gentleman who loathed gentlemanly C's, the passionate theorist of democracy whose personal conduct was suavely autocratic." The interplay of democratic and patrician instincts, and especially his insistence on defending his positions when others found them indefensible, made him hard for his contemporaries to grasp. As one historian posed the question: "How could a consensus form around one who exasperated his friends as often as he confounded his enemies."

Early years
Lowell was born on December 13, 1856, in Boston, Massachusetts, the second son of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. His mother was a cousin of architect Charles H. Bigelow. A member of the Brahmin Lowell family, his siblings included the poet Amy Lowell, the astronomer Percival Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother's side, the grandchildren of Abbott Lawrence.

Lowell graduated from Noble and Greenough School in 1873 and attended Harvard College where he presented a thesis for honors in mathematics that addressed using quaternions to treat quadrics and graduated in 1877. While at Harvard, he was a member of the Hasty Pudding. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1880 and practiced law from 1880 to 1897 in partnership with his cousin, Francis Cabot Lowell, with whom he wrote Transfer of Stock in Corporations, which appeared in 1884. On June 19, 1879, while a law student, he married a distant cousin, Anna Parker Lowell in King's Chapel in Boston and honeymooned in the Western U.S.

His first scholarly publications appeared before he undertook an academic career. Essays on Government appeared in 1889, designed to counter the arguments Woodrow Wilson made in his Congressional Government. The two volumes of Governments and Parties in Continental Europe followed in 1896. Lowell was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joining his father and brother, in 1897. He became a trustee of MIT in 1897. In 1899 Lowell was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Harvard University
In 1897, Lowell became lecturer, and in 1898, professor of government at Harvard. His publishing career continued with the appearance of Colonial Civil Service in 1900, and The Government of England in two volumes in 1908. In December 1901, Lowell and his wife donated funds anonymously to erect a building housing a large lecture hall, a facility the university lacked at the time. It became the New Lecture Hall (later renamed Lowell Lecture Hall), at the corner of Oxford and Kneeland Streets, and held a 928-seat auditorium as well as 8 meeting rooms.

From relatively early in his professional career, Lowell worried about the role of racial and ethnic minorities in American society. As early as 1887, he wrote of the Irish: "What we need is not to dominate the Irish, but to absorb them ... We want them to become rich, and send their sons to our colleges, to share our prosperity and our sentiments. We do not want to feel that they are among us and yet not really part of us." He believed that only a homogeneous society could safeguard the achievements of American democracy. Sometime before 1906, he became an honorary vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League, an organization that promoted literacy tests and tightened enforcement of immigration laws. In 1910, he wrote approvingly in private of excluding Chinese immigrants entirely and of Southern states that denied the franchise to black citizens. Publicly he consistently adopted assimilation as the solution to absorbing other groups, limiting their numbers to levels he believed would allow American society to absorb them without being changed itself, a stance that "fused liberal and racist ideas in making the case for exclusion."

In 1909, he became president of the American Political Science Association. That same year, he succeeded Charles William Eliot as president of Harvard University, a post he held for 24 years until his retirement in 1933.

Lowell received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leiden (the Netherlands) on 30 August 1919.

Harvard reforms

Lowell immediately embarked upon a series of reforms that were both academic and social in nature. Under his predecessor, Charles W. Eliot, Harvard had replaced the single standardized undergraduate course with a system that allowed students free choice of electives. That was a logical extension of the trend in U.S. education that had modeled the university on the German system, including the German principle of student freedom in choosing courses. So dominant was Harvard's role in American education that all large American colleges and universities had adopted the elective system by 1904. It appealed to all student types, those intellectually curious and energetic as well as the lazy without intellectual ambition.

Lowell now implemented a second, equally revolutionary restructuring of undergraduate education. As early as his service on an ad hoc faculty Committee on Improving Instruction in 1903, he had determined that the elective system was a failure. Large numbers of students, lacking intellectual ambition, chose their courses with little concern for learning, more intent on the ease with which they could fulfill the course requirements, resulting in a course of study that was "neither rigorous nor coherent." Lowell dismantled the elective system and in its place established concentration (what is commonly called a "major") and distribution requirements that would soon become the new American model. Paired with the concentration requirement was a tutorial system in which every student had the guidance of a tutor to see he was prepared for examination in his area of concentration.

On admissions, Lowell continued Eliot's attempts to broaden the backgrounds of the entering class. Eliot had abolished the requirement in Greek (1886) and Latin (1898) so that students from schools other than elite preparatory schools could gain entry. Lowell in 1909–10 added a new admission procedure that allowed students to qualify through a new examination process designed to admit "the good scholar from a good school that does not habitually prepare for Harvard." The numbers of students from public schools grew steadily, forming a majority by 1913.

Educational practices were only one side of the crisis Lowell saw at Harvard. He analyzed the social divisions of the Harvard students in similar terms. As the admissions process changed over the years, Lowell recognized that the student body was divided sharply socially and by class, far from the cohesive body he remembered from a few decades earlier. Student living arrangements embodied and intensified the problem. As early as 1902, Lowell had decried the "great danger of a snobbish separation of the students on lines of wealth," resulting in "the loss of that democratic feeling which ought to lie at the basis of university life." Harvard had not built new dormitories even as the size of its undergraduate enrollment grew, so private capital constructed living quarters designed to serve as dormitory-like accommodations for those who afford it. That produced two classes, the underprivileged living in Harvard Yard in out-of-date buildings and the upper crust living on the "Gold Coast" of Mt. Auburn Street, the "centre of social life."

Lowell's long-term solution was a residential system that he only achieved with the opening of the residential houses in 1930. In the short term, Lowell raised funds and initiated construction projects that would permit the College to house all its freshmen together. The first Freshman Halls opened in 1914. In 1920, Harvard purchased the private dormitories on Mt. Auburn Street "so that the student body may enjoy what was the privilege of the few."

Lowell Institute and Harvard Extension School
In 1900, Lowell succeeded his father as Trustee of the Lowell Institute, which Lowell's great-grandfather founded to subsidize public lectures and popular education programs. Throughout the 40 years he headed the Institute, Lowell's selection of topics and lecturers for the public series reflected his conservative tastes. Topics tended to history and government, with some science and music upon occasion. He ignored contemporary literature and current social trends. Typical were "The War of 1812," "The Development of Choral Music," "The Migration of Birds," and "American Orators and Oratory." A balanced series on "Soviet Russia after Thirteen Years" was an exception.

To the education programs Lowell brought his instinct for organization. He transformed the earlier variety of scientific courses into the School for Industrial Foremen at MIT, later called the Lowell Institute School, and focused its program on mechanical and electrical engineering. Stating that "any popular education at the present day should be systematic," he hired Harvard professors to repeat their courses for an audience of adults in Boston in the late afternoon or evening, promising the same quality and examinations. When he became Harvard's President, Lowell exploited his two positions to press further. In 1910, he led in the formation of a consortium of area schools, soon called the Commission on Extension Courses, that included Boston University, Boston College, MIT, Simmons, Tufts, Wellesley, and the Museum of Fine Arts. All agreed to provide similar courses and agreed to award the degree of Associate in Arts to students who completed the equivalent of a college program. He had earlier been approached by a committee of Boston schoolteachers, and he believed his extension program would "put a college degree within the reach of schoolteachers." When the Harvard Overseers agreed in 1910 to appoint a dean for the Department of University Extension, the program's 600 student were two-thirds female. Roughly a third of the students were teachers, a third office workers, and the remainder working at home. After 7 years, enrollment reached 1500.

When the schoolteachers asked why they were not entitled to the same bachelor's degree as the Harvard College students, Lowell defended the distinction. Though courses were comparable, the programs and requirements were different, since the many specialized courses required of the College students could not be offered in the Extension Program. He meant the Associate in Arts degree to be distinctive. When Lowell learned in 1933 that other American schools had begun to award the Associate in Arts degree to students after the equivalent of just two years of work, he felt betrayed. He wrote: "the name of Associate in Arts has been degraded, probably beyond recovery, by wicked, thievish, and otherwise disreputable institutions." Harvard responded with a new Adjunct in Arts.

Academic freedom

During World War I, when American universities were under great pressure to demonstrate their unambiguous commitment to the American war effort, Harvard under Lowell established a distinguished record of independence. The New York Times later wrote that Lowell "steadfastly refused to accede to the demands of the hysterically patriotic that German subjects be dropped from the curriculum." When a Harvard alumnus threatened to withdraw a ten-million-dollar bequest unless a certain pro-German professor was dismissed, the Harvard Corporation refused to submit to his demand. Lowell's uncompromising statement in support of academic freedom was a landmark event at a time when other universities were demanding compliant behavior from their faculty.

He similarly defended a student's anti-German poem with a statement of principle in defense of free speech within the academic community. In 1915, Kuno Meyer a professor at the University of Berlin who was considering a temporary Harvard appointment, protested the publication of an undergraduate's satirical poem in a college magazine. Lowell replied that freedom of speech played a different role in American universities than in their German counterparts. "We have endeavored to maintain the right of all members of the university to express themselves freely, without censorship or supervision by the authorities of the university, and have applied this rule impartially to those who favor Germany and those who favor the Allies—to the former in the face of a pretty violent agitation for muzzling professors by alumni of the university and outsiders."

During the Boston police strike of 1919, Lowell called upon Harvard's students "to help in any way ... to maintain order and support the laws of the Commonwealth" by providing security in place of the strikers. Harold Laski, a tutor in political science of socialist views and still too young to have a scholarly reputation, supported the strikers. Members of the University's Board of Overseers began to talk of dismissing Laski, which provoked a threat from Lowell: "If the Overseers ask for Laski's resignation they will get mine!"

Harvard's Professor Zechariah Chafee paid tribute to Lowell's defense of Harvard's teachers and students by dedicating his 1920 study Free Speech in the United States to Lowell, "whose wisdom and courage in the face of uneasy fears and stormy criticism made it unmistakably plain that so long as he was president no one could breathe the air of Harvard and not be free."

Purge of homosexuals

In 1920, the brother of a student who had recently committed suicide brought evidence of ongoing homosexual activity among the students to the College's Acting Dean Chester N. Greenough. After consulting with Lowell and under his authority, the Dean convened an ad hoc tribunal of administrators to investigate the charges. It conducted more than 30 interviews behind closed doors and took action against eight students, a recent graduate, and an assistant professor. They were expelled or had their association with the university severed. Lowell proved particularly opposed to readmission for those who had been expelled only for associating too closely with those more directly involved. He eventually relented in two of four cases. The affair went unreported until 2002, when Harvard President Lawrence Summers called the affair "part of a past that we have rightly left behind."

Excluding African-Americans from the Freshman Halls

African-American students had lived in Harvard's dormitories for decades, until Lowell changed the policy. Freshmen were required to live in the Freshman Halls beginning in 1915. Two black students did live there during World War I without incident. When a few were excluded after the war they raised no protest.

The matter became the object of student protest in 1922, when six banned black freshmen, led by a recent alumnus who was studying at the Business School, protested their exclusion. Lowell wrote this explanation to Roscoe Conkling Bruce, himself an African American Harvard alumnus and the father of an incoming freshman: "We have not thought it possible to compel men of different races to reside together." Bruce's lengthy reply underscored the irony of Lowell's position: "The policy of compulsory residence in the Freshman Halls is costly indeed if it is the thing that constrains Harvard to enter open-eyed and brusque upon a policy of racial discrimination." Lowell stood his ground: "It is not a departure from the past to refuse to compel white and colored men to room in the same building. We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man; but we do not owe it to him to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial." He accused Bruce of insisting on a change of policy and employed an argument about minority presence provoking prejudice that he also used about the same time in the Jewish quota dispute. "For the colored man to claim that he is entitled to have the white man compelled to live with him is a very unfortunate innovation which, far from doing him good, would increase a prejudice which, as you and I will thoroughly agree, is most unfortunate and probably growing."

When their direct appeal to Lowell failed, the students organized public support from alumni and the press. Of those who wrote to Lowell, blacks saw his position as unqualified racism. Whites either saw it as a violation of Harvard's traditions or applauded it in frankly racist terms. Most criticism saw Lowell's stance as a submission to Southern prejudice. One called it "the slaveholder's prejudice" and another called Lowell's policy a "surrender to the Bourbon South." One Wisconsin minister suggested Lowell allow the black students to live "voluntarily" in a segregated section of the Freshman Halls. Lowell replied that such a plan "seems to me to be something like the Jim Crow car, an enforced seclusion which is, to me, very repulsive." A faculty committee called Lowell's exclusion policy "a dangerous surrender of traditional ideals," and in March 1923 the Harvard Board of Overseers unanimously overruled Lowell. One of them, Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote: "It seems to be a pity that the matter ever came up in this way. There were certainly many colored students in Cambridge when we were there and no question ever arose."

Despite an official policy of integration, what freshmen experienced thereafter is not entirely clear. Some black freshmen lived in the dormitories but believed that not all the Freshman Halls were open to them. One was granted permission to live outside the Freshman Halls even though he had not requested such a privilege. Harvard Dean Henry Aaron Yeomans, later Lowell's biographer, frankly admitted that he and Lowell as administrators found a way to accommodate themselves to the Overseers' stated principle: "The matter was settled in theory, and in practice no serious difficulties were encountered. The applicant who had raised the question decided to live elsewhere. A few others who applied at long intervals, were so skillfully located in the Halls that no susceptible feelings were hurt."

Admissions and Jewish quota controversy
Following Lowell's earlier reform of Harvard's admissions process to increase the admission of public school students, the Jewish proportion of the student body rose from 6% in 1908 to 22% in 1922, at a time when Jews constituted about 3% of the U.S. population. Lowell, continuing to focus on the cohesiveness of the student body, described a campus where antisemitism was growing and Jewish students were ever more likely to be isolated from the majority. He feared—and recent developments at Columbia University supported him—that the social elite would cease sending its sons to Harvard as Jewish enrollment increased. He cited what he saw as the parallel experience of hotels and clubs that lost their old membership when the proportion of Jewish members increased. He proposed limiting Jewish admissions to 15% of the entering class. His attempts to persuade members of the Harvard Board of Overseers to adopt his views were already failing when the plan was leaked to the Boston Post in May 1922. The idea was immediately denounced by Irish and black groups and by the American Federation of Labor.

Lowell continued to argue both in private correspondence and in public speeches that his rationale was the welfare of the Jewish students. "It is the duty of Harvard," he said, "to receive just as many boys who have come, or whose parents have come, to his country without our background as it can effectively educate." If higher Jewish enrollment provoked greater prejudice against them, he asked, "How can we cause the Jews to feel and be regarded as an integral part of the student body?" He also suggested that Harvard would not be facing this issue if other universities and colleges would admit Jews in similar numbers: "If every college in the country would take a limited proportion of Jews, I suspect we should go a long way toward eliminating race feeling among the students."

The question was turned over to a faculty committee: the Committee on Methods of Sifting Candidates for Admission. In the course of the internal campaign to influence that group's work, Lowell sought to exploit divisions within the Jewish community. Despite the basic divide between the older Jewish immigrants, usually of German origin, and the lower class of more recently arrived Eastern European Jews, Lowell found no ally there who would articulate his view of "desirable" and "undesirable" Jews. The faculty committee eventually rejected Lowell's proposed quota. Instead, Harvard's new guiding principle in admissions would be the top seventh rule. Harvard would reach out to youths in smaller cities and towns, even to rural communities, with the guideline that the student place in the top seventh of his class. It would seek "to pick out the best pupils from good schools, here, there, and everywhere." Though some suspected this was nothing but a covert way to decrease Jewish enrollment, the policy had the opposite effect. The numbers of non-Jewish students attracted from the South and West could not match the larger numbers of Jews admitted from the Middle Atlantic and New England states. By 1925, Jews made up 28% of the entering class.

Lowell then found another way to accomplish his goal, this time less publicly. He first won approval from the Harvard Board of Overseers for a new policy that would, in addition to traditional academic criteria, use letters from teachers and interviews to assess an applicant's "aptitude and character," thus introducing discretion in the place of the strict top seventh rule. He even persuaded one doubtful Overseer that this would not support discrimination against Jews as a group, but merely "careful discernment of differences among individuals." When Lowell gained final approval of these modifications in 1926 and appointed a compliant Admissions Committee, he had won his way. When Lowell left his position in 1933, Jews made up 10% of the undergraduate population.

Public stances

Opposition to Brandeis nomination
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis, a private attorney renowned as a liberal opponent of monopolies and proponent of social reform legislation, to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. As public opinion on the nomination divided along ideological lines, Lowell joined the Republican establishment, particularly that of his Boston Brahmin class, in opposition. He joined 54 others in signing a letter claiming that Brandeis lacked the requisite "legal temperament and capacity." An editorial in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin criticized him for needlessly involving the university in a political dispute. Some students organized their own petition in favor of the nomination. Though some opposition to Brandeis was rooted in antisemitism, Brandeis himself viewed Lowell's opposition as driven by social class prejudice. Writing in private in 1916, Brandeis described men like Lowell "who have been blinded by privilege, who have no evil purpose, and many of whom have a distinct public spirit, but whose environment—or innate narrowness—have obscured all vision and sympathy with the masses."

Internationalism and the League of Nations
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Lowell helped found a civic organization to promote international cooperation to prevent future wars. It was meant to be non-partisan but was inevitably drawn into partisan politics as the subject of American participation in the League of Nations dominated post-war politics. Lowell described himself as "an inconsistent Republican" or "an independent of Republican antecedents." By the time the debate ended, many questioned that independence.

At a convention at Philadelphia's Independence Hall on June 17, 1915, with former President William Howard Taft presiding, one hundred noteworthy Americans announced the formation of the League to Enforce Peace. They proposed an international agreement in which participating nations would agree to "jointly use their economic and military force against any one of their number that goes to war or commits acts of hostility against another." The founders included Alexander Graham Bell, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, and Edward Filene on behalf of the recently founded U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Lowell was elected to the Executive Committee.

The initial efforts of the League to Enforce Peace aimed at creating public awareness through magazine articles and speeches. Then-President Wilson's specific proposal for the League of Nations met resistance from the Republican-controlled Senate and the opposition led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Lowell watched the high-minded debate deteriorate until the ideal of international cooperation was "sacrificed to party intrigue, personal antipathy, and pride of authorship." Lowell and the League to Enforce Peace tried to hold the middle ground. He cared little about Wilson's specific plan or the details of the reservations or amendments Lodge wanted to attach for the Senate to give its assent. Lowell believed American participation was the greater goal, the exact nature of the organization secondary.

One of the most widely publicized confrontations saw Lowell debate Lodge, the League's most prominent opponent, in Boston's Symphony Hall on March 19, 1919, with Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge presiding. That debate proved gentlemanly, since Lowell believed that the resolution of the policy dispute required Wilson and Lodge to compromise. Lowell had sharper exchanges with the die-hard Republican isolationist Senator William Borah of Idaho. Lowell repeatedly argued that George Washington's Farewell Address and its stricture against entangling alliances held no relevance for the present. Senator Borah saw a lack of patriotism: "There are a vast number of people supporting the league of nations who never let an opportunity go by of belittling ... everything that is truly American: and Dr. Lowell is one of them." The Harvard president replied in kind:

I yield neither to Senator Borah nor to any other man in admiration of the Farewell Address and of the great Fathers of the Republic; but I would not use them as a cover for party politics. Never did I sneer at the Farewell Address; but I believe that the greatness of Washington was due to his looking the facts of his day in the face, and determining his conduct thereby, instead of by utterances, however wise of a hundred and fifty years before. I will trust the American people not to mistake short-sightedness for patriotism or narrow-mindedness for love of country.

In the summer of 1919, the League to Enforce Peace published a book of essays modeled on the Federalist Papers called The Covenanter: An American Exposition of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Lowell authored 13 of its 27 essays. The New York Times called it a "masterly analysis" and thought it perfectly suited for a broad public: "This—thank Heaven—is a brochure for the lazy-minded!"

As the election of 1920 approached, the Republican nominee, Warren Harding, campaigned on the domestic issues that united his party and sent confusing signals about his support for a League of Nations. With the election just weeks away, whole groups of League proponents chose different sides. One entire organization of independent voters chose James Cox, the Democratic candidate, who favored the League but showed no more flexibility than President Wilson. Lowell and many other prominent League supporters backed Harding, publishing a statement that became known as the "Letter of the 31 Republicans" on October 14, 1920. Lowell could not express his reasoning publicly. In his view, the League's proponents, and especially the League's Republican proponents, needed to control public perception of Harding's victory, which everyone knew was certain. They could not allow the election to appear as a victory of anti-League Republicans over pro-League Democrats. If the League lost a referendum in that way, there would be no hope for its revival under the new administration.

The claim in the "Statement of 31 Republicans" that a Harding victory meant brighter prospects for the League of Nations was badly received by some League proponents. Lowell came in for attack precisely because of his earlier claims to independence. One Harvard graduate, who had just formed the New Hampshire committee to raise funds for the University's endowment, wrote: "One can understand a Republican partisan and respect him. One can understand a Democratic partisan and respect him. But how can any man explain this recent act of yours consistently with the dignity, gravity, high character and devotion to truth which should attach to the President of Harvard College?" Charged with sacrificing his principles to expediency, Lowell admitted he had but provided his own definition of expediency: "striving to find the most effective way of achieving a principle—refusing to beat one's head uselessly against a wall to attack an entrenchment in face instead if taking it by a turning movement."

Harding as president disappointed proponents of the League, but Lowell never regretted his decision to endorse him. He did view the work of the League to Enforce Peace more critically. Its oratory had failed to engage the public at large, he thought, so public opinion remained "indifferent" to its call for muscular internationalism, leaving isolation or at least inaction to win the day.

Advisory Committee on Sacco and Vanzetti trial
In 1927, Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller was facing last minute appeals to grant clemency to Sacco and Vanzetti, whose case had attracted attention worldwide. He appointed Lowell to an Advisory Committee along with President Samuel Wesley Stratton of MIT and Probate Judge Robert Grant. They were tasked with reviewing the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti to determine whether the trial had been fair. Lowell's appointment was generally well received, for though he had controversy in his past he had also at times demonstrated an independent streak. The defense attorneys considered resigning when they determined that the Committee was biased against the defendants, but some of the defendants' most prominent supporters, including Harvard Law Professor Felix Frankfurter and Judge Julian W. Mack of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, persuaded them to stay because Lowell "was not entirely hopeless."

After two weeks of hearing witnesses and reviewing evidence, the trio produced a report largely authored by Lowell that criticized the judge in the case but deemed the trial fair. A defense attorney later noted ruefully that the release of the Committee's report "abruptly stilled the burgeoning doubts among the leaders of opinion in New England." Supporters of the convicted men denounced the Committee. Harold Laski said the decision represented Lowell's "loyalty to his class." The affair dogged Lowell for the rest of his life. In 1936, on the day when Harvard's 300th anniversary was celebrated, 28 Harvard alumni attacked Lowell for his role in the case, including editor Malcolm Cowley, scholar Newton Arvin, and author John Dos Passos.

Later years and death

Lowell's health declined slowly and his lifelong hearing problems worsened. He resigned his position as Harvard's president on November 21, 1932, and served through the following summer. During his years as president, enrollment at the College expanded from 3,000 to 8,000 and its endowment grew from $23 to $123 million. Lowell's construction projects, some based on the Freshman Halls and the College system, but including Widener Library, the Memorial Church and many others, had transformed the university's infrastructure. Also among the new campus buildings of Lowell's tenure was the President's House (later called Loeb House) at 17 Quincy Street, which Lowell commissioned from his cousin Guy Lowell. It remained the residence of succeeding Harvard Presidents until 1971.

Lowell is remembered as well for a donation of one million dollars to help found the Harvard Society of Fellows. Years before, he had given $10,500 to purchase a 13-inch telescope for his deceased brother Percival's Lowell Observatory, which in 1930 gained fame as the Pluto Discovery Telescope.

Lowell's wife of 51 years, Anna Parker Lowell, died in the spring of 1930.

In retirement from Harvard, he lived on Marlborough Street in Boston's Back Bay and in Cotuit on Cape Cod. He owned Conaumet Neck along the shores of Mashpee Pond. In his will, he bequeathed land along the pond to The Trustees of Reservations, which maintains it as the Lowell Holly Reservation.

He headed the Boston Municipal Research Bureau and chaired a Committee on the Reform of Judicial Procedure under the auspices of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. He also became head of the Motion Picture Research Council, a group established to promote studies of the social values of motion pictures. He published frequently in such periodicals as The Atlantic and Foreign Affairs.

Lowell was an honorary member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and was invested with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor of France.

He died at home on Marlborough Street on January 6, 1943. Funeral services were held at Harvard's Memorial Church.

Quotes

Works
Transfer of Stock in Corporations, with Francis Cabot Lowell (1884)
Essays on Government (1889)
Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, 2 vols. (1896)
Colonial Civil Service (1900)
The Influence of Party on Legislation in England and America (1902)
The Government of England, 2 vols. (1908)
Public Opinion and Popular Government (1909)
The Covenanter: an American exposition of the covenant of the League of Nations, with William H. Taft, George W. Wickersham, and Henry W. Taft (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1919)
Public Opinion in War and Peace (1923)
At War with Academic Traditions in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934)
Biography of Percival Lowell (Macmillan, 1935)
What a University President has Learned (NY: Macmillan Company, 1938)
Facts and Visions: Twenty-four Baccalaureate Sermons, edited by Henry Aaron Yeomans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944)

See also
 Lowell family
 Lowell Institute
 People on the cover of Time magazine: 1920s – June 21, 1926

Notes

Further reading
Ruhl Jacob Bartlett, The League to Enforce Peace (University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

External links

 The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells of America from 1639 to 1899 is available for free download at Google Books.

1856 births
1943 deaths
American essayists
Harvard Extension School
Harvard Law School alumni
Presidents of Harvard University
Lawyers from Boston
American people of English descent
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Burials at Mount Auburn Cemetery
Massachusetts Republicans
People from Cotuit, Massachusetts
Members of the American Antiquarian Society
Hasty Pudding alumni
Harvard College alumni
Discrimination against LGBT people in the United States
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy
Harvard Extension School faculty

A. Lawrence Lowell


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In some orders, the highest grade may be called the "grand cordon", "grand collar" or something like this. In those cases the rank of grand cross may come after another rank, but before the highest grade.

As an example:
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Most big transmission towers are lattice steel structures. Smaller ones may be wood, concrete or steel poles.

Types
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Tension towers (also known as anchor towers) pull on the wires. Their insulators are used horizontally. They work as terminal towers at the end of a power line. They work as branch towers where power lines split and run in different directions.

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History

Middle Ages
From 1050 to 1571, the city became very important because it was on key trade routes. Many of the parliaments of the Holy Roman Empire (called the Reichstage) met at Nuremberg Castle. The Diets of Nuremberg were an important part of the administrative structure of the empire. In 1219, Nuremberg became an Imperial Free City under Emperor Frederick II. This meant it was ruled by the Emperor, not one of the local lords or princes. It also meant that Nuremberg had a seat in the Imperial Parliament.

In 1298 there was a big pogrom. Nearly 700 Jews were killed. The Jews lived near the river, and by getting rid of the Jews the northern and southern parts of the city could be linked together. This area is now the place of the City Market, Frauenkirche and Rathaus (City Hall).

Early modern age

In 1532, the Peace of Nuremberg, gave Lutherans important concessions. In 1632 during the Thirty Years' War, the Imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein besieged King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Siege of Nuremberg. The city became less important after this war, and only recovered in the nineteenth century, when it grew as an industrial centre.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Nuremberg was practically bankrupt. In 1806 the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, and Nuremberg became part of the Kingdom of Bavaria, and Bavaria took over the city's debts. The first German railway, from Nuremberg to nearby Fürth, was opened in 1835.

Nazi period

Nuremberg was very important during the Nazi Germany period. The Nazi Party held huge Nazi Party conventions – the Nuremberg rallies in the city.

The rallies were held every year from 1927 to 1938 in Nuremberg. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933 the Nuremberg rallies became huge state propaganda events, and a centre of anti-Semitism and other Nazi ideas. At one rally, Hitler passed the anti-Semitic (anti Jewish) Nuremberg Laws which took German citizenship away from all Jews. A number of buildings were built for the rallies, some of which were not finished.

Today many examples of Nazi architecture can still be seen in the city. The city was also the home of the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer.

During World War II, Nuremberg was the headquarters of Wehrkreis (military district) XIII, and an important site for military production, including airplanes, submarines, and tank engines. A subcamp of Flossenbürg concentration camp was here. A lot of the factories used slave labour.

The city was badly damaged in bombing World War II, especially between 1943 and 1945. On January 2, 1945, the medieval city centre was bombed by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Air Force and about ninety percent of it was destroyed in only one hour, with 1800 residents killed and roughly 100,000 left homeless. In February 1945, more attacks followed. In total, about 6000 Nuremberg residents are estimated to have been killed in air raids. Despite this, the city was rebuilt after the war and was to some extent, restored to its pre-war appearance including the reconstruction of some of its medieval buildings.

Between 1945 and 1946, German officials involved in the Holocaust and other war crimes were taken in front of the International Military Tribunal in the Nuremberg Trials. The Soviet Union had wanted the trials to take place in Berlin, but Nuremberg was chosen as the site for the trials for specific reasons:
 It was in the American occupation zone
 The Nuremberg Palace of Justice was big and only damaged a little by the Allied bombing of Germany. A large prison was also part of the complex.
 The city had been the location of the Nazi party's Nuremberg rallies, so there was symbolic value in having the trials to prosecute Nazism there.
 As a compromise, Berlin was the permanent seat of the International Military Tribunal and that the first trial (several were planned) would take place in Nuremberg. Because of the Cold War, there were no subsequent trials.

The same courtroom in Nuremberg was the venue of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, organised by the United States as occupying power in the area.

Economy
Nuremberg city has 501,000 people. As of 2005, the urban area had 763,000 people (about 822,000 people as of 2008). Nuremberg metropolitan area has 1,205,000 people. Nuremberg is still associated with gingerbread (Lebkuchen) products, sausages, and handmade toys. The first pocket watches, called Nuremberg eggs, were made there in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century Nuremberg became the "industrial heart" of Bavaria with companies such as Siemens and MAN.

Things made in the area include electrical equipment, mechanical and optical products, motor vehicles, and printed materials.

Siemens is still the largest industrial employer in the Nuremberg region but a third of German market research agencies is also in the city.

The Nuremberg International Toy Fair is the largest of its kind in the world. The city also hosts several specialist hi-tech fairs every year, attracting experts from every corner of the glob

Culture

Nuremberg was an early center of humanism, science, printing, and mechanical invention.

The city contributed much to the science of astronomy. In 1471 Johannes Mueller of Königsberg (Bavaria), later called Regiomontanus, built an astronomical observatory in Nuremberg and published many important astronomical charts. In 1515, Albrecht Dürer, a native of Nuremberg, mapped the stars of the northern and southern hemispheres, producing the first printed star charts, which had been ordered by Johann Stabius. Around 1515 Dürer also published the "Stabiussche Weltkarte", the first perspective drawing of the terrestrial globe. Perhaps most famously, the main part of Nicolaus Copernicus' work was published in Nuremberg in 1543.

Printers and publishers have a long history in Nuremberg. Many of these publishers worked with well-known artists of the day to produce books that could also be considered works of art. In 1470 Anton Koberger opened Europe's first print shop in Nuremberg. In 1493, he published the Nuremberg Chronicles, also known as the World Chronicles (Schedelsche Weltchronik), an illustrated history of the world from the creation to the present day. It was written in the local Franconian dialect by Hartmann Schedel and had illustrations by Michael Wohlgemuth, Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, and Albrecht Dürer. Others furthered geographical knowledge and travel by map making. Notable among these was navigator and geographer Martin Behaim, who made the first world globe.

Sculptors such as Veit Stoss and Peter Vischer are also associated with Nuremberg.

Composed of prosperous artisans, the guilds of the Meistersingers flourished here. Richard Wagner made their most famous member, Hans Sachs, the hero of his opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel was born here and was organist of Saint Sebald church.

Nuremberg is also famous for its Christmas market, which draws well over a million shoppers each year.

Main sights

The southern part of the old town, known as Lorenzer Seite, is separated from the north by the river Pegnitz and surrounded by the city walls on the south.
 Nuremberg Castle: the three castles that tower over the city including central burgraves' castle, with Free Reich's buildings to the east, the Imperial castle to the west.
 Heilig-Geist-Spital. The Hospital of the Holy Spirit in the centre of the city was founded in 1332. It was one of the largest hospitals of the Middle Ages. Now it houses an old-folks' home and restaurant.
 Hauptmarkt, which provides a picturesque setting and famous market for gingerbread. Nuremberg's star attraction is the Gothic Schöner Brunnen (Beautiful Fountain) which was built around 1385. Now it is a copy, the original fountain is kept in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, the German National Museum.
 The Johannisfriedhof is a medieval cemetery, containing many old graves (Albrecht Dürer, Willibald Pirckheimer, and others). The Rochusfriedhof or the Wöhrder Kirchhof are near the Old Town.
 There is also a medieval market just inside the city walls, selling handcrafted goods.
 The German National Railways Museum  is also in Nuremberg.
 The Nuremberg Ring (now welded within an iron fence) is said to bring good luck to those that touch it.

Transportation

Railways

Nuremberg was the first city in Germany to have a railway, and today Nuremberg Central Station is a stop for IC and ICE trains on the German long-distance railway network. Trains on the Nuremberg – Ingolstadt – Munich High-Speed line travel at up to 300-km/h. The line opened on May 28, 2006. It meant travel times to Munich were reduced to as little as one hour.

Public Transportation
In Nuremberg there are subways, suburban trains, trams and buses.

Sports clubs
 1. F.C. Nuremberg
 SpVgg Greuther Fürth (not really a club from Nuremberg as Fürth is a rural town of its own)
 Thomas Sabo Ice Tigers - Local professional hockey club.

Sister cities
Worldwide, Nuremberg is twinned with the following cities:
  Nice, since 1954
  Kraków, since 1979
  Skopje, since 1982
  Glasgow, since 1985
  San Carlos, since 1985
  Gera, since 1988, renewed 1997
  Prague, since 1990
  Kharkiv, since 1990
  Hadera, since 1995
  Shenzhen, since 1997 (This is why Shenzhen set up its European Contact Agency in Nuremberg)
  Antalya,  since 1997
  Kavala, since 1998
  Atlanta, since 1998
  Venice, since 1999
  Rotterdam

Famous citizens
 Alexander Schreiner organist, Mormon Tabernacle.
 Chaya Arbel (Israeli composer)
 Kaspar Hauser
 Hans Behaim the Elder
 Peter Bucher
 Albrecht Dürer
 Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
 Hermann Kesten (writer)
 Adam Kraft (sculptor and architect)
 Anton Koberger
 Max Morlock
 Conrad Paumann
 Hans Sachs
 Hartmann Schedel
 Veít Stoß
 Peter Vischer the Elder
 Johann Philipp von Wurzelbauer
 Johann Pachelbel
 Kunz Lochner

Related pages
 Nuremberg Trials
 Nuremberg Rally
 Nürnberger Bratwürste
 Lebkuchen (gingerbread, specialty of Nuremberg)
 Leni Riefenstahl
 List of mayors of Nuremberg
 Nuremberg Underground

References

Other websites

 English website of the city
 Nuremberg City Panoramas - Panoramic Views and virtual Tours
 Carnival's Schembart run turns Nuremberg into a medieval city again
 Nuremberg by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 more Nuremberg Panoramas
 Architecture of Nuremberg
 Nuremberg
 Tramway in Nuremberg
 Article at jewishencyclopedia.com
 "nuremberg") 49 digitized objects on Nuremberg in The European Library

Imperial free cities

Nuremberg


Muzio Clementi was an Italian composer in classical period who lived from 1752 to 1832. He was born in Rome, Italy. He was the first composer to write music for the pianoforte which made use of the instrument's special features.  He was also the first virtuoso performer on the instrument. As a composer, performer, and maker of pianos, he is known as the "father of the pianoforte.

Early life
Clementi was born in Rome on January 23, 1752. He was the eldest child of Nicolo Clementi, a silversmith, and Magdalena Kaiser. Clementi began to learn music from Antonio Baroni (1738-1792), who was a relative. Baroni was in charge of the choir at St. Peter's Basilica. He also had lessons from the organist, Cordicelli, Giuseppe Santarelli (1710-1790) and Gaetano Carpani.

When he was 13, he became the church organist at San Lorenzo in Damaso (Saint Lawrence in the House of Damascus), a parish church in Rome. He had also started writing music including an oratorio, Martirio de' gloriosi Santi Giuliano and a mass. In 1766, Sir Peter Beckford, heard him playing the harpsichord. He took Clementi back to England with him, so that he could provide the musical entertainment at Beckford's house in Dorset. He died in Evesham, Worcestershire, after a short illness.

References

1752 births
1832 deaths
18th-century Italian composers
Musicians from Rome
19th-century Italian composers

Muzio Clementi


Hesder ( "arrangement"; also Yeshivat Hesder ) is an Israeli yeshiva program which combines advanced Talmudic studies with military service in the Israel Defense Forces, usually within a Religious Zionist framework. The program allows Orthodox Jewish men to serve in the Israeli military while still engaging in Torah study.

Description
Hesder service usually lasts a total of five years, within which participants are officially soldiers in the IDF. Through those five years, 16 months are dedicated to actual army service, comprising both training and active duty. In some Hesder Yeshivas, service lasts six years, of which 24 months are army service. Almost all Hesder Yeshiva students serve in the army as combat soldiers. The remainder of the time in Hesder is designated for full-time Torah study. Some students study for several years after this mandatory term. Yeshivot Hesder typically have 150–300 students; some of the larger yeshivot have up to 500 students, while some have fewer than 100 students. The largest is the Hesder Yeshiva of Sderot.

The typical Yeshivat Hesder functions along the lines of a traditional Orthodox yeshiva, with an emphasis on in-depth study of the Talmud. However, the curriculum of a Hesder yeshiva often additionally includes an increased focus on Tanakh and Jewish philosophy. In addition, most Yeshivot Hesder encourage their students to spend time helping the needy in surrounding communities.

Many of the Yeshivot Hesder also support a Kollel, and offer a Semicha ("rabbinic ordination") program, usually in preparation for the "Semicha of the Rabbanut"; many Hesder graduates would also obtain semicha from the late Rabbi Zalman Nechemia Goldberg. Since 1990, various hesder yeshivot have established, or are associated with, teachers' institutes. Graduates of these yeshivot are thus often active in the educational system of the national-religious, both as rabbis and as teachers.

A number have programs for students from the Diaspora ("overseas programs") lasting one or two years; these vary in size from about ten people to over a hundred and fifty. The most prominent of these programs are those of Yeshivat Kerem B'Yavneh, Yeshivat Hakotel, Yeshivat Sha'alvim, and Yeshivat Har Etzion.

As an alternative to Hesder, some male high school students opt to study at a one-year mechina, and then proceed to a regular period of military service.

Students at Mercaz HaRav, and some Hardal yeshivot, such as Har Hamor, undertake their Service through a modified framework called "Hesder Mercaz"; usually serving in the artillery. Yeshivat Ma'ale Gilboa through a framework called shiluv, integrates two years of Torah study with the full three years military service.

History
The idea of hesder yeshivas is attributed to Yehuda Amital, a rabbi and Israeli politician who served in the Haganah, fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. After writing an essay about the religious and moral aspects of military service, he envisaged a program for combining army service and Torah study. Following the Six-Day War, Rav Amital became the founding Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion, a Hesder Yeshiva in Alon Shevut that Amital headed for 40 years.

The first yeshivat hesder, Kerem B'Yavneh, was established in 1953 modelled on Nahal, a unit combining time on a (frontier) agricultural settlement with army service.

In 1991, the hesder yeshiva program was awarded the Israel Prize for its special contribution to society and the State of Israel.

A new Knesset law on Haredi yeshiva student exemptions addresses the legal status of Hesder service and yeshivot.

In 2011, there were 68 hesder yeshivas in Israel, with a total of over 8,500 students.

List of yeshivot

See also
 Haim Drukman
 Midrasha
 Netzah Yehuda Battalion
 Sherut Leumi
 Torato Omanuto – The special arrangement for Ultra-Orthodox Israelis (Haredi Judaism), on postponements or special exemptions from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) compulsory service.
 Religion in Israel
 List of Israel Prize recipients
 Yeshiva#Israel
 Religious Zionism#Educational institutions & #Military service

References

External links
 Association of Hesder Yeshivot

Israel Prize for special contribution to society and the State recipients
Israel Prize recipients that are organizations
Religion in the Israel Defense Forces
Orthodox yeshivas

Hesder


Langelinie (English: Long Line) is a pier, promenade and park in central Copenhagen, Denmark, and home of The Little Mermaid statue. The area has for centuries been a popular destination for excursions and strolls in Copenhagen. Most cruise ships arriving in Copenhagen also berth at Langelinie Pier.

History

Military area and the first promenade

The name Langelinie goes back to the middle of the 17th century where it referred to an idyllic path along the Øresund coast that rounded the citadel Kastellet and continued towards a lime kiln north of the city. For a long time, the stretch was a military area where civilians were not granted unrestricted access. Under a general order from 1819, soldiers were required to "throw water in the head and on the breast and to cool their feet in the water".

Eventually a beach promenade and a park for the Bourgeoisie were made but with access only on the payment of a toll to keep the more common people out. Not until a public uprising in 1848 did the area become open to everybody.

Port area and the second promenade
The expansion of the city and the increasing industrialization soon made it clear that the city's harbour was becoming too small and in the same time old plans to create a free port were revived. In a plan from 1862 it was decided to dig out the area to allow access for the largest ocean-going vessels and use the materials removed for land fills along the coast. A suggestion to make all of Amager into a duty-free zone was abolished and instead it was decided to create a free port in the area north of Kastellet at the site of the Langelinie promenade. The beginning of the work was prompted by  Germany's construction of the Kiel Canal that was begun in 1887 and threatened Copenhagen's position. In 1894 the work was completed and Copenhagen had got an entirely new harbourfront. The old beach promenade with Bourgeois mansions had turned into the heavily trafficated street Strandboullevarden located several hundred metres inland and the beach where the soldiers had been required to cool their feet had turned into harbour basins. Langelinie became now a pier on the other side of that harbour basin.

Langelinie Park
The Langelinie Park (Danish: Langelinieparken) stretches from Esplanaden in the south to Langelinie Marina and the base of the Langelinie Pier in the north. Formally, it includes Kastellet although this site is generally referred to under its own name. The park contains numerous monuments, buildings, a marina, statues and a playground. Among these are the Gefion Fountain, the Ivar Huitfeldt Column and The Little Mermaid.

Langelinie Marina

Langelinie Marina was established in the 1890s in connection with the foundation of the Free Port and the Langelinie Quat. Its purpose was to provide the  workers from the construction site as well as those from the Burmeister & Wain shipyard on the other side of the harbour with a chance to have a small boat, enabling them to supplement their incomes with a bit of fishing.

Copenhagen rowing clubs have for many years had their base at the marina. Today only B&Ws and DFDS' are left after ØK's passed their premises to Langelinie Marina's Boat Huild.

Langelinie Pier

The Langelinie Pier (Danish: Langeliniekajen) has a water depth allowing big ocean-going vessels to tie up. The area has a number of statues and memorials. These include a cast bronze sculpture polar bear with cubs and memorials for MS Jutlandia, Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen. The polar bear has some bullet holes at the head, which were made by a German soldier under the Occupation of Denmark.

Langelinie Pavilion
The Langelinie Pavilion was designed by Nils and Rva Koppel. It is the third building of the name at the site.

References

External links

 Langelinie Marina Boat Club

Tourist attractions in Copenhagen
Port of Copenhagen
Waterfronts

Langelinie


Henry Ward Ranger (January 29, 1858 – November 7, 1916) was an American artist. Born in western New York State, he was a prominent landscape and marine painter, an important Tonalist, and the leader of the Old Lyme Art Colony. Ranger became a National Academician (1906), and a member of the American Water Color Society. Among his paintings are, Top of the Hill, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and East River Idyll, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Early life
Henry Ward Ranger was born on January 29, 1858, in New York State. His mother was Martha Marie, and his father Ward Valencourt Ranger. He was born in the rural western part of New York State, most likely in Geneseo and grew up in Syracuse, where his father worked as a commercial photographer, but his father also had some artistic training and later taught drawing. As a young man he studied music, excelling on the piano and organ.

Ranger grew up drawing and painting and received initial encouragement from his parents. After graduating from public school, he studied at Syracuse University for two years, where he studied art formally for the first time. While he worked in his father's photographic business, he began painting watercolor landscapes, which were said to have surprisingly free brush work for someone who had not yet studied abroad. He moved to New York City in 1878 where he saw works of the Barbizon School for the first time. He supported his art studies by reviewing music and theater for several New York newspapers. In 1883, he married an Helen Jennings, a divorced actress with a son.

Europe
The newly formed Ranger family moved to Europe, visiting Paris first, but then settling in Laren, Holland where he became active with the Hague School painters, Jozef Israëls, Anton Mauve and the Maris brothers.
Ranger was rapidly adopted by the Dutch painters and he quickly adopted their subjects and way of working. He sketched with the Hague School artists and learned to paint the quickly changing skies of the low counties. Because of the flatness of the land, the skies were important in Hague School paintings, and the cloud-filled skies with their diffused light became characteristic of Ranger's early work.
The artist enjoyed living in the modest town, and his work advanced enough to be accepted by the Paris Salons by the late 1880s, and his work was accepted by leading Dutch collectors.

The United States
Ranger set up a New York studio in 1888, so he could paint landscapes there and cultivate American collectors. In 1892, he had a major exhibition of twenty-four paintings at Knoedler Galleries in New York, which received a positive review.
He painted watercolors that were considered free and vibrant by critics like Arthur Hoeber.
Once back in the United States, Ranger became one of the leaders of the "Tonal" school of painting, and it is he who was given credit for coming up with the name "Tonalist." An exhibition of his paintings at the Lotos Club in the mid-1890s institutionalized the style.
In 1894, he had an exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery, the first firm to specialize in the works of American artists. This exhibition included many works that had been done on a sketching trip to Canada.

Founding of the Old Lyme School
Ranger was the first member of the Florence Griswold circle in the Old Lyme Art Colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut. He first stayed at Florence Griswold's boardinghouse in the summer of 1899, perhaps having heard about the area from several colleagues who had summered there and in nearby towns on the Connecticut coast in the 1890s. Inspired by the landscape's resemblance to the Barbizon forest of France, the art colony was established under Ranger's leadership in 1900.

The gathering in Old Lyme was the largest art colony of its time. At Ranger's example, the artists' primary purpose was to make preliminary studies while working directly from nature, with the further intent that the paintings' surfaces be texturally interesting. Then, in emulation of the Old Masters, Ranger and his followers added layers of golden-brown glazes to finish their works, in order to "acquire the tonal expression of a subject."

The ascendance of Tonalism in Old Lyme was truncated when Childe Hassam joined the colony in 1903, and with his arrival Impressionism became the dominant manner of the artists painting there." In 1904 Ranger moved twenty miles east to Noank, where he continued to paint forest interiors and coastal scenes, though with a palette that increasingly suggested the influence of Impressionism.

Legacy
Immediately after his death, Ranger's work continued to bring good prices. When his estate was auctioned off in 1917, 129 paintings sold for $66,240; the New York Times claimed it was the highest average price paid for the works of a dead artist.

Ranger's artistic legacy has been problematic. Once considered the leader of the 'Tonal School', his reputation declined precipitously in the 1930s. That he was heavily influenced by the Hague School, the Barbizon School and the Venetian Renaissance helped to account for some of his most vibrant painterly characteristics, yet it also marked Ranger's work as among the most conservative examples of the Tonalist movement. The Tonalism of Old Lyme came to be viewed as anachronistic, and Ranger's stock suffered as a result.

Recent reassessment has restored credit to Ranger, as "an artist whose influence is not generally understood and whose work has been neglected far too long." In his best landscapes there is "an emotion visible in the molten forces bubbling up from his surfaces in thick impastos, luscious and rich with jewel-like tone, a painterly approximation of the underlying powers constantly transforming the natural world."

A successful businessman, Ranger made a bequest to the National Academy of Design, allocating between $250,000 and $400,000. Ranger's gift allowed the National Collection, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum, to purchase major works by American artists.

Gallery

See also
Tonalism
California Tonalism
American Impressionism
Pictorialism
Barbizon school
Paul Dougherty (artist)
American Barbizon school

References

Sources
Anderson, Jeffrey, The American Barbizon, Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut, 1982
Becker, Jack, Henry Ward Ranger and the Humanized Landscape, Lyme Historical Society, 1999, foreword by Jeffrey Anderson
Bermingham, Peter, American Art in the Barbizon Mood. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Cleveland, David A. A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920, Hudson Hills Press, Manchester, Vermont, 2010
Cleveland, David, Intimate Landscapes: Charles Warren Eaton and the Tonalist Movement in American Art, 1880–1920, Groton School, 2004
Corn, Wanda M., The Color of Mood: American Tonalism, 1880–1910, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, 1972
Dougherty, Paul, "The Art of Henry Ward Ranger", Brush and Pencil, Vol. XVI, No. 2, August 1905
Riback, Estelle, The Intimate Landscape: A New Look at the Origins of the American Barbizon Movement, Lost Coast Press, Ft. Bragg, California, 2004
Riback, Estelle, Modulator of Harmonious Color, Lost Coast Press, Ft. Bragg, California, 2000
Rosenfeld, Daniel & Workman, Robert G., The Spirit of Barbizon: France and America, Art Museum Association of America, San Francisco, California, 1986

External links

 antiques and the arts online
 Mattatuck Museum Arts & History Center
 Florence Griswold Museum

1858 births
1916 deaths
19th-century American painters
19th-century American male artists
American male painters
20th-century American painters
20th-century American male artists
American landscape painters
Tonalism

Henry Ward Ranger


Outkast (sometimes written as OutKast) was an American hip hop duo. It members were musicians, André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton. At first they were known as Two Shades Deep. Their early music was a mixture of Southern hip hop and G-funk. Their later music includes rock, electronic, soul, jazz, funk, and blues sounds. In 2003 Outkast's singles "Hey Ya!" and "The Way You Move" from Speakerboxxx/The Love Below reached both number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Outkast has won six Grammy Awards.

Career

Beginning years, Southernplaylisticadillacmuzic, ATLiens, Aquemini and Stankonia (1992-2001)
Outkast started in 1992 when Benjamin and Patton were students at Tri-Cities High School in Atlanta. They were signed to LaFace Records that year. Their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, was released on April 26, 1994. The album was produced by Organized Noize. The album was important in the making of Southern hip hop.

In 1996 Outkast released their second album, ATLiens. It entered the US Billboard 200 at number two. Three singles were released from the album.

Outkast's third album Aquemini was released on September 29, 1998. It got good reviews from music critics.

On October 31, 2000 Stankonia was released. It entered the Billboard 200 at number two after selling over 530,000 copies in its first week. Outkast's first greatest hits album Big Boi and Dre Present... Outkast was released on December 4, 2001.

They did have tours for these four albums.
The Southernplaylisticadillacmuzic Tour (1994-1995)
The ATLiens Tour (1996-1997)
The Aquemini Tour (1998-1999)
The Stankonia Tour (2000-2001)

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2002-2004)
In September 2003 Outkast released Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. The album was different to Outkast's previous albums because it was a double album. The double album is actually two albums. Speakerboxxx, the first disc, is an album by Big Boi. The Love Below, the second disc, is an album by André 3000. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is Outkast's best selling album so far. It won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2004. It was the first hip hop album to win the award. The album's first single "Hey Ya!" was number one in the United States for nine weeks. It sold over one million copies there. It also reached number one in Canada, Australia, Norway, and Sweden. The second single "The Way You Move" spent eight weeks at number two in the Billboard Hot 100. In 2004, the album's third single "Roses" was released. It reached number four in the UK Singles Chart.

They had a tour for this album from 2003-2004.

Idlewild (2005-2006)
On August 22, 2006 Outkast's sixth album Idlewild was released. The album was the soundtrack for the movie Idlewild. Rolling Stone gave the album four out of five stars.

They had a mini-tour in 2006.

References

Other websites
Official website

Musical groups established in 1992
Musical groups disestablished in 2014
African-American musical groups
Grammy Award winners
American rap music groups
Musical duos
Outkast

Outkast


The Numantine War (from Bellum Numantinum in Appian's Roman History) was the last conflict of the Celtiberian Wars fought by the Romans to subdue those people along the Ebro. It was a twenty-year conflict between the Celtiberian tribes of Hispania Citerior and the Roman government. It began in 154 BC as a revolt of the Celtiberians of Numantia on the Douro. The first phase of the war ended in 151, but in 143, war flared up again with a new insurrection in Numantia.

The first war was fought contemporaneously with the Lusitanian War in Hispania Ulterior. The Lusitanians were subdued by Sulpicius Galba, who betrayed their surrender and executed their leading men, and the Arevaci of Hispania Citerior continued the war and allied with the Lusitanian leader Viriathus.

After open war reignited in 143, Rome sent a series of generals to the Iberian peninsula to deal with the Numantines. In that year, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus tried and failed to take Numantia by siege, but subjugated all the other tribes of the Arevaci. His successor, Quintus Pompeius, was inept and suffered severe defeats at their hands, so he secretly negotiated a peace with the city abiding by the previous treaty. Yet in 138 BC a new general arrived, Marcus Pompillius Laenas, and when the Numantine envoys came to finish their obligations of the peace treaty, Pompeius disavowed negotiating any such peace. The matter was referred to the Senate for a judgment. Rome decided to ignore Pompeius' peace and sent Gaius Hostilius Mancinus to continue the war in 136 BC. He assaulted the city and was repulsed several times before being routed and encircled, and so forced to accept a treaty, negotiated by a young Tiberius Gracchus. The Senate did not ratify this treaty either but only sent Mancinus to the Numantines as a prisoner. His successors Lucius Furius Philus and Gaius Calpurnius Piso avoided conflict with the Numantines.

In 134 BC, the Consul Scipio Aemilianus was sent to Hispania Citerior to end the war. He recruited 20,000 men and 40,000 allies, including Numidian cavalry under Jugurtha. Scipio built a ring of seven fortresses around Numantia itself before beginning the siege proper. After suffering pestilence and famine, most of the surviving Numantines committed suicide rather than surrender to Rome. The decisive Roman victory over Numantia ushered in an era of lasting peace in Hispania until the Sertorian War over half a century later.

This war also launched the careers of several important figures. Tiberius Gracchus was present as a quaestor during Mancinus's failed siege. Due to the reputation Gracchus's father had with the Numantines, Tiberius was selected to negotiate the treaty. Gaius Marius also fought in this war, as well as the later Roman enemy Jugurtha.

Notes

Sources

 Davis, Paul K. Besieged: 100 Great Sieges from Jericho to Sarajevo. Oxford University Press, 2001.
 Wintle, Justin. The Rough Guide History of Spain. Rough Guides: Spain, 2003.
 Encyclopaedia Romana: The Celtiberian War and Numantia.
  The History of Rome, Book IV

150s BC conflicts
140s BC conflicts
130s BC conflicts
2nd century BC in Hispania
2nd century BC in the Roman Republic
Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula
Wars involving the Roman Republic
Rebellions against the Roman Republic

Numantine War


The Danish Resistance Movement was an underground movement organized to resist the Nazi German occupation of Denmark during World War II. Due to the initially lenient arrangements, in which the Nazi occupation authority allowed the democratic government to stay in power, the resistance movement was slower to develop effective tactics on a wide scale than in some other countries.

By 1943, many Danes were involved in underground activities, ranging from producing illegal publications to spying and sabotage. Major groups included the communist BOPA (Danish: Borgerlige Partisaner, Civil Partisans) and Holger Danske, both based in Copenhagen. Resistance agents killed an estimated 400 Danish Nazis, informers and collaborators until 1944. After that date, they also killed some German nationals.

In the postwar period, the Resistance was supported by politicians within Denmark and there was little effort to closely examine the killings. Studies were made in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and people learned that there was sometimes improvised and contingent decision making about the targets, with some morally ambiguous choices.

In popular media

Books
 Lowry, Lois Number The Stars (1989) historical fiction, in English, 1990 Newberry Award winner

Films
 "Miracle at Midnight" (1998), a Disney made-for-TV movie starring Sam Waterson and Mia Farrow, dramatizing a true story of Danish citizens rescuing the Jewish population in Septemer 1943.

20th century in Denmark
Resistance movements of World War II

Danish resistance movement


Lower Egypt is the fertile Nile Delta region, which stretches from the area between El-Aiyat and Zawyet Dahshur, south of modern-day Cairo, and the Mediterranean Sea.

Lower Egypt was known as Ta-Mehu which means "land of papyrus." It was divided into twenty districts called nomes. Lower Egypt was mostly undeveloped scrubland, undeveloped for human life and filled with all types of plant life such as grasses and herbs.

The climate in Lower Egypt is milder than that of Upper Egypt. Temperatures are less extreme and there is more rainfall.

The capital of Lower Egypt was Buto. Its patron goddess was the cobra goddess Wadjet. Lower Egypt was represented by the Low Red Crown Deshret, and its symbol was the papyrus.

Related pages
Upper Egypt
Nomes of Egypt
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt

Lower Egypt


The term power loom, corresponds to a mechanized loom powered by a driveshaft. The first power loom was designed in 1784 by Edmund Cartwright and first built in 1785, later to be perfected by William Horrocks. It allowed textile making to be done far faster than if a human had done the same work. By 1850, over 250,000 of Cartwright's designs were used in England. James Henry Northrop invented the automatic "weft replenishment" loom. It revolutionized the weaving industry. Some 700,000 "Northrop" automatic looms were sold worldwide.

Originally, power looms used a shuttle to throw the weft across, but in the early part of the 20th century the faster and more efficient shuttleless loom came into use. Today, advances in technology have produced a variety of looms designed to maximize production for specific types of material. The most common of these are air-jet looms and water-jet looms. Computer-driven looms are now also available to individual home weavers.

Tools
Machines
Weaving

Power loom


Leviticus (lih-vih-tih-kus) is the third book of both the Bible, and the Torah. In Hebrew it is known as Wayiqra' (וַיִּקְרָא), meaning 'And He will declare.' It was written by the Old Testament Patriarch Moses. Leviticus was written to the Hebrew people of Israel. The book has several main topics, some of which are the Jewish laws of sacrificing to God, and the work of the priests. These priests are sometimes known as Levites (what this book is named after).

When was it written
It was likely developed over a long period of time, reaching its present form during the Persian empire (Yehud Madinata) between 538-332 BCE. Tradition says this book was written around 1300 B.C. by Moses.

Summary
God gives more instructions to Moses. God asks Moses to repeat what He said to Moses' people, the Israelites.

Continuing from Exodus the Israelites are escaping Egypt. They reach the Biblical Mount Sinai. In Exodus, Moses learned from God how to build the holy tabernacle (a tent for praying and worshiping). In Leviticus God teaches Moses and the Levites how to make sacrifices and how to behave in a good way.

The first few chapters show God's laws for offering sacrifices for various reasons, such as for the forgiveness of sins.

Then Moses makes Aaron a priest of God. Details about how the priests are to make sacrifices to God are given.  This is sometimes called the "ceremonial law".  Two sons of Aaron were destroyed for doing the work of the priest in the wrong way.

Then God teaches the people how to eat right and be clean. Examples of food that are forbidden are pork and shrimp. Meat is also not to be eaten with milk at the same time. Beyond that, eaten meat is to be taken from animals that were slaughtered in a specific way. The meat must not contain blood either, as this is seen as representing life in the face of the animal having died. Regarding staying clean, laws are given about menstruation (the monthly period), sexual relations, skin disease, and how dead bodies are to be disposed of.

The rest of the book describes how priests, the Levites, should be ordained, should dress, carry out rituals, and act (for example on the Day of Atonement, and other important Holy Days).

References

Related pages
Liberty Bell

Other websites
 Leviticus (KJV)
 Leviticus (NIV)

Old Testament books
Books of the Hebrew Bible

Book of Leviticus


Alice Ivers (February 17, 1851 – February 27, 1930), better known as Poker Alice, was a famous poker player. Her family moved from Devon, England, where she was born, to Virginia, United States, where she went to school and was raised. As an adult, Ivers moved to Leadville, Colorado where she met her husband Frank Duffield. Duffield was responsible for getting Ivers interested in poker, but he was killed a few years after they got married. Ivers made a name for herself by winning money from poker games in places like Silver City, New Mexico, and even working at a saloon that was owned by Bob Ford, the man who killed Jesse James

Early life
"Poker" Alice Ivers was born on February 17, 1851 in Devon, England to Irish Immigrants. Her family moved to Virginia when Alice was 12. As a young woman, she went to boarding school in Virginia to become a refined lady. While in her late teens, her family moved to Leadville, a city in the Colorado Territory.

Personal life
It was in Leadville that Alice met Frank Duffield, whom she married at a young age. Frank Duffield was a mining engineer who played poker in his spare time. After just a few years of marriage, Duffield was killed in an accident while resetting a dynamite charge in a Leadville mine.

Ivers was known for splurging her winnings, as when she won a lot of money in Silver City and spent it all in New York. After all of her big wins, she would travel to New York and spend her money on clothes. She was very keen on keeping up with the latest fashions and would buy dresses to wear to play poker.

Alice met her next husband around 1890 when she was a dealer in Bedrock Tom's saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. When a drunken miner tried to attack her fellow dealer Warren G. Tubbs with a knife, Alice threatened him with her .38. After this incident, Tubbs and Ivers started a romance and were married soon after.

Alice Ivers and Warren Tubbs had 4 sons and 3 daughters together. Tubbs and Ivers did not want their children to be influenced by the world of poker, so they moved to a house just northeast of Sturgis on the Moreau River in South Dakota. Tubbs was not only a dealer, but a housepainter as well. It was most likely this house painting that caused him to fall sick with tuberculosis. Warren Tubbs died in 1910 in of pneumonia during a blizzard. To pay for his funeral, Alice had to pawn her wedding ring, which led her back to the poker world.

Alice's third husband was George Huckert, who worked on her homestead taking care of the sheep. Huckert was constantly proposing to Ivers, yet for a while she did not agree. Eventually, however, Ivers owed Huckert $1,008, so she married him figuring that it would be cheaper than paying his back wages. Huckert died in 1913.

Poker career
First husband Frank Duffield introduced Alice to poker when she accompanied him to his poker games in Leadville. For a while she just attended, watching and observing, but eventually she started to play and gamble along with the men. However, it wasn't until after her first husband died that she started to play poker seriously.

Alice was in a tough financial position, and after failing in a few different jobs including teaching; she turned to poker to support herself financially. Alice would make money by gambling and working as a dealer. Ivers made a name for herself by winning money from poker games in places like Silver City, New Mexico, even working at a saloon that was owned by Bob Ford, the man who killed Jesse James.

By the time Ivers was given the name "Poker Alice," she was drawing in large crowd to watch her play and men were constantly challenging her to play. Saloon owners liked that Ivers was a respectable woman who kept to her values. These values included her refusal to play poker on Sundays.

As her reputation grew, so did the amount of money she was making. Some nights she would even make $6,000, an incredibly large sum of money at the time. Alice claimed that she won $250,000, which would now be worth over three million dollars.

Ivers used her good looks to distract men at the poker table. She always had the newest dresses, and even in her 50s was considered a very attractive woman. She was also very good at counting cards and figuring odds, which helped her at the table.

Alice was known to always be carrying a gun with her, preferably her .38. She was also known to smoke a lot.

Poker's Palace and jailtime
In 1910, Ivers opened "Poker's Palace," a saloon in Fort Meade, South Dakota, which offered gambling and liquor downstairs, and prostitution upstairs. The saloon was always closed on Sundays, due to Iver's religious beliefs. However, in 1913, some drunken soldiers disobeyed Iver's "no work on Sunday" rule and started to get unruly, chaotic, and destructive of the house. It was then that Ivers shot her gun, supposedly to quiet the soldiers down. The shot ended up killing one of the soldiers and injuring another, resulting in Iver's arrest, along with the arrest of six of her 'girls'.

Iver's time spent in jail was short, but she got through it with the help of reading the bible and smoking cigars. At the trial, she claimed self-defense and was acquitted. After the trial, her saloon was shut down.

While in her 60s, Alice Ivers was arrested several times after the "Poker Palace" incident for being a madam, a gambler, and a bootlegger, as well as her drunkenness. She would comply with the law and pay her fines, but keep her business still. In 1928, she was arrested again for bootlegging and her repeated offenses of holding a brothel. Despite this sentence to prison, Ivers did not end up having to stay, because she was pardoned by then Governor Bulow of South Dakota who did so because of her old age.

Legacy
After being forced to retire by the anger of the military and other people who were upset with her blend of religious elements at her house in Sturgis, Alice's health began to fail her. Alice Ivers died on February 27, 1930 in Rapid City after a gallbladder operation at the age of 79. Ivers was buried at the St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sturgis, South Dakota.

References

1853 births
1930 deaths
Sportspeople from Virginia
Poker players

Poker Alice


The coat o arms o the Republic o Seychelles shows a shield, in which a turtle is locatit on green grunds.  On the grund thare is a coconut tree.  Ahint it thare is a blue sea wi twa islands an a boat tae be seen.  The shield is enthroned bi a siller helmet, on which a tropicbird is locatit afore blue an white waves.  The shield is supportit bi twa white swordfish.  Beneath the shield the motto o Seychelles is statit: "Finis Coronat Opus" (Latin for "The End Crouns the Wirk").

Seychelles
Naitional seembols o Seychelles

Coat o airms o Seychelles


Princess Elizabeth Land is part of Antartica. It is located between longitude 73° east and Cape Penck 87°43' east. It includes the land from latitude 64°56'S and the South Pole. It is divided into two sectors:
 Ingrid Christensen Coast, 73°35'E to 81°24'E
 Leopold and Astrid Coast 81°24'E to 87°43'E
It is bounded on the west by Mac. Robertson Land and on the east by Kaisar Wilhelm II Land.

The land was discovered in 1931. It was named after Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom, who later became Queen Elizabeth II.

It is part of the Australian Antarctic Territory.

Geography of Antarctica

Princess Elizabeth Land


The 1997 Southwestern Bell Cotton Bowl Classic was a college football bowl game played on January 1, 1997, at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas, USA. The Cotton Bowl Classic was part of the 1996 NCAA Division I-A football season.   The bowl game featured the Kansas State Wildcats from the Big 12 and the BYU Cougars from the Western Athletic Conference.  The game was televised on CBS.

Game summary
BYU's defense had kept the Cougars in range, limiting Kansas State to 199 yards of offense through three quarters, with 113 of them coming on two plays, a Hail Mary, tipped touchdown pass to Andre Anderson at the end of the first half and a 72-yard catch and run by Kevin Lockett early in the third quarter for another touchdown.

BYU was trailing, 15–5, in the fourth quarter when Kansas State's All-America cornerback, Chris Canty, was helped off the field because of cramps caused by dehydration. When Joe Gordon moved to the short side of the field to take Canty's place, reserve cornerback Demetric Denmark entered on the wide side.

BYU immediately attacked the less experienced player when James Dye caught a 32-yard touchdown catch over Denmark in the end zone to cut K-State's lead to 15–12.

Canty was still off the field two possessions later when BYU began what would prove to be the winning 60-yard drive. When Gordon also came off the field on a third-and-seven at the K-State 28, freshman cornerback Lamar Chapman was thrown into the game for the first time.

Again, BYU picked up on the substitution and Steve Sarkisian hit K.O. Kealaluhi, who had a step on Chapman, in the left corner of the end zone for the go-ahead touchdown. With the extra-point kick, BYU had a 19–15 lead with three minutes, 39 seconds left.

An important part of the touchdown, according to Bill Snyder, was that his defense was on the field for 17:30 of the second half, five minutes longer than BYU's defense.

After BYU took the lead, Kansas State still had one last chance to win and drove from its own 28 to the BYU 17 with 1:34 remaining in the game.

But that's when BYU's cornerbacks stepped up.

K-State quarterback Brian Kavanagh threw to Lockett in back of the end zone, but McTyer hit Lockett in the air and drove him out of bounds before he could get his feet down.

Two plays later, Kavanagh tried a pass to Jimmy Dean on a slant pattern. But BYU's Morgan broke on the ball and tipped it to himself for the game-saving interception.

References

Cotton Bowl Classic
Cotton Bowl Classic
BYU Cougars football bowl games
Kansas State Wildcats football bowl games
Cotton Bowl Classic
January 1997 sports events in the United States
1990s in Dallas
1997 in Texas

1997 Cotton Bowl Classic


Sidereal time is a time-keeping system. It is used by astronomers to find celestial objects. Using sidereal time it is possible to point a telescope to the proper coordinates in the night sky.

Sidereal time is a "time scale based on Earth's rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars".

Because the Earth moves in its orbit about the Sun, a mean solar day is about four minutes longer than a sidereal day. Thus, a star appears to rise four minutes earlier each night, compared to solar time. Different stars are visible at different times of the year.

By contrast, solar time is reckoned by the movement of the Earth from the perspective of the Sun. An average solar day (24 hours) is longer than a sidereal day (23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds) because of the amount the Earth moves each day in its orbit around the Sun.

Related pages
 Rotation period

References

Celestial mechanics
Measurement

Sidereal time


The gudok (, ), gudochek (, ) is an ancient Eastern Slavic string musical instrument, played with a bow.

A gudok usually had three strings, two of them tuned in unison and played as a drone, the third tuned a fifth higher. All three strings were in the same plane at the bridge, so that a bow could make them all sound simultaneously. Sometimes the gudok also had several sympathetic strings (up to eight) under the sounding board. These made the gudok's sound warm and rich.

The player held the gudok on his lap, like a cello or viola da gamba. It was also possible to play the gudok while standing and even while dancing, which made it popular among skomorokhs.  Initially in the 12th century (and probably before), the gudok did not have a neck for pressing strings.  This suggests that it was played by stopping the strings from the side with fingernails (similarly to the Byzantine lyra), rather than pressing strings onto the instrument's neck. Later in the 14th century some modifications of the gudok had a real neck for pressing strings.

Russian gudok ceased to exist as a folk instrument for several centuries. All present instruments are replicas, based on several parts of gudoks found in the Novgorod excavations.

There have been several attempts to revive the gudok in music. Borodin's opera Prince Igor, contains a "Gudok Player's Song", which is an artistic reconstruction of how the gudok may have sounded.

See also
Gadulka - a related Bulgarian instrument

References
Humeniuk, A. - Ukrainski narodni muzychni instrumenty - Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1967
Mizynec, V. - Ukrainian Folk Instruments - Melbourne: Bayda books, 1984
Cherkaskyi, L. - Ukrainski narodni muzychni instrumenty // Tekhnika, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2003 - 262 pages.
Povetkin, V. I.  - "Musical instruments" // Wood Use in Medieval Novgorod. Edited by Mark Brisbane and Jon Hather. Oxbow Books and the authors, 2007. р. 360-381: illustrated.
N.G. Gerasimova, M.I. Kolosova, K.M. Plotkin, V.I. Povetkin. - "Thirteenth century fiddles from excavations in Pskov. Their investigation, stabilization and reconstruction" // Proceedings of the 4-th IGOM Group on Wet Organic Archaeological Materials Conference. Bremerhaven, 1990. Edited by  Per Hoffmann Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum. P. 267-279: il.

External links

Site with large photo of 12th century gudok or rebec.

Necked bowl lutes
Bowed instruments
Ukrainian musical instruments
Russian musical instruments
Russian inventions
String instruments with sympathetic strings

Gudok


The Tours Aillaud (also known as Tours Nuages) is a group of residential buildings located in Nanterre, in the inner suburbs of Paris, France.

Built in 1976 at the outskirts of La Défense business district, the Tours Aillaud are named after their main architect, Emile Aillaud. The housing project represents 18 towers including 1,607 apartments all together. The tallest of those are the Tours 1 and 2 with 39 floors and a height of 105 meters. The Tours 3 to 10 have 20 floors and the Tours 11 to 18 have 13 floors.

Despite the differences in height, the towers share the same shape, consisting of the superposition of several cylinders. Their cladding is made of frescos representing clouds in the sky (in French nuages), which is the origin of their nickname.

The frescos in "pate de verre" were designed by Fabio Rieti, son-in-law of Emile Aillaud, while his daughter Laurence Rieti designed the large snake shaped sculpture that constitutes a large part of the playground area near the highest towers. Emile Aillaud noticeably looked after the outdoor area so that there would be one tree per apartment, and so that each apartment would have a designated tree (there were more than 1600 of them).

Criticism
The buildings were derided by art critic Robert Hughes in his 1980 BBC documentary series The Shock of the New:

Without respect for the body as it is, social memory as it stands, there is no such thing as a workable or humane architecture.  And that's why a place like this - La Defence outside Paris, is experienced by everybody, including those who live in it, as a piece of social scar tissue, gimmicky, condescending alphaville modernism.  Stick 'em in concrete boxes and give them some concrete to play on, and then paint it all bright colours because that's what the kiddies like, and if the kiddies don't like it, they can write to the minister!

See also
 Skyscraper
 List of tallest structures in Paris

External links

 Tours Aillaud (Emporis)

Aillaud
Aillaud
Buildings and structures completed in 1976
Twin towers
20th-century architecture in France

Tours Aillaud