The University of Calcutta (informally known as Calcutta University;  CU) is a public state university located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It has 151 affiliated undergraduate colleges and 16 institutes in Kolkata and nearby areas. It was established on 24 January 1857 and is the oldest multidisciplinary university of Indian Subcontinent and South East Asian Region. Today, the university's jurisdiction is limited to a few districts of West Bengal, but at the time of its establishment it had a catchment area ranging from Kabul to Myanmar. Within India, it is recognized as a "Five-Star University" and accredited an "A++" grade by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).

The university has a total of fourteen campuses spread over the city of Kolkata and its suburbs. As of 2020, 151 colleges and 21 institutes and centres are affiliated with CU. The university was fourth in the Indian University Ranking 2021 list, released by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the Ministry of Education.

Its alumni and faculty include several heads of state and government, social reformers, prominent artists, the only Indian Academy Award winner and Dirac Medal winner, many Fellows of the Royal Society and six Nobel laureates as of 2019. The Nobel laureates associated with this university are Ronald Ross, Rabindranath Tagore, C. V. Raman, Amartya Sen, and Abhijit Banerjee.

The university has the highest number of students who have cleared the National Eligibility Test. The University of Calcutta is a member of the United Nations Academic Impact.

History

Pre-independence
Fredrick John, the education secretary to the British Government in India, first tendered a proposal to them in London for the establishment of a university in Calcutta, along the lines of London University. In July 1854, the Court of Directors of the East India Company sent a dispatch, known as Wood's despatch, to the Governor General of India in Council, to establish universities in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.

The Calcutta University Act came into force on 24 January 1857, and a 41-member Senate was formed as the policy-making body of the university. The land for the establishment of the university was given by Maharaja Maheshwar Singh Bahadur, who was a Maharaja of Darbhanga. When the university was first established it had a jurisdiction from Kabul to Rangoon and Ceylon, the largest of any Indian university. Calcutta University was the first university east of Suez to teach European classics, English literature, European and Indian philosophy and Occidental and Oriental history. The first medical school in British India, the Calcutta Medical College, was affiliated with the university in 1857. The first college for women in India, Bethune College, is also affiliated with the university.

From 1836 to 1890, Government Science College, Jabalpur, the first Indian science college, was affiliated with the University of Calcutta. The first university library began functioning in the 1870s. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Joddu Nath Bose became the first graduates of the university in 1858, and Kadambini Ganguly and Chandramukhi Basu were the first Indian female graduates in 1882. The first chancellor and vice-chancellor of the Calcutta University were Governor General Lord Canning and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Sir William Colvile, respectively. Ashutosh Mukherjee was the vice-chancellor for four consecutive two-year terms (1906–1914) and a fifth two-year term in 1921–23.Initially, the university was only an affiliating and examining body. All the academic and teaching work was done in constituent colleges, which were the Presidency College, the Scottish Church College, the Sanskrit College and the Bengal Engineering College. During that period, the Council Room of the Calcutta Medical College and private residence of the vice-chancellor used to house the Senate meetings. The faculty councils generally met at the residences of the presidents of the faculties concerned, in the Civil Engineering College or in the Writers' Building. Because of the lack of space, university examinations were conducted in the Kolkata Town Hall and in tents in the Maidan urban park.

In 1866, a grant of  for the site and  was sanctioned to construct the new building on College Street. It opened in 1873 and was called Senate House. It had meeting halls for the Senate, a chamber for the vice-chancellor, the office of the registrar, examination rooms and lecture halls. In 1904, postgraduate teaching and research began at the university, which led to an increase in the number of students and candidates. After almost sixty years, a second building, known as the Darbhanga Building, was erected in 1912 with a donation of  from Maharaja Maheshwar Singh Bahadur.

The Darbhanga Building housed the University Law College, its library and some university offices and afforded space to hold university examinations on its top floor. In the same year, the Government of British India granted a sum of  for the acquisition of a market, Madhab Babu's Bazar, situated adjacent to the Senate House, and construction of a new building for the teaching departments began. It opened in 1926, and was later named the Asutosh Building, after Asutosh Mukherjee, vice-chancellor of the university in 1906–14. Between 1912 and 1914, Taraknath Palit and Rash Behari Ghosh, two eminent lawyers, donated assets totalling , and founded the University College of Science at Upper Circular Road (now known as Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road).

Post-independence
Before the partition of India, twenty-seven colleges from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) were affiliated with the university. The Government of West Bengal passed the Calcutta University Act of 1951, which substituted the earlier act of 1904 and ensured a democratic structure for the university. The West Bengal Secondary Education Act was passed in the same year linking the university with the school leaving examination. Gradually the requirements of the university grew, and the Senate House was becoming incapable of handling them. After the centenary of Calcutta University, the building was demolished to make space for a more utilitarian building. In 1957, the university's centenary year, it received a grant of  from the University Grants Commission, which aided with the construction of the Centenary Building on the College Street campus and the Law College Building on Hazra Road campus. The Economics Department got its own building in 1958 near Barrackpore Trunk Road. In 1965, the Goenka Hospital Diagnostic Research Centre for the University College of Medicine was opened as the university health service. Until 1960, Senate House was one of the city's most prominent landmarks.

In 1968, the Centenary Building opened on the former location of the Senate House. Currently, it houses the Central Library, the Asutosh Museum of Indian Art, the centenary auditorium and a number of university offices. By the mid-1970s, it had become one of the largest universities in the world. It had 13 colleges under its direct control and more than 150 affiliated colleges, along with 16 postgraduate faculties. In the year 2001, the University of Calcutta was awarded the 'Five-Star' status in the first cycle of the university's accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). In 2009 and 2017, the NAAC awarded its highest grade of 'A' to the University of Calcutta in the second and third cycle of the university's accreditation. In 2019, the university's central library and 40 departmental libraries were opened to the public. They have over one million books and more than 200,000 journals, proceedings and manuscripts.

Seal
The seal has changed multiple times over the years. The first seal dates back to 1857. It was changed when the Government of India Act 1858 was passed by the British parliament. This brought the government and territories of the East India Company, including the University of Calcutta, under the British Crown. Seal three, four and five were introduced in 1930s, The fourth seal faced criticism locally.  The current university seal is the modified version of the sixth seal. The motto Advancement of Learning has remained the same through the seal's transitions.

Campuses

The university has a total of 14 campuses spread over the city of Kolkata and its suburbs. They are referred to as Sikhsa Prangan, which means education premises. Major campuses include the Central Campus (Ashutosh Shiksha Prangan) on College Street, University College of Science, Technology and Agriculture (Rashbehari Shiksha Prangan or Rajabazar Science College or Science College) in Rajabazar, Taraknath Palit Shiksha Prangan in Ballygunge and Sahid Khudiram Siksha Prangan in Alipore. Other campuses include the Hazra Road Campus, the University Press and Book Depot, the B. T. Road Campus, the Viharilal College of Home Science Campus, the University Health Service, the Haringhata Campus, the Dhakuria Lakes (University Rowing Club) and the University Ground and Tent at Maidan.

Asutosh Siksha Prangan
Asutosh Siksha Prangan (commonly called the College Street Campus) is the university's main campus where the administrative work is done. Located on College Street, it is spread over an area of . It houses the Arts and Language department, administrative offices, museum, the central library, an auditorium etc. Exhibits like folk art of Bengal are present in the Asutosh Museum of Indian Art. Senate House was the first university building situated on this campus; it opened in 1872. In 1960, it was demolished to make way for a larger building, the Centenary Building, which opened in 1968. The Darbhanga Building and the Asutosh Building are the two other buildings opened in 1921 and 1926, respectively.

Rashbehari Siksha Prangan
 Rashbehari Siksha Prangan (also known as University College of Science and Technology or more commonly Rajabazar Science College), is located on Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road in Rajabazar. Established in 1914, it houses several scientific and technological departments, including pure and applied chemistry, pure and applied physics, applied optics and photonics, radio physics, applied mathematics, psychology, physiology, biophysics, molecular biology, and others.

Taraknath Palit Siksha Prangan

Taraknath Palit Siksha Prangan (also known as University College of Science or commonly Ballygunge Science College) on Ballygunge Circular Road in the southern part of the city, houses the departments of agriculture, anthropology, biochemistry, microbiology, botany, geography, genetics, statistics, zoology, neuroscience, marine science, biotechnology, and most notably geology, among others. It also houses S. N. Pradhan Centre For Neurosciences and the Institute of Agricultural Science.

Sahid Khudiram Siksha Prangan
Sahid Khudiram Siksha Prangan, commonly known as Alipore Campus, located at Alipore, is the humanities campus of the university. The departments of history, ancient Indian history and culture, Islamic history and culture, South and Southeast Asian studies, archaeology, political science, business management and museology are situated on this campus.

Technology Campus

The Technology Campus, also known as the Tech Camps, is the newest on the university. It brings together the three engineering and technical departments:  the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the A.K.C. School of Information Technology and the Department of Applied Optics and Photonics, in Sector 3, JD Block, Salt Lake.

Organisation and administration

Governance
The university is governed by a board of administrative officers, which includes the vice-chancellor, pro-vice-chancellor for academic affairs, pro-vice-chancellor for business affairs and finance, the registrar, the university librarian, the inspector of colleges, the system manager and 35 others. They monitor the operation of the university and its affiliated colleges and the university's funding. In 2017, Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee became the 51st vice-chancellor of the university. The university is funded by the University Grants Commission, the Government of West Bengal, other agencies for various research works and by the university's own initiatives like fees, sales proceeds, publications and service charges generated from endowment funds.

Jurisdiction

At one time, the university had a huge catchment area in British India, ranging from Lahore in the west to Rangoon in east and Ceylon in the south. Colleges like Thomason Engineering College (now IIT Roorkee), Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College (now Aligarh Muslim University) etc. were affiliated to the university. Schools situated in districts like Rawalpindi, Lahore, Jaypur, Cawnpur, Lucknow, and Mussoorie used to prepare and send students for the university entrance examination. No provisions to curtail territorial control were made after establishment of University of Punjab and Allahabad in 1882 and 1887 respectively. After the Indian Universities Act of 1904 came in, however, for the first time, the university's control was curtailed to Bengal (which included Orissa and Bihar), Assam and Burma provinces. In the act, the Governor-General-in-Council was given the power to the limit territorial jurisdiction of the five universities; Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, the Punjab and Allahabad.

Following the Government of British India notification on 20 August 1904, Ceylon went under the University of Madras; provinces, states and agencies of Central India, such as the Central India Agency, Rajputana Agency, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh etc. went to the hands of University of Allahabad; Northern and North-Western provinces and states went under the University of Punjab. Jurisdiction of schools and colleges in Eastern India was retained by Calcutta University. By 1907, two colleges in Punjab, three in the Central Province, five in the State of Rajputana Agency, six in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh and seven in Ceylon were disaffiliated. A series of disaffiliations continued till 1948. Schools and colleges in Orissa and Bihar province went under University of Patna after its establishment in 1917. University of Rangoon was established in 1920 and the Burma region went under it in 1921. In the same year, University of Dacca was established and some colleges in East Bengal went under it and whole control was cut with the partition of India in 1947. In 1948, all the schools and colleges in Assam left the university after the establishment of Gauhati University.

As of 2020, 151 colleges and 22 institutes and centres, in West Bengal are affiliated with the university. Some of the affiliated colleges include:

Faculties, departments and centres

The university has 60 departments organized into seven faculties: arts, commerce, social welfare and business management, education, journalism and library science, engineering and technology, fine arts, music and home science, law and science; and an agriculture institute with six departments.

To provide agricultural education and research, the Institute of Agricultural Science was established under the University of Calcutta. It was founded by Pabitra Kumar Sen, who was the Khaira Professor of Agriculture (another endowment chair) in the early 1950s. Initial efforts began as early as 1913, but the first institute was set up only in 1939 at Barrackpore (a city near Kolkata) by the university, following the establishment of the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research (now known as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research) in 1926. Although it was shut down in 1941 due to World War II. Then, in 1954, a postgraduate department in agriculture was started in Ballygunge Science College by the university, with agricultural botany as the only subject; two years later, a Veterinary Science Institute was included and the department was upgraded into a faculty called agriculture and veterinary science. In 2002 university decided to reopen undergraduate agriculture courses in the agricultural experiment farm campus at Baruipur, a city south of Calcutta. In the same year, the department was restructured as a separate Institute of Agricultural Science.

The Faculty of Arts consists of 23 departments; commerce consists of three departments; education, journalism and library science consist of three departments; engineering and technology consist of eight departments; science has 22 departments and home science offers courses on subjects such as food and nutrition, human development, and home science. The Faculty of Law was established in January 1909 as the University College of Law. It was granted status as the university's department of law in February 1996. This campus is popularly known as Hazra Law College. The faculty has many luminaries associated with it, including Rajendra Prasad, Rashbehari Ghose, and Chittaranjan Das.

Academics

Admission
For undergraduate courses—Arts (BA), Commerce (B.Com.) and Science (BSc) streams (except engineering courses)—one can apply directly for multiple courses based on their Higher Secondary School Certificate examination or any equivalent exam results. Students are shortlisted according to their marks and the number of places available. For some departments, entrance exams may take place at the sole discretion of the head of the department. Anyone can apply within five years of passing the Higher Secondary Examination. For engineering courses, admission is based on the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE) rankings. Meanwhile, for postgraduate courses and doctoral degree courses, one has to take an entrance exam or written test given by the university or any national level exam related to the subject, held by the UGC. A merit list is prepared on the basis of the exam results.

Research

Undergraduates may enroll for a three- or four-year program in engineering. Students choose a major when they enter the university, and cannot change it unless they opt later for the university's professional or self-financed postgraduate programs. Science and business disciplines are in high demand, largely in anticipation of better employment prospects. Most programs are organized on an annual basis, though some programs are semester dependent. Most departments offer master's programs of a year or a few years' duration. Research is conducted in specialized institutes as well as individual departments, many of which have doctoral programs.

The University of Calcutta has the largest research center, which started from the 100th Science Congress of India in January 2013. This is the Center for Research in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (CRNN) on the Technology Campus of CU at Salt Lake, West Bengal. The university has 18 research centres, 710 teachers, 3000 non-teaching staff and 11,000 postgraduate students.

Libraries
The central library at the Asutosh Siksha Prangan was started around the 1870s. Apart from 39 departmental libraries, it has a central library, two campus libraries, and two libraries at the advanced centers spread across the seven campuses. Students of affiliated colleges can also access the central library. The university library has over one million books and more than 200,000 bound journals, proceedings, manuscripts, patents and other valuable collections.

Publishing

The university has its own publishing house called University Press and Publications along with a book depot, which was established in the 20th century. It publishes textbooks, treatises, journals and confidential papers for all the examinations conducted by the university. It also publishes the journal The Calcutta Review, which is one of the oldest Asian university journals. The Calcutta Review was established by Sir John Kaye in May 1844. It has been issued biannually since 1913.

Rankings

Internationally, the University of Calcutta was ranked 801–1000 in the QS World University Rankings of 2023 and 181 in Asia. It was ranked 1001–1200 in the world by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings of 2023, 401–500 in Asia in 2022 and in the same band among emerging economies. It was ranked 901–1000 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities of 2022.

In India, the University of Calcutta was ranked 11th overall by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) in 2021 and 4th among universities.

Accreditation and recognition
In 2001, the University of Calcutta was awarded "Five-Star" status in the first cycle of the university's accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). In 2009 and 2017, NAAC awarded its highest grade of 'A' to the University of Calcutta in the second and third cycle of the university's accreditation. The UGC recognized the University of Calcutta as a "University with Potential for Excellence", on 8 December 2005. It was also awarded the status of "Centre with Potential for Excellence in Particular Area" in Electro-Physiological and Neuro-imaging studies including mathematical modeling.

The Manuscript Library at the university has also been designated as a "Manuscript Conservation Centre" under the National Mission for Manuscripts, which was established in 2003. The university has the highest number of students who have cleared the doctoral entrance eligibility exam, known as National Eligibility Test, in Natural Science and Arts to become eligible to pursue research with a full scholarship awarded by the Government of India. The university is a member of the United Nations Academic Impact initiative.

Student life
The university has a ground and tent in Maidan, where various sports are played. Inter-college tournaments in sports like football, archery, basketball, and hockey are also organised. The university rowing club started in the year 1983 at Rabindra Sarobar. The Calcutta University Students' Union organises social and cultural activities occasionally, which include blood donation camps, environmental awareness programmes, relief fund collection, teachers day celebrations, and Saraswati puja, among others.

Most of the affiliated undergraduate colleges located in the city have their own student hostels. The university has 17 hostels, of which eight (two for undergraduates and six for post graduates) are for women. A total of 13 hostels are for paying guest students located across the city.

University song
In 1938, the then Vice-Chancellor Syama Prasad Mookerjee asked Rabindranath Tagore to compose a "university song" for the university. Rabindranath composed two songs instead of one— "Cholo Jai, Cholo Jai" and "Subho Karmapathe Dharo Nirvayo Gaan" (in English, "Let's go, let's go" and "Take up fearless song on the path of good deeds" respectively). The former song was adopted and sung by parading students on the university's foundation day on 24 January 1937. In the post centenary golden jubilee year of the university, the latter was adopted as the new university song.

Notable alumni and faculties

The university has produced many scientists, engineers, world leaders, Nobel laureates and teachers. As the oldest university of Bengal and India, it attracts students from diverse walks of life. Nobel laureates who either studied or worked there include Rabindranath Tagore, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Ronald Ross, Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee. The Academy Award winning director Satyajit Ray was an alumnus of the university, as was the composer of the national song of India, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, as was Padma Shri Award winning director Tarun Majumdar. Some of the industrialists who studied at the university include Sir Rajen Mookerjee, Rama Prasad Goenka, Lakshmi Mittal, and Aditya Birla. Notable scientists, medical doctors and mathematicians associated with the university include Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray, Meghnad Saha, Anil Kumar Gain, Satyendra Nath Bose, Subir Kumar Ghosh, Ashoke Sen, Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, C. R. Rao, Asima Chatterjee, and Ujjwal Maulik.

Fatima Jinnah, one of the leading founders of Pakistan, studied dentistry at the university. A nationalist leader and former president of the Indian National Congress, co-founder of the Indian National Army, and head of state of the Provisional Government of Free India, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose also spent some time at the university. Other presidents of the Indian National Congress include Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Anandamohan Bose, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Bhupendra Nath Bose and Madan Mohan Malaviya. Malaviya was also the founder of the Banaras Hindu University. Among the presidents of India associated with this university are Rajendra Prasad (who studied there) and Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan (who taught there), and Pranab Mukherjee, who both studied and taught at affiliated colleges of the university. The former vice president of India, Mohammad Hamid Ansari studied there, as did a former deputy prime minister of India, Jagjivan Ram.

Many governors of Indian states studied at the university including the first Indian governors of Bihar and Odisha, Lord Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, 1st Baron Sinha of Raipur, Chandeshwar Prasad Narayan Singh, governor of the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, and Banwari Lal Joshi, the former governor of Delhi, Meghalaya, Uttar Pradesh and the current governor of Uttarakhand. The former rulers of the Indian princely state of Coochbehar and of Saraikela were also alumni of this university, as were colonial-era prime ministers Albion Rajkumar Banerjee of Kashmir and A.K. Fazlul Huq of undivided Bengal.

Among its former students are eight chief ministers of West Bengal: Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, Bidhan Chandra Ray, Prafulla Chandra Sen, Ajoy Mukherjee, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, and Mamata Banerjee; three chief ministers each of Assam: Gopinath Bordoloi, Bishnuram Medhi and Golap Borbora; chief ministers of Bihar: Krishna Sinha, Binodanand Jha and Ram Sundar Das; two chief ministers of Meghalaya: B.B. Lyngdoh and S.C. Marak, and two chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh: Ravishankar Shukla, Kamal Nath. The chief ministers of Manipur, Rishang Keishing, Nagaland, S.C. Jamir and Sikkim B B Gurung were also students. Among the chief justices of the Supreme Court of India associated with the University are Bijan Kumar Mukherjea, Sudhi Ranjan Das, Amal Kumar Sarkar, Ajit Nath Ray, Sabyasachi Mukharji and Altamas Kabir. Others have also served as judges in the Supreme Court, and as chief justices and judges in state high courts.

Heads of state from other countries associated with the university include four presidents of Bangladesh (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Mohammad Mohammadullah, Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem, and Abdus Sattar) two prime ministers of Bangladesh (Muhammad Mansur Ali and Shah Azizur Rahman), three prime ministers of Pakistan (Mohammad Ali Bogra, Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, and Nurul Amin), the first premier of Burma under British rule, Ba Maw, the first president of Nepal, Ram Baran Yadav, and the first democratically elected prime minister of Nepal, Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, as well as his successor Tulsi Giri.

One of the prominent indigenous leaders from the Tripuri Community, Birendra Kishore Roaza, also graduated from the University

See also

Honoris Causa of the University of Calcutta
List of University of Calcutta people
List of vice-chancellors of the University of Calcutta
Distance Education Council
Education in India
List of institutions of higher education in India
List of universities in India

References

Citations

Bibliography

External links

1857 establishments in India
Academic institutions associated with the Bengal Renaissance
Universities and colleges established in 1857
University of Calcutta
Universities in Kolkata

University of Calcutta


The pars compacta (SNpc) is one of two subdivisions of the substantia nigra of the midbrain (the other being the pars reticulata); it is situated medial to the pars reticulata. It is formed by dopaminergic neurons. It projects to the striatum and portions of the cerebral cortex. It is functionally involved in fine motor control.

Parkinson's disease is characterized by the death of dopaminergic neurons in this region.

Anatomy
In humans, the nerve cell bodies of the pars compacta are coloured black by the pigment neuromelanin. The degree of pigmentation increases with age. This pigmentation is visible as a distinctive black stripe in brain sections and is the origin of the name given to this volume of the brain.

Microanatomy
The neurons have particularly long and thick dendrites. The ventral dendrites, particularly, go down deeply in the pars reticulata. Other similar neurons are more sparsely distributed in the midbrain and constitute "groups" with no well-defined borders, although continuous to the pars compacta, in a pre-rubral position. These have been given, in early works in rats (with not much respect for the anatomical subdivisions), the name of "area A8" and "A10". The pars compacta itself ("A9") is usually subdivided into a ventral and a dorsal tier, the last being calbindin positive. The ventral tier is considered as A9v. The dorsal tier A9d is linked to an ensemble comprising also A8 and A10, A8, A9d and A10 representing 28% of dopaminergic neurons.  The neurons of the pars compacta receive inhibiting signals from the collateral axons from the neurons of the pars reticulata.

Efferents
The dopaminergic neurons of the pars compacta project many of their axons along the nigrostriatal pathway to the dorsal striatum, where they release the neurotransmitter dopamine. There is an organization in which dopaminergic neurons of the fringes (the lowest) go to the sensorimotor striatum and the highest to the associative striatum. Dopaminergic axons also project to other elements of the basal ganglia, including the lateral and medial pallidum, substantia nigra pars reticulata, and the subthalamic nucleus.

Function
The function of the dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) is complex. Contrary to what was initially believed, SNc neurons do not directly stimulate movement: instead, it plays an indirect role by regulating the more direct role of the striatum, contributing to fine motor control, as has been confirmed in animal models with SNc lesions. Thus, electrical stimulation of the substantia nigra does not result in movement, but lack of pars compacta neurons has a large influence on movement, as evidenced by the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Pathology
Degeneration of pigmented neurons in this region is the principal pathology that underlies Parkinson's disease and this depigmentation can be visualized in vivo with Neuromelanin MRI. In a few people, the cause of Parkinson's disease is genetic, but in most cases, the reason for the death of these dopamine neurons is unknown (idiopathic). Parkinsonism can also be produced by viral infections such as encephalitis or a number of toxins, such as MPTP, an industrial toxin which can be mistakenly produced during synthesis of the meperidine analog MPPP. Many such toxins appear to work by producing reactive oxygen species. Binding to neuromelanin by means of charge transfer complexes may concentrate radical-generating toxins in the substantia nigra.

Pathological changes to the dopaminergic neurons of the pars compacta are also thought to be involved in schizophrenia (see the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia) and psychomotor retardation sometimes seen in clinical depression.

References

Basal ganglia
Midbrain
Dopamine

Pars compacta


Finnish Argentine is an Argentine person of full, partial, or predominantly Finnish ancestry, or a Finnish-born person residing in Argentina.

Finnish immigration in Argentina began in the early twentieth century and was not as massive as those of other European nationalities. Currently, most of the descendants of Finnish immigrants live in the city of Oberá, Misiones.

The arrival
The first Finnish immigrants who arrived relatively organized to Argentina, arrived in the country in 1906 and founded the "Colonia Finlandesa" (Finnish Settlement) near the city of Oberá. It was estimated that there were about 120 families. One of the pioneers of this wave was Arthur Thesleff. The reasons for the Finnish emigration seem to have been related to the repressive context that the country was in the early twentieth century because of the Russian occupation of the territory.

Oberá

The Finns were one of the first foreign communities to settle in what is now the city of Oberá. At first, they called "Picada Finlandesa" to the three sections that were pooled city lots. This was because most of its inhabitants had come from Finland.

Other areas where they settled
Besides Misiones, Finnish immigrant groups and their descendants settled in regions of the provinces of Corrientes, Córdoba and Buenos Aires.

Gastronomic traditions
In their adaptation and integration into Argentina, Finnish immigrants-like the Swedes and Norwegians, continued with some of its gastronomic traditions. The Finns who settled in Misiones, continued the habit of cooking fish (particularly surubí) and its tradition of homemade biscuits with spices like cinnamon and cloves.

See also
 Argentina–Finland relations
 Argentines of European descent
 Swedish Argentines
 Virpi Niemelä (Finnish-born Argentine astronomer)

References

External links

Immigration to Argentina
European Argentine

Finnish Argentine


The Pleven breed of horse is essentially Anglo-Arabian, and the breed was officially recognized in 1951. It is a competition horse with a natural jump and has free-flowing gaits.

Characteristics

The Pleven is essentially Anglo-Arabian, a cross between an Arabian horse and a Thoroughbred.

The Pleven's head has a straight profile, a long, muscular neck, and a nice topline. They are excellent movers, whose free-flowing gaits make them excel in dressage. They have fairly long backs and high withers, with quarters that are muscular, croups which are slightly sloping, and a tail that is carried well. Their legs are well-conformed and muscular, have good bone joints, well-defined tendons, and hard feet. Their temperament is calm and willing. The Pleven is usually sound, tough, and economical to feed.

Plevens are always chestnut in color, and stand at 15.2 to 16 hands high.

History

The Pleven breed of horse was developed in 1898 in the Klementina stud (now called the Georgi Dimitrov Agricultural Center) in Bulgaria. Plevens are mostly Anglo-Arab, but Gidran stallions were later added to the breed. The breed was officially recognized in 1951, and English Thoroughbred blood was further added to add refinement and size to the Pleven.

The breed is still selectively bred throughout Bulgaria, and an effort is being made to increase their size, which would make it more attractive as an international sport horse.

Horse breeds
Horse breeds originating in Bulgaria
Pleven

Pleven horse


Daniel Webster Highway (also known as D.W. Highway or Webster Highway) is the name for several sections of U.S. Route 3 (or former alignments) in New Hampshire.  The highway is named after 19th century statesman Daniel Webster, a New Hampshire native.

Extent
The following sections (or former sections) of U.S. Route 3 are named "Daniel Webster Highway":
From the Massachusetts state line to the south end of Main St. in Nashua (formerly U.S. 3)
From the southern boundary of Merrimack to the northern boundary of Bedford
From Webster St. in northern Manchester to the northern boundary of Hooksett
From U.S. Route 4 in the center of Boscawen to the southern boundary of Franklin
In Belmont from the boundary with Tilton to the Laconia Bypass
From Endicott St. in Weirs Beach, through Meredith, to the northern boundary of Center Harbor
From Bridgewater at its boundary with Ashland to the south end of Main St. in Plymouth
From the north end of Main St. in Plymouth, through Campton and Thornton, to the south end of Main St. in North Woodstock
From the southern boundary of Lincoln to the merge with Interstate 93 in Franconia Notch
From Interstate 93 north of Franconia Notch to Union St. in Whitefield
From the southern boundary of Stratford to the northern boundary of Columbia
From the southern boundary of Clarksville to the west end of Main St. in Pittsburg
From the east end of Main St. in Pittsburg to the Canada–US border

South Nashua
Running from Tyngsborough, Massachusetts up to the junction of Main Street, South Main Street, and East Dunstable Road, D.W. Highway in Nashua is the main thoroughfare for the South Nashua Commercial District in the southeastern portion of the city. Before the construction of the Everett Turnpike, this was also designated as U.S. Route 3.
Access between the D.W. Highway and Route 3/Everett Turnpike:
 Full access via East Dunstable Road at Turnpike Exit 4.
 Partial access at Turnpike Exit 3; there is no Turnpike exit on the northbound side.
 Full access between the two roads at Turnpike Exit 2 (Circumferential Highway).
 Full access via Spit Brook Road at Turnpike Exit 1.
 Partial access at Route 3 Massachusetts Exit 91 (Middlesex Road); there is no southbound Route 3 exit here.

Merrimack and Bedford
The main road in Merrimack, the highway runs from the southeastern to northeastern portion of town, just east of the Everett Turnpike. It continues into Bedford, crossing to the west of the Everett Turnpike, and passing through the town's main commercial district, ending at the town's northern border with Manchester, where it becomes Second Street.Access between the D.W. Highway and the Turnpike:
 At Turnpike Exit 7 via the Henri Burque Highway to Concord Street.
 At Turnpike Exit 10 (Industrial Drive)
 At Turnpike Exit 11 (Continental Boulevard)
 At Turnpike Exit 12 (Bedford Road)
 At New Hampshire Route 101 in Bedford, just west of Interstate 293 Exit 3 (where it merges with the Everett Turnpike)

North of Manchester into Hooksett
Beginning at Webster Street near Livingston Park in north Manchester, heading past Interstate 93, this D.W. Highway is the main commercial thoroughfare in Hooksett, continuing northbound east of the Merrimack River to the town boundary with Allenstown, where US 3 becomes Allenstown Road.

See also

References

Auto trails in the United States
New Hampshire highways
U.S. Route 3

Daniel Webster Highway


Alanis Nadine Morissette (born June 1, 1974) is a Grammy Award-winning Canadian-American singer and songwriter. She was born in Ottawa, Canada. She began singing in Canada as a teenager in 1990. In 1995, she became popular all over the world.

As a young child in Canada, Morissette began to act on television, including 5 episodes of the long-running series, You Can't Do That on Television. Her first album was released only in Canada in 1990.

Her first international album was Jagged Little Pill, released in 1995. It was a rock-influenced album. Jagged has sold more than 33 million units globally. It became the best-selling debut album in music history. Her next album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was released in 1998. It was a success as well. Morissette took up producing duties for her next albums, which include Under Rug Swept, So-Called Chaos and Flavors of Entanglement. Morissette has sold more than 60 million albums worldwide.

She also acted in several movies, including Kevin Smith's Dogma, where she played God.

About her life
Alanis Morissette was born in Riverside Hospital of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario. Her father is French-Canadian. Her mother is from Hungary. She has an older brother, Chad, and a twin brother, Wade, who is 12 minutes younger than she is. Her parents had worked as teachers at a military base in Lahr, Germany.

Morissette became an American citizen in 2005. She is still Canadian citizen.

On May 22, 2010, Morissette married rapper Mario "MC Souleye" Treadway.

Jagged Little Pill
Morissette has had many albums. Her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill became a very popular album. It has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. The album caused Morissette to win four Grammy Awards. The album Jagged Little Pill touched many people.

On the album, Morissette sang songs about many different things. These things include:
love (in the song "Head Over Feet")
life (in the songs "Ironic" and "You Learn")
her feelings (in the songs "Hand In My Pocket" and "All I Really Want")
sadness (in the song "Mary Jane")
anger (in the song "You Oughta Know")
frustration (in the songs "Not the Doctor" and "Wake Up")

Discography

Albums
Alanis (Canada-only, 1991)
Now Is the Time (Canada-only, 1992)
Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)
Alanis Unplugged (1999)
Under Rug Swept (2002)
Feast on Scraps (CD/DVD, 2002)
So-Called Chaos (2004)
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic (2005)
Alanis Morissette: The Collection (2005)
Flavors of Entanglement (2008)
Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)

Selected songs
Morissette has written many songs. Some of her most famous songs are:
"You Oughta Know" - This song is to Morissette's ex-boyfriend, a man she once loved. In this song, Morissette is very angry. She wants her ex-boyfriend to know that he caused many problems after leaving her for another woman.
"Ironic" - This song is about life. It contains several stories about unlucky people. In one of the stories, a man is afraid of flying on airplanes. He finally flies in one, but the airplane crashes.
"You Learn" - In this song, Morissette says that bad things happen in life, but people learn from them. Anyone can make bad things into good things. She wants people to try new things in life.
"Uninvited" - In this song, Morissette is not happy because she is famous. She does not know whether she wants to continue to be famous or not.
"Thank U" - In this song, she thanks many things that have helped her. She thanks India, a country she visited and almost died in. She also lists ways she can improve herself.
"Hands Clean" - In this song, a man does something bad, and tells Morissette not to tell anyone else the bad thing the man did. She hides the man's secret for many years.

References

Other websites

 Official website

1974 births
Living people

American child actors
American movie actors
American pop musicians
American rock singers
American singer-songwriters
American television actors
Canadian movie actors
Canadian pop singers
Canadian rock singers
Canadian singer-songwriters
Canadian television actors
Grammy Award winners
People from Ottawa
Singers from Ontario
Twin people from Canada

Alanis Morissette


Jonathan Earl Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.

Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.

Early life and education
Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, the son of Irene (née Super) and Earl T. Franzen. His father, raised in Minnesota, was the son of an immigrant from Sweden; his mother's ancestry was Eastern European. Franzen grew up in an affluent neighborhood, on 83 Webster Woods Drive in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated with high honors from Swarthmore College, receiving a degree in German in 1981. As part of his undergraduate education, he studied abroad in Germany during the 1979–80 academic year with Wayne State University's Junior Year in Munich program. While there, he met Michael A. Martone, on whom he would later base the character Walter Berglund in Freedom. He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship at Freie Universität Berlin in Berlin in 1981–82; he speaks fluent German. Franzen was married in 1982 and moved with his wife to Somerville, Massachusetts to pursue a career as a novelist. While writing his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, he worked as a research assistant at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, coauthoring several dozen papers. In September 1987, a month after he and his wife moved to New York City, Franzen sold The Twenty-Seventh City to Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Career

Early novels
The Twenty-Seventh City, published in 1988, is set in Franzen's hometown, St. Louis, and deals with the city's fall from grace, St. Louis having been the "fourth city" in the 1870s. This sprawling novel was warmly received and established Franzen as an author to watch. In a conversation with novelist Donald Antrim for Bomb Magazine, Franzen described The Twenty-Seventh City as "a conversation with the literary figures of my parents' generation[,] the great sixties and seventies Postmoderns", adding in a later interview "I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer."

Strong Motion (1992) focuses mainly on a dysfunctional family, the Hollands, and uses seismic events on the American East Coast as a metaphor for the quakes that occur in family life (as Franzen put it, "I imagined static lives being disrupted from without—literally shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer and get people shouting angry moral truths at each other."). A 'systems novel', the key 'systems' of Strong Motion according to Franzen are "... the systems of science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making sense in the world." The novel was not a financial success at the time of its publication. Franzen subsequently defended the novel in his 2010 Paris Review interview, remarking "I think they [critics and readers] may be overlooking Strong Motion a little bit."

Franzen taught a fiction-writing seminar at Swarthmore in the spring of 1992 and 1994:

For the 1992 class, Franzen invited David Foster Wallace to be a guest judge of the workshop pieces.

The Corrections

Franzen's The Corrections, a novel of social criticism, garnered considerable critical acclaim in the United States, winning both the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction
and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The novel was also a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (won by Richard Russo for Empire Falls).

In September 2001, The Corrections was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club. Franzen initially participated in the selection, sitting down for a lengthy interview with Oprah and appearing in B-roll footage in his hometown of St. Louis (described in an essay in How To Be Alone titled "Meet Me In St. Louis"). In October 2001, however, The Oregonian printed an article in which Franzen expressed unease with the selection. In an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, he expressed his worry that the Oprah logo on the cover dissuaded men from reading the book:

Soon afterward, Franzen's invitation to appear on Oprah's show was rescinded. Winfrey announced, "Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. We have decided to skip the dinner and we're moving on to the next book."

These events gained Franzen and his novel widespread media attention. The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction. At the National Book Award ceremony, Franzen said "I'd also like to thank Oprah Winfrey for her enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of The Corrections."

Following the success of The Corrections and the publication of The Discomfort Zone and How to Be Alone, Franzen began work on his next novel. In the interim, he published two short stories in The New Yorker: "Breakup Stories", published November 8, 2004, concerned the disintegration of four relationships; and "Two's Company", published May 23, 2005, concerned a couple who write for TV, then split up.

In 2011, it was announced that Franzen would write a multi-part television adaptation of The Corrections in collaboration with The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach for HBO. HBO has since passed on Corrections, citing "difficulty" in "adapting the book's challenging narrative, which moves through time and cuts forwards and back": that would be "difficult to sustain in a series and challenging for viewers to follow, hampering the potential show's accessibility."

In September 2019, The Corrections was voted sixteenth in a list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century so far by writers and critics of the Guardian newspaper.

Freedom

On June 8, 2009, Franzen published an excerpt from Freedom, his novel in progress, in The New Yorker. The excerpt, titled "Good Neighbors", concerned the trials and tribulations of a couple in St. Paul, Minnesota. On May 31, 2010, a second excerpt — titled "Agreeable" — was published, also in The New Yorker.

On October 16, 2009, Franzen made an appearance alongside David Bezmozgis at the New Yorker Festival at the Cedar Lake Theatre, reading a portion of his forthcoming novel. Sam Allard, writing for North By Northwestern about the event, said that the "...material from his new (reportedly massive) novel" was "as buoyant and compelling as ever" and "marked by his familiar undercurrent of tragedy". Franzen read "an extended clip from the second chapter."

On September 9, 2010, Franzen appeared on Fresh Air to discuss Freedom in the wake of its release. Franzen has drawn what he describes as a "feminist critique" for the attention that male authors receive over female authors—a critique he supports. Franzen also discussed his friendship with David Foster Wallace and the impact of Wallace's suicide on his writing process.

Freedom was the subject of a highly unusual "recall" in the United Kingdom starting in early October 2010. An earlier draft of the manuscript, to which Franzen had made over 200 changes, had been published by mistake. The publisher, HarperCollins, initiated an exchange program, but thousands of books had been distributed by that time.

While promoting the book, Franzen became the first American author to appear on the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King in 2000. Franzen appeared alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". He discussed the implications of the Time coverage, and the reasoning behind the title of Freedom in an interview in Manchester, England, in October 2010.

On September 17, 2010, Oprah Winfrey announced that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom would be an Oprah book club selection, the first of the last season of The Oprah Winfrey Show. On December 6, 2010, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote Freedom where they discussed that book and the controversy over his reservations about her picking The Corrections and what that would entail.

Franzen has stated the writing of Freedom was influenced by the death of his close friend and fellow novelist David Foster Wallace.

Purity

In an interview with Portland Monthly on December 18, 2012, Franzen revealed that he currently had "a four-page, single-spaced proposal" for a fifth novel he was currently working on, although he went on to suggest that while he had a proposal there was no guarantee that what was proposed would make the final cut, saying of similar proposals for previous novels, "I look at the old proposals now, and I see the one part of them that actually got made into a book, and I think, 'How come I couldn't see that? What is all this other stuff?'". Franzen also hinted that the new novel would probably also be long, adding "I've let go of any illusion that I'm a writer of 150-page novels. I need room to let things turn around over time and see them from the whole lives of other characters, not just the single character. For better or worse, one point of view never seems to do it for me." In October 2014, during a discussion at Colgate University, Franzen read a "self-contained first-person narrative" that is part of a novel that he hoped will be out in the summer of 2015.

On November 17, 2014, The New York Times Artsbeat Blog reported that the novel, titled Purity, would be out in September. Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, described Purity as a multigenerational American epic that spans decades and continents. The story centers on a young woman named Purity Tyler, or Pip, who doesn't know who her father is and sets out to uncover his identity. The narrative stretches from contemporary America to South America to East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and hinges on the mystery of Pip's family history and her relationship with a charismatic
hacker and whistleblower.

In 2016, Daily Variety reported that the novel was in the process of being adapted into a 20-hour limited series for Showtime by Todd Field who would share writing duties with Franzen and the playwright Sir David Hare. It would star Daniel Craig as Andreas Wolf and be executive produced by Field, Franzen, Craig, Hare & Scott Rudin.

However, in a February 2018 interview with The Times London, Hare said that, given the budget for Field's adaptation (170 million), he doubted it would ever be made, but added "It was one of the richest and most interesting six weeks of my life, sitting in a room with Todd Field, Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Craig bashing out the story. They're extremely interesting people."

Purity was a relative commercial disappointment compared to Franzen's two previous novels, selling only 255,476 copies, compared to 1.15 million copies of Freedom and 1.6 million copies of The Corrections.

A Key to All Mythologies
On November 13, 2020, Franzen's publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced the publication of Franzen's new novel, Crossroads, the first volume in a trilogy titled A Key to All Mythologies.

Crossroads was published October 5, 2021.

The novel received mostly favorable reviews, with a cumulative "Positive" rating at the review aggregator website Book Marks, based on 48 book reviews from mainstream literary critics. Bookforum called it Franzen's "finest novel yet," his "greatest and most perfect novel," and Dwight Garner of the New York Times said it was "warmer than anything he's yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect." According to the Times Literary Supplement:Crossroads is largely free from the vices to which Franzen's previous work has been addicted: the self-conscious topicality; the show-off sophistication; the formal heavy-handedness. It retains many of his familiar virtues: the robust characterization; the escalating comedy; the virtuosic command of narrative rhythm.Critics especially praised the character of Marion, whom Garner called "one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction."

The novel is about a pastor, his wife, and four children. It's split into two sections called 'Advent' and 'Easter.' Writing for The Nation, Rumaan Alam says "in Crossroads, every plotline leads to God."

Other works

In 1996, while still working on The Corrections, Franzen published a literary manifesto in Harper's Magazine entitled Perchance to Dream. Referencing manifestos written by Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe, among others, Franzen grappled with the novelist's role in an advanced media culture which seemed to no longer need the novel. In the end, Franzen rejects the goal of writing a great social novel about issues and ideas, in favor of focusing on the internal lives of characters and their emotions. Given the huge success of The Corrections, this essay offers a prescient look into Franzen's goals as both a literary and commercially minded author.

In 2002, Franzen published a critique of the novels of William Gaddis, entitled "Mr. Difficult", in The New Yorker. He begins by recounting how some readers felt The Corrections was spoiled by being too high-brow in parts, and summarizes his own views of reading difficult fiction. He proposes a "Status model", whereby the point of fiction is to be Art, and also a "Contract model", whereby the point of fiction is to be Entertainment, and finds that he subscribes to both models. He praises The Recognitions, admits that he only got halfway through J R, and explains why he does not like the rest of Gaddis's novels.

In 2004 Franzen published "The Discomfort Zone", a personal essay about his childhood and family life in Missouri and his love of Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, in The New Yorker. Susan Orlean selected it for the subsequent volume of The Best American Essays.

Since The Corrections Franzen has published How to Be Alone (2002), a collection of essays including "Perchance To Dream", and The Discomfort Zone (2006), a memoir. How To Be Alone is essentially an apologia for reading, articulating Franzen's uncomfortable relationship with the place of fiction in contemporary society. It also probes the influence of his childhood and adolescence on his creative life, which is then further explored in The Discomfort Zone.

In September 2007, Franzen's translation of Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening () was published. In his introduction, Franzen describes the Broadway musical version as "insipid" and "overpraised." In an interview with New York magazine, Franzen stated that he had in fact made the translation for Swarthmore College's theater department for $50 in 1986 and that it had sat in a drawer for 20 years since. After the Broadway show stirred up so much interest, Franzen said he was inspired to publish it because "I knew it was a good translation, better than anything else out there."

Franzen published a social commentary on cell phones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space, "I Just Called To Say I Love You" (2008), in the September/October 2008 issue of MIT Technology Review.

In 2012 he published Farther Away, a collection of essays dealing with such topics as his love of birds, his friendship with David Foster Wallace, and his thoughts on technology.

In 2013, Franzen published The Kraus Project. It consists of three major essays by the "Perennially ... impossible to translate" Austrian "playwright, poet, social commentator and satirical genius" Karl Kraus – ""Heine and the Consequences" a takedown of the beloved German poet, "Nestroy and Posterity" which established that playwright's reputation in Austria to this day, and "Afterword to Heine and the Consequences"". The essays are accompanied by "Franzen's [own] plentiful, trenchant yet off-beat annotations" taking on "... Kraus' mantle-commenting on what Kraus would say (and what Franzen's opinion is) about Macs and PCs; decrying Twitter's claim of credit for the Arab Spring; and unfurling how media conglomerates influence politics in their quest for profits."

Franzen published his third essay collection, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, in November 2018. According to advance press for the book, the collection "gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, [and] Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes—both human and literary—that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen.
Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative, and necessary."

In September 2019, Franzen published an essay on climate change in The New Yorker entitled "What If We Stopped Pretending?", which generated controversy among scientists and online pundits because of its alleged pessimism. The term doomerism became popular amid the response to the piece. A Sierra Club interview with Franzen, from January 2019 further explores Franzen's feelings about climate change and action.

In an interview with Transatlantica conducted in March 2018, Franzen mentioned that he had just started work on a new novel, having recently sold it to publishers on the basis of a three-page proposal. Later that year in a profile piece for The New York Times Magazine in June 2018, Franzen confirmed that he was currently at work on the early stages of his sixth novel, which he speculated could be his last. "So, I may be wrong ... But somehow this new one really does feel like my last.". Subsequently, in an interview reproduced on The Millions website in April 2020, Franzen mentioned that he was "almost done" with writing this sixth novel. Crossroads: A Novel was published on October 5, 2021.

Philosophy of writing

During a lecture on autobiography and fiction, Franzen discussed four perennial questions often asked of him by audiences, all of which annoy or bother him in some way. They are:

 Who are your influences?
 What time of day do you work, and what do you write on?
 I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters "take over" and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?
 Is your fiction autobiographical?

In the lecture he said of the third question in particular "This one always raises my blood pressure" and quoted Nabokov in response.

In February 2010, Franzen (along with writers such as Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, and Anne Enright) was asked by The Guardian to contribute what he believed were ten serious rules to abide by for aspiring writers.

Personal life
In his early twenties, Franzen was married to fellow writer Valerie Cornell. They lived in New York City and were married for fourteen years. His marriage and divorce are mentioned in some of his essays in the collection Farther Away.

Franzen lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his "spouse-equivalent", writer Kathy Chetkovich.

As first reported in his essay "My Bird Problem," Franzen is well known as a serious birdwatcher. He appeared on CBS Sunday Morning in March 2018 to discuss his love of birds and birdwatching. Franzen served for nine years on the board of the American Bird Conservancy. A feature-length documentary based on Franzen's reported essay "Emptying the Skies" was released in 2013.

Franzen is a longtime fan of the punk-rock collective The Mekons; he appeared in the 2014 documentary Revenge of the Mekons to discuss the group's importance to him.

In 2010, at an event at the Serpentine Pavilion in London celebrating the launch of Freedom, Franzen's glasses were stolen from his face by a gate-crasher, who jokingly attempted to ransom them for $100,000 before being apprehended by police elsewhere in Hyde Park.

Awards and honors
1981 Fulbright Scholarship to Germany
1988 Whiting Award
1996 Guggenheim Fellowship
2000 Berlin Prize (American Academy in Berlin)
2001 National Book Award (Fiction) for The Corrections
2001 Salon Book Award (Fiction) for The Corrections
2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner (Fiction) for The Corrections
2010 Salon Book Award (Fiction) for Freedom
2010 Galaxy National Book Awards, International Author of the Year, Freedom
2011 Heartland Prize for Freedom
2011 John Gardner Award (Fiction) for Freedom
2012 Carlos Fuentes Medal (Inaugural award)
2013 Welt-Literaturpreis
2015 Budapest Grand Prize
 2015 Euronatur Award for outstanding commitment to nature conservation in Europe
2017 Frank Schirrmacher Preis
2022 Thomas Mann Prize

Honors and other recognition
1996 Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists
2001 The New York Times Best Books of the Year for The Corrections
2001 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (for The Corrections)
2001 Oprah's Book Club Selection (for The Corrections)
2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist (Fiction)
2002 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist
2003 International Dublin Literary Award (short list)
2009 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor American Academy in Berlin
2010 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (for Freedom)
2010 The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010 list (for Freedom)
2010 The New York Times Best Books of the Year (for Freedom)
2010 Oprah's Book Club selection (for Freedom)
2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) finalist (for Freedom)
2010 Elected to the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin
2011 Named one of Time Magazine's Time 100
2012 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
2012 Elected to the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) shortlist for The Kraus Project
In January 2011, The Observer named him as one of "20 activists, filmmakers, writers, politicians and celebrities who will be setting the global environmental agenda in the coming year".
On May 21, 2011, Franzen delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College to the class of 2011.
 On June 16, 2012, Franzen delivered the commencement address at Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz
The first international academic symposium solely dedicated to Franzen's work took place at Glasgow University, UK, March 22, 2013. Another one, "Jonathan Franzen: Identity and Crisis of the American Novel", was scheduled to take place at the University of Córdoba, Spain, April 18–19, 2013.

Bibliography

Novels

Short fiction

Non-fiction
  Essays.
  Memoir.
  Essays.

  Guest editor.

  Essays.

Translations
 Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind 2007
 The Kraus Project (essays by Karl Kraus translated and annotated by Franzen) 2013

Critical studies and reviews of Franzen's work

Crossroads

———————
Notes

Television appearances
In 1996, Franzen appeared on Charlie Rose with friend and fellow author David Foster Wallace and author Mark Leyner to debate "The Future of American Fiction."
In 2001, Franzen appeared on Charlie Rose, on November 21, 2001 to discuss The Corrections; and again on December 27 after winning the National Book Award for The Corrections.
In 2002, Franzen appeared on Charlie Rose (October 30, 2002) to discuss his essay collection How to Be Alone.
In 2006, Franzen guest starred alongside Michael Chabon, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal in The Simpsons episode "Moe'N'a Lisa", which first aired November 19, 2006. In the episode, he is depicted fighting over literary influences with Chabon.
In 2010, Franzen appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in support of her selection of Freedom for Oprah's Book Club. Several viewers noted the brevity of Franzen's appearance on the show, although a thirty-minute "After the Show" Q&A was later made available online.
In 2015, Franzen appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and CBS This Morning to promote the release of Purity.
In 2016, Franzen appeared on Jeopardy! as part of the show's Power Players Week, where journalists and intellectuals compete on the show with winnings donated to the player's charity of choice—Franzen played for the American Bird Conservancy. Franzen also appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
In 2018, Franzen appeared on CBS This Morning – Saturday to discuss his love of birds and birdwatching.

References

Further reading
 Burn, Stephen J. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London/New York 2011.
 Freitag, Sibylle. The Return of the Real in the Works of Jonathan Franzen. Essen (Germany) 2009.
Miceli, Barbara. "A cancer on the planet": Mountaintop Removal and Environmental Crime in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom" in Forum Filologiczne Ateneum 1(7) 2019, pp. 343–356.
 Weinstein, Philip. Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage. Bloomsbury, 2015.

External links

  – official site
 Jonathan Franzen on the cover of Time magazine
 Jonathan Franzen acceptance speech following National Book Award win

1959 births
Living people
People from Western Springs, Illinois
People from Webster Groves, Missouri
Novelists from Illinois
Novelists from Missouri
Writers from Missouri
American male essayists
American male novelists
American memoirists
American people of Swedish descent
National Geographic people
The New Yorker people
Postmodern writers
Birdwatchers
Swarthmore College alumni
Webster Groves High School alumni
National Book Award winners
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners
James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients
Members of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
20th-century American essayists
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American novelists
21st-century American essayists
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American novelists
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Fulbright alumni

Jonathan Franzen


King Kong is a 1933 black and white American adventure fantasy horror movie. the first film of the series. It was directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The screenplay was by Ruth Rose and James Ashmore Creelman. They based the script on a story by Cooper and Edgar Wallace and the novel by Delos Lovelace. The movie stars Fay Wray, Bruce Cabot, and Robert Armstrong. It opened in New York City on March 2, 1933, to good reviews. As the first film of the King Kong series, followed up by Son of Kong in the following year.

The movie is about a huge ape a 15-meter creature called Kong who attacked by biplanes and kill in an attempt to possess a beautiful young woman. Kong is famous for its stop-motion animation by Willis O'Brien. The music was written by Max Steiner. In 1991, the movie was thought "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It has been remade twice: once in 1976 and again in 2005.

Cast
 Fay Wray as Ann Darrow
 Bruce Cabot as Jack Driscoll
 Robert Armstrong as Carl Denham
 Frank Reicher as Captain Englehorn
 James Flavin as Briggs
 Victor Wong as Charlie the Cook
 Sam Hardy as Charles Weston
 Murray Spivack as King Kong

Story
In 1932, New York Harbor, filmmaker Carl Denham, known for wildlife films in remote and exotic locations, charters Captain Englehorn's ship, the Venture, for his new project. However, he cannot secure an actress for a role he has been reluctant to describe. Searching the streets of New York City, he meets Ann Darrow and promises her the adventure of a lifetime. As the Venture sets off, Ann meets the first mate, Jack Driscoll. Six weeks into the voyage, Denham reveals to Englehorn and Jack that their destination is, in fact, an uncharted island with a mountain that looks like a skull, of which he has come to knowledge from a Norwegian skipper who discovered a canoe blown off course with only one native left alive. Before the native died, the skipper was able to get a rough location of the island and some details on it, including its most distinctive feature - a huge ancient stone wall with an enormous wooden gate built by the ancestors of the natives back when they had high civilization. Denham alludes to a monstrous creature named Kong, rumored to dwell on the island. Anchoring offshore at the island, the crew find a native village, where the natives prepare to sacrifice a young woman termed the "bride of Kong". The crew is spotted, and the native chief stops the ceremony. When he sees Ann, he offers to trade six of his tribal women for the "golden woman." Englehorn rebuffs him.

That night, Jack falls in love with Ann which she accepts. The natives kidnap Ann and take her through the gate and to an altar on the other side of the wall, where she is offered to Kong, an enormous gorilla-like creature. Kong carries a terrified Ann into the wilderness as Denham, Jack, and some volunteers enter the jungle in hopes of rescuing her. They encounter a giant dinosaur-like creature, a Stegosaurus, which they manage to defeat. After facing an aggressive Brontosaurus and Kong himself, Jack and Denham are the only survivors. A Tyrannosaurus rex attempts to devour Ann, but Kong kills it to defend her. Jack continues to pursue Kong, while Denham returns to the village, where Englehorn and the remaining crewmen are waiting. Upon arriving in Kong's lair, Ann is menaced by a snake-like Elasmosaurus, which Kong also kills. While Kong is distracted killing a Pteranodon that attempted to fly away with Ann, Jack rescues her, and the ape gives chase. Jack and Ann run through the jungle and back to the village. Pursuing Ann, Kong breaks open the gate despite the huge beam securing it and the combined efforts of the crew and natives to push it closed. Kong relentlessly rampages through the village until Denham, who has decided to switch his plan from producing a film to capturing Kong and sailing him to New York City, knocks him unconscious with a gas bomb.

Shackled in chains, Kong is taken to New York City and presented to a Broadway theatre audience as "King Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World." Ann and Jack, now engaged, are brought on stage to join him, surrounded by a group of press photographers. Kong, enraged by the ensuing flash photography, breaks loose. The audience flees in terror and Ann has whisked away to a hotel room on a high floor, but Kong, scaling the building, finds her and abducts her again. Kong rampages through the city with Ann in his grip, wrecking a crowded elevated train, and then climbs the Empire State Building. Jack suggests to the police for army airplanes to shoot Kong off the building, without hitting Ann. Four planes take off to attack Kong. However, Jack becomes agitated for Ann's safety and rushes to the top of the building with Denham in following. The planes wait until Kong sets Ann down and then open fire on him. Kong tries to fight off the planes, destroying one, but is mortally wounded by their gunfire. He gazes at Ann one last time before he is hit twice more, and falls from the tower to his death. Jack reunites with Ann and Denham head backs down below to the street and pushes through a crowd to look at Kong's corpse. When a policeman remarks that the planes got him, Denham says, "Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast".

Reception
Variety thought the movie was a powerful adventure. The New York Times thought the movie a fascinating adventure.

The movie was not shown in Nazi Germany because it was thought a threat to Aryan womanhood, even though it was allegedly Hitler's favorite movie.

In 2002, Roger Ebert wrote that the special effects are not up to modern standards, but the movie remains one "that still somehow works."

In 2020, King Kong held a score of 98% "Certified Fresh" based on 66 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie made about $2 million when it was first shown. Its opening weekend total was estimated at $90,000. After the 1952 re-release, Variety estimated the film had made $4 million in cumulative domestic rentals for that year.

References

1933 adventure movies
1930s American adventure movies
American horror movies
Giant gorilla movies
English-language movies
Monster movies
Movies set on islands
Movies set in New York City
Jungle movies
Movies about filmmaking
United States National Film Registry movies
King Kong
1930s horror movies

King Kong (1933 movie)


Albert Christiadi Sutanto (born December 24, 1975) is an Indonesian former swimmer, who specialized in butterfly and medley events. He is a two-time Olympian (2000 and 2004), and multi medalist 9 Gold 5 Silver and 16 Bronze at the Southeast Asian Games (1991 to 2005).

Sutanto made his first Indonesian team, along with his twin brother Felix, at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. He failed to reach the top 16 in any of his individual events, finishing fifty-fifth in the 100 m butterfly (56.50), and forty-second in the  200 m butterfly (2:05.13).

At the 2003 Southeast Asian Games in Hanoi, Vietnam, Sutanto won a bronze medal in the 200 m butterfly with a time of 2:05.03. He also blasted an Indonesian record of 2:06.09 in the 200 m individual medley, but managed to pull off a fourth-place effort in the final.

Sutanto shortened his swimming program at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, as his spots in both 100 and 200 m butterfly were respectively taken by Andy Wibowo and Donny Utomo. Instead, he qualified only for the 200 m individual medley. After breaking his own record from the SEA Games, his entry time of 2:06.09 was officially accredited under a FINA B-standard. He challenged seven other swimmers in heat three, including Denmark's Jacob Carstensen and South Korea's Kim Bang-Hyun, who both competed at their third Olympics. Sutanto upset SEA Games bronze medalist Gary Tan of Singapore to take a sixth seed by less than nearly a second in 2:07.55. Sutanto failed to advance into the semifinals, as he placed fortieth overall in the preliminaries.

References

External links

1975 births
Living people
Indonesian people of Chinese descent
Indonesian male swimmers
Olympic swimmers for Indonesia
Swimmers at the 2000 Summer Olympics
Swimmers at the 2004 Summer Olympics
Male butterfly swimmers
Male medley swimmers
Sportspeople from Surabaya
SEA Games medalists in swimming
SEA Games bronze medalists for Indonesia
Swimmers at the 1994 Asian Games
Competitors at the 2003 SEA Games
Asian Games competitors for Indonesia

Albert Sutanto


The Eastern Sudan States Coordinating Council is a body established by the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement signed by the Government of Sudan and the rebel  Eastern Front in June 2006. It seeks to enhance cooperation between the three eastern states of the Republic of Sudan; Kassala, Red Sea and Al Qadarif. The agreement also established an Eastern Sudan Reconstruction and Development Fund to aid wealth-sharing between the central government and the three states. It requires the President of Sudan to appoint one Assistant to the President from nominees presented by the Eastern Front.

Composition of the council

The council is composed of the following 15 members:

 The Governor of Kassala
 The Governor of Red Sea
 The Governor of Al Qadarif
 The Speaker of the Assembly of Kassala
 The Speaker of the Assembly of Red Sea
 The Speaker of the Assembly of Al Qadarif
 Three representatives of the Eastern Front
 Six representatives from other political groups

The three state Governors chair the proceedings of the council on a rotational basis.

Power-sharing principles of the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement

In addition to the establishment of the Eastern Sudan States Coordinating Council and the Eastern Sudan Reconstruction and Development Fund, the peace agreement also allocated the following political positions to East Sudanese people:

Federal level
 One Assistant to the President
 One advisor to the President of Sudan
 Two Cabinet Ministers and two State Ministers
 Eignt seats of the National Assembly shall be allocated to the Eastern Front

State level
 The Deputy-Governor of Kassala shall be nominated by the Eastern Front
 The Deputy-Governor of Al Qadarif shall be nominated by the Eastern Front
 One Minister in the executive of Red Sea state
 Ten seats in the legislative assemblies of each of the three states

References

Government agencies of Sudan
Politics of Sudan


Thymelicus lineola, known in Europe as the Essex skipper and in North America as the European skipper, is a species of butterfly in the family Hesperiidae.

With a wingspan of 2.5 to 2.9 cm, it is very similar in appearance to the small skipper, Thymelicus sylvestris. They can be told apart by the forward-facing flattish part of the antenna tip: in the Essex Skipper this face is black, whereas in the Small Skipper it is orange or brown. In males, there is a difference in the scent mark. In Essex Skipper this is a fine, straight, short dark line on the forewing, parallel to the wing edge; in the Small Skipper males, this line is bolder and bent. This butterfly occurs throughout much of the Palaearctic region. Its range is from southern Scandinavia through Europe to North Africa and east to Central Asia. It was only identified in the UK in 1889, and its range is expanding both in England and in northern Europe. In North America, this butterfly was accidentally introduced in 1910 via London, Ontario and has spread across southern Canada and into several northern US states. In many parts of the Northeastern United States it is the most abundant skipper.

Life cycle
Eggs are laid in strings on the stems of grasses where they remain over the winter. The Essex skipper's favoured foodplant is cock's-foot (Dactylis glomerata), and it rarely uses the small skipper's favoured foodplant Yorkshire fog. Essex skippers' other foods include creeping soft grass (Holcus mollis), couch grass (Elymus repens), timothy-grass (Phleum pratense), meadow foxtail (Alopecurus pratensis), false brome (Brachypodium sylvaticum) and tor-grass (Brachypodium pinnatum). This skipper's caterpillars emerge in the spring and feed until June before forming shelters from leaves tied with silk at the base of the foodplant to pupate. Adults fly from July through August. Like most skippers, they are fairly strictly diurnal, though individuals are very rarely encountered during the night.

This skipper's oval eggs are pale greenish-yellow, flattened above and below with slightly depressed tops. Caterpillars are green, with yellowish incisions between their rings; each with a dorsal, darker green stripe and yellow lateral lines. A larva's head is pale brown  striped with darker brown. Their elongate chrysalids are yellowish-green, and each has a dark dorsal stripe seen in caterpillars.

See also

 List of butterflies of Great Britain

References

 : The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies of Britain and Ireland Oxford University Press

External links
Butterflies and Moths of North America
Butterfly Conservation
Lepiforum.de
UK Butterflies
Butterfly Conservation Armenia

Thymelicus
Butterflies of Europe
Butterflies of North America
Butterflies described in 1808
Taxa named by Ferdinand Ochsenheimer

Essex skipper


Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet (27 December 1773 – 15 December 1857) was an English engineer, inventor, and aviator. He is one of the most important people in the history of aeronautics. Many consider him to be the first true scientific aerial investigator and the first person to understand the underlying principles and forces of flight and the first man to create the wire wheel.

In 1799, he set forth the concept of the modern aeroplane as a fixed-wing flying machine with separate systems for lift, propulsion, and control.
He was a pioneer of aeronautical engineering and is sometimes referred to as "the father of aviation." He identified the four forces which act on a heavier-than-air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag and thrust. Modern aeroplane design is based on those discoveries and on the importance of cambered wings, also proposed by Cayley. He constructed the first flying model aeroplane and also diagrammed the elements of vertical flight.
He also designed the first glider reliably reported to carry a human aloft. He correctly predicted that sustained flight would not occur until a lightweight engine was developed to provide adequate thrust and lift. The Wright brothers acknowledged his importance to the development of aviation.

Cayley represented the Whig party as Member of Parliament for Scarborough from 1832 to 1835, and in 1838, helped found the UK's first Polytechnic Institute, the Royal Polytechnic Institution (now University of Westminster) and served as its chairman for many years. He was elected as a Vice-President of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in 1824. He was a founding member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and was a distant cousin of the mathematician Arthur Cayley.

General engineering projects
Cayley, from Brompton-by-Sawdon, near Scarborough in Yorkshire, inherited Brompton Hall and Wydale Hall and other estates on the death of his father, the 5th baronet.  Captured by the optimism of the times, he engaged in a wide variety of engineering projects.  Among the many things that he developed are self-righting lifeboats, tension-spoke wheels,
 the "Universal Railway" (his term for caterpillar tractors), automatic signals for railway crossings, seat belts, small scale helicopters, and a kind of prototypical internal combustion engine fuelled by gunpowder (Gunpowder engine).  He suggested that a more practical engine might be made using gaseous vapours rather than gunpowder, thus foreseeing the modern internal combustion engine. He also contributed in the fields of prosthetics, air engines, electricity, theatre architecture, ballistics, optics and land reclamation, and held the belief that these advancements should be freely available.

According to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, George Cayley was the inventor of the hot air engine in 1807: "The first successfully working hot air engine was Cayley's, in which much ingenuity was displayed in overcoming practical difficulties arising from the high working temperature." His second hot air engine of 1837 was a forerunner of the internal combustion engine: "In 1837, Sir George Cayley, Bart., Assoc. Inst. C.E., applied the products of combustion from closed furnaces, so that they should act directly upon a piston in a cylinder. Plate No. 9 represents a pair of engines upon this principle, together equal to 8 HP, when the piston travels at the rate of 220 feet per minute."

Flying machines

Cayley is mainly remembered for his pioneering studies and experiments with flying machines, including the working, piloted glider that he designed and built. He wrote a landmark three-part treatise titled "On Aerial Navigation" (1809–1810), which was published in Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts. The 2007 discovery of sketches in Cayley's school notebooks (held in the archive of the Royal Aeronautical Society Library) revealed that even at school Cayley was developing his ideas on the theories of flight. It has been claimed that these images indicate that Cayley identified the principle of a lift-generating inclined plane as early as 1792. To measure the drag on objects at different speeds and angles of attack, he later built a "whirling-arm apparatus", a development of earlier work in ballistics and air resistance. He also experimented with rotating wing sections of various forms in the stairwells at Brompton Hall.

These scientific experiments led him to develop an efficient cambered airfoil and to identify the four vector forces that influence an aircraft: thrust, lift, drag, and weight. He discovered the importance of the dihedral angle for lateral stability in flight, and deliberately set the centre of gravity of many of his models well below the wings for this reason; these principles influenced the development of hang gliders. As a result of his investigations into many other theoretical aspects of flight, many now acknowledge him as the first aeronautical engineer.  His emphasis on lightness led him to invent a new method of constructing lightweight wheels which is in common use today.  For his landing wheels, he shifted the spoke's forces from compression to tension by making them from tightly-stretched string, in effect "reinventing the wheel". Wire soon replaced the string in practical applications and over time the wire wheel came into common use on bicycles, cars, aeroplanes and many other vehicles.

The model glider successfully flown by Cayley in 1804 had the layout of a modern aircraft, with a kite-shaped wing towards the front and an adjustable  tailplane at the back consisting of horizontal stabilisers and a vertical fin.  A movable weight allowed adjustment of the model's centre of gravity.  Around 1843 he was the first to suggest the idea for a convertiplane, an idea which was published in a paper written that same year.  At some time before 1849 he designed and built a biplane in which an unknown ten-year-old boy flew. Later, with the continued assistance of his grandson George John Cayley and his resident engineer Thomas Vick, he developed a larger scale glider (also probably fitted with "flappers") which flew across Brompton Dale in front of Wydale Hall in 1853. The first adult aviator has been claimed to be either Cayley's coachman, footman or butler. One source (Gibbs-Smith) has suggested that it was John Appleby, a Cayley employee; however, there is no definitive evidence to fully identify the pilot. An entry in volume IX of the 8th Encyclopædia Britannica of 1855 is the most contemporaneous authoritative account regarding the event. A 2007 biography of Cayley (Richard Dee's The Man Who Discovered Flight: George Cayley and the First Airplane) claims the first pilot was Cayley's grandson George John Cayley (1826–1878).

A replica of the 1853 machine was flown at the original site in Brompton Dale by Derek Piggott in 1973 for TV and in the mid-1980s for the IMAX film On the Wing. The glider is currently on display at the Yorkshire Air Museum. Another replica, piloted by Allan McWhirter, flew in Salina, Kansas just before Steve Fossett landed the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer there in March 2003, and later piloted by Richard Branson at Brompton in summer 2003.

Memorial

Cayley died in 1857 and was buried in the graveyard of All Saints' Church in Brompton-by-Sawdon.

He is commemorated in Scarborough at the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus, where a hall of residence and a teaching building are named after him. He is one of many scientists and engineers commemorated by having a hall of residence and a bar at Loughborough University named after him. The University of Westminster also honours Cayley's contribution to the formation of the institution with a gold plaque at the entrance of the Regent Street building.

There are display boards and a video film at the Royal Air Force Museum London in Hendon honouring Cayley's achievements and a modern exhibition and film "Pioneers of Aviation" at the Yorkshire Air Museum, Elvington, York.
The Sir George Cayley Sailwing Club is a North Yorkshire-based free flight club, affiliated to the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, which has borne his name since its founding in 1975.

In 1974, Cayley was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame.

Family
On 3 July 1795 Cayley married Sarah Walker, daughter of his first tutor George Walker. (J W Clay's expanded edition of Dugdale's Visitation of Yorkshire incorrectly gives the date as 9 July 1795, as does George Cayley's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.) They had ten children, of whom three died young. Sarah died on 8 December 1854.

See also
Early flying machines
Matthew Piers Watt Boulton
William Samuel Henson
Timeline of aviation – 18th century
Timeline of aviation – 19th century
Kite types

Notes

References

 Gibbs-Smith, Charles H. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 17, No. 1 (May 1962), pp. 36–56
 Gibbs-Smith, C.H. Aviation. London, NMSO, 2002
 Gerard Fairlie and Elizabeth Cayley, The Life of a Genius, Hodder and Stoughton, 1965.

External links

Cayley's principles of flight, models and gliders
Cayley's gliders
Some pioneers of air engine design
Sir George Cayley – Making Aviation Practical
Sir George Cayley
"Sir George Cayley – The Man: His Work" a 1954 Flight article
"Aerodynamics in 1804" a 1954 Flight art
"Cayley's 1853 Aeroplane" a 1973 Flight article
Ackroyd, J.A.D. "Sir George Cayley, the father of Aeronautics". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 56 (2002) Part 1 (2), pp167–181, Part 2 (3), pp333–348
Cayley's Flying Machines

Cayley, Sir George
Cayley, Sir George
18th-century English people
19th-century English people
Aerodynamicists
Aviation inventors
Aviation pioneers
Cayley, George, 6th Baronet
George
English aviators
English inventors
English aerospace engineers
Independent scientists
Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for English constituencies
People from Brompton, Scarborough
UK MPs 1832–1835
Whig (British political party) MPs for English constituencies
Members of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society

George Cayley


The Cave of the Ramban is located in the southern cliff of the Upper Kidron Valley, on a slope descending into the Arab neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz, Jerusalem. It is believed by some to be the traditional burial place of Nahmanides (also known as Ramban), a foremost rabbinical scholar during the medieval era.

Burial chamber
The large rock-hewn cave, measuring 19 by 20 m, reaches a height of 3.5 meters and is supported by two columns. The area once functioned as an ancient underground stone quarry. Above the façade, in the upper portion of the cliff, are the remains of a square rock-cut chamber which may have been used for burials.

Significance
The cave is believed by some Jews to be the site where Ramban prayed in the 13th-century and the place of his interment. It is thus claimed to have been a holy site for Jews for many centuries. Other traditions hold that Ramban was buried in Silwan, in Hebron or in Acre.

Recent history
In 2000, the cave became a subject of controversy between a group of Jewish inhabitants in Wadi al-Joz and the Muslim owner of the site, who had fenced off the cave in protest to Jewish settlement in the area. The National Authority for Holy Sites convinced the Ministry of Religious Affairs of its religious significance and the cave was declared a holy site and handed over to the ministry's control. The Muslim wakf subsequently petitioned the High Court of Justice which resulted in a temporary injunction freezing the site's designation. In 2003, a government committee was appointed to examine the issue. While acknowledging the site's connection to the Jewish faith, it was decided that the court could rule on the matter. This however was thwarted when the holy status was reinstated by a government minister. The wakf persisted in its battle for control of the site in the courts and in 2008 it was decided that the cave be placed under the wakfs authority and Jews were banned from entering.

See also
 Ramban Synagogue

References

Sources
 Nadavi Shragai, Ramban Cave Made Place of Worship, Haaretz. (May 23, 2000)

Archaeological sites in Jerusalem
Burial monuments and structures
Jewish pilgrimage sites
Shrines in Jerusalem
Rock-cut tombs
Caves of the State of Palestine
Nachmanides

Cave of the Ramban


A standing army is an army that is made up of full-time soldiers. It is kept ready even in times of peace. to attack, invade, or defend. It is more prepared for war than militias or military reserves.

A few states have had standing armies for thousands of years, but they became more popular only during the Late Middle Ages. The term's use started around 1600.

Army

Standing army