The year 2000 problem, also commonly known as the Y2K problem, Y2K scare, millennium bug, Y2K bug, Y2K glitch, Y2K error, or simply Y2K refers to potential computer errors related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates in and after the year 2000. Many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Computer systems' inability to distinguish dates correctly had the potential to bring down worldwide infrastructures for computer reliant industries.

In the years leading up to the turn of the century (millennium), the public gradually became aware of the "Y2K scare", and individual companies predicted the global damage caused by the bug would require anything between $400 million and $600 billion to rectify. A lack of clarity regarding the potential dangers of the bug led some to stock up on food, water, and firearms, purchase backup generators, and withdraw large sums of money in anticipation of a computer-induced apocalypse.

Contrary to published expectations, few major errors occurred in 2000.  Supporters of the Y2K remediation effort argued that this was primarily due to the pre-emptive action of many computer programmers and information technology experts. Companies and organizations in some countries, but not all, had checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems to address the problem. Then-U.S. president Bill Clinton, who organized efforts to minimize the damage in the United States, labeled Y2K as "the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met", and retrospectives on the event typically commend the programmers who worked to avert the anticipated disaster.

Critics argued that even in countries where very little had been done to fix software, problems were minimal. The same was true in sectors such as schools and small businesses where compliance with Y2K policies was patchy at best.

Background
Y2K is a numeronym and was the common abbreviation for the year 2000 software problem. The abbreviation combines the letter Y for "year", the number 2 and a capitalized version of k for the SI unit prefix kilo meaning 1000; hence, 2K signifies 2000. It was also named the "millennium bug" because it was associated with the popular (rather than literal) rollover of the millennium, even though most of the problems could have occurred at the end of any century.

Computerworlds 1993 three-page "Doomsday 2000" article by Peter de Jager was called "the information-age equivalent of the midnight ride of Paul Revere" by The New York Times.

The problem was the subject of the early book Computers in Crisis by Jerome and Marilyn Murray (Petrocelli, 1984; reissued by McGraw-Hill under the title The Year 2000 Computing Crisis in 1996). Its first recorded mention on a Usenet newsgroup is from 18 January 1985 by Spencer Bolles.

The acronym Y2K has been attributed to Massachusetts programmer David Eddy in an e-mail sent on 12 June 1995. He later said, "People were calling it CDC (Century Date Change), FADL (Faulty Date Logic). There were other contenders. Y2K just came off my fingertips."

The problem started because on both mainframe computers and later personal computers, memory was expensive, from as low as $10 per kilobyte, to in many cases as much as or even more than US$100 per kilobyte in 1975. It was therefore very important for programmers to minimize usage. Since computers only gained wide usage in the 20th century, programs could simply prefix "19" to the year of a date, allowing them to only store the last two digits of the year instead of four. As space on disc and tape storage was also expensive, these strategies saved money by reducing the size of stored data files and databases in exchange for becoming unusable past the year 2000.

This meant that programs facing two-digit years could not distinguish between dates in 1900 and 2000. Dire warnings at times were in the mode of:

The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe.
— John Hamre, United States Deputy Secretary of Defense

Options on the De Jager Year 2000 Index, "the first index enabling investors to manage risk associated with the  ... computer problem linked to the year 2000" began trading mid-March 1997.

Special committees were set up by governments to monitor remedial work and contingency planning, particularly by crucial infrastructures such as telecommunications, utilities and the like, to ensure that the most critical services had fixed their own problems and were prepared for problems with others. While some commentators and experts argued that the coverage of the problem largely amounted to scaremongering, it was only the safe passing of the main event itself, 1 January 2000, that fully quelled public fears.

Some experts who argued that scaremongering was occurring, such as Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, have since claimed that despite sending out hundreds of press releases about research results suggesting that the problem was not likely to be as big as some had suggested, they were largely ignored by the media. In a similar vein, the Microsoft Press book Running Office 2000 Professional, published in May 1999, accurately predicted that most personal computer hardware and software would be unaffected by the year 2000 problem. Authors Michael Halvorson and Michael Young characterized most of the worries as popular hysteria, an opinion echoed by Microsoft Corp.

Programming problem
The practice of using two-digit dates for convenience predates computers, but was never a problem until stored dates were used in calculations.

Bit conservation need

Business data processing was done using unit record equipment and punched cards, most commonly the 80-column variety employed by IBM, which dominated the industry. Many tricks were used to squeeze needed data into fixed-field 80-character records. Saving two digits for every date field was significant in this effort.

In the 1960s, computer memory and mass storage were scarce and expensive. Early core memory cost one dollar per bit. Popular commercial computers, such as the IBM 1401, shipped with as little as 2 kilobytes of memory. Programs often mimicked card processing techniques. Commercial programming languages of the time, such as COBOL and RPG, processed numbers in their character representations. Over time, the punched cards were converted to magnetic tape and then disc files, but the structure of the data usually changed very little.

Data was still input using punched cards until the mid-1970s. Machine architectures, programming languages and application designs were evolving rapidly. Neither managers nor programmers of that time expected their programs to remain in use for many decades, and the possibility that these programs would both remain in use and cause problems when interacting with databases - a new type of program with different characteristics - went largely uncommented upon.

Early attention
The first person known to publicly address this issue was Bob Bemer, who had noticed it in 1958 as a result of work on genealogical software. He spent the next twenty years fruitlessly trying to raise awareness of the problem with programmers, IBM, the government of the United States and the International Organization for Standardization. This included the recommendation that the COBOL picture clause should be used to specify four digit years for dates.

In the 1980s, the brokerage industry began to address this issue, mostly because of bonds with maturity dates beyond the year 2000. By 1987 the New York Stock Exchange had reportedly spent over $20 million on Y2K, including hiring 100 programmers.

Despite magazine articles on the subject from 1970 onward, the majority of programmers and managers only started recognizing Y2K as a looming problem in the mid-1990s, but even then, inertia and complacency caused it to be mostly unresolved until the last few years of the decade. In 1989, Erik Naggum was instrumental in ensuring that internet mail used four digit representations of years by including a strong recommendation to this effect in the internet host requirements document . On April Fools' Day 1998, some companies set their mainframe computer dates to 2001, so that "the wrong date will be perceived as good fun instead of bad computing" while having a full day of testing.

While using 3-digit years and 3-digit dates within that year was used by some, others chose to use the number of days since a fixed date, such as 1 January 1900. Inaction was not an option, and risked major failure. Embedded systems with similar date logic were expected to malfunction and cause utilities and other crucial infrastructure to fail.

Saving space on stored dates persisted into the Unix era, with most systems representing dates to a single 32-bit word, typically representing dates as elapsed seconds from some fixed date, which causes the similar Y2K38 problem.

Resulting bugs from date programming

Storage of a combined date and time within a fixed binary field is often considered a solution, but the possibility for software to misinterpret dates remains because such date and time representations must be relative to some known origin. Rollover of such systems is still a problem but can happen at varying dates and can fail in various ways. For example:
 An upscale grocer's 1997 credit-card caused a crash of their 10 cash registers, repeatedly, due to year 2000 expiration dates, and was the source of the first Y2K-related lawsuit.
 The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program had a very elementary Y2K problem: Excel (in both Windows and Mac versions, when they are set to start at 1900) incorrectly set the year 1900 as a leap year for compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3. In addition, the years 2100, 2200, and so on, were regarded as leap years. This bug was fixed in later versions, but since the epoch of the Excel timestamp was set to the meaningless date of 0 January 1900 in previous versions, the year 1900 is still regarded as a leap year to maintain backward compatibility.
 In the C programming language, the standard library function to extract the year from a timestamp returns the year minus 1900. Many programs using functions from C, such as Perl and Java, two programming languages widely used in web development, incorrectly treated this value as the last two digits of the year. On the web this was usually a harmless presentation bug, but it did cause many dynamically generated web pages to display 1 January 2000 as "1/1/19100", "1/1/100", or other variants, depending on the display format.
 JavaScript was changed due to concerns over the Y2K bug, and the return value for years changed and thus differed between versions from sometimes being a four digit representation and sometimes a two-digit representation forcing programmers to rewrite already working code to make sure web pages worked for all versions.
 Older applications written for the commonly used UNIX Source Code Control System failed to handle years that began with the digit "2".
 In the Windows 3.x file manager, dates displayed as 1/1/19:0 for 1/1/2000 (because the colon is the character after "9" in the ASCII character set). An update was available.
 Some software, such as Math Blaster Episode I: In Search of Spot which only treats years as two-digit values instead of four, will give a given year as "1900", "1901", and so on, depending on the last two digits of the present year.

Similar date bugs

4 January 1975
The date of 4 January 1975 overflowed the 12-bit field that had been used in the Decsystem 10 operating systems. There were numerous problems and crashes related to this bug while an alternative format was developed.

9 September 1999
Even before 1 January 2000 arrived, there were also some worries about 9 September 1999 (albeit less than those generated by Y2K). Because this date could also be written in the numeric format 9/9/99, it could have conflicted with the date value 9999, frequently used to specify an unknown date. It was thus possible that database programs might act on the records containing unknown dates on that day. Data entry operators commonly entered 9999 into required fields for an unknown future date, (e.g., a termination date for cable television or telephone service), in order to process computer forms using CICS software. Somewhat similar to this is the end-of-file code 9999, used in older programming languages. While fears arose that some programs might unexpectedly terminate on that date, the bug was more likely to confuse computer operators than machines.

Leap years

Normally, a year is a leap year if it is evenly divisible by four. A year divisible by 100 is not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar unless it is also divisible by 400. For example, 1600 was a leap year, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Some programs may have relied on the oversimplified rule that "a year divisible by four is a leap year". This method works fine for the year 2000 (because it is a leap year), and will not become a problem until 2100, when older legacy programs will likely have long since been replaced. Other programs contained incorrect leap year logic, assuming for instance that no year divisible by 100 could be a leap year. An assessment of this leap year problem including a number of real-life code fragments appeared in 1998. For information on why century years are treated differently, see Gregorian calendar.

Year 2010 problem
Some systems had problems once the year rolled over to 2010. This was dubbed by some in the media as the "Y2K+10" or "Y2.01K" problem.

The main source of problems was confusion between hexadecimal number encoding and binary-coded decimal encodings of numbers. Both hexadecimal and BCD encode the numbers 0–9 as 0x0–0x9. BCD encodes the number 10 as 0x10, while hexadecimal encodes the number 10 as 0x0A; 0x10 interpreted as a hexadecimal encoding represents the number 16.

For example, because the SMS protocol uses BCD for dates, some mobile phone software incorrectly reported dates of SMSes as 2016 instead of 2010. Windows Mobile is the first software reported to have been affected by this glitch; in some cases WM6 changes the date of any incoming SMS message sent after 1 January 2010 from the year 2010 to 2016.

Other systems affected include EFTPOS terminals, and the PlayStation 3 (except the Slim model).

The most important occurrences of such a glitch were in Germany, where up to 20 million bank cards became unusable, and with Citibank Belgium, whose Digipass customer identification chips failed.

Year 2022 problem
Known as the Y2K22 bug. The maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer, as used in many computer systems, is 2147483647. Systems using an integer to represent a 10 character date-based field, where the leftmost two characters are the 2-digit year, ran into an issue on 1 January 2022 when the leftmost characters needed to be '22', i.e. values from 2200000001 needed to be represented.

Microsoft Exchange Server was one of the more significant systems affected by the Y2K22 bug. The problem caused emails to be stuck on transport queues on Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019, reporting the following error:

Year 2038 problem

Many systems use Unix time and store it in a signed 32-bit integer.  This data type is only capable of representing integers between −(2) and (2)−1, treated as number of seconds since the epoch at 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC.   These systems can only represent times between 13 December 1901 at 20:45:52 UTC and 19 January 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC.   If these systems are not updated and fixed, then dates all across the world that rely on Unix time will wrongfully display the year as 1901 beginning at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038.

Programming solutions
Several very different approaches were used to solve the year 2000 problem in legacy systems. Several of them follow:

 Date expansion
 Two-digit years were expanded to include the century (becoming four-digit years) in programs, files, and databases. This was considered the "purest" solution, resulting in unambiguous dates that are permanent and easy to maintain. This method was costly, requiring massive testing and conversion efforts, and usually affecting entire systems.
Date windowing
 Two-digit years were retained, and programs determined the century value only when needed for particular functions, such as date comparisons and calculations. (The century "window" refers to the 100-year period to which a date belongs.) This technique, which required installing small patches of code into programs, was simpler to test and implement than date expansion, thus much less costly. While not a permanent solution, windowing fixes were usually designed to work for many decades. This was thought acceptable, as older legacy systems tend to eventually get replaced by newer technology.
 Date compression
 Dates can be compressed into binary 14-bit numbers. This allows retention of data structure alignment, using an integer value for years. Such a scheme is capable of representing 16384 different years; the exact scheme varies by the selection of epoch.
 Date re-partitioning
 In legacy databases whose size could not be economically changed, six-digit year/month/day codes were converted to three-digit years (with 1999 represented as 099 and 2001 represented as 101, etc.) and three-digit days (ordinal date in year). Only input and output instructions for the date fields had to be modified, but most other date operations and whole record operations required no change. This delays the eventual roll-over problem to the end of the year 2899.
 Software kits
 Software kits, such as those listed in CNN.com's Top 10 Y2K fixes for your PC: ("most ... free") which was topped by the $50 Millennium Bug Kit.
 Real Time Clock Upgrades
 One unique solution found prominence. While other fixes worked at the BIOS level as TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident), intercepting BIOS calls, Y2000RTC was the only product that worked as a device driver and replaced the functionality of the faulty RTC with a compliant equivalent. This driver was rolled out in the years before the 1999/2000 deadline onto millions of PCs.
 Bridge programs
 Date servers where Call statements are used to access, add or update date fields.

Documented errors

Before 2000
 In late 1998, Commonwealth Edison reported a computer upgrade intended to prevent the Y2K glitch caused them to send the village of Oswego, Illinois an erroneous electric bill for $7 million.
 On 1 January 1999, taxi meters in Singapore stopped working, while in Sweden, incorrect taxi fares were given.
 At midnight on 1 January 1999, at three airports in Sweden, computers that police used to generate temporary passports stopped working.
 On 8 February 1999, while testing Y2K compliance in a computer system monitoring nuclear core rods at Peach Bottom Nuclear Generating Station, instead of resetting the time on the external computer meant to simulate the date rollover a technician accidentally changed the time on the operation systems computer. This computer had not yet been upgraded, and the date change caused all the computers at the station to crash. It took approximately seven hours to restore all normal functions, during which time workers had to use obsolete manual equipment to monitor plant operations.
 In November 1999, approximately 500 residents in Philadelphia received jury duty summonses for dates in 1900.
 In December 1999, in the United Kingdom, a software upgrade intended to make computers Y2K compliant prevented social services in Bedfordshire from finding if anyone in their care was over 100 years old, since computers failed to recognize the dates of birth being searched.
 In late December 1999, Telecom Italia (now Gruppo TIM), Italy's largest telecom company, sent a bill for January and February 1900. The company stated this was a one-time error and that it had recently ensured its systems would be compatible with the year rollover.
 On 28 December 1999, 10,000 card swipe machines issued by HSBC and manufactured by Racal stopped processing credit and debit card transactions. This was limited to machines in the United Kingdom, and was the result of the machines being designed to ensure transactions had been completed within four business days; from 28 to 31 December they interpreted the future dates to be in the year 1900. Stores with these machines relied on paper transactions until they started working again on 1 January.
 On 31 December, at 7:00 pm EST, as a direct result of a patch intended to prevent the Y2K glitch, computers at a ground control station in Fort Belvoir, Virginia crashed and ceased processing information from five spy satellites, including three KH-11 satellites. The military implemented a contingency plan within 3 hours by diverting their feeds and manually decoding the scrambled information, from which they were able produce a limited dataset. All normal functionality was restored at 11:45 pm on 2 January 2000.

On 1 January 2000
Problems that occurred on 1 January 2000 were generally regarded as minor. Consequences did not always result exactly at midnight. Some programs were not active at that moment and problems would only show up when they were invoked. Not all problems recorded were directly linked to Y2K programming in a causality; minor technological glitches occur on a regular basis.

Reported problems include:
 In Australia, bus ticket validation machines in two states failed to operate.
 In Japan:
 machines in 13 train stations stopped dispensing tickets for a short time.
 in Ishikawa, the Shika Nuclear Power Plant reported that radiation monitoring equipment failed at a few seconds after midnight. Officials said there was no risk to the public, and no excess radiation was found at the plant.
 at two minutes past midnight, the telecommunications carrier Osaka Media Port found date management mistakes in their network. A spokesman said they had resolved the issue by 02:43 and did not interfere with operations.
 NTT Mobile Communications Network (NTT Docomo), Japan's largest cellular operator, reported that some models of mobile telephones were deleting new messages received, rather than the older messages, as the memory filled up.
Fifteen securities companies discovered glitches in programs used for trading. Officials said that fourteen of them resolved all issues within a day.
 In South Korea:
 at midnight, 902 ondol heating systems and water heating failed at an apartment building near Seoul; the ondol systems were down for 19 hours and would only work when manually controlled, while the water heating took 24 hours to restart.
two hospitals in Gyeonggi Province reported malfunctions with equipment measuring bone marrow and patient intake forms, with one accidentally registering a newborn as having been born in 1900, four people in the city of Daegu received medical bills with dates in 1900, and a court in Suwon sent out notifications containing a trial date for 4 January 1900.
 a video store in Gwangju accidentally generated a late fee of approximately 8 million won (approximately $7,000 US dollars) because the store's computer determined a tape rental to be 100 years overdue. South Korean authorities stated the computer was a model anticipated to be incompatible with the year rollover, and had not undergone the software upgrades necessary to make it compliant.
Korea University sent graduation certificates dated 13 January 1900.
 In Hong Kong, police breathalyzers failed at midnight.
 In Jiangsu, China, taxi meters failed at midnight.
 In Egypt, three dialysis machines briefly failed.
 In Greece, approximately 30,000 cash registers, amounting to around 10% of the country's total, printed receipts with dates in 1900.
 In Denmark, the first baby born on 1 January was recorded as being 100 years old.
 In France, the national weather forecasting service, Météo-France, said a Y2K bug made the date on a webpage show a map with Saturday's weather forecast as "01/01/19100". Additionally, the government reported that a Y2K glitch rendered one of their Syracuse satellite systems incapable of recognizing onboard malfunctions.
 In Germany:
 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the payroll system interpreted the new year to be 1900 and determined the ages of employees' children by the last two digits of their years of birth, causing it to wrongly withhold government childcare subsidies in paychecks. To reinstate the subsidies, accountants had to reset the operating system's year to 1999.
 a bank accidentally transferred 12 million Deutsche Marks  (equivalent to $6.2 million) to a customer and presented a statement with the date 30 December 1899. The bank quickly fixed the incorrect transfer.
 In Italy, courthouse computers in Venice and Naples showed an upcoming release date for some prisoners as 10 January 1900, while other inmates wrongly showed up as having 100 additional years on their sentences.
 In Mali, a program for tracking trains throughout the country failed.
 In Norway, a day care center for kindergarteners in Oslo offered a spot to a 105 year old woman because the citizen's registry only showed the last two digits of citizens' years of birth.
 In Spain, a worker received a notice for an industrial tribunal in Murcia which listed the event date as 3 February 1900.
 In Sweden, the main hospital in Uppsala, a hospital in Lund, and two regional hospitals in Karlstad and Linkoping reported that machines used for reading electrocardiogram information failed to operate, although the hospitals stated it had no effect on patient health.
 In Sheffield, United Kingdom, a Y2K bug that was not discovered and fixed until 24 May caused computers to miscalculate the ages of pregnant mothers, which led to 154 patients receiving incorrect risk assessments for having a child with Down syndrome. As a direct result two abortions were carried out, and four babies with Down syndrome were also born to mothers who had been told they were in the low-risk group.
 In Brazil, at the Port of Santos, computers which had been upgraded in July 1999 to be Y2K compliant could not read three-year customs registrations generated in their previous system once the year rolled over. Santos said this affected registrations from before June 1999 that companies had not updated, which Santos estimated was approximately 20,000, and that when the problem became apparent on 10 January they were able to fix individual registrations, "in a matter of minutes". A computer at Viracopos International Airport in São Paulo state also experienced this glitch, which temporarily halted cargo unloading.
 In Jamaica, in the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation, 8 computerized traffic lights  at major intersections stopped working. Officials stated these lights were part of a set of 35 traffic lights known to be Y2K non-compliant, and that all 35 were already slated for replacement.
 In the United States:
 the US Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country's official time, gave the date on its website as 1 Jan 19100.
 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives could not register new firearms dealers for 5 days because their computers failed to recognize dates on applications.
 150 Delaware Lottery racino slot machines stopped working.
 In New York, a video store accidentally generated a $91,250 late fee because the store computer determined a tape rental was 100 years overdue.
 In Tennessee, the Y-12 National Security Complex stated that a Y2K glitch caused an unspecified malfunction in a system for determining the weight and composition of nuclear substances at a nuclear weapons plant, although the United States Department of Energy stated they were still able to keep track of all material. It was resolved within three hours, no one at the plant was injured, and the plant continued carrying out its normal functions.
In Chicago, for one day the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank could not transfer $700,000 from tax revenue; the problem was fixed the following day. Additionally, another bank in Chicago could not handle electronic Medicare payments until January 6, during which time the bank had to rely on sending processed claims on diskettes.
In New Mexico, the New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division was temporarily unable to issue new driver's licenses.
The campaign website for United States presidential candidate Al Gore gave the date as 3 January 19100 for a short time.
Godiva Chocolatier reported that cash registers in its American outlets failed to operate. They first became aware of and determined the source of the problem on 2 January, and immediately began distributing a patch. A spokesman reported they that restored all functionality to most of the affected registers by the end of that day and had fixed the rest by noon on 3 January.
 The credit card companies MasterCard and Visa reported that, as a direct result of the Y2K glitch, for weeks after the year rollover a small percentage of customers were being charged multiple times for transactions.
 Microsoft reported that, after the year rolled over, Hotmail e-mails sent in October 1999 or earlier showed up as having been sent in 2099, although this did not affect the e-mail's contents or the ability to send and receive e-mails.

After January 2000

On 29 February and 1 March 2000

Problems were reported on 29 February 2000, Y2K's first Leap Year Day, and 1 March 2000. These were mostly minor.
 In New Zealand, an estimated 4,000 electronic terminals could not properly authenticate transactions.
 In Japan, around five percent of post office cash dispensers failed to work, although it was unclear if this was the result of the Y2K glitch. In addition, 6 observatories failed to recognize 29 February while over 20 seismographs incorrectly interpreted the date 29 February to be 1 March, and data from 43 weather bureau computers that had not been updated for compliance was corrupted, causing them to release inaccurate readings on 1 March.
 In Singapore, on 29 February subway terminals would not accept some passenger cards.
 In Bulgaria, police documents were issued with expiration dates of 29 February 2005 and 29 February 2010 (which are not leap years) and the police computer system defaulted to 1900.
 In Canada, on 29 February a program for tax collecting and information in the city of Montreal interpreted the date to be 1 March 1900; although it remained possible to pay taxes, computers miscalculated interest rates for delinquent taxes and residents could not access tax bills or property evaluations. Despite being the day before taxes were due, to fix the glitch authorities had to entirely turn off the city's tax system.
 In the United States, on 29 February the archiving system of the Coast Guard's message processing system was affected.
 At Reagan National Airport, on 29 February a computer program for curbside baggage handling initially failed to recognize the date, forcing passengers to use standard check-in stations and causing significant delays.
 At Offutt Air Force Base south of Omaha, Nebraska, on 29 February records of aircraft maintenance and parts could not be accessed or updated by computer. Workers continued normal operations and relied on paper records for the day.

On 31 December 2000 or 1 January 2001
Some software did not correctly recognize 2000 as a leap year, and so worked on the basis of the year having 365 days. On the last day of 2000 (day 366) and first day of 2001 these systems exhibited various errors. Some computers also treated the new year 2001 as 1901, causing errors. These were generally minor.

 The Swedish bank Nordbanken reported that its online and physical banking systems went down 5 times between 27 December 2000 and 3 January 2001, which was believed to be due to the Y2K glitch.
 In Norway, on 31 December 2000, the national railroad company Vy reported that all 29 of its new Signatur trains failed to run because their onboard computers considered the date invalid, causing some delays. As an interim measure, engineers restarted the trains by resetting their clocks back by a month and used older trains to cover some routes.
 In Hungary, computers at over 1000 drug stores stopped working on 1 January 2001 because they did not recognize the new year as a valid date.
 In South Africa, on 1 January 2001 computers at the First National Bank interpreted the new year to be 1901, affecting approximately 16,000 transactions and causing customers to be charged incorrect interest rates on credit cards. First National Bank first became aware of the problem on 4 January and fixed it the same day.
 A large number of cash registers at the convenience store chain 7-Eleven stopped working for card transactions on 1 January 2001 because they interpreted the new year to be 1901, despite not having had any prior glitches. 7-Eleven reported the registers had been restored to complete functionality within two days.
 In Connecticut, in early January the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles sent duplicate motor vehicle tax bills for vehicles that had their registrations renewed between 2 October 1999 and 30 November 1999, affecting 23,000 residents. A spokesman stated the Y2K glitch caused these vehicles to be double-entered in their system.
In Multnomah County, Oregon, in early January approximately 3,000 residents received jury duty summonses for dates in 1901. Due to using two-digit years when entering the summons dates, courthouse employees had not seen that the computer inaccurately rolled over the year.

Since 2000

Since 2000, various issues have occurred due to errors involving overflows. An issue with time tagging caused the destruction of the NASA Deep Impact spacecraft. In April 2019, a "Y2K-like bug" due to an overflow caused a New York City government wireless system to go down for 10 days because of a GPS system's date-rollover problem. Infrastructure affected included "traffic lights, license-plate readers used by cops and other key functions."

Some software used a process called date windowing to fix the issue by interpreting years 00-19 as 2000–2019 and 20–99 as 1920–1999. As a result, a new wave of problems started appearing in 2020, including parking meters in New York City refusing to accept credit cards, issues with Novitus point of sale units, and some utility companies printing bills listing the year 1920. The video game WWE 2K20 also began crashing when the year rolled over, although a patch was distributed later that day.

Government responses

Bulgaria
Although the Bulgarian national identification number allocates only two digits for the birth year, the year 1900 problem and subsequently the Y2K problem were addressed by the use of unused values above 12 in the month range. For all persons born before 1900, the month is stored as the calendar month plus 20, and for all persons born in or after 2000, the month is stored as the calendar month plus 40.

Canada
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's most important cabinet ministers were ordered to remain in the capital Ottawa, and gathered at 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister's residence, to watch the clock. 13,000 Canadian troops were also put on standby.

Netherlands
The Dutch Government promoted Y2K Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) to share readiness between industries, without threat of antitrust violations or liability based on information shared.

Norway and Finland
Norway and Finland changed their national identification numbers to indicate a person's century of birth. In both countries, the birth year was historically indicated by two digits only. This numbering system had already given rise to a similar problem, the "Year 1900 problem", which arose due to problems distinguishing between people born in the 19th and 20th centuries. Y2K fears drew attention to an older issue, while prompting a solution to a new problem. In Finland, the problem was solved by replacing the hyphen ("-") in the number with the letter "A" for people born in the 21st century (for people born before 1900, the sign was already "+"). In Norway, the range of the individual numbers following the birth date was altered from 0–499 to 500–999.

Romania
Romania also changed its national identification number in response to the Y2K problem, due to the birth year being represented by only two digits. Before 2000, the first digit, which shows the person's sex, was 1 for males and 2 for females. Individuals born since 1 January 2000 have a number starting with 5 if male or 6 if female.

Uganda
The Ugandan government responded to the Y2K threat by setting up a Y2K Task Force. In August 1999 an independent international assessment by the World Bank International Y2k Cooperation Centre found that Uganda's website was in the top category as "highly informative". This put Uganda in the "top 20" out of 107 national governments, and on a par with the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Japan, and ahead of Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland which were rated as only "somewhat informative". The report said that "Countries which disclose more Y2K information will be more likely to maintain public confidence in their own countries and in the international markets."

United States
In 1998, the United States government responded to the Y2K threat by passing the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, by working with private sector counterparts in order to ensure readiness, and by creating internal continuity of operations plans in the event of problems and set limits to certain potential liabilities of companies with respect to disclosures about their year 2000 programs. The effort was coordinated by the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, headed by John Koskinen, in coordination with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and an interim Critical Infrastructure Protection Group within the Department of Justice.

The US government followed a three-part approach to the problem: (1) outreach and advocacy, (2) monitoring and assessment, and (3) contingency planning and regulation.

A feature of US government outreach was Y2K websites, including y2k.gov, many of which have become inaccessible in the years since 2000. Some of these websites have been archived by the National Archives and Records Administration or the Wayback Machine.

Each federal agency had its own Y2K task force which worked with its private sector counterparts; for example, the FCC had the FCC Year 2000 Task Force.

Most industries had contingency plans that relied upon the internet for backup communications. As no federal agency had clear authority with regard to the internet at this time (it had passed from the Department of Defense to the National Science Foundation and then to the Department of Commerce), no agency was assessing the readiness of the internet itself. Therefore, on 30 July 1999, the White House held the White House Internet Y2K Roundtable.

The U.S. government also established the Center for Year 2000 Strategic Stability as a joint operation with the Russian Federation. It was a liaison operation designed to mitigate the possibility of false positive readings in each nation's nuclear attack early warning systems.

International cooperation
The International Y2K Cooperation Center (IY2KCC) was established at the behest of national Y2K coordinators from over 120 countries when they met at the First Global Meeting of National Y2K Coordinators at the United Nations in December 1998. IY2KCC established an office in Washington, D.C. in March 1999. Funding was provided by the World Bank, and Bruce W. McConnell was appointed as director.

IY2KCC's mission was to "promote increased strategic cooperation and action among governments, peoples, and the private sector to minimize adverse Y2K effects on the global society and economy." Activities of IY2KCC were conducted in six areas:
 National Readiness: Promoting Y2K programs worldwide
 Regional Cooperation: Promoting and supporting co-ordination within defined geographic areas
 Sector Cooperation: Promoting and supporting co-ordination within and across defined economic sectors
 Continuity and Response Cooperation: Promoting and supporting co-ordination to ensure essential services and provisions for emergency response
 Information Cooperation: Promoting and supporting international information sharing and publicity
 Facilitation and Assistance: Organizing global meetings of Y2K coordinators and to identify resources

IY2KCC closed down in March 2000.

Private sector response

 The United States established the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, which limited the liability of businesses who had properly disclosed their Y2K readiness.
 Insurance companies sold insurance policies covering failure of businesses due to Y2K problems.
 Attorneys organized and mobilized for Y2K class action lawsuits (which were not pursued).
 Survivalist-related businesses (gun dealers, surplus and sporting goods) anticipated increased business in the final months of 1999 in an event known as the Y2K scare.
 The Long Now Foundation, which (in their words) "seeks to promote 'slower/better' thinking and to foster creativity in the framework of the next 10,000 years", has a policy of anticipating the Year 10,000 problem by writing all years with five digits. For example, they list "01996" as their year of founding.
 While there was no one comprehensive internet Y2K effort, multiple internet trade associations and organisations banded together to form the Internet Year 2000 Campaign. This effort partnered with the White House's Internet Y2K Roundtable.

The Y2K issue was a major topic of discussion in the late 1990s and as such showed up in most popular media. A number of "Y2K disaster" books were published such as Deadline Y2K by Mark Joseph. Movies such as Y2K: Year to Kill capitalized on the currency of Y2K, as did numerous TV shows, comic strips, and computer games.

Fringe group responses
A variety of fringe groups and individuals such as those within some fundamentalist religious organizations, survivalists, cults, anti-social movements, self-sufficiency enthusiasts and those attracted to conspiracy theories, called attention to Y2K fears and claimed that they provided evidence for their respective theories. End-of-the-world scenarios and apocalyptic themes were common in their communication.

Interest in the survivalist movement peaked in 1999 in its second wave for that decade, triggered by Y2K fears. In the time before extensive efforts were made to rewrite computer programming codes to mitigate the possible impacts, some writers such as Gary North, Ed Yourdon, James Howard Kunstler, and Ed Yardeni anticipated widespread power outages, food and gasoline shortages, and other emergencies. North and others raised the alarm because they thought Y2K code fixes were not being made quickly enough. While a range of authors responded to this wave of concern, two of the most survival-focused texts to emerge were Boston on Y2K (1998) by Kenneth W. Royce and Mike Oehler's The Hippy Survival Guide to Y2K.

Y2K also appeared in the communication of some fundamentalist and charismatic Christian leaders throughout the Western world, particularly in North America and Australia. Their promotion of the perceived risks of Y2K was combined with end times thinking and apocalyptic prophecies, allegedly in an attempt to influence followers. The New York Times reported in late 1999, "The Rev. Jerry Falwell suggested that Y2K would be the confirmation of Christian prophecy – God's instrument to shake this nation, to humble this nation. The Y2K crisis might incite a worldwide revival that would lead to the rapture of the church. Along with many survivalists, Mr. Falwell advised stocking up on food and guns". Adherents in these movements were encouraged to engage in food hoarding, take lessons in self-sufficiency, and the more extreme elements planned for a total collapse of modern society. The Chicago Tribune reported that some large fundamentalist churches, motivated by Y2K, were the sites for flea market-like sales of paraphernalia designed to help people survive a social order crisis ranging from gold coins to wood-burning stoves. Betsy Hart wrote in the Deseret News that many of the more extreme evangelicals used Y2K to promote a political agenda in which the downfall of the government was a desired outcome in order to usher in Christ's reign. She also said, "the cold truth is that preaching chaos is profitable and calm doesn't sell many tapes or books". Y2K fears were described dramatically by New Zealand-based Christian prophetic author and preacher Barry Smith in his publication "I Spy with my Little Eye," where he dedicated an entire chapter to Y2K. Some expected, at times through so-called prophecies, that Y2K would be the beginning of a worldwide Christian revival.

In the aftermath, some accused leaders of these fringe groups had used fears of apocalyptic outcomes to manipulate followers into dramatic scenes of mass repentance or renewed commitment to their groups, additional giving of funds and more overt commitment to their respective organizations or churches. The Baltimore Sun claimed this in their article "Apocalypse Now – Y2K spurs fears," noting the increased call for repentance in the populace in order to avoid God's wrath. Christian leader Col Stringer in his commentary published, "Fear-creating writers sold over 45 million books citing every conceivable catastrophe from civil war, planes dropping from the sky to the end of the civilized world as we know it. Reputable preachers were advocating food storage and a "head for the caves" mentality. No banks failed, no planes crashed, no wars or civil war started. And yet not one of these prophets of doom has ever apologized for their scare-mongering tactics." Critics argue that some prominent North American Christian ministries and leaders generated huge personal and corporate profits through sales of Y2K preparation kits, generators, survival guides, published prophecies and a wide range of other associated merchandise, such as Christian journalist Rob Boston in his article "False Prophets, Real Profits." However, Pat Robertson, founder of the global Christian Broadcasting Network, gave equal time to pessimists and optimists alike and granted that people should at least expect "serious disruptions".

Cost
The total cost of the work done in preparation for Y2K likely surpassed US$300 billion ($ billion as of January 2018, once inflation is taken into account). IDC calculated that the US spent an estimated $134 billion ($ billion) preparing for Y2K, and another $13 billion ($ billion) fixing problems in 2000 and 2001. Worldwide, $308 billion ($ billion) was estimated to have been spent on Y2K remediation.

Remedial work organization
Remedial work was driven by customer demand for solutions. Software suppliers, mindful of their potential legal liability, responded with remedial effort. Software subcontractors were required to certify that their software components were free of date-related problems, which drove further work down the supply chain.

By 1999, many corporations required their suppliers to certify that their software was all Y2K-compliant. Some signed after accepting merely remedial updates. Many businesses or even whole countries suffered only minor problems despite spending little effort themselves.

Results
There are two ways to view the events of 2000 from the perspective of its aftermath:

Supporting view
This view holds that the vast majority of problems were fixed correctly, and the money spent was at least partially justified. The situation was essentially one of preemptive alarm. Those who hold this view claim that the lack of problems at the date change reflects the completeness of the project, and that many computer applications would not have continued to function into the 21st century without correction or remediation.

Expected problems that were not seen by small businesses and small organizations were prevented by Y2K fixes embedded in routine updates to operating system and utility software that were applied several years before 31 December 1999.

The extent to which larger industry and government fixes averted issues that would have more significant impacts had they not been fixed, were typically not disclosed or widely reported.

It has been suggested that on 11 September 2001, infrastructure in New York City (including subways, phone service, and financial transactions) was able to continue operation because of the redundant networks established in the event of Y2K bug impact and the contingency plans devised by companies. The terrorist attacks and the following prolonged blackout to lower Manhattan had minimal effect on global banking systems. Backup systems were activated at various locations around the region, many of which had been established to deal with a possible complete failure of networks in Manhattan's Financial District on 31 December 1999.

Opposing view
The contrary view asserts that there were no, or very few, critical problems to begin with. This view also asserts that there would have been only a few minor mistakes and that a "fix on failure" approach would have been the most efficient and cost-effective way to solve these problems as they occurred.

International Data Corporation estimated that the US might have wasted $40 billion.

Skeptics of the need for a massive effort pointed to the absence of Y2K-related problems occurring before 1 January 2000, even though the 2000 financial year commenced in 1999 in many jurisdictions, and a wide range of forward-looking calculations involved dates in 2000 and later years. Estimates undertaken in the leadup to 2000 suggested that around 25% of all problems should have occurred before 2000. Critics of large-scale remediation argued during 1999 that the absence of significant reported problems in non-compliant small firms was evidence that there had been, and would be, no serious problems needing to be fixed in any firm, and that the scale of the problem had therefore been severely overestimated.

Countries such as South Korea and Russia invested little to nothing in Y2K remediation, yet had the same negligible Y2K problems as countries that spent enormous sums of money. Western countries anticipated such severe problems in Russia that many issued travel advisories and evacuated non-essential staff.

Critics also cite the lack of Y2K-related problems in schools, many of which undertook little or no remediation effort. By 1 September 1999, only 28% of US schools had achieved compliance for mission critical systems, and a government report predicted that "Y2K failures could very well plague the computers used by schools to manage payrolls, student records, online curricula, and building safety systems".

Similarly, there were few Y2K-related problems in an estimated 1.5 million small businesses that undertook no remediation effort. On 3 January 2000 (the first weekday of the year), the Small Business Administration received an estimated 40 calls from businesses with computer issues, similar to the average. None of the problems were critical.

See also

 Year 2038 problem: a time formatting bug in computer systems with representing times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038
 512k day: an event in 2014, involving a software limitation in network routers
 IPv4 address exhaustion, problems caused by the limited allocation size for numeric internet addresses
 ISO 8601, an international standard for representing dates and times, which mandates the use of (at least) four digits for the year
 "Life's a Glitch, Then You Die" is a "Treehouse of Horror segment" from The Simpsons eleventh season. The segment sees Homer forget to make his company's computers Y2K-compliant, causing a virus to be unleashed upon the world
 Perpetual calendar, a calendar valid for many years, including before and after 2000
 Y2K, a 1999 American made-for-television science fiction-thriller film directed by Dick Lowry
 YEAR2000, a configuration setting supported by some versions of DR-DOS to overcome Year 2000 BIOS bugs
 Millennium celebrations, a worldwide, coordinated series of events to celebrate and commemorate the end of 1999 and the start of the year 2000 in the Gregorian calendar.

Notes

References

External links

 Center for Y2K and Society Records, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Documents activities of Center for Y2K and Society (based in Washington, D.C.) working with non-profit institutions and foundations to respond to possible societal impacts of the Y2K computer problem: helping the poor and vulnerable as well as protecting human health and the environment. Records donated by executive director, Norman L. Dean.
 International Y2K Cooperation Center Records, 1998–2000, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Collection contains the materials of the International Y2K Cooperation Center. Includes country reports, news clippings, country questionnaires, country telephone directories, background materials, audio visual materials and papers of Bruce W. McConnell, director of IY2KCC.
 Preparing for an Apocalypse: Y2K, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. A web exhibit curated by Stephanie H. Crowe
 BBC: Y2K coverage
 In The Beginning there Was the Nerd – BBC Radio documentary about the history of computers and the millennium bug 10 years after using archival recordings.
 The Surprising Legacy of Y2K – Radio documentary by American Public Media, on the history and legacy of the millennium bug five years on.
 The Yawn of a New Millennium
 CBC Digital Archives – The Eve of the Millennium
  How the UK coped with the millennium bug
 "Time running out for PCs at big companies"—CNN

Problem
2000 in Internet culture
Calendars
Doomsday scenarios
Technology hazards
Software bugs
Year 02000 problem
Turn of the third millennium

Year 2000 problem


Francis Awe is a prince of the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria. He is said to be a master of the Nigerian talking drum.

Life
His grandmother was the one who discovered his talent when he was only two months old. Every time there would be drums being played he would cry. So one day his grandmother decided to take him to a place where there were drums being played. Francis would stop crying as soon as he heard the drums. The grandmother did this on three occasions and finally she introduced him to the village drummers and they took him under their wing. In 1981 Francis earned a degree in Dramatic Arts at The University of Ife in Osun State, Nigeria. After graduating he got a job as a drummer and Chief Cultural Assistant at The University of Lagos, Centre for Cultural Studies. Soon after decided he wanted to come to America and go to school at The California Institute of the Arts. There he received a bachelor's degree in World Arts and Cultures.

In 1985 Francis Awe formed The Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble with his wife, Omowale, who is the lead dancer. The Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble is a group that performs with the hopes to educate the people about the Nigerian culture through music and dance. The group has traveled to places throughout the United States and also to Mexico, Italy, Germany, and India. With the Ensemble, Francis goes to universities and schools, and also teaches at workshops. He has composed for movies, television, and on stage. He is currently a recording artist for Bindu Records and is releasing an album with his drumming titled, Oro Ijinle. Awe has said that his mission is to, "Not only make the Dundun a universal instrument, but also to transmit the family aspect of African life to all the people of the universe." He also had two children. His oldest, Asabi Awe and his youngest Babatunde Awe (www.bindurecords.com)

References

African Music Encyclopedia: Francis Awe
Bindu Records - Francis Awe
http://www.greatleap.org/awe/

External links
Francis Awe and the Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble

Nigerian drummers
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Yoruba musicians
Yoruba royalty
Obafemi Awolowo University alumni
University of Lagos people
Nigerian emigrants to the United States
American people of Yoruba descent
African-American drummers
California Institute of the Arts alumni
21st-century African-American people

Francis Awe


Lasta (Amharic: ላስታ lāstā) is a historic province in northern Ethiopia. It is the province in which Lalibela is situated, the former capital of Ethiopia during the Zagwe dynasty and home to 11 medieval rock-hewn churches. Its original name in the Middle Ages was Begwena.

According to G.W.B. Huntingford, Lasta is first mentioned in the fourteenth century, although it obviously had been inhabited long before that. In the 18th century the Czech Franciscan Remedius Prutky listed Lasta as one of the 22 provinces of Ethiopia still subject to the Emperor, but singled Lasta out as one of the six he considered "large and truly deserving of the name of kingdom." Its neighbor to the west was Begemder, and to the north, Wag.

See also
Lasta (woreda), the present district of the same name
Wagshum

References

Provinces of Ethiopia

Lasta


Gladys Lee Commons (born Gladys Lee James; November 2, 1948) is the former United States Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management and Comptroller).

Biography
Gladys J. Commons was born in Maple Hill, North Carolina. She educated at Fayetteville State University (B.Ed.) and at the American University (master's degree in Public Financial Management).

In July 1969, Commons became a Claims Representative with the Social Security Administration.  In 1971, she moved to the Office of Naval Research, taking a job as a Budget Analyst with the Office of Naval Research's Comptroller.  With the creation of the Naval Data Automation Command (NAVDAC) in 1977, she became Lead Budget Analyst for the Operations Program/Budget Division.  In 1980, she moved to the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC), becoming Supervisory Budget Analyst and Branch Head of the Budget and Operations Branch.  In 1983, she became the Budget Officer and Head of the Materiel Program and Budget Branch, Materiel Division at the Installations and Logistics Department at Headquarters Marine Corps.  She spent 1986-87 at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at Fort Lesley J. McNair.  In 1987, she became Comptroller of the Marine Corps Research, Development and Acquisition Command (later renamed the Marine Corps Systems Command).  She was promoted to the Senior Executive Service in August 1991.

In February 1994, Commons was named Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management), a post she held for eight years, until September 2002.  She served as acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management) from March 20, 1998 to October 15, 1998.  In October 2002, she became Comptroller of the Military Sealift Command.  She retired from federal service in March 2004.

In 2009, President of the United States Barack Obama nominated Commons as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management and Comptroller), and she has held that office since November 3, 2009.

References

 U.S. Navy Biography

1948 births
Fayetteville State University alumni
American University alumni
United States Assistant Secretaries of the Navy
Living people
Obama administration personnel

Gladys J. Commons


Duncan Leitch FRSE FGS (1904 -1956) was a 20th-century Scottish geologist and palaeontologist. He specialised in Carboniferous stratigraphy.

Life

He was born in Glasgow on 20 March 1904. He was educated at Woodside School in Glasgow. He then studied Science at Glasgow University drifting towards an interest in geology due to Prof John Walter Gregory. He graduated with First Class Honours BSc in Geology in 1926. He then became a Demonstrator in the Geology lectures, assisting Prof Gregory. He was granted a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship and in 1938 he began lecturing in his own right.

In 1946 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Arthur Trueman, John Weir, Thomas Alty and Sir Maurice Yonge. In 1947 he accepted a professorship at University College, Swansea in Wales.
He had joined the Geological Society in 1928 and served as its Assistant Librarian until 1932. He became Secretary in 1937 and Chairman in 1947.

He died in Swansea on 11/12 January 1956.

Publications

Geology in the Life of Man (1948)

References

1904 births
1956 deaths
Scottish geologists
Scientists from Glasgow
Alumni of the University of Glasgow
Academics of the University of Glasgow
Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Scottish non-fiction writers

Duncan Leitch (geologist)


Arthur Albert Irwin (February 14, 1858 – July 16, 1921), nicknamed "Doc", "Sandy", "Cutrate" or "Foxy", was a Canadian-American shortstop and manager in Major League Baseball (MLB) during the late nineteenth century. He played regularly in the major leagues for eleven years, spending two of those seasons as a player-manager. He played on the 1884 Providence Grays team which won the first interleague series to decide the world champions of baseball. Irwin then served as a major league manager for several years.

Irwin occupied numerous baseball roles in the latter years of his career, having spent time as a college baseball coach, a major league scout and business manager, a minor league owner and manager, and a National League umpire. For most of Irwin's career, the collegiate and professional baseball schedules allowed him to hold positions at both levels in the same year.

Irwin also produced several innovations which impacted sports. He took the field with the first baseball fielder's glove, invented a type of football scoreboard, promoted motor-paced cycling tracks and ran a short-lived professional soccer league.

Irwin became terminally ill with cancer in the last weeks of his life. Shortly after his death from an apparent suicide, Irwin made headlines when it was discovered that two wives and families survived him in separate cities. He had been married to one woman since the 1880s and to the other since the 1890s. He was posthumously elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1989.

Early life
Arthur Irwin was born in 1858 in Toronto, Canada West, to an Irish blacksmith and a Canadian mother. As a child, he moved with his family to Boston and attended school there. He played local amateur baseball from 1873 until he was recruited by the Worcester team of the National Association in 1879.

In late 1879, manager Frank Bancroft took Irwin and most of the other Worcester players on a baseball tour which included visits to New Orleans and Cuba. The team, which traveled under the name of the Hop Bitters (the usual nickname of a different National Association team), returned to the United States after only a few days due to financial and contractual difficulties. The team may have played as few as two games in Cuba.

Baseball career

Playing days
Irwin's major league career began when the Ruby Legs moved into the National League (NL) in 1880. He led the league in assists in his rookie season, and remained with the team through 1882, when it folded due to poor attendance. Irwin next spent three seasons with the Providence Grays, and was captain and starting shortstop of the 1884 Providence team that became world champions. The 1884 Grays featured star pitchers Charles Radbourn and Charlie Sweeney; the two hurlers did not get along well, and Sweeney left the team in the middle of the season. The club folded after a fourth-place finish in 1885.

Irwin moved on to the recently formed Philadelphia Phillies in 1886 where he was named team captain during spring training. Tragedy struck the Philadelphia squad in 1888 when pitcher Charlie Ferguson developed typhoid fever, dying at Irwin's home.

During the 1889 season, Irwin went to the Washington Nationals for his first opportunity as player-manager, although the team folded at the end of the season. He next played for the Boston Reds in the Players' League in 1890. That same year, Irwin coached the baseball team at Dartmouth College. While Irwin served as a player-manager for Boston in 1890, he was able to focus on the managerial role for the team in 1891. That year the team signed his brother, John Irwin, on May 21. Newspapers brought accusations of nepotism and criticized John's mediocre play.  John Irwin was released by Boston on July 16, and his major league playing career was over by the next month.

Although Irwin's regular playing career ended after the 1890 season, he appeared in six games while managing the Boston team after it moved to the American Association in 1891. He also played in one game while managing the 1894 Philadelphia Phillies. A left-handed hitter, Irwin finished his playing career with 1,015 games played and batted .241 in 4,190 plate appearances. He tallied 396 runs batted in and 552 runs scored. Stolen bases were not awarded until 1886, but Irwin tallied 93 stolen bases in his last 532 games. He recorded an .878 career fielding percentage, committing 647 errors in 5,317 fielding chances. Irwin played 947 games at shortstop and 56 games at third base. He also appeared at second base, pitcher and catcher.

Early non-playing roles
Irwin coached at the University of Pennsylvania between 1893 and 1895, and managed the Philadelphia major league club during those last two seasons.

In 1894, he angered Penn supporters when a talented first baseman named Goeckle nearly signed with Irwin's major league team just prior to a series of collegiate championship games.  Nonetheless, by 1895, Irwin's coaching role at Penn included the selection of players and other duties that traditionally fell to the team captain. Irwin left Philadelphia in 1896 to manage the New York Giants. Relieved of his duties after one season in New York, he was subsequently recruited to manage in Milwaukee. However, he returned to coach the minor league team in his native Toronto instead.

Irwin coached Toronto during 1897 and 1898. He faced arrest on a libel charge in 1898, which stemmed from comments made by Irwin about the actions of the Philadelphia ownership during his time there. Though Irwin turned himself in, it appears that he was never arrested. In 1898, Irwin traded some of his best players to the Washington major league team. The moves were seen as particularly suspect when Irwin was named the Washington manager shortly thereafter. After 1899, Irwin did not return to the major leagues as a coach. He returned for a subsequent term as Penn's coach in 1900, but he left in 1902. In August 1902, Irwin was signed as an NL umpire for the remainder of that season. Irwin, who had previously only filled in for one three-day umpiring stretch in 1881, umpired his first NL game on August 7, 1902. His last umpiring appearance came with the end of the 1902 season on October 3. In fifty games as an umpire, Irwin ejected nine players, including future Hall of Fame inductees Roger Bresnahan and Fred Clarke. Irwin, who had retained partial ownership of the Toronto club, then returned to manage that team for a couple of seasons.

By 1906, Irwin was manager of the Altoona Mountaineers in the Tri-State League. In July 1907, Irwin resigned as manager of the Mountaineers after fans became disgruntled. Even after entering baseball scouting, Irwin briefly managed the 1908 Washington club in the short-lived Union Professional League. The league was plagued by financial problems—including the inability to pay players at times—and it folded less than two months after play began. He was rehired to the Penn coaching staff in 1908.

Scouting

In the summer of 1907, Irwin became a scout for the New York Highlanders. In 1909, New York manager George Stallings rented an apartment overlooking Hilltop Park and sent Irwin up to steal signs from the opposing team. Using a system of binoculars and mirrors, Irwin read the signs and flashed them back to Stallings so they could be relayed to the batter. By 1912, almost the entire Highlanders roster had been scouted by Irwin. In a newspaper interview covering his scouting career, Irwin asserted that he preferred signing young prospects over expensive stars. "The chances are better with a young player, for by getting him early you can gradually break him into the style of play the team is using", he said.

In December 1912, New York president Frank J. Farrell promoted Irwin from scout to business manager. Upon his promotion, a statement from the team said, "He has been of such service to the club in numerous ways that Mr. Farrell has invested him with full power to look after business details in future." The poor relationship between Irwin and New York manager Frank Chance was a factor in the manager's 1914 resignation after two years of a three-year contract. The New York Times said that Chance "did not think it was possible to collect so many mediocre players on one major league club." Irwin remained with the Highlanders until Farrell sold the team to Jacob Ruppert and T.L. Huston. Upon the sale of the team, Irwin and several other Highlanders personnel submitted their resignations.

Later coaching career
Irwin became part-owner of the Lewiston Cupids in 1915 and managed that club in the final season of the original New England League. The 1915 Cupids featured 16-year-old Cuban pitcher Oscar Tuero, who won 17 games in his third professional season. The team did not win the pennant that year, but the race came down to the final days of the season. Irwin and Christy Mathewson were considered for a coaching position at Harvard College that year, but former Highlanders catcher and professional scout Fred Mitchell was ultimately selected. In 1916, Irwin publicly accused Philadelphia's Connie Mack of underhanded dealings in obtaining third baseman Jim Ritter from Baltimore. He said that Mack convinced the New England League's Baltimore club to draft Ritter so that Mack could later obtain him cheaply. Mack was outraged at the accusations and immediately severed all connections with the player.  Ritter never appeared in a major league game.

Irwin managed the Rochester Hustlers between 1918 and 1920. Rochester was not successful under Irwin; the 1920 Hustlers finished with 45 wins and 106 losses. Cray L. Remington of the Rochester Evening Journal later wrote, "Local fans used to pan Arthur Irwin in the old days when Arthur was as innocent of wrong as the little sparrows on the limbs. Arthur's job was to win ball games minus talent. He couldn't do it." While managing the Eastern League's Hartford Senators in 1921 against a New York semi-pro team, Irwin noticed the play of Lou Gehrig and convinced him to sign his first professional contract with Hartford. Gehrig had already committed to play at Columbia University and professional experience would affect his collegiate eligibility, so he began playing for Hartford using assumed names like Lou Lewis. However, Columbia found out about Gehrig's play and the slugger was forced to sit out of college baseball for a year.

Sports innovations

While playing with Providence in 1883, Irwin broke the third and fourth fingers of his left hand. Not wanting to miss any games, he obtained an oversized buckskin driving glove, padded it and sewed the third and fourth fingers together to allow space for bandages. He used the glove even after his fingers healed. John Montgomery Ward of New York soon took the field with a similar glove. By the following season, almost every professional player was using the "Irwin glove." Prior to 1884, use of gloves was limited to first basemen and catchers. In 1882, Irwin committed a league-high 78 errors in 84 games. He committed 66 errors in 98 games the following year. Over his next two seasons with the glove, Irwin committed 98 errors in 163 games.

Irwin organized and was president of the American League of Professional Football (ALPF) for its lone season in 1894. The organization represented the first American professional soccer league. Teams in the league were named after their MLB counterparts in the same cities. Some of the active baseball managers served as coaches for the soccer teams, and fans were sometimes enticed by the rumor of MLB players who might participate in the league. Irwin was also involved in an attempt to popularize roller polo.

Irwin developed and patented a football scoreboard, which was in use in the Ivy League by the 1890s. The large scoreboard featured a miniature representation of a football field, and the ball moved along the board to report each play. By 1915, Irwin's scoreboards were featured at each end of the field for the Army-Navy game at the Polo Grounds.

Other influence
Irwin owned athletic facilities in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and negotiated with baseball officials about bringing organized baseball there in 1900. Irwin opened a motor-paced bicycle racing track in the city in July 1902. His focus on the bicycle track enterprise had been a factor in his resignation from the Penn coaching staff in 1902. He also became involved with the Hartford Avenue Colosseum Company and oversaw its Philadelphia bicycle track.

Death
On June 21, 1921, Irwin gave up his managerial role with the Hartford club in the Eastern League due to health concerns. He was experiencing abdominal trouble and severe nervous attacks. Irwin was diagnosed with stomach cancer; he had lost 60 pounds in two weeks. While in the hospital, he was told that he only had a few days to live. While traveling from New York City to Boston on the vessel Calvin Austin, Irwin was lost overboard in an apparent suicide on July 16. Shortly after his death, a theory emerged that Irwin had been robbed for $5,000 and then murdered aboard the ship. This theory was discounted when it was learned from family members that Irwin had taken only $35 on the trip. When Irwin was last seen aboard the ship around midnight on July 16, he told a friend that he was "coming home to his brother John's to die."

During the investigation into Irwin's disappearance and death, two widows emerged; one lived in Boston and the other lived in New York. He first married Elizabeth, the woman in Boston, in 1883. Together they had three children, including a son who was 37 at the time of Irwin's death, and nine grandchildren. In the 1890s he married again, this time in Philadelphia to May, a woman he met while coaching baseball at the University of Pennsylvania. They settled in New York and had a son who was 24 when Irwin died.

In his final days, Irwin sold his rights from his scoreboard business for $2000. Though he sent $1500 to May and only $500 to Elizabeth, his Boston widow was surprised at the gesture since Irwin rarely visited Boston and provided almost no financial support to their family. In fact, May said that he had not been away from New York for more than a few days at a time in 27 years. She said that his only long trips were baseball-related, when he would scout players in other cities. Before he left New York for the final time, he told May that he was going to say goodbye to friends in Boston and that he would return to New York. Though neither woman knew of the other, Irwin's New York son Harold learned about an unknown brother while he was visiting his father in the hospital just before Irwin's death.

In 1989, Irwin was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.

See also

List of Major League Baseball player–managers
List of Major League Baseball umpires

References

External links

1858 births
1921 suicides
1921 deaths
19th-century baseball players
Baseball players from Toronto
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Arthur Irwin


The Riverview Terrace Historic District is a  historic district in Davenport, Iowa, United States, that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. It was listed on the Davenport Register of Historic Properties in 1993. The neighborhood was originally named Burrow's Bluff and Lookout Park and contains a three-acre park on a large hill.

Description

In 1984, the district included 21 buildings deemed to contribute to the historic character of the area, and one other contributing site. The district is significant for its architectural styles, which are representative of late-19th century and early-20th century styles that were popular during that period in Davenport. The neighborhood has local significance as being one of the few developed at the turn of the twentieth century with a park as the focal point.

Riverview Terrace runs along Clay Street from Fillmore Street northwest a few blocks to the edge of the former Marycrest College campus. On the south side of the neighborhood is Riverview Terrace Park. The park is a large steep hill, and offers a view of the river and Rock Island, Illinois. The area around the park contains large Italianate, Georgian, and Federal style houses. Beyond the park are smaller houses in the Bungalow and American Craftsman styles along with brick streets.

History

The first house built in the district was J.M.D. Burrows' house.  Named Clifton, it is an Italianate house that was built in 1853.  It remained the only house in the area until the 1880s. At that time it was joined by two Italian Villa-style homes, the Samuel Hoffman House (1401 Clay St.) and the Henry Petersen House (1012 Marquette). They were joined by houses for prominent German-American families that were significant in Davenport's 19th century commercial and industrial development such as the Schrickers (pearl button manufacturing), Muellers (lumber milling), Strucks (banking), and the Petersens (retail merchandising). Many of these families had previously settled in the Hamburg neighborhood. The Schrickers' built two of the city's finest examples of the Georgian Revival style, the John C. Schricker House (1896) and the Selma Schricker House (1902).

The land that the park sits on was acquired by the Davenport Board of Parks Commissioners in 1894. At that time it was called Lookout Park and was renamed Riverview Terrace shortly after 1900. It, along with Prospect Park, was part of a city program to develop public parks throughout Davenport. Unlike the Prospect Park neighborhood, which developed mostly large and fashionable residences, Riverview Terrace included construction of more modest-sized homes in the Foursquare and Craftsman styles that dominate the western portion of Clay Street. The Max Petersen and Kuno Struck houses were disconnected from the Riverview Terrace neighborhood when Marycrest College was established on their properties by the Catholic Diocese of Davenport in the 1930s.

Notes

References
Plan and Zoning Commission, "Historic preservation in Davenport, Iowa for inclusion in the Davenport Comprehensive Plan : preliminary report to the Comprehensive Plan Committee Plan and Zoning Commission", (1985)

External links

Historic districts in Davenport, Iowa
Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Iowa
National Register of Historic Places in Davenport, Iowa
Davenport Register of Historic Properties
Bungalow architecture in Iowa
American Craftsman architecture in Iowa
Georgian Revival architecture in Iowa
Victorian architecture in Iowa
Italianate architecture in Iowa
Houses in Davenport, Iowa
Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Iowa

Riverview Terrace Historic District


Gubbi Hampanna Veeranna (1891 – 1972) was an Indian theatre director. He was one of the pioneers and most prolific contributors to Kannada theatre. He established the drama company, Gubbi Sree Channabasaveshwara Nataka Company, which played a crucial role in promoting the Kannada theatre field. He has been conferred the title Nataka Ratna meaning "A Precious Jewel" in the theatre world. Gubbi Veeranna laid the foundation stone for the Kannada film industry. He established a studio, produced silent films in early days of cinema and produced good Kannada short films, He built theaters and introduced many actors including Dr Rajkumar, G.V Iyer, B.V Karanth, Girish Karnad and others to the Kannada film industry.

Gubbi Veeranna Nataka Company is the first theatre company in Karnataka to employ female artists to portray female characters on the stage. Elephants and horses were also brought on stage in war scenes of Kurukshetra. There is a popular saying that the story of Gubbi Veeranna's company is itself the story of the Kannada theatre, which indicates the popularity of this company in the theatre world. Apart from theatre, Gubbi Veeranna has also produced films and acted in them as well. He setup one of the first film studio's in Bengaluru called the Sree Kanteerava Studios in association with the government and few other personalities like TS Karibasavaiah and V Shankare Gowda.

In 1955, he was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for acting, given by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy of Music, Dance & Drama, and the highest Indian recognition given to practising artists. The Government of India awarded him the fourth-highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri, in 1972, for his contributions to arts.

Biography
Gubbi Veeranna was born in the village Gulaganjihalli, Near Gubbi in the Tumkur district of Karnataka in the year 1891. He started a drama company called Gubbi Shree Channa Basaveshwara Nataka Company and started producing plays in which he also acted sometimes. He had three wives, Sundaramma, Bhadramma and B. Jayamma. He had an unnerving commitment towards the theatre. An incident to corroborate this is when his second wife Sundaramma, who was also an artist with the company, died on the stage while enacting a play. It is said that Gubbi Veeranna who was also acting in the play along with his children, did not stop the play but allowed it to continue till the end. He and his children attended to her dead body only after the play stopped.

Veeranna also is credited for having groomed Rajkumar, Narasimharaju, Balakrishna, G.V.Iyer, B. V. Karanth, Master Hirannaiah and many more artists. He not only helped them with their careers in the theatre field but also provided them with other financial help. As an example, Veeranna provided a financial contribution towards B. V. Karanth's graduation and master's degree at Banaras Hindu University.

Veeranna had many children including G.V Shivanand who was an accomplished dramatist and director. He also had  37 grandchildren including B. Jayashree and Vyjayanthi Kashi, G.S. Sundarashree and G.S. Nataraj. who have been associated with the Kannada theater and film industry.

Theatre company
Initially located in Gubbi, the company started to travel to different places and stage plays in those locations. The company had a troupe of more than 150 artists and backstage workers. Some popular plays staged by the company included Sadaarame and Yechamma Nayaka. These plays consisted of innovations like trick scenes, floods, clouds and rain. In those days, dramas used were staged for free with people only paying according to their liking at the end of the drama.

However, Gubbi Veeranna's dramas were an exception with people willing to buy tickets to watch them. Most of the actors and actresses that entered the Kannada cinema world in those days were from this drama company. Later the company opened branches in different places. An important branch of the company was the Mysore branch which staged popular plays and the finances generated from this branch actually sustained the whole company. The humorist Hirannaiah was one of the persons responsible for the popularity of the Mysore branch.

Gubbi Veeranna's company first came to Bangalore in the year 1916. Later Gubbi Veeranna constructed his own theatre in Bangalore on the Subedar Chatram Road in 1924 and the Shivananda Theatre (now called as Movieland) in 1930. Probably, the most famous artist to emerge from the Gubbi Veeranna company was Rajkumar. Rajkumar's father Singanallur Puttaswamiah was an actor in the company and Rajkumar and his brother joined the company as child artistes. Rajkumar actually attributed his command over the Kannada language and his singing skills to the training he underwent under the watchful eyes of Gubbi Veeranna.

Film production
One of the early pioneers of Kannada cinema, Gubbi Veeranna  started a limited company called Karnataka Films Productions to produce films. His first production was a movie 'Song of Life' in 1930, followed by 'His Love Affair' in 1931. He then produced 'Harimaya' in 1932 followed by the evergreen comedy Sadarame in 1935, in which he acted in the lead role. The film had C.I.D. Sakunthala, Ashwathama and B. Jayamma in the cast and was directed by Raja Chandrasekar. He then produced Subhadra which had Honnappa Bhagavathar in the lead.

In 1942, he produced Jeevana Nataka with Kemraj Urs in the lead. He again acted in the lead role in the film Hemareddy Mallamma, in 1945. He produced Sathya Shodhanai in 1953, which was a Tamil Film and had again starred Honnappa Bhagavathar. Karnataka Gubbi Productions was later called as The Karnataka Films Ltd., it is attributed to have started the film career of Rajkumar when it agreed to offer him the lead role in his first film Bedara Kannappa.

He has also produced silent movies like His Love Affair which was directed by a foreigner, Raphel Algoet. In this film, the lead role of the actor was played by Gubbi Veeranna himself and the actress was none other than his wife, Jayamma. In 1956, he produced Sadaarme, which had T.N. Balakrishna in lead and also had Kalyan Kumar. It was the remake of 1936 movie with the same name. In 1959, he produced Sahodhari, a Tamil Film which had K. Balaji in the Lead.

Filmography

Recognition
The Karnataka government has instituted the Gubbi Veeranna award for excellence in theatre in his memory.

Notes

Indian theatre directors
1890 births
1974 deaths
People from Tumkur
Kannada dramatists and playwrights
Recipients of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award
Male actors in Kannada cinema
Indian male film actors
Indian male dramatists and playwrights
Male actors from Karnataka
20th-century Indian dramatists and playwrights
Dramatists and playwrights from Karnataka
Recipients of the Padma Shri in arts
20th-century Indian male actors
Film producers from Karnataka
Kannada film producers
20th-century Indian male writers

Gubbi Veeranna


Pilot Peak (Shoshoni: Waahkai) is the highest mountain in the Pilot Range in extreme eastern Elko County, Nevada, United States. It is the most topographically prominent peak in Elko County and the fourth-most prominent peak in Nevada. The peak is on public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management and thus has no access restrictions.

History

Pilot Peak was named in 1845 for its use as an easily recognized landmark. John C. Fremont saw the peak from the east during his third expedition, mapping the Great Basin. Wondering whether his entire party could cross the desert he sent Kit Carson ahead to scout for water sources. Finding a perennial spring just east of the peak, Carson lit a large bonfire, the smoke from which signaled Fremont that the crossing was possible.

In 1846 the Donner Party also used the peak as a landmark for their crossing of the Great Salt Lake Desert, part of the Hastings Cutoff emigrant route. Running out of water, they had to temporarily abandon their wagons and oxen in order to reach the springs (now called Donner Springs) at the base of the peak. They eventually recovered most of their stock animals and wagons, and continued their journey to the California Trail and the Sierra Nevada mountains.

See also
 List of Ultras of the United States

References

External links

Mountains of Elko County, Nevada
Mountains of Nevada

Pilot Peak (Nevada)


The Congregational Library & Archives is an independent special collections library and archives. It is located on the second floor of the Congregational House at 14 Beacon Street in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The Library was founded in 1853 by a gathering of Congregational ministers and has since evolved into a professional library and archives that holds more than 250,000 items, predominantly focused on 18th to 21st century American Congregational history. The Library's reading room is free and open to the public for research but the Library's stacks are closed and book borrowing privileges are extended exclusively to members.

History

The American Congregational Association
The Library was organized on May 25, 1853 by a gathering of Congregational ministers who donated a total of 56 books and pamphlets from their own personal collections. The Congregational Library Association was formally established in 1854 in Boston, Massachusetts "...for the purpose of establishing and perpetuating a library of religious history and literature of New England." The Association occupied a room in Tremont Temple until 1857, when the growing collection was moved to Chauncy Street.

In 1864, the Congregational Library Association was authorized by the Governor of Massachusetts to change its name to the American Congregational Association as well as "do such acts as may promote the interests of Congregational Churches by publishing works, by furnishing libraries and pecuniary aid to parishes, churches, and cooperation among Congregational ministers and churches with other denominations by collecting and disbursing funds for the above objects."

By 1866, the Library contained 3,638 bound volumes and approximately 20,000 pamphlets and found their current location was too small to accommodate the Library. The Association sold said property to Jordan, Marsh, & Co. By this point, the Library's collection grew significantly, up to 15,000 bound volumes and 50,000 pamphlets The Library was then temporarily housed at 40 Winter Street until, in 1873, the Old Congregational House, at the corner of Beacon and Somerset Streets, was dedicated.

After 20 years of occupying the old Congregational House, the Association posed the question if a more permanent location should be found. In 1898, it was decided that the old Congregational House would be sold and the lots of 12 and 14 Beacon Street would be purchased and built upon. Ground was broken for the Congregational House July 28, 1897 and the corner stone was laid on November 29, 1897.

The Library was to occupy the second floor of the Congregational House, with the reading room two stories high, with 1,000 reference books available, and with the ceiling decorated by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, and the stacks holding a capacity of 125,00 bound volumes.

Congregational House
The Congregational House, located at 14 Beacon Street, is an eight-story brick building completed in 1898. The building was constructed, according to its explanatory plaque to house the Library and "...provide housing for Congregational societies and other religious charitable organizations."

"The object of this Association shall be to secure the erection (and maintenance) in the city of Boston, of a Congregational House for the meetings of the body, the accommodation of its library, and for the furtherance of its general purposes; to found and perpetuate a library of books, pamphlets, and manuscripts, and a collection of portraits and relics of the past; and to do whatever else -- within limits of its charter -- shall serve to illustrated Congregational History, and promote the general interest of the Congregational Churches."

Occupants at the time of founding include the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Woman's Board of Missions, the Woman's Home Missionary Association, the Massachusetts Home Missionary Society, the National Council, the Congregational Educational Society, the American Missionary Association, the Seaman's Friend Society, the Boston City Mission Society, the Sunday School and Publishing Society, the Congregationalist, and Thomas Todd's Printing Establishment.

In 1957, the United Church of Christ was founded after merging the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Christian Churches together. The UCC moved its headquarters from the Congregational House to The Interchurch Center in New York City by 1961, and many church groups and Congregational organizations found space outside of 14 Beacon Street. This led the Congregational House to become home to a wide range of advocacy groups and nonprofits.

In the summer of 2017, the American Congregational Association sold the Congregational House to Faros Properties for $25.4 million, citing the need to prioritize the mission of the organization over continuing to steward a large office building. The Library signed a lease for its current space for up to 100 years.

Architecture

The building was designed by the Boston-based architecture firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, now Shepley Bulfinch, in a Georgian-Federal revival style and built by the Norcoss Brothers. The building was added to the Park Street Historic District in the National Register of Historic Places on May 1, 1974, citing the historic significance of the architecture of the area and the importance of the Congregational House and Library as a place "...to protect the original Puritan literature."

Bas-Reliefs

During design and construction the Building Committee of the American Congregational Association agreed on a series of four bas-reliefs should be included in the second story facade of the Congregational house, with each relief depicting a fundamental principle of Congregationalism. The tablets are carved from Knoxville marble and bear no inscription as it was assumed the subject of each panel would be known on sight to the average citizen. The reliefs were carved by Domingo Mora, a Spanish sculptor who, catalyzed by the Spanish–American War, left the country and reliefs unfinished, citing his inability to stay and work in a country hostile to his own. The reliefs were carefully completed according to Mora's design by a Swiss modeler known only as Mr. Stadler.

Collections and Programs

Holdings

While the Congregational Library & Archives was founded as a library for Congregational ministers, it has evolved into a research library and repository for some 250,000 books, pamphlets, and periodicals, documenting the growth and development of the Congregational tradition in the United States, intimately bound up with early American history and the social movements in which Congregationalists actively participated such as abolition, temperance, and women's suffrage.

As the designated archive of the Congregational Christian churches, the Library collects material on the history of the denomination from the Puritans to its present incarnation, holding all significant institutional records from the United Church of Christ, the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, and the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, before and after. The Library also holds some 1,500 different periodicals representing its longstanding interest in social reform, missionary work, and education. The Congregational Library also holds rare newspapers from the Christian Connection denomination.

The Library's rare book room includes an unusually rich and complete representation of English and first-generation Puritan works, including an original copy of the Cambridge Platform of 1649. The Library's archival collection of colonial-era church records is also extensive, containing many sets of seventeenth-century documents as well as full collections from large and historically significant modern churches like Boston's Old South Church and Park Street Church. Many of these records have been digitized and made accessible as part of the New England's Hidden Histories program.

The Congregational Library also has a large sermon collection, some 15,000 individual pieces, covering the period from the late 1600s to the twentieth century, in both manuscript and printed form.

Visiting

The Congregational Library & Archives is open to the public on Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with some exceptions for after hours events.

There is no admissions fee into the Library and the reading room is free and open to the public to visitors and researchers alike who may request access to any of the items in the collection, including the rare books collection. Book borrowing is limited to Library members but scans of specific materials can be made in the reading room or via email for a small fee to non-members.

The Library is located a short walk from the Massachusetts State House, King's Chapel, Park Street Church, Boston Common and the Library's reading room looks out over the Granary Burying Ground.

In popular culture
The facade of the Congregational House is used as the office building of Cage & Fish, the fictional law firm of the legal comedy-drama Ally McBeal (1997-2002).

The stacks of the Library were used in the 1988 legal drama film A Civil Action.

References

External links
 The official website of the Congregational Library & Archives
 Beacon Street Diary - the blog of the Congregational Library & Archives

Commercial buildings completed in 1898
Congregational library
Libraries in Beacon Hill, Boston
Archives in the United States
Conservative Congregational Christian Conference
Beacon Hill, Boston
1853 establishments in Massachusetts

Congregational Library & Archives