Carenza Rachel Lewis  (born 30 November 1963) is a British academic archaeologist and television presenter.

Early life
Lewis received her formal education at the school of the Church of England Community of All Hallows, in Suffolk. She studied archaeology and anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge.

Field and academic career
In 1985, she joined the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England as a field archaeologist for the Wessex area. During part of her time with the Commission she was seconded to the History Department of the University of Birmingham to research the relationship between settlement and landscape in the East Midlands. She followed this with a similar project in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

Lewis was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1998. In 1999, she was elected a visiting fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where she was a Senior Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer. In 2004, she took on a new post at Cambridge to promote undergraduate archaeology, and created Access Cambridge Archaeology. In 2015, Lewis was appointed to the Professorial Chair of 'Public Understanding of Research' at the University of Lincoln.

Television career
In the early 1990s she joined the team presenting the Time Team series, a new television programme designed to make archaeology accessible for the general public, which was first broadcast on Channel 4 Television in 1994. She appeared on the show from 1993 to 2005, appearing each season from the first through the twelfth. The ratings success of the Time Team series led to further television presenting commissions for Lewis, including the series House Detectives (1997–2002).

In 2000, Lewis presented an episode of the BBC's theoretical history programme entitled What If, where she examined the failed revolt of Queen Boudicca and the Iceni against the Roman Empire in AD 60. She also devised and presented a series called Sacred Sites for HTV.

In 2010, she appeared in the television series Michael Wood's Story of England.

In 2022, she rejoined the Time Team crew for its Youtube revival.

Personal life
Lewis has three children. In 2000, she appeared in national print media detailing her experiences as one of a number of victims of medical misdiagnosis at the hands of Dr James Elwood in the late 1990s.

Publications

Aston, Mick and Lewis, Carenza (eds.) (1994) The Medieval Landscape of Wessex Oxford: Oxbow
Lewis, Carenza, Mitchell-Fox, Patrick and Dyer, Christopher (1997) Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Central England Manchester University Press
Lewis, Carenza, Harding, Phil and Aston, Mick (2000) Time Team's Timechester: a companion to archaeology; ed. Tim Taylor London: Macmillan
Aberg, Alan and Lewis, Carenza (eds.) (2000) The Rising Tide: Archaeology and Coastal Landscapes Oxford: Oxbow

References

External links
Access Cambridge Archaeology
My inspiration: Carenza Lewis talks to the Guardian
Carenza Lewis's Home Page at the University of Lincoln

1963 births
British archaeologists
Academics of the University of Cambridge
Academics of the University of Birmingham
Living people
Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Place of birth missing (living people)
Archaeologists appearing on Time Team
British women archaeologists
Fellows of the Higher Education Academy
People of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England

Carenza Lewis


Christina B. Rocca (born 1957) was United States Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs from 2001 to 2006.

Biography

A native of Washington, D.C., Christina B. Rocca is the daughter of CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley and his wife, Maria Lonyay Bagley. She was educated at King's College London, receiving a B.A. in History in 1980.  She speaks French, Russian, Spanish, and German.

In 1982, Rocca joined the Central Intelligence Agency as a staff operations officer.  She worked there until January 1997, at which time she became Foreign Affairs Advisor to Sen. Sam Brownback (R—KS), a member of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.  She held this post until May 2001.  While working for Brownback, she specialized on South Asia, as well as Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.  She authored several pieces of legislation, including the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1999; bills granting permanent normal trade relations status to Kyrgyzstan and Georgia; and three amendments allowing the president to waive certain sanctions imposed on India and Pakistan.

In 2001, President of the United States George W. Bush nominated Rocca as Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs and, after Senate confirmation, she held this office from June 1, 2001 to February 17, 2006.  In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Rocca helped design a new set of US policies towards South Asia.  In the immediate post-9/11 period, she oversaw U.S. diplomacy in the period leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan.  She also oversaw the U.S.'s diplomatic response to the 2001–2002 India–Pakistan standoff.  She was involved in the organized response and humanitarian assistance in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.

President Bush then named Rocca as the United States Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and Ambassador Rocca held this post from August 2006 until January 2009.  There, she represented the U.S. during nuclear disarmament talks and negotiations related to the Biological Weapons Convention and the peaceful use of space.

Upon leaving government service in 2009, Rocca joined the consulting firm Visión Américas.

References

Biography from Visión Américas
Bio in the Times of India

1957 births
Living people
People from Washington, D.C.
Alumni of King's College London
United States Assistant Secretaries of State
American women diplomats
American diplomats
21st-century American women

Christina B. Rocca


Michael Andrew Gove (; born Graeme Andrew Logan, 26 August 1967) is a British politician serving as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations since October 2022, having previously held both offices from September 2021 to July 2022. He has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Surrey Heath since 2005. A member of the Conservative Party, he has also served in various Cabinet positions under Prime Ministers Cameron, May, Johnson and Sunak. Gove has twice run to become Leader of the Conservative Party, in 2016 and 2019, finishing in third place on both occasions. Apart from a period of just over one year, he has served continually in the Cabinet since 2010.

Born in Aberdeen, Gove was in care until being adopted aged four months old, after which he was raised in the Kittybrewster area of the city. He attended the independent Robert Gordon's College and studied English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He then began a career as a journalist at The Press and Journal before having a long tenure as a leader writer at The Times. Elected for Surrey Heath at the 2005 general election, he was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet by Cameron in 2007 as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.

Appointed Secretary of State for Education in the Cameron–Clegg coalition, Gove terminated the previous Labour government's Building Schools for the Future programme, reformed A-Level and GCSE qualifications in favour of final examinations, and responded to the Trojan Horse scandal. The National Association of Head Teachers, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the National Union of Teachers and the NASUWT passed motions of no confidence in his policies at their conferences in 2013. In the 2014 cabinet reshuffle he was moved to the post of chief whip. Following the 2015 general election and the formation of the majority Cameron government, Gove was promoted to Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor. As the co-convenor of Vote Leave, Gove was seen, along with Johnson, a fellow Conservative MP, as one of the most prominent figures of the 2016 referendum on EU membership. He was campaign manager for Johnson in the 2016 Conservative Party leadership election but withdrew his support on the morning Johnson was due to declare and announced his own candidacy, finishing third behind May and Andrea Leadsom.

Following May's appointment as Prime Minister, Gove was dismissed from the Cabinet but was appointed to the second May government as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs following the 2017 general election. He launched a second Conservative leadership bid in 2019, coming third behind Johnson and Jeremy Hunt. Upon appointment of Johnson as Prime Minister, Gove was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibilities including preparations for a no-deal Brexit. He took on the additional role of minister for the Cabinet Office in the 2020 cabinet reshuffle. After the 2021 cabinet reshuffle he served as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations until Gove told Johnson to resign during the July 2022 Government crisis and was dismissed by Johnson. Under Rishi Sunak, Gove was reinstated to his previous roles of Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations.

Early life and education (1967–1988)

Gove was born as Graeme Andrew Logan on 26 August 1967. His biological mother, whom he originally understood to have been an unmarried Edinburgh student, was in fact a 23-year-old cookery demonstrator. Gove regarded his birthplace as Edinburgh until it was revealed in a biography in 2019 that he was born in a maternity hospital in Fonthill Road, Aberdeen. Logan was put into care soon after he was born. At the age of four months he was adopted by a Labour-supporting couple in Aberdeen, Ernest Gove (died 2023) and Christine Gove, by whom he was brought up. After he joined the Gove family, Logan's name was changed to Michael Andrew Gove. His adoptive father, Ernest, ran a fish processing business and his adoptive mother, Christine, was a lab assistant at the University of Aberdeen, before working at the Aberdeen School for the Deaf.

Gove, his parents, and his adoptive sister Angela Christine lived in a small property in the Kittybrewster area of Aberdeen, before relocating to Rosehill Drive. He was educated at two state schools (Sunnybank Primary School and Kittybrewster Primary School), and later, on the recommendation of his primary school teacher, he sat and passed the entrance exam for the independent Robert Gordon's College. In October 2012, he wrote an apology letter to his former French teacher for misbehaving in class. Gove joined the Labour Party in 1983 and campaigned on behalf of the party for the 1983 general election. Outside of school, he spent time as a Sunday school teacher at Causewayend Church. As he entered sixth year he had to apply for a scholarship as his family fell on difficult economic circumstances. He passed the scholarship exam and served as a school prefect in his final two years.

From 1985 to 1988 he read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, during which time he joined the Conservative Party. He became a member of the Oxford University Conservative Association and was secretary of Aberdeen South Young Conservatives. He helped write speeches for Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet ministers, including Peter Lilley and Michael Howard. During his first year, he met future Prime Minister Boris Johnson and ran his campaign to be President of the Oxford Union. In an interview with Andrew Gimson, Gove remarked that at Oxford, Johnson was "quite the most brilliant extempore speaker of his generation". Gove was elected as Oxford Union President a year after Johnson. He graduated with an upper second.

Career

Journalism (1988–2005)
After university, when applying for a job at the Conservative Research Department, Gove was told he was "insufficiently political" and "insufficiently Conservative", so he turned to journalism. He first found employment on the Peterborough column of The Daily Telegraph, after passing an interview with Max Hastings. Struggling to maintain his career in London, he moved back to Aberdeen and became a trainee reporter at The Press and Journal, where he spent several months on strike in the 1989–1990 dispute over union recognition and representation. From 1990 to 1991, he worked as a reporter for Scottish Television, with a brief interlude at Grampian Television in Aberdeen.

After moving to national television in 1991, Gove worked for the BBC's On the Record, and the Channel 4 current affairs programme A Stab in the Dark, alongside David Baddiel and Tracey MacLeod. In 1994 he began working for the BBC's Today programme. In 1995 he was identified by The Guardian as part of a group of "a new breed of 21st-century Tories". He broke the news of the 1995 Conservative Party leadership election thanks to his connections with the upper echelons of the party. Gove was a member of the winning team in Grampian Television's quiz show Top Club, and played the school chaplain in the 1994 family comedy A Feast at Midnight.

He joined The Times in 1996 as a leader writer and assumed posts as its comment editor, news editor, Saturday editor and assistant editor. He also wrote a weekly column on politics and current affairs for the newspaper and contributed to The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine and The Spectator. He remains on good terms with Rupert Murdoch, whom Gove described in evidence before the Leveson Inquiry as "one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last 50 years". He wrote a sympathetic biography of Michael Portillo and a highly critical study of the Northern Ireland peace process (The Price of Peace), where he compared the Good Friday Agreement to appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s. He was a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze and Newsnight Review on BBC Two. He met the journalist Sarah Vine in 1998, when he was comment editor and she was arts editor at The Times. They married in October 2001 and have two children—a daughter born in 2003 and a son born in 2004. Gove has lived in Earl's Court, Notting Hill, North Kensington, Mayfair and St James's.

Gove co-founded Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank launched in 2002. He chaired it for three years. He was also involved in founding the right-leaning magazine Standpoint, to which he occasionally contributed.

Early parliamentary career (2005–2010)

Gove won the Conservative candidacy for Surrey Heath on 5 July 2004, after the sitting MP Nick Hawkins was deselected by the local Conservative association. He first entered the House of Commons after being elected in the 2005 general election. In 2005 he was appointed Shadow Minister for Housing and Planning. He made his maiden speech on 7 June 2005, focusing on national security. Gove was seen as part of an influential set of Conservatives referred to as the Notting Hill Set, which included Conservative leader David Cameron, future Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Ed Vaizey, Nick Boles and Rachel Whetstone.

Over a five-month period between December 2005 and April 2006, Gove claimed more than £7,000 on a house bought with his wife Sarah Vine, in 2002. Around a third of the money was spent at OKA, an upmarket interior design company established by Viscountess Astor, Cameron's mother-in-law. Shortly afterwards he reportedly 'flipped' his designated second home, a property for which he claimed around £13,000 to cover stamp duty. Gove also claimed for a cot mattress, despite children's items being banned under updated Commons rules. Gove said he would repay the claim for the cot mattress, but maintained that his other claims were "below the acceptable threshold costs for furniture" and that moving house was necessary "to effectively discharge my parliamentary duties". While he was moving between homes, on one occasion he stayed at the Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot, Surrey, following a constituency engagement, charging the taxpayer more than £500 per night's stay.

Gove won the "Rising Star Award" at the February 2006 Channel 4 political awards. On 2 July 2007, he was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (a newly created department set up by Gordon Brown), shadowing Ed Balls. In the role he advocated the introduction of a Swedish-style education voucher system, whereby parents would choose where their child would be educated, with the state paying what they would have cost in a state school. He also advocated Swedish-style free schools, to be managed by parents and funded by the state, with the possibility that such schools would be allowed to be run on a for-profit model. Gove contracted H1N1 swine flu during the 2009 influenza pandemic. Prior to the 2010 general election, most of his questions in Commons debates concerned children, schools and families, education, local government, Council Tax, foreign affairs and the environment.

Education secretary (2010–2014)

With the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government following the hung parliament after the 2010 general election, Gove became Secretary of State for Education. His first moves included reorganising his department, announcing plans to allow schools rated as Outstanding by Ofsted to become academies, and cutting the previous government's school-building programme. He apologised, however, when the list of terminated school-building projects he had released was found to be inaccurate; the list was reannounced several times before it was finally accurately published.

In July 2010, Gove said that Labour had failed in their attempt to break the link between social class and school achievement despite spending billions of pounds: quoting research, he indicated that by the age of six years, children of low ability from affluent homes were still out-performing brighter children from poorer backgrounds. At a House of Commons Education Select Committee he said that this separation of achievement grew larger throughout pupils' school careers, stating, "In effect, rich thick kids do better than poor clever children when they arrive at school [and] the situation as they go through gets worse".

Gove's second home was not in his constituency, but in Elstead, in the South West Surrey constituency. Gove sold the house and began to commute to his constituency.

During the 2010 Conservative Party Conference, Gove announced that the primary and secondary-school national curricula for England would be restructured, and that study of authors such as Byron, Keats, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thomas Hardy would be reinstated in English lessons as part of a plan to improve children's grasp of English literature and language. Academies were not required to follow the national curriculum, and so weren't affected by the reforms. Children who failed to write coherently and grammatically, or who were weak in spelling, were penalised in the new examinations. Standards in mathematics and science were also strengthened. Gove won the "Minister of the Year" award at the 2011 Spectator awards,

In March 2011, Gove was criticised for not understanding the importance of school architecture and accused of having misrepresented the cost. In February 2011, he had told Parliament that one individual had made £1,000,000 in one year when the true figure was £700,000 for five advisers at different times over a four-year period.

During the Cameron–Clegg ministry, Gove was the subject of repeated criticism for alleged attempts to avoid the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. The criticism surrounded Gove's use of various private email accounts to send emails that allegedly related to his departmental responsibilities. The allegations suggested that Gove and his advisers believed they could avoid their correspondence being subject to freedom of information requests, as they believed that their private email accounts were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In September 2011, the Financial Times reported that Gove had used an undisclosed private email account – called "Mrs Blurt" – to discuss government business with advisers. In March 2012 the Information Commissioner ruled that because emails the Financial Times had requested contained public information they could be the subject of a freedom of information request and ordered the information requested by the paper to be disclosed. It was also alleged by the Financial Times that Gove and his advisors had destroyed email correspondence in order to avoid freedom of information requests. The allegation was denied by Gove's department, which stated that deleting email was simply part of good computer housekeeping.

In June 2012, Michael Portillo backed Gove to be a serious contender in a future race for the Conservative Party leadership, though Gove had said in an interview a few months before that "I'm constitutionally incapable of it. There's a special extra quality you need that is indefinable, and I know I don't have it. There's an equanimity, an impermeability and a courage that you need. There are some things in life you know it's better not to try."

Gove was criticised by teachers unions for his attempts to overhaul English education. At the Association of Teachers and Lecturers Annual Conference in March 2013 a motion of no-confidence in Gove was passed. The next month the National Union of Teachers passed a vote of no confidence in Gove at their annual conference and called for his resignation. The National Association of Head Teachers and NASUWT also passed motions of no confidence at their conferences that year.

Chief whip (2014–2015)
On 15 July 2014, Gove's four-year stint in charge of the Department for Education came to an end when he was dismissed as Secretary of State for Education and replaced by former Treasury Minister Nicky Morgan in a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle. Gove was moved to the post of Government chief whip, which was portrayed as a demotion by his detractors; Prime Minister Cameron denied this was the case. Gove told BBC News that he had mixed emotions about starting the new role, saying it was a privilege to become Chief Whip but that leaving the Department for Education was "a wrench".

The position came with a £30,000 pay cut, and a specific media role saw Gove on television and radio "more than a traditional Chief Whip would be". He missed his first House of Commons vote in the new role, as explained by Shadow Commons Leader Angela Eagle; "Gove not only lost his first vote but managed to get stuck in the toilet in the wrong lobby". Gove remained in the post of chief whip until May 2015, when the role was taken over by Mark Harper.

Justice secretary (2015–2016)

Following the 2015 general election, Cameron promoted Gove as Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor in his newly formed cabinet. He was praised in December 2015 for scrapping the courts fee introduced by his predecessor, Chris Grayling. The fee had been heavily criticised for, among other things, causing innocent people to plead guilty out of financial concerns. Gove removed the 12-book limit on prison books introduced by Grayling, arguing that books increased literacy and numeracy, skills needed for making prisoners a "potential asset to society". The move, effective from September 2015, was welcomed by Frances Cook of the Howard League for Penal Reform. Gove was also praised for his prominent role in scrapping a British bid for a Saudi prison contract.

Within three months of his taking office, the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) voted to stop taking new work in protest at Gove's insistence that they work for lower fees. The CBA subsequently praised his "courage" in reversing the proposed cuts. On 14 July 2016 Gove was removed from the position of justice secretary by the new prime minister, Theresa May.

EU referendum (2016)

Gove was a prominent figure in the campaign for Britain to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum and described his decision to take that side as "the most difficult decision of my political life". He and his family spent Christmas with the Camerons at Chequers where, according to Craig Oliver, Cameron was under the impression that Gove would support remaining in the EU. Despite this, Gove decided to support the Leave campaign. At the beginning of March 2016, he was appointed co-convenor of Vote Leave, with Labour MP Gisela Stuart, and given responsibility for chairing the campaign committee.

He argued Britain would be "freer, fairer and better off" for leaving, and that "[t]he day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want." When in an interview it was claimed that there was no expert opinion to support this, Gove remarked that "the people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong." However, interviewer Faisal Islam interrupted Gove after the word "experts", causing some sources to report that he had made a general statement that "the people... have had enough of experts". In 2021, Louise Richardson, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, said she was "embarrassed" that Gove was an alumnus, on account of these comments.

In his memoir For the Record, Cameron described Gove during this period as "mendacious", adding: "One quality shone through, disloyalty. Disloyalty to me and, later, disloyalty to Boris [Johnson]".

Leadership election (2016)
After Cameron announced his intention to resign as Prime Minister, with his successor now likely to be in office by September 2016, Gove was not a candidate, having said in the past that he had no interest in becoming Prime Minister. Instead, he was seen as a strong, highly influential supporter of Johnson for that role. In a move that surprised most political analysts, Gove withdrew his support for Johnson on 30 June 2016, hours before the deadline, without any previous notice to Johnson and announced his own candidacy in the leadership election. Subsequently, Johnson declined to run.

The Telegraph opined that Gove's actions in undermining Johnson's leadership aspirations constituted "the most spectacular political assassination in a generation" while The Guardian labelled it as a "Machiavellian move".

Gove said: "I wanted to help build a team behind Boris Johnson so that a politician who argued for leaving the European Union could lead us to a better future. But I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead. I have, therefore, decided to put my name forward for the leadership. I want there to be an open and positive debate about the path the country will now take. Whatever the verdict of that debate I will respect it. In the next few days I will lay out my plan for the United Kingdom which I hope can provide unity and change."

By 5 July 2016, Gove was in third place in the leadership election, behind May and Andrea Leadsom; the latter had gained an endorsement from Johnson. Some political analysts predicted that Gove might quit the race if he was unable to beat Leadsom in the first round of voting. Later that day, it was announced that May had won the first round of voting, with support from 165 MPs, while Andrea Leadsom received 66 votes and Gove trailed with 48. Gove was eliminated in the second ballot after receiving 46 votes, compared to 199 for May and 84 for Leadsom. He subsequently told the media that he was "naturally disappointed" and described his two opponents as "formidable politicians", welcoming the fact that the next PM would be female. He also encouraged a "civilised, inclusive, positive and optimistic debate".

Backbencher (2016–2017)

On 14 July 2016, Gove was dismissed by the prime minister, Theresa May. According to Jon Craig of Sky News, Gove was told to "go and learn about loyalty on the backbenches" in a two-minute meeting with May.

In the aftermath of the EU referendum, Gove was accused by Nick Clegg of being the source of a claim by The Sun that Queen Elizabeth II made comments supportive of Brexit in a private lunch at Windsor Castle. Clegg told a BBC documentary that Gove "obviously communicated it – well, I know he did". Gove declined to deny leaking the Queen's comments. The Sun said it had "multiple sources" and was confident its report was true.

In October 2016, Gove was elected to the Exiting the European Union Select Committee. That month, he was re-hired by The Times as a weekly columnist and book reviewer. As well as attending meetings of the newspaper's politics team, Gove was dispatched to the United States to report on campaign rallies in the upcoming presidential election.

In December 2016, Gove defended a Vote Leave claim that an additional £350 million a week could be spent on the NHS when Britain left the EU. Gove said the figure was robust and it was up to the Government to decide how to spend it.

In his capacity as a writer for The Times, Gove gave the first British post-election interview to Donald Trump in January 2017, along with Kai Diekmann from Bild, making him the second British politician to meet Trump as President-elect of the United States after Nigel Farage. Despite preferring Hillary Clinton to Trump as President of the United States, Gove's interview and consequent defence of it was seen by some as praising the President-elect unduly.

Environment secretary (2017–2019)

Following the 2017 general election, Gove was promoted to Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs by May during a reshuffle. Gove said he "was quite surprised" to be asked to join the cabinet after May dismissed him in 2016 after she became Prime Minister.

Following his appointment, Gove announced that a microbead ban would be put into place by the end of 2017. The ban arrived in early 2018. It meant that manufacturers could no longer produce the tiny beads used in cosmetics and care products. Another ban came in June 2018 which stopped shops from selling products that contained the beads. The reasoning behind the ban was to stop the beads harming marine life.

In July 2017, Gove announced that a fuel combustion vehicle ban will be put into place due to air pollution. He said that the ban would take effect by 2040 and end the sales of new fuel combustion cars, trucks, vans, and buses that have petrol and diesel engines in the UK. The ban does not include plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Gove introduced a ban on bee-harming pesticides like neonicotinoids. He was praised by Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven for his strong stance on issues like bee-harming pesticides, single-use plastic bottles and the future of the internal combustion engine", adding "Gove has defied many people's expectations on the environment".

In October 2017, Gove issued an apology for a joke which compared tough interviews on the Today programme to a sexual encounter with Harvey Weinstein. He was criticised by political opponents who felt allegations of sexual abuse were not a suitable subject for jokes.

Other policies Gove had announced by December 2017 were that CCTV would be used in all slaughterhouses and beavers would be reintroduced into the UK.

Gove faced criticism over the appointment of Ben Goldsmith to the role of non-executive director at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as Goldsmith had previously donated cash to Gove's Surrey Heath constituency. Concerns were also raised about the selection process for the job, which was overseen by Sir Ian Cheshire, the chairman of Goldsmith's investment firm, Menhaden Capital Management.

An important aspect of Gove's tenure was the introduction of laws concerning animal welfare. Maximum sentences for the crime of animal cruelty increased, as did protection for animals used by Government services, such as police dogs and horses. One of the "toughest worldwide bans" on ivory trade was also introduced in 2018.

May offered Gove the post of secretary of state for exiting the European Union after Dominic Raab's resignation over the Brexit withdrawal agreement in November 2018. Gove rejected the offer after May told him that there was "no chance" of trying to renegotiate the agreement.

Gove was portrayed by actor Oliver Maltman in the 2019 HBO and Channel 4 drama Brexit: The Uncivil War. In January 2019, May survived a vote of no confidence in her government, after a "barnstorming" speech from Gove directed towards the Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The speech, which gained significant media attention, attacked Corbyn for his foreign policy record, with Tom Rogan of the Washington Examiner describing it as "A tour de force. It was angry but not fanatical, passionate but not somber, and intellectual but simply put".

In March 2019, Gove argued that "we didn't vote to leave without a deal. That wasn't the message of the campaign I helped lead. During that campaign, we said we should do a deal with the EU and be part of the network of free trade deals that covers all Europe, from Iceland to Turkey".

In April 2019, after having a meeting with Extinction Rebellion, Gove said he agreed with the activists that there needed to be a deeper level of public understanding over climate change, but he declined to declare a climate emergency in the United Kingdom. Despite Gove's position, Parliament passed a motion to declare a climate emergency.

In May 2019, Gove introduced the Wild Animals in Circuses Bill, banning the use of wild animals in travelling circuses in England.

Leadership election (2019)

On 26 May 2019, Gove announced he would stand for the Conservative leadership following May's resignation, becoming the eighth candidate to enter the contest. He promised to remove the charge for UK citizenship applications from EU nationals if elected, and to replace VAT with a "simpler sales tax". He also planned to scrap the High Speed 2 rail project and increase school funding by £1 billion.

By 5 June 2019, Johnson became the clear frontrunner with the bookmakers, with Gove second favourite, followed closely by Jeremy Hunt. In June, reports emerged that Gove had taken cocaine as a journalist in his twenties. Gove stated that he regretted having done so, and regarded it as having been a mistake. In an article for The Times in December 1999, Gove had argued against the legalisation of drugs and criticised members of the middle classes for their hypocrisy in doing so. This was a key component of his bid to be leader. In reaction, Craig Oliver said it would have a negative impact on his run whereas fellow candidate for leadership Dominic Raab said he "admires [Gove's] honesty".

Gove progressed following the first ballot, having received 37 votes. He received 41 votes in the second ballot, and by the third ballot had 51 MPs backing him. The fourth ballot saw him gain 61 votes, moving him into second position. In the last ballot, he had 75 votes and was voted out – losing by only two to Hunt, the eventual runner-up.

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (2019–2021)

Upon the election of Johnson as Prime Minister, Gove was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, legally representing the Crown as Duke of Lancaster. His otherwise non-portfolio role included responsibility for no-deal Brexit preparations, overseeing constitutional affairs, maintaining the integrity of the Union and having oversight over all Cabinet Office policy. Gove was excluded from a place on the National Security Council committee as Johnson pursued a slimming down of Cabinet operations. He became a central figure in the conduction of Operation Yellowhammer, the civil contingency planning for the possibility of a no-deal Brexit.

Writing in The Sunday Times on 28 July 2019, Gove said that a no-deal Brexit was "a very real prospect" and one that the Government was "working on the assumption of". He said in August that it was "wrong and sad" that the EU was "refusing to negotiate" over a new withdrawal agreement. That month, an official Cabinet Yellowhammer document leaked, predicting that a no-deal Brexit would lead to food, medicine and petrol shortages. Gove said the leaked dossier outlined a "worst-case scenario". Interviewed in September 2019, Gove declined to say whether the Government would abide by legislation designed to stop a no-deal Brexit.

In 2019, LBC's Iain Dale and a "panel of experts" placed Gove third in a list of that year's "Top 100 Most Influential Conservatives". During the 2019 Speaker of the House of Commons election, Gove nominated Labour MP Chris Bryant to replace John Bercow. Gove helped to prepare Johnson for the 2019 general election debates by playing the role of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He offered to stand in for Johnson during a Channel 4 debate on environmental issues but the editor of Channel 4 News said the debate was only open to party leaders.

Gove won the "Minister to watch" award at the January 2020 Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards. On 13 February 2020, he took on additional responsibilities as Minister for the Cabinet Office, succeeding Oliver Dowden, who had been appointed Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in Johnson's first large reshuffle of his government.

During the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Gove generated confusion after saying on ITV's Good Morning Britain that children with separated parents were not allowed to move between their parents' homes. He later apologised and clarified that what he had said was not the case. When Johnson was self-isolating after having been tested positive for COVID-19, Gove stood in for Johnson briefly from 27 March 2020 at the daily briefings of the pandemic, until Gove self-isolated himself after a family member developed COVID-19 symptoms.

In May 2020, Gove was criticised after his wife Sarah Vine shared a bookcase picture "as a very special treat for my trolls" which featured a book by the Holocaust denier David Irving, and a copy of The Bell Curve, which controversially claims that intelligence is highly heritable and that median IQ varies among races. Another book in the photograph was The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray, which, according to The Guardian, cites Enoch Powell and argues for protecting white Christian Europe from "outsiders".

After Johnson said that the UK had ended trade talks with the EU in October 2020, Gove said that the door was "still ajar" if the EU made changes over issues including fishing access and that "We hope the EU will change their position and we are certainly not saying if they do change their position we can't talk to them".

Gove was part of a committee of Cabinet ministers, comprising Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock, that made decisions on the COVID-19 pandemic. He was chair of the COVID-19 operations subcommittee. In a COBR meeting he chaired on 24 November 2020, he agreed, with the leaders of the UK's devolved governments, to a set of rules governing social mixing for the whole of the country over the Christmas period. It allowed for up to three households to form a "bubble" from 23 to 27 December, but was cancelled for London and South East England, while being limited to a single day for the rest of England, after the discovery of a mutant COVID-19 strain.

Under the terms of England's all-tier COVID-19 restrictions in December 2020, pubs were only legally allowed to serve alcoholic beverages with a substantial meal. Gove initially said that this did not include Scotch eggs, which he defined as a "starter" on multiple occasions (although he said it "would count as a substantial meal if there were table service"); however, he later backtracked and said: "I do recognise that it is a substantial meal."

Gove was co-chair of the EU–UK Partnership Council with European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič. On 8 December 2020, after 10 months of talks with Šefčovič, he helped reach an agreement that included post-Brexit arrangements for the Irish border. As a consequence the Government decided to abandon parts of the Internal Market Bill that could have seen the UK break international law. David Frost succeeded Gove as the UK chair of the Partnership Council on 1 March 2021.

In the 2020 revival of Spitting Image, Gove's puppet was given "beady eyes, large ears and bulging cheeks" and was voiced by Lewis MacLeod. In May 2021, Gove attended the 2021 Champions League Final in Porto with his son, supporting Chelsea; following his visit he was alerted by the NHS Test and Trace system of his potential exposure to the disease, and that he would need to self-isolate. Rather than isolating for the normal ten-day period, Gove was able to take part in a pilot scheme designed to investigate the efficacy of testing, which required him to self-isolate for only one day and undergo testing every day for a week.

In a case brought to the High Court of Justice by the Good Law Project in June 2021, Gove was found to have acted unlawfully when the Government awarded a COVID-19 contract without a tender to a polling company owned by long-term associates of his and Dominic Cummings, then Johnson's chief adviser.

In July 2021, Gove worked part-time in Glasgow as part of the Government strategy to strengthen the Union. That month, a joint statement on behalf of Gove and Vine said that they had agreed to separate and were in the process of finalising their divorce. The next month, Gove was filmed dancing "merrily" at Bohemia nightclub in Aberdeen. He had allegedly tried to avoid a £5 entrance fee by stating he was the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Friends of Gove denied he had attempted to avoid paying. In January 2022, a divorce was granted on the grounds of Gove's unreasonable behaviour.

Levelling up secretary (2021–2022)
In a cabinet reshuffle on 15 September 2021, Gove was appointed Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. He was given responsibilities for the Government's levelling up agenda, the Union and elections, the last two of which he retained from his previous post. Within days his department was renamed the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and his title changed to Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. He was given the additional title of Minister for Intergovernmental Relations. Following his appointment, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss let Gove move in to her grace-and-favour flat at 1 Carlton Gardens, despite him being a lower ranked minister.

In October 2021, while walking on Horseferry Road in Westminster, Gove was accosted by COVID-19 anti-lockdown protesters. As the protesters attempted to surround him, he was protected by police officers and escorted to a nearby building.

In December 2021, Gove was part of a trio of Cabinet ministers that self-isolated after meeting Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who was later diagnosed with COVID-19.

Gove launched a white paper on levelling up on 2 February 2022. The paper included plans to increase public investment across the UK and expand devolution in England. It was reported that parts of it had been copied from Wikipedia.

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gove announced his intention to draft plans to allow Ukrainian refugees to be housed in Russian oligarchs' homes in the UK. He later announced the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which would arrange for British households to take in Ukrainian refugees.

Gove attended the 2022 Bilderberg meeting in Washington, D.C.

The Telegraph journalist Matthew Lynn attacked Gove's record in government, describing him as the "driving force behind a whole series of terrible policy mistakes". In particular, Lynn identified Gove's resistance to new skyscrapers in London, his changes to the rules concerning the rental sector to make it harder for landlords to evict tenants, and his opposition to a fracking trial as damaging the economic growth prospects for the UK.

On 6 July 2022, Gove was dismissed by Johnson for alleged disloyalty, after visiting Downing Street to tell him to resign, during the July 2022 Government crisis. A Downing Street source described him as a "snake" following the sacking.

Backbencher (2022)
Gove declined to run in the July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election. He endorsed Kemi Badenoch's leadership bid and, after her defeat, announced his support for Rishi Sunak.

Following the election of Liz Truss, Gove variously backed and criticised the prime minister on Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng's controversial reforms to taxation. According to journalist Harry Cole, Truss offered Gove the posts of British Ambassador to Israel and British Ambassador to China.

Gove declined to run in the October 2022 Conservative Party leadership election. He endorsed Sunak's leadership bid.

Levelling up secretary (2022–present)

On 25 October 2022, following the accession of Rishi Sunak to the prime ministership, Gove was reinstated to his previous roles of Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations. Gove had previously said that he did not expect to serve in government again.

According to The Times, in the 2023 cabinet reshuffle, Sunak wanted Gove to become Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, but Gove asked to stay at the levelling up department.

In February 2023, following the death of Awaab Ishak, a two-year old child living in a mould-hit flat, the Government announced that it would implement "Awaab's Law", which will require social housing providers to remedy reported damp and mould within certain time limits. Gove made the announcement as he met with Awaab's family in Rochdale.

Political positions
Gove is generally considered as combining socially liberal views—for example, on gay marriage—with a harder Eurosceptic and neoconservative position on foreign affairs. He has expressed his view that the state should generally not interfere in domestic affairs and attests to have campaigned for economic freedom in certain matters. Gove has argued that "the only sustainable ethical foundation for society is a belief in the innate worth and dignity of every individual."

Giving evidence before the Leveson Inquiry in May 2012, Gove said he was "unashamedly on the side of those who say that we should think very carefully before legislation and regulation because the cry 'Something must be done' often leads to people doing something which isn't always wise."

During the 2008 Conservative Party Conference, Gove argued that Edmund Burke, an 18th-century philosopher who commented on organic society and the French Revolution, was the greatest conservative ever. When asked about those who believe "Marx was right all along", he responded that they were guilty of ignoring the systematic abuses and poverty of centrally planned economies, and criticised the historian Eric Hobsbawm, saying that "only when Hobsbawm weeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he ever be worth listening to."

In remarks prepared for the 2020 Ditchley Lecture, Gove portrayed what he saw as the malaise of modern society as leading to populism, because the non-intellectual classes "chose to opt for polarised identity politics rather than stay with broad-based national political movements" instead of choosing to follow the politics of diversity, inclusion and identity politics they were force-fed by the elites. He praised Franklin D. Roosevelt as a model for his renewal of capitalism and he imagined the construction of inclusive societies with the deconstruction of Whitehall. Gove stressed "basic writing, meeting chairing and time management skills" for all policy civil servants. He ended with a paean to his purpose in public service: "to tackle inequality".

Capital punishment
In 1997, Gove wrote of capital punishment, which was abolished in the UK in 1965, arguing in The Times that, "Were I ever alone in the dock I would not want to be arraigned before our flawed tribunals, knowing my freedom could be forfeited as a result of political pressures. I would prefer a fair trial, under the shadow of the noose." The Independent reported in 2015 that Gove had not appeared to repeat his backing for the death penalty since he made the remarks in the late 1990s.

Foreign policy
The Financial Times describes Gove as having "strong neoconservative convictions".

In 2003, he stated that he did not believe the United States' "current position in the world [was] analogous to that of an Imperial power, as we have come to understand imperial powers".

William Dalrymple, reviewing Gove's book Celsius 7/7 on the roots of Islamic terrorism in The Times, dismissed Gove's knowledge of the Middle East as being derivative and based on the views of Bernard Lewis.

Iraq
In February 2003, Gove expressed admiration for New Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair because of the way he was handling the crisis in Iraq: "As a right-wing polemicist, all I can say looking at Mr Blair now is, what's not to like?" Blair, he thought, was "behaving like a true Thatcherite". In December 2008, Gove wrote that declarations of either victory or defeat in Iraq in 2003 were premature, and that the liberation of Iraq was a foreign policy success.

Tariq Ali once recalled how, at the time of the Iraq War, he "debat[ed] the ghastly Gove on television [... and found him] worse than most Bush apologists in the United States."

Intervention in Syria
Gove had to be calmed by parliamentary colleagues in August 2013 after shouting, "A disgrace, you're a disgrace!" at various Conservative and Liberal Democrat rebels who contributed to defeating the coalition government's motion to attack Syria in retaliation for the 2013 Ghouta attacks. He later stated he was reacting to the manner in which Labour MPs celebrated the outcome of the vote.

Saudi Arabian prisons
In 2015, Gove cancelled a £5.9 million contract to provide services for prisons in Saudi Arabia, according to The Guardian, because it was thought "the British government should not be assisting a regime that uses beheadings, stoning, crucifixions and lashings as forms of punishment." Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond accused Gove of being naive.

Health
Gove is one of several Conservative MPs who co-authored Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model Party (2005). The book says the NHS "fails to meet public expectations" and calls for it to be dismantled and replaced with personal health accounts. Gove fractured his foot in July 2015. His wife Sarah Vine (somewhat inaccurately) complained in her Daily Mail column that he could not have his foot X-rayed by the NHS because the minor injuries unit the couple visited did not provide the facility at weekends.

Scottish independence
Gove believes that Scotland should remain part of the United Kingdom, arguing that Scotland's strengths complement those of other parts of the UK. He has expressed interest in the idea of letting Scottish people living in the other regions of the UK vote in a second Scottish independence referendum.

Israel and Jewish people
Gove has described himself as "a proud Zionist", and supports the United Jewish Israel Appeal's fundraising activities. In 2019, he reiterated "One thing I have always been since I was a boy is a Zionist" and spoke of his desire to "celebrate everything that Israel and the Jewish people have brought to the life of this world and hold it dear to our hearts" and that "For as long as I have breath in my body and a platform on which to argue I shall be on your side, by your side and delighted and honoured to argue, powerfully I hope, on behalf of people who have contributed so powerfully to the life of this nation".

Gove is, like the great majority of UK Conservative Party MPs, a member of Conservative Friends of Israel. He has said that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel is anti-Semitic. Gove said that jihadist terrorists "hate Israel, and they wish to wipe out the Jewish people's home, not because of what Israel does but because of what Israel is – free, democratic, liberal and western."

First World War
In an article about the First World War centenary in January 2014, Gove criticised academic and television interpretations of World War I as "left-wing versions of the past designed to belittle Britain and its leaders."

Some of Gove's key points were rebuffed by the academics that Gove had used to support his thesis. Gove had criticised Cambridge professor Sir Richard Evans saying his views were more like that of an undergraduate cynic in a Footlights review. Instead he urged people to listen to Margaret MacMillan of Oxford University. MacMillan responded, saying: "I agree with some of what Mr Gove says, but he is mistaking myths for rival interpretations of history. I did not say, as Mr Gove suggests, that British soldiers in the First World War were consciously fighting for a western liberal order. They were just defending their homeland and fighting what they saw as German militarism." Evans said Gove's attack was "ignorant" and asked how anyone could possibly say Britons were fighting for freedom given their country's main ally was Tsarist Russia. Jeremy Paxman said Gove had "wilfully misquoted" Evans on the subject of the First World War.

Religion
In 2012, Gove was behind plans to provide schools throughout England and Wales with a copy of the King James Bible (inscribed "presented by the Secretary of State for Education") to celebrate the 400th anniversary of its translation into English, though he said he backed the scheme because of the historical and cultural significance of that translation rather than on purely religious grounds.

In 2013, Gove credited Cardinal Keith O'Brien with using his intellect to protect the vulnerable in Scotland whilst regretting the absence of a similar figure in the Kirk.

In April 2015, he described his faith in an article for The Spectator. In widely reported remarks, he complained that "to call yourself a Christian in contemporary Britain is to invite pity, condescension or cool dismissal."

In 2016, he credited his Christian faith for his focus as Justice Secretary on redemption and rehabilitation.

Other views
Gove's proposal for a new Royal Yacht costing £60 million was made public in January 2012. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg criticised the idea, calling it "a case of the haves and the have yachts".

In March 2014, he described the concentration of Old Etonians at the top of the Conservative coalition as "ridiculous. I don't know where you can find a similar situation in any other developed economy."

Notes and references
Notes

References

Sources

Books and journals

News

 f

Websites and others

External links

1967 births
Living people
20th-century British journalists
21st-century British journalists
Alumni of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
BBC newsreaders and journalists
British Christian Zionists
British Christians
British Secretaries of State for Education
British Secretaries of State for the Environment
Chancellors of the Duchy of Lancaster
Conservative Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Daily Mail journalists
Lord chancellors of Great Britain
Members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom
People educated at Robert Gordon's College
Politicians from Aberdeen
Politicians from Edinburgh
Presidents of the Oxford Union
Scottish adoptees
Scottish columnists
Scottish journalists
Secretaries of State for Justice (UK)
The Times people
UK MPs 2005–2010
UK MPs 2010–2015
UK MPs 2015–2017
UK MPs 2017–2019
UK MPs 2019–present
British Eurosceptics

Michael Gove


Lusatia (, , , , ; rarely also referred to as Sorbia) is a historical region in Central Europe, split between Germany and Poland. Lusatia stretches from the Bóbr and Kwisa rivers in the east to the Pulsnitz and Black Elster rivers in the west, and is located within the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg as well as in the Polish voivodeships of Lower Silesia and Lubusz. Lusatia's central rivers are the Spree and the Lusatian Neisse, which constitutes the border between Germany and Poland. The Lusatian Mountains (part of the Sudetes), separate Lusatia from Bohemia (Czech Republic) in the south. Lusatia is traditionally divided into Upper Lusatia (the hilly southern part) and Lower Lusatia (the flat northern part).

The areas east and west along the Spree in the German part of Lusatia are home to the Slavic Sorbs, one of Germany's four officially recognized indigenous ethnic minorities (alongside Sinti and Roma, Frisians, and Danes). The Upper Sorbs inhabit Saxon Upper Lusatia, and the Lower Sorbs Brandenburgian Lower Lusatia. Upper and Lower Sorbian are spoken in the German parts of Upper and Lower Lusatia respectively, and the signage there is mostly bilingual. Throughout history, the region was ruled at various times by the Poles, Czechs, Germans and Hungarians.

Lusatia is the theme of the Sorbian national anthem Rjana Łužica (Rědna Łužyca). The Lusatian Lake District is Europe's largest artificial lake district. The village of Herrnhut (Ochranow) is the seat of the Moravian Church. Muskau Park in Bad Muskau (Mužakow) and Łęknica is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Tropical Islands Resort, a large water park housed in the biggest free-standing hall in the world, is located in the north of Lusatia. The closest international airport to Lusatia is Dresden Airport in Klotzsche (Kłóčow).

The largest Lusatian city is Cottbus (Chóśebuz), other notable towns are the former members of the Lusatian League (the German/Polish twin towns of Görlitz (Zhorjelc) and Zgorzelec, Bautzen (Budyšin), Zittau (Žitawa), Lubań, Kamenz (Kamjenc), and Löbau (Lubij)), as well as Żary, the German/Polish twin towns of Guben (Gubin) and Gubin, Hoyerswerda (Wojerecy), Senftenberg (Zły Komorow), Eisenhüttenstadt (Pśibrjog), and Spremberg (Grodk).

Etymology
The name derives from the Sorbian word łužicy meaning "swamps" or "water-hole", Germanized as Lausitz. Lusatia is the Latinized form which spread in the English and Romance languages area.

Geography

Lusatia comprises two both scenically and historically different parts: a hilly southern "upper" section and a "lower" region, which belongs to the North European Plain. The border between Upper and Lower Lusatia is roughly marked by the course of the Black Elster river at Senftenberg and its eastern continuation toward the Silesian town of Przewóz on the Lusatian Neisse. Neighbouring regions were Silesia in the east, Bohemia in the south, the Margraviate of Meissen, and the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg in the west as well as the Margraviate of Brandenburg (Mittelmark) in the north.

Upper Lusatia

Upper Lusatia (Oberlausitz or Hornja Łužica) is today part of the German state of Saxony, except for a small part east of the Neisse River around Lubań, which now belongs to the Polish Lower Silesian voivodeship. It consists of hilly countryside rising in the South to the Lusatian Highlands near the Czech border, and then even higher to form the Zittau Hills, the small northern part of the Lusatian Mountains (Lužické hory/Lausitzer Gebirge) in the Czech Republic.

Upper Lusatia is characterized by fertile soil and undulating hills as well as by historic towns and cities such as Bautzen, Görlitz, Zittau, Löbau, Kamenz, Lubań, Bischofswerda, Herrnhut, Hoyerswerda, and Bad Muskau. Many villages in the very south of Upper Lusatia contain a typical attraction of the region, the so-called Umgebindehäuser, half-timbered-houses representing a combination of Franconian and Slavic style. Among those villages are Niedercunnersdorf, Obercunnersdorf, Wehrsdorf, Jonsdorf,  Sohland an der Spree with Taubenheim, Oppach, Varnsdorf or Ebersbach.

Lower Lusatia

Most of the area belonging to the German state of Brandenburg today is called Lower Lusatia (Niederlausitz or Dolna Łužyca) and is characterized by forests and meadows. In the course of much of the 19th and the entire 20th century, it was shaped by the lignite industry and extensive open-pit mining. Important towns include Cottbus, Eisenhüttenstadt, Lübben, Lübbenau, Spremberg, Finsterwalde, Senftenberg (Zły Komorow), and Żary, which is now considered the capital of Polish Lusatia.

Between Upper and Lower Lusatia is a region called the Grenzwall, literally meaning "border dyke", although it is in fact a morainic ridge. In the Middle Ages this area had dense forests, so it represented a major obstacle to civilian and military traffic. Some of the region's villages were damaged or destroyed by the open-pit lignite mining industry during the DDR era. Some, now exhausted, former open-pit mines are now being converted into artificial lakes, with the hope of attracting holiday-makers, and the area is now being referred to as the Lusatian Lake District (Lausitzer Seenland).

Lusatian Lake District

The Lusatian Lake District (German: Lausitzer Seenland, Lower Sorbian: Łužyska jazorina, Upper Sorbian: Łužiska jězorina) will become Europe's largest artificial lake district. Some of the biggest lakes are Lake Senftenberg (Senftenberger See / Złokomorowski jazor) and Bluno Southern Lake (Blunoer Südsee / Južny Blunjanski jězor).

Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape

The Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape (German: Oberlausitzer Heide- und Teichlandschaft, Upper Sorbian: Hornjołužiska hola a hatowa krajina) is the region richest in ponds in Germany, and together with the Lower Lusatian Pond Landscape forms the biggest pond landscape in Central Europe.

Lusatian capitals

As Lusatia is not, and never has been, a single administrative unit, Upper and Lower Lusatia have different, but in some respects similar, histories.  The city of Cottbus is the largest in the region, and though it is recognized as the cultural capital of Lower Lusatia, it was a Brandenburg exclave since 1445. Historically, the administrative centres of Lower Lusatia were at Luckau and Lübben, while the historical capital of Upper Lusatia is Bautzen. Since 1945, when a small part of Lusatia east of the Oder–Neisse line was incorporated into Poland, Żary has been touted as the capital of Polish Lusatia.

History

Early history
According to the earliest records, the area was settled by culturally Celtic tribes. Later, around 100 BC, the Germanic Semnones settled in that area. The name of the region may be derived from that of the Ligians. From around 600 onwards, West Slavic tribes known as the Milceni and Lusici settled permanently in the region.

In the 10th century, the region came under the influence of the Kingdom of Germany, starting with the 928 eastern campaigns of King Henry the Fowler. Until 963 the Lusatian tribes were subdued by the Saxon margrave Gero and upon his death two years later, the March of Lusatia was established on the territory of today's Lower Lusatia and remained with the Holy Roman Empire, while the adjacent Northern March again got lost in the Slavic uprising of 983. The later Upper Lusatian region of the Milceni lands up to the Silesian border at the Kwisa river at first was part of the Margraviate of Meissen under Margrave Eckard I.

At the same time the Polan duke of the later Kingdom of Poland raised claims to the Lusatian lands and upon the death of Emperor Otto III in 1002, Margrave Gero II lost Lusatia to the Polish Duke Boleslaw I the Brave, who took the region in his conquests,  acknowledged by Henry II first in the same year in Merseburg and later in the 1018 Peace of Bautzen, Lusatia became part of his territory; however, Germans and Poles continued to struggle over the administration of the region. It was regained in a 1031 campaign by Emperor Conrad II in favour of the Saxon German rulers of the Meissen House of Wettin and the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg, who purchased the March of (Lower) Lusatia in 1303.

In 1367 the Brandenburg elector Otto V of Wittelsbach finally sold Lower Lusatia to King Karel of Bohemia, thereby becoming a Bohemian crown land.

Bohemian rule

As Margrave Egbert II of Meissen supported anti-king Rudolf of Rheinfelden during the Investiture Controversy, King Henry IV of Germany in 1076 awarded the Milceni lands of Upper Lusatia as a fief to the Bohemian duke Vratislav II. After Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had elevated Duke Vladislaus II to the rank of a King of Bohemia in 1158, the Upper Lusatian lands around Bautzen evolved into a Bohemian crown land. Around 1200, large numbers of German settlers came to Lusatia in the course of the Ostsiedlung, settling in the forested areas yet not inhabited by the Slavs. For centuries, from as early as the Middle Ages, trade flourished, and several important trade routes ran through Lusatia, connecting German states in the west, Poland in the east and Bohemia in the south. In 1319, the region was divided between the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Duchy of Jawor, the southwesternmost duchy of fragmented Piast-ruled Poland, while northernmost parts also passed to the Margraviate of Brandenburg in the following years. From 1368, it was entirely part of the Bohemian Crown.

In 1346 six Upper Lusatian cities formed the Lusatian League to resist the constant attacks conducted by robber barons. The association supported King Sigismund in the Hussite Wars leading to armed attacks and devastation. The cities were represented in the (Upper) Lusatian Landtag assembly, where they met with the fierce opposition of the noble state countries. In 1469 the region passed to Hungary, and in 1490 it returned to the Bohemian Crown, then under the rule of Polish Prince Vladislaus II.

Following the Lutheran Reformation, the greater part of Lusatia became Protestant except for the area between Bautzen, Kamenz and Hoyerswerda. The Lusatias remained under Bohemian rule – from 1526 onwards under the rule of the House of Habsburg – until the Thirty Years' War.

Saxon rule

According to the 1635 Peace of Prague, most of Lusatia became a province of the Electorate of Saxony, except for the region around Cottbus possessed by Brandenburg. After the Saxon elector Augustus the Strong was elected king of Poland in 1697, Lusatia became strategically important as the elector-kings sought to create a land connection between their Saxon homelands and the Polish territories. Two main routes connecting Warsaw and Dresden ran through the region in the 18th century and Kings Augustus II the Strong and Augustus III of Poland often traveled the routes. Numerous Polish dignitaries also traveled through Lusatia on several occasions, and some Polish nobles owned estates in Lusatia. A distinct remnant of the region's ties to Poland are the 18th-century mileposts decorated with the coat of arms of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth located in various towns in the region. Polish-Sorbian contacts increased in that period. With the Age of Enlightenment, the Sorbian national revival began and resistance to Germanization emerged.

Herrnhut, between Löbau and Zittau, founded in 1722 by religious refugees from Moravia on the estate of Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf became the starting point of the organized Protestant missionary movement in 1732 and missionaries went out from the Moravian Church in Herrnhut to all corners of the world to share the Gospel.

The newly established Kingdom of Saxony, however, sided with Napoleon; therefore, at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Lusatia was divided, with Lower Lusatia and the northeastern part of Upper Lusatia around Hoyerswerda, Rothenburg, Görlitz, and Lauban awarded to Prussia. Only the southwestern part of Upper Lusatia, which included Löbau, Kamenz, Bautzen, and Zittau, remained part of Saxony.

Prussian rule
The Lusatians in Prussia demanded that their land become a distinct administrative unit, but Lower Lusatia was incorporated into the Province of Brandenburg, while the Upper Lusatian territories were attached to the Province of Silesia instead.

The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed an era of cultural revival for Slavic Lusatians. The modern languages of Upper and Lower Lusatian (or Sorbian) emerged, national literature flourished, and many national organizations such as Maćica Serbska and Domowina were founded.

In the interbellum, the German government carried out a massive campaign of changing of place names in Lusatia in order to erase traces of Slavic origin, and while most of the historic names were restored after World War II, some were retained.

This era came to an end during the Nazi regime in Germany, when all Sorbian organizations were abolished and forbidden, newspapers and magazines closed, and any use of the Sorbian languages was prohibited. During World War II, some Sorbian activists were arrested, executed, exiled or sent as political prisoners to concentration camps. From 1942 to 1944 the underground Lusatian National Committee was formed and was active in German-occupied Warsaw.

During the war, the Germans established and operated several prisoner-of-war camps, including Oflag III-C, Oflag IV-D, Oflag 8, Stalag III-B, Stalag IV-A and Stalag VIII-A, with multiple forced labour subcamps in the region. Prisoners included Polish POWs and civilians, and French, Belgian, British, Australian, New Zealander, Canadian, South African, Dutch, Italian, Soviet, Serbian, Slovak and American POWs.

During the war, the Poles postulated that after the defeat of Germany, the Sorbs should be allowed free national development either within the borders of Poland or Czechoslovakia, or as an independent Sorbian state in alliance with Poland.

The Eastern Front reached Lusatia in early 1945, with Soviet and Polish troops defeating the Germans and capturing the region. In Horka, on April 26, 1945, the Germans carried out a massacre of a field hospital column of the 9th Polish Armored Division, killing some 300 POWs, mostly wounded soldiers and medical personnel (see German atrocities committed against Polish prisoners of war).

Since 1945

After World War II according to the Potsdam Agreement, Lusatia was divided between Allied-occupied Germany (Soviet occupation zone) and the Republic of Poland along the Oder–Neisse line. Poland's communist government expelled all remaining Germans and Sorbs from the area east of the Neisse river in 1945 and 1946 in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement. The Lusatian National Committee in Prague claimed the right to self-government and separation from Germany and the creation of a Lusatian Free State or attachment to Czechoslovakia. The majority of the Sorbian intelligentsia was organized in the Domowina, though, and did not wish to split from Germany. Claims asserted by the Lusatian National movement were postulates of joining Lusatia to Poland or Czechoslovakia. Between 1945 and 1947 they produced about ten memorials to the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; however, this did not bring any results. On 30 April 1946, the Lusatian National Committee also submitted a petition to the Polish Government, signed by Paweł Cyż – the minister and an official Sorbian delegate in Poland. There was also a project to proclaim a Lusatian Free State, whose Prime Minister was intended to be the Polish archaeologist of Lusatian origin, Wojciech Kóčka.

In 1945, the northeastern part of Upper Lusatia west of the Neisse rejoined Saxony and in 1952, when the state was divided into three administrative areas (Bezirke), the Upper Lusatian region became part of the Dresden administrative region. After the East German Revolution of 1989, the state of Saxony was reestablished in 1990. Lower Lusatia remained with Brandenburg, from 1952 until 1990 in the Bezirk of Cottbus.

In 1950, the Sorbs obtained language and cultural autonomy within the then–East German state of Saxony. Lusatian schools and magazines were launched and the Domowina association was revived, although under increasing political control of the ruling Communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). At the same time, the large German-speaking majority of the Upper Lusatian population kept up a considerable degree of local, 'Upper Lusatian' patriotism of its own. An attempt to establish a Lusatian Land within the Federal Republic of Germany failed after German reunification in 1990. The constitutions of Saxony and Brandenburg guarantee cultural rights, but not autonomy, to the Sorbs.

Demographics

Sorbs

More than 80,000 of the Sorbian Slavic minority continue to live in the region. Historically, their ancestors are West-Slavic-speaking tribes such as the Milceni, who settled in the region between the Elbe and the Saale. Many still speak their language (though numbers are dwindling and especially Lower Sorbian is considered endangered), and road signs are usually bilingual. However, the number of all the inhabitants of this part of eastern Saxony is declining rapidly – by 20% in the last 10 to 15 years. Sorbs make efforts to protect their traditional culture manifested in the traditional folk costumes and the style of village houses. The coal industry in the region (like the Schwarze Pumpe power station needing vast areas of land) destroyed dozens of Lusatian villages in the past and threatens some of them even now. The Sorbian language is taught at many primary and some secondary schools and at two universities (Leipzig and Prague). Project "Witaj" ("welcome!") is a project of eight preschools where Sorbian is currently the main language for a few hundred Lusatian children.

There is a daily newspaper in the Sorbian language (Serbske Nowiny); a Sorbian radio station (Serbski Rozhłós) uses local frequencies of two otherwise German-speaking radio stations for several hours a day. There are very limited programmes on television (once a month) in Sorbian on two regional television stations (RBB and MDR TV).

In 2020, despite the loss of the Sorbian language in most of Lusatia, there are some Sorbian traditions and habits that still live on to this day. In February, many people (mostly people from villages, regardless of German or Sorbian ancestry) will still engage in the Sorbian tradition of Zampern (a festive procession). Some Sorbian dishes like boiled potatoes with linseed oil and curd (German: Quark mit Leineöl) are still prevalent and, today, are eaten in other parts of Germany (like Berlin or western Saxony) too. Spreewälder Gurken (pickled cucumbers potted by using a special mixture of herbs and spices) are often associated with the Sorbs even though the cucumbers themselves were introduced by Dutch migrants, who started to pickle them for higher durability. Soon Sorbs adopted the pickling and might have changed the recipes slightly over time.

The traditional Sorbian costumes are still to be worn in the Spreewald region even though mainly in the tourism industry. Recently, some women started to revive traditional clothes by using them as wedding dresses, even though this practise differs from original traditions.

Demographics in 1900
Percentage of Sorbs:
Cottbus (Chóśebuz) (Province of Brandenburg) 55.8%
Hoyerswerda (Wojerecy) (Province of Silesia) 37.8%
Bautzen (Budyšin) (Kingdom of Saxony) 17.7%
Rothenburg, Oberlausitz (Rózbork) (Province of Silesia) 17.2%
Kamenz (Kamjenc) (Kingdom of Saxony) 7.1%
Total number: 93,032

The percentage of Serbs (Sorbs) in Lusatia has decreased since the 1900 census due to intermarriage, germanization, cultural assimilation related to industrialization and urbanization, Nazi suppression and discrimination, ethnocide and the settlement of expelled Germans after World War II, mainly from Lower Silesia and Northern Bohemia.

Literature
 Micklitza, Kerstin and André: Lausitz – Unterwegs zwischen Spreewald und Zittauer Gebirge. 5. aktualisierte und erweiterte Aufl. Trescher Verlag, Berlin 2016. .
 Brie, André: Lausitz – Landschaft mit neuem Gesicht. Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011. .
 Micklitza, Kerstin and André: HB-Bildatlas Spreewald-Lausitz. 4. aktualisierte Aufl. HB Verlag, Ostfildern 2008. .
 Jacob, Ulf: Zwischen Autobahn und Heide. Das Lausitzbild im Dritten Reich. Eine Studie zur Entstehung, Ideologie und Funktion symbolischer Sinnwelten. Hrsg. von der Internationalen Bauausstellung Fürst-Pückler-Land, Großräschen (Zeitmaschine Lausitz), Verlag der Kunst, Dresden in der Verlagsgruppe Husum, Husum 2004. .
 Freiherr von Vietinghoff-Riesch, Arnold: Der Oberlausitzer Wald – seine Geschichte und seine Struktur bis 1945 [reprint]. Oberlausitzer Verlag, Spitzkunnersdorf 2004. .

See also

 Herrnhut Moravian Church and Nicolaus Zinzendorf
 Lusatian League
 Milceni
 Wends
 Obotrites

References

External links

Geography of Brandenburg
Regions of Saxony
Historical regions in Germany
Historical regions in Poland
Former duchies of the Kingdom of Bohemia

Lusatia


Pélé Island, sometimes spelled Pele in English, is a volcanic island located 11,2 miles north of the island of Éfaté in the Shefa Province of the Republic of Vanuatu. It has a total area of 1.7 square miles, Pélé is inhabited by about 200-220 Ni-Vanuatu villagers residing in the four villages: Worsiviu, Worearu, Piliura, and Launamoa. Pélé Island is a part of the MPA Nguna-Pele Marine Protected Area, which was established in 2003, and is a popular Vanuatuan diving location. The Nguna-Pele Marine Protected Area covers a total area of 11.5 sq. mi., including numerous reefs, sea grass beds, mangrove forests and intertidal lagoons. The Nguna-Pele Marine Protection Agency is located in the village of Piliura, and mounts an exhibition and sells T-shirts. Income from tourism is distributed by the Village Tourism Committee and supports aims as village water supply projects. The island can be visited daily by boat from the Paonangisu area by the town of Emua on Éfaté's north coast. There are also yachts available both from Emua and Nguna for day and overnight charters to the island. The island is nearly adjacent to the island of Nguna, with a small passage no deeper than 33 yards separating the two. It has a tropical climate and has a maximum elevation of 650 feet at its highest. Much of the island is extremely steep and rocks prevent you from walking along the coastline around the island. White sandy beaches are found in Piliura, Worearu, Laonamoa, and Sake. Overpopulation has led to a steady migration from Pele villages to southern Nguna in recent times.

References

External links

Islands of Vanuatu
Shefa Province

Pele Island


Douglas Emlen (born April 29, 1967) is an evolutionary biologist and Professor of Biology at the University of Montana. He has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, multiple research awards from the National Science Foundation, and the E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award from the American Society of Naturalists. His research provides insights into the development and evolution of exaggerated male weaponry, such as the horns found in scarab beetles. He combines approaches from behavioral ecology, genetics, phylogenetics, and developmental biology to understand how evolution has shaped these bizarre structures. His current projects include an examination of how altered expression of appendage patterning genes contributes to species differences in the shape of horns, and how the insulin receptor (InR) pathway modulates the size of male weapons in response to the larval nutritional environment. He recently starred in documentaries about his work for the BBC (Nature's Wildest Weapons) and NOVA (Extreme Animal Weapons), and released his first narrative nonfiction book for middle school readers, Beetle Battles: One Scientist's Journey of Adventure and Discovery in December 2019. He is the grandson of John T. Emlen.

Education
Emlen received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1989, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1994.

Selected awards and honors
 American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016)
 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science (2015, for Animal Weapons)
 E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award, The American Society of Naturalists (2013)
 Golden Key Honor Society (2012)
 Elected to the council, Society for the Study of Evolution (2007-2009)
 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, Washington, D.C. 2002
 American Naturalists Young Investigator Prize (1997)

Bibliography
 Evolution: Making Sense of Life (2012), co-authored with Carl Zimmer.
 Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle (2014).
 Beetle Battles: One One Scientist's Journey of Adventure and Discovery

References

External links

American science writers
Living people
Cornell University alumni
Princeton University alumni
University of Montana faculty
1967 births
Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

Douglas Emlen


The Trump Prophecy (also known as The Trump Prophecy: A Voice of Hope; A Movement of Prayer) is a 2018 Christian drama film based on a story by Orlando-based retired firefighter Mark Taylor that he named "The Commander-in-Chief Prophecy".
It is a collaboration between ReelWorksStudios and Liberty University's Cinematic Arts program, and is the school's second involvement in a theatrically released motion picture after another Christian film, Extraordinary (2017). ReelWorksStudios is owned by Rick Eldridge, who produced the film, and the school's Cinematic Arts department is handled by Stephen Schultze, the film's director.

The film stars Chris Nelson as Taylor, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a house fire that kills a young boy (Landon Starns). In April 2011, after a prayer from his wife (Karen Boles), he is told by God that Donald Trump would one day become president of the United States. By the time near the 2016 election, Mary Colbert (Paulette Todd) learns about the message and starts a national prayer chain to make God's wish of Trump becoming president come true.

There are two parts of The Trump Prophecy: the narrative part about Taylor's experiences that makes up around three quarters of the film, and an interview segment with well-known speakers in the evangelical and conservative circle of the United States.

Described by Vox as a depiction of Christian nationalism in the United States, The Trump Prophecy was released in a time when the idea that God was responsible for Trump winning the election was shared by several evangelical leaders, like Franklin Graham, Richard Land, and Robert Jeffress. It was screened in theaters only on the days of October 2 and October 4, 2018, landing at number 22 on the weekly American box office chart with $671,198 grossed. Making less than its $2,000,000 budget, the film garnered negative reviews from critics.

The Trump Prophecy's producers denied any political motive behind the film. Nevertheless, it was viewed by some Christian commentators, film critics, and Liberty University students as political propaganda. Facebook blocked advertisements for the film for being political, and a Liberty University student started an online petition trying to stop the film that was signed by more than 2,000 people.

Plot
In 2005, Mark Taylor (Chris Nelson), an American Christian firefighter married to a fire dispatcher named Mary Jo (Karen Boles), carries a dead young boy (Landon Starns) out of a crackhouse fire. He has had fever dreams relating to the incident since then, which prompts his doctor (Todd McLaren) to diagnose him as having post-traumatic stress disorder. However, he is not taking his prescribed medication and retires from his position as a firefighter.

Taylor spends the next six years descending into his PTSD-infused situation, facing hypersomnia and nightmares about being taken hostage by a fire demon from hell (Darrell Nelson) while watching television to numb the illness. Mary Jo notices these episodes and prays to God to help her husband; the prayer works, as Mark dreams about a glowing orb that explodes electrical energy onto him. While hearing Donald Trump on television news, Taylor receives a message from God, which he writes down in a journal, informing him, "You're hearing the voice of president [sic]." By the time of the 2012 election, Taylor hopes God's wish will be fulfilled. However, Trump doesn't make it as a nominee and Barack Obama wins instead.

Taylor continues journaling accounts of his dreams and hearings from God up until the start of the 2016 United States presidential election, when he shares his writings with his doctor, Don Colbert (Don Brooks) and his wife, Mary (Paulette Todd). Mary notices a "rhythm of truth" when reading them and builds up a national prayer chain so that Trump will be president and, in turn, Taylor will be relieved of his disorder. She obtains participants by calling others via phone and instructs them to use a shofar in order to increase the chances of Trump winning the election.

Despite several news reports of the unlikelihood of Trump being elected, the miracle occurs as he wins, leaving Mark and Mary Taylor happy and relieved. Worldwide coverage of Mary Colbert's shofar group influences Israelis to start their own group of people blowing the horn. The Trump Prophecy ends with interviews of "a panel of world leaders," those being notable conservatives and evangelicals, answering political questions.

Cast

 Chris Nelson, a theater teacher at Liberty University, as Mark Taylor, a retired firefighter with PTSD who, in 2011, was told by God that businessman Donald Trump would become president.
 Paulette Todd as Mary Colbert, who starts a national prayer call service to fulfill God's wish to Taylor of making Trump president
 Karen Boles as Mary Jo Taylor, Mark's wife and a former fire dispatcher
 Don Brooks as Dr. Don Colbert, Mary Colbert's husband who is treating Mark Taylor
 Michael Johnson as Dr. Vander, another one of Mark's doctors
 Darrell Nelson as Mark's grandfather and the fire demon that repeatedly appears in Taylor's nightmares
 Paul Stober as the chief of the fire department Mark Taylor worked for
 Landon Starns as the young boy who dies in a house fire in 2005, a tragedy that traumatizes Mark Taylor to the point that he has frequent nightmares about it
 Rachel Behrmann as a heroin-addicted woman who starts the housefire by accident
 Sabrina Nelson as the young boy's sister
 Todd McLaren as a family doctor who diagnoses Mark with PTSD
 Luis Vazquez and Scotty Curlee as Taylor's firefighting colleagues
 Andy Geffken, Denise Thomas, and Austin Russell as D.J., Billye Brim, and George respectively, three of the many people Mary Colbert calls in getting participants for the prayer movement
 Michele Bachmann, David Barton, Lance Wallnau, and William G. Boykin appear as interviewees at the end of the film
 Donald Trump as himself (archival footage). The television footage used for The Trump Prophecy was from a CNN interview with him by John King on April 28, 2011.

Background

Mark Taylor, a retired Orlando-based firefighter that the film follows, has claimed many prophecies on platforms like YouTube and his book The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story of the Man Who Saw Tomorrow... and What He Says Is Coming Next (2017), released by Defender Publishing on Independence Day 2017. His claims have been described by professional writers as "radical" conspiracy theories and "outlandish". The Trump Prophecy is about one of Taylor's prophecies, which he named "The Commander in Chief Prophecy". The prophecy was that on April 28, 2011, while listening to a television interview with American businessman Donald Trump, he heard God say that "you're hearing the voice of a president" and that a stronger relationship between the United States and Israel will occur in the future.

Shortly before the 2016 election, Mary Colbert, an international ministry networker, met Taylor because her husband, Dr. Don Colbert, was treating him. Taylor gave her the journals of God's messages, and she felt they needed to be spread around to the world; thus, she started a phone-based prayer chain that garnered approximately 100,000 callers per day, a number so high it shut down two servers. Trump won, and after the 2016 election, numerous evangelical leaders such as Richard Land, Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffress made statements that God was responsible for the Republican nominee's victory. According to HuffPost, the fact that a big Christian university like Liberty University would produce a film promoting the idea is an indicator of how widespread it was at the time of its release.

Production
On Thanksgiving Day in 2017, Rick Eldridge, a film producer and owner of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based studio ReelWorks Studios, pitched the idea of a film adaptation of Taylor's book to Stephan Schultze, who was the executive director of the Liberty University's Cinematic Arts group. The program had previously been involved in the making of five feature films, as it attempted to incorporate one full-length movie every year into its curriculum. One of its past projects, Extraordinary (2017), was released in 600 theaters nationwide, making it the first film in the United States to be both theatrically distributed and produced by school students. The Cinematic Arts program first announced a film adaptation of the real-life Taylor's book The Trump Prophecies (2017) on January 26, 2018; it revealed that it was going to be named Commander and have its theatrical release date be in October.

The Trump Prophecy is a production of Rick Eldridge's ReelWorks Studios, in cooperation with the film department of Liberty University, the evangelical Christian school founded by Jerry Falwell.  It was directed by Stephan Schultze, the head of Liberty University's film program, and made with the help of many of the school's film students. The film was made by 63 students, as well as school staff, and served as a spring semester project for the students, as it was shot from March to April 2018 in Lynchburg and Bedford, Virginia. $1 million was raised by Eldridge for the film's production, while another million was used for post-production and distribution, totaling the budget to $2 million. Eldridge, who had a career as a musician before working in film, wrote "The Greater Good," the film's theme song.

Concepts
The Trump Prophecy's official press release marketed the film as "an inspirational message of Hope, highlighting the vast beauty and greatness of The United States [and] its electoral process." Vox journalist Tara Isabella Burton labeled The Trump Prophecy as a true portrait of Christian nationalism in the United States.

The film's focus on prophecy comes from the ideas of miracles and prophecies by a group of Pentecostal evangelicals named the New Apostolic Reformation. The NAR follows a dominion theology, which states that the world must turn Christian in order for the Second Coming to occur. Several evangelicals suggest Trump's moving of the Israeli embassy, which is heavily praised by those interviewed in the end of the film, is a step towards fulfilling the dominion theology. Some of the film's interviewees, like Bachmann, Wallnau, and Barton, are NAR members, and the real-life Don Colbert has regularly appeared on shows run by NAR associates, including Ken Copeland and Jim Bakker.

A major theme in the film is its promotion of authority and hierarchy. Burton opines that the film informs its audience not to resist Trump as doing so would disrespect the real authority of God; the same type of reasoning has been used by people close to Trump, such as Jeff Sessions, Paula White, and Robert Jeffress, to excuse its actions, such as the family separation policy. The film references passages in the Bible about Cyrus the Great, which many Christian fans of Trump have compared him to. The movie's authority element extends into its presentation of domestic families, where a female submits to the permissions and demands of a male; Colbert doesn't start the Trump prayer chain until her husband gives permission to do so, and Mary Jo Taylor is very submissive to her husband, to the point where she gave up her fire dispatching job.

The film's praise for Trump's activity in office is only brought up in its interview segment, where they applaud his relocation of the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. The narrative rarely presents how fit he is to become president; the only depiction of his character is that he doesn't share the same evangelical values as most of his supporters. When Mary Colbert asks other evangelicals to participate in the prayer chain, they admit to not being fans of the Republican candidate. This religious disconnect and the message of God that Mark Taylor receives indicates that Christians are voting for Trump not because of his qualities, but because they are following the person God chose to lead the country.

Art lecturer and writer Emily Pothast categorized The Trump Prophecy as "an accidental advertisement for a quasi-socialist utopia", as it shows American public sector workers like Mark Taylor being very wealthy and having easy and heavily encouraged access to health care by the time they retire.

Release
Using promotion from channels like Fox News Radio and The Blaze, and evangelical leaders such as Jim Bakker, The Trump Prophecy was screened by Fathom Events in 1,200 theaters throughout the U.S. on October 2 and 4, 2018. Eldridge claimed that his expectations of The Trump Prophecy's commercial performance were exceeded. It was number 22 on the weekly box office chart on the week of its release, grossing $671,198. According to Eldridge, the film garnered 18,000 pre-sold tickets and, as of October 3, 2018, more than double the ticket sales. While screenings in locations such as Union Square, Manhattan, and Lynchburg, Virginia were reported by sources to have very small attendance, Eldridge reported that there were "quite a few screenings across the country that were sold out." The Trump Prophecy was issued on DVD by GVN Releasing on March 12, 2019.

Reception
While audience response towards The Trump Prophecy was mediocre at best, professional journalists were much harsher on the film. Not including opinions about the film's political undertones, Pothast was disappointed that it was not as "weird and unhinged" as she hoped, and Burton criticized the filler that made up "[around] 75 minutes" of the film, such as scenes of discussions between Mark and Mary Taylor and an unresolved subplot involving Mark selling his boat. However, she also wrote that the film is essential to watch in order for non-Christians to learn the reality of American Christian nationalism. A review from The Film Magazine was a detailed summary of technical problems of the movie, not only of the amount of filler but also the "shallow and pedantic" dialogue, poor acting, "amateur" and "dull" shot composition, and the unintentionally funny visual effects.

Controversy

Due to the overwhelming support of Trump from Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. and the film's release date being scheduled only a month before the midterm elections,  Christian commentators such as Samuel Smith, Michael L. Brown, and Jim Wallis expressed concern about the film's possible negative effects on the American political climate before it was distributed. Brown, who believed in religious prophecy, worried that the film would inspire evangelical viewers to take on a form of "hyper-patriotism" that compared America and its leadership to God, and Wallis called the message of the film "heretical".

Fox News reported on June 21, 2018 that Facebook blocked ads from ReelWorks Studios promoting The Trump Prophecy for meeting the social media platform's definition of "political" content, although Eldridge and the film's male lead, Chris Nelson, reasoned that Facebook judged the ads only by their inclusion of the word Trump.

Quickly after The Trump Prophecy's January 2018 announcement, a Liberty University student began a petition on Change.org objecting to the film. The petition's concern was that it endorsed a man who performed actions in his office that went against Jesus' teaching to help marginalized groups of people. It also suggested students would have a harder time finding work in more liberal-aligned companies. By the time of the film's premiere on October 2, the petition garnered 2,286 signees.

When The Trump Prophecy was released, critical reviews were published that expressed disgust with the film, as they were alarmed by the fact that Liberty University, a powerful evangelical company, invested in a film that presented a disturbing message and legitimized the beliefs of a "radical" conspiracy theorist like Taylor. The Film Magazine described it as "a glorification of ignoring real solutions to mental illness that takes a turn into political propaganda."

The producers of The Trump Prophecy denied any controversial political motive behind the film. While Eldridge predicted the backlash The Trump Prophecy received, he explained that the film was meant to ask "a divided nation" to pray for authority because humans are "called" to do so in the Bible.

References

External links

2010s American films
2010s English-language films
2018 films
2018 drama films
2018 controversies in the United States
2010s political drama films
Films set in 2005
Films set in 2012
American political drama films
American propaganda films
Christian nationalism
Christianity and political ideologies
Conservative media in the United States
Films about Christianity
Films shot in Virginia
Heresy in Christianity
Liberty University
Films about the Trump presidency
Religious controversies in film
Prophecy in Christianity
Christianity in popular culture controversies
Films about post-traumatic stress disorder
Films about firefighting
Films about dreams
Films about God
2012 United States presidential election in popular culture
Films about the 2016 United States presidential election
Films about prophets
Demons in film

The Trump Prophecy


Alfred Holmes White (April 28, 1873  – August 25, 1953) was a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan.

Biography
He was born in Peoria, Illinois to Samuel Holmes White and Jennie McLaren. He married Rebecca Mason Downey on July 28, 1903, and had two children.

He led the university's chemical engineering department to great heights of prestige, for over 40 years, beginning with its founding in 1898.  His earliest academic job was at the University of Illinois, from 1893 to 1896, after which he joined the University of Michigan the next year, and rose to become a full professor by 1911. He was later made an emeritus professor.

His published works include The Disintegration of Cement Floors and Sidewalks and Studies in the Manufacture of Coal Gas, both in 1909.

References

Further reading
Snippet of a bio of him from the Journal of Engineering Education, Volume 32, 1941.
—contains an illustration of him

American chemical engineers
1873 births
1953 deaths
University of Michigan faculty
University of Illinois faculty

Alfred Holmes White