Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield  (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason (first published as a magazine article in 1945 and then expanded to the book in 1947), later The New Meaning of Treason (1964), a study of the trial of the British fascist William Joyce and others; The Return of the Soldier (1918), a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows (1956), This Real Night (published posthumously in 1984), and Cousin Rosamund (1985). Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959; in each case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic". She took the pseudonym "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She was a recipient of the Benson Medal.

Biography

Rebecca West was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield in 1892 in London, England, and grew up in a home full of intellectual stimulation, political debate, lively company, books and music. Her mother, Isabella, a Scotswoman, was an accomplished pianist but did not pursue a musical career after her marriage to Charles Fairfield. The Anglo-Irish Charles had been a Confederate stretcher-bearer at the siege of Richmond in the US Civil War, and had returned to the UK to become a journalist of considerable reputation but financial incompetence. He deserted his family when Cicily was eight years old. He never rejoined them, and died impoverished and alone in a boarding house in Liverpool in 1906, when Cicily was 14. The rest of the family moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Cicily was educated at George Watson's Ladies College. She had to leave school in 1907 due to a bout of tuberculosis. She chose not to return after recovering from the illness, later describing her schooling at Watson's as akin to a "prison".

West had two older sisters. Letitia ("Lettie"), who was the best educated of the three, became one of the first fully qualified female doctors in Britain, as well as a barrister at the Inns of Court. Winifred ("Winnie"), the middle sister, married Norman Macleod, Principal Assistant Secretary in the Admiralty, and eventually director general of Greenwich Hospital. Winnie's two children, Alison and Norman, became closely involved in Rebecca's life as she got older; Alison Macleod would achieve a literary career of her own. West trained as an actress in London, taking the name "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She and Lettie became involved in the women's suffrage movement, participating in street protests. Meanwhile, West worked as a journalist for the feminist weekly Freewoman and the Clarion, drumming up support for the suffragette cause.

Affairs and motherhood
In September 1912, West accused the famously libertine writer H. G. Wells of being "the Old Maid among novelists." This was part of a provocative review of his novel Marriage published in Freewoman, an obscure and short-lived feminist weekly review. The review attracted Wells's interest and an invitation to lunch at his home. The two writers became lovers in late 1913, despite Wells being both married and twenty-six years older than West. Their 10-year relationship produced a son, Anthony West, born on 4 August 1914. Wells was behind her move to Marine Parade, Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, where she lived between 1917 and 1919. Their friendship lasted until Wells's death in 1946.

West is also said to have had relationships with Charlie Chaplin, newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, and journalist John Gunther.

Early career and marriage
West established her reputation as a spokeswoman for feminist and socialist causes and as a critic, turning out essays and reviews for The New Republic, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, and many more newspapers and magazines. George Bernard Shaw said in 1916 that "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely." During the 1920s, West began a lifelong habit of visits to the United States to give lectures, meet artists, and get involved in the political scene. She was a great friend of the novelist G. B. Stern, and Stern and Clemence Dane stayed with her in America in 1924. There, she befriended CIA founder Allen Dulles, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Ross of The New Yorker, and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., among many other significant figures of the day. Her lifelong fascination with the United States culminated in 1948 when President Truman presented her with the Women's Press Club Award for Journalism, calling her "the world's best reporter."

In 1930, at the age of 37, she married a banker, Henry Maxwell Andrews, and they remained nominally together, despite one public affair just before his death in 1968. West's writing brought her considerable wealth, and, by 1940, she owned a Rolls-Royce and a grand country estate, Ibstone House, in the Chiltern Hills of southern England. During World War II, West housed Yugoslav refugees in the spare rooms of her blacked-out manor, and she used the grounds as a small dairy farm and vegetable plot, agricultural pursuits that continued long after the war had ended.

Later life

As West grew older, she turned to broader political and social issues, including Mankind's propensity to inflict violent injustice on itself. Before and during World War II, West travelled widely, collecting material for books on travel and politics. In 1936–38, she made three trips to Yugoslavia, a country she came to love, seeing it as the nexus of European history since the late Middle Ages. Her non-fiction masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an amalgamation of her impressions from these trips. New York Times reviewer Katherine Woods wrote: "In two almost incredibly full-packed volumes one of the most gifted and searching of modern English novelists and critics has produced not only the magnification and intensification of the travel book form, but, one may say, its apotheosis." West was assigned by Ross' magazine to cover the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker, an experience she memorialized in the book A Train of Powder. In 1950, she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also went to South Africa in 1960 to report on apartheid in a series of articles for The Sunday Times, particularly regarding a prominent trial for a seditious uprising aiming to establish Communist rule. She accidentally misidentified a South African judge for some questions put by another judge and was sued for libel along with the Sunday Times whose editor, Harry Hodson, failed to support West. She wrote "My problem is complicated by the fact that the defence, the people who would naturally be against the Judge and for me, are mostly Communist and won't lift a finger for me. It worries me a lot. It's so hard to work with this hanging over me." She felt her only support was her friends, the anti-apartheid politician Bernard Friedman and his wife, with whom she stayed in Johannesburg. "I will get over this case. But it isn't easy to feel that some people are for no reason that you know of possessed by an intention to ruin you; and I also felt I was letting you down in South Africa. I have been deeply grateful for all the kindness and sympathy you have shown me and I thought of Tall Trees as a warm place in a chilly world."

She travelled extensively well into old age. In 1966 and 1969, she undertook two long journeys to Mexico, becoming fascinated by the indigenous culture of the country and its mestizo population. She stayed with actor Romney Brent in Mexico City and with Katherine (Kit) Wright, a long-time friend, in Cuernavaca.

Old age

Her husband became both sleepy and inattentive as he got older. The sleepiness led to a car accident where no one was hurt but Henry was charged with dangerous driving. He became obsessed with the Norwegian ballerina Gerd Larsen; he would refuse to travel with West, instead preferring to return to London to be with Larsen. West initially considered this to be purely her husband's infatuation, but came to think that Larsen was driven by money. At her husband's funeral West had the upsetting problem of Larsen's request to be amongst the mourners, even though she had only known him for 18 months. Henry's will left £5,000 for Larsen. After her husband's death in 1968, West discovered that he had been unfaithful with other women.

After she was widowed, she moved to London, where she bought a spacious apartment overlooking Hyde Park. Unfortunately, it was next door to the Iranian embassy. During the May 1980 incident, West, then 87, had to be evacuated. In the last two decades of her life, West kept up a very active social life, making friends with Martha Gellhorn, Doris Lessing, Bernard Levin, comedian Frankie Howerd, and film star and director Warren Beatty, who filmed her for the production Reds, a biography of journalist John Reed and his connection with the Russian Revolution. She also spent time with scholars such as Jane Marcus and Bonnie Kime Scott, who began to chronicle her feminist career and varied work. She wrote at an unabated pace, penning masterful reviews for The Sunday Telegraph, publishing her last novel The Birds Fall Down (1966), and overseeing the film version of the story by BBC in 1978. The last work published in her lifetime was 1900 (1982). 1900 explored the last year of Queen Victoria's long reign, which was a watershed in many cultural and political respects.

At the same time, West worked on sequels to her autobiographically inspired novel The Fountain Overflows (1957); although she had written the equivalent of two more novels for the planned trilogy, she was never satisfied with the sequels and did not publish them. She also tinkered at great length with an autobiography, without coming to closure, and started scores of stories without finishing them. Much of her work from the late phase of her life was published posthumously, including Family Memories (1987), This Real Night (1984), Cousin Rosamund (1985), The Only Poet (1992), and Survivors in Mexico (2003). Unfinished works from her early period, notably Sunflower (1986) and The Sentinel (2001) were also published after her death, so that her oeuvre was augmented by about one third by posthumous publications.

Relationship with her son

West's relationship with her son, Anthony West, was not a happy one. The rancour between them came to a head when Anthony, himself a gifted writer, his father's biographer (H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life [1984]), and a novelist, published Heritage (1955), a fictionalised autobiography. West never forgave her son for depicting in Heritage the relationship between an illegitimate son and his two world-famous, unmarried parents, and for portraying the mother in unflattering terms. The depiction of West's alter ego in Heritage as a deceitful, unloving actress (West had trained as an actress in her youth) and poor caregiver so wounded West that she broke off relations with her son and threatened to sue any publisher who would bring out Heritage in England. She successfully suppressed an English edition of the novel, which was only published there after her death, in 1984. Although there were temporary rapprochements between her and Anthony, a state of alienation persisted between them, causing West grief until her dying hour. She fretted about her son's absence from her deathbed, but when asked whether he should be sent for, answered: "perhaps not, if he hates me so much."

Death

West suffered from failing eyesight and high blood pressure in the late 1970s, and became increasingly frail. Her last months were mostly spent in bed, at times delirious and other times lucid; she complained that she was dying too slowly. She died on 15 March 1983, and is buried at Brookwood Cemetery, Woking.

Upon hearing of her death, William Shawn, then editor in chief of The New Yorker, said:

She is honoured with a blue plaque at Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, her childhood home which also provided the setting for her novel The Judge.

Politics

West grew up in a home filled with discussions of world affairs. Her father was a journalist who often involved himself in controversial issues. He brought home Russian revolutionaries and other political activists, and their debates helped to form West's sensibility, which took shape in novels such as The Birds Fall Down, set in pre-revolution Russia. But the crucial event that moulded West's politics was the Dreyfus affair. The impressionable Rebecca learned early on just how powerful was the will to persecute minorities and to subject individuals to unreasonable suspicion based on flimsy evidence and mass frenzy. West had a keen understanding of the psychology of politics, how movements and causes could sustain themselves on the profound need to believe or disbelieve in a core of values—even in contradiction of reality.

It would seem that her father's ironic, sceptical temper so penetrated her sensibility that she could not regard any body of ideas as other than a starting point for argument. Although she was a militant feminist and active suffragette, and published a perceptive and admiring profile of Emmeline Pankhurst, West also criticised the tactics of Pankhurst's daughter, Christabel, and the sometimes doctrinaire aspects of the Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).

The first major test of West's political outlook was the Bolshevik Revolution. Many on the left saw it as the beginning of a new, better world, and the end of the crimes of capitalism. West regarded herself as a member of the left, having attended Fabian socialist summer schools as a girl. Yet to West, both the Revolution and the revolutionaries were suspect. Even before the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, West expressed her doubts that events in Russia could serve as a model for socialists in Britain or anywhere else.

West paid a heavy price for her cool reaction to the Russian Revolution; her positions increasingly isolated her. When Emma Goldman visited Britain in 1924 after seeing Bolshevik violence firsthand, West was exasperated that British intellectuals ignored Goldman's testimony and her warning against Bolshevik tyranny.

For all her censures of communism, however, West was hardly an uncritical supporter of Western democracies. Thus in 1919–1920, she excoriated the US government for deporting Goldman and for the infamous Palmer Raids. She was also appalled at the failure of Western democracies to come to the aid of Republican Spain, and she gave money to the Republican cause.

A staunch anti-fascist, West attacked both the Conservative governments of her own country for appeasing Adolf Hitler and her colleagues on the left for their pacifism. Neither side, in her view, understood the evil Nazism posed. Unlike many on the left, she also distrusted Joseph Stalin. To West, Stalin had a criminal mentality that communism facilitated. She was outraged when the Allies switched their loyalties as to Yugoslav resistance movements by deciding in 1943 to start backing the Communist-led Partisans led by Tito in Yugoslavia, thus abandoning their support of Draža Mihailović's Chetniks, whom she considered the legitimate Yugoslav resistance. She expressed her feelings and opinions on the Allies' switch in Yugoslavia by writing the satirical short story titled "Madame Sara's Magic Crystal", but decided not to publish it upon discussion with Orme Sargent, Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. Writing in her diary, West mentioned that Sargent had persuaded her that "the recognition of Tito was made by reason of British military necessities, and for no other reason." Following Sargent's claim, she described her decision not to publish the story as an expression of "personal willingness to sacrifice myself to the needs of my country." After the war, West's anti-Communism hardened as she saw Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other Eastern and Central European states succumb to Soviet domination.

In 1951 she provided a critical review of Alistair Cooke's sympathetic portrait of Alger Hiss during his postwar trials from a classical liberalism point of view. It is not surprising in this context that West reacted to US Senator Joseph McCarthy differently from her colleagues. They saw a demagogue terrorising liberals and leftists with baseless accusations of Communist conspiracy. West saw an oaf blundering into the minefield of Communist subversion. For her, McCarthy was right to pursue Communists with fervour, even if his methods were roughshod, though her mild reaction to McCarthy provoked powerful revulsion among those on the left and dismay even among anti-Communist liberals. She refused, however, to amend her views.

Although West's anti-communism earned the high regard of conservatives, she never considered herself one of them. In postwar Britain, West voted Labour and welcomed the Labour landslide of 1945 but spoke out against domination of the Labour Party by British trade unions, and thought left-wing politicians such as Michael Foot unimpressive. She had mixed feelings about the Callaghan government. West admired Margaret Thatcher, not for Thatcher's policies, but for Thatcher's achievement in rising to the top of a male-dominated sphere. She admired Thatcher's willingness to stand up to trade union bullying.

In the end, West's anti-communism remained the centrepiece of her politics because she so consistently challenged the communists as legitimate foes of the status quo in capitalist countries. In West's view, communism, like fascism, was merely a form of authoritarianism. Communists were under party discipline, and therefore could never speak for themselves; West was a supreme example of an intellectual who spoke for herself, no matter how her comments might injure her. Indeed, few writers explicitly acknowledged how much West's embrace of unpopular positions hurt her on the left. A whole generation of writers abandoned West and refused to read her, as Doris Lessing suggested.

Religion

West's parents had her baptised into the Church of England two months after birth and she considered herself a Christian, though an unconventional believer. At times, she found God to be wicked; at other times she considered him merely ineffectual and defeated. However, she revered Christ as the quintessentially good man, she had great respect for the literary, pictorial, and architectural manifestations of the Christian ethos, and she considered faith a valid tool to grapple with the conundrums of life and the mysteries of the cosmos. Although her writings are full of references to the Bible and ecclesiastical history, she was essentially anti-doctrinaire and occasionally blasphemous. In 1926 she expressed the unorthodox belief that "Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation." Moreover, she rejected specific articles of belief such as the virgin birth, Original sin, the Atonement, and Providence. Her contribution to Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Letters Series, Letter to a Grandfather (1933), is a declaration of "my faith, which seems to some unfaith" disguised as philosophical fiction. Written in the midst of the Great Depression, Letter to a Grandfather traces the progressive degeneration of the notion of Providence through the ages, concluding skeptically that "the redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it." As for the Atonement, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is in part meant as a refutation of that very doctrine, which she saw as having sparked a fatal obsession with sacrifice throughout the Christian era and, specifically, as having prompted Neville Chamberlain to formulate his policy of appeasement, which she vehemently opposed. She wrote:

World War II shocked her into a more conventional belief: "I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them." In the early 1950s, she thought she had a mystical revelation in France and actively tried to convert to Catholicism. There was a precedent in her family for this action, as her sister, Letitia, had earlier converted to Catholicism, thereby causing quite a stir, but West's attempt was short-lived, and she confessed to a friend: "I could not go on with being a Catholic ... I don't want, I can't bear to, become a Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and I cannot believe that I am required to pay such a price for salvation." Her writings of the 1960s and early 1970s again betray a profound mistrust towards God: "The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him."

Alongside her fluctuating Christianity, West was fascinated with Manichaeanism. She describes the Manichean idea that the world is a mixture of two primeval kingdoms, one of light the other of darkness, as an "extremely useful conception of life" affirming that a "fusion of light and darkness" is "the essential human character." On the other hand, West criticised "the strictly literal mind of the founder [of Manichaeanism] and his followers" and what she perceived as the meanness of Christian heretics who adopted Manichaean ideas. West states that "the whole of modern history could be deduced from the popularity of this heresy in Western Europe: its inner sourness, its preference for hate over love and for war over peace, its courage about dying, its cowardice about living." Regarding the suppression of Manichaean heresies by the Christian authorities West says that whilst "it is our tendency to sympathise with the hunted hare... much that we read of Western European heretics makes us suspect that here the quarry was less of a hare than a priggish skunk." Nonetheless, Manichean influence persists in an unpublished draft of West's own memoirs where she writes: "I had almost no possibility of holding faith of any religious kind except a belief in a wholly and finally defeated God, a hypothesis which I now accept but tried for a long time to reject, I could not face it."

West's interest in Manichaeanism reflects her lifelong struggle with the question of how to deal with dualisms. At times she appears to favour the merging of opposites, for which Byzantium served as a model: "church and state, love and violence, life and death, were to be fused again as in Byzantium." More dominant, however, was her tendency to view the tensions generated in the space between dualistic terms as life-sustaining and creative; hence, her aversion to homosexuality and her warning not to confuse the drive for feminist emancipation with the woman's desire to become like a man. Her insistence on the fundamental difference between men and women reveals her essentialism, but it also bespeaks her innate Manichaean sensibility. She wanted respect and equal rights for women, but at the same time she required that women retain their specifically feminine qualities, notably an affinity with life: "Men have a disposition to violence; women have not. If one says that men are on the side of death, women on the side of life, one seems to be making an accusation against men. One is not doing that." One reason why she does not want to make an accusation against men is that they are simply playing their assigned role in a flawed universe. Only love can alleviate destructive aspects of the sex-antagonism: "I loathe the way the two cancers of sadism and masochism eat into the sexual life of humanity, so that the one lifts the lash and the other offers blood to the blow, and both are drunken with the beastly pleasure of misery and do not proceed with love's business of building a shelter from the cruelty of the universe." In addition to the operations of love, female emancipation is crucial to removing the moral, professional, and social stigma associated with the notion of the "weaker sex," without trying to do away altogether with the temperamental and metaphysical aspects of the gender dualism itself. Thus, the "sex war" described in West's early short story "Indissoluble Matrimony" (1914) elevates the female character, Evadne, in the end because she accepts the terms of the contest without superficially trying to "win" that war.

The task of reconciling dualisms can also be seen in West's political propensities. As Bernard Schweizer has argued: "St. Augustine and Schopenhauer emphasized the fallenness of human life, implying a quietistic stance that could be confused with conservatism, while the Reclus brothers [famous French anarchists] urged her to revolt against such pessimistic determinism. West's characteristically heroic personal and historic vision is a result of these two contending forces." West's conviction that humanity will only fulfill its highest potentials if it adheres to the principle of process reflects the same preoccupation: "Process is her most encompassing doctrine," states Peter Wolfe. "Reconciling her dualism, it captures the best aspects of the male and female principles."

Cultural references

Long time book reviewer and senior editor at Time, Whittaker Chambers, considered West "a novelist of note ... a distinguished literary critic ... above all ... one of the greatest of living journalists."

Virginia Woolf questioned Rebecca West being labelled as an "arrant feminist" because she offended men by saying they are snobs in chapter two of A Room of One's Own:  was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?"

Bill Moyers's interview "A Visit With Dame Rebecca West," recorded in her London home when she was 89, was aired by PBS in July 1981. In a review of the interview, John O'Connor wrote that "Dame Rebecca emerges as a formidable presence. When she finds something or somebody  the adjective suddenly becomes withering."

West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier, was turned into a major motion picture in 1982, directed by Alan Bridges, starring Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie. More recently, an adaptation of The Return of the Soldier for the stage by Kelly Younger titled Once a Marine took West's theme of shell-shock-induced amnesia and applied it to a soldier returning from the war in Iraq with PTSD.

There have been two plays about Rebecca West produced since 2004. That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers, by Carl Rollyson, Helen Macleod, and Anne Bobby, is a one-woman monologue in which an actress playing Rebecca West recounts her life through some of her most famous articles, letters, and books. Tosca's Kiss, a 2006 play by Kenneth Jupp, retells West's experience covering the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker.

Robert D. Kaplan's influential book Balkan Ghosts (1994) is an homage to West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), which he calls "this century's greatest travel book."

In February 2006, BBC broadcast a radio version of West's novel The Fountain Overflows, dramatized by Robin Brook, in six 55-minute installments.

Bibliography

Fiction

 1914 – Indissoluble Matrimony, a controversial short story which was first published in Blast No. 1. Edited by Yolanda Morató for the Spanish publishing house Zut, it was also published in the Spanish edition of Blast No. 1 (Madrid: Juan March Foundation, 2010). This novella challenges many issues about feminism and women's involvement in politics in pre-war Britain.
 1918 – The Return of the Soldier, the first World War I novel written by a woman, about a shell-shocked, amnesiac soldier returning from World War I in hopes of being reunited with his first love, a working-class woman, instead of continuing to live with his upper-class wife.
 1922 – The Judge, a brooding, passionate novel combining Freudian Oedipal themes with suffragism and an existential take on cosmic absurdity.
 1929 – Harriet Hume, a modernist story about a piano-playing prodigy and her obsessive lover, a corrupt politician.
 1935 – The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels, contains the short story "The Salt of the Earth," featuring Alice Pemberton, whose obsessive altruism becomes so smothering that her husband plots her murder. This was adapted for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour as "The Paragon" starring Joan Fontaine (season 1, episode 20) in 1963. An additional story from the collection, "There is No Conversation", is the tale of a romance as told in hindsight by both parties, one a caddish Frenchman and the other a coarse American woman. This story was adapted for an hour-long radio drama in 1950 on NBC University Theatre and featured a commentary on West's story and writing skills by Katherine Anne Porter.
 1936 – The Thinking Reed, a novel about the corrupting influence of wealth even on originally decent people. Perhaps a disguised self-critique of her own elegant lifestyle.
 1956 – The Fountain Overflows, a semi-autobiographical novel weaving a fascinating cultural, historical, and psychological tapestry of the first decade of the 20th century, reflected through the prism of the gifted, eccentric Aubrey family.
1966 – The Birds Fall Down, spy thriller based on the deeds of the historical double agent Yevno Azef.
 1984 – This Real Night, sequel to The Fountain Overflows published posthumously
 1985 – Cousin Rosamund, final, unfinished installment of the "Aubrey Trilogy" published posthumously
 1986 – Sunflower, published posthumously, about a tense love-relationship between an actress and a politician, reminiscent of West's relationship with H. G. Wells.
 2002 – The Sentinel, edited by Kathryn Laing and published posthumously, West's very first extended piece of fiction, an unfinished novel about the suffragist struggle in Britain, including grim scenes of female incarceration and force-feeding.

Non-fiction

 1916 – Henry James
 1928 – The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews, a blend of modernist literary criticism and cognitive science, including a long essay explaining why West disliked James Joyce's Ulysses, though she judged it an important book
 1931 – Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log
 1932 – Arnold Bennett Himself, John Day
 1933 – St. Augustine, first psycho-biography of the Christian Church Father
 1934 – The Modern Rake's Progress (co-authored with cartoonist David Low)
 1941 – Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a 1,181-page classic of travel literature, giving an account of Balkan history and ethnography, and the significance of Nazism, structured around her trip to Yugoslavia in 1937
 1949 – The Meaning of Treason , edit new 1964 – The New Meaning of Treason
 1955 – A Train of Powder
 1958 – The Court and the Castle: some treatments of a recurring theme, excellent revisionist interpretations of literary classics, including Hamlet and Kafka's stories
 1963 – The Vassall Affair
 1982 – 1900, cultural history and fascinating "thick description" of this pivotal year
 1982 – The Young Rebecca, West's early, radical journalism for The Freewoman and Clarion, edited by Jane Marcus
 1987 – Family Memories: An Autobiographical Journey, West's autobiographical musings which remained unpublished during her life, assembled and edited by Faith Evans
 2000 – The Selected Letters of Rebecca West, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott
 2003 – Survivors in Mexico, posthumous work about West's two trips to Mexico in 1966 and 1969, edited by Bernard Schweizer
 2005 – Woman as Artist and Thinker, re-issues of some of West's best essays, together with her short-story "Parthenope"
 2010 – The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose,

Select criticism and biography

References

External links

 Rebecca West papers at The University of Tulsa McFarlin Library's Department of Special Collections and University Archives.
Rebecca West Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
New York Times obituary, 16 March 1983

Biography of Rebecca West on the Yale Modernism Lab

Rebecca West Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Rebecca West Papers review Hitler's Children.

1892 births
1983 deaths
Writers from London
Modernist women writers
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English feminist writers
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Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire
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People educated at George Watson's College
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Burials at Brookwood Cemetery
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20th-century British novelists
20th-century British women writers
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20th-century British essayists
Member of the Mont Pelerin Society
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Rebecca West


Sir Nicholas Fortescue the Elder (1575?-1633), was an English Chamberlain of the Exchequer.

He was the eldest son of William Fortescue of Cookhill, and grandson of Sir Nicholas Fortescue, Groom Porter to Henry VIII, to whom the Cistercian nunnery of Cookhill, on the borders of Worcestershire and Warwickshire, was granted in 1542.

Fortescue, who was throughout his life a zealous Roman Catholic, for several years harboured at Cookhill the Benedictine monk, Augustine Baker. In 1605, after the Gunpowder Plot and the rising of the Roman Catholics of Warwickshire, Fortescue underwent several examinations, and fell under some suspicion on account of a large quantity of armour found in his house. His name appears twice in the Calendar of State Papers in connection with the plot. A letter from Chief-justice Anderson and Sheriff Warburton to the Privy council states that Fortescue of Warwickshire, though summoned to appear before them, had not come forward to be examined. A declaration by himself says that the armour in question has been in his house for five years, and adds that he has not seen Wintour, the conspirator, for eight years, and was not summoned to join the rising in Warwickshire. He succeeded in clearing himself from these suspicions and lived at Cookhill unmolested until about 1610, when he was appointed a commissioner of James's household and of the navy.

He was knighted in 1618, and in the same year, on the death of Sir John Poyntz (formerly Morice) of Chipping Ongar, he obtained the lucrative and honourable post of Chamberlain of the Exchequer, which he held until May 1625, when he resigned it. During 1622 and 1623 his name appears as serving on royal commissions, to inquire into the state of the plantations of Virginia and of Ireland, into the depredations committed by pirates on the high seas, and on royal grants of lands.

Fortescue died at his house in Fetter Lane on 2 November 1633, and was buried in the private chapel of Cookhill, where his tomb may still be seen. He married Prudence, daughter of William Wheteley of Holkham, Norfolk, by whom he had five sons, William, Francis, Edmund, Nicholas, John, and two daughters.

References

1575 births
1633 deaths
English knights
16th-century English people
17th-century English people
16th-century Roman Catholics
17th-century Roman Catholics
English Roman Catholics
People from Redditch (district)
Nicholas

Nicholas Fortescue the Elder


Submission Management is the art and science of collecting and managing any kind of submissions. Traditionally, submissions were collected offline i.e. in the form of 'hard' paper files or folders. However, with the recent penetration of Internet in almost every sphere of life, there has been a steady shift towards collecting electronic submissions as compared to hard copies of submissions. The Internet has also facilitated a change in the perception towards the deliverables or contents of a submission. As a result of this, submitting audio and video files, pictures and presentations in addition to standard text, word and pdf-like documents has become common in the last few years.

Managing submissions may include evaluating submissions and providing feedback to submitters, accepting or rejecting submissions or requesting submitters to make a re-submission. In some cases, a panel of experts may also be requested to assist in the evaluation of submissions by reviewing or judging them.

Common scenarios

Academics
It is a common practice for teachers, professors and teaching assistants to get assignments and projects submitted by students, either electronically or otherwise. These assignments are graded and the students are given feedback on whatever they submitted and how can they improve it. In institutes where academic submissions are done electronically, there generally is a system (usually a web-based one) in place to assist in the collection and management of submissions.

Call-for-paper (academic) conferences
In call-for-paper or academic conferences, prospective presenters are usually asked to submit a short abstract of their presentation or research work, which is reviewed before being accepted for the conference. Some conferences require researchers to submit a full paper of about 6–15 pages, which is peer reviewed by members of the conference's program committee and/or external reviewers chosen by them.

Competitions and contests
Most competitions and contests held world over usually have an initial screening round in which they accept nominations or entries from prospective participants. After all the nominations and entries have been received, the organizers of the competition or contest evaluate and shortlist the required number of entries on the basis of certain parameters set by them, notify the participants whose entries have been shortlisted and invite them to participate in further rounds of the competition or contest. Those whose entries were not shortlisted may also be given feedback by the organizers with a reason for the rejection and tips for improvement.

College events and fests
Student bodies in colleges and universities usually organize various inter-college and intra-college events and fests on an annual and/or semester basis. These events and fests are usually made up of several big and small competitions and contests, each of which generally follow a procedure as explained in the paragraph above.

Pharmaceuticals industry
Regulatory submissions in the pharmaceutical–biotechnology and medical device industry comprise documents and data that are submitted to a regulatory agency to gain approval to market new drugs, biologics and devices but also when modifications are introduced in registered data (variations). The documentation represents years of research and includes multi-disciplinary information (including preclinical and clinical data) regarding the safety and efficacy of a compound. The regulatory process varies from country to country and involves numerous interactions between the submitting company (sponsor) and the regulatory authority (agency). Many regulatory agencies accept electronic submissions in conjunction with or in lieu of submitting paper.

Human resources
Human resource departments collect résumés and CVs as a part of processing job applications. Applicants submit their résumés either via email, on the website of their prospective employer or on employment websites that help connect job seekers and employers.

Contemporary art
In contemporary art, curators often select and interpret works of art created by various artists. Before the popularity of the Internet, this was often done in person but these days some curators prefer artists submitting pictures of their work over email or by other electronic means for an initial screening. If the curator likes a particular work of art, he may electronically communicate his desire to work with the artist after verifying that the picture is indeed of his work.

The fashion industry
Models create and maintain portfolios which they use to showcase themselves during the process of getting selected for various fashion shows, advertisements and other events in the fashion industry. Those who are responsible for taking a decision on which models to choose usually ask prospective models to submit their portfolios with them. They take their decision after evaluating all the portfolios available with them.

Publication and media houses
Journalists and writers (full-time as well as freelancers) usually submit their articles and reports to editors of magazines, journals, newspapers and news channels who then select which ones will be published and/or telecasted and which ones won't be. At times, editors even provide feedback to the authors of reports with an intention of seeking pre-publication improvement.

Government applications
Most government procedures demand the filling up of a form, either electronically or on paper. Citizens submit their forms to the desired government agency by their preferred mode of communication after which the agency performs an initial verification during which they may contact the concerned person for further information, data or correction of errors. After the verification stage, the forms are marked for processing and the concerned person is intimated once the processing is over. The processing stage may involve external or sister agencies too.

Challenges

Submission standards and formats
As companies, agencies and institutes move towards electronic submissions, a lot of complexity has been added in the submission management domain. In the paper world, much of the effort of managing a submission involves printing and collating volumes of information but with electronic submissions, it becomes increasingly difficult to efficiently manage the tens and thousands of submissions coming from different sources, in different formats at different times. As a result, many agencies are in the process of trying to implement global standards for submission formats and standards.

One example of this is the standards put forth by the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) in the context of the pharmaceuticals industry. The ICH has developed the electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) to promote harmonization of regulatory submissions in electronic format across various regions (United States, Europe and Japan).

Inappropriate modes and lack of automated systems
Email is by-far the most popular mode for collecting and managing electronic submissions and post for paper submissions. Since, both these processes are manual to quite an extent, they often lead to delays, inconsistencies and mishaps. In some setups, there are tailor-made systems that help collectors of submissions to some extent but they often fail owing to their ultra specific nature.

The key to successful submission management involves tracking each submission as well as all its versions and sub-parts that may be related to it or dependent on it. In addition to planning and tracking submission content, it is also important to manage and allocate resources effectively based on workload, skill sets and availability. Submission collectors may seek the help of expert reviewers or judges in such cases. All these reasons have motivated many companies and researchers to begin looking at submission management as a formal discipline and to start analyzing metrics behind various submission processes.

Submission management systems
Certain software vendors have begun developing submission management systems to assist submission collectors in the automation, tracking and management of complex submission processes. Most of these systems are web based and accessible from any device with a browser and an Internet connection. However, a majority of these systems are application specific and cannot be applied to all submission management scenarios. This means that a lot of work needs to be done in this field before we have good and reliable submission management systems that are suitable and usable in every context of submission management.

References

Management by type
Academia
Research
Educational technology
Digital media
Competitions
Grants (money)

Submission management


Each Little Bird That Sings is a 2005 novel aimed for people of all ages, by Deborah Wiles, the author of Love, Ruby Lavender. It won the 2006 Association of Booksellers for Children E. B. White Read Aloud Award for older children, was a finalist at the 2005 United States National Book Awards, and won the California Young Reader Medal in 2008.

Comfort Snowberger's family lives in the fictional Snapfinger, Mississippi, where they own a funeral home. As a result, Comfort has grown up around a funeral culture and has attended 247 funerals. Comfort has a best friend named Declaration, and a cousin named Peach, whom she dislikes.

Summary
This book says that death is a part of life

Comfort Snowberger's Great-great-Aunt Florentine dies in her garden, and her Great-Uncle Edisto dies the day they had planned a picnic. Comfort is very worried about her next funeral, which will be her 248th, and whose it will be. She is also annoyed with the burden of having to care for her cousin, Peach, after the funeral.  After a while, this is when Comfort realizes that her true friend had been there all along with Peach. All Comfort wants to do now is hide in her closet with Dismay. However, Comfort, Peach and Dismay are caught in a flash flood at the cemetery, and struggle to stay above water on an oak tree. Comfort tells Peach to let Dismay go, but Peach does not hear her, submerged underwater. Comfort pries Peach's fingers off of Dismay's collar, leaving the dog to float down the stream alone. Dismay's collar is found by Declaration close to a drainage ditch near Lake Tallyhoma. Knowing he is dead, Snapfinger holds a memorial service for Dismay, but Declaration and Comfort remain upset with each other.

Main characters
Comfort Snowberger
Merry Snowberger is Comfort's little sister.
Tidings Snowberger is Comfort's older brother.
Great Uncle Edisto Snowberger is Comfort, Tidings, and Merry's great uncle.
Great Great Aunt Florentine is Comfort, Tidings, and Merry's great, great aunt.
Peach Shuggars is Comfort's eight-year-old cousin.
Declaration Johnson was Comforts best friend
Dismay is Comfort's pet dog, a Black Labrador retriever.

References

2005 American novels
American children's novels
Funeral homes in fiction
Novels set in Mississippi
Novels about death
2005 children's books
Children's books set in Mississippi
Children's books about death

Each Little Bird That Sings


Hit means to strike someone or something.

Hit or HIT may also refer to:

Arts, entertainment and media

Fictional entities
 Hit, a fictional character from Dragon Ball Super
 Homicide International Trust or HIT, a fictional organization in MacGyver
Homicide Intervention Team or HIT, a fictional investigative organization in the HIT Indian film series (see below)

Film and television
 HIT (TV series), a Spanish high school-drama themed-awarded series
 H.I.T (TV series), a South Korean drama miniseries
 HIT Entertainment, a British-American production company
 Hit!, a 1973 crime film
 TV HIT, a Bosnian television channel
 HIT Universe, Indian crime thriller film series
 HIT: The First Case, 2020 Indian Telugu-language crime thriller film by Sailesh Kolanu
HIT: The Second Case, 2022 sequel film by Kolanu
 HIT: The First Case (2022 film), 2022 remake of the 2020 Telugu film in Hindi

Music
 Hit song, a recorded song that becomes popular or commercially successful
 Hit (album), by Peter Gabriel
 "Hit" (The Sugarcubes song), a single by The Sugarcubes from their 1992 album Stick Around for Joy
 "Hit", a song by Guided by Voices from the 1995 album Alien Lanes
 "Hit", a song by The Wannadies from the 1997 album Bagsy Me
 Hit Records (Croatia), a Croatian record label
 Hit Records, a defunct American record company

Radio
 Hit FM (disambiguation)
 Hit Network, an Australian radio network

Brands and enterprises
 Hit (drink), a Venezuelan carbonated soft drink
 Hitachi, Ltd., a Japanese multinational conglomerate
 Hongkong International Terminals Ltd.
 Heavy Industries Taxila, a military complex in Pakistan

Computing
 Hit (internet), a single request for a file from a web server
 An intersection of the cursor and graphic object during hit-testing in computer graphics
 Human Intelligence Task, an Amazon Mechanical Turk task

Education
 Hanze Institute of Technology, in the Netherlands
 Harare Institute of Technology, in Zimbabwe
 Harbin Institute of Technology, in China
 Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, in India
 Holon Institute of Technology, in Israel

Language
 Hit (pronoun), Old English, third-person singular neuter accusative, "it" in modern English
 Hit, slang for contract killing
 Hittite language

Places
 Hit, Qasr-e Qand, a village in Iran
 Hit Rural District, Iraq
 Hit, Iraq, a town
 Hit District, a district centered on the town
 Hit, Syria

Science and medicine
 Health information technology
 Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia
 Herd immunity threshold; see herd immunity § Mechanism
 Hibernation induction trigger

Sports
 Hit (baseball) or base hit
 High intensity training
 The Hit (Chuck Bednarik), a November 20, 1960, tackle by Chuck Bednarik of the Philadelphia Eagles on Frank Gifford of the New York Giants

See also
 Hits (disambiguation)
 The Hit (disambiguation)

Hit


The 1,140-seat National Theatre of Costa Rica () is Costa Rica's national theatre, located in the central section of San José. Construction began in 1891, and it opened to the public on 21 October 1897 with a performance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust.

The National Theatre stood as a cultural asset of the country during a time when coffee exports were a source of its success. It presents high quality performances, with artistic criteria being very high.

The building is considered the finest historic building in the capital, and it is known for its exquisite interior which includes its lavish furnishings.

Construction history

Constructed in the late 19th century, when San Jose's population was only around 19,000 people, the theatre presented many private performances. Its only real competition was the Teatro Mora (also called the Municipal Theatre, or Teatro Municipal), that existed for many years before the National Theatre, until it was destroyed and deemed unsafe by an earthquake.

To finance the construction of a theatre suitable for name "National Theatre", the President of Costa Rica, José Joaquín Rodríguez Zeledón decided to place a tax on coffee, then the principal export product. Later, one coffee planter begged the government to remove the export tax on his product and put it on rice and beans (also principal export products of the time).

There were many problems during the early period of construction. However, the construction errors were corrected by an Italian engineer who was brought in to direct the process. It took seven years to finish the theatre, and the inauguration took place on 21 October 1897.

The front of the theatre features statues of Calderón de la Barca and Ludwig van Beethoven. There are several monuments by the entry walkway including Frédéric Chopin. The inside features the mural Allegory of Coffee and Bananas by Milanese artist Aleardo Villa, which is featured on the five colón bill.

The theatre today
As well as having performances several times a week, the theatre is a tourist attraction. Performances by the National Symphonic Orchestra (NSO) take place as part of orchestra's regular season, and include both Costa Rican and foreign composers.

References
Notes

External links

1897 establishments in Costa Rica
Costa Rica, National Theatre of Costa Rica
Opera houses in Costa Rica
Theatres in Costa Rica
Tourist attractions in San José, Costa Rica
Buildings and structures in San José, Costa Rica
Theatres completed in 1897
Music venues completed in 1897

National Theatre of Costa Rica


Choux pastry, or  (), is a delicate pastry dough used in many pastries.  The essential ingredients are butter, water, flour and eggs.

Instead of a raising agent, choux pastry employs its high moisture content to create steam, as the water in the dough evaporates when baked, puffing the pastry.  The pastry is used in many European cuisines, including French and Spanish, and is the basis of many notable desserts, including profiteroles, éclairs and churros.

History
The term "choux" has two meanings in the early literature. One is a kind of cheese puff, first documented in the 13th century; the other corresponds to the modern choux pastry and is documented in English, German, and French cookbooks in the 16th century. This dough was sometimes baked, sometimes fried. Choux pastry is later widely documented in the 18th century, under names including Pate a la Royale or Paste Royal.

Popelins were common aristocratic desserts in the 16th century, and were flavored with cheese or citrus (for example lemon peel, orange blossom water, etc.). They were prepared from dough that had been dried over a fire to evaporate its water, which was called  (literally meaning 'hot pastry').

The royal chefs Jean Avice, a , and , who worked in the court of Marie Antoinette, made modifications to the recipe in the 18th century, resulting in the recipe most commonly used now for profiteroles.

The name pouplin (lit. 'baby, small child'), later popelin or poupelin, is attested in around 1349 for a kind of cake made with flour and eggs.

A widely repeated story claims that choux pastry was invented in 1540 by a Pantanelli and a Popelini (neither of whom is ever cited with a first name), supposedly the pastry chefs of Queen Catherine de' Medici, the Italian wife of King Henry II of France. This is part of the fiction that Italian cuisine was introduced to France by her retinue, apparently first mentioned in the 18th century. Pantenelli supposedly invented the dough in 1540, seven years after the arrival of Catherine in France. He is said to have used the dough to make a gâteau named . Over time, the recipe of the dough evolved, and the name changed to , which was used to make , named after Pantanelli's successor Popelini. However, the story of Popelini, also called Popelin, only appears in the beginning of the 1890s in the writings of the French pastry chef . The story is clearly fictional given that poupelins are attested long before the 16th century, with the name Popelini being created from the word popelin and not the other way around; similarly, Pantarelli appears to be derived from pâte.

Essential ingredients and manner of rising
The ingredients for choux pastry are butter, water, flour and eggs. Like Yorkshire pudding or David Eyre's pancake, instead of a raising agent, it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry. The high moisture content is achieved by boiling the water and butter, then adding the flour. The mixture is cooked a few minutes longer, then cooled before adding enough eggs to achieve the desired consistency. The boiling step causes the starch in the flour to gel, allowing the incorporation of more water.

Foods made with choux pastry

This pastry is used to make choux (small puffs), as the name implies, but also profiteroles, , éclairs, , French crullers, , St. Honoré cake, Parisian gnocchi, dumplings, chouquettes (unfilled choux pastry paired with pearl sugar) and gougères.

Choux pastry is usually baked, but for beignets, it is fried. In Spain and Latin America, churros are made of fried choux pastry, sugared and dipped in a thick hot chocolate for breakfast.  In Italian cuisine, choux pastry is the base for zeppole di San Giuseppe which are cream-filled pastries eaten on March 19 for the feast of Saint Joseph. In Austrian cuisine, one variation of , a sweet apricot dumpling cooked in simmering water, uses choux pastry; in that case it does not puff, but remains relatively dense. Choux pastries are sometimes filled with cream after baking to make cream puffs or éclairs.

A  is covered in a "crackly" sugar topping — and often filled with pastry cream, much like an éclair.

Chouquette

A  (), a diminutive of , is a small, round, hollow choux pastry covered with pearl sugar. Unlike éclairs which are also made with choux pastry, chouquettes are bite-sized and the hollow inside is not filled.

Chouquettes originate from Paris, and can be enjoyed at anytime of the day, typically for breakfast or as an afternoon snack.

Gallery

See also
 List of choux pastry dishes
 List of pastries

 Pastry

References

External links

Doughs
French pastries

Choux pastry


Victoria Strait is a strait in northern Canada that lies in Nunavut off the mainland in the Arctic Ocean. It is between Victoria Island to the west and King William Island to the east. From the north, the strait links the M'Clintock Channel and the Larsen Sound with the Queen Maud Gulf to the south. The strait is about  long and anywhere from  wide.

The strait is wide, with almost no islands, save for the rather large Royal Geographical Society Island near the Queen Maud Gulf at the extreme south of the strait. The strait has never been comprehensively surveyed, however, charted portions indicate several patches where the water is only  deep. Ships drawing up to  have navigated the strait, but it is made very difficult by the ice. Most of the year the strait is covered with rough, heavy ice. Much of this is polar ice which has flowed down the M'Clintock Channel from the Viscount Melville Sound. Large-scale breakup of the ice in the strait begins by late July and continues into late September when it begins to freeze again.

Near the entrance of Victoria Strait was where HMS Terror and HMS Erebus became trapped during John Franklin's expedition and were abandoned in 1848. Due to the hazards of the strait, a longer route was used which went around King William Island. This route was easier despite having an even shallower bottom. In 1967, the Victoria Strait was used for the first time by an icebreaker, the CCGS John A. Macdonald, when travelling to the western Arctic to assist shipping. It was crossed again by the same icebreaker in 1975, and later in 1976 by the icebreakers CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent and CCGS J.E. Bernier.

Notes

Straits of Kitikmeot Region
Victoria Island (Canada)
Franklin's lost expedition

Victoria Strait


The Archos AV series is a line of portable media players from the company called Archos that was released through 2003 to 2005. This series introduced the digital video recorder for the AV500, an optional feature that would be compatible in subsequent players. Although the AV series did not have standalone digital audio players, Archos did release them under the concurrently released Gmini series.

Products

AV100

The AV100 series were similar to the Jukebox Multimedia with some updates including recording capability and faster performance. Also came in a 40 GB model.

AV300

The device plays the standard formats (AVI, MP3, WMA, AVI, JPG, PNG, and BMP) and also comes in three sizes (20, 40, & 80 GB).

The unit also features a line in source for audio and video, enabling users to record video from external sources, as well as recording audio from the combined line / S/PDIF / ExtMic input or through its built in microphone.

The player was criticized for its low battery performance and lack of DRM playback facilities. The battery playback on the device is stated at 3 and a half hours when watching video or 10 hours when listening to music.

This device was released in 2003, and weighs 350 g.

The optional AVCam 300 turns the device into a digital camera and camcorder, with other selective addons available such as an FM radio remote control (which also enables radio recording) and a memory card reader.

The 2004 edition Guinness World Records would state the 80GB AV380 to be the multimedia jukebox with the largest capacity.

AV400
Running the same software as AV300, the camera has been removed and a CompactFlash card slot has been built into the product directly. Image preview slides and DRM WMA support, as well as WMV access are also included.

The unit is sold in many hard drive sizes, 20, 40, 60, & 80 GB and the AV4100 which is 100 GB in size. The actual size of the unit depends on the capacity, the AV420 (20 GB) was smaller than all of the other models and also has a smaller screen size.

The cradle enables users to connect their device to their television, DVD players and stereos with ease without having loose wires or problems locating the right sockets.

Archos built a copy protection system into the video recording software to make sure that while protected videos can be recorded on the device, they can't be transferred onto computers or the Internet. One feature of the AV300 was its lack of security and ability to rip movies but this was disabled for the AV400. If one records a protected DVD, then one can only play it back on the device.

An included remote control enables one to control the entire device.

The device plays all the standard formats as the AV300 with the addition of DRM protected WMA files and standard WMV files. The device also supports Windows Media's PlaysForSure platform. A limitation of the device at its release was that it wasn't specifically designed to play back ASP (Advanced Simple Profile) MP4 files, creating compatibility problems with several files encoded with the popular XviD and DivX compression techniques.

This device was released Wednesday June 30, 2004, and weighs 290 g (20 GB model) or 320 g (higher capacity models)

AV500
Variants - AV530, AV560, AV580, AV5100

Just before the PMA 400 was released, there was a name conflict within the models. The PMA400 was scheduled to be released as the AV500. Ultimately, the name went to a new model of Digital Video Recorder (DVR). The Archos AV500 is similar to the GMini 500, but it has extra facilities (video recording and the new AV Pod).

The Archos AV500 series plays Divx/Xvid and WMV9 format video; MP3 and WAV audio files; and displays JPEG and BMP graphic files. It records video in the Divx format, either through its DVR function or through its minicam accessory, and it records sound either through its built-in microphone or through its analog input. It can play and record audio and video to or from external sources via the mini-RCA jacks of its AV Pod. The AV500 case is made of brushed aluminum and forms a solid, rugged, dense box with a built-in LCD screen.

Three formats of the AV500 were manufactured, containing either 40, 60, or 100 GB hard disk drives, each format using a different size and shape of battery. Sometimes the specific format is referenced by combining the model name with the hard disk drive format, e.g., the AV5100 to designate the AV500 with a 100 GB hard drive. The AV5100 has an optional triple-life battery pack.

Data transfer for the AV500 is provided through its USB ports. The AV500 can act as either a USB controller or a USB device, using its USB A and USB B ports respectively. A memory card reader would be read through the USB A port, for example, but a home computer would access the AV500 through the USB B port.

An optional camera attachment (digital minicam) was available for the AV500 from late December 2005 to mid-2006, when Archos discontinued its production. The minicam records video directly to the Archos' hard disk drive in Divx format. The camera is powered from the AV500 unit via its single video cable. A control unit in the middle of the cable contains a high-quality microphone and a begin/end recording control button.

The AV500 was released on Friday June 10, 2005. It weighs 255 g for the 30 GB Model and 315 g for the 100 GB Model. Archos has replaced the AV product line with its Generation 4 series.

AV700
The Archos AV700 was the turning point for Archos to change the way they sell these devices to the public. The previous slogan, "Think Smaller" was seen as inappropriate for the purpose, so they then changed it to "On The Go".

The AV700 comes in 40, 80 or 100 gigabyte models. The built-in screen resolution is 420 by 234. It is a digital video recorder and it is possible to record video from an external source, too. Like the Gmini 400 series, the AV700 also has a built-in Mophun gaming engine.

This device was released Monday May 23, 2005, and weighs 590 g.

In 2006, Archos developed the TV-Edition from the AV700, the AV700TV.

PocketDish
The AV700 and AV500, along with the Gmini 402, were sold under the PocketDish brand of Dish Network, though the original Archos logos remained. They were named the AV700E, AV500E, and AV402E respectively. While the AV700E and AV402E are listed as sold out, the AV500E is still listed as available even though the standard AV500 has been discontinued.

References

External links
Manufacturer's Website
Open Source Firmware for some AV Series players

Portable media players
Consumer electronics brands

Archos AV series


The chairman or chairwoman of the Crow Nation is the head of the executive branch of the Crow Nation of Montana. Every four years, the Crow Tribal General Council (all adult-aged registered voters) elects a chairman of the Executive Branch.

The current chairman is Frank Whiteclay. The chairman serves as chief executive officer, with enumerated powers in the 2001 Crow Constitution. The constitutional changes of 2001 created a three branch government. The chairman serves as the head of the executive branch, which includes the offices of vice-chairman, secretary, and vice-secretary and the tribal offices and departments of the Crow Tribal Administration. Notable chairmen were Clara Nomee, Edison Real Bird, and Robert Yellowtail.

See list of Crow Tribal Administrations.

Notes and references

Crow tribe
Titles and offices of Native American leaders

Chairpersons of the Crow Nation


Rude Awakening is the first live album by American heavy metal band Megadeth. The album was released by Sanctuary Records in 2002, and is the last release before the band broke up in 2002. It was released in both CD and DVD formats.

The album was originally going to be recorded live at a concert in Argentina, but due to the September 11, 2001 attacks, the band decided to record it live in the United States.

Tracks on the album are taken from two live concerts, performed two nights in a row in November 2001. The first night was at the Rialto Theater in Tucson, Arizona, followed the next day by an almost identical performance (to ensure clean audio and video footage, and for a variety of editing options), at the Web Theater in Phoenix, Arizona. Dave Mustaine dedicated the performance of "A Tout le Monde" to the victims of the September 11th attacks and mentions this before performing it. Two previously unreleased tracks from the concert, "The Conjuring" and "Time: The Beginning"/"Use the Man" were released on Still Alive... and Well? (which also features "In My Darkest Hour", "Sweating Bullets", "Symphony of Destruction" and "Holy Wars... The Punishment Due"). "Silent Scorn" can be heard as a tape outro for the band during "Holy Wars".

The tracks on the DVD are all from the second show at the Web Theater in Phoenix, Arizona on November 17, 2001. For the bonus features of the DVD they used recordings from the show in Tucson, Arizona,

This is the only Megadeth album which does not include the band logo or title on the immediate cover. It is located on the side bar of the album instead. The album's cover was designed by graphic designer Storm Thorgerson (noted for his work with Pink Floyd) and Peter Curzon.

This was the end of this line-up of the band. Al Pitrelli and Jimmy DeGrasso played their final show. Dave Ellefson left the band because he wasn't satisfied with his share of the band's earnings. In 2010  he returned to the band. The DVD was certified gold in the US and Canada.

Reception

Brian O'Neill of AllMusic rated Rude Awakening a 3 out of 5, opining that, while he believes the album is "fraught with" limitations, it is "a far better encapsulation of the band's career to date than the spotty Capitol Punishment: The Megadeth Years compilation."

The album won a 2002 Metal Edge Readers' Choice Award for Compilation/Live Album of the Year. Since it was generally believed to be Megadeth's swan song at the time (until their reformation in 2004), the magazine stated, "Megadeth's farewell gets the recognition it deserves."

Track listing

CD

DVD
 Dread and the Fugitive Mind
 Wake Up Dead
 In My Darkest Hour
 She-Wolf
 Reckoning Day
 Devil's Island
 Burning Bridges
 Hangar 18
 Return to Hangar
 Hook in Mouth
 1,000 Times Goodbye
 Mechanix
 Tornado of Souls
 Ashes in Your Mouth
 Sweating Bullets
 Trust
 Symphony of Destruction
 Peace Sells
 Holy Wars... The Punishment Due

DVD bonus features
Megadeth on Megadeth
Paul Gargano on Megadeth (text)
Bonus footage of live show at Rialto Theatre (Tucson, Arizona) on November 16, 2001

 Kill the King
 Angry Again
 Almost Honest
 Train of Consequences
 A Tout le Monde

Personnel
Credits adapted from CD liner notes:

Megadeth
Dave Mustaine – guitars, lead vocals
Dave Ellefson – bass, backing vocals
Al Pitrelli – guitars, backing vocals
Jimmy DeGrasso – drums

Production
 Produced by Megadeth and Bill Kennedy
 Engineered and mixed by Bill Kennedy
 Mastered by Tom Baker
 Cover design by Storm Thorgerson and Peter Curzon

Charts

Certifications

References

Megadeth live albums
Sanctuary Records albums
2002 live albums
Albums with cover art by Storm Thorgerson

Rude Awakening (Megadeth album)


Friedrich Wilhelm Sollmann, later William Frederick Sollmann (1 April 1881 – 6 January 1951) was a German journalist, politician, and interior minister of the Weimar Republic. In 1919, he was on the staff of the German delegation that was to receive the Treaty of Versailles. In 1933, he emigrated and eventually moved to the United States where he became an advocate for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

Life

Early life in the German Empire
Wilhelm Sollmann was born on 2 April 1881 in , Saxe-Meiningen (today a part of Sonneberg, Thuringia). His father was Johan Jakob Sollmann, a brewer and farmer in Oberlind and after 1889 tenant of the Ratskeller at Coburg. His mother was Christiane Sollmann, inn keeper. After the move to Coburg, Wilhelm attended the Casimirianum gymnasium from 1891 to 1897, when he had to leave due to the family's financial difficulties. That year, his family moved to Cologne. There, he began work as an apprentice (kaufmännische Lehre). From 1901-11 he worked as a Handlungsgehilfe whilst attending night school at the Handelshochschule Köln. Originally rooted in Lutheran Christianity, he was a member of the Internationaler Guttempler-Orden and the CVJM. However, in 1902 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and in 1907 co-founded the Workers' Youth at Cologne. He was also active in the temperance movement and was chairman of the Arbeiter-Abstinenzbewegung (workers' temperance movement, 1906–10). He was also a member of the Angestelltengwerkschaft (white-collar workers' union). In 1906, Sollmann married Anna Katharina (Käthe, Kate) née Grümmer (born 1883, died before 1975). They had one daughter, Elfriede (1912–97). In 1908, Sollmann became a Freidenker.

In 1911, Sollmann became editor of the socialdemocratic newspaper Fränkischer Volksfreund at Würzburg, but soon returned to Cologne where he became editor (1912) and later editor-in-chief (1920–33) of the Rheinische Zeitung. During World War I, Sollmann was the chairman of the socialdemocratic union (Verein) of Cologne.

German Revolution and Weimar Republic
During the German Revolution of 1918 he played a key role in the formed Workers' and soldiers' council of Cologne. From 1918-24, Sollmann was a member of the Cologne municipal parliament (Stadtverordneter). In 1919, he was elected to the Weimar National Assembly and held his seat until the new elections to the Reichstag in 1920. Working closely with Konrad Adenauer, whom he later described as "a personal friend and political enemy", Sollmann helped turn the Handelshochschule into the University of Cologne in 1919. He rejected an honorific doctorate in 1919 (and again in 1928) for personal reasons.

In 1919, Sollmann also was a staff member of the German delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles, where he served as an expert on problems of the Rheinland occupation. He was a member of the Reichstag from 1920 until 1933. In 1921, he initiated the establishment of the Sozialdemokratischer Parlamentsdienst (after 1924: Sozialdemokratischer Pressedienst), a political news service. From 13 August 1923 until his resignation on 3 November, he served as Reichsminister des Innern (Reich Minister of the Interior) in the cabinets of Gustav Stresemann.

In parliament, he served as a member of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, and as an expert on disarmament and adult education.

Germany 1933 and emigration
In 1933, he was elected to the executive board of the SPD and as such persecuted by the Nazis after the Machtergreifung. On 9 March, he was taken into Schutzhaft ("protective custody") and tortured. After being released, he fled in May via Luxembourg to the occupied Saar. There he briefly worked as the editor-in-chief of the socialdemocratic Volskstimme. After the referendum he returned to Luxembourg, in 1936 went on to the United Kingdom and in 1937 emigrated to the United States.

In America
In the U.S., Sollmann worked as a writer, speaker, radio announcer and faculty member (1937–1950) of the Pendle Hill Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation, a Quaker study center located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

In the next years, Sollmann travelled through most of the United States, giving lectures on world affairs. He became a visiting professor of international affairs at Haverford, Bard, and Reed Colleges.

Having lost his German citizenship in 1936, in 1943 he was naturalized and changed his name to William Frederick Sollmann. That year, he also became a Quaker.

A member of the SPD's right wing, in exile he was one of the leading proponents of the volkssozialistische Richtung within the party. At the request of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, Sollmann briefly visited occupied Germany in 1948, where he held speeches and radio addresses. On another visit the following year he served as visiting professor at the University of Cologne. In 1949/50, the U.S. government consulted him on setting up a new German Civil Liberties Union (Bund für Bürgerrechte) and he worked for the Allied High Commission, but he had to return to the United States due to the onset of illness. During his visits, he met with politicians like Adenauer and Kurt Schumacher and also was Adenauer's guest of honour at the inaugural meeting of the Deutscher Bundestag. Sollmann was co-founder of the Carl Schurz-Gesellschaft, member of the Verbands deutscher Journalisten im Ausland and of the Legion for American Unity.

On 6 January 1951, Sollmann died in Mount Carmel, Connecticut.

A street in Cologne is named after him.

Works
 "Zum Ausbau unserer sozialistischen Jugendbewegung", in: Die Neue Zeit, Wochenschrift der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 1911
 Der Kölner Polizeiprozeß vom 7. – 17. 1. 1914, 1914
 "Ernährungsbeirat von Frauen", in: Die Gleichheit 26, 1916
 Die Revolution in Köln, 1918
 Sozialismus der Tat, 1925
 "Untergang Amerikas", in: Studierstube 23, 1927
 "Antwort an Josef Wirth, Wahlrecht und Parteien", in: Deutsche Republik 3, 1929
 Presse und Kommunalverwaltung, in: Vorträge und Abhandlungen internationaler Institute (Köln), R. 11, 1930
 "Jugend und Partei", in: Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus 2, 1931
 Alkohol und öffentliche Meinung, in: Alkoholismus, Gesundheitspolitik, Gesundheitswirtschaft, 1931
 "Schankstätten und Sozialhygiene", in: Zeitschrift für Gesundheitsverwaltung und Gesundheitsfürsorge 1, 1932
 Der politische Antisemitismus, in: Gegen die Phrase vom jüdischen Schädling, 1933
 "Sozialistische Machtpolitik", in: Zeitschrift für Sozialismus 2, 1935, pp. 758–65
 Religion and Politics, 1941
 German Labour, Hitler's Nemesis, in: Peace Aim Leaflets 1, 1943
 Educational Reconstruction in Germany, in: Schoolmen's Week Proceedings, 1944
 Zwischen Krieg und Frieden, 1948

References

External links
 Wilhelm Sollmann papers at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection

1881 births
1951 deaths
People from Sonneberg
People from Saxe-Meiningen
Social Democratic Party of Germany politicians
Interior ministers of Germany
Members of the Weimar National Assembly
Members of the Reichstag 1920–1924
Members of the Reichstag 1924
Members of the Reichstag 1924–1928
Members of the Reichstag 1928–1930
Members of the Reichstag 1930–1932
Members of the Reichstag 1932
Members of the Reichstag 1932–1933
Members of the Reichstag 1933
Emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
Bard College faculty

Wilhelm Sollmann


Eheim GmbH & Co. KG is a German company founded by Gunther Eheim, operating in the domain of aquariums and aquarium accessories, garden ponds and related accessories. It manufactures different kinds of water filters (internal and external) and the associated filter media, pumps, accessories such as aquarium fish feeders, gravel cleaners, UV-clarifier for aquariums and garden ponds, while its subsidiaries MP (Mueller and Pfleger) manufacture aquariums and Jäger, aquarium heaters. The latest innovation from EHEIM is an external canister filter with WiFi connection and monitoring. Last but not least, EHEIM also manufactures an LED light for aquariums since 2016

Also, a modern and seemingly unrelated domain that Eheim got indirectly involved in is the use of its aquarium pumps in the liquid-cooling systems of overclocked computers. Similarly to aquarium filters, these cooling systems require small water pumps with a low noise level and reliable continuous operation.

See also

 Hagen

References

External links
Eheim main webpage

Manufacturing companies of Germany

Eheim


Christian Heinrich Emil Hermann Voss (October 13, 1894 – January 19, 1987) was a German anatomist. Well known as a medical academic and textbook author he was also notorious for his experiments during the Third Reich.

Early life
The son of a manor lessee, Voss was born in Berlin but raised in Warnkenhagen and Malchin. He studied variously at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Heidelberg University and the University of Rostock before completing his doctorate in 1919, including a spell away from study in the army during the First World War as an army doctor.

Voss became assistant anatomist at his Rostock alma mater in May 1919. In 1926 he transferred to the University of Leipzig but here found career advancement difficult to come by. Voss joined the Nazi Party in 1937, initially only to help advance his career which he felt was being held back by his lack of involvement in the party. The following year Voss was appointed chief anatomist and associate professor at Leipzig.

Under the Nazis
Following the establishment of the Reich University of Posen Voss served as director of the anatomy institute. Under Voss experiments on both Jews and Poles became commonplace and indeed Voss became notorious for his anti-Polish sentiment, writing in his diaries that "the Polish people must be eradicated". By this time Voss had become a convinced follower of the Nazi Weltanschauung, with his diaries revealing a strong current of anti-Semitism and anti-communism.

Whilst in this role he made a deal with the local Gestapo allowing them to use his incinerators in return for the use of some of the bodies of those executed by hanging or decapitation. Voss also had a sideline selling the skulls and death masks of Jews and Poles, with the Naturhistorisches Museum's curator Josef Wastl being his leading customer for this particular service. Along with colleagues such as Robert Herrlinger Voss undertook preparation work for this trade as soon as the victims had been killed.

Post-war
Following the war Voss settled in East Germany and was a professor at the University of Jena from 1952 to 1962 and later as a professor emeritus at Greifswald Medical School. His anatomy textbook, popularly known as "Voss und Herrlinger" was published simultaneously in Jena and Stuttgart for almost forty years and seventeen editions and became a standard reference for German medical students, with editions also appearing in Spanish and Polish. He also edited the world-renowned journal Anatomischer Anzeiger from 1952 to 1974 and from 1954 to 1980 was director of the equally prestigious Acta Histochemica, the leading journal on delicate tissue studies.

He would subsequently move to West Germany in retirement and died in Hamburg in 1987 at the age of 95.

Personal life
Voss was married to Eva, who was four years older than him, in 1919. They had one son Hermann junior in November 1919, who demonstrated highly advanced intelligence from an early age but who also suffered from severe physical disabilities. He died of suffocation in 1939. A daughter, Sabine, followed in 1933.

See also
Nazi human experimentation

References

1894 births
1987 deaths
German anatomists
German Army personnel of World War I
Physicians in the Nazi Party
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni
Heidelberg University alumni
University of Rostock alumni
Academic staff of the University of Rostock
Academic staff of Leipzig University
Academic staff of the University of Jena
Academic staff of the University of Greifswald
Scientists from Berlin
Scientists from the Province of Brandenburg
Nazi human subject research

Hermann Voss (anatomist)


Van Pelt Manor was the name given to an area of Brooklyn, New York, that today is part of the section of Bensonhurst. In the early part of the 20th century, it gave its name to a railroad station, a post office, and Public School 128  was known as Van Pelt Manor grammar school. The house purchased or raised by Aert Teunisse Van Pelt about 1670-1690 stood on modern-day 18th Avenue between 81st and 82nd Streets, east of the old village square and north of the pre-revolutionary Dutch Church of New Utrecht.

Van Pelt Manor was an area in New Utrecht one of the Dutch towns in Brooklyn. Van Pelt Manor was originally owned by the descendants of Teunis Laenen van Pelt, an early Dutch settler. Some authors have written that Teunis Van Pelt was a "Patroon" who was granted manorial rights. Several other tracts of land in New York were designated as "manors', such as Pelham Manor and Livingston Manor. However, author Harold D. Eberlein states: "there never was a duly and legally constituted Van Pelt Manor and this appellation has no defense whatever on any historic grounds. In 1675, 1678 and 1680 considerable tracts of land were acquired by Teunis Van Pelt, the emigre, and added to what he already had previously. These additional holdings in New Utrecht, mentioned in Governor Dongan's Patent of 1686, may have created the impression that the Van Pelts, who were always a prominent family in the neighbourhood, were paving the way for the erection of their possessions to the legal and administrative status of a manor, but if they cherished any such intention it was never consummated."

Eight generations of the Van Pelt family lived at Van Pelt Manor. Some of the more noteworthy were Captain Petrus Van Pelt, who  was elected to the New York Provincial Congress in 1776, Teunis Van Pelt Talmage, elected to the New York State Assembly, and John V.B. Van Pelt, the last elected Supervisor (mayor) of New Utrecht before it was annexed by the City of Brooklyn in 1894. Townsend Cortelyou Van Pelt, brother of Supervisor Van Pelt, deeded the Van Pelt Manor House and surrounding grounds to the City of New York for one dollar in 1910. The Manor House was torn down after a fire in 1952, but the grounds, known as Milestone Park, are administered by the New York City Department of Parks as a small recreation area. In the early 1950s the house which was unprotected was used by neighborhood children to play in. The fire was suspected to have started by children whom often built small fires to stay warm while playing in the structure.

Sources

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace

Geography of Brooklyn
History of Brooklyn
Houses in Brooklyn

Van Pelt Manor