The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany.

The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher as the University of Berlin () in 1809, and opened in 1810, making it the oldest of Berlin's four universities. From 1828 until its closure in 1945, it was named Friedrich Wilhelm University (). During the Cold War, the university found itself in East Berlin and was de facto split in two when the Free University of Berlin opened in West Berlin. The university received its current name in honour of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1949.

The university is divided into nine faculties including its medical school shared with the Freie Universität Berlin. The university has a student enrollment of around 32,000 students, and offers degree programs in some 189 disciplines from undergraduate to post-doctorate level. Its main campus is located on the  boulevard in central Berlin. The university is known worldwide for pioneering the Humboldtian model of higher education, which has strongly influenced other European and Western universities.

It was regarded as the world's preeminent university for the natural sciences during the 19th and early 20th century, as the university is linked to major breakthroughs in physics and other sciences by its professors, such as Albert Einstein. Past and present faculty and notable alumni include 57 Nobel Prize laureates (the most of any German university), as well as scholars and academics including Albert Einstein, Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Robert Koch, Theodor Mommsen, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Felix Mendelssohn, Otto von Bismarck, W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Liebknecht, Ernst Cassirer, Heinrich Heine, Eduard Fraenkel, Max Planck, Wernher von Braun and the Brothers Grimm.

History

Main building
The main building of Humboldt-Universität is the Prinz-Heinrich-Palais (English: Prince Henry's Palace) on Unter den Linden boulevard in the historic centre of Berlin. It was erected from 1748 to 1753 for Prince Henry of Prussia, the brother of Frederick the Great, according to plans by Johann Boumann in Baroque style. In 1809, the former Royal Prussian residence was converted into a university building. Damaged during the Allied bombing in World War II, it was rebuilt from 1949 to 1962.

In 1967, eight statues from the destroyed Potsdam City Palace were placed on the side wings of the university building. Currently there is discussion about returning the statues to the Potsdam City Palace, which was rebuilt as the Landtag of Brandenburg in 2013.

Early history

The University of Berlin was established on 16 August 1809, on the initiative of the liberal Prussian educational politician Wilhelm von Humboldt by King Friedrich Wilhelm III, similar to University of Bonn, during the period of the Prussian Reform Movement. The university was located in a palace constructed from 1748 to 1766 for the late Prince Henry, the younger brother of Frederick the Great. After his widow and her ninety-member staff moved out, the first unofficial lectures were given in the building in the winter of 1809. Humboldt faced great resistance to his ideas as he set up the university. He submitted his resignation to the King in April 1810, and was not present when the school opened that fall. The first students were admitted on 6 October 1810, and the first semester started on 10 October 1810, with 256 students and 52 lecturers in faculties of law, medicine, theology and philosophy under rector Theodor Schmalz. The university celebrates 15 October 1810 as the date of its opening. In 1810, at the time of the opening, the university established the first academic chair in the field of history in the world. From 1828 to 1945, the school was named the Friedrich Wilhelm University, in honor of its founder. Ludwig Feuerbach, then one of the students, made a comment on the university in 1826: "There is no question here of drinking, duelling and pleasant communal outings; in no other university can you find such a passion for work, such an interest for things that are not petty student intrigues, such an inclination for the sciences, such calm and such silence. Compared to this temple of work, the other universities appear like public houses."

The university has been home to many of Germany's greatest thinkers of the past two centuries, among them the subjective idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the absolute idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, the Romantic legal theorist Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the anti-optimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the objective idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling, cultural critic Walter Benjamin, and famous physicists Albert Einstein and Max Planck.

The founders of Marxist theory Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attended the university, as did poet Heinrich Heine, novelist Alfred Döblin, founder of structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure, German unifier Otto von Bismarck, Communist Party of Germany founder Karl Liebknecht, African American Pan Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois and European unifier Robert Schuman, as well as the influential surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach in the early half of the 1800s.

The structure of German research-intensive universities served as a model for institutions like Johns Hopkins University. Further, it has been claimed that "the 'Humboldtian' university became a model for the rest of Europe [...] with its central principle being the union of teaching and research in the work of the individual scholar or scientist."

Enlargement

In addition to the strong anchoring of traditional subjects, such as science, law, philosophy, history, theology and medicine, the university developed to encompass numerous new scientific disciplines. Alexander von Humboldt, brother of the founder William, promoted the new learning. The construction of modern research facilities in the second half of the 19th century aided the teaching of the natural sciences. Famous researchers, such as the chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, the mathematicians Ernst Eduard Kummer, Leopold Kronecker, Karl Weierstrass, the physicians Johannes Peter Müller, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Albrecht von Graefe, Rudolf Virchow, and Robert Koch, contributed to Berlin University's scientific fame.

During this period of enlargement, the university gradually expanded to incorporate other previously separate colleges in Berlin. An example would be the Charité, the Pépinière and the Collegium Medico-chirurgicum. In 1710, King Friedrich I had built a quarantine house for Plague at the city gates, which in 1727 was rechristened by the "soldier king" Friedrich Wilhelm: "Es soll das Haus die Charité heißen" (It will be called Charité [French for charity]). By 1829 the site became the Friedrich Wilhelm University's medical campus and remained so until 1927 when the more modern University Hospital was constructed.

The university started a natural history collection in 1810, which by 1889, required a separate building and became the Museum für Naturkunde. The preexisting Tierarznei School, founded in 1790 and absorbed by the university, in 1934 formed the basis of the Veterinary Medicine Facility (Grundstock der Veterinärmedizinischen Fakultät). Also the Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule Berlin (Agricultural University of Berlin), founded in 1881 was affiliated with the Agricultural Faculties of the university.

In August 1870, in a speech delivered on the eve of war with France, Emil du Bois-Reymond proclaimed that "the University of Berlin, quartered opposite the King's palace, is, by the deed of our foundation, the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern (das geistige Leibregiment des Hauses Hohenzollern)."

Third Reich

After 1933, like all German universities, Friedrich Wilhelm University was affected by the Nazi regime. The rector during this period was Eugen Fischer. It was from the university's library that some 20,000 books by "degenerates" and opponents of the regime were taken to be burned on 10 May of that year in the Opernplatz (now the Bebelplatz) for a demonstration protected by the SA that also featured a speech by Joseph Goebbels. A monument to this can now be found in the center of the square, consisting of a glass panel opening onto an underground white room with empty shelf space for 20,000 volumes and a plaque, bearing an epigraph from an 1820 work by Heinrich Heine: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" ("This was but a prelude; where they burn books, they ultimately burn people").

The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (German "Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums") resulted in 250 Jewish professors and employees being fired from Friedrich Wilhelm University during 1933–1934 and numerous doctorates being withdrawn. Students and scholars and political opponents of Nazis were ejected from the university and often deported. During this time nearly one third of all of the staff were fired by the Nazis.

Cold War

During the Cold War, the university was located in East Berlin. It reopened in 1946 as the University of Berlin, but faced repression from the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, including the persecution of liberal and social democrat students. Almost immediately, the Soviet occupiers started persecuting non-communists and suppressing academic freedom at the university, requiring lectures to be submitted for approval by Socialist Unity Party officials, and piped Soviet propaganda into the cafeteria. This led to strong protests within the student body and faculty. NKVD secret police arrested a number of students in March 1947 as a response. The Soviet Military Tribunal in Berlin-Lichtenberg ruled the students were involved in the formation of a "resistance movement at the University of Berlin", as well as espionage, and were sentenced to 25 years of forced labor. From 1945 to 1948, 18 other students and teachers were arrested or abducted, many gone for weeks, and some taken to the Soviet Union and executed. Many of the students targeted by Soviet persecution were active in the liberal or social democratic resistance against the Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship; the German communist party had regarded the social democrats as their main enemies since the early days of the Weimar Republic. During the Berlin Blockade, the Freie Universität Berlin was established as a de facto western successor in West Berlin in 1948, with support from the United States, and retaining traditions and faculty members of the old Friedrich Wilhelm University. The name of the Free University refers to West Berlin's perceived status as part of the Western "free world", in contrast to the "unfree" Communist world in general and the "unfree" communist-controlled university in East Berlin in particular.

Since the historical name, Friedrich Wilhelm University, had monarchic origins, the school was officially renamed in 1949. Although the Soviet occupational authorities preferred to name the school after a communist leader, university leaders were able to name it the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, after the two Humboldt brothers, a name that was also uncontroversial in the west and capitalized on the fame of the Humboldt name, which is associated with the Humboldtian model of higher education.

Modern Germany

After the German reunification, the university was radically restructured under the Structure and Appointment Commissions, which were presided by West German professors. For departments on social sciences and humanities, the faculty was subjected to a "liquidation" process, in which contracts of employees were terminated and positions were made open to new academics, mainly West Germans. Older professors were offered early retirement. The East German higher education system included a much larger number of permanent assistant professors, lecturers and other middle level academic positions. After reunification, these positions were abolished or converted to temporary posts for consistency with the West German system. As a result, only 10% of the mid-level academics in Humboldt-Universität still had a position in 1998. Through the transformations, the university's research and exchange links with Eastern European institutions were maintained and stabilized.

Today, Humboldt University is a state university with a large number of students (36,986 in 2014, among them more than 4,662 foreign students) after the model of West German universities, and like its counterpart the Freie Universität Berlin.

The university consists of three different campuses, namely Campus Mitte, Campus Nord and Campus Adlershof. Its main building is located in the centre of Berlin at the boulevard Unter den Linden and is the heart of Campus Mitte. The building was erected on order by King Frederick II for his younger brother Prince Henry of Prussia. All the institutes of humanities are located around the main building together with the Department of Law and the Department of Business and Economics. Campus Nord is located north of the main building close to Berlin Hauptbahnhof and is the home of the life science departments including the university medical center Charité. The natural sciences, together with computer science and mathematics, are located at Campus Adlershof in the south-east of Berlin. Furthermore, the university continues its tradition of a book sale at the university gates facing Bebelplatz.

Organization

The aforementioned nine faculties into which the university is divided:
 Faculty of Law
 Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (Geography, Computer Science, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics)
 Faculty of Life Sciences (Agriculture and Horticulture, Biology, Psychology)
 Charité – Berlin University of Medicine (jointly with Free University of Berlin)
 Faculty of Philosophy I (Philosophy, History, European Ethnology, Department of Library and Information Science)
 Faculty of Philosophy II (Literature, Linguistics, Scandinavian Studies, Romance literatures, English and American Studies, Slavic Studies, Classical Philology)
 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Social Sciences, Cultural Studies/Arts, Asian/African Studies (includes Archeology), Sport science, Rehabilitation Studies, Education, Quality Management in Education)
 Faculty of Theology
 Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Furthermore, there are two independent institutes (Zentralinstitute) that are part of the university:
 Centre for British Studies (in German: Großbritannienzentrum)
 Humboldt-Innovation (research transfer and spin-off service)
 Museum für Naturkunde (Natural History Museum)
 Späth-Arboretum

Student representation
Each year, students elect the , which serves as the body of student representatives under German law.
|-
! colspan="2" style="text-align:left;" | Lists
! Votes
! %
! ±
! Seats
! ±
|-
| style="background-color:#BB0301;" |
| style="text-align:left;" | Juso-Hochschulgruppe
| 252
|
|
| 13
| +4
|-
| style="background-color:#FC3ABE;" |
| style="text-align:left;" | OLKS – OffeneListeKritischerStudierender
| 180
|
|
| 9
| +3
|-
| style="background-color:#C62B29;" |
| style="text-align:left;" | Linke Liste an der HU – LiLi
| 156
|
|
| 8
| 0
|-
| style="background-color:#0C4EAE;" |
| style="text-align:left;" | Association of Christian Democratic Students (Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten) – Demokratisch. Praktisch. Gut.
| 151
|
|
| 8
| +4
|-
| style="background-color:#578724;" |
| style="text-align:left;" | Grünboldt
| 115
|
|
| 6
| +2
|-
| style="background-color:none" |
| style="text-align:left;" | Queer-feministische LGBT*I*Q*-Liste
| 114
|
|
| 6
| +3
|-
| style="background-color:#C40049;" |
| style="text-align:left;" | Die Linke.SDS HU Berlin
| 88
|
|
| 4
| +2
|-
| style="background-color:#ED1C24;" |
| style="text-align:left;" | IYSSE
| 63
|
|
| 3
| +1
|-
| style="background-color:#000000;" |
| style="text-align:left;" | João & the autonome alkis.Die LISTE
| 53
|
|
| 3
| +2
|-
! colspan="2" style="text-align:left;" | Total
! 1172
! style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"| 100%
! style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"| 60
|}

Library

When the Royal Library proved insufficient, a new library was founded in 1831, first located in several temporary sites. In 1871–1874 a library building was constructed, following the design of architect Paul Emanuel Spieker. In 1910 the collection was relocated to the building of the Berlin State Library.

During the Weimar Period the library contained 831,934 volumes (1930) and was thus one of the leading university libraries in Germany at that time.

During the Nazi book burnings in 1933, no volumes from the university library were destroyed. The loss through World War II was comparatively small. In 2003, natural science-related books were outhoused to the newly founded library at the Adlershof campus, which is dedicated solely to the natural sciences.

Since the premises of the State Library had to be cleared in 2005, a new library building was erected close to the main building in the center of Berlin. The "Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm-Zentrum" (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Centre, Grimm Zentrum, or GZ as referred to by students) opened in 2009.

In total, the university library contains about 6.5 million volumes and 9,000 held magazines and journals, and is one of the biggest university libraries in Germany.

The books of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft were destroyed during the Nazi book burnings, and the institute destroyed. Under the terms of the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, the government had agreed to continue the work of the institute at the university after its founder's death. However, these terms were ignored. In 2001, the university acquired the Archive for Sexology from the Robert Koch Institute, which was founded with a large private library donated by Erwin J. Haeberle. This has now been housed at the new Magnus Hirschfeld Center.

Academics

Rankings
According to the 2024 QS World University Rankings, the university ranked 120th globally and 7th at the national level. Additionally, in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2024, it was placed at 87th worldwide and 4th within the country. Because of an unresolved dispute over the counting of Nobel laureates before the Second World War – both Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin claim to be the rightful successor of the Friedrich Wilhelm University – both do not appear in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) anymore since 2008.

In the 2023 QS Subject Ranking, Humboldt University ranks first in Germany in the arts and humanities and the social sciences. In the 2023 THE Subject Ranking, Humboldt University ranks second in Germany in the arts and humanities, law, and psychology. In the 2022 ARWU Subject Ranking, Humboldt University ranks first in Germany in geography, dentistry, law, and nursing.

Measured by the number of top managers in the German economy, Humboldt-Universität ranked 53rd in 2019. In 2020, the American U.S. News & World Report listed Humboldt-Universität as the 82nd best in the world, climbing eight positions, being among the 100 best in the world in 17 areas out of 29 ranked.

International partnerships
HU students can study abroad for a semester or a year at partner institutions such as the University of Warwick, Princeton University, and the University of Vienna.

Notable alumni and faculty

 Monika Lüke, international law scholar and former secretary general Amnesty International, Germany

See also
 History of European universities
 Friedrich Althoff
 List of split up universities

References

Further reading

External links

Educational institutions established in 1810
Universities and colleges in Berlin
Rebuilt buildings and structures in Berlin
1810 establishments in Prussia
Universities and colleges established in the 19th century
Alexander von Humboldt
Frederick William III of Prussia

Humboldt University of Berlin


Southern Nevada Correctional Center was a medium-security men's prison in Jean, Clark County, Nevada (about 30 miles south of Las Vegas), owned and operated by the Nevada Department of Corrections.  The facility has been closed since 2008.

First opened in 1978, the facility was closed in 2000, then re-opened for two years to house inmates under 25 years of age.  As late as 2015, Nevada legislators raised the possibility of reopening it, if only to illustrate a political point.

SNCC should not be confused with the Southern Desert Correctional Center, also run by the state for state inmates, and the Nevada Southern Detention Center, a private prison run by Corrections Corporation of America.

History
The original 1978 facility housed prisoners sentenced for DUI or similar crimes.  Later a psychiatric center was established in Desert Hall, which housed a medium security psychological treatment facility for inmates deemed to be too impaired to live among the general population.  In the 1980s the prison contained mostly sex offenders, offenders who had been on protective custody in other prisons in the state and "lifers" who had been in custody for many years with no problems.

In 2006 the center installed the first in the nation electronic tracking system for all prisoners.

Description
The cell blocks are situated alongside the left, right, and rear sides of a central campus and, from the outside, resemble condominiums or apartments constructed in free-standing modules. Each housing unit consists of two "wings".  Each wing has a central rotunda with two tiers of cells.  The cells are fitted for two people with a bunk bed, sink and toilet.  There are no bars.  Each cell has a door with a small window in it.

There are no shrubs, trees, or grass inside the compound, which is double fenced. The interior fence, a heavy-duty chain-link fence, is approximately 20 feet tall, curves inward near the top, and is topped with a roll of razor wire. The outside fence is also a heavy-duty chain-link fence. It is taller than the interior fence, also curves inward near its top, and it is equipped with two rolls of razor-wire along its top. Another roll of razor wire is attached along the bottom of the exterior fence, making even an approach to the fence difficult, if not impossible. Instead of grass, shrubs, and trees, the compound inside the double fence contains raked gravel which is tan in color.

Sidewalks, which are identified by an alphanumeric code at their heads, lead to the modules and the cafeteria. At the south end of the compound is the gym, and the north end contains the chapel, school and administrative building and visiting center.(Ref. - former inmate 1984–1991)

In popular culture
 In the 2006 Sci Fi Channel miniseries The Lost Room, the protagonist visits the prison in search of his missing daughter.
 In the 2010 video game Fallout: New Vegas, one of the locations in-game is a prison called the "NCR Correctional Facility" located in the same geographical location in Jean, Nevada, which is based on the Southern Nevada Correctional Facility.

References

Buildings and structures in Clark County, Nevada
Prisons in Nevada
Jean, Nevada
Residential buildings in the Las Vegas metropolitan area
1978 establishments in Nevada
2008 disestablishments in Nevada

Southern Nevada Correctional Center


Simon Phipps is a British self-taught game programmer and video game designer. He began making games in 1982 when he wrote his first published video game he wrote while he was at school. He spent a few months writing business software before he was approached to provide some freelance artwork for Sheffield-based Gremlin Graphics. At his interview, he was offered a full-time position.

In 1988, he was one of the founders of Core Design, where he would work on many of their titles until leaving in 1996.

Phipps then worked on Acclaim Entertainment's hit Shadow Man, alongside game designer Guy Miller. Phipps worked for Acclaim Teesside, but about 9 months into making the game ShadowMan: 2econd Coming, he left for Electronic Arts (EA) where he worked alongside Guy Miller on the Harry Potter games for five years.

In 2006, he moved to EA's studio Criterion Games working on a number of unpublished titles as well as contributing to their website and video podcast. In early 2009 he left EA and joined Eurocom.

Games
 Jet Power Jack
 Masters of the Universe: the Movie
 Skate Crazy
 Night Raider
 Rick Dangerous
 Switchblade
 Saint and Greavsie's Football Trivia
 Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Computer Game
 Rick Dangerous 2
 Thunderhawk
 Wolfchild
 Asterix and the Power of the Gods
 Bubba 'n' Stix
 Shellshock
 College Slam
 ShadowMan
 ShadowMan: 2econd Coming
 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

References

External links
 Phipps' Webpage

1966 births
Living people
British video game designers
British video game programmers

Simon Phipps (game designer)


The 386 Generation () is the generation of South Koreans born in the 1960s who were very active politically as young adults, and instrumental in the democracy movement of the 1980s. The 386 Generation takes a critical view of the United States and a sympathetic view of North Korea.

The Hankyoreh, a South Korean left-liberal newspaper, reported that right-wing conservatives in Japan perceive the 386 generation as being "anti-Japanese".

Etymology
The term was coined in the early 1990s, in reference to what was then the latest computer model, Intel's 386, and referring to people then in their 30s, having attended university in the 1980s, and born in the 1960s.

History
This was the first generation of South Koreans to grow up free from the poverty that had marked South Korea in the recent past. The broad political mood of the generation was far more left-leaning than that of their parents, or their eventual children. They played a pivotal role in the democratic protests which forced President Chun Doo-hwan to claim democratic elections in 1987, marking the transition from military dictatorship (Third and Fifth republic) to democracy.

Members of the 386 generation now comprise much of the elite of South Korean society. Kim Dae-jung benefitted from widespread 386er support, but it is the election of Roh Moo-hyun who was the strongest demonstration of the more left-leaning politics of the generation. Not all 386 generations are upper class or left-liberal, but some 386 generations are described as "liberal elite" or "progressive elite".

See also
 Neoliberalism
 Gangnam leftist
 Democratic Party of Korea
 People Party (South Korea)
 Justice Party (South Korea)
 Angry young man (South Korea)
June Struggle
Undongkwon

References

Cultural generations
Demographics of South Korea
Liberalism in South Korea
South Korean democracy movements
Korean nationalism
History of South Korea
Political terminology in South Korea
Fifth Republic of Korea

386 Generation


Christian views on magic vary widely among Christian denominations and among individuals. Many Christians actively condemn magic as satanic, holding that it opens the way for demonic possession. Some Christians simply view it as entertainment. Conversely, some branches of esoteric Christianity actively engage in magical practices.

Biblical references

There are several references to witchcraft in the Bible that strongly condemn such practices. For example,  condemns anyone who "casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord, and because of these detestable practices the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you", and  states "Do not allow a sorceress to live" (or in the King James Bible "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"). It has also been suggested that the word "witch" (Heb. מְכַשֵּׁפָ֖ה məḵaššêp̄āh) might be a mistranslation of "poisoner."

Others point to a primitive idealist belief in a relation between bewitching and coveting, reflected in the occasional translation of the Tenth Commandment as 'Thou shalt not covet'. This may suggest that the prohibition related specifically to sorcery or the casting of spells to unnaturally possess something.

Some adherents of near-east religions acted as mediums, channeling messages from the dead or from a familiar spirit. The Bible sometimes is translated as referring to "necromancer" and "necromancy" (). However, some lexicographers, including James Strong and Spiros Zodhiates, disagree. These scholars say that the Hebrew word kashaph (כשפ), used in Exodus 22:18 and 5 other places in the Tanakh comes from a root meaning "to whisper". Strong, therefore, concludes that the word means "to whisper a spell, i.e. to incant or practice magic". The Contemporary English Version translates  as referring to "any kind of magic".

At the very least, older biblical prohibitions included those against 'sorcery' to obtain something unnaturally; 'necromancy' as the practice of magic or divination through demons or the dead, and any forms of malevolent 'bewitchery'.

Early Paulian Christianity

The Apostle Paul's Epistle to the Galatians includes sorcery in a list of "works of the flesh". This disapproval is echoed in the Didache, a very early book of church discipline which dates from the mid-late first century.

Medieval views

During the Early Middle Ages, the Christian Churches did not conduct witch trials. The Germanic Council of Paderborn in 785 explicitly outlawed the very belief in witches, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne later confirmed the law. Among Eastern Orthodox Christians concentrated in the Byzantine Empire, belief in witchcraft was widely regarded as deisidaimonia—superstition—and by the 9th and 10th centuries in the Latin Christian West, belief in witchcraft had begun to be seen as heresy.

Christian perspectives began to change with the influential writings of the mystic poet Dante Alighieri and scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, both of whom believed in astrology, whilst condemning sorcery as moral perversion. Dante also condemned then-current forms of alchemy and divination, whilst Aquinas had a more nuanced and sympathetic view.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period (post-Reformation), belief in witchcraft became more popular and witches were seen as directly in league with the Devil. This marked the beginning of a period of witch hunts among early Protestants which lasted about 200 years, and in some countries, particularly in North-Western Europe, tens of thousands of people were accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death.

The Inquisition within the Roman Catholic Church had conducted trials against supposed witches in the 13th century, but these trials were to punish heresy, of which belief in witchcraft was merely one variety. Inquisitorial courts only became systematically involved in the witch-hunt during the 15th century: in the case of the Madonna Oriente, the Inquisition of Milan was not sure what to do with two women who in 1384 and in 1390 confessed to have participated in a type of white magic.

Not all Inquisitorial courts acknowledged witchcraft. For example, in 1610 as the result of a witch-hunting craze the Suprema (the ruling council of the Spanish Inquisition) gave everybody an Edict of Grace (during which confessing witches were not to be punished) and put the only dissenting inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, in charge of the subsequent investigation. The results of Salazar's investigation was that the Spanish Inquisition did not bother witches ever again though they still went after heretics and Crypto-Jews.

Martin Luther
Martin Luther shared some of the views about witchcraft that were common in his time. When interpreting Exodus 22:18, he stated that, with the help of the devil, witches could steal milk merely by thinking of a cow. In his Small Catechism, he taught that witchcraft was a sin against the second commandment and prescribed the Biblical penalty for it in a "table talk":

On 25 August 1538 there was much discussion about witches and sorceresses who poisoned chicken eggs in the nests, or poisoned milk and butter. Doctor Luther said: "One should show no mercy to these [women]; I would burn them myself, for we read in the Law that the priests were the ones to begin the stoning of criminals."

Luther's view of practitioners of magic as quasi-demons was at odds with the Catholic view that emphasized choice and repentance. He also argued that one of the most serious perversions wrought by magic was the threatened degeneration of traditional female roles in the family.

Renaissance views

In the era of the Inquisition and anti-witchcraft sentiment, there was a more acceptable form of "purely natural" occult and pagan study, the study of "natural" phenomena in general with no evil or irreligious intent whatsoever.

Renaissance humanism (15th and 16th century) saw a resurgence in hermeticism and Neo-Platonic varieties of ceremonial magic. Both bourgeoisie and nobility of that era showed great fascination with these arts, which exerted an exotic charm by their ascription to Arabic, Jewish, Romani, and Egyptian sources. There was great uncertainty in distinguishing practices of vain superstition, blasphemous occultism, and perfectly sound scholarly knowledge or pious ritual. The people during this time found that the existence of magic was something that could answer the questions that they could not explain through science. To them it was suggesting that while science may explain reason, magic could explain "unreason".

Marsilio Ficino advocated the existence of spiritual beings and spirits in general, though many such theories ran counter to the ideas of the later Age of Enlightenment, and were treated with hostility by the Roman Catholic Church. Ficino however theorised a "purely natural" magic that did not require the invocation of spirits, malevolent or malicious. Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius reportedly created incantations of his own related to beneficial communication with spirits. His works, including the Steganographia, were immediately placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. However these works were later revealed to be concerned with cryptography and steganography, and the "magical" formulae were cover texts for cryptographic content. Behind their methods however, is an underlying theological motive for their contrivance. The preface to the Polygraphia establishes the everyday practicability of Trithemian cryptography as a "secular consequent of the ability of a soul specially empowered by God to reach, by magical means, from earth to Heaven".

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), a German magician, occult writer, theologian, astrologer, and alchemist, wrote the influential Three Books of Occult Philosophy, incorporating Kabbalah in its theory and practice of Western magic. It contributed strongly to the Renaissance view of ritual magic's relationship with Christianity. Giambattista della Porta expanded on many of these ideas in his Magia Naturalis. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola promoted a syncretic worldview combining Platonism, Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Hermeticism and Kabbalah.

Pico's Hermetic syncretism was further developed by Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest, hermeticist and polymath, who wrote extensively on the subject in 1652, bringing further elements such as Orphism and Egyptian mythology to the mix.
Lutheran Bishop James Heiser recently evaluated the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as an attempted "Hermetic Reformation".

John Dee

John Dee was an intense Christian, but his religiosity was influenced by Hermetic and Renaissance Neo-Platonism and pervasive Pythagorean doctrines. From Hermeticism he drew a belief that man had the potential for divine power that could be exercised through mathematics. He immersed himself in magic, astrology and Hermetic philosophy. Much effort in his last 30 years went into trying to commune with angels, so as to learn the universal language of creation and achieve a pre-apocalyptic unity of mankind. His goal was to help bring forth a unified world religion through the healing of the breach of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and the recapture of the pure theology of the ancients.

Modern views
During the Age of Enlightenment, belief in the powers of witches and sorcerers to harm began to die out in the West.  But the reasons for disbelief differed from those of early Christians. For the early Christians the reason was theological—that Christ had already defeated the powers of evil. For the post-Enlightenment Christians in West and North Europe, the disbelief was based on a belief in rationalism and empiricism.

It was at this time, however, that Western Christianity began expanding to parts of Africa and Asia where premodern worldviews still held sway, and where belief in the power of witches and sorcerers to harm was, if anything, stronger than it had been in Northern Europe. Many African Independent Churches developed their own responses to witchcraft and sorcery.

The situation was further complicated by the rise of new religious movements that considered witchcraft to be a religion. These perspectives do not claim that witches actually consciously enter into a pact with Satan because Satan is not normally believed to exist in Wicca or other modern neo-pagan witchcraft practices.

Christian opposition to witchcraft

Several Christian groups continue to believe in witchcraft and view it as a negative force. Much of the criticism originates among Evangelical Christian groups, especially those which have a fundamentalist tendency, which believe that witchcraft is a danger to children. The 2006 documentary Jesus Camp, which depicts the life of young children attending Becky Fischer's summer camp, shows Fischer condemning the Harry Potter novels and telling the students that "Warlocks are enemies of God" (see also Religious debates over the Harry Potter series). While Fischer's summer camp has sometimes been incorrectly identified as Pentecostal, Fischer is most closely associated with the neo-Pentecostal movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation.

Among Christian tendencies, the NAR is especially aggressive in efforts to counter alleged acts of witchcraft; the NAR's globally distributed "Transformations" pseudo-documentaries by filmmaker George Otis, Jr. show charismatic Christians creating mini-utopias by driving off "territorial spirits" and by banishing or even killing accused witches. During the 2008 United States presidential election, footage surfaced from a 2005 church ceremony in which a NAR apostle, Kenyan bishop Thomas Muthee laid hands on Sarah Palin and called upon God to protect her from "every form of witchcraft".

In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI denounced belief in witchcraft during a visit to Angola.

Magic in literature

Magic in literature, while condemned by some Christians, is often viewed by Christians as non-evil. The key distinction would be between real-life magic and pretend magic. This view holds that in real life, the practice of supernatural abilities (i.e. magic) must have a supernatural power source or origin, which would be either holy or evil. Thus born of Holy Spirit or of demons. (See Spiritual gift and Christian demonology for details on these teachings.) Thus, magic in the Biblical context would be viewed as only an act of evil, whereas in literature, pretend magic is a morally neutral tool available to conduct both good and bad behaviors.

In literature, magical abilities have many different power sources. Technological ability (science) can appear as magic. Often, wielding magic is accomplished by imposing one's will by concentration and/or use of devices to control an external magical force.  This explanation is offered for the Force in Star Wars, magic in Dungeons & Dragons, and magic in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.

The latter two works are by notable Christians, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, respectively. In the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician's Nephew, Lewis specifically explains that magic is a power readily available in some other worlds, less so on Earth. The Empress Jadis (later, the White Witch) was tempted to use magic for selfish reasons to retain control of her world Charn, which ultimately led to the destruction of life there. Lewis related questions of the morality of magic to the same category as the morality of technology, including whether it is real, represents an 'unhealthy interest', or contravenes the basic divine plan for our universe.

Tolkien, a devout Catholic, had strict rules imposed by the ruling powers, angels who had assumed the 'raiment of the earth', for the use of magic by their servants. These included a general discouragement of magic in all but exceptional circumstances, and also prohibitions against use of magic to control others, to set the self up as a political power, or to create a world that violates the natural order.  He did however allow his wizard character to entertain children with magical fireworks.

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading
 Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power by Marvin W. Meyer and Richard Smith, Princeton University Press. 1999

External links

 Catholic Encyclopedia "Occult Art, Occultism"
 Catholic Encyclopedia "Witchcraft"

Christianity and paganism
Magic (supernatural)
Witchcraft
Religious controversies

Christian views on magic


The retina is the thin neural tissue that contains light sensitive neurons called photoreceptors (rods and cones) that interact with secondary and tertiary neurons inside the eyeball in humans and in many animals. Its  role is to sense the light which gets into the eye and send information about it to the brain.

Most information about light images that leaves the retina travels through the optic nerve, and is used by the brain to create visual sensations.  Information about light which travels through the retino-hypothamalic tract is for adjusting circadian rhythms to the 24-hour day.

The center of the human retina, called the fovea centralis, or just fovea, has the most [cone cells] for sensing bright colors and fine detail of a viewed object. Even though the fovea takes up only 1.5 square millimeters, it plays the most important role in vision.  It is only around 1% of the human retina, but the fovea sends about as much information to the visual cortex as the rest of the retina combined.

Eye anatomy

Retina


The UAW-Ford National Programs Center is a tall building in Hart Plaza, Downtown Detroit, Michigan. The high-rise building was constructed in 1948–1950 as the Veterans Memorial Building. It stands at  in height, with 10 above-ground floors.

Architecture
The Veterans Memorial Building was designed in the International style by the firm of Harley, Ellington and Day, which also designed the nearby 211 West Fort Street Building and the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center. The building exterior is faced with marble to conform with the master plan of the Civic Center. Windows on the east and west walls are square with a single marble frame extending the length of each floor. The narrow north wall has a  high Victory Eagle by sculptor Marshall Fredericks carved in relief over the inscription In honored memory of those who gave their lives for their country. Above the eagle at the roof line are 13 stars. The building was dedicated on June 11, 1950, as the Veterans Memorial Building; it housed offices for city agencies and veterans groups.

The main building area contains a 450-seat theater-style conference and a 200-seat lecture hall, both on the ground level. The rear entrance (on the Atwater Street level) also contains a lobby, and another on the second level at the Jefferson Avenue entrance. The Jefferson lobby is  above the Atwater lobby.

In September 1995, the United Auto Workers and the City of Detroit reached a long-term agreement to lease the structure, after which it was remodeled to house UAW offices. The remodel included adding a large window above the eagle on the North wall. The remodel was completed on 1 October 1997.

In 2008, the structure received the Twenty-five Year Award from the Michigan Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

This building is located between Cobo Hall and Hart Plaza. Although its address is on Jefferson Avenue, it is located several feet south of Jefferson on Civic Center Drive. To the west are seven pylons which were also carved by Marshall Fredericks, which depict the founding of Detroit and the ends of several conflicts in which the US played a part.

References

External links
 Google Maps' location of the UAW-Ford National Programs Center

Skyscraper office buildings in Detroit
Office buildings in Detroit
United Auto Workers
International style architecture in Michigan
Modernist architecture in Michigan
Ford Motor Company
Trade union buildings in the United States

UAW-Ford National Programs Center


James "Jem" Grundy (5 March 1824 in New Radford, Nottingham – 24 November 1873 in Carrington, Nottingham) was an English cricketer during the game's roundarm era.  He was one of the notable bowlers of the 1850s and was frequently among the leading wicket-takers.  He bowled right-arm fast roundarm and is known to have occasionally used fast underarm deliveries, but he is said to have varied his pace.  He batted right-handed and was an occasional wicket-keeper.

Grundy's known first-class career spanned the 1850 to 1869 seasons.  He took 1,137 wickets in 298 matches with a bowling average of 12.81 with a best analysis of 9/19.  He had 84 5-wicket innings and 24 10-wicket matches.  He scored 5,898 runs with the bat at an average of 12.65 with a highest score of 95.  He took 233 catches and made 2 stumpings.

In 1857, he became the first person to be given out handled the ball.

At the end of the 1859 English cricket season, Grundy was one of the 12 players who took part in cricket's first-ever overseas tour when an England cricket team led by George Parr visited North America.

Grundy, who kept the "Cricketers' Arms" hotel in Nottingham, in his later years suffered from gout, the probable cause of his death.

References

Further reading
 H S Altham, A History of Cricket, Volume 1 (to 1914), George Allen & Unwin, 1926
 Derek Birley, A Social History of English Cricket, Aurum, 1999
 Rowland Bowen, Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970
 Arthur Haygarth, Scores & Biographies, Volumes 3–9 (1841–1866), Lillywhite, 1862–1867
 John Major, More Than A Game, HarperCollins, 2007 – includes the famous 1859 touring team photo taken on board ship at Liverpool

External links

1824 births
1873 deaths
United All-England Eleven cricketers
English cricketers
English cricketers of 1826 to 1863
English cricketers of 1864 to 1889
Nottinghamshire cricketers
Marylebone Cricket Club cricketers
Players cricketers
North v South cricketers
Cricketers from Nottingham
Professionals of Marylebone Cricket Club cricketers
Marylebone Cricket Club and Metropolitan Clubs cricketers
North of the Thames v South of the Thames cricketers

James Grundy (cricketer)


The Stoner Site is a substantial archaeological site in the far eastern portion of the U.S. state of Illinois.  Discovered during the Great Depression, the site has produced large numbers of artifacts from a prehistoric village that was once located there, and archaeological investigations have shown it to be one of the area's most important archaeological sites for the Allison-Lamotte culture.  After more than a decade of fruitful research and predictions of potentially rich results from future work, it has been designated a historic site.

Geology
Stoner lies in the middle of open fields several miles from the nearest community.  Located near the Wabash River and about  south of the village of Hutsonville, the site is situationed in rural eastern Crawford County.  It lies in the floodplain of a small stream, Sugar Creek, which flows about  below the site, approximately  to the northeast; the soil is largely clay, but due to the presence of the stream, much of the immediate vicinity is typically marshland.  The surrounding countryside is the heavily glaciated prairies typical of much of Illinois, although before settlement the region straddled the boundary between the open plains to the west and the woodlands to the east.  A gravel road traverses the fields a short distance west of the site.  Its location in a prairie near marshland is common for sites of the culture that inhabited the village.

Features
The predominant feature of the Stoner Site is a wide semicircular midden that is believed to have been the site of a prehistoric village.  With a diameter of almost  and a height of nearly , the midden contains numerous postholes, but its most prominent feature is found at its northeastern corner: a substantial mound measuring  by  and approximately  high.  Despite its prominent size, the mound has been greatly reduced since the middle of the 20th century; before that time, the site was covered by woods, but cultivation since that time has reduced the mound from its previous height of .

Excavations
The Illinois Archaeological Survey first recorded the Stoner Site in 1930 and carried out a minimal field survey at the site, collecting materials that could be found at the surface.  Aside from occasional reckless digging into the mound in the early 1950s by the owners, no further work of any sort was done for nearly thirty years.  Local resident Denzil Stephens, an amateur archaeologist, conducted far more detailed work at the site starting in the late 1950s: besides investigating the mound, he excavated the surrounding field and discovered the midden and village site.  By digging test pits at regular intervals and removing everything down to the subsoil, he demonstrated the existence of a village: by the early 1960s, he had revealed more than three hundred postholes and thus shown the complete outline of one house and portions of outlines for eleven other buildings.  Stephens returned to the site once more in the late 1960s to test an area away from his previous excavations; this excavation's nearly complete absence of discoveries helped to demonstrate the site's boundaries.

Due to the cursory work done by the IAS field survey in the early 1930s, few artifacts from Stoner were known until Stephens began working at the site.  His early excavations revealed unfamiliar types of pottery and hitherto-unknown forms of projectile points.  As he returned to the site in the 1960s, he began to uncover plentiful cultural materials, including many projectile points identified as the work of the Allison-Lamotte culture, numerous stone tools (e.g. scrapers and , plus more than three hundred lamellar flint knives), gorgets, and projectile points strongly resembling those found at the Merom site in the nearby town of Merom, Indiana.  Clay artifacts are also known at the site; the owners found pieces of pipes while digging around the mound, Stephens' excavations yielded more pipe pieces and one substantial clay figurine, and more than five thousand potsherds of various types have been recovered.  Excavations yielded virtually no evidence of shellfish consumption by the inhabitants, which contrasts strongly with comparable nearby sites, such as the Daugherty-Monroe Site northwest of Merom.

Conclusions
Stephens' unfamiliarity with the artifacts that he found in his early excavations led him to suggest that the village was populated by members of a previously unknown culture.  His further work permitted the inhabitants to be identified as members of the Middle Woodland period Allison-Lamotte culture, which was first defined in 1963, and which flourished from around the birth of Christ until AD 400.  The arrangement of the postholes enabled him to understand the site as a collection of circular houses (typically  in diameter) partially encircling a central plaza.  Later research demonstrated similar town planning at other Allison-Lamotte sites, and the placement of a mound near the midden has also been shown to be a common feature for Allison-Lamotte villages.  Unlike many of the mounds built by other peoples of the Woodland period, Allison-Lamotte mounds were sometimes built for non-mortuary purposes; the owners' inability to find grave goods in the mound is comparable to the results of looting at many other mounds of the culture.  Small elements of other cultures appear at Stoner; the Havana Hopewell left minimal artifacts, and the locally prominent Riverton culture of the earlier Archaic period was also present, but their artifacts are few and insignificant compared to those of the Allison-Lamotte period.  Particularly rich is the collection of earthenware from the site, which is so comprehensive as to make it a potential type site for the culture's pottery.

As a well-preserved Allison-Lamotte village, Stoner is unusually valuable: it retains substantial evidence of that culture's occupation, and this evidence is unmixed with materials from other cultures.  As a result, the Illinois Archaeological Survey deemed it the state's purest example of the culture, and two of its archaeologists predicted that future excavations would be able to gain crucial evidence of daily life from its richness and purity.  Into the late 1970s, the distinctions between Allison-Lamotte and contemporary cultures elsewhere in the region were poorly known, so the IAS archaeologists suggested that excavations at Stoner would permit researchers to draw much clearer conclusions about the relationships between the different cultures living along the Middle Wabash in the Middle Woodland period.

In 1978, the Stoner Site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places because of its archaeological potential.  It is one of three archaeological sites in Crawford County to be accorded this distinction, along with the Riverton Site (type site for the Riverton culture) and the Riverton-era clam shell midden known as the Swan Island Site.

See also
List of archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois

References

Further reading
Stephens, Denzil.  Excavations at the Stoner and Lowe Sites.  Illinois State Museum Research Series Papers in Anthropology 2.  Springfield: State Museum, 1974.

1930 archaeological discoveries
Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois
Geography of Crawford County, Illinois
National Register of Historic Places in Crawford County, Illinois
Woodland period
Mounds in Illinois

Stoner Site


Major Trevor Coleridge Spring  (6 March 1882 – 13 March 1926) was an English cricketer and British Army officer. A right-handed batsman, he played first-class cricket for Somerset and the Army between 1909 and 1919. He also played minor counties cricket for Devon.

Early life
Spring was born in Kidderpore, Bengal, India, a descendant of the Suffolk Spring family. He was the son of the Reverend Henry Coleridge Spring and Constance Paynter, his father being a Chaplain to the Bengal establishment. He had been educated at Blundell's School before entering the Army.

Military career
Spring was commissioned a Militia officer in the 4th Battalion, The Prince Albert's (Somersetshire Light Infantry), and embarked with the battalion for South Africa in March 1900, to serve in the Second Boer War. He was promoted to lieutenant on 4 February 1902, and returned with his battalion to the United Kingdom three months later. A commission into the regular army followed later that year, when he was appointed second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment on 3 September 1902. He became a captain in March 1911.

He fought in the First World War, was promoted to major in 1917 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order that same year. He temporarily commanded the 2nd Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment for several months in 1917.

Cricket career
Spring made his first-class debut for Somerset in a County Championship match against Lancashire in 1909. He played four more County Championship matches that year, and played three more the following year. In 1912, he played his first first-class match for the Army, scoring 117 in the second innings against the Royal Navy at Lord's. He played in the fixture again the following year.

He played his final first-class game in 1919, for the Army against Cambridge University. He later played twice for the Straits Settlements against the Federated Malay States in the 1920s.

Family life
In 1910, Spring married Gwladys Emma Griffith in Winchester and they had two children. Spring died in London in 1926 at King Edward VII's Hospital following an operation. Spring caught a chill while watching a football match at Winchester and was taken to hospital. He had previously developed septic poisoning in his head while serving in Singapore, and he died of septic pneumonia following the operation to deal with the problem. On 16 March 1926 he was buried in Alwington, Devon where his father was rector.

Both his siblings had also served in the Army. Geoffrey had been killed in the Boer War and Harold had died from enteric fever.

References

1882 births
1926 deaths
English cricketers
Straits Settlements cricketers
Somerset cricketers
Devon cricketers
British Army cricketers
Trevor
British Army personnel of World War I
Royal Hampshire Regiment officers
Companions of the Distinguished Service Order
People educated at Blundell's School
Deaths from pneumonia in England
Deaths from sepsis
Somerset Light Infantry officers
British Army personnel of the Second Boer War
Military personnel of British India
British people in colonial India

Trevor Spring


David Michael Lucian Measham (1 December 19376 February 2005) was a British-Australian conductor and violinist.

Measham was born in Nottingham, England, to a musical family.  His father, Lester, had trained as an opera singer and his mother, Joan, was a pianist. He began violin studies at age 7, and first conducted at age 13. He attended the Mundella Grammar School (Nottingham), and later the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, where he studied with Norman Del Mar.  He then became a section violinist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.  He served with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as co-leader (1963–1967) alongside John Georgiadis.  He became principal second violin with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in 1967 following Neville Marriner's departure.

At one rehearsal, Measham took over when the conductor, Leonard Bernstein, said he wanted to hear what the orchestra sounded like from the back of the hall and called for a volunteer conductor. He then had further assistance in conducting from Bernstein.  Subsequently, in his conducting career, Measham was music director of Phoenix Opera, and chief conductor of the Stetson University Summer Institute in Florida.  In 1971, Measham made his Royal Festival Hall conducting debut with the LSO, when he took over from Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt at the last minute on one 2-hour rehearsal.

Measham worked as a conductor with non-classical artists such as the saxophonist Ornette Coleman (The Skies Of America, 1972), Neil Young (Harvest, 1972) and on a full orchestral version of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  In 1972, Measham conducted the LSO on Tommy, a full orchestral version of The Who's Tommy (1969). In 1974, Measham conducted the LSO on Rick Wakeman's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, touring the US and Canada with the American Symphony Orchestra, and Japan and later the New World Symphony Orchestra on The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

In 1971, Measham emigrated to Western Australia and was based in Perth.  He was principal conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra 1974-81, and its principal guest conductor 1981-86.  There he gave many first performances, and took the orchestra on its first overseas tour, to Singapore, and to the Sydney Festival, before an audience of 120,000.  In 1975, he began an indoor season of three Promenade Concerts as part of the Perth International Arts Festival, modelled on The Proms.  He presented a radio series for ABC Classic FM called "Both Sides Of The Podium", where orchestra players discussed their experiences working with various conductors.  His other interests in Perth included yachting, and he was a member of the Claremont Yacht Club and then Mounts Bay Sailing Club where he raced his own keel-boat.

Measham's recordings include several with flautist Sir James Galway. He also recorded works by Barber, Kabalevsky, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and John Carmichael, and the only commercial recording of Wilfred Josephs' Kaddish based Requiem.

Measham died of cancer of the pancreas, in Perth.  His early marriage to the soprano Susan Shoemaker ended in divorce.  His two children from his marriage, Aaron and Guenevere, survive him.

References

External links
 Mundella School
  Tribute to Friend and Conductor David Measham
 Guenevere Measham profile

British male conductors (music)
British violinists
British male violinists
London Symphony Orchestra players
Australian conductors (music)
1937 births
2005 deaths
Alumni of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Musicians from Perth, Western Australia
Musicians from Nottingham
20th-century violinists
Deaths from cancer in Western Australia
20th-century British conductors (music)
20th-century British male musicians

David Measham


Ralph Kimball (born July 18, 1944) is an author on the subject of data warehousing and business intelligence. He is one of the original architects of data warehousing and is known for long-term convictions that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His bottom-up methodology, also known as dimensional modeling or the Kimball methodology, is one of the two main data warehousing methodologies alongside Bill Inmon.

He is the principal author of the best-selling books The Data Warehouse Toolkit (1996), The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit (1998), The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit (2004) and The Kimball Group Reader (2015), published by Wiley and Sons.

Career
After receiving a Ph.D. in 1973 from Stanford University in electrical engineering (specializing in man-machine systems), Ralph joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). At PARC Ralph was a principal designer of the Xerox Star Workstation, the first commercial product to use mice, icons and windows.

Kimball then became vice president of applications at Metaphor Computer Systems, a decision support software and services provider. He developed the Capsule Facility in 1982. The Capsule was a graphical programming technique which connected icons together in a logical flow, allowing a very visual style of programming for non-programmers. The Capsule was used to build reporting and analysis applications at Metaphor.

Kimball founded Red Brick Systems in 1986, serving as CEO until 1992. The company was acquired by Informix, which is now owned by IBM. Red Brick was known for its relational database optimized for data warehousing. Their claim to fame was the use of bit-map Indexes in order to achieve performance gains that amounted to almost 10 times that of other Database vendors at that time.

Since 1992, Kimball has provided data warehouse consulting and education through various companies such as Ralph Kimball Associates and the Kimball Group.

See also
 Single version of the truth
 The Kimball lifecycle, a high-level sequence tasks used to design, develop and deploy a data warehouse or business intelligence system

Bibliography

References

External links
 Kimball Group
 Differences of Opinion: The Kimball bus architecture and the Corporate Information Factory

Business intelligence
Data warehousing
Technical writers
Living people
1944 births
Scientists at PARC (company)

Ralph Kimball


Vehicle insurance (also called auto insurance or car insurance) is a kind of insurance that protects people if they have a car accident. Somebody with vehicle insurance would not have to pay the entire cost of damage a car accident causes. In many places, it is against the law to drive without vehicle insurance.

The driver pays a premium to the car insurance company. In exchange, the company covers the potential cost of damages and financial loss that are a result of driving.

The bare minimum everyday driver should require to purchase liability coverage. It varies from state to state and it is important to have the minimum amount as required by law. You can receive a ticket, have your driver's license revoked, or even be arrested.

Liability is there to protect the other drivers on the road from the damages you cause.

Insurance prices vary a lot by the company. The car you drive can affect your auto insurance rates. If you get in an accident the repairs on the car may be different from others.

Premium
Somebody with vehicle insurance would pay what is called a premium  (perhaps every month). The insurance company would decide how big the premium is and might consider several factors. These include some of the following:

Age
Type of car
Type of job
Gender
Home
History of insurance
Past accidents
When you pay a premium, the insurance company agrees to pay your losses as outlined in your policy. Depending on different factors, the insurance company may not pay all or any of your losses.

References

Insurance

Vehicle insurance


Hollyworld is a role playing game published in 2005 by Blacksburg Tactical Resource Center (BTRC), and designed by Greg Porter.

Setting
Hollyworlds premise is both simple and humorous.  What if everything behaved like it does in big budget action movies?  Falling rarely does damage, explosions can't hurt if you are running away from them, and children and cute creatures must be rescued.  All characters are Actors, and have a goal of becoming more famous than other actors.

System
Hollyworld uses a custom game system, designed for fast, easy and non-realistic play. Every character is an Actor, and everything that happens is part of a Movie.  Characters have only two stats: Style and Substance'.

Blacksburg Tactical Research Center games
Comedy role-playing games
Role-playing games introduced in 2005

Hollyworld


Bettino Ricasoli, 1st Baron Ricasoli, 1st Count of Brolio (29 March 1809 - 23 October 1880) was an Italian statesman. He was born in Florence. Ricasoli served as Mayor of Florence from January 1848 to November of the same year. Member of the "Historic Right", after the Camillo Cavour's death Ricasoli became Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Italy. He was Prime Minister of Italy from 12 June 1861 to 3 March 1862 and from 20 June 1866 to 10 April 1867. He was also twice Foreign Minister, twice Interior Minister and once Minister of War.

In the last years of his life he was mayor of Gaiole in Chianti, a small town near Siena. Ricasoli died in his castle in Broglio, another village near Siena. Ricasoli's private life and public career were marked by the utmost integrity, and by a rigid austerity which earned him the name of the "Iron Baron". He was also a freemason.

Note

1809 births
1880 deaths
Freemasons
Italian esotericists
Italian mayors
Politicians from Florence
Prime Ministers of Italy

Bettino Ricasoli


Andrew Judd is a New Zealand local government politician and activist. He won the mayoralty of New Plymouth from one-term incumbent Harry Duynhoven with a resounding 9,206 vote majority in 2013 and served one term before announcing he would not stand again in 2016.

Māori wards

In 2014 Judd caused controversy when he and his council supported the establishment of a special Māori ward in New Plymouth in a move intended to increase Māori representation, lift Iwi participation in council decision-making and fulfill Treaty of Waitangi obligations. Judd also called for all councils in New Zealand to have up to 50% Māori representation. The proposals were widely criticised by politicians and the media, with New Zealand First leader Winston Peters calling arguments for the ward "childish nonsense"  and right-wing media personality Mike Hosking labelling Judd "completely out of touch with middle New Zealand". In the months following a publicly initiated referendum on the creation of a Māori ward, which Judd lost in a landslide, the Mayor spoke to media about "a man in a Nazi uniform" coming to see him, getting removed as a patron of a club, being abused walking down the street in a Santa parade and being spat on whilst out with family at a local supermarket. Judd, a New Zealand European, labels himself a "recovering racist".

However, Judd gained the admiration and recognition of notable political figures, including MP Marama Fox who called for his critics to apologise in a general debate speech before parliament. Support for Judd also flowed on social media, with a Facebook group named "Andrew Judd Fan Club" reaching 10,500 members.

References

Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Mayors of New Plymouth
Māori Party politicians
21st-century New Zealand politicians

Andrew Judd


Willy Reisvang (23 May 1923 – 17 February 2001) was a Norwegian sports official.

He chaired the club Oslo SK from 1958 to 1962, 1963 to 1966 and 1972 to 1976. From 1966 to 1969 he was the president of the Norwegian Skating Association. He was a board member of the Norwegian Olympic Committee from 1968 to 1984, and also chairman of the Norwegian Skating Museum, which has been called his "life work".

He was decorated with the King's Medal of Merit. He spent his working career outside of sports in the companies Jiffy-Pot and Strøm-Stål, and resided in Billingstad.

References

1923 births
2001 deaths
Norwegian sports executives and administrators
Recipients of the King's Medal of Merit

Willy Reisvang


Peter Penzoldt (18 January 1925 in Munich – 21 August 1969 in Geneva) was the author of The Supernatural in Fiction (1952), a major critical study of the weird tale.

The Supernatural in Fiction is an expansion of Penzoldt's doctoral thesis, which was submitted to the University of Geneva when he was twenty-four. Published on the recommendation of Algernon Blackwood, whom Penzoldt met in 1949, it contains chapters on the structure of supernatural tales, on various motifs such as the ghost, the vampire, the werewolf, the witch, on the relationship of the supernatural tale to science fiction, and on the "psychological ghost story".

There are also individual chapters on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Rudyard Kipling, M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, and Algernon Blackwood, to whom the book is dedicated.

Penzoldt was the son of Sigrid Onegin from her second marriage with Fritz Penzoldt.

References
Douglas A. Anderson, "Notes on Lost and Forgotten Writers", All Hallows 43 (Summer 2007).

1925 births
1969 deaths
American literary critics
20th-century American writers
20th-century American journalists
American male journalists

Peter Penzoldt


Bethesda Softworks LLC is an American video game publisher based in Rockville, Maryland. The company was founded by Christopher Weaver in 1986 as a division of Media Technology Limited. In 1999, it became a subsidiary of ZeniMax Media. In its first 15 years, it was a video game developer and self-published its titles. In 2001, Bethesda spun off its in-house development team into Bethesda Game Studios, leaving Bethesda Softworks to focus on publishing operations.

In March 2021, Microsoft acquired Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax Media, maintaining that the company will continue to operate as a separate business. While part of the larger Microsoft Gaming division, Bethesda Softworks retains its function as the publisher of games developed by the different studios under ZeniMax Media.

History

1980s

Prior to founding Bethesda Softworks, Christopher Weaver was a technology forecaster and a communications engineer in the television and cable industries. After finishing graduate school, he was hired by the American Broadcasting Company, where he wrote several memos about "the importance of alternative distribution systems and how satellites and broadband networks would impact network television", which landed him the position of manager of technology forecasting. After several national magazines quoted his articles on "the exciting prospects for cabled distribution systems". He was recruited by the National Cable Television Association and created its Office of Science and Technology, where he helped design high-speed data communication systems for several member companies of the association. Eventually, Weaver became the chief engineer for the United States House Energy Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, where he influenced legislation that affected the telephone, television, and cable industries.

In the meantime, Weaver also founded VideoMagic Laboratories with a friend from the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They authored and assembled a 400-page business plan to commercialize their prior lab work and, through the Industrial Liaison Office at MIT, came in contact with a wealthy family in the electronics industry that provided VideoMagic with venture capital. The company developed several technologies, including location-based entertainment systems, that Weaver deemed "radical and cutting-edge" but put out prematurely, causing little commercial return. The funding family, having financial issues of its own, dropped out of the venture and sold off some of VideoMagic's properties. After leaving the House Subcommittee some years later, Weaver established Media Technology Associates, Limited (renamed Media Technology Limited in March 1988) in June 1981. The company provided engineering and media consulting for private companies and government organizations. Media Technology had offices in Maryland and New York.

At Media Technology, Weaver worked with Ed Fletcher, an electrical engineer with whom he had collaborated at VideoMagic, on video games for LaserDisc-based systems until that industry crashed in 1984. While waiting for potential new contracts, the company acquired an Amiga personal computer with which the two began to experiment. Fletcher was a fan of American football and suggested that they develop a football video game for the system, which Weaver supported despite no interest in the sport. Fletcher developed the game, later named Gridiron!, out of Weaver's house in Bethesda, Maryland, in roughly nine months. His initial approach was to use lookup tables to map player inputs to predetermined outcomes. Weaver disliked this concept and, at his behest, he and Fletcher devised a more realistic, physics-based system. No artists or animators were involved in the project, which gave the game a sub-par graphical presentation for the time.

Weaver formed Bethesda Softworks "on the proverbial kitchen table" of his Bethesda home as a division of Media Technology on June 28, 1986. The formation was described as an experiment "to see if the PC market was a viable place to develop games". Weaver originally named the company "Softwerke" but found that the name was taken by a company based in Virginia. Weaver and the owner of that company agreed to co-exist rather than fight over the title, and Weaver changed the name of his company to Bethesda Softworks. He had considered creating a unique name, such as one using the word "magic" after a quote from Arthur C. Clarke, but "Bethesda Softworks" ultimately stuck. Unlike VideoMagic, Bethesda Softworks was entirely self-funded, starting with roughly , and was not attached to any business plan. Gridiron! was released as the company's first game later in 1986 for the Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64 systems. The initial release of a few hundred copies distributed in plastic bags was sold out within one week, to the surprise of Bethesda Softworks.

Early games scored respectably in the gaming press. Electronic Arts was working on the first John Madden Football, and hired Bethesda to help finish developing it, and acquired distribution rights for future versions of Gridiron!. In June 1988, after no new cross-console version of Gridiron! had been released, Bethesda stopped work on the project and sued Electronic Arts for , claiming EA halted the release while incorporating many of its elements into Madden. The case was resolved out of court.

Courteney Cox, later known for her role in the sitcom Friends, worked at the publisher briefly in the 1980s.

1990s

In 1990, the company moved from Bethesda to Rockville, Maryland. By February 1993, the company employed 40 people.

The first game Bethesda published and developed, based on a popular film franchise, was The Terminator for MS-DOS. The title was released in July 1991, coinciding with the theatrical release of the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

In 1994, the company released its best-known project at the time, The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The game, the first in The Elder Scrolls role-playing video game series was the work of Programmer Julian Lefay, Director and Producer Vijay Lakshman as well as others. Several sequels have been released since.

Between 1994 and 1997, Bethesda was developing a space combat game titled The 10th Planet. It was a collaboration between Bethesda and Roland Emmerich's Centropolis Entertainment. During development, Centropolis chose to stop working on the game due to the company's commitments to its films. The project was never released.

In 1995, Bethesda Softworks acquired Noctropolis developer Flashpoint Productions, which Brent Erickson had founded in 1992.

In 1997, Bethesda acquired XL Translab, a Washington, D.C., graphics company that stemmed from the Catholic University School of Architecture and Planning. It was moved to Bethesda Softworks' Rockville headquarters. XL Translab had previously done work for PBS and Fortune 500 companies. By 1996, the company had become the third-biggest player in the privately held PC publishing industry after LucasArts and Interplay Entertainment with 75 employees by that year and revenues of $25 million by 1997.

In June and July 1997, Bethesda announced a partnership with CBS Enterprises to produce the first-ever true companion PC series of games for the television series Pensacola: Wings of Gold. By December 1997, the first CD-ROM game was still in production.

For The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, Bethesda developed XnGine, a 3D game engine, replacing the raycasting engine used for Arena. The engine was used in The Terminator: Future Shock, Terminator: SkyNET, Daggerfall, and XCar: Experimental Racing. In 1997 and 1998, Bethesda released two The Elder Scrolls spin-offs based on Daggerfall code—Battlespire and Redguard—neither of which enjoyed the success of Daggerfall and Arena. The downturn in sales was not limited just to The Elder Scrolls franchise, and the company considered filing for bankruptcy as a result. Battlespire and Redguard were the last games to use XnGine.

In October 1999, Pete Hines joined Bethesda to head up its marketing department, running it as what he described as a one-man band. At the start of his tenure, the company had employed around 15 people in its Rockville headquarters.

In 1999, Weaver and Robert A. Altman formed the holding company ZeniMax Media. In an interview with Edge, he described the company as being a top-level administrative structure rather than a "parent company" for its holdings, explaining that "ZeniMax and Bethesda for all intents and purposes are one thing. Bethesda has no accounting department, we have no finance, we have no legal, our legal department [and] our financial department is ZeniMax, we all operate as one unit." According to the designer Bruce Nesmith, Altman was principally interested in Bethesda's web development business at Vir2L Studios, not the game development aspect. ZeniMax acquired Media Technology in July 1999 and Bethesda Softworks was reorganized as a division of ZeniMax. By then Bethesda employed nearly 100 people.

2000s
In 2001, Bethesda Game Studios was established as the development team, leaving Bethesda Softworks to focus on all publishing operations of ZeniMax Media.

In 2002, Weaver stopped being employed by ZeniMax. He later filed a lawsuit against ZeniMax, claiming he was ousted by his new business partners after giving them access to his brand and was owed  in severance pay. ZeniMax filed counterclaims and moved to dismiss the case, claiming Weaver had gone through emails of other employees to find evidence. This dismissal was later vacated on appeal, and the parties settled out of court. Weaver remained a major shareholder in the company; as of 2007, he said that he still owned 33% of ZeniMax's stock. Providence Equity bought 25% of ZeniMax's stock in late 2007, and an additional stake in 2010.

In 2007, the Fallout franchise was acquired by Bethesda Softworks from Interplay Entertainment and the development of Fallout 3 was handed over to Bethesda Game Studios. Fallout 3 was released on October 28, 2008. Five downloadable content packs for Fallout 3 were released in the year following its release—Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout, and Mothership Zeta. Obsidian Entertainment's new Fallout title, Fallout: New Vegas was published in 2010. Fallout 4 was released on November 10, 2015.

Between 2004 and 2008, ZeniMax's subsidiaries Mud Duck Productions and Vir2L Studios released 4 bowling games for various platforms, AMF Bowling 2004, AMF Xtreme Bowling 2006, AMF Bowling World Lanes and AMF Bowling Pinbusters!.

In January 2006, Bethesda acquired the rights to the Star Trek series of video games. The first game published by the company was Star Trek: Encounters, released in 2006.

In September 2009, Bethesda filed a lawsuit against Interplay Entertainment, after being unsatisfied with Interplay's development of the Fallout massively multiplayer online game project. Bethesda stopped funding the project, and Interplay was forced to abandon work on it.

Between 2007 and 2010, Bethesda raised  in new capital from Providence Equity Partners to fund expansion efforts. In February 2008, the company opened a European publishing arm in London, named ZeniMax Europe, to distribute titles throughout UK/EMEA territories under the Bethesda Softworks brand. This was followed in by opening publishing offices in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, Eindhoven, Hong Kong, Sydney and Moscow in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2018 respectively.

On June 24, 2009, ZeniMax Media acquired id Software, whose titles, including Rage, would be published by Bethesda Softworks. Between 2009 and 2012, the company expanded publishing operations, with games from independent third-party developers such as Rebellion Developments's Rogue Warrior, Artificial Mind and Movement's Wet, Splash Damage's Brink, and inXile's Hunted: The Demon's Forge.

2010s
In 2011, Bethesda filed a lawsuit against Mojang (makers of Minecraft) for using Scrolls as the name of a new digital card game, which sounded too close to The Elder Scrolls trademarked by Bethesda.

In the early 2010s, Bethesda Softworks published games such as Dishonored, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and The Evil Within.

In the mid-2010s, Bethesda began to experiment with new kinds of games, releasing Fallout Shelter, its first mobile, free-to-play game in the summer of 2015. A year later, it released a reboot of id Software's Doom, after several years of development as a failed attempt to produce a sequel to Doom 3. Later that year, Zen Studios released virtual pinball adaptations of three games that Bethesda released during the decade thus far (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 4 and the 2016 reboot of Doom) as the Bethesda Pinball collection for its pinball games. Bethesda went on to release two more free-to-play mobile games based on The Elder Scrolls series, a card battle game titled The Elder Scrolls: Legends in 2017 and a first-person role-playing game titled The Elder Scrolls: Blades in 2019.

When Nintendo unveiled its new hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch, Bethesda expressed support for it and released ports of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Doom for that system in November 2017. A year later, it also ported Fallout Shelter, and has future plans to do the same for its two Elder Scrolls mobile games.

Games such as Prey, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, The Evil Within 2, and Wolfenstein II have not sold as well as compared to Fallout and The Elder Scrolls according to Bethesda's Pete Hines.

In late 2018, Bethesda announced and released its first massively multiplayer online game, Fallout 76, a prequel to the Fallout series. Upon its initial release, it was given mixed reviews for its poor quality and was embroiled in several other controversies, including problems with tie-in products and a data breach.

The following year saw Bethesda announce sequels to Rage and Doom, Rage 2 and Doom Eternal. The former was released on May 14, while the latter released in early 2020 shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States, following a series of delays for polish after the negative reception of Fallout 76s initial launch.

In November 2019, Human Head Studios shut down while Bethesda established a new studio, Roundhouse Studios, offering all Human Head employees a position within it.

In 2016, Bethesda had released its own application launcher for PC. Fallout 76 and Fallout Shelter were exclusives to the launcher before eventually released on Steam. In 2022, Bethesda shut down the launcher. The launcher was mostly met with negative reception. PC Gamer said that "Bethesda's launcher seems to be designed more as a pretty interface to purchase Bethesda's games than a way of managing them. [...] the client feels more like a store than anything."

2020s
In March 2020, Bethesda Softworks published DOOM Eternal, a sequel to the 2016 reboot for PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One and the Stadia games streaming service from Google. The game's release was one of many that was affected by the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on the games industry, prompting retailers such as GameStop to begin selling physical copies a day in advance of its general release to minimize crowding of customers. As with the original game, Eternal enjoyed positive critical reception, with praise directed at the level design and combat of the main campaign, the graphical presentation, soundtrack and mechanical improvements over its predecessor, while slight criticism was drawn towards the game's larger overall emphasis on narrative and lore, as well as the repetitive platforming segments. A Nintendo Switch version of Eternal ported by Panic Button, released as a digital-only title in December 2020, while an enhancement patch for the ninth-generation consoles PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S was released free-of-charge in July 2021. To coincide with Eternal's original release, a remaster of DOOM 64 was also launched as both a standalone release, and as a pre-order bonus for the former game on the aforementioned platforms. The re-release was co-developed by id Software and Nightdive Studios, and includes a new post-campaign expansion.

In September 2020, Microsoft entered an agreement to acquire Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion, gaining ownership over all of Bethesda's associated development teams, now as part of Microsoft Gaming. The agreement stipulated that Bethesda continued to finance and self-publish their own games and that titles on other platforms would be decided on a "case-by-case" basis, but that the merger would also allow Bethesda's existing back-catalog of titles to become available on Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass service for console, PC and cloud, and that select future games from the publisher would become exclusives for Windows and the Xbox Series X/S consoles, which simultaneously launched that November. The acquisition of ZeniMax Media was formally completed on March 9, 2021. Following the merger's completion, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer clarified that future titles from Bethesda would primarily ship on any platforms hosting Xbox Game Pass.

In September 2021, Bethesda published Deathloop, a first-person shooter with time-warping mechanics from Arkane Lyon. The following March, Bethesda released Ghostwire: Tokyo, a first-person horror-themed action-adventure game developed by Tango Gameworks. Both games were announced as being timed console exclusives for PlayStation 5 prior to Microsoft's purchase of ZeniMax Media, an existing contractual obligation that would be honored by Microsoft in spite of the amended terms. Both titles were eventually released on Xbox Series X/S a year following their respective PlayStation 5 versions. During that year's QuakeCon@Home digital event, Bethesda announced and launched an enhanced remaster of the original Quake again co-developed by Nightdive Studios and id Software, for Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. The remaster supported improved rendering to accommodate modern gaming hardware and bundled together all previously released expansions for the original game, including two new campaign episodes developed by Bethesda sister studio MachineGames, as well as the entirety of the Nintendo 64 port of the original game as an optional add-on. An upgrade patch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S was released that October.

In January 2023, Bethesda announced and released Hi-Fi Rush from Tango Gameworks exclusively for Windows and Xbox Series X/S during the Xbox & Bethesda Developer Direct video presentation. The game's development was purposely kept secret by the publisher due to possible skepticism and uncertainty regarding audience feedback, due to the game's pivot away from the tone and gameplay of titles such as The Evi Within and towards a brighter presentation and atmosphere. Microsoft's marketing department additionally suggested to Bethesda that Game Pass would increase the title's visibility given its ability to lower the barrier-of-entry for audiences and by generating interest through word-of-mouth. Hi-Fi Rush received favorable reception for its vibrant presentation and combat system, with many applauding the stylistic departure from prior games developed by Tango Gameworks, while some criticism was directed towards the level design, repetition of action sequences, and the arguably dated usage of licensed music. As of August 2023, the game has reached 3 million players between digital sales on Xbox and PC, as well as Xbox Game Pass subscribers.

In May 2023, Bethesda launched Redfall for Windows and Xbox Series X/S from Arkane Austin. The game similarly represented a stylistic and gameplay departure from the usually single-player focused games associated with the developer, as the title differentiated itself by emphasizing cooperative multiplayer with its four, distinctly powered protagonists, as well as a prominent looting and crafting system for weapons retrieved across the game's titular open world sandbox, the fictional town of Redfall, Massachusetts. The game received a largely mixed to negative reception, with scrutiny directed towards the uninspired narrative, the overall repetitiveness in objectives during the campaign, and consistent technical problems. Particular controversy stemmed from the game's performance on Xbox consoles being limited to 30 frames-per-second (FPS) in spite of pre-release promotional material advertising higher performance metrics. In August 2023 during that year's QuakeCon, an enhanced port of Quake II again co-developed by id Software and Nightdive Studios, was announced and released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, in addition to being a free update for existing owners of the original Windows version. The remaster bundles every previously released single-player expansion and multiplayer map, in addition to supporting the highest resolution and performance metrics on each compatible platform, while also including an 8-player split-screen mode exclusive to the Windows and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game. The re-release also introduces a new single-player expansion developed by MachineGames, and again includes the Nintendo 64 port of Quake II as an optional add-on.

In September 2023, Bethesda published Starfield for Windows and Xbox Series X/S. Developed by Bethesda Game Studios, the game marked the studio's first wholly original intellectual property in over 25 years, and culminated several attempts the developer had made to create a space-based role-playing video game dating back to 1994. The game's aesthetic was described as "NASA-punk" by lead artist Istvan Pely, referring to the meshing of the analog technology reminiscent of what is used in present-day space travel, to more traditional elements of other science fiction works that reflected the game's setting in the far future of humanity. The game launched in early access for owners of the title's Premium Edition on September 1, 2023, before being released to the wider public on September 6. The game received largely positive reviews, with critics highlighting the immersive open world, setting and the musical score composed by Inon Zur, reprising his duties from Bethesda's Fallout titles, while the story and elements of exploration drew more divisive reactions. Upon the early access launch, the game reached a peak of 230,000 concurrent players on Steam within two hours. Xbox CEO Phil Spencer announced on launch day that the game subsequently became the most played Xbox Series X/S-exclusive game since the console's launch, as well as the most wishlisted game on Steam for either Xbox or Bethesda in their respective histories. Starfield reached ten million players across Xbox and PC by September 19, making it the biggest launch period in Bethesda's history as a publisher.

In October 2023, Bethesda's head of publishing Pete Hines announced he would be retiring.

Games published

 Wayne Gretzky Hockey (1988–1992)
 Terminator series (1990–1996)
 The Elder Scrolls series (1994–present)
 Symbiocom (1998)
 Zero Critical (1998)
 IHRA Drag Racing series (2000–2006)
 Pirates of the Caribbean series (2003–2006)
 Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (2005)
 Star Trek series (2006–2007)
 Fallout series (2008–present)
 Wet (2009)
 Rogue Warrior (2009)
 Rage series (2010–2019)
 Brink (2011)
 Hunted: The Demon's Forge (2011)
 Dishonored series (2012–2017)
 Doom series (2012–present)
 Wolfenstein series (2014–present)
 The Evil Within series (2014–2017)
 Prey (2017)
 Deathloop (2021)
 Ghostwire: Tokyo (2022)
 Hi-Fi Rush (2023)
 Redfall (2023)
 Starfield (2023)

Controversies

Conflicts with other developers
In 2001, Bethesda Softworks published Echelon in the United States, a video game developed by the Russian development studio Madia. Madia stated that Bethesda did not pay for boxed sales of the game, as was allegedly specified in the contract. The developers at Madia wrote an open letter to Bethesda in which they have detailed the affair, but Bethesda refused to pay. In the end Madia decided not to take it to court. Pete Hines, VP of PR at Bethesda, stated that Madia presented misleading allegations about Bethesda's role as publisher of Echelon in North America and that Bethesda had no contractual obligations to Madia.

Bethesda Softworks and ZeniMax Media have been accused of attempting a hostile acquisition of Human Head Studios, as well as a successful hostile acquisition of Arkane Studios prior to that. According to a report from IGN, ZeniMax started purposefully failing Human Head's project milestones so that they would not get paid, allowing ZeniMax to buy the company at a reduced rate. They were accused of doing the same thing with Arkane Studios, although in Arkane's case the studio gave in and allowed themselves to be bought. The failed hostile acquisition of Human Head Studios led to cancellation of Human Head's Prey 2, according to the report.

Bethesda also pressured developer No Matter Games to change the name of their game Prey for the Gods to Praey for the Gods, as Bethesda felt the initial title infringed upon the trademark of their own game, Prey. Pete Hines, who serves as Bethesda's VP of marketing, said Bethesda would have risked losing their Prey trademark if they had not requested the title change.

Lawsuits
In September 2009, Bethesda Softworks sued Interplay Entertainment over Fallout trademark infringement. After a lengthy legal battle the lawsuit was settled in January 2012, with Interplay receiving  while Bethesda Softworks gained the right to develop a Fallout massively multiplayer online game, as well as the rights to Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics after December 31, 2013.

In September 2011, Bethesda's parent company, ZeniMax Media, filed a lawsuit against Mojang, claiming that Mojang's planned trademark of the title Scrolls infringed upon Bethesda's trademark of The Elder Scrolls series. On October 18, Markus Persson announced that Mojang had won the interim injunction, but that Bethesda still had the option to file an appeal. In March 2012, Mojang and Bethesda reached a settlement, in which Mojang would not trademark Scrolls, but Bethesda would not contest Mojang's naming of Scrolls, so long as it would not be a direct competitor against The Elder Scrolls.

In 2018, Bethesda Softworks sued Behaviour Interactive, the company responsible for developing Fallout Shelter, for appearing to copy the game's design onto a tie-in mobile game for the Westworld franchise. The issue was settled with undisclosed terms, allowing Bethesda to drop the lawsuit.

Notes

References

External links

1986 establishments in Maryland
1999 mergers and acquisitions
American companies established in 1986
American corporate subsidiaries
Companies based in Rockville, Maryland
Video game companies based in Maryland
Video game companies established in 1986
Video game development companies
Video game publishers
ZeniMax Media

Bethesda Softworks