Orlando Radhames Antigua Fernández (born February 20, 1973), nicknamed "Hurricane", is a former Dominican-American basketball player and is currently an assistant coach at the University of Kentucky under John Calipari. He is widely known as becoming the first Hispanic and the first non-black player for the Harlem Globetrotters in 52 years when he signed in 1995. After his retirement from playing professional basketball he was named an assistant coach for the Pittsburgh Panthers, the Memphis Tigers, the Illinois Fighting Illini and the Kentucky Wildcats. In 2014, he was named the head coach of South Florida, which he held until 2017. He is also the head coach of the Dominican Republic national basketball team.

Early years
Antigua was born in the Dominican Republic to a Dominican father and Puerto Rican mother. The family moved to New York City and lived in the Bronx where he was raised. There Antigua and his two siblings received their primary and secondary education. He attended St. Raymond's High School, where he played basketball.

On Halloween night in 1988, Antigua became the victim of a drive-by shooting and was shot in the head near his left eye. He recovered from the shooting, however the doctors were unable to retrieve the bullet until a later time. He was back playing basketball just two months after the incident and gained media attention as the kid who'd taken a bullet to the head in a drive-by in his rough Bronx neighborhood. During this period of his life Antigua's family also went through a period of homelessness. He kept the family together while housing was secured.

He overcame these difficulties and went on to serve as student council president at his high school and played a major role in the program's New York Catholic League Championship run under head coach Gary DeCesare. As a senior, he earned All-New York City and Parade All America Second Team honors. Antigua also played on the Gauchos youth basketball team. He caught the attention of various scouts during his high school playing days and was signed with the University of Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh Panthers
From 1991 to 1995 Antigua played basketball for the University of Pittsburgh Panthers basketball team. Antigua's performance during his freshman (Big East All-Rookie Team) and sophomore years under coach Paul Evans contributed to an appearance in the NIT (National Invitation Tournament) second round, and an NCAA tournament berth the season after. Antigua was named the recipient of the United States Basketball Writers' Association (USBWA) Most Courageous Award in 1994, an honor presented annually to an individual associated with college basketball who displays exceptional courage both on and off the floor. As a member of the Panthers, Antigua ranks 11th all-time in career 3-pointers made (117) and sixth in career 3-point field goal percentage (.386). He also ranks among the school's career leaders in blocked shots with 78, the 12th best total in Panthers history.

Basketball in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic
Antigua was able to play basketball in the Puerto Rican and Dominican basketball leagues because of his parents' Puerto Rican and Dominican roots. During his college years he would spend summers from 1991 to 1993 playing for the Gigantes de Carolina (Carolina Giants), a team in the Baloncesto Superior Nacional (BSN). Antigua averaged 7.5 points and 4.5 rebounds in 1991, 10.4 points and 3.7 rebounds in 1992, and 8.7 points and 4.4 rebounds in 1993.

Antigua continued to play for Carolina in 1996 and 1997 and averaged a career-high 16.8 points in 1997. He ended his professional playing career in 2002 with Mets de Guaynabo.

In 1998, Antigua played for the Dominican Republic national team, which came close to representing the country in the Olympics and World championships for the first time in the history of its program. The team, however fell short in the qualifications. Among his teammates were fellow BSN player Franklyn Western, of the Vaqueros de Bayamón (Bayamon Cowboys) and NBA player Felipe López.

Harlem Globetrotters
In December 1995, Antigua graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in social sciences. He  received offers from various NBA teams to attend their camps and also received offers from European scouts, but instead he decided to sign a deal to play for the world-renowned Harlem Globetrotters. Antigua, thus became the first Hispanic and the first non-black player on the Globetrotters' roster since Bob Karstens played with the squad in 1942–43. He made his debut as a Globetrotter in Pittsburgh and was nicknamed "Hurricane" because of his dazzling moves and quickness.

During the seven years in which he played with the Globetrotters, he represented the squad in 49 different countries and on tours to South America, South Africa and on the acclaimed "Youth in Our Lives Tour." Antigua met many people such as Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. He did commercials and showed his skills on the Late Show with David Letterman and in Regis and Kathy Lee. According to Antigua, he rates meeting Nelson Mandela in South Africa as his favorite moment. He retired from the Globetrotters in February 2002.

Coaching career
From 2002–03, Antigua served as an assistant basketball coach at Mt. Lebanon High School under Joey David and worked as a sales representative for Cavanaugh Promotions in the North Hills. In 2003, Antigua returned to University of Pittsburgh men's basketball as the director of  operations under head coach Jamie Dixon, and on June 7, 2006, was named an assistant coach.

In 2008, Antigua was hired as an assistant coach for the University of Memphis men's basketball program where he joined head coach John Calipari's staff. He then followed Calipari to the University of Kentucky to take an assistant job there.

On March 31, 2014, Antigua was named the new head coach of the South Florida Bulls. He left Kentucky's staff at the conclusion of the 2014 NCAA Tournament. He was also the head coach of the Dominican Republic national basketball team from 2013 to 2015. On January 3, 2017, USF dismissed Antigua as their head coach.

On April 5, 2017, Antigua was added to Brad Underwood's staff at Illinois.

In April 2021, it was rumored that Orlando Antigua may return to the University of Kentucky as an Assistant Coach under John Calipari.

This was made official on May 6, 2021, when Kentucky announced that Antigua and Illinois assistant coach Ronald "Chin" Coleman had been added to their staff.

Awards and recognitions
Among the many awards and recognitions which Antigua has received are the following:

1991–95 Named the United States Basketball Writers' Association Most Courageous Athlete award recipient
Named to Big East All-Rookie Team after the 1991–92 season; started in 78 games, averaged 8.0 points and 3.5 rebounds in 116 career games from 1991–95; concluded career as one of Pittsburgh's best all-time three-point shooters (.386- 117–303).
Named one of the nation's top-100 most influential Hispanic Americans by Hispanic Business magazine.

Head coaching record

See also

 List of Puerto Ricans
 List of people from the Dominican Republic

References

1973 births
Living people
Basketball coaches from New York (state)
Basketball players from New York City
Baloncesto Superior Nacional players
Dominican Republic people of Puerto Rican descent
Harlem Globetrotters players
High school basketball coaches in Pennsylvania
Illinois Fighting Illini men's basketball coaches
Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball coaches
Memphis Tigers men's basketball coaches
Parade High School All-Americans (boys' basketball)
Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball coaches
Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball players
Puerto Rican men's basketball players
South Florida Bulls men's basketball coaches
Dominican Republic emigrants to the United States
Forwards (basketball)
Mets de Guaynabo basketball players
Gigantes de Carolina basketball players

Orlando Antigua


Richard Vander Wende is an American visual designer and video game designer best known for his work on the 1992 Disney film Aladdin and the Cyan Worlds computer game Riven.

Career
Vander Wende's career began at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), working on projects such as the films Willow and Innerspace as a concept designer. Because of a fondness for the old Disney films, Vander Wende took a position at Walt Disney Feature Animation. His early visual development for Aladdin led directors Ron Clements and John Musker to choose that story as the subject for their next film. Vander Wende eventually became production designer for the film.

Following his stint at Disney, Vander Wende became interested in the potential of computer games as a medium for telling a different kind of story. After a chance meeting with Robyn Miller, he began working at Cyan (currently, Cyan Worlds) and eventually became co-director and co-designer of the computer game Riven; the sequel to Myst. His more cinematic visual influence is clearly seen throughout the Riven world. His wife Kate had a cameo appearance in the game as Leira/Keta. After the successful launch of Riven, Vander Wende left Cyan to pursue other work before returning to Cyan in 2023 as Director of their upcoming remake of Riven.

External links
 Richard Vander Wende's personal website

 WIRED magazine - Riven cover story
 Feature Creatures, a newspaper interview
 Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture - Richard Vander Wende gives a talk.

American production designers
American video game designers
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Art Center College of Design alumni

Richard Vander Wende


Reginald Walter Maudslay (1 September 1871 – 14 December 1934) was a British car manufacturer and founder of the Standard Motor Company. Born in Paddington, London, Maudslay was the son of Athol Edward Maudslay, "gentleman", and Kate, daughter of Sir Thomas Lucas, founder of a large firm of building contractors.

Maudslay was educated at St David's School in Moffat, Scotland, followed by Marlborough College. After leaving school he attended the Crystal Palace School of Engineering, trained as a civil engineer under Sir John Wolfe-Barry, during which time he worked on a number of major engineering projects such as Barry Docks. Maudslay abandoned his civil engineering career in 1902 and with financial support from Wolfe-Barry moved to Coventry, where he leased a small workshop; his cousin, Cyril Maudslay, was by then managing director of the nearby Maudslay Motor Company. In 1903 Reginald Maudslay established the Standard Motor Company in larger premises in Much Park Street. Unable to use the family name to brand his vehicles, Maudslay appears to have been influenced in his adoption of the "Standard" marque by the Roman standard on display in the lounge of his house.

In 1914 the Standard Motor Company went public, for a "comparatively modest" £50,000 (equivalent to £ in ). Production was increased and soon reached 750 cars per year. Maudslay was reported to be a designer of "considerable ability", and reputedly invented the side-entrance car body so familiar today, but his contribution to the development of Standard after the First World War is "difficult to assess". He relied heavily on the engineering skills of others such as John Budge and later John Black, who by 1933 was joint managing director with Maudslay. Maudslay's enthusiasm for the export market drove the company's finances into the doldrums during the 1920s, particularly in 1927 after an anticipated large Australian order, to which most of the company's production had been diverted, failed to materialise.

Maudslay married Susan Gwendolen, née Herbert, on 30 January 1908; the couple had two sons and a daughter. One of the sons, Henry, flew with the Royal Air Force in World War II, and was killed on the famous Dam Busters' Raid in May 1943.

Little is known of his private life, but "he acquired the reputation of a country gentleman and was fond of inspecting the shop floor wearing a deerstalker hat and matching overcoat." Contemporaries described him as "a gentlemanly engineer of the old school who found it difficult to adjust his ideas to the post-1918 industry". He died in Marylebone, London, on 14 December 1934 after a short illness.

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

1871 births
1934 deaths
British automotive pioneers
People from Paddington
People educated at Marlborough College
Standard Motor Company
British founders of automobile manufacturers

Reginald Walter Maudslay


Marcus Elieser Bloch (1723–1799) was a German physician and naturalist who is best known for his contribution to ichthyology through his multi-volume catalog of plates illustrating the fishes of the world. Brought up in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish family, he learned German and Latin and studied anatomy before settling in Berlin as a physician. He amassed a large natural history collection, particularly of fish specimens. He is generally considered one of the most important ichthyologists of the 18th century, and wrote many papers on natural history, comparative anatomy, and physiology.

Life

Bloch was born at Ansbach in 1723 where his father was a Torah writer and his mother owned a small shop. Educated at home in Hebrew literature he became a private tutor in Hamburg for a Jewish surgeon. Here he learned German, Latin and anatomy. He then studied medicine in Berlin and received a doctorate in 1762 from Frankfort on the Oder with a treatise on skin disorders. He then became a general practitioner in Berlin and married Breinche, daughter of "protected Jew" Ruben Joseph Rintel (1699–1765?) in 1765. This allowed him to settle in Berlin. Bloch helped found the Society of Friends of Natural Sciences in 1773 along with Moses Mendelssohn serving also as Mendelssohn's physician. He began to establish a large natural history collection and a library. He also began to publish in journals. Breinche died in 1769 and their only son died aged 21 while on a trip to Paris to sell the book on fishes that his father had written. In 1774 he married Cheile, daughter of banker Joseph Veitel Ephraim (1775–1807) and they would have a daughter who married physician Wolf Davidson (1772–1800). After the death of Cheile, he married Rahel, daughter of a Jewish social worker Jeremias Bendix (1735 -1790), and they had a son and two daughters.

Bloch became interested in fishes only in 1782 after finding fish that he could not find a name for in the works of Linnaeus. He then began to collect fishes and had fish specimens sent from around the world, including correspondents from as far as India like Johann Gerhard König and Christoph Samuel John. The collection was of nearly 1400 specimens and about 800 are now in the Bloch Cabinet of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. He began to catalog the fishes of Germany in publications from 1782 to 1784, and on fishes from abroad until 1795, printing the books with copper plate engravings made largely at his own expense. He later managed to get subscribers including the Queen and Prince of Prussia, the Prince of Saxe-Coburg, the royal families of Denmark, Sweden, Poland and the court banker Isaac Daniel Itzig. Bloch also published on medicine, writing on such topics as the waters of Pyrmont and on intestinal parasitic worms.

Bloch visited Paris in 1797 to examine the fish collections there and returned via Holland. His health became poor and he went to Carlsbad where he died of a stroke. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Lichtenstadt.

Works and legacy

Bloch is best known for his encyclopedic work in ichthyology. Between 1782 and 1795 he published his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische, a 12-volume, beautifully illustrated comprehensive work on fishes. The first three volumes describe fishes in Germany and were entitled Oeconomische Naturgeschichte der Fische Deutschlands, the remaining volumes (in 9 parts) dealt with fishes from other parts of the world and were entitled Naturgeschichte der ausländischen Fische. A French translation "Ichthyologie, ou histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des poissons" was published in 12 volumes between 1785 and 1797. His Systema Ichthologia was published posthumously by Johann G. Schneider. Bloch followed the fish systematics of Peter Artedi and Carl Linnaeus although he added new systematic characters including the presence or absence of a fifth gill, gill structure, and bony arches. He described at least 267 new species and 19 genera and several of his binomial names are still in use. Bloch's collection of about 800 surviving specimens is preserved at the Museum für Naturkunde of the Humboldt University of Berlin.

References

External links
Bloch's works at the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Gallica Illustrations de Ichtyologie ou histoire naturelle générale et particulière des Poissons text Marcus Elieser Bloch, Illustrations:Krüger, J. F. Hennig, Pater Plumier, Ludwig Schmidt, G. Bodenehr and J. F. Hennig Published 1795–1797 at the authors house in Berlin.In French
Bloch's Fishes (1782-1795) revisited - eti.uva.nl

1723 births
1799 deaths
18th-century German zoologists
Jewish biologists
German ichthyologists
German taxonomists
Jewish German scientists
People from Ansbach
People from the Principality of Ansbach
18th-century German writers
18th-century German male writers
18th-century Jewish physicians of Germany
Jewish physicians
Members of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Marcus Elieser Bloch


Hajji Dubin Abdulla İbrahim ulı (, Tatar Cyrillic: Дубин Абдулла Ибраһим улы; , Dubin Abdulla Ibragimovich; born March 26, 1941) was a Tatar television and radio newsreader, and currently, he is an ethnographer.

Born on March 26, 1941, in Astrakhan in a large family.

Dubin graduated from the faculty of theatrics of the GITIS in Moscow. Later he moved to Kazan and was a top-level news reader of Tatar television and radio broadcasting from 1961 to 1981.

Abdulla Dubin is also known as a journalist and as a historical postcards collector. He published some of his collection in original booklets in color and black-and-white, devoted to Kazan, Astrakhan, Chistopol and Elabuga.

Dubin studies regional ethnography from 1968, fights for preservation of  tumbledown historical buildings in Kazan.

In 1990 he committed the Hajj.

References

Russian reporters and correspondents
Tatar people of Russia
1941 births
Living people
People from Astrakhan
Radio in the Soviet Union
20th-century Russian journalists
Deltiologists

Abdulla Dubin


kemi Nelson was born in Lagos on the 9th of February 1956, she attended Anglican Girls Grammar School Ijube-Ode for her secondary education. For her tertiary education,she went to school of Nursing in the University College Hospital Ibadan where she qualified as a registered Nurse and midwife. She got an MBA in financial management and a Diploma in law from the Lagos State University Ojo.
Political history.
In the 1980s,kemi Nelson joined the now no longer in use National Republican Convention (NRC)during the period of General Ibrahim Babangida. She was the senatorial candidate (House Of Senate)for the Lagos West senatorial district in 1992 and was won over at the polls by Bola Ahmed Tinubu.In 1998,during the period of General Abacha,she contested the Ikeja Federal Constituency in the house of assembly,this time,as a member of UNCP. She won the election but it was cut-short by the death of General Abacha. In 1999, she joined Alliance for Democracy (AD) and from 1999-2003, she served as the Lagos State Commissioner for Women Affairs and Poverty Alleviation during the period of Ahmed Tinubu and has served as the Women Leader of Lagos State Chapter of The Progressive Congress (APC) and was later made the South West Women Leader of APC. She was the only female serving member of the Lagos State Governor's Advisory Council. She was the Executive Director of Operations of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund and before hand headed the Ministry of Establishment, Training and Job Creation.

She died on 17 July 2022.

1956 births
2022 deaths
Politicians from Lagos
Nurses

Kemi Nelson


The LaSalle City Building is the historic civic hall building in LaSalle, Illinois, United States. Completed in 1907, the hall exemplifies early 20th-century trends in city management.

History
The idea of a new city building for LaSalle, Illinois came from Walter A. Panneck, who served as mayor from 1903 to 1909. However, the city treasury did not have the funds to match Panneck's vision. To raise enough money for the structure, 450 bonds of $100 were issued, 422 of which were sold. The building was designed by Victor Andre Matteson, a relatively obscure architect who previously worked under Frost & Granger. All city departments were consolidated into this one building, a popular trend during the Progressivism movement. The building was recognized by the National Park Service with a listing on the National Register of Historic Places on August 29, 1985.

Architecture
The symmetrical two and a half story building is largely rectangular. It was built with red brick with Bedford limestone trim. Balustrades and modillions are detailed with galvanized iron and tin. The main entrance is a double door on the south, facing Second Street, while a second public entrance faces Joliet Street on the east. There is also a private entrance, used by the police department, facing an alley to the north. Fanlight windows are found over each entrance, though the exterior of each has been covered with a panel.

The first floor has a central hall plan and is home to the police department. A jail was originally part of the police wing, but has since been converted to office use. Although the police wing has been extensively modified from its original design, the public hall closely resembles the original plan. The city engineer's office is on the second floor and council chambers are on the third. A basement, originally small and intended only for a furnace, has been greatly expanded.

References

National Register of Historic Places in LaSalle County, Illinois
Colonial Revival architecture in Illinois
Government buildings completed in 1907
Buildings and structures in LaSalle County, Illinois
City and town halls on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois
City and town halls in Illinois

LaSalle City Building


Maria Antônia Gigliotti Campos Maya (born 29 June 1981 in Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian actress.

Biography and career

She is the daughter of director Wolf Maya and also an actress and director Cininha de Paula, grand-niece of comedian Chico Anysio, granddaughter of Lupe Gigliotti, second cousin of comedian and actor Nizo Neto, Marcos Palmeira and Bruno Mazzeo.

Maria started in the telenovela Cara e Coroa in 1995, where he played Nádia. This was followed by Kelly Bola one of its greatest figures in Salsa e Merengue in 1996. After the novel only came back to the novels in 2003; at the time married to actor Ernani Moraes, 25 years older than she, who is separated.

At this time three did miniseries: Hilda Furacão, A Muralha and O Quinto dos Infernos. His back was in the novels Chocolate com Pimenta where did the hypochondriac Lili, doctor's secretary Paul (played by Guilherme Piva). After he made his most prominent characters, Regininha, a lush samba Senhora do Destino, 2004. In 2006 he Sandrinha in Cobras & Lagartos.

In India – A Love Story played Inês, a girl who wore weird clothes and makeup and tried to warn his parents Melissa and Ramiro, played by Christiane Torloni and Humberto Martins, about the illness of his brother, Tarso (Bruno Gagliasso). Grandfather also helped to uncover some family secrets.

In 2009, he made a cameo appearance in Tempos de Paz, of Daniel Filho. In the same year and the following year starred in two parts, Play and A Loba de Ray-ban, in which she plays Fernanda Porto, who falls for Júlia Ferraz (Christiane Torloni).

In 2011, the novel is Aquele Beijo. In 2013 returns to the novels Amor à Vida, the plot she plays the Bolivian Alejandra.

Filmography

Television

Film

Theater

References

External links

1981 births
Living people
Actresses from Rio de Janeiro (city)
Brazilian television actresses
Brazilian telenovela actresses
Brazilian film actresses
21st-century Brazilian actresses
Brazilian LGBT actresses
Brazilian bisexual people
Bisexual actresses

Maria Maya


Bhagwanpura, also known as Baghpur, is a village in  Kurukshetra district, Haryana, India. It is an archaeological site that lies on the bank of Hakra Ghaggar channel. Situated 24 km northeast of Kurukshetra, the site is notable for showing an overlap between the late Harappan and Painted Grey Ware cultures. Painted Grey Ware is generally associated with the Vedic people, so this area can be said as the junction of two great civilizations of India.

An archaeological museum at Sheikh Chilli's Tomb complex in Kurukshetra established by the Archaeological Survey of India consists of archaeological finds like a humped bull-shaped carnelian pendant, terracotta beads and semi-precious stones from sites in Bhagwanpura.

Overview

Bhagwanpura shows one period of habitation, with two sub-periods:
Sub-period IA: late Harappan culture (c. 1700–1300 BCE)
Sub-period IB: overlap between late Harappan and PGW culture (c. 1400–1000 BCE)

During sub-period IA, the late Harappan people lived in houses of burnt brick and built mud platforms to protect against flooding. During sub-period IB, the late Harappan pottery continued, but a new form of pottery (the PGW) was introduced. Initially, the PGW people lived in thatched wattle-and-daub huts, but later they began to build mud-walled houses. One large house had thirteen rooms and a courtyard, and may have belonged to a chief. Towards the end of sub-period IB, the PGW people began to use burnt bricks, but no complete structures have been found. During both phases, cattle, sheep, and pig were domesticated, but horse bones have only been found in sub-period IB. Six oval structures from this sub-period may have had some ritualistic use.

Some scholars believe that the burnt bricks (square, rectangular, and wedge-shaped) from sub-period IB were not in fact used for building houses, but for the construction of Vedic fire altars.

See also
Indus Valley Civilisation
Painted Grey Ware culture
Vedic period
Kuru Kingdom

References

Indus Valley civilisation sites
Archaeological sites in Haryana
Sarasvati River
Indo-Aryan archaeological sites

Bhagwanpura, Haryana


The Eugene Public Library is a municipal public library in Eugene, Oregon, United States. It has been in four different buildings since 1898.

History
In 1898, a group of women founded the Fortnightly Club and opened a private reading room in a store building in downtown Eugene.  Eugene Public Library was established as a tax-supported entity in 1904. In 1906, Oregon's first Carnegie Library was established on the corner of Willamette Street and East 11th Avenue. In 1959, a new library building opened at the corner of West 13th Avenue and Olive Street. This remained the main library building until it was moved to its current location at West 10th Avenue and Charnelton Street in 2002. At this time, the library already had two branches—Bethel (West Eugene) and Sheldon (Cal Young neighborhood)—that had opened in 2000.

In 2003 the new library building won first place in the American Institute of Architects of Southwest Oregon's public architecture awards. The library received a $1.1 million bequest in 2009 from the estate of Frederick "Doc" Rankin, a Eugene doctor and property owner who died in 2004.

Current building
The library's latest building and its underground parking garage have been described as "energy efficient, low maintenance, and filled with daylight." The new building is four times larger than the older one.

The number of users of the library approximately tripled after the new building opened, and then further increased following the economic downturn of 2008. In addition, its collection of items has had a net increase since 2005, as well as its circulation and visits.

References

External links
Official site
"Public libraries grow to support community needs": Daily Journal of Commerce

1898 establishments in Oregon
Buildings and structures in Eugene, Oregon
Education in Eugene, Oregon
Library buildings completed in 1959
Library buildings completed in 2002
Public libraries in Oregon
Libraries established in 1898

Eugene Public Library


Gagauzca : Besarabiya ; Rumence : Basarabia ; Rusça : Бессарабия, Bessarabiya ; Türkçe : Besarabya ; Ukraynaca : Бесса , ра́ая басарія ) _ _ _ _ _ Doğu Avrupa'dadoğuda Dinyester nehri ve batıda Prut nehri ile çevrilidir. Besarabya'nın yaklaşık üçte ikisi, güney kıyı bölgesini kapsayan Ukrayna Budjak bölgesi ve kuzeyde küçük bir alanı kaplayan Ukrayna Chernivtsi Oblastı'nın bir kısmı ile günümüz Moldova'sında yer almaktadır.

Osmanlı-Rus Savaşı'nın (1806-1812) ve ardından gelen Bükreş Barışı'nın ardından, bir Osmanlı vasalı olan Boğdan Prensliği'nin doğu kısımları, daha önce doğrudan Osmanlı yönetimi altındaki bazı bölgelerle birlikte İmparatorluk Rusya'ya devredildi. Satın alma, İmparatorluğun Avrupa'daki son toprak kazanımları arasındaydı. Yeni edinilen topraklar, daha önce Dinyester ve Tuna nehirleri arasındaki güney ovaları için kullanılan bir adı benimseyerek, Rus İmparatorluğu'nun Besarabya Valiliği olarak örgütlendi. 1856'da Kırım Savaşı'nın ardından Besarabya'nın güney bölgeleri Moldovya yönetimine iade edildi; Boğdan'ın Eflak ile birliğinin sonucu olan Romanya, 1878'de, bu bölgeleri Dobruca ile değiştirmesi için baskı altında kaldığında, tüm bölge üzerinde Rus egemenliği yeniden tesis edildi.

1917'de, Rus Devrimi'nin ardından, bölge kendisini önerilen bir federatif Rus devletinin özerk bir cumhuriyeti olan Moldavya Demokratik Cumhuriyeti olarak oluşturdu. 1917'nin sonlarında ve 1918'in başlarındaki Bolşevik ajitasyon, görünüşte bölgeyi pasifize etmek için Rumen Ordusunun müdahalesiyle sonuçlandı. Kısa bir süre sonra, parlamenter meclis bağımsızlığını ve ardından Romanya Krallığı ile birlik ilan etti.  Bununla birlikte, bu eylemlerin yasallığı, en belirgin şekilde bölgeyi Romanya tarafından işgal edilen bir bölge olarak gören Sovyetler Birliği tarafından tartışıldı.

1940 yılında, Molotov-Ribbentrop Paktı aracılığıyla Nazi Almanyası'nın onayını sağladıktan sonra, Sovyetler Birliği, savaş tehdidi altındaki Romanya'ya,  Kızıl Ordu'nun girmesine ve Sovyetler Birliği'nin bölgeyi ilhak etmesine izin vererek Besarabya'dan çekilmesi için baskı yaptı. Bölge resmen Sovyetler Birliği'ne entegre edildi: Çekirdek, Moldova SSR'sini oluşturmak için Moldovya ÖSSC'nin bazı kısımlarını birleştirirken, Besarabya'nın kuzeyinde ve güneyinde Slav çoğunluklarının yaşadığı bölgeler Ukrayna SSR'sine devredildi. Eksen hizalı Romanya, 1941'de München Operasyonunun başarısıyla bölgeyi yeniden ele geçirdi. Sovyetler Birliği'nin Nazi işgali sırasında, ancak savaşın gidişatı döndüğünde 1944'te kaybetti. 1947'de Prut boyunca uzanan Sovyet-Romanya sınırı, II. Dünya Savaşı'nı sona erdiren Paris Antlaşması ile uluslararası olarak tanındı.

Sovyetler Birliği'nin dağılması sürecinde, Moldova ve Ukrayna SSR'leri 1991'de bağımsızlıklarını ilan ettiler ve Besarabya'nın mevcut bölümünü korurken Moldova ve Ukrayna'nın modern devletleri oldular. 1990'ların başındaki kısa bir savaşın ardından, Transdinyester'de Pridnestrovian Boğdan Cumhuriyeti ilan edildi ve yetkisini Dinyester nehrinin sağ kıyısındaki Bender belediyesine de genişletti. Güney Besarabya'daki Gagauzların yaşadığı bölgelerin bir kısmı, 1994 yılında Moldova içinde özerk bir bölge olarak örgütlendi.

Etymology and usage of the name
According to the traditional explanation, the name Bessarabia (Basarabia in Romanian) derives from the Wallachian Basarab dynasty, who allegedly ruled over the southern part of the area in the 14th century. However, some scholars question this, claiming that:

 the name was initially an exonym applied by Western cartographers
 it was first used in local sources only in the late 17th century;
 the idea that it referred to Moldavian regions near the Black Sea was explicitly rejected as a cartographic confusion by the early Moldavian chronicler Miron Costin, and;
 the confusion may have been caused by medieval Western cartographers, misinterpreting contemporaneous Polish references to Wallachia as Bessarabia as referring to a separate land between Wallachia and Moldavia.

According to Dimitrie Cantemir, the name Bessarabia originally applied only to the part of the territory south of the Upper Trajanic Wall, i.e. an area only slightly bigger than present-day Budjak.

Geography
Main articles: Prehistory of Moldavia and Bronze Age in Romania

People have inhabited the territory of Bessarabia for thousands of years. Cucuteni–Trypillia culture flourished between the 6th and 3rd millennium BC.

Ancient times[edit]
See also: Dacians, Dacia, and Free Dacians

In Antiquity the region was inhabited by Thracians, as well as for shorter periods by Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and Celts, specifically by tribes such as the Costoboci, Carpi, Britogali, Tyragetae, and Bastarnae. In the 6th century BC, Greek settlers established the colony of Tyras along the Black Sea coast and traded with the locals. Celts also settled in the southern parts of Bessarabia, their main city being Aliobrix.

The first polity that is believed to have included the whole of Bessarabia was the Dacian polity of Burebista in the 1st century BC. After his death, the polity was divided into smaller pieces, and the central parts were unified in the Dacian kingdom of Decebalus in the 1st century AD. This kingdom was defeated by the Roman Empire in 106. Southern Bessarabia was included in the empire even before that, in 57 AD, as part of the Roman province Moesia Inferior, but it was secured only when the Dacian Kingdom was defeated in 106. The Romans built defensive earthen walls in Southern Bessarabia (e.g. Lower Trajan Wall) to defend the Scythia Minor province against invasions. Except for the Black Sea shore in the south, Bessarabia remained outside direct Roman control; the myriad of tribes there are called by modern historians Free Dacians. The 2nd to the 5th centuries also saw the development of the Chernyakhov culture.

In 270, the Roman authorities began to withdraw their forces south of the Danube, especially from the Roman Dacia, due to the invading Goths and Carpi. The Goths, a Germanic tribe, poured into the Roman Empire from the lower Dniepr River, through the southern part of Bessarabia (Budjak steppe), which due to its geographic position and characteristics (mainly steppe), was swept by various nomadic tribes for many centuries. In 378, the area was overrun by the

Annexation by the Russian Empire[edit]
Main article: Bessarabia in the Russian Empire
The Moldavian (later Romanian)–Russian boundary between 1856/1857 and 1878
By the Treaty of Bucharest of May 28, 1812—concluding the Russo-Turkish War, 1806-1812—the Ottoman Empire ceded the land between the Pruth and the Dniester, including both Moldavian and Turkish territories, to the Russian Empire. That entire region was then called Bessarabia.

In 1814, the first German settlers arrived and mainly settled in the southern parts, and Bessarabian Bulgarians began settling in the region too, founding towns such as Bolhrad. Between 1812 and 1846, the Bulgarian and Gagauz population migrated to the Russian Empire via the River Danube, after living many years under oppressive Ottoman rule, and settled in southern Bessarabia. Turkic-speaking tribes of the Nogai horde also inhabited the Budjak Region (in Turkish Bucak) of southern Bessarabia from the 16th to 18th centuries but were totally driven out prior to 1812.

Administratively, Bessarabia became an oblast of the Russian Empire in 1818, and a guberniya in 1873.

By the Treaty of Adrianople that concluded the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-1829 the entire Danube Delta was added to the Bessarabian oblast.[citation needed] According to Vasile Stoica, emissary of the Romanian government to the United States, in 1834, the Romanian language was banned from schools and government facilities, despite 80% of the population speaking the language. This would eventually lead to the banning of Romanian in churches, media, and books. According to the same author, those who protested the banning of Romanian could be sent to Siberia.

Southern Bessarabia returned to Moldavia[edit]
At the end of the Crimean War, in 1856, by the Treaty of Paris, Southern Bessarabia (organised as the Cahul and Ismail counties, with the Bolgrad county split from the latter in 1864) was returned to Moldavia, causing the Russian Empire to lose access to the Danube river.

In 1859, Moldavia and Wallachia united to form the Romanian United Principalities (Romania), which included the southern part of Bessarabia.

The railway Chișinău-Iași was opened on June 1, 1875, in preparation for the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) and the Eiffel Bridge was opened on April 21 [O.S. April 9] 1877, just three days before the outbreak of the war. The Romanian War of Independence was fought in 1877–78, with the help of the Russian Empire as an ally. Northern Dobruja was awarded to Romania for its role in the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War, and as compensation for the transfer of Southern Bessarabia.

Early 20th century
The Kishinev pogrom took place in the capital of Bessarabia on April 6, 1903, after local newspapers published articles inciting the public to act against Jews; 47 or 49 Jews were killed, 92 severely wounded and 700 houses destroyed. The anti-Semitic newspaper Бессарабец (Bessarabetz, meaning "Bessarabian"), published by Pavel Krushevan, insinuated that local Jews killed a Russian boy. Another newspaper, Свет (Lat. Svet, meaning "World" or Russian for "Light"), used the age-old blood libel against the Jews (alleging that the boy had been killed to use his blood in preparation of matzos).

After the 1905 Russian Revolution, a Romanian nationalist movement started to develop in Bessarabia. In the chaos brought by the Russian revolution of October 1917, a National Council (Sfatul Țării) was established in Bessarabia, with 120 members elected from Bessarabia by some political and professional organizations and 10 elected from Transnistria (the left bank of Dniester where Moldovans and Romanians accounted for less than a third and the majority of the population was Ukrainian. See Demographics of Transdniestria).

The Rumcherod Committee (Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Romanian Front, Black Sea Fleet and Odessa Military District) proclaimed itself the supreme power in Bessarabia.

On the pretext of securing supply lines against raids by Bolsheviks and armed bandits, members of the Moldavian legislative council Sfatul Țării and the Entente Powers requested military assistance from Romania, and the Romanian Army crossed the republic's border on January 23 [O.S. January 10] 1918; following several skirmishes with Moldovan and Bolshevik troops, the occupation of the whole region was completed in early March. The occupation of Bessarabia by the Romanians was not universally welcomed, and the members of the Bessarabian government denied that the Romanian troops had ever been invited to occupy the republic.

After Ukraine issued its Fourth Universal, breaking ties with Bolshevik Russia and proclaiming a sovereign Ukrainian state, Sfatul Țării declared Bessarabia's independence on January 24, 1918, as the Moldavian Democratic Republic.

Unification with Romania[edit]
Main article: Union of Bessarabia with Romania

On March 5 [O.S. 20 February] 1918, in a secret agreement signed along the Treaty of Buftea, the German Empire allowed Romania to annex Bessarabia in exchange for free passage of German troops toward Ukraine. The county councils of Bălți, Soroca and Orhei were the earliest to ask for unification of the Moldavian Democratic Republic with the Kingdom of Romania, and on April 9 [O.S. March 27] 1918, in the presence of the Romanian Army, The Country Council, called "Sfatul Țării", voted in favour of the union, with the following conditions:

 The Country Council would undertake an agrarian reform, which the Romanian Government would accept.
 Bessarabia would remain autonomous, with its own diet, the Country Council, elected democratically
 The Country Council would vote for local budgets, control the councils of the zemstva and cities, and appoint the local administration
 Conscription would be done on a territorial basis
 Local laws and the form of administration could be changed only with the approval of local representatives
 The rights of minorities had to be respected
 Two Bessarabian representatives would be part of the Romanian government
 Bessarabia would send to the Romanian Parliament a number of representatives equal to the proportion of its population
 All elections must involve a direct, equal, secret, and universal vote
 Freedom of speech and of belief must be guaranteed in the constitution
 All individuals who had committed felonies for political reasons during the revolution would be amnestied.

86 deputies voted in support, three voted against and 36 abstained. The Romanian prime minister at the time, Alexandru Marghiloman, would later admit that the union was decided in Bucharest and Iași, the seats of the Romanian government.

The first condition, the agrarian reform, was debated and approved in November 1918. The Country Council also decided to remove the other conditions and made unification with Romania unconditional. The legality of this vote was considered highly debatable since the meeting had not been publicly announced, there was no quorum (only 44 of the 125 members took part in it, mostly Moldavian conservatives), and then the Country Council voted for its self-dissolution, preventing the protests of the Moldavians and minorities members who had not participated in the parliamentary session from being taken into account.

In the autumn of 1919, elections for the Romanian Constituent Assembly were held in Bessarabia; 90 deputies and 35 senators were chosen. On December 20, 1919, these men voted, along with the representatives of Romania's other regions, to ratify the unification acts that had been approved by the Country Council and the National Congresses in Transylvania and Bukovina.

The union was recognized by France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan in the Treaty of Paris of 1920. However, the treaty never came into force, as Japan did not ratify it. The United States refused to sign the treaty on the grounds that Russia was not represented at the Conference. The US also considered Bessarabia a territory under Romanian occupation, rather than Romanian territory, despite existing political and economic relations between the US and Romania. Soviet Russia (and later, the USSR) did not recognize the union, and by 1924, after its demands for a regional plebiscite were declined by Romania for the second time, declared Bessarabia to be Soviet territory under foreign occupation. On all Soviet maps, Bessarabia was highlighted as territory not belonging to Romania.

Aftermath[edit]
A Provisional Workers' & Peasants' Government of Bessarabia was founded on May 5, 1919, in exile at Odessa, by the Bolsheviks.

On May 11, 1919, the Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed as an autonomous part of Russian SFSR, but was abolished by the military forces of Poland and France in September 1919 (see Polish–Soviet War). After the victory of Bolshevist Russia in the Russian Civil War, the Ukrainian SSR was created in 1922, and in 1924 the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was established on a strip of Ukrainian land on the west bank of Dniester where Moldovans and Romanians accounted for less than a third and the relative majority of the population was Ukrainian. (See Demographics of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic).

Historiography[edit]
Svetlana Suveică considers that historical discourse regarding interwar Bessarabia was heavily influenced by the political association of the authors, and sought mainly to argue for or against the legality of Romanian rule in Bessarabia. The impact of the various reforms on the progress of the province was mostly ignored.

Romanian historiography, for the most part, consistently sought to demonstrate the legitimacy of the regime established after the Union of Bessarabia with Romania. During the interwar period, Romanian historians countered Soviet historians' description of it as the establishment of an "occupation regime". The agrarian reform, considered one of the most radical in Europe (an idea also supported by Western historians), was appreciated as having a positive role, emphasizing the national emancipation of the Romanian peasantry, while the modernization of agriculture was presented as a complex phenomenon, which also required further mechanism to support the new owner. However, agriculture was ignored by the state, and the new owners were greatly affected by the lack of credit, Romanian authors of the time suggested various ways this situation could have been overcome. Ultimately, as the state failed to create an adequate agricultural policy, by the end of the 1920 authors were hoping progress could be made through private initiative. Romanian authors also paid particular attention to the unification of administrative legislation, norms, and principles of administrative law, as well as their application in Romanian practice. The institute of the zemstvo was regarded by some of them as the most democratic form of government, and its dissolution by the Romanian authorities was deplored; authors such as Onisifor Ghibu expressed a critical view on the relation between Romanian administrative personnel from outside Bessarabia and the locals, as well as the general structure of the administrative corps.

During the Communist period, Romanian historians initially treated the reforms applied after World War I mainly from social class perspectives. Starting with the 1960s, the first studies that mentioned the existence of a "Bessarabian historical problem" appeared. From the second half of the 1970s, studies on the agrarian reform considered that while this led to a "natural and rational distribution of agricultural property", it also led to fragmentation of agricultural land. This made the practice of intensive agriculture difficult, since peasants had reduced opportunity to purchase agricultural equipment. Towards the end of the Communist period, the two interwar concepts of development and modernization were re-embraced.

After the fall of Communism, Romanian historiography treated Bessarabia mainly in the context of Romanian nation-building, seen as the main issue affecting Greater Romania; authors focused mainly on issues related to the general and specific context of Bessarabia after the Union, the state's efforts for social-political and economic integration, and cultural development of Bessarabia. The internal and external factors that determined the specifics of the province's integration into the Romanian common framework are also of interest. Romanian authors mainly blamed the lasting effects of Russian domination and the destabilizing role of Soviet Russia (USSR) for the malfunctioning of the Romanian administration, with some also pointing to the difficult and non-uniform character of the integration generated by the non-uniform character of the development of the provinces until 1918, of a different degree of their adaptability to the new conditions. The modernization interwar period is also seen as the third phase of a continuous process, begun in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and brutally interrupted by the establishment of Communism. In this context, some authors consider the comparative studies of the interwar and post-Communist periods in different fields as particularly current.

Soviet historiography considered the changes that took place in interwar Bessarabia expressed were directed either towards strengthening the political, economical, and social position of the bourgeoisie, to the detriment of the peasantry, or towards creating a favourable position for the Romanian population, to the detriment of the national minorities; Soviet authors thus reportedly rejected the notion that any modernization and progress took place in the region during Romanian rule. The transformations that took place on different levels of the Bessarabian society at that time were treated from a social class and/or ethnopolitical positions; Svetlana Suveică states "the writings from the Soviet period, directly determined by the interference of politics in historical science, alternated the ideas regarding the "Moldovan" nation and the national identity, with severe condemnations of the Romanian interwar period". In Suveică's opinion, the conception of Soviet historiography was based on distorted facts that would serve as "indisputable arguments" for the establishment of an illegal "occupation" regime. According to Wim P. van Meurs "the legitimation of the political regime has been the main function of (the Soviet) historiography and such a legitimation has usually been based on a number of historical myths". The discussion of the social-economic and politico-administrative situation in the region was also closely related to the Romanian-Soviet conflictual relations of the 1960s and 1970s, during which both communist countries treated the Bessarabian problem for political purposes.

The presence of the ideological factor in writing the history of Bessarabia was manifested itself not only at the central level, but also at the level of the historiography of Soviet Moldavia. It was not until the second half of the '80s that the Moldovan historiography raised the issue of the Soviet political and ideological pressures.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Moldovan historiography, largely marked by the public identity discourse, deals with the problems of the interwar Bessarabian history, depending on the context. On the one hand, the supporters of the idea of Moldovan statehood reject the option of modernization and progress of Bessarabia after the Union with Romania while, on the other hand, the historians who, starting from the idea of the Romanian character of Bessarabia, and using new sources, "contribute to the in-depth knowledge of the integrating and modernizing processes that marked the history of the (Bessarabian) land in the interwar period". This ongoing controversy highlights the two antagonistic geopolitical tendencies present in the contemporary Moldovan historiography: the pro-East current versus the pro-West current.

The Western historiography pointed out that the reforms at the beginning of Romania's rule were mainly directed at easing the social tensions existing across Easter Europe and were, therefore, similar to the ones taking place elsewhere in the region. In the case of the agrarian reform, G. Clenton Logio states that the Romanians were pressed into legislating it, as expropriation had begun before the Union and there was the danger that Bessarabians would undo this act; he notes that no planning took place regarding the effects of the reform and the problems of the peasantry were ignored, transforming the latter in "a numerous and profitable mass of clients for the banks". According to the analysis Western authors, the reform only changed the distribution of the land, and not agricultural policies; as a result of the economical and social policies of the Romanian governments, small and medium-sized farms remained unprofitable, while the large farms not affected by the reform also lost their economic role. Western authors also criticized the administrative corps of Bessarabia - "an unstable and corrupt stratum" - observing that transfer of administrative personnel from Romania to Bessarabia was regarded as a severe punishment, and the clerks affected generally sought personal enrichment; the local administration was also considered rigid and unwilling to reform. In general, Western historiography analyzed the modernization of Bessarabia in a general Romanian context in relation to the previous Russian period, as well as the uneven and not so fast modernization process, determined by both internal and external factors

Overview[edit]
According to Vladimir Solonar and Vladimir Bruter, Bessarabia under Romanian rule experienced low population growth due to high mortality (highest in Romania and one of the highest in Europe) as well as emigration; Bessarabia was also characterized by economic stagnation and high unemployment. Access to social services declined after the abolition of the zemstvos in the early 1920s, as these had previously provided local autonomy in managing education and public health. In the late 1930s, the Bessarabian population had among the highest incidences of several major infectious diseases and some of the highest mortality rates from these diseases.

According to Dan Dungaciu, the only European modernization process of Bessarabia was carried out during the Romanian interwar period, despite the all unfavorable domestic and international conditions (post-war recession, actions backed by the Soviet Union, worldwide Great Depression). Gheorghe Duca considers that, in terms of science, economy, art, political and social life, Bessarabia made considerable progress in the interwar period.

Nicolae Enciu appreciates that, through the political, social-economic, and cultural modernization, the interwar period meant a progress of the Romanian society, with beneficial effects in all its historical regions. At the same time, the interwar period also experienced failures, being too short to be able to produce radical transformations, in order to reduce the economic and social polarization.

Politics[edit]
According to Wim P. van Meurs, after 1918 Bessarabia remained for a long time in a state of emergency, under a military administration, due to border incidents and agitation among the peasantry and the minorities. Strict censorship was imposed in order to restrain Bolshevik propaganda. Three major revolts or Soviet raids took place in the province during the first decade of Romanian rule. In January 1919, local peasants, with support from across the Dniester, rebelled against the Romanian army in the area of Hotin. A similar uprising took place later that year in Tighina. While in the first case Soviet participation is not documented, the latter was probably a Soviet raid, though van Meurs indicates it was most likely a local initiative not coordinated with the central government in Moscow. The longest-lasting rebellion took place for several weeks in 1924 in the area of Tatarbunary when the local population was instigated by agitators from the Soviet Union and proclaimed a Bessarabian Soviet Republic. In all cases, the rebellions were brutally suppressed by the Romanian army, which at times fielded artillery against the rebels.

According to Anatol Petrencu, during the most of the Romanian period, Bessarabia benefited by democracy, with a multiparty and a modern electoral system, based on the 1923 Constitution and laws. In November 1919, Romania elected the first post-war parliament based on the proportional representation of the mandates according to the number of the population. As of mid 1919, the population of Bessarabia was estimated at around 2 million. With a voter turnout of 72.2%, the Bessarabians elected and sent to the Romanian Parliament 90 deputies and 37 senators.

According to Charles King, in Romania "the budding democracy [...] was soon crushed beneath the weight of corruption, court intrigues, and right-wing reaction". The same author notes that corrupt and heavy-handed Romanian administrators were especially prevalent in the region, and the Siguranța, the Romanian secret police, conducted extensive surveillance among the minorities and regarded Transnistrian refugees and Bessarabian students as potential Bolshevik agents. This resulted in "a sense among locals that Bessarabia had been occupied by Romania rather than united with". Russians, in particular, were regarded as "Bolsheviks in disguise", with their churches and libraries closed down or Romanianized.

Economy[edit]
At the beginning of World War I, around 80% of the population worked in agriculture. While the Sfatul Țării envisioned distributing land freely to the peasants, Romanian pressure resulted in a significant modification of the plans, bringing the reform more in line with similar ones taking place in the Old Kingdom and Transylvania. While more radical than elsewhere, as it provided lower payments, lower limits for land exempt from expropriation and larger plots, the Romanian land reform also reverted some of the ad-hoc land distribution that had taken place during the Russian Revolution, raising discontent among the peasantry. Thus, of the 1.5 million dessiatin (40% of the agricultural land) held by the large landowners in 1917, more than one third (38.6%) was distributed to peasants, another third was restored to its previous owners, while the rest became state property and was to a large degree later awarded to officers of the Romanian army, officials and clergy. A significant number of plots were awarded to Romanians immigrants from Wallachia and Western Moldavia, while Romanian offices who married Bessarabian women were eligible to receive 100 hectares. Though the reform set the lot at 6 hectares, more than two-thirds of the peasant households received less than 5 hectares each, and, as of 1931, 367.8 thousand peasant families were still landless. The average size of the peasant household further dropped after the land reform due to land division among heirs.

According to Alla Skvortsova, while the reform stimulated the development of commodity farming in the countryside and expanded the market for industrial products, it failed to produce the expected results. The peasants had to pay for the land they received during the following 20 years, there was little to no state support provided for them to acquire technical equipment required for the development of successful farms and credit was only accessible to the more prosperous among them and therefore insignificant overall. The region also lacked qualified specialists and lagged behind in infrastructure, as the government had few resources and other priorities. The main factors which impeded the creation of a prosperous peasant class were the payments for land redemption, peasant debts, and taxes, lack of access to the traditional Russian market, difficulties to break into the Romanian and European agricultural market and frequent droughts (1921, 1924, 1925, 1927–28 and 1935). Winemaking, one of the mainstays of the local economy, was particularly affected by the external policy of the Romanian state: the most favoured nation status awarded to France brought inexpensive French wine to the local market, access to the Soviet market was blocked, while exports to the traditional markets in Poland were hindered by the trade war started in 1926.

According to Alla Skvortsova, the peasant situation was further aggravated by the Great Depression in Romania, with prices for agricultural products dropping catastrophically and not recovering until the end of the decade. While only 2.8% of the national agricultural credit was directed by the National Bank of Romania towards Bessarabia in 1936, by 1940 70% of the peasants were in debt to the large landowners and moneylenders. In order to pay debts, many of the poorer peasants had to sell their livestock and even their land. Failure to pay the redemption payments for 2.5 years also resulted in the land reverting to state property; thus, by 1938, in the district of Soroca only a quarter of the peasant households had retained their allotment. By 1939 farms of up to 5 hectares throughout the region had lost a seventh of their land, while farms with more than 10 hectares had increased their land by 26%. According to a study of the new Soviet administration, in June 1940 7.3% of the peasant households in the Bessarabian regions of the Moldavian SSR were completely landless, 38.15% had up to 3 hectares (an average of 1.7 hectares per lot) and 22.4% had 3 to 5 hectares (an average of 2.6 hectares per one household), i.e. more than two-thirds of the peasant households were farm laborers and poor peasants. Better off was the middle peasantry, which owned 5 to 10 hectares, and constituted 22.73% of peasant farms. The rest, constituting 9.4% of the farms, owned more than 10 hectares each, but held under their control 36% of peasant land, i.e. more than all small farms taken together. The 818 large landowners held an average of 100 hectares each, while institutional owners (the state, churches, and monasteries) held another 59 thousand hectares. About 54% of peasant households had no livestock, about two-thirds had no horse, a little more than a sixth had one horse each, and only 13.2% had two or more working horses. In the whole of Bessarabian region of the Moldavian SSR there were at the beginning of Soviet administration only 219 obsolete tractors, mostly owned by larger farms and used primarily as threshing engines. With little serviceable equestrian equipment, tillage, sowing, and harvesting of all crops were mostly carried out manually. Throughout the interwar era, Bessarabia witnessed several negative phenomena: further social stratification in the countryside, deepening poverty, lowering yields, worsening of the structure of crops grown, reduction of the total agricultural production. The number of cattle fell by 26% between 1926 and 1938, the number of sheep by 5%, the number of pigs by 14%. Average grain yield also decreased from 1920/1925 to 1935/1939 from 850 kg per hectare to 800 kg. The area used in wine-making grew by 15,000 hectares between 1930 and 1938. However, wine quality dropped, as slightly over 80% of the vineyards were planted with lower quality grape varieties. According to V.I. Tsaranov, adding to the lack of land, small plots, poor crop yields, unemployment was also high among rural residents, with around 550 thousand recorded in June 1940.

According to Alla Skvortsova, the Romanian government, either directly or through the banking system, encouraged the development of industry in the areas of prewar Romania, while hindering the process in new territories. As a consequence, even Bessarabian entrepreneurs preferred to invest their capital in those areas instead of using it within the region. Local industry faced fierce competition from larger Romanian companies, which had access to preferential rail tariffs, limited credit to local entrepreneurs, and flooded the local market with cheaper industrial goods produced in Romania or imported from abroad. Nevertheless, some new small-scale industrial enterprises were established in the 1920s, using primarily local raw materials and producing for the local market. The total engine power rose from 7.8 thousand hp in 1925 to 12.2 thousand in 1929. Although the number of industrial enterprises more than doubled after 1918, small semi-handicraft production prevailed, seldomly using hired labor: in 1930 there were an average of only 2.4 employees per enterprise. During the 22 years of Romanian rule, only one large enterprise was built in Bessarabia: the Bălți sugar plant.

According to Alla Skvortsova, not all new enterprises survived for long, and the Great Depression had a particularly strong impact on the region, many of the companies going bankrupt or closing in 1929–1933. Governmental policy, influenced by the banking system and the industrial cartels, prevented a rebound, the industry of the Old Kingdom again receiving preferential treatment. The main factors that affected the development of Bessarabia in the 1930s were severe credit restrictions, increases in transport tariffs and customs restrictions, and special tax policies. The tax burden was notably high, with enterprises required to fully provide the assigned tax agent with housing, heating, lighting, and office space. Bessarabia was reduced mostly to a supplier of raw materials and a market for industrial goods of Romanian or foreign origin. By the end of the 1930s, the only industrial sectors that managed to rebound were the food and woodworking industries, the rest witnessing either stagnation or a decrease compared to pre-Depression levels. Most industrial facilities in the food industry worked significantly below their installed capacity even in prosperous years such as 1937. Several large factories, such as the Basarabeasca, Cetatea Albă, Florești and Tighina, railway workshops, the Cetatea Albă and Chișinău textile and knitwear factories and the Cetatea Albă canning factory and distillery were dismantled and relocated to the Old Kingdom by 1938. Between 1929 and 1937, fixed capital in the industry dropped by 10%, and the number of industrial workers in Bessarabia dropped from 5,400 in 1925 to 3,500 in 1937, while their overall number in Romania had increased by almost 27% during the same period. Between 1926 and 1937 the share of the food industry in the total production of large manufacturing industries increased from 77.1% to 92.4%, with sharp decreases observed in sectors with higher added value, such as the metalworking, textile and leather processing industries. Even so, the food industry failed to fulfill local needs; most industries heavily relied on manual labor and primitive technologies. Electricity production in Chișinău, Bessarabia's center and Romania's second-largest city, recorded in 1925 at 4.47 million kWh, only increased by 6.7% during the following decade, lagging far behind other Romanian cities: 572.3% in Galați, 238.2% in Bucharest, and over 101% in Iași. By the end of the 1930s, only one in seven Bessarabians had access to electricity, compared to one in four among the general Romanian population.

The Romanian administration carried out many projects aimed at improving the infrastructure of the province to introduce European gauge and reorient it towards Romania. The total length of the railway lines in Bessarabia increased only by 78 km (from 1140 in 1918 to 1218 in 1940). Local businessmen remained dissatisfied with the pace of the construction of new railways (the Chișinău-Căinari was the only one built anew) and the closure of a number of lines. Road infrastructure was also improved, as new highways and bridges over the Prut were built, while part of the existing roads were repaired and paved, increasing the length of highways from 150 to 754 km. However, most other roads remained impassable during rainy periods. Shipping on the Dniester was closed, and was never established on the Prut. In the 1930s, new airports were built, telephone lines were laid out, and radio transmitters were installed; nevertheless, the region still lagged behind Transylvania and the Old Kingdom.

According to Alla Skvortsova, overall, the share of Bessarabian enterprises in the Romanian industry fell between 1919 and 1937 from 9% to 5.7%, while the number of enterprises employing at least 20 employees dropping from 262 to 196. The share of investments in Bessarabian industry also fell from 0.3% in 1923 to 0.1% in 1936. Sociologist T. Al. Ştirbu observed, commenting on the Romanian government's apparent long-term economical plans, that "Bessarabia can only be considered as a reserve of labor and cheap bread for the industry of the rest of the country". In a 1938 review, the Bessarabian Federation of Chambers of Commerce noted that "the decline in industrial production in Bessarabia hinders the rational processing of local raw materials, thereby turning our province into a colony for industry in the rest of the country". According to V.I. Tsaranov, throughout the period, industrial workers in the region faced long working hours (up to fourteen per day), lack of proper safety measures, unsanitary conditions, the perspective of unemployment and a general decrease in the standard of living: the real wage of a Chișinău worker dropped 60% between 1913 and 1937.

Education[edit]
In 1919, Bessarabia became the Romanian region with the highest illiteracy rate. Although the Romanian/Moldovan population was the largest, no Romanian language school operated in Bessarabia before 1918. As a result, among them, only 10.5% of men and 1.77% of women were literate. By 1930, although Bessarabia continued to be the region with the most illiterate people in Romania, the number of literates doubled, to 38,1% of the total population. In the 1920-1938 period, the number of primary schools increased from 1,747 to 2,718, and the number of students from 136,172 to 346,747. In 1940, there were also 24 gymnasiums and middle schools and 26 high schools. Despite a large number of minorities (over 870,000 Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews), education in minority languages was curtailed: private schools were allowed to function after 1925 only if the instruction was in Romanian and, by 1938, there were no state- sponsored Russian or Ukrainian schools and only one each in private hands. In 1939, after the German and Soviet attacks on Poland, the government reverted on its earlier policy and decided to reintroduce minority language classes in state schools and allow a greater degree of cultural expression for the Slavic minorities, in an effort to improve its image among the local population.

Also, in the interwar period, the foundations were laid for the first higher education institutions in Bessarabia. In 1926, the Faculty of Theology was established in Chișinău, followed by the National Conservatory in 1928, and the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences in 1933. The two faculties were sections of the University of Iași, in pre-war Romania.

The Soviet Union regained the region in 1944, and the Red Army occupied Romania. By 1947, the Soviets had imposed a communist government in Bucharest, which was friendly and obedient towards Moscow. The Soviet occupation of Romania lasted until 1958. The Romanian communist regime did not openly raise the matter of Bessarabia or Northern Bukovina in its diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. At least 100,000 people died in a post-war famine in Moldavia.

Between 1969 and 1971, a clandestine National Patriotic Front was established by several young intellectuals in Chișinău, totaling over 100 members, vowing to fight for the establishment of a Moldavian Democratic Republic, its secession from the Soviet Union and union with Romania.

In December 1971, following an informative note from Ion Stănescu [ro], the President of the Council of State Security of the Romanian Socialist Republic, to Yuri Andropov, the chief of KGB, three of the leaders of the National Patriotic Front, Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgar, Gheorghe Ghimpu and Valeriu Graur, as well as a fourth person, Alexandru Soltoianu, the leader of a similar clandestine movement in northern Bukovina (Bucovina), were arrested and later sentenced to long prison terms.

Rise of independent Moldova[edit]
Main articles: Moldova and History of Moldova

With the weakening of the Soviet Union, in February 1988, the first non-sanctioned demonstrations were held in Chișinău. At first pro-Perestroika, they soon turned anti-government and demanded official status for the Romanian (Moldavian) language instead of the Russian language. On August 31, 1989, following a 600,000-strong demonstration in Chișinău four days earlier, Romanian (Moldavian) became the official language of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. However, this was not implemented for many years. In 1990, the first free elections were held for Parliament, with the opposition Popular Front winning them. A government led by Mircea Druc, one of the leaders of the Popular Front, was formed. The Moldavian SSR became SSR Moldova, and later the Republic of Moldova. The Republic of Moldova became independent on August 31, 1991; it took over unchanged the boundaries of the Moldavian SSR.

Population[edit]
According to Bessarabian historian Ștefan Ciobanu and Moldovan philologist Viorica Răileanu, in 1810, the Romanian (Moldavian) population was approximately 95%. During the 19th century, as a result of the Russian policy of colonization and Russification, the Romanian population decreased to (depending on data sources) 47.6% (in 1897), 52% or 75% for 1900 (Krusevan), 53.9% (1907), 70% (1912, Laskov), or 65–67% (1918, J. Kaba).

The Russian Census of 1817, which recorded 96,526 families and 482,630 inhabitants, did not register ethnic data except for recent refugees (primarily Bulgarians) and certain ethno-social categories (Jews, Armenians and Greeks). Official records indicated 3,826 Jewish families (4.2%), 1,200 Lipovan families (1.5%), 640 Greek families (0.7%), 530 Armenian families (0.6%), 482 Bulgarian and Gagauz families (0.5%). In the 20th century, Romanian historian Ion Nistor extrapolated the number of Romanians at 83,848 families (86%) and Ruthenians at 6,000 families (6.5%). The estimate was based on the assumption that Ruthenes constituted up to a third of the population of the Khotyn county, and the rest of the recorded population was exclusively Moldavian or Romanian. An alternative estimate for the same year indicates 76.4% Romanians, 8.7% Ukrainians, 5.1% Bulgarians and Gaguzes, 4.5% Jews and 2% Russians. An 1818 statistic of three counties in southern Bessarabia (Akkerman, Izmail and Bender) that had witnessed strong emigration of the Muslim population and immigration from other regions, including Ottoman lands south of the Danube, recorded a total population of 113,835. There are conflicting figures regarding the national distribution (first figure cited by Poștarencu, second by Ungureanu): 48.64/37% Moldavians, 7.07/8.9% Russians, 15.65/17.9% Ukrainians, 17.02/21.5% Bulgarians and 11.62/14.7% others. Still in 1818, statistics for the Khotyn county in northern Bessarabia indicated 47.5% Moldavians and 42.6% Ukrainians.

The Moldovan historian Ion Gumenâi records the population of Bessarabia in 1828 as 517,135, and states that 376,910 were Romanians (72.88%), 52,000 Ruthenians (10.05%), 30,929 Jews (5.9%), 8,846 Germans (1.71%), 7,947 Russians (1.53%), 5,974 Lipovans (1.15%), 2,384 Poles (0.46%), 2,000 Greeks (0.38%), 2,000 Armenians (0.38%), and 27,445 (5.3%) settlers in the south of Bessarabia.

The first statistic to record ethnic groups throughout Bessarabia was an incomplete administrative census made in 1843–1844 at the request of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The following proportions were recorded, in a total of 692,777 inhabitants: 59.4% Moldavians, 17.2% Ukrainians, 9.3% Bulgarians, 7.1% Jews, and 2.2% Russians. In the case of some urban centres, figures were not reported for all ethnic groups. Furthermore, the size of the total populations differs from other official reports of the same period, which put the population of Bessarabia at 774,492 or 793,103.

Church records gathered around 1850–1855 put the total population at 841,523, with the following composition: 51.4% Moldavians, 4.2% Russians, 21.3% Ukrainians, 10% Bulgarians, 7.2% Jews and 5.7% others. On the other hand, official data for 1855 record a total population of 980,031, excluding the population on the territory under the authority of the Special Administration of the town of Izmail.

According to Ion Nistor, the population of Bessarabia in 1856 was composed of 736,000 Romanians (74%), 119,000 Ukrainians (12%), 79,000 Jews (8%), 47,000 Bulgarians and Gagauz (5%), 24,000 Germans (2.4%), 11,000 Romani (1.1%), 6,000 Russians (0.6%), adding to a total of 990,274 inhabitants. Historian Constantin Ungureanu provides significantly different figures for the same year: 676,100 Romanians (68.2%), 126,000 Ukrainians (12.7%), 78,800 Jews (7.9%), 48,200 Bulgarians and Gaguz (4.9%), 24,200 (2.4%) Germans and 20,000 Russians (2%) for a total of 991,900.

Russian data, 1889 (Total: 1,628,867 inhabitants)

The Russian census in 1897 had a total of 1,935,412 inhabitants. By language:

 920,919 Moldavians and Romanians (47.6%)
 379,698 Ukrainians (19.6%)
 228,168 Jews (11.8%)
 155,774 Russians (8%)
 103,225 Bulgarians (5.3%)
 60,026 Germans (3.1%)
 55,790 Turks (Gagauzes) (2.9%)

Bessarabia


The Slovak invasion of Poland occurred during Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939. The recently created Slovak Republic joined the attack, and Field Army Bernolák contributed over 50,000 soldiers in three divisions. Since most of the Polish forces were engaged with the German armies, which were more to the north of the southern border, the Slovak invasion met only weak resistance and suffered minimal losses.

Background

On March 14, 1939, the Slovak State was established as a client state of Germany, which initiated the breakup of Czechoslovakia. The south-Slovak part of Czechoslovakia had contained a substantial Hungarian population (Slovakia had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary). It was taken by the Royal Hungarian Army as a result of the First Vienna Award on November 2, 1938.

The official political pretext for the Slovak participation in the Polish Campaign was a small disputed area on the Poland-Slovakia border. Poland had appropriated the area on October 1, 1938, after the previous month's Munich Agreement. In addition, some Polish politicians supported Hungary in its effort to include areas that were inhabited mostly by Hungarians.

During secret discussions with the Germans on July 20–21, 1939, the Slovak government agreed to participate in Germany's planned attack on Poland and to allow Germany to use Slovak territory as the staging area for German troops. On August 26, Slovakia mobilised its armed forces and established a new field army, codenamed "Bernolák", with 51,306 soldiers. Additionally, 160,000 reservists were called up, with 115,000 entering service until September 20, 1939.

Order of battle

The Bernolák army group was led by Slovak Defence Minister Ferdinand Čatloš and had its initial headquarters in Spišská Nová Ves, though after September 8 this was moved to Solivar near Prešov. It consisted of:
 1st Infantry Division "Jánošík", led by Anton Pulanich in the sector Spišská Nová Ves – Prešov.
 2nd Infantry Division "Škultéty", led by Alexander Čunderlík in the sector Brezno – Poprad.
 3rd Infantry Division "Rázus", led by Augustín Malár in the sector east of High Tatra.
 A motorized unit "Kalinčiak" was created on September 5, but the campaign ended before it had arrived at the front.

The group was part of the German Army Group South; was subordinated to the 14th Army, led by Wilhelm List; and contributed to the 14th Army's total of five infantry divisions, three mountain divisions, two panzer divisions and one Luftwaffe division. Bernolák's tasks were to prevent a Polish incursion into Slovakia and to support German troops.

They were opposed by the Polish Karpaty Army (Carpathian Army), which consisted mainly of infantry units with some light artillery support and no tanks.

Campaign
The attack started without a formal declaration of war on September 1, 1939, at 5:00 a.m. The 1st division occupied the village of Javorina and the town of Zakopane and continued toward Nowy Targ to protect the German 2nd Mountain Division from the left. On September 4 and 5, it engaged in fighting with regular Polish Army units. On September 7, the division stopped its advance 30 km inside Polish territory. Later, the division was pulled back, with one battalion remaining until September 29 to occupy Zakopane, Jurgów and Javorina.

The 2nd Division was kept in reserve and participated only in mopping-up operations in which was supported by the Kalinčiak group. The 3rd Division had to protect 170 km of the Slovak border between Stará Ľubovňa and the border with Hungary. It fought minor skirmishes, and after several days, it moved into Polish territory and ended its advance on September 11.

Two or three Slovak air squadrons (codenamed Ľalia, Lily) were used for reconnaissance, bombing and close support for German fighters. Two Slovak planes were lost (one to anti-aircraft fire, another to an accidental crash), and one Polish plane was shot down. The total Slovak losses during the campaign were 37 dead, 114 wounded and 11 missing.

Aftermath
All Slovak units were pulled back until the end of September 1939. On October 5, a victorious military parade was held in Poprad. The mobilised units were gradually demobilised, and the Army Group Bernolák was disbanded on October 7.

The Slovak Army took around 1,350 civilian prisoners in Poland. In February 1940, around 1,200 of them were handed to Germans and some of the remainders to the Soviets. The rest were kept in a Slovak prison camp in Lešť.

All of the disputed territory, whether in Poland from 1920 or only from 1938, was given to Slovakia, which was confirmed by a Slovak parliamentary resolution on December 22, 1939. That arrangement lasted until 20 May 1945, when the border line was returned to its 1920 position. Since the war was started without a formal declaration of war and there were no longer any Polish prisoners of war held by Slovakia, there was no formal peace treaty between Poland and Slovakia.

Gallery

See also
 Army Karpaty
List of Czechoslovakia interwar period weapons-Slovak arsenal was those weapons inherited from Czechoslovakia.
Slovak Air Force (1939–1945)
List of World War II military equipment of Poland
List of German military equipment of World War II

References

Further reading
 Charles K. Kliment and Břetislav Nakládal: Germany's First Ally, Schiffer Publishing, 1998, . The book covers the Slovak Armed Forces in World War II. 2003 Czech edition, .
 Igor Baka: Slovensko vo vojne proti Poľsku v roku 1939 (Slovakia during the war against Poland in 1939), Vojenská história, 2005, No 3, pg 26 – 46.
 Igor Baka: Slovenská republika a nacistická agresia proti Poľsku (Slovak Republic and the Nazi Aggression Against Poland), Vojenský historický ústav, 2006, , online.

External links

 Overview of the campaign
 Map of the campaign  (archived link)
 Another overview, more military details

Conflicts in 1939
1939 in Poland
Slovakia
1939 in Slovakia
Poland 1939
Poland–Slovakia military relations
Kraków Voivodeship (1919–1939)

Slovak invasion of Poland


"O Come, All Ye Faithful", also known as "", is a Christmas carol that has been attributed to various authors, including John Francis Wade (1711–1786), John Reading (1645–1692), King John IV of Portugal (1604–1656), and anonymous Cistercian monks. The earliest printed version is in a book published by Wade. A manuscript by Wade, dating to 1751, is held by Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.

The original four verses of the hymn were extended to a total of eight, and these have been translated into many languages. In 1841, the English Catholic priest Frederick Oakeley translated the hymn into English as "O Come All Ye Faithful", which became widespread in English-speaking countries.

Text
The original text of the hymn has been from time to time attributed to various groups and individuals, including St. Bonaventure in the 13th century or King John IV of Portugal in the 17th, though it was more commonly believed that the text was written by Cistercian monks – the German, Portuguese or Spanish provinces of that order having at various times been credited.

In modern English hymnals, the text is usually credited to John Francis Wade, whose name appears on the earliest printed versions. Wade, an English Catholic, lived in exile in France and made a living as a copyist of musical manuscripts which he found in libraries. He often signed his copies, possibly because his calligraphy was so beautiful that his clients requested this. In 1751 he published a printed compilation of his manuscript copies, Cantus Diversi pro Dominicis et Festis per annum. This is the first printed source for Adeste Fideles.

The version published by Wade consisted of four Latin verses. Later in the 18th century, the French Catholic priest  wrote an additional three verses in Latin. Another anonymous Latin verse is rarely printed.

The text has been translated innumerable times into English. The most common version today is a combination of one of Frederick Oakeley's translations of the original four verses, and William Thomas Brooke's translation of the three additional verses. It was first published in Murray's Hymnal in 1852. Oakeley originally titled the song "Ye Faithful, approach ye" when it was sung at his Margaret Chapel in Marylebone (London), before it was altered to its current form. The song was sometimes referred to as the "Portuguese Hymn" after the Duke of Leeds, in 1795, heard a version of it sung at the Portuguese embassy in London. McKim and Randell nonetheless argue for Wade's authorship of the most popular English language version. Bennett Zon offers limited support for that argument, although he also suggests that the author may instead have been someone known to Wade.

Tune
Besides John Francis Wade, the tune has been attributed to several musicians, from John Reading and his son, to Handel, and even the German composer Gluck. The Portuguese composer Marcos Portugal or King John IV of Portugal have also been credited. Thomas Arne, whom Wade knew, is another possible composer. There are several similar musical themes written around that time, though it can be hard to determine whether these were written in imitation of the hymn, whether the hymn was based on them, or whether they are totally unconnected.

Published versions

The hymn was first published by John Francis Wade in his collection Cantus Diversi (1751), with four Latin verses, and music set in the traditional square notation used for medieval liturgical music. It was published again in the 1760 edition of Evening Offices of the Church. It also appeared in Samuel Webbe's An Essay on the Church Plain Chant (1782).
The hymn tune also made its way to the Sacred Harp tradition, appearing as "Hither Ye Faithful, Haste with Songs of Triumph" in an 1860 collection.
With "Herbei, o ihr Gläub'gen" a German translation of the Latin text was published in 1823 by Friedrich Heinrich Ranke.

Lyrics
These are the original four Latin verses as published by Wade, along with their English translation by Frederick Oakeley.

These are the additional Latin verses composed in the 18th century, with English prose translations, not from Oakeley:

Claims of Jacobite connections
Although, as previously stated, the hymn's exact sources and origins remain unproven, there is universal agreement among musicologists that it was through the efforts of Catholic layman and music copyist John Francis Wade that it first appeared in print. Wade himself fled to France after the Jacobite rising of 1745 was crushed, and his liturgical books were often decorated with Jacobite imagery (for context, the aim of the rebellion had been to restore a Catholic monarch – Charles Edward Stuart, popularly known as "Bonnie Prince Charlie" – to the throne of England). These aspects of Wade's life and political leanings have given rise to speculation that he might have intended for Adeste Fideles to be a ciphered birth ode to the Jacobite's Young Pretender.

This theory regarding the hymn's meaning has been most recently proposed by Professor Bennett Zon, head of music at Durham University. It essentially holds that "the song's original Latin version was actually a coded rallying cry for the Stewart cause". Elements of this theory include:

The as-yet-unproven but popular claim that "Bethlehem" was a common Jacobite cipher for England.
The claim (also currently unproven) that Wade deliberately meant for the title Regem Angelorum – which is found in the hymn's original Latin lyrics and translates literally to "King of Angels" – to refer to the king of England via a pun on the Latin words "Angelorum" ("of the angels") and "Anglorum" ("of the English").
The fact that during the mid-18th century some English Roman Catholic liturgical books would place Adeste Fideles physically close to prayers for the would-be king in exile.

Proponents of this theory interpret the notions and circumstances described above as evidence that the lyrics of Adeste Fideles are meant to be "a call to arms for faithful Jacobites to return with triumphant joy to England (Bethlehem) and venerate the king of angels, that is, the English king (Bonnie Prince Charlie)." However, certain historical circumstances would seem to disprove or at least problematize the Jacobite ode theory. Namely:

 The absence of any textual evidence that can conclusively prove that Wade explicitly composed Adeste Fideles as a piece of political propaganda. In the absence of such evidence, the Jacobite imagery found in Wade's books might be merely an expression of the author's idiosyncratic blend of political and religious thought, which in turn might have reflected the sentiments of Catholic Jacobites as a group.
 Sources that credit the hymn's composition to Wade overlook the fact that the exact origins of Adeste Fideles are uncertain. It is not known whether Wade might have simply copied the hymn from other sources (for instance, it could have been composed by Cistercian monks and eventually sung at the Portuguese embassy chapel in London), or to what extent he might have innovated on the contributions of the hymn's other plausible authors.
 Most of the hymn's original lyrics are an almost-verbatim expression of Roman Catholic dogmas regarding the person of Jesus Christ. As stated elsewhere in this article, the hymn takes almost all its contents from Bible verses and the Nicene Creed. To Irish musicologist William H. Grattan Flood, it is so readily evident that the hymn is merely an artistic expression of the Catholic spiritual and intellectual tradition that he concludes that the words and music of the song "are to be attributed to a Catholic source and for Catholic worship".

Performance
In performance, verses are often omitted – either because the hymn is too long in its entirety or because the words are unsuitable for the day on which they are sung. For example, the eighth anonymous verse is only sung on Epiphany, if at all; while the last verse of the original is normally reserved for Christmas Midnight Mass, Mass at Dawn or Mass during the Day.

In the United Kingdom and United States it is often sung today in an arrangement by Sir David Willcocks, which was originally published in 1961 by Oxford University Press in the first book in the Carols for Choirs series. This arrangement makes use of the basic harmonisation from The English Hymnal but adds a soprano descant in verse six (verse three in the original) with its reharmonised organ accompaniment, and a last verse harmonisation in verse seven (verse four in the original), which is sung in unison.

This carol has served as the penultimate hymn sung at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, after the last lesson from Chapter 1 of the Gospel of John.

Adeste Fideles is traditionally the final anthem during Midnight Mass at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

See also
 List of Christmas carols

References

External links

 Free sheet music of "O Come, All ye Faithful" for SATB from Cantorion.org
 Adeste Fideles, two 19th-century arrangements
 Original Latin, English translation, historical notes
 , sung to David Willcocks' arrangement by the Georgia Boy Choir

Christmas carols
Catholic music
English Christian hymns
Hymn tunes
Songs about Jesus
18th-century hymns in Latin
Charles Edward Stuart
Jacobite songs
Hymns in The English Hymnal
Christmas carols in Latin
Hymns in The New English Hymnal

O Come, All Ye Faithful


The Wilderspin National School is a former national school and Grade II listed building in Barton-upon-Humber, North Lincolnshire, and a museum focussing on the life and works of Samuel Wilderspin.

Architecture
The building was designed by the architect William Hey Dykes and Samuel Wilderspin for the Church of England and the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. It is a red brick, single storey building, in the Tudor revival style with a Welsh slate roof. In plan it is H-shaped, originally intend for the infants to be in the area on the right, the boys to the left, and the girls in the centre. There are stone tablets carved on each of the wings, the Royal coat of arms to the left, and the arms of Reverend George Uppleby to the right. A rear extension was added in 1935.

History
The school was opened in 1844 and remains nearly complete. It is the only known survival of both a Wilderspin school and playground.

When the school opened it superseded a smaller one ran by Isaac Pitman. When it opened it catered for over 100 infants aged 2–6 years old and is notable for its connection to Samuel Wilderspin who taught at the school alongside both his wife and daughter, and trained other teachers here. The school closed in 1978 and was first listed as a grade II building in September 1992.

Gallery

Museum

The building closed in 1978. In 1993 the Queen Street School Preservation Trust was formed to safeguard the building from further deterioration.

It reopened as a museum in January 2009 following funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (£858,500), Yorkshire Forward (£760,000), English Heritage (£198,000) WREN Ltd (£40,000), SITA Trust (£33,645) and Glanford Building Buildings Preservation Trust (£10,000).

Since reopening in 2009 the Museum has had over 85,000 visitors and 40,000 people have used its conference facilities. Over 22,000 pupils have been involved with its schools education programme.

Awards
The Museum has been a recipient of a Sandford Award for heritage education.

In May 2017, the school was listed as one of the ten 'best things to visit in North Lincolnshire' in a poll by the Scunthorpe Telegraph.

The Queen Street School Preservation Trust, which runs the school, received the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service in June 2018 for saving and restoring the Model Infant School and providing museum and educational services. Also in 2018, the school's Development Officer was awarded the 2018 Annual Town Award by the Barton Town Council in recognition of voluntary services to Barton-upon-Humber.

References

Local museums in Lincolnshire
Museums established in 2009
2009 establishments in England
Grade II listed buildings in North Lincolnshire
Barton-upon-Humber

Wilderspin National School