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[
"Anwar al-Awlaki",
"Lawsuit against the US",
"what was the reason behind the lawsuit?",
"contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list.",
"why was he on the targeted kill list?",
"the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world.",
"what was his argument in the trial?",
"sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be \"targeted for death\"."
] | C_bfe5daac479f47d7942846e4235d1cca_0 | what was the verdict? | 4 | What was the verdict in the lawsuit filed against the US? | Anwar al-Awlaki | In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said: the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow. Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the US Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010. On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the US Constitution committed to the political branches. On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died. CANNOTANSWER | Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, | Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi, al-Awlaqi; ; April 21 or 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded. US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's right to due process, including a trial.
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen. Growing up partially in the United States and partially in Yemen, he attended various universities across the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s while also working as an imam, despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education. Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a university lecturer after a brief stint as a public speaker in the United Kingdom. He was detained by Yemeni authorities in 2006, where he spent 18 months in prison before being released without facing trial. Following his release, Al-Awlaki's message started to become overtly supportive of violence, as he condemned United States foreign policy against Muslims.
The Yemeni government tried him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive". U.S. officials said that in 2009, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda, although they described his role as more "inspirational" than "operational." He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States. In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama due to his alleged terrorist activities. Al-Awlaki's father and civil rights groups challenged the order in court. Al-Awlaki was believed to be in hiding in southeast Yemen in the last years of his life. The U.S. deployed unmanned aircraft (drones) in Yemen to search for and kill him, firing at and failing to kill him at least once; he was successfully killed on September 30, 2011. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed by a CIA-led drone strike in Yemen. His daughter, 8-year old Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed during a raid against Al Qaeda ordered by President Donald Trump in 2017.<ref name="uk.reuters.com">Ghobari, Mohammed and Phil Stewart. "Commando dies in U.S. raid in Yemen, first military op OK'd by Trump", Reuters, January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.</ref> The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki's public statements and videos have been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than before his death.
Early life
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen, while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, was doing graduate work at U.S. universities. His father was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master's degree in agricultural economics at New Mexico State University in 1971, received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska, and worked at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1977. Nasser al-Awlaki served as Agriculture Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. He was also President of Sana'a University. Yemen's prime minister from 2007 to 2011, Ali Mohammed Mujur, was a relative.
The family returned to Yemen in 1978, when al-Awlaki was seven years old. He lived there for 11 years, and studied at Azal Modern School.
Life in the United States 1990–2002
Education
In 1991, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S. to attend college. He earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University (1994), where he was president of the Muslim Student Association.
In 1993, while still a college student in Colorado State's civil engineering program, al-Awlaki visited Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. He spent some time training with the mujahideen who had fought the Soviets. He was depressed by the country's poverty and hunger, and "wouldn't have gone with al-Qaeda," according to friends from Colorado State, who said he was profoundly affected by the trip. Mullah Mohammed Omar did not form the Taliban until 1994. When Al-Awlaki returned to campus, he showed increased interest in religion and politics. Al-Awlaki studied Education Leadership at San Diego State University, but did not complete his degree. He worked on a doctorate in Human Resource Development at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development from January to December 2001.
Time as imam
In 1994, al-Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen, and began service as a part-time imam of the Denver Islamic Society. In 1996, he was chastised by an elder for encouraging a Saudi student to fight in Chechnya against the Russians. He left Denver soon after, moving to San Diego.
From 1996 to 2000, al-Awlaki was imam of the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque in San Diego, California, where he had a following of 200–300 people. U.S. officials later alleged that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, attended his sermons and personally met him during this period. Hazmi later lived in Northern Virginia and attended al-Awlaki's mosque there. The 9/11 Commission Report said that the hijackers "reportedly respected [al-Awlaki] as a religious figure". While in San Diego, al-Awlaki volunteered with youth organizations, fished, discussed his travels with friends, and created a popular and lucrative series of recorded lectures.
In August 1996 and in April 1997, al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego and charged with soliciting prostitutes. The first time, in 1996, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was fined $400 and required to attend informational sessions about AIDS. The second time, in 1997, he pleaded guilty and was fined $240, ordered to perform 12 days of community service, and received three years' probation. From November 2001 to January 2002 the FBI observed him visiting a number of prostitutes, and interviewed them, establishing that he had paid for sex acts. No prosecution was brought.
In 1998 and 1999, he served as vice-president for the Charitable Society for Social Welfare. In 2004, the FBI described this group as a "front organization to funnel money to terrorists". Although the FBI investigated al-Awlaki from June 1999 through March 2000 for possible links to Hamas, the Bin Laden contact Ziyad Khaleel, and a visit by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, it did not find sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution. Al-Awlaki told reporters that he resigned from leading the San Diego mosque "after an uneventful four years," and took a brief sabbatical, traveling overseas to various countries.
In January 2001, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S., settling in the Washington metropolitan area. There, he was imam at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque near Falls Church, Virginia, and his services were attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. He led academic discussions frequented by FBI Director of Counter-Intelligence for the Middle East Gordon M. Snow. Al-Awlaki also served as the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, where he was hired by Esam Omeish. Omeish said in 2004 that he was convinced that al-Awlaki was not involved in terrorism.
His proficiency as a public speaker and command of the English language helped him attract followers who did not speak Arabic. "He was the magic bullet", according to the mosque spokesman Johari Abdul-Malik. "He had everything all in a box." "He had an allure. He was charming."
When police investigating the 9/11 attacks raided the Hamburg apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, they found the telephone number of al-Awlaki among bin al-Shibh's personal contacts. The FBI interviewed al-Awlaki four times in the eight days following the 9/11 attacks. One detective later told the 9/11 Commission he believed al-Awlaki "was at the center of the 9/11 story". And an FBI agent said, "if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been" him, since "someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused". One 9/11 Commission staff member said: "Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something? Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it." A separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks suggested that al-Awlaki may have been connected to the hijackers, according to its director, Eleanor Hill. In 2003, Representative Anna Eshoo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "In my view, he is more than a coincidental figure."
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki suggested in writing on the IslamOnline.net website that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible for the attacks, and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default".
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki was sought in Washington, D.C., by the media to answer questions about Islam, its rituals, and its relation to the attacks. He was interviewed by National Geographic, The New York Times, and other media. Al-Awlaki condemned the attacks. According to an NPR report in 2010, in 2001 al-Awlaki appeared to be a moderate who could "bridge the gap between the United States and the worldwide community of Muslims." The New York Times said at the time that he was "held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West." In 2010, Fox News and the New York Daily News reported that some months after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon employee invited al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary's Office of General Counsel. The U.S. Secretary of the Army had suggested that a moderate Muslim be invited to give a talk.
In 2002, al-Awlaki was the first imam to conduct a prayer service for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association at the U.S. Capitol. That year, Nidal Hasan visited al-Awlaki's mosque for his mother's funeral, at which al-Awlaki presided. In November 2009, Hasan killed 13 and wounded 32 in the Fort Hood shooting. Hasan usually attended a mosque in Maryland closer to where he lived while working at the Walter Reed Medical Center (2003–09).
Later in 2002, al-Awlaki posted an essay in Arabic on the Islam Today website titled "Why Muslims Love Death", lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. He expressed a similar opinion in a speech at a London mosque later that year. By July 2002, al-Awlaki was under investigation in the United States for having received money from the subject of a U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation. His name was added to the list of terrorism suspects.
Passport fraud issues
In June 2002, a Denver federal judge signed an arrest warrant for al-Awlaki for passport fraud. On October 9, the Denver U.S. Attorney's Office filed a motion to dismiss the complaint and vacate the arrest warrant. Prosecutors believed that they lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, according to U.S. Attorney Dave Gaouette, who authorized its withdrawal. Al-Awlaki had listed Yemen rather than the United States as his place of birth on his 1990 application for a U.S. Social Security number, soon after arriving in the US. Al-Awlaki used this documentation to obtain a passport in 1993. He later corrected his place of birth to Las Cruces, New Mexico. "The bizarre thing is if you put Yemen down (on the application), it would be harder to get a Social Security number than to say you are a native-born citizen of Las Cruces", Gaouette said.
Prosecutors could not charge him in October 2002, when he returned from a trip abroad, because a 10-year statute of limitations on lying to the Social Security Administration had expired. According to a 2012 investigative report by Fox News, the arrest warrant for passport fraud was still in effect on the morning of October 10, 2002, when FBI Agent Wade Ammerman ordered al-Awlaki's release. U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and several congressional committees urged FBI Director Robert Mueller to provide an explanation about the bureau's interactions with al-Awlaki, including why he was released from federal custody when there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The motion for rescinding the arrest warrant was approved by a magistrate judge on October 10 and filed on October 11.ABC News reported in 2009 that the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego disagreed with the decision to cancel the warrant. They were monitoring al-Awlaki and wanted to "look at him under a microscope". But U.S. Attorney Gaouette said that no objection had been raised to the rescinding of the warrant during a meeting that included Ray Fournier, the San Diego federal diplomatic security agent whose allegation had set in motion the effort to obtain a warrant. Gaouette said that if al-Awlaki had been convicted at the time, he would have faced about six months in custody.The New York Times suggested later that al-Awlaki had claimed birth in Yemen (his family's place of origin) to qualify for scholarship money granted to foreign citizens. U.S. Congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) wrote in May 2010 that by claiming to be foreign-born, al-Awlaki fraudulently obtained more than $20,000 in scholarship funds reserved for foreign students.
While living in Northern Virginia, al-Awlaki visited Ali al-Timimi, later known as a radical Islamic cleric. Al-Timimi was convicted in 2005 and is now serving a life sentence for leading the Virginia Jihad Network, inciting Muslim followers to fight with the Taliban against the US.
In the United Kingdom 2002–04
Al-Awlaki left the United States before the end of 2002, because of a "climate of fear and intimidation" according to Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.
He lived in the UK for several months, where he gave talks attended by up to 200 people. He urged young Muslim followers: "The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar [disbeliever]. Do not trust them! [Their leaders] are plotting to kill this religion. They're plotting night and day." "He was the main man who translated the jihad into English," said a student who attended his lectures in 2003.
He gave a series of lectures in December 2002 and January 2003 at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque, describing the rewards martyrs (Shahid) receive in paradise (Jannah). He began to gain supporters, particularly among young Muslims, and undertook a lecture tour of England and Scotland in 2002 in conjunction with the Muslim Association of Britain. He also lectured at "ExpoIslamia", an event held by Islamic Forum Europe. At the East London Mosque he told his audience: "A Muslim is a brother of a Muslim... he does not betray him, and he does not hand him over... You don't hand over a Muslim to the enemies."
In Britain's Parliament in 2003, Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, discussed the relationship between al-Awlaki and the Muslim Association of Britain, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front organization founded by Kemal el-Helbawy, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Return to Yemen 2004–11
Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004, where he lived in Shabwah Governorate with his wife and five children. He lectured at Iman University, headed by Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. The latter has been included on the UN 1267 Committee's list of individuals belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda. Al-Zindani denied having any influence over al-Awlaki, or that he had been his "direct teacher". Some believe that the school's curriculum deals mostly, if not exclusively, with radical Islamic studies, and promotes radicalism. American convert John Walker Lindh and other alumni have been associated with terrorist groups.
On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché. He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007. He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention.
His name was on a list of 100 prisoners whose release was sought by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. After 18 months in a Yemeni prison, al-Awlaki was released on December 12, 2007, following the intercession of his tribe. According to a Yemeni security official, he was released because he had repented. He moved to his family home in Saeed, a hamlet in the Shabwa mountains.
Moazzam Begg's Cageprisoners, an organization representing former Guantanamo detainees, campaigned for al-Awlaki's release when he was in prison in Yemen. Al-Awlaki told Begg in an interview shortly after his release that prior to his incarceration in Yemen, he had condemned the 9/11 attacks.
In December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them.
Al-Awlaki provided al-Qaeda members in Yemen with the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis, against the government. The tribal code required it to protect those who seek refuge and assistance. This imperative has greater force when the person is a member of the tribe or a tribesman's friend. The tribe's motto is "We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned." Al-Awlaki also reportedly helped negotiate deals with leaders of other tribes.
Sought by Yemeni authorities who were investigating his al-Qaeda ties, al-Awlaki went into hiding in approximately March 2009, according to his father. By December 2009, al-Awlaki was on the Yemeni government's most-wanted list. He was believed to be hiding in Yemen's Shabwa or Mareb regions, which are part of the so-called "triangle of evil". The area has attracted al-Qaeda militants, who seek refuge among local tribes unhappy with Yemen's central government.
Yemeni sources originally said al-Awlaki might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived. Pravda reported that the planes, using Saudi and U.S. intelligence, killed at least 30 al-Qaeda members from Yemen and abroad, and that an al-Awlaki house was "raided and demolished". On December 28 The Washington Post reported that U.S. and Yemeni officials said that al-Awlaki had been present at the meeting. Abdul Elah al-Shaya, a Yemeni journalist, said al-Awlaki called him on December 28 to report that he was well and had not attended the al-Qaeda meeting. Al-Shaya said that al-Awlaki was not tied to al-Qaeda.
In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence.
Reaching out to the United Kingdom
After 2006, al-Awlaki was banned from entering the United Kingdom. He broadcast lectures to mosques and other venues there via video-link from 2007 to 2009, on at least seven occasions at five locations in Britain. Noor Pro Media Events held a conference at the East London Mosque on January 1, 2009, showing a videotaped lecture by al-Awlaki; former Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve expressed concern over his being featured.
He gave video-link talks in England to an Islamic student society at the University of Westminster in September 2008, an arts center in East London in April 2009 (after the Tower Hamlets council gave its approval), worshippers at the Al Huda Mosque in Bradford, and a dinner of the Cageprisoners organization in September 2008 at the Wandsworth Civic Centre in South London. On August 23, 2009, al-Awlaki was banned by local authorities in Kensington and Chelsea, London, from speaking at Kensington Town Hall via videolink to a fundraiser dinner for Guantanamo detainees promoted by Cageprisoners. His videos, which discuss his Islamist theories, have circulated across the United Kingdom. Until February 2010, hundreds of audio tapes of his sermons were available at the Tower Hamlets public libraries. In 2009, the London-based Islam Channel carried advertisements for his DVDs and at least two of his video conference lectures.
Other connections
FBI agents identified al-Awlaki as a known, important "senior recruiter for al Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator. His name came up in a dozen terrorism plots in the US, UK, and Canada. The cases included suicide bombers in the 2005 London bombings, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2006 Toronto terrorism case, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2007 Fort Dix attack plot, the jihadist killer in the 2009 Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, and the 2010 Times Square bomber. In each case the suspects were devoted to al-Awlaki's message, which they listened to online and on CDs.
Al-Awlaki's recorded lectures were heard by Islamist fundamentalists in at least six terror cells in the UK through 2009. Michael Finton (Talib Islam), who attempted in September 2009 to bomb the Federal Building and the adjacent offices of Congressman Aaron Schock in Springfield, Illinois, admired al-Awlaki and quoted him on his Myspace page. In addition to his website, al-Awlaki had a Facebook fan page with "fans" in the US, many of whom were high school students. Al-Awlaki also set up a website and blog on which he shared his views.
Al-Awlaki influenced several other extremists to join terrorist organizations overseas and to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries. Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte, two American citizens from New Jersey who attempted to travel to Somalia in June 2010 to join the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al Shabaab, allegedly watched several al-Awlaki videos and sermons in which he warned of future attacks against Americans in the United States and abroad. Zachary Chesser, an American citizen who was arrested for attempting to provide material support to Al Shabaab, told federal authorities that he watched online videos featuring al-Awlaki and that he exchanged several e-mails with al-Awlaki. In July 2010, Paul Rockwood was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a list of 15 potential targets in the US, people he felt had desecrated Islam. Rockwood was a devoted follower of al-Awlaki, and had studied his works Constants on the Path to Jihad and 44 Ways to Jihad.
In October 2008, Charles Allen, U.S. Under-Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, warned that al-Awlaki "targets U.S. Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen." Responding to Allen, al-Awlaki wrote on his website in December 2008: "I would challenge him to come up with just one such lecture where I encourage 'terrorist attacks'".
Fort Hood shooter
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009. Even before the contents of the e-mails were revealed, terrorism expert Jarret Brachman said that Hasan's contacts with al-Awlaki should have raised "huge red flags", because of his influence on radical English-speaking jihadis. Charles Allen, no longer in government, noted that there was no work-related reason for Hasan to be in touch with al-Awlaki. Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel opined: "E-mailing a known al-Qaeda sympathizer should have set off alarm bells. Even if he was exchanging recipes, the bureau should have put out an alert." A DC-based Joint Terrorism Task Force operating under the FBI was notified of the e-mails and reviewed the information. Army employees were informed of the e-mails, but they didn't perceive any terrorist threat in Hasan's questions. Instead, they viewed them as general questions about spiritual guidance with regard to conflicts between Islam and military service and judged them to be consistent with legitimate mental health research about Muslims in the armed services. The assessment was that there was not sufficient information for a larger investigation. In one of the e-mails, Hasan wrote al-Awlaki: "I can't wait to join you [in the afterlife]". "It sounds like code words," said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a military analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. "That he's actually either offering himself up, or that he's already crossed that line in his own mind."
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea interviewed al-Awlaki in November 2009. Al-Awlaki acknowledged his correspondence with Hasan. He said he "neither ordered nor pressured ... Hasan to harm Americans." Al-Awlaki said Hasan first e-mailed him December 17, 2008, introducing himself by writing: "Do you remember me? I used to pray with you at the Virginia mosque." Hasan said he had become a devout Muslim around the time al-Awlaki was preaching at Dar al-Hijrah, in 2001 and 2002, and al-Awlaki said 'Maybe Nidal was affected by one of my lectures.'" He added: "It was clear from his e-mails that Nidal trusted me. Nidal told me: 'I speak with you about issues that I never speak with anyone else.'" Al-Awlaki said Hasan arrived at his own conclusions regarding the acceptability of violence in Islam and said he was not the one to initiate this. Shaea said, "Nidal was providing evidence to Anwar, not vice versa."
Asked whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target in his e-mails, Shaea declined to comment. Al-Awlaki said the shooting was acceptable in Islam, however, because it was a form of jihad, as the West began the hostilities with the Muslims. Al-Awlaki said he "blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were ... those who were trained and prepared to go to Iraq and Afghanistan".
Al-Awlaki's e-mail conversations with Hasan were not released, and he was not placed on the FBI Most Wanted list, indicted for treason, or officially named as a co-conspirator with Hasan. The U.S. government was reluctant to classify the Fort Hood shooting as a terrorist incident, or identify any motive. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2010 that al-Awlaki had not "played a direct role" in any of the attacks, and noted he had never been charged with a crime in the US.
One of his fellow officers at Fort Hood said Hasan was enthusiastic about al-Awlaki. Some investigators believe al-Awlaki's teachings may have been instrumental in Hasan's decision to stage the attack. On his now-disabled website, al-Awlaki praised Hasan's actions, describing him as a hero.
Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber"
According to a number of sources, Al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the convicted al-Qaeda attempted bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on December 25, 2009, had contacts. In January 2010, CNN reported that U.S. "security sources" said that there is concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was Abdulmutallab's recruiter and one of his trainers, and met with him prior to the attack. In February 2010, al-Awlaki admitted in an interview published in al-Jazeera that he taught and corresponded with Abdulmutallab, but denied having ordered the attack.
Representative Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said officials in the Obama administration and officials with access to law enforcement information told him the suspect "may have had contact [with al-Awlaki]".The Sunday Times established that Abdulmutallab first met al-Awlaki in 2005 in Yemen, while he was studying Arabic. During that time the suspect attended lectures by al-Awlaki.NPR reported that according to unnamed U.S. intelligence officials he attended a sermon by al-Awlaki at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, a former trustee of the mosque, expressed "grave misgivings" with regard to its stewardship. A spokesperson of the mosque stated that al-Awlaki had never spoken there or had even to his knowledge entered the building.
Abdulmutallab was also reported by CBS News, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph to have attended a talk by al-Awlaki at the East London Mosque, which al-Awlaki may have attended by video teleconference. The Sunday Telegraph later removed the report from its website following a complaint by the East London Mosque, which stated that "Anwar Al Awlaki did not deliver any talks at the ELM between 2005 and 2008, which is when the newspaper had falsely alleged that Abdullmutallab had attended such talks".
Investigators who searched flats connected to Abdulmutallab in London said that he was a "big fan" of al-Awlaki, as al-Awlaki's blog and website had repeatedly been visited from those locations.
According to federal sources, Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki repeatedly communicated with one another in the year prior to the attack. "Voice-to-voice communication" between the two was intercepted during the fall of 2009, and one government source said al-Awlaki "was in some way involved in facilitating [Abdulmutallab]'s transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things." NPR reported that intelligence officials suspected al-Awlaki may have told Abdulmutallab to go to Yemen for al-Qaeda training.
Abdulmutallab told the FBI that al-Awlaki was one of his al-Qaeda trainers in Yemen. Others reported that Abdulmutallab met with al-Awlaki in the weeks leading up to the attack. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to a U.S. intelligence official, intercepts and other information point to connections between the two:
Some of the information ... comes from Abdulmutallab, who ... said that he met with al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaeda members during an extended trip to Yemen this year and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the attack and in providing religious justification for it. Other intelligence linking the two became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation.
Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs, Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, said Yemeni investigators believe that Abdulmutallab traveled to Shabwa in October 2009. Investigators believe he obtained his explosives and received training there. He met there with al-Qaeda members in a house built by al-Awlaki. A top Yemen government official said the two met with each other.
In January 2010, al-Awlaki acknowledged that he met and spoke with Abdulmutallab in Yemen in the fall of 2009. In an interview, al-Awlaki said: "Umar Farouk is one of my students; I had communications with him. And I support what he did." He also said: "I did not tell him to do this operation, but I support it". Fox News reported in early February 2010 that Abdulmutallab told federal investigators that al-Awlaki directed him to carry out the bombing.
In June 2010 Michael Leiter, the Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said al-Awlaki had a "direct operational role" in the plot.
Sharif Mobley
Sharif Mobley had acknowledged contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. The Mobley family claims the contact was for spiritual guidance in further studies of Islam.
The Mobley family went to Yemen and resided there for several years. They decided to return to the United States and went to the U.S. Embassy to update the family travel documents. While waiting for their travel documents, Sharif Mobley was kidnapped by Yemen Security Services and shot on January 26, 2010. He was then held in Yemen's Central Prison. Mobley disappeared from the Central Prison on February 27, 2014. His current location is known to the U.S. Embassy in Yemen (currently closed 2015) but is withheld from his family and legal advisers based on U.S. State Department Regulations on "U.S. Citizens Missing Abroad".
All charges related to "terrorism/terrorist activity" were dropped by the Yemen government. There are no charges relating to allegations of "killing a guard during an escape attempt from the hospital" and there are no other legal proceedings against him in Yemen.
Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad, convicted of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, told interrogators that he was a "fan and follower" of al-Awlaki, and his writings were one of the inspirations for the attack. On May 6, 2010 ABC News reported that unknown sources told them Shahzad made contact with al-Awlaki over the internet, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Stabbing of British former minister Stephen Timms
Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed former British Cabinet Minister Stephen Timms in May 2010, and was found guilty of his attempted murder in November 2010, claimed to have become radicalized by listening to online sermons of al-Awlaki.
Seattle Weekly cartoonist death threat
In 2010, after Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, cartoonist Molly Norris at Seattle Weekly had to stop publishing, and at the suggestion of the FBI changed her name, moved, and went into hiding due to a fatwā issued by al-Awlaki calling for her death. In the June 2010 issue of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, al-Awlaki cursed her and eight others for "blasphemous caricatures" of Muhammad. "The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved", he wrote. Daniel Pipes observed in an article entitled "Dueling Fatwas", "Awlaki stands at an unprecedented crossroads of death declarations, with his targeting Norris even as the U.S. government targets him."
Cargo planes bomb plotThe Guardian, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph reported that U.S. and British counter-terrorism officials believed that al-Awlaki was behind the cargo plane PETN bombs that were sent from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010.Yemen bomb scare 'mastermind' lived in London | World news. The Guardian. Retrieved on October 1, 2011. When U.S. Homeland Security official John Brennan was asked about al-Awlaki's suspected involvement in the plot, he said: "Anybody associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a subject of concern." U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein said "al-Awlaki was behind the two bombs."
Final years
Al-Awlaki's father, tribe, and supporters denied his alleged associations with Al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism. Al-Awlaki's father proclaimed his son's innocence in an interview with CNN's Paula Newton, saying: "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son. He's not Osama bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not." Responding to a Yemeni official's assertions that his son had taken refuge with al-Qaeda, Nasser said: "He's dead wrong. What do you expect my son to do? There are missiles raining down on the village. He has to hide. But he is not hiding with al-Qaeda; our tribe is protecting him right now."
The Yemeni government attempted to get the tribal leaders to release al-Awlaki to their custody. They promised they would not turn him over to U.S. authorities for questioning. The governor of Shabwa said in January 2010 that al-Awlaki was on the move with members of al-Qaeda, including Fahd al-Quso, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole.
In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship. U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an "imminent threat". Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council. Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare. As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons. The authorization was nevertheless controversial.
By February 4, 2010, the New York Daily News reported that al-Awlaki was "now on a targeting list signed off on by the Obama administration". On April 6, The New York Times reported that President Obama had authorized the killing of al-Awlaki.
The al-Awalik tribe responded: "We warn against cooperating with America to kill Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. We will not stand by idly and watch." Al-Awlaki's tribe wrote that it would "not remain with arms crossed if a hair of Anwar al-Awlaki is touched, or if anyone plots or spies against him. Whoever risks denouncing our son (Awlaki) will be the target of Al-Awalik weapons", and gave warning "against co-operating with the Americans" in the capture or killing of al-Awlaki. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, announced that the Yemeni government had not received any evidence from the US, and that "Anwar al-Awlaki has always been looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist and shouldn't be considered as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism".
In a video clip bearing the imprint of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, issued on April 16 in al-Qaeda's monthly magazine Sada Al-Malahem, al-Awlaki said: "What am I accused of? Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?" In the video he also praises both Abdulmutallab and Hasan, and describes both as his "students".
In late April, Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA) introduced a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to withdraw al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship. By May, U.S. officials believed he had become directly involved in terrorist activities. Former colleague Abdul-Malik said he "is a terrorist, in my book", and advised shops not to carry any of his publications. In an editorial, Investor's Business Daily called al-Awlaki the "world's most dangerous man", and recommended that he be added to the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list, a bounty put on his head, that he be designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, charged with treason, and extradition papers filed with the Yemeni government. IBD criticized the Justice Department for stonewalling Senator Joe Lieberman's security panel's investigation of al-Awlaki's role in the Fort Hood massacre.
On July 16, the U.S. Treasury Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, called him "extraordinarily dangerous", and said al-Awlaki was involved in several organizational aspects of terrorism, including recruiting, training, fundraising, and planning individual attacks.
A few days later, the United Nations Security Council placed al-Awlaki on its UN Security Council Resolution 1267 list of individuals associated with al-Qaeda, describing him as a leader, recruiter, and trainer for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The resolution stipulates that U.N. members must freeze the assets of anyone on the list, and prevent them from travelling or obtaining weapons. The following week, Canadian banks were ordered to seize any assets belonging to al-Awlaki. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's senior counter-terrorism officer Gilles Michaud described him as a "major, major factor in radicalization". In September 2010, Jonathan Evans, the Director General of the United Kingdom's domestic security and counter-intelligence agency (MI5), said that al-Awlaki was the West's Public Enemy No 1.
In October 2010, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) urged YouTube to take down al-Awlaki's videos from its website, saying that by hosting al-Awlaki's messages, "We are facilitating the recruitment of homegrown terror." Pauline Neville-Jones, British security minister, said "These Web sites ... incite cold-blooded murder." YouTube began removing the material in November 2010.
Al-Awlaki was charged in absentia in Sana'a, Yemen, on November 2 with plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. Ali al-Saneaa, the head of the prosecutor's office, announced the charges during the trial of Hisham Assem, who had been accused of killing Jacques Spagnolo, an oil industry worker. He said that al-Awlaki and Assem had been in contact for months, and that al-Awlaki had encouraged Assem to commit terrorism. Al-Awlaki's lawyer said that his client was not connected to Spagnolo's death. On November 6, Yemeni Judge Mohsen Alwan ordered that al-Awlaki be caught "dead or alive".
In his book Ticking Time Bomb: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (2011), former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman described al-Awlaki, Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad, Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, and Pakistani-American Samir Khan as "virtual spiritual sanctioners" who use the internet to offer religious justification for Islamist terrorism.
Lawsuit against the US
In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said:
the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow.
Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010.
On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches.
On May 5, 2011, the United States tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died.
Death
On September 30, 2011, al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Al Jawf Governorate, Yemen, according to U.S. sources, the strike was carried out by Joint Special Operations Command, under the direction of the CIA. A witness said the group had stopped to eat breakfast while traveling to Ma'rib Governorate. The occupants of the vehicle spotted the drone and attempted to flee in the vehicle before Hellfire missiles were fired Yemen's Defense Ministry announced that al-Awlaki had been killed. Also killed was Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia, thought to be behind al-Qaeda's English-language web magazine Inspire. U.S. President Barack Obama said:
The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. He took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans ... and he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda. [The strike] is further proof that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.
Journalist and author Glenn Greenwald argued on Salon.com that killing al-Awlaki violated his First Amendment right of free speech and that doing so outside of a criminal proceeding violated the Constitution's due process clause, specifically citing the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force." He mentioned doubt among Yemeni experts about al-Awlaki's role in al-Qaeda, and called U.S. government accusations against him unverified and lacking in evidence.
In a letter dated May 22, 2013, to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, Patrick J. Leahy, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder wrote that
high-level U.S. government officials [...] concluded that al-Aulaqi posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Before carrying out the operation that killed al-Aulaqi, senior officials also determined, based on a careful evaluation of the circumstances at the time, that it was not feasible to capture al-Aulaqi. In addition, senior officials determined that the operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles, including the cardinal principles of (1) necessity – the requirement that the target have definite military value; (2) distinction – the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted; (3) proportionality – the notion that the anticipated collateral damage of an action cannot be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage; and (4) humanity – a principle that requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering. The operation was also undertaken consistent with Yemeni sovereignty. [...] The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was lawful, it was considered, and it was just.
On April 21, 2014, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the Obama administration must release documents justifying its drone killings of foreigners and Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki. In June 2014, the United States Department of Justice disclosed a 2010 memorandum written by the acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, David J. Barron. The memo stated that Anwar al-Awlaki was a significant threat with an infeasible probability of capture. Barron therefore justified the killing as legal, as "the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process". The New York Times Editorial Board dismissed the memo's rationale for al-Awlaki's killing, saying it "provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care", instead describing it as "a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result." A lawyer for the ACLU described the memo as "disturbing" and "ultimately an argument that the president can order targeted killings of Americans without ever having to account to anyone outside the executive branch."
Legacy
Seth Jones, who as a political scientist specializes in al-Qaida, considers that the continuing relevance of al-Awlaki is due to his fluency in the English language as well as his charisma, precising that "he had a disarming aura and unnerving confidence, with an easy smile and a soothing, eloquent voice. He stood a lanky six feet, one inch tall, weighed 160 pounds, and had a thick black beard, an oversized nose, and wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in a clear, almost hypnotic voice."
Awlaki's videos and writings remain highly popular on the internet, where they continue to be readily accessible. Those who viewed and still view his videos are estimated by journalist Scott Shane to number in the hundreds of thousands, while his father Dr. Nasser Awlaqi says that "five million preaching tapes of Anwar Awlaqi have been sold in the West." And thus, even following his death, Awlaki has continued to inspire his devotees to carry out terrorist attacks, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. According to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), 88 "extremists," 54 in the U.S. and 34 in Europe, have been influenced by Awlaki. Because "his work has inspired countless plots and attacks," CEP has "called on YouTube and other platforms to permanently ban Mr. Awlaki's material, including his early, mainstream lectures."
FOIA documents
During the FBI investigation of the 9/11 attacks, it was discovered that a few of the attackers had attended the mosques in San Diego and Falls Church with which al-Awlaki was associated. Interviews with members of the San Diego mosque showed that Nawaz al-Hazmi, one of the attackers, may have had a private conversation with him. On that basis he was placed under 24-hour surveillance. It was discovered that he regularly patronized prostitutes. It was through FBI interrogation of prostitutes and escort service operators that al-Awlaki was tipped off in 2002 about FBI surveillance. Shortly thereafter, he left the United States.
In January 2013, Fox News announced that FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request showed possible connections between al-Awlaki and the September 11 attackers. According to Judicial Watch, the documents show that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and Las Vegas. Judicial Watch further stated that al-Awlaki "was a central focus of the FBI's investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn't cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance."
When queried by Fox News, the FBI denied having evidence connecting al-Awlaki and the September 11 attacks: "The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents. The FBI and investigating bodies have not found evidence connecting Anwar al-Awlaki and the attack on September 11, 2001. The document referenced does not link Anwar al-Awlaki with any purchase of airline tickets for the hijackers."
Family
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki and Egyptian-born Gihan Mohsen Baker had a son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, born August 26, 1995, in Denver, who was an American citizen. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed on October 14, 2011, in Yemen at the age of 16 in an American drone strike. Nine other people were killed in the same CIA-initiated attack, including a 17-year-old cousin of Abdulrahman. According to his relatives, shortly before his father's death, Abdulrahman had left the family home in Sana'a and travelled to Shabwa in search of his father who was believed to be in hiding in that area (though he was actually hundreds of miles away at the time ). Abdulrahman was sitting in an open-air cafe in Shabwa when killed. According to U.S. officials, the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a mistake; the intended target was an Egyptian, Ibrahim al-Banna, who was not at the targeted location at the time of the attack. Human rights groups have raised questions as to why an American citizen was killed by the United States in a country with which the United States is not officially at war. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was not known to have any independent connection to terrorism.
Nasser al-Awlaki
Nasser al-Awlaki is the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki stated he believed his son had been wrongly accused and was not a member of Al Qaeda. After the deaths of his son and grandson, Nasser in an interview in Time magazine called the killings a crime and condemned U.S. President Obama directly, saying: "I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some, he may be that. To me and my family, he is nothing more than a child killer."
In 2013, Nasser al-Awlaki published an op-ed in The New York Times stating that two years after killing his grandson, the Obama administration still declines to provide an explanation. In 2012, Nasser al-Awlaki filed a lawsuit, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, challenging the constitutionality of the drone killings of his son and grandson. This lawsuit was dismissed in April 2014 by D.C. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
Tariq al-Dahab
Tariq al-Dahab, who led al-Qaeda insurgents in Yemen, was a brother-in-law of al-Awlaki. On February 16, 2012, the terrorist organization stated that he had been killed by agents, although media reports contain speculation that he was killed by his brother in a bloody family feud.
Nawar al-Awlaki
On January 29, 2017, Anwar al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen, was killed in a DEVGRU operation authorized by President Donald Trump."1 US service member killed, 3 wounded in Yemen raid" , WPVI-TV, 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA. January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
Islamic education
Al-Awlaki's Islamic education was primarily informal, and consisted of intermittent months with various scholars reading and contemplating Islamic scholarly works. Despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education, Al-Awlaki made a name for himself as a public speaker who released popular audio recordings.Some Muslim scholars said they did not understand alAwlaki's popularity, because while he spoke fluent English and could therefore reach a large non-Arabic-speaking audience, he lacked formal Islamic training and study.
Ideology
While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004, al-Awlaki was influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, described by The New York Times as an originator of the contemporary "anti-Western Jihadist movement". He read 150 to 200 pages a day of Qutb's works, and described himself as "so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly".
Terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann in 2009 referred to al-Awlaki as "one of the principal jihadi luminaries for would-be homegrown terrorists. His fluency with English, his unabashed advocacy of jihad and mujahideen organizations, and his Web-savvy approach are a powerful combination." He called al-Awlaki's lecture, "Constants on the Path of Jihad", which he says was based on a similar document written by al-Qaeda's founder, the "virtual bible for lone-wolf Muslim extremists". Philip Mudd, formerly of the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI's top intelligence adviser, called him "a magnetic character ... a powerful orator." He attracted young men to his lectures, especially US-based and UK-based Muslims.
U.S. officials and some U.S. media sources called al-Awlaki an Islamic fundamentalist and accused him of encouraging terrorism. According to documents recovered from bin Laden's hideout, the al-Qaeda leader was unsure about al-Awlaki's qualifications.
Works
The Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation said al-Awlaki's ability to write and speak in fluent English enabled him to incite English-speaking Muslims to terrorism. Al-Awlaki notes in 44 Ways to Support Jihad that most reading material on the subject is in Arabic.
Written works
44 Ways to Support Jihad: Essay (January 2009). In it, al-Awlaki states that "The hatred of kuffar is a central element of our military creed" and that all Muslims are obligated to participate in jihad, either by committing the acts themselves or supporting others who do so. He says all Muslims must remain physically fit so as to be prepared for conflict. According to U.S. officials, it is considered a key text for al-Qaeda members.
Al-Awlaki wrote for Jihad Recollections, an English language online publication published by Al-Fursan Media.
Allah is Preparing Us for Victory – short book (2009).
Lectures
Lectures on the book Constants on the Path of Jihad by Yusef al-Ayeri—concerns leaderless jihad.
In 2009, the UK government found 1,910 of his videos had been posted to YouTube. One of them had been viewed 164,420 times.
The Battle of Hearts and Minds The Dust Will Never Settle Down Dreams & Interpretations The Hereafter—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Makkan Period—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Medinan Period—Lecture in 2 Parts—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Lives of the Prophets (AS)—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (RA): His Life & Times—15 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Umar ibn al-Khattāb (RA): His Life & Times—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
25 Promises from Allah to the Believer—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Companions of the Ditch & Lessons from the Life of Musa (AS)—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Remembrance of Allah & the Greatest Ayah—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Stories from Hadith—4 CDs—Center for Islamic Information and Education ("CIIE")
Hellfire & The Day of Judgment—CD—CIIE
Quest for Truth: The Story of Salman Al-Farsi (RA)—CD—CIIE
Trials & Lessons for Muslim Minorities—CD—CIIE
Young Ayesha (RA) & Mothers of the Believers (RA)—CD—CIIE
Understanding the Quran—CD—CIIE
Lessons from the Companions (RA) Living as a Minority—CD—CIIE
Virtues of the Sahabah—video lecture series promoted by the al-Wasatiyyah Foundation
Website
Al-Awlaki maintained a website and blog on which he shared his views. On December 11, 2008, he said Muslims should not seek to "serve in the armies of the disbelievers and fight against his brothers".
In "44 Ways to Support Jihad", posted on his blog in February 2009, al-Awlaki encouraged others to "fight jihad", and explained how to give money to the mujahideen or their families. Al-Awlaki's sermon encourages others to conduct weapons training, and raise children "on the love of Jihad". Also that month, he wrote: "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies." He wrote as well: "We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword, whether the masses like it or not." On July 14, he said that Muslim countries should not offer military assistance to the US. "The blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders ... who sells his religion for a few dollars," he said. In blog post dated July 15, 2009, entitled "Fighting Against Government Armies in the Muslim World", al-Awlaki wrote, "Blessed are those who fight against [American soldiers], and blessed are those shuhada [martyrs] who are killed by them."
In a video posted to the internet on November 8, 2010, al-Awlaki called for Muslims to kill Americans "without hesitation", and overthrow Arab governments that cooperate with the US. "Don't consult with anyone in fighting the Americans, fighting the devil doesn't require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils", al-Awlaki said. That month, Intelligence Research Specialist Kevin Yorke of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division called him "the most dangerous man in the world".
See also
Church Committee
Executive Order 12333
Extrajudicial killing
International counter-terrorism activities of the CIA
Protocol I
References
Further reading
al-Ashanti, AbdulHaq and Sloan, Abu Ameenah AbdurRahman. (2011) A Critique of the Methodology of Anwar al-Awlaki and his Errors in the Fiqh of Jihad. London: Jamiah Media, 2011
External links
Ruling of Judge Bates in Al Aulaqi v Obama
Statements
Interviews
"Exclusive; Ray Suarez: My Post-9/11 Interview With Anwar al-Awlaki", PBS, October 30, 2001
"Al-Jazeera Satellite Network Interview with Yemeni-American Cleric Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki Regarding his Alleged Role in Radicalizing Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan", The NEFA Foundation, December 24, 2009
Media coverage
The imam's very curious story: A skirt-chasing mullah is just one more mystery for the 9/11 panel, Ragavan, Chitra, US News and World Report'', June 13, 2004
DBI.gov
1971 births
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People associated with the September 11 attacks
People from Las Cruces, New Mexico
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United States military killing of American civilians | true | [
"Not proven (, ) is a verdict available to a court of law in Scotland. Under Scots law, a criminal trial may end in one of three verdicts, one of conviction (\"guilty\") and two of acquittal (\"not proven\" and \"not guilty\").\n\nBetween the Restoration in the late 17th century and the early 18th century, jurors in Scotland were expected only to find whether individual factual allegations were proven or not proven, rather than to rule on an accused's guilt. In 1728, the jury in a murder trial asserted \"its ancient right\" to declare a defendant \"not guilty\". Over time, the \"not guilty\" verdict regained wide acceptance and use amongst Scots juries, with the encouragement of defence lawyers. It eventually displaced \"not proven\" as the primary verdict of acquittal. Nowadays, juries can return a verdict of either \"not guilty\" or \"not proven\", with the same legal effect of acquittal.\n\nAlthough historically it may be a similar verdict to not guilty, in the present day not proven is typically used by a jury when there is a belief that the defendant is guilty but the crown has not provided sufficient evidence. Scots law requires corroboration; the evidence of one witness, however credible, is not sufficient to prove a charge against an accused or to establish any material or crucial fact.\n\nOut of the country, the \"not proven\" verdict may be referred to as the Scottish verdict. \n\nIn Scotland, there have been attempts to abolish what Sir Walter Scott famously called that bastard verdict. In 1827, Scott, who was sheriff in the court of Selkirk, wrote in his journal that \"the jury gave that bastard verdict, Not proven.\n\nHistory\nBy the early 17th century, the standard practice of juries in Scotland was to return a finding of \"fylet, culpable and convict\" or \"clene, innocent and acquit\". This changed in the late 17th century, at which point the role of the jury became simply to \"declare whether or not the facts alleged had been proved\", with the judge left to determine, based on that declaration, whether the accused was guilty or not.\n\nThere is some disagreement between historians as to why this change happened. David Hume and Hugo Arnot argue that it was rooted in religious oppression. The Crown persecuted the Covenanters but popular support made it impossible to convict them in a jury trial. To pare the power of the jury, the Scottish judges began restricting the jury's role: no longer would the jury announce whether the accused was \"guilty\" or \"not guilty\"; instead it would decide whether specific factual allegations were \"proven\" or \"not proven\"; and the judge would then decide whether to convict.\n\nReintroduction of \"not guilty\"\nIn 1728, in the trial of Carnegie of Finhaven for the murder of the Earl of Strathmore, the defence lawyer (Robert Dundas) persuaded a jury to reassert its ancient right of acquitting, of finding an accused \"not guilty\", in spite of the facts being proven. The law required the jury merely to look at the facts and pass a verdict of \"proven\" or \"not proven\" depending on whether they believed the evidence proved that the accused had killed the Earl. Carnegie had undoubtedly killed the Earl, but had also clearly not intended to do so. If the jury brought in a \"proven\" verdict they would in effect constrain the judge to find Carnegie guilty of murder, for which the punishment was hanging. To avert this outcome, the jury asserted what it believed to be their \"ancient right\" to judge the whole case and not just the facts, and brought in the verdict of \"not guilty\".\n\nThe reintroduction of the \"not guilty\" verdict was part of a wider movement during the 17th and 18th century which saw a gradual increase in the power of juries, such as the trial of William Penn in 1670, in which an English jury first gained the right to pass a verdict contrary to the law (known as jury nullification), and the trial of John Peter Zenger in New York in 1735 in which jury nullification is credited with establishing freedom of the press as a firm right in what became the United States. Legal academic Ian Willock argues that the 1728 case was \"of great significance in calling a halt to a process of attrition which might have led to the total extinction of the criminal jury\".\n\nAlthough jurors continued to use both \"not guilty\" and \"not proven\" after 1728, jurors tended to favour the \"not guilty\" verdict over the \"not proven\" and the interpretation changed.\n\nCalls for reform\nThere have been repeated calls to abolish the \"not proven\" verdict since the middle of the 20th century. In 1975, the Thomson Committee on Criminal Procedure in Scotland (chaired by Lord Thomson) recommended retaining the three-verdict system. The Scottish Office consulted on removing \"not proven\" in 1994. Unsuccessful attempts to scrap the \"not proven\" verdict were made in Parliament by Donald Dewar in 1969, George Robertson in 1993 (prompted by the trial outcome in the murder of Amanda Duffy) and Lord Macauly of Bragar in 1995. A members' bill to abolish the \"not proven\" verdict was debated in the Scottish Parliament in 2016, but was rejected by 80 votes to 28.\n\nProponents of reform argue that the \"not proven\" verdict is widely regarded as an acquittal used when the judge or jury does not have enough evidence to convict but is not sufficiently convinced of the accused person's innocence to bring in a \"not guilty\" verdict. Essentially, the judge or jury is unconvinced that the suspect is innocent, but guilt has not been proven \"beyond reasonable doubt\". Conversely, its opponents argue that a two-verdict system would lead to an increase in wrongful convictions.\n\nFollowing a not proven verdict in a criminal trial in 2015, Miss M successfully sued Stephen Coxen in the civil courts, in what was the first civil damages action for rape following an unsuccessful criminal prosecution in almost 100 years. In 2018 Miss M launched #EndNotProven alongside Rape Crisis Scotland, calling for Not Proven to be removed and citing the disproportionate use in rape cases, the widespread misunderstandings of the verdict and fears that it is being used as an 'easy way out' by jurors.\n\nModern usage\nIn Scotland, a criminal case may be decided either in solemn procedure by a jury (instructed by the judge), or in summary procedure by the judge alone (with no jury appointed). There are various rules for when the one or the other procedure may or must be employed; in general, juries are employed for the more severe accusations, while petty crimes and offences are treated summarily. A criminal case jury consists of fifteen jurors, who make their decision by a simple majority vote: eight votes are necessary and sufficient for the verdict guilty, which has replaced the verdict proven.\n\nApproximately one-third of all acquittal verdicts by Scottish juries use the formulation not proven; the others use not guilty. The verdict not proven also is available for judges in the summary procedure, and is employed in about a fifth of such acquittals. The proportion of not proven acquittals, in general, is higher in the more severe cases; but so then are the proportion of acquittals versus convictions. This might have many different reasons, for example that on average it might be more difficult to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the more severe cases.\n\nNot proven is sometimes interpreted as indicating that the jury or judge is not convinced of the innocence of the accused; in fact, they may be morally convinced that the accused is guilty, but do not find the evidence sufficient for a conviction. One reason for this is the rule that in such cases the evidence for the prosecution must be corroborated in order to permit a conviction. Thus, there might be a single plaintiff or witness for the prosecution, which the jury or judge believes is both truthful and trustworthy, but no other witness or circumstances against the accused. By Scots law, the accused then should be acquitted, but often will be so by the verdict not proven.\n\nUse in other jurisdictions\n\nIn general, the Scottish verdict has not been permanently adopted outside its home country, but it was sometimes used in colonial Canada, especially by some judges in southwestern Ontario. Its most famous use in the United States came when Senator Arlen Specter tried to vote \"not proven\" on the two articles of impeachment of Bill Clinton, his votes were recorded as \"not guilty\" and when, at the O. J. Simpson murder case, various reformers, including Fred Goldman, Ron Goldman's father, pushed for a change to \"not proven\" because of what they felt was an incorrect presumption of innocence on the part of Simpson. The verdict is often referenced in US cases where the jury is obliged to find the state has not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, but there is widespread feeling that the defendant does not deserve the exoneration of a \"not guilty\" verdict. A popular saying about the \"not proven\" verdict is that it means \"not guilty, but don't do it again\".\n\nIn 2005, a proposal was made in the University of Chicago Law Review to introduce the not proven verdict into the United States.\n\nCases which resulted in a not proven verdict\nSir Hugh Campbell and Sir George Campbell for being part of the rising at Bothwell Bridge.\nAlfred John Monson, in relation to the Ardlamont murder\nMadeleine Smith, accused of murdering her boyfriend by poison\nHelen McDougal, in relation to the Burke and Hare murders\nAlan Peters, in relation to the murder of Maxwell Garvie\nDonald Merrett, tried in February 1927 for the murder of his mother \nJohn Leslie, in relation to an alleged sexual assault\nFrancis Auld, accused of the murder of Amanda Duffy\n Stephen Coxen, in 2015 acquitted with a not proven verdict for raping Miss M. In 2018 a judge in a civil case found that he had raped her. \nOn 23 March 2020, a jury found the former SNP leader and Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond \"not proven\" on one charge—and not guilty on twelve other charges—of sexual assault; he was thus acquitted of all charges against him.\n\nSee also\nJury nullification\nMiscarriage of justice\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\n The Scottish criminal jury: A very peculiar institution, Peter Duff, 62 Law & Contemp. Probs. 173 (Spring 1999)\n \n \n\nScots language\nScottish criminal law\nScots law legal terminology\nHigh Court of Justiciary",
"DVD Verdict was a judicial-themed website for DVD reviews. The site was founded in 1999. The editor-in-chief was actor Michael Stailey, who owned the website between 2004 and 2016, and the site employed a large editorial staff of critics, whose reviews were quoted by sources such as CBS Marketwatch, and were praised by such writers as Anthony Augustine of Uptown.\n\nDVD Verdict also had four sister sites, titled Cinema Verdict, a theatrical movie review site, TV Verdict, a television review site, Pixel Verdict, a video game review site, and DVD Verdict Presents. The last reviews were published in 2017. , the site is offline.\n\nSee also\n DVD Talk\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nExternal links\nDVD Verdict\nDVD Verdict Presents\n\nAmerican film review websites\nInternet properties established in 1999\nInternet properties disestablished in 2017"
] |
[
"Anwar al-Awlaki",
"Lawsuit against the US",
"what was the reason behind the lawsuit?",
"contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list.",
"why was he on the targeted kill list?",
"the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world.",
"what was his argument in the trial?",
"sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be \"targeted for death\".",
"what was the verdict?",
"Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit,"
] | C_bfe5daac479f47d7942846e4235d1cca_0 | what happened after the lawsuit? | 5 | What happened after the lawsuit against the US? | Anwar al-Awlaki | In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said: the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow. Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the US Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010. On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the US Constitution committed to the political branches. On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died. CANNOTANSWER | On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. | Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi, al-Awlaqi; ; April 21 or 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded. US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's right to due process, including a trial.
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen. Growing up partially in the United States and partially in Yemen, he attended various universities across the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s while also working as an imam, despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education. Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a university lecturer after a brief stint as a public speaker in the United Kingdom. He was detained by Yemeni authorities in 2006, where he spent 18 months in prison before being released without facing trial. Following his release, Al-Awlaki's message started to become overtly supportive of violence, as he condemned United States foreign policy against Muslims.
The Yemeni government tried him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive". U.S. officials said that in 2009, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda, although they described his role as more "inspirational" than "operational." He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States. In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama due to his alleged terrorist activities. Al-Awlaki's father and civil rights groups challenged the order in court. Al-Awlaki was believed to be in hiding in southeast Yemen in the last years of his life. The U.S. deployed unmanned aircraft (drones) in Yemen to search for and kill him, firing at and failing to kill him at least once; he was successfully killed on September 30, 2011. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed by a CIA-led drone strike in Yemen. His daughter, 8-year old Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed during a raid against Al Qaeda ordered by President Donald Trump in 2017.<ref name="uk.reuters.com">Ghobari, Mohammed and Phil Stewart. "Commando dies in U.S. raid in Yemen, first military op OK'd by Trump", Reuters, January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.</ref> The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki's public statements and videos have been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than before his death.
Early life
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen, while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, was doing graduate work at U.S. universities. His father was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master's degree in agricultural economics at New Mexico State University in 1971, received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska, and worked at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1977. Nasser al-Awlaki served as Agriculture Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. He was also President of Sana'a University. Yemen's prime minister from 2007 to 2011, Ali Mohammed Mujur, was a relative.
The family returned to Yemen in 1978, when al-Awlaki was seven years old. He lived there for 11 years, and studied at Azal Modern School.
Life in the United States 1990–2002
Education
In 1991, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S. to attend college. He earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University (1994), where he was president of the Muslim Student Association.
In 1993, while still a college student in Colorado State's civil engineering program, al-Awlaki visited Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. He spent some time training with the mujahideen who had fought the Soviets. He was depressed by the country's poverty and hunger, and "wouldn't have gone with al-Qaeda," according to friends from Colorado State, who said he was profoundly affected by the trip. Mullah Mohammed Omar did not form the Taliban until 1994. When Al-Awlaki returned to campus, he showed increased interest in religion and politics. Al-Awlaki studied Education Leadership at San Diego State University, but did not complete his degree. He worked on a doctorate in Human Resource Development at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development from January to December 2001.
Time as imam
In 1994, al-Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen, and began service as a part-time imam of the Denver Islamic Society. In 1996, he was chastised by an elder for encouraging a Saudi student to fight in Chechnya against the Russians. He left Denver soon after, moving to San Diego.
From 1996 to 2000, al-Awlaki was imam of the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque in San Diego, California, where he had a following of 200–300 people. U.S. officials later alleged that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, attended his sermons and personally met him during this period. Hazmi later lived in Northern Virginia and attended al-Awlaki's mosque there. The 9/11 Commission Report said that the hijackers "reportedly respected [al-Awlaki] as a religious figure". While in San Diego, al-Awlaki volunteered with youth organizations, fished, discussed his travels with friends, and created a popular and lucrative series of recorded lectures.
In August 1996 and in April 1997, al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego and charged with soliciting prostitutes. The first time, in 1996, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was fined $400 and required to attend informational sessions about AIDS. The second time, in 1997, he pleaded guilty and was fined $240, ordered to perform 12 days of community service, and received three years' probation. From November 2001 to January 2002 the FBI observed him visiting a number of prostitutes, and interviewed them, establishing that he had paid for sex acts. No prosecution was brought.
In 1998 and 1999, he served as vice-president for the Charitable Society for Social Welfare. In 2004, the FBI described this group as a "front organization to funnel money to terrorists". Although the FBI investigated al-Awlaki from June 1999 through March 2000 for possible links to Hamas, the Bin Laden contact Ziyad Khaleel, and a visit by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, it did not find sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution. Al-Awlaki told reporters that he resigned from leading the San Diego mosque "after an uneventful four years," and took a brief sabbatical, traveling overseas to various countries.
In January 2001, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S., settling in the Washington metropolitan area. There, he was imam at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque near Falls Church, Virginia, and his services were attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. He led academic discussions frequented by FBI Director of Counter-Intelligence for the Middle East Gordon M. Snow. Al-Awlaki also served as the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, where he was hired by Esam Omeish. Omeish said in 2004 that he was convinced that al-Awlaki was not involved in terrorism.
His proficiency as a public speaker and command of the English language helped him attract followers who did not speak Arabic. "He was the magic bullet", according to the mosque spokesman Johari Abdul-Malik. "He had everything all in a box." "He had an allure. He was charming."
When police investigating the 9/11 attacks raided the Hamburg apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, they found the telephone number of al-Awlaki among bin al-Shibh's personal contacts. The FBI interviewed al-Awlaki four times in the eight days following the 9/11 attacks. One detective later told the 9/11 Commission he believed al-Awlaki "was at the center of the 9/11 story". And an FBI agent said, "if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been" him, since "someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused". One 9/11 Commission staff member said: "Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something? Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it." A separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks suggested that al-Awlaki may have been connected to the hijackers, according to its director, Eleanor Hill. In 2003, Representative Anna Eshoo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "In my view, he is more than a coincidental figure."
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki suggested in writing on the IslamOnline.net website that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible for the attacks, and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default".
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki was sought in Washington, D.C., by the media to answer questions about Islam, its rituals, and its relation to the attacks. He was interviewed by National Geographic, The New York Times, and other media. Al-Awlaki condemned the attacks. According to an NPR report in 2010, in 2001 al-Awlaki appeared to be a moderate who could "bridge the gap between the United States and the worldwide community of Muslims." The New York Times said at the time that he was "held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West." In 2010, Fox News and the New York Daily News reported that some months after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon employee invited al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary's Office of General Counsel. The U.S. Secretary of the Army had suggested that a moderate Muslim be invited to give a talk.
In 2002, al-Awlaki was the first imam to conduct a prayer service for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association at the U.S. Capitol. That year, Nidal Hasan visited al-Awlaki's mosque for his mother's funeral, at which al-Awlaki presided. In November 2009, Hasan killed 13 and wounded 32 in the Fort Hood shooting. Hasan usually attended a mosque in Maryland closer to where he lived while working at the Walter Reed Medical Center (2003–09).
Later in 2002, al-Awlaki posted an essay in Arabic on the Islam Today website titled "Why Muslims Love Death", lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. He expressed a similar opinion in a speech at a London mosque later that year. By July 2002, al-Awlaki was under investigation in the United States for having received money from the subject of a U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation. His name was added to the list of terrorism suspects.
Passport fraud issues
In June 2002, a Denver federal judge signed an arrest warrant for al-Awlaki for passport fraud. On October 9, the Denver U.S. Attorney's Office filed a motion to dismiss the complaint and vacate the arrest warrant. Prosecutors believed that they lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, according to U.S. Attorney Dave Gaouette, who authorized its withdrawal. Al-Awlaki had listed Yemen rather than the United States as his place of birth on his 1990 application for a U.S. Social Security number, soon after arriving in the US. Al-Awlaki used this documentation to obtain a passport in 1993. He later corrected his place of birth to Las Cruces, New Mexico. "The bizarre thing is if you put Yemen down (on the application), it would be harder to get a Social Security number than to say you are a native-born citizen of Las Cruces", Gaouette said.
Prosecutors could not charge him in October 2002, when he returned from a trip abroad, because a 10-year statute of limitations on lying to the Social Security Administration had expired. According to a 2012 investigative report by Fox News, the arrest warrant for passport fraud was still in effect on the morning of October 10, 2002, when FBI Agent Wade Ammerman ordered al-Awlaki's release. U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and several congressional committees urged FBI Director Robert Mueller to provide an explanation about the bureau's interactions with al-Awlaki, including why he was released from federal custody when there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The motion for rescinding the arrest warrant was approved by a magistrate judge on October 10 and filed on October 11.ABC News reported in 2009 that the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego disagreed with the decision to cancel the warrant. They were monitoring al-Awlaki and wanted to "look at him under a microscope". But U.S. Attorney Gaouette said that no objection had been raised to the rescinding of the warrant during a meeting that included Ray Fournier, the San Diego federal diplomatic security agent whose allegation had set in motion the effort to obtain a warrant. Gaouette said that if al-Awlaki had been convicted at the time, he would have faced about six months in custody.The New York Times suggested later that al-Awlaki had claimed birth in Yemen (his family's place of origin) to qualify for scholarship money granted to foreign citizens. U.S. Congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) wrote in May 2010 that by claiming to be foreign-born, al-Awlaki fraudulently obtained more than $20,000 in scholarship funds reserved for foreign students.
While living in Northern Virginia, al-Awlaki visited Ali al-Timimi, later known as a radical Islamic cleric. Al-Timimi was convicted in 2005 and is now serving a life sentence for leading the Virginia Jihad Network, inciting Muslim followers to fight with the Taliban against the US.
In the United Kingdom 2002–04
Al-Awlaki left the United States before the end of 2002, because of a "climate of fear and intimidation" according to Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.
He lived in the UK for several months, where he gave talks attended by up to 200 people. He urged young Muslim followers: "The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar [disbeliever]. Do not trust them! [Their leaders] are plotting to kill this religion. They're plotting night and day." "He was the main man who translated the jihad into English," said a student who attended his lectures in 2003.
He gave a series of lectures in December 2002 and January 2003 at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque, describing the rewards martyrs (Shahid) receive in paradise (Jannah). He began to gain supporters, particularly among young Muslims, and undertook a lecture tour of England and Scotland in 2002 in conjunction with the Muslim Association of Britain. He also lectured at "ExpoIslamia", an event held by Islamic Forum Europe. At the East London Mosque he told his audience: "A Muslim is a brother of a Muslim... he does not betray him, and he does not hand him over... You don't hand over a Muslim to the enemies."
In Britain's Parliament in 2003, Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, discussed the relationship between al-Awlaki and the Muslim Association of Britain, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front organization founded by Kemal el-Helbawy, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Return to Yemen 2004–11
Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004, where he lived in Shabwah Governorate with his wife and five children. He lectured at Iman University, headed by Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. The latter has been included on the UN 1267 Committee's list of individuals belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda. Al-Zindani denied having any influence over al-Awlaki, or that he had been his "direct teacher". Some believe that the school's curriculum deals mostly, if not exclusively, with radical Islamic studies, and promotes radicalism. American convert John Walker Lindh and other alumni have been associated with terrorist groups.
On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché. He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007. He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention.
His name was on a list of 100 prisoners whose release was sought by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. After 18 months in a Yemeni prison, al-Awlaki was released on December 12, 2007, following the intercession of his tribe. According to a Yemeni security official, he was released because he had repented. He moved to his family home in Saeed, a hamlet in the Shabwa mountains.
Moazzam Begg's Cageprisoners, an organization representing former Guantanamo detainees, campaigned for al-Awlaki's release when he was in prison in Yemen. Al-Awlaki told Begg in an interview shortly after his release that prior to his incarceration in Yemen, he had condemned the 9/11 attacks.
In December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them.
Al-Awlaki provided al-Qaeda members in Yemen with the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis, against the government. The tribal code required it to protect those who seek refuge and assistance. This imperative has greater force when the person is a member of the tribe or a tribesman's friend. The tribe's motto is "We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned." Al-Awlaki also reportedly helped negotiate deals with leaders of other tribes.
Sought by Yemeni authorities who were investigating his al-Qaeda ties, al-Awlaki went into hiding in approximately March 2009, according to his father. By December 2009, al-Awlaki was on the Yemeni government's most-wanted list. He was believed to be hiding in Yemen's Shabwa or Mareb regions, which are part of the so-called "triangle of evil". The area has attracted al-Qaeda militants, who seek refuge among local tribes unhappy with Yemen's central government.
Yemeni sources originally said al-Awlaki might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived. Pravda reported that the planes, using Saudi and U.S. intelligence, killed at least 30 al-Qaeda members from Yemen and abroad, and that an al-Awlaki house was "raided and demolished". On December 28 The Washington Post reported that U.S. and Yemeni officials said that al-Awlaki had been present at the meeting. Abdul Elah al-Shaya, a Yemeni journalist, said al-Awlaki called him on December 28 to report that he was well and had not attended the al-Qaeda meeting. Al-Shaya said that al-Awlaki was not tied to al-Qaeda.
In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence.
Reaching out to the United Kingdom
After 2006, al-Awlaki was banned from entering the United Kingdom. He broadcast lectures to mosques and other venues there via video-link from 2007 to 2009, on at least seven occasions at five locations in Britain. Noor Pro Media Events held a conference at the East London Mosque on January 1, 2009, showing a videotaped lecture by al-Awlaki; former Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve expressed concern over his being featured.
He gave video-link talks in England to an Islamic student society at the University of Westminster in September 2008, an arts center in East London in April 2009 (after the Tower Hamlets council gave its approval), worshippers at the Al Huda Mosque in Bradford, and a dinner of the Cageprisoners organization in September 2008 at the Wandsworth Civic Centre in South London. On August 23, 2009, al-Awlaki was banned by local authorities in Kensington and Chelsea, London, from speaking at Kensington Town Hall via videolink to a fundraiser dinner for Guantanamo detainees promoted by Cageprisoners. His videos, which discuss his Islamist theories, have circulated across the United Kingdom. Until February 2010, hundreds of audio tapes of his sermons were available at the Tower Hamlets public libraries. In 2009, the London-based Islam Channel carried advertisements for his DVDs and at least two of his video conference lectures.
Other connections
FBI agents identified al-Awlaki as a known, important "senior recruiter for al Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator. His name came up in a dozen terrorism plots in the US, UK, and Canada. The cases included suicide bombers in the 2005 London bombings, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2006 Toronto terrorism case, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2007 Fort Dix attack plot, the jihadist killer in the 2009 Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, and the 2010 Times Square bomber. In each case the suspects were devoted to al-Awlaki's message, which they listened to online and on CDs.
Al-Awlaki's recorded lectures were heard by Islamist fundamentalists in at least six terror cells in the UK through 2009. Michael Finton (Talib Islam), who attempted in September 2009 to bomb the Federal Building and the adjacent offices of Congressman Aaron Schock in Springfield, Illinois, admired al-Awlaki and quoted him on his Myspace page. In addition to his website, al-Awlaki had a Facebook fan page with "fans" in the US, many of whom were high school students. Al-Awlaki also set up a website and blog on which he shared his views.
Al-Awlaki influenced several other extremists to join terrorist organizations overseas and to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries. Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte, two American citizens from New Jersey who attempted to travel to Somalia in June 2010 to join the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al Shabaab, allegedly watched several al-Awlaki videos and sermons in which he warned of future attacks against Americans in the United States and abroad. Zachary Chesser, an American citizen who was arrested for attempting to provide material support to Al Shabaab, told federal authorities that he watched online videos featuring al-Awlaki and that he exchanged several e-mails with al-Awlaki. In July 2010, Paul Rockwood was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a list of 15 potential targets in the US, people he felt had desecrated Islam. Rockwood was a devoted follower of al-Awlaki, and had studied his works Constants on the Path to Jihad and 44 Ways to Jihad.
In October 2008, Charles Allen, U.S. Under-Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, warned that al-Awlaki "targets U.S. Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen." Responding to Allen, al-Awlaki wrote on his website in December 2008: "I would challenge him to come up with just one such lecture where I encourage 'terrorist attacks'".
Fort Hood shooter
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009. Even before the contents of the e-mails were revealed, terrorism expert Jarret Brachman said that Hasan's contacts with al-Awlaki should have raised "huge red flags", because of his influence on radical English-speaking jihadis. Charles Allen, no longer in government, noted that there was no work-related reason for Hasan to be in touch with al-Awlaki. Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel opined: "E-mailing a known al-Qaeda sympathizer should have set off alarm bells. Even if he was exchanging recipes, the bureau should have put out an alert." A DC-based Joint Terrorism Task Force operating under the FBI was notified of the e-mails and reviewed the information. Army employees were informed of the e-mails, but they didn't perceive any terrorist threat in Hasan's questions. Instead, they viewed them as general questions about spiritual guidance with regard to conflicts between Islam and military service and judged them to be consistent with legitimate mental health research about Muslims in the armed services. The assessment was that there was not sufficient information for a larger investigation. In one of the e-mails, Hasan wrote al-Awlaki: "I can't wait to join you [in the afterlife]". "It sounds like code words," said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a military analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. "That he's actually either offering himself up, or that he's already crossed that line in his own mind."
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea interviewed al-Awlaki in November 2009. Al-Awlaki acknowledged his correspondence with Hasan. He said he "neither ordered nor pressured ... Hasan to harm Americans." Al-Awlaki said Hasan first e-mailed him December 17, 2008, introducing himself by writing: "Do you remember me? I used to pray with you at the Virginia mosque." Hasan said he had become a devout Muslim around the time al-Awlaki was preaching at Dar al-Hijrah, in 2001 and 2002, and al-Awlaki said 'Maybe Nidal was affected by one of my lectures.'" He added: "It was clear from his e-mails that Nidal trusted me. Nidal told me: 'I speak with you about issues that I never speak with anyone else.'" Al-Awlaki said Hasan arrived at his own conclusions regarding the acceptability of violence in Islam and said he was not the one to initiate this. Shaea said, "Nidal was providing evidence to Anwar, not vice versa."
Asked whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target in his e-mails, Shaea declined to comment. Al-Awlaki said the shooting was acceptable in Islam, however, because it was a form of jihad, as the West began the hostilities with the Muslims. Al-Awlaki said he "blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were ... those who were trained and prepared to go to Iraq and Afghanistan".
Al-Awlaki's e-mail conversations with Hasan were not released, and he was not placed on the FBI Most Wanted list, indicted for treason, or officially named as a co-conspirator with Hasan. The U.S. government was reluctant to classify the Fort Hood shooting as a terrorist incident, or identify any motive. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2010 that al-Awlaki had not "played a direct role" in any of the attacks, and noted he had never been charged with a crime in the US.
One of his fellow officers at Fort Hood said Hasan was enthusiastic about al-Awlaki. Some investigators believe al-Awlaki's teachings may have been instrumental in Hasan's decision to stage the attack. On his now-disabled website, al-Awlaki praised Hasan's actions, describing him as a hero.
Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber"
According to a number of sources, Al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the convicted al-Qaeda attempted bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on December 25, 2009, had contacts. In January 2010, CNN reported that U.S. "security sources" said that there is concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was Abdulmutallab's recruiter and one of his trainers, and met with him prior to the attack. In February 2010, al-Awlaki admitted in an interview published in al-Jazeera that he taught and corresponded with Abdulmutallab, but denied having ordered the attack.
Representative Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said officials in the Obama administration and officials with access to law enforcement information told him the suspect "may have had contact [with al-Awlaki]".The Sunday Times established that Abdulmutallab first met al-Awlaki in 2005 in Yemen, while he was studying Arabic. During that time the suspect attended lectures by al-Awlaki.NPR reported that according to unnamed U.S. intelligence officials he attended a sermon by al-Awlaki at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, a former trustee of the mosque, expressed "grave misgivings" with regard to its stewardship. A spokesperson of the mosque stated that al-Awlaki had never spoken there or had even to his knowledge entered the building.
Abdulmutallab was also reported by CBS News, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph to have attended a talk by al-Awlaki at the East London Mosque, which al-Awlaki may have attended by video teleconference. The Sunday Telegraph later removed the report from its website following a complaint by the East London Mosque, which stated that "Anwar Al Awlaki did not deliver any talks at the ELM between 2005 and 2008, which is when the newspaper had falsely alleged that Abdullmutallab had attended such talks".
Investigators who searched flats connected to Abdulmutallab in London said that he was a "big fan" of al-Awlaki, as al-Awlaki's blog and website had repeatedly been visited from those locations.
According to federal sources, Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki repeatedly communicated with one another in the year prior to the attack. "Voice-to-voice communication" between the two was intercepted during the fall of 2009, and one government source said al-Awlaki "was in some way involved in facilitating [Abdulmutallab]'s transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things." NPR reported that intelligence officials suspected al-Awlaki may have told Abdulmutallab to go to Yemen for al-Qaeda training.
Abdulmutallab told the FBI that al-Awlaki was one of his al-Qaeda trainers in Yemen. Others reported that Abdulmutallab met with al-Awlaki in the weeks leading up to the attack. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to a U.S. intelligence official, intercepts and other information point to connections between the two:
Some of the information ... comes from Abdulmutallab, who ... said that he met with al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaeda members during an extended trip to Yemen this year and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the attack and in providing religious justification for it. Other intelligence linking the two became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation.
Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs, Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, said Yemeni investigators believe that Abdulmutallab traveled to Shabwa in October 2009. Investigators believe he obtained his explosives and received training there. He met there with al-Qaeda members in a house built by al-Awlaki. A top Yemen government official said the two met with each other.
In January 2010, al-Awlaki acknowledged that he met and spoke with Abdulmutallab in Yemen in the fall of 2009. In an interview, al-Awlaki said: "Umar Farouk is one of my students; I had communications with him. And I support what he did." He also said: "I did not tell him to do this operation, but I support it". Fox News reported in early February 2010 that Abdulmutallab told federal investigators that al-Awlaki directed him to carry out the bombing.
In June 2010 Michael Leiter, the Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said al-Awlaki had a "direct operational role" in the plot.
Sharif Mobley
Sharif Mobley had acknowledged contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. The Mobley family claims the contact was for spiritual guidance in further studies of Islam.
The Mobley family went to Yemen and resided there for several years. They decided to return to the United States and went to the U.S. Embassy to update the family travel documents. While waiting for their travel documents, Sharif Mobley was kidnapped by Yemen Security Services and shot on January 26, 2010. He was then held in Yemen's Central Prison. Mobley disappeared from the Central Prison on February 27, 2014. His current location is known to the U.S. Embassy in Yemen (currently closed 2015) but is withheld from his family and legal advisers based on U.S. State Department Regulations on "U.S. Citizens Missing Abroad".
All charges related to "terrorism/terrorist activity" were dropped by the Yemen government. There are no charges relating to allegations of "killing a guard during an escape attempt from the hospital" and there are no other legal proceedings against him in Yemen.
Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad, convicted of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, told interrogators that he was a "fan and follower" of al-Awlaki, and his writings were one of the inspirations for the attack. On May 6, 2010 ABC News reported that unknown sources told them Shahzad made contact with al-Awlaki over the internet, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Stabbing of British former minister Stephen Timms
Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed former British Cabinet Minister Stephen Timms in May 2010, and was found guilty of his attempted murder in November 2010, claimed to have become radicalized by listening to online sermons of al-Awlaki.
Seattle Weekly cartoonist death threat
In 2010, after Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, cartoonist Molly Norris at Seattle Weekly had to stop publishing, and at the suggestion of the FBI changed her name, moved, and went into hiding due to a fatwā issued by al-Awlaki calling for her death. In the June 2010 issue of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, al-Awlaki cursed her and eight others for "blasphemous caricatures" of Muhammad. "The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved", he wrote. Daniel Pipes observed in an article entitled "Dueling Fatwas", "Awlaki stands at an unprecedented crossroads of death declarations, with his targeting Norris even as the U.S. government targets him."
Cargo planes bomb plotThe Guardian, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph reported that U.S. and British counter-terrorism officials believed that al-Awlaki was behind the cargo plane PETN bombs that were sent from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010.Yemen bomb scare 'mastermind' lived in London | World news. The Guardian. Retrieved on October 1, 2011. When U.S. Homeland Security official John Brennan was asked about al-Awlaki's suspected involvement in the plot, he said: "Anybody associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a subject of concern." U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein said "al-Awlaki was behind the two bombs."
Final years
Al-Awlaki's father, tribe, and supporters denied his alleged associations with Al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism. Al-Awlaki's father proclaimed his son's innocence in an interview with CNN's Paula Newton, saying: "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son. He's not Osama bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not." Responding to a Yemeni official's assertions that his son had taken refuge with al-Qaeda, Nasser said: "He's dead wrong. What do you expect my son to do? There are missiles raining down on the village. He has to hide. But he is not hiding with al-Qaeda; our tribe is protecting him right now."
The Yemeni government attempted to get the tribal leaders to release al-Awlaki to their custody. They promised they would not turn him over to U.S. authorities for questioning. The governor of Shabwa said in January 2010 that al-Awlaki was on the move with members of al-Qaeda, including Fahd al-Quso, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole.
In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship. U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an "imminent threat". Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council. Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare. As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons. The authorization was nevertheless controversial.
By February 4, 2010, the New York Daily News reported that al-Awlaki was "now on a targeting list signed off on by the Obama administration". On April 6, The New York Times reported that President Obama had authorized the killing of al-Awlaki.
The al-Awalik tribe responded: "We warn against cooperating with America to kill Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. We will not stand by idly and watch." Al-Awlaki's tribe wrote that it would "not remain with arms crossed if a hair of Anwar al-Awlaki is touched, or if anyone plots or spies against him. Whoever risks denouncing our son (Awlaki) will be the target of Al-Awalik weapons", and gave warning "against co-operating with the Americans" in the capture or killing of al-Awlaki. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, announced that the Yemeni government had not received any evidence from the US, and that "Anwar al-Awlaki has always been looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist and shouldn't be considered as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism".
In a video clip bearing the imprint of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, issued on April 16 in al-Qaeda's monthly magazine Sada Al-Malahem, al-Awlaki said: "What am I accused of? Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?" In the video he also praises both Abdulmutallab and Hasan, and describes both as his "students".
In late April, Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA) introduced a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to withdraw al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship. By May, U.S. officials believed he had become directly involved in terrorist activities. Former colleague Abdul-Malik said he "is a terrorist, in my book", and advised shops not to carry any of his publications. In an editorial, Investor's Business Daily called al-Awlaki the "world's most dangerous man", and recommended that he be added to the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list, a bounty put on his head, that he be designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, charged with treason, and extradition papers filed with the Yemeni government. IBD criticized the Justice Department for stonewalling Senator Joe Lieberman's security panel's investigation of al-Awlaki's role in the Fort Hood massacre.
On July 16, the U.S. Treasury Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, called him "extraordinarily dangerous", and said al-Awlaki was involved in several organizational aspects of terrorism, including recruiting, training, fundraising, and planning individual attacks.
A few days later, the United Nations Security Council placed al-Awlaki on its UN Security Council Resolution 1267 list of individuals associated with al-Qaeda, describing him as a leader, recruiter, and trainer for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The resolution stipulates that U.N. members must freeze the assets of anyone on the list, and prevent them from travelling or obtaining weapons. The following week, Canadian banks were ordered to seize any assets belonging to al-Awlaki. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's senior counter-terrorism officer Gilles Michaud described him as a "major, major factor in radicalization". In September 2010, Jonathan Evans, the Director General of the United Kingdom's domestic security and counter-intelligence agency (MI5), said that al-Awlaki was the West's Public Enemy No 1.
In October 2010, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) urged YouTube to take down al-Awlaki's videos from its website, saying that by hosting al-Awlaki's messages, "We are facilitating the recruitment of homegrown terror." Pauline Neville-Jones, British security minister, said "These Web sites ... incite cold-blooded murder." YouTube began removing the material in November 2010.
Al-Awlaki was charged in absentia in Sana'a, Yemen, on November 2 with plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. Ali al-Saneaa, the head of the prosecutor's office, announced the charges during the trial of Hisham Assem, who had been accused of killing Jacques Spagnolo, an oil industry worker. He said that al-Awlaki and Assem had been in contact for months, and that al-Awlaki had encouraged Assem to commit terrorism. Al-Awlaki's lawyer said that his client was not connected to Spagnolo's death. On November 6, Yemeni Judge Mohsen Alwan ordered that al-Awlaki be caught "dead or alive".
In his book Ticking Time Bomb: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (2011), former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman described al-Awlaki, Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad, Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, and Pakistani-American Samir Khan as "virtual spiritual sanctioners" who use the internet to offer religious justification for Islamist terrorism.
Lawsuit against the US
In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said:
the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow.
Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010.
On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches.
On May 5, 2011, the United States tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died.
Death
On September 30, 2011, al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Al Jawf Governorate, Yemen, according to U.S. sources, the strike was carried out by Joint Special Operations Command, under the direction of the CIA. A witness said the group had stopped to eat breakfast while traveling to Ma'rib Governorate. The occupants of the vehicle spotted the drone and attempted to flee in the vehicle before Hellfire missiles were fired Yemen's Defense Ministry announced that al-Awlaki had been killed. Also killed was Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia, thought to be behind al-Qaeda's English-language web magazine Inspire. U.S. President Barack Obama said:
The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. He took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans ... and he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda. [The strike] is further proof that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.
Journalist and author Glenn Greenwald argued on Salon.com that killing al-Awlaki violated his First Amendment right of free speech and that doing so outside of a criminal proceeding violated the Constitution's due process clause, specifically citing the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force." He mentioned doubt among Yemeni experts about al-Awlaki's role in al-Qaeda, and called U.S. government accusations against him unverified and lacking in evidence.
In a letter dated May 22, 2013, to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, Patrick J. Leahy, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder wrote that
high-level U.S. government officials [...] concluded that al-Aulaqi posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Before carrying out the operation that killed al-Aulaqi, senior officials also determined, based on a careful evaluation of the circumstances at the time, that it was not feasible to capture al-Aulaqi. In addition, senior officials determined that the operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles, including the cardinal principles of (1) necessity – the requirement that the target have definite military value; (2) distinction – the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted; (3) proportionality – the notion that the anticipated collateral damage of an action cannot be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage; and (4) humanity – a principle that requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering. The operation was also undertaken consistent with Yemeni sovereignty. [...] The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was lawful, it was considered, and it was just.
On April 21, 2014, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the Obama administration must release documents justifying its drone killings of foreigners and Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki. In June 2014, the United States Department of Justice disclosed a 2010 memorandum written by the acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, David J. Barron. The memo stated that Anwar al-Awlaki was a significant threat with an infeasible probability of capture. Barron therefore justified the killing as legal, as "the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process". The New York Times Editorial Board dismissed the memo's rationale for al-Awlaki's killing, saying it "provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care", instead describing it as "a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result." A lawyer for the ACLU described the memo as "disturbing" and "ultimately an argument that the president can order targeted killings of Americans without ever having to account to anyone outside the executive branch."
Legacy
Seth Jones, who as a political scientist specializes in al-Qaida, considers that the continuing relevance of al-Awlaki is due to his fluency in the English language as well as his charisma, precising that "he had a disarming aura and unnerving confidence, with an easy smile and a soothing, eloquent voice. He stood a lanky six feet, one inch tall, weighed 160 pounds, and had a thick black beard, an oversized nose, and wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in a clear, almost hypnotic voice."
Awlaki's videos and writings remain highly popular on the internet, where they continue to be readily accessible. Those who viewed and still view his videos are estimated by journalist Scott Shane to number in the hundreds of thousands, while his father Dr. Nasser Awlaqi says that "five million preaching tapes of Anwar Awlaqi have been sold in the West." And thus, even following his death, Awlaki has continued to inspire his devotees to carry out terrorist attacks, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. According to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), 88 "extremists," 54 in the U.S. and 34 in Europe, have been influenced by Awlaki. Because "his work has inspired countless plots and attacks," CEP has "called on YouTube and other platforms to permanently ban Mr. Awlaki's material, including his early, mainstream lectures."
FOIA documents
During the FBI investigation of the 9/11 attacks, it was discovered that a few of the attackers had attended the mosques in San Diego and Falls Church with which al-Awlaki was associated. Interviews with members of the San Diego mosque showed that Nawaz al-Hazmi, one of the attackers, may have had a private conversation with him. On that basis he was placed under 24-hour surveillance. It was discovered that he regularly patronized prostitutes. It was through FBI interrogation of prostitutes and escort service operators that al-Awlaki was tipped off in 2002 about FBI surveillance. Shortly thereafter, he left the United States.
In January 2013, Fox News announced that FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request showed possible connections between al-Awlaki and the September 11 attackers. According to Judicial Watch, the documents show that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and Las Vegas. Judicial Watch further stated that al-Awlaki "was a central focus of the FBI's investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn't cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance."
When queried by Fox News, the FBI denied having evidence connecting al-Awlaki and the September 11 attacks: "The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents. The FBI and investigating bodies have not found evidence connecting Anwar al-Awlaki and the attack on September 11, 2001. The document referenced does not link Anwar al-Awlaki with any purchase of airline tickets for the hijackers."
Family
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki and Egyptian-born Gihan Mohsen Baker had a son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, born August 26, 1995, in Denver, who was an American citizen. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed on October 14, 2011, in Yemen at the age of 16 in an American drone strike. Nine other people were killed in the same CIA-initiated attack, including a 17-year-old cousin of Abdulrahman. According to his relatives, shortly before his father's death, Abdulrahman had left the family home in Sana'a and travelled to Shabwa in search of his father who was believed to be in hiding in that area (though he was actually hundreds of miles away at the time ). Abdulrahman was sitting in an open-air cafe in Shabwa when killed. According to U.S. officials, the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a mistake; the intended target was an Egyptian, Ibrahim al-Banna, who was not at the targeted location at the time of the attack. Human rights groups have raised questions as to why an American citizen was killed by the United States in a country with which the United States is not officially at war. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was not known to have any independent connection to terrorism.
Nasser al-Awlaki
Nasser al-Awlaki is the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki stated he believed his son had been wrongly accused and was not a member of Al Qaeda. After the deaths of his son and grandson, Nasser in an interview in Time magazine called the killings a crime and condemned U.S. President Obama directly, saying: "I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some, he may be that. To me and my family, he is nothing more than a child killer."
In 2013, Nasser al-Awlaki published an op-ed in The New York Times stating that two years after killing his grandson, the Obama administration still declines to provide an explanation. In 2012, Nasser al-Awlaki filed a lawsuit, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, challenging the constitutionality of the drone killings of his son and grandson. This lawsuit was dismissed in April 2014 by D.C. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
Tariq al-Dahab
Tariq al-Dahab, who led al-Qaeda insurgents in Yemen, was a brother-in-law of al-Awlaki. On February 16, 2012, the terrorist organization stated that he had been killed by agents, although media reports contain speculation that he was killed by his brother in a bloody family feud.
Nawar al-Awlaki
On January 29, 2017, Anwar al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen, was killed in a DEVGRU operation authorized by President Donald Trump."1 US service member killed, 3 wounded in Yemen raid" , WPVI-TV, 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA. January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
Islamic education
Al-Awlaki's Islamic education was primarily informal, and consisted of intermittent months with various scholars reading and contemplating Islamic scholarly works. Despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education, Al-Awlaki made a name for himself as a public speaker who released popular audio recordings.Some Muslim scholars said they did not understand alAwlaki's popularity, because while he spoke fluent English and could therefore reach a large non-Arabic-speaking audience, he lacked formal Islamic training and study.
Ideology
While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004, al-Awlaki was influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, described by The New York Times as an originator of the contemporary "anti-Western Jihadist movement". He read 150 to 200 pages a day of Qutb's works, and described himself as "so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly".
Terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann in 2009 referred to al-Awlaki as "one of the principal jihadi luminaries for would-be homegrown terrorists. His fluency with English, his unabashed advocacy of jihad and mujahideen organizations, and his Web-savvy approach are a powerful combination." He called al-Awlaki's lecture, "Constants on the Path of Jihad", which he says was based on a similar document written by al-Qaeda's founder, the "virtual bible for lone-wolf Muslim extremists". Philip Mudd, formerly of the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI's top intelligence adviser, called him "a magnetic character ... a powerful orator." He attracted young men to his lectures, especially US-based and UK-based Muslims.
U.S. officials and some U.S. media sources called al-Awlaki an Islamic fundamentalist and accused him of encouraging terrorism. According to documents recovered from bin Laden's hideout, the al-Qaeda leader was unsure about al-Awlaki's qualifications.
Works
The Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation said al-Awlaki's ability to write and speak in fluent English enabled him to incite English-speaking Muslims to terrorism. Al-Awlaki notes in 44 Ways to Support Jihad that most reading material on the subject is in Arabic.
Written works
44 Ways to Support Jihad: Essay (January 2009). In it, al-Awlaki states that "The hatred of kuffar is a central element of our military creed" and that all Muslims are obligated to participate in jihad, either by committing the acts themselves or supporting others who do so. He says all Muslims must remain physically fit so as to be prepared for conflict. According to U.S. officials, it is considered a key text for al-Qaeda members.
Al-Awlaki wrote for Jihad Recollections, an English language online publication published by Al-Fursan Media.
Allah is Preparing Us for Victory – short book (2009).
Lectures
Lectures on the book Constants on the Path of Jihad by Yusef al-Ayeri—concerns leaderless jihad.
In 2009, the UK government found 1,910 of his videos had been posted to YouTube. One of them had been viewed 164,420 times.
The Battle of Hearts and Minds The Dust Will Never Settle Down Dreams & Interpretations The Hereafter—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Makkan Period—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Medinan Period—Lecture in 2 Parts—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Lives of the Prophets (AS)—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (RA): His Life & Times—15 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Umar ibn al-Khattāb (RA): His Life & Times—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
25 Promises from Allah to the Believer—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Companions of the Ditch & Lessons from the Life of Musa (AS)—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Remembrance of Allah & the Greatest Ayah—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Stories from Hadith—4 CDs—Center for Islamic Information and Education ("CIIE")
Hellfire & The Day of Judgment—CD—CIIE
Quest for Truth: The Story of Salman Al-Farsi (RA)—CD—CIIE
Trials & Lessons for Muslim Minorities—CD—CIIE
Young Ayesha (RA) & Mothers of the Believers (RA)—CD—CIIE
Understanding the Quran—CD—CIIE
Lessons from the Companions (RA) Living as a Minority—CD—CIIE
Virtues of the Sahabah—video lecture series promoted by the al-Wasatiyyah Foundation
Website
Al-Awlaki maintained a website and blog on which he shared his views. On December 11, 2008, he said Muslims should not seek to "serve in the armies of the disbelievers and fight against his brothers".
In "44 Ways to Support Jihad", posted on his blog in February 2009, al-Awlaki encouraged others to "fight jihad", and explained how to give money to the mujahideen or their families. Al-Awlaki's sermon encourages others to conduct weapons training, and raise children "on the love of Jihad". Also that month, he wrote: "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies." He wrote as well: "We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword, whether the masses like it or not." On July 14, he said that Muslim countries should not offer military assistance to the US. "The blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders ... who sells his religion for a few dollars," he said. In blog post dated July 15, 2009, entitled "Fighting Against Government Armies in the Muslim World", al-Awlaki wrote, "Blessed are those who fight against [American soldiers], and blessed are those shuhada [martyrs] who are killed by them."
In a video posted to the internet on November 8, 2010, al-Awlaki called for Muslims to kill Americans "without hesitation", and overthrow Arab governments that cooperate with the US. "Don't consult with anyone in fighting the Americans, fighting the devil doesn't require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils", al-Awlaki said. That month, Intelligence Research Specialist Kevin Yorke of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division called him "the most dangerous man in the world".
See also
Church Committee
Executive Order 12333
Extrajudicial killing
International counter-terrorism activities of the CIA
Protocol I
References
Further reading
al-Ashanti, AbdulHaq and Sloan, Abu Ameenah AbdurRahman. (2011) A Critique of the Methodology of Anwar al-Awlaki and his Errors in the Fiqh of Jihad. London: Jamiah Media, 2011
External links
Ruling of Judge Bates in Al Aulaqi v Obama
Statements
Interviews
"Exclusive; Ray Suarez: My Post-9/11 Interview With Anwar al-Awlaki", PBS, October 30, 2001
"Al-Jazeera Satellite Network Interview with Yemeni-American Cleric Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki Regarding his Alleged Role in Radicalizing Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan", The NEFA Foundation, December 24, 2009
Media coverage
The imam's very curious story: A skirt-chasing mullah is just one more mystery for the 9/11 panel, Ragavan, Chitra, US News and World Report'', June 13, 2004
DBI.gov
1971 births
2011 deaths
20th-century imams
21st-century imams
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
Al-Qaeda propagandists
Assassinated al-Qaeda leaders
American al-Qaeda members
American expatriates in the United Kingdom
American expatriates in Yemen
American imams
American Islamists
American people of Yemeni descent
Colorado State University alumni
George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development alumni
People associated with the September 11 attacks
People from Las Cruces, New Mexico
San Diego State University alumni
Yemeni imams
Yemeni al-Qaeda members
Yemeni Sunni Muslim scholars of Islam
Yemeni Sunni Muslims
Deaths by drone strikes of the Central Intelligence Agency in Yemen
Islam-related controversies
People designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee
American male criminals
Yemeni criminals
Yemeni Islamists
Yemeni expatriates in the United Kingdom
Shafi'is
American Muslim activists
Assassinated Yemeni people
Yemeni propagandists
United States military killing of American civilians | false | [
"Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books",
"Nora Bernard (September 22, 1935 – December 26, 2007) was a Canadian Mi'kmaq activist who sought compensation for survivors of the Canadian Indian residential school system. She was directly responsible for what became the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history, representing an estimated 79,000 survivors; the Canadian government settled the lawsuit in 2005 for upwards of 5 billion dollars.\n\nIn 1945, when Bernard was 9 years old, her mother was told that if she did not sign the consent forms to send her children to a residential school, the child welfare system would take her children into \"protective custody\"; as a result, Bernard attended the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School for five years. In 1955, she married a non-native man, and consequently lost her legal status under the Indian Act; the relevant section of the Indian Act was repealed in 1985, but this did not automatically lead to reinstatement as a band member, and it was not until March 2007 that she was voted back into the Millbrook First Nation.\n\nIn 1995, Bernard began an organization to represent survivors of the Shubenacadie school; she subsequently convinced Halifax lawyer John McKiggan to represent the Shubenacadie survivors in a class-action suit. After the Shubenacadie suit became public knowledge, many other survivors' associations across Canada filed similar suits; these were eventually amalgamated into one national lawsuit. In McKiggan's words, \"(...) if it wasn't for Nora's efforts, and other survivors like her across Canada, this national settlement never would have happened. (...) After we filed our lawsuit, a number of other students from other schools filed similar class actions.\"\n\nIn 2005, she testified before the House of Commons of Canada about the abuse children suffered in residential schools:\n\nOn December 27, 2007, Bernard was found dead in her home in Truro, Nova Scotia; although she was originally thought to have died of natural causes, on December 31, police arrested her grandson James Douglas Gloade and charged him with her murder. She had been stabbed to death. On January 23, 2009, Gloade was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison.\n\nIn 2008 Bernard was posthumously awarded the Order of Nova Scotia.\n\nSee also \n Nova Scotia Heritage Day\n\nReferences\n\n1935 births\n2007 deaths\n20th-century First Nations people\n21st-century First Nations people\nCanadian activists\nCanadian women activists\nMembers of the Order of Nova Scotia\nMi'kmaq people\nPeople murdered in Nova Scotia\nSipekneꞌkatik First Nation\n20th-century Canadian women"
] |
[
"Anwar al-Awlaki",
"Lawsuit against the US",
"what was the reason behind the lawsuit?",
"contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list.",
"why was he on the targeted kill list?",
"the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world.",
"what was his argument in the trial?",
"sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be \"targeted for death\".",
"what was the verdict?",
"Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit,",
"what happened after the lawsuit?",
"On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen."
] | C_bfe5daac479f47d7942846e4235d1cca_0 | did anyone speak at the trial? | 6 | Did anyone speak at the trial in the lawsuit against the US? | Anwar al-Awlaki | In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said: the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow. Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the US Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010. On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the US Constitution committed to the political branches. On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi, al-Awlaqi; ; April 21 or 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded. US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's right to due process, including a trial.
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen. Growing up partially in the United States and partially in Yemen, he attended various universities across the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s while also working as an imam, despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education. Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a university lecturer after a brief stint as a public speaker in the United Kingdom. He was detained by Yemeni authorities in 2006, where he spent 18 months in prison before being released without facing trial. Following his release, Al-Awlaki's message started to become overtly supportive of violence, as he condemned United States foreign policy against Muslims.
The Yemeni government tried him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive". U.S. officials said that in 2009, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda, although they described his role as more "inspirational" than "operational." He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States. In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama due to his alleged terrorist activities. Al-Awlaki's father and civil rights groups challenged the order in court. Al-Awlaki was believed to be in hiding in southeast Yemen in the last years of his life. The U.S. deployed unmanned aircraft (drones) in Yemen to search for and kill him, firing at and failing to kill him at least once; he was successfully killed on September 30, 2011. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed by a CIA-led drone strike in Yemen. His daughter, 8-year old Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed during a raid against Al Qaeda ordered by President Donald Trump in 2017.<ref name="uk.reuters.com">Ghobari, Mohammed and Phil Stewart. "Commando dies in U.S. raid in Yemen, first military op OK'd by Trump", Reuters, January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.</ref> The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki's public statements and videos have been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than before his death.
Early life
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen, while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, was doing graduate work at U.S. universities. His father was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master's degree in agricultural economics at New Mexico State University in 1971, received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska, and worked at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1977. Nasser al-Awlaki served as Agriculture Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. He was also President of Sana'a University. Yemen's prime minister from 2007 to 2011, Ali Mohammed Mujur, was a relative.
The family returned to Yemen in 1978, when al-Awlaki was seven years old. He lived there for 11 years, and studied at Azal Modern School.
Life in the United States 1990–2002
Education
In 1991, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S. to attend college. He earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University (1994), where he was president of the Muslim Student Association.
In 1993, while still a college student in Colorado State's civil engineering program, al-Awlaki visited Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. He spent some time training with the mujahideen who had fought the Soviets. He was depressed by the country's poverty and hunger, and "wouldn't have gone with al-Qaeda," according to friends from Colorado State, who said he was profoundly affected by the trip. Mullah Mohammed Omar did not form the Taliban until 1994. When Al-Awlaki returned to campus, he showed increased interest in religion and politics. Al-Awlaki studied Education Leadership at San Diego State University, but did not complete his degree. He worked on a doctorate in Human Resource Development at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development from January to December 2001.
Time as imam
In 1994, al-Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen, and began service as a part-time imam of the Denver Islamic Society. In 1996, he was chastised by an elder for encouraging a Saudi student to fight in Chechnya against the Russians. He left Denver soon after, moving to San Diego.
From 1996 to 2000, al-Awlaki was imam of the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque in San Diego, California, where he had a following of 200–300 people. U.S. officials later alleged that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, attended his sermons and personally met him during this period. Hazmi later lived in Northern Virginia and attended al-Awlaki's mosque there. The 9/11 Commission Report said that the hijackers "reportedly respected [al-Awlaki] as a religious figure". While in San Diego, al-Awlaki volunteered with youth organizations, fished, discussed his travels with friends, and created a popular and lucrative series of recorded lectures.
In August 1996 and in April 1997, al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego and charged with soliciting prostitutes. The first time, in 1996, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was fined $400 and required to attend informational sessions about AIDS. The second time, in 1997, he pleaded guilty and was fined $240, ordered to perform 12 days of community service, and received three years' probation. From November 2001 to January 2002 the FBI observed him visiting a number of prostitutes, and interviewed them, establishing that he had paid for sex acts. No prosecution was brought.
In 1998 and 1999, he served as vice-president for the Charitable Society for Social Welfare. In 2004, the FBI described this group as a "front organization to funnel money to terrorists". Although the FBI investigated al-Awlaki from June 1999 through March 2000 for possible links to Hamas, the Bin Laden contact Ziyad Khaleel, and a visit by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, it did not find sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution. Al-Awlaki told reporters that he resigned from leading the San Diego mosque "after an uneventful four years," and took a brief sabbatical, traveling overseas to various countries.
In January 2001, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S., settling in the Washington metropolitan area. There, he was imam at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque near Falls Church, Virginia, and his services were attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. He led academic discussions frequented by FBI Director of Counter-Intelligence for the Middle East Gordon M. Snow. Al-Awlaki also served as the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, where he was hired by Esam Omeish. Omeish said in 2004 that he was convinced that al-Awlaki was not involved in terrorism.
His proficiency as a public speaker and command of the English language helped him attract followers who did not speak Arabic. "He was the magic bullet", according to the mosque spokesman Johari Abdul-Malik. "He had everything all in a box." "He had an allure. He was charming."
When police investigating the 9/11 attacks raided the Hamburg apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, they found the telephone number of al-Awlaki among bin al-Shibh's personal contacts. The FBI interviewed al-Awlaki four times in the eight days following the 9/11 attacks. One detective later told the 9/11 Commission he believed al-Awlaki "was at the center of the 9/11 story". And an FBI agent said, "if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been" him, since "someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused". One 9/11 Commission staff member said: "Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something? Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it." A separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks suggested that al-Awlaki may have been connected to the hijackers, according to its director, Eleanor Hill. In 2003, Representative Anna Eshoo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "In my view, he is more than a coincidental figure."
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki suggested in writing on the IslamOnline.net website that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible for the attacks, and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default".
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki was sought in Washington, D.C., by the media to answer questions about Islam, its rituals, and its relation to the attacks. He was interviewed by National Geographic, The New York Times, and other media. Al-Awlaki condemned the attacks. According to an NPR report in 2010, in 2001 al-Awlaki appeared to be a moderate who could "bridge the gap between the United States and the worldwide community of Muslims." The New York Times said at the time that he was "held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West." In 2010, Fox News and the New York Daily News reported that some months after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon employee invited al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary's Office of General Counsel. The U.S. Secretary of the Army had suggested that a moderate Muslim be invited to give a talk.
In 2002, al-Awlaki was the first imam to conduct a prayer service for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association at the U.S. Capitol. That year, Nidal Hasan visited al-Awlaki's mosque for his mother's funeral, at which al-Awlaki presided. In November 2009, Hasan killed 13 and wounded 32 in the Fort Hood shooting. Hasan usually attended a mosque in Maryland closer to where he lived while working at the Walter Reed Medical Center (2003–09).
Later in 2002, al-Awlaki posted an essay in Arabic on the Islam Today website titled "Why Muslims Love Death", lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. He expressed a similar opinion in a speech at a London mosque later that year. By July 2002, al-Awlaki was under investigation in the United States for having received money from the subject of a U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation. His name was added to the list of terrorism suspects.
Passport fraud issues
In June 2002, a Denver federal judge signed an arrest warrant for al-Awlaki for passport fraud. On October 9, the Denver U.S. Attorney's Office filed a motion to dismiss the complaint and vacate the arrest warrant. Prosecutors believed that they lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, according to U.S. Attorney Dave Gaouette, who authorized its withdrawal. Al-Awlaki had listed Yemen rather than the United States as his place of birth on his 1990 application for a U.S. Social Security number, soon after arriving in the US. Al-Awlaki used this documentation to obtain a passport in 1993. He later corrected his place of birth to Las Cruces, New Mexico. "The bizarre thing is if you put Yemen down (on the application), it would be harder to get a Social Security number than to say you are a native-born citizen of Las Cruces", Gaouette said.
Prosecutors could not charge him in October 2002, when he returned from a trip abroad, because a 10-year statute of limitations on lying to the Social Security Administration had expired. According to a 2012 investigative report by Fox News, the arrest warrant for passport fraud was still in effect on the morning of October 10, 2002, when FBI Agent Wade Ammerman ordered al-Awlaki's release. U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and several congressional committees urged FBI Director Robert Mueller to provide an explanation about the bureau's interactions with al-Awlaki, including why he was released from federal custody when there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The motion for rescinding the arrest warrant was approved by a magistrate judge on October 10 and filed on October 11.ABC News reported in 2009 that the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego disagreed with the decision to cancel the warrant. They were monitoring al-Awlaki and wanted to "look at him under a microscope". But U.S. Attorney Gaouette said that no objection had been raised to the rescinding of the warrant during a meeting that included Ray Fournier, the San Diego federal diplomatic security agent whose allegation had set in motion the effort to obtain a warrant. Gaouette said that if al-Awlaki had been convicted at the time, he would have faced about six months in custody.The New York Times suggested later that al-Awlaki had claimed birth in Yemen (his family's place of origin) to qualify for scholarship money granted to foreign citizens. U.S. Congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) wrote in May 2010 that by claiming to be foreign-born, al-Awlaki fraudulently obtained more than $20,000 in scholarship funds reserved for foreign students.
While living in Northern Virginia, al-Awlaki visited Ali al-Timimi, later known as a radical Islamic cleric. Al-Timimi was convicted in 2005 and is now serving a life sentence for leading the Virginia Jihad Network, inciting Muslim followers to fight with the Taliban against the US.
In the United Kingdom 2002–04
Al-Awlaki left the United States before the end of 2002, because of a "climate of fear and intimidation" according to Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.
He lived in the UK for several months, where he gave talks attended by up to 200 people. He urged young Muslim followers: "The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar [disbeliever]. Do not trust them! [Their leaders] are plotting to kill this religion. They're plotting night and day." "He was the main man who translated the jihad into English," said a student who attended his lectures in 2003.
He gave a series of lectures in December 2002 and January 2003 at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque, describing the rewards martyrs (Shahid) receive in paradise (Jannah). He began to gain supporters, particularly among young Muslims, and undertook a lecture tour of England and Scotland in 2002 in conjunction with the Muslim Association of Britain. He also lectured at "ExpoIslamia", an event held by Islamic Forum Europe. At the East London Mosque he told his audience: "A Muslim is a brother of a Muslim... he does not betray him, and he does not hand him over... You don't hand over a Muslim to the enemies."
In Britain's Parliament in 2003, Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, discussed the relationship between al-Awlaki and the Muslim Association of Britain, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front organization founded by Kemal el-Helbawy, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Return to Yemen 2004–11
Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004, where he lived in Shabwah Governorate with his wife and five children. He lectured at Iman University, headed by Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. The latter has been included on the UN 1267 Committee's list of individuals belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda. Al-Zindani denied having any influence over al-Awlaki, or that he had been his "direct teacher". Some believe that the school's curriculum deals mostly, if not exclusively, with radical Islamic studies, and promotes radicalism. American convert John Walker Lindh and other alumni have been associated with terrorist groups.
On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché. He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007. He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention.
His name was on a list of 100 prisoners whose release was sought by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. After 18 months in a Yemeni prison, al-Awlaki was released on December 12, 2007, following the intercession of his tribe. According to a Yemeni security official, he was released because he had repented. He moved to his family home in Saeed, a hamlet in the Shabwa mountains.
Moazzam Begg's Cageprisoners, an organization representing former Guantanamo detainees, campaigned for al-Awlaki's release when he was in prison in Yemen. Al-Awlaki told Begg in an interview shortly after his release that prior to his incarceration in Yemen, he had condemned the 9/11 attacks.
In December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them.
Al-Awlaki provided al-Qaeda members in Yemen with the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis, against the government. The tribal code required it to protect those who seek refuge and assistance. This imperative has greater force when the person is a member of the tribe or a tribesman's friend. The tribe's motto is "We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned." Al-Awlaki also reportedly helped negotiate deals with leaders of other tribes.
Sought by Yemeni authorities who were investigating his al-Qaeda ties, al-Awlaki went into hiding in approximately March 2009, according to his father. By December 2009, al-Awlaki was on the Yemeni government's most-wanted list. He was believed to be hiding in Yemen's Shabwa or Mareb regions, which are part of the so-called "triangle of evil". The area has attracted al-Qaeda militants, who seek refuge among local tribes unhappy with Yemen's central government.
Yemeni sources originally said al-Awlaki might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived. Pravda reported that the planes, using Saudi and U.S. intelligence, killed at least 30 al-Qaeda members from Yemen and abroad, and that an al-Awlaki house was "raided and demolished". On December 28 The Washington Post reported that U.S. and Yemeni officials said that al-Awlaki had been present at the meeting. Abdul Elah al-Shaya, a Yemeni journalist, said al-Awlaki called him on December 28 to report that he was well and had not attended the al-Qaeda meeting. Al-Shaya said that al-Awlaki was not tied to al-Qaeda.
In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence.
Reaching out to the United Kingdom
After 2006, al-Awlaki was banned from entering the United Kingdom. He broadcast lectures to mosques and other venues there via video-link from 2007 to 2009, on at least seven occasions at five locations in Britain. Noor Pro Media Events held a conference at the East London Mosque on January 1, 2009, showing a videotaped lecture by al-Awlaki; former Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve expressed concern over his being featured.
He gave video-link talks in England to an Islamic student society at the University of Westminster in September 2008, an arts center in East London in April 2009 (after the Tower Hamlets council gave its approval), worshippers at the Al Huda Mosque in Bradford, and a dinner of the Cageprisoners organization in September 2008 at the Wandsworth Civic Centre in South London. On August 23, 2009, al-Awlaki was banned by local authorities in Kensington and Chelsea, London, from speaking at Kensington Town Hall via videolink to a fundraiser dinner for Guantanamo detainees promoted by Cageprisoners. His videos, which discuss his Islamist theories, have circulated across the United Kingdom. Until February 2010, hundreds of audio tapes of his sermons were available at the Tower Hamlets public libraries. In 2009, the London-based Islam Channel carried advertisements for his DVDs and at least two of his video conference lectures.
Other connections
FBI agents identified al-Awlaki as a known, important "senior recruiter for al Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator. His name came up in a dozen terrorism plots in the US, UK, and Canada. The cases included suicide bombers in the 2005 London bombings, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2006 Toronto terrorism case, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2007 Fort Dix attack plot, the jihadist killer in the 2009 Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, and the 2010 Times Square bomber. In each case the suspects were devoted to al-Awlaki's message, which they listened to online and on CDs.
Al-Awlaki's recorded lectures were heard by Islamist fundamentalists in at least six terror cells in the UK through 2009. Michael Finton (Talib Islam), who attempted in September 2009 to bomb the Federal Building and the adjacent offices of Congressman Aaron Schock in Springfield, Illinois, admired al-Awlaki and quoted him on his Myspace page. In addition to his website, al-Awlaki had a Facebook fan page with "fans" in the US, many of whom were high school students. Al-Awlaki also set up a website and blog on which he shared his views.
Al-Awlaki influenced several other extremists to join terrorist organizations overseas and to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries. Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte, two American citizens from New Jersey who attempted to travel to Somalia in June 2010 to join the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al Shabaab, allegedly watched several al-Awlaki videos and sermons in which he warned of future attacks against Americans in the United States and abroad. Zachary Chesser, an American citizen who was arrested for attempting to provide material support to Al Shabaab, told federal authorities that he watched online videos featuring al-Awlaki and that he exchanged several e-mails with al-Awlaki. In July 2010, Paul Rockwood was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a list of 15 potential targets in the US, people he felt had desecrated Islam. Rockwood was a devoted follower of al-Awlaki, and had studied his works Constants on the Path to Jihad and 44 Ways to Jihad.
In October 2008, Charles Allen, U.S. Under-Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, warned that al-Awlaki "targets U.S. Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen." Responding to Allen, al-Awlaki wrote on his website in December 2008: "I would challenge him to come up with just one such lecture where I encourage 'terrorist attacks'".
Fort Hood shooter
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009. Even before the contents of the e-mails were revealed, terrorism expert Jarret Brachman said that Hasan's contacts with al-Awlaki should have raised "huge red flags", because of his influence on radical English-speaking jihadis. Charles Allen, no longer in government, noted that there was no work-related reason for Hasan to be in touch with al-Awlaki. Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel opined: "E-mailing a known al-Qaeda sympathizer should have set off alarm bells. Even if he was exchanging recipes, the bureau should have put out an alert." A DC-based Joint Terrorism Task Force operating under the FBI was notified of the e-mails and reviewed the information. Army employees were informed of the e-mails, but they didn't perceive any terrorist threat in Hasan's questions. Instead, they viewed them as general questions about spiritual guidance with regard to conflicts between Islam and military service and judged them to be consistent with legitimate mental health research about Muslims in the armed services. The assessment was that there was not sufficient information for a larger investigation. In one of the e-mails, Hasan wrote al-Awlaki: "I can't wait to join you [in the afterlife]". "It sounds like code words," said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a military analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. "That he's actually either offering himself up, or that he's already crossed that line in his own mind."
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea interviewed al-Awlaki in November 2009. Al-Awlaki acknowledged his correspondence with Hasan. He said he "neither ordered nor pressured ... Hasan to harm Americans." Al-Awlaki said Hasan first e-mailed him December 17, 2008, introducing himself by writing: "Do you remember me? I used to pray with you at the Virginia mosque." Hasan said he had become a devout Muslim around the time al-Awlaki was preaching at Dar al-Hijrah, in 2001 and 2002, and al-Awlaki said 'Maybe Nidal was affected by one of my lectures.'" He added: "It was clear from his e-mails that Nidal trusted me. Nidal told me: 'I speak with you about issues that I never speak with anyone else.'" Al-Awlaki said Hasan arrived at his own conclusions regarding the acceptability of violence in Islam and said he was not the one to initiate this. Shaea said, "Nidal was providing evidence to Anwar, not vice versa."
Asked whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target in his e-mails, Shaea declined to comment. Al-Awlaki said the shooting was acceptable in Islam, however, because it was a form of jihad, as the West began the hostilities with the Muslims. Al-Awlaki said he "blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were ... those who were trained and prepared to go to Iraq and Afghanistan".
Al-Awlaki's e-mail conversations with Hasan were not released, and he was not placed on the FBI Most Wanted list, indicted for treason, or officially named as a co-conspirator with Hasan. The U.S. government was reluctant to classify the Fort Hood shooting as a terrorist incident, or identify any motive. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2010 that al-Awlaki had not "played a direct role" in any of the attacks, and noted he had never been charged with a crime in the US.
One of his fellow officers at Fort Hood said Hasan was enthusiastic about al-Awlaki. Some investigators believe al-Awlaki's teachings may have been instrumental in Hasan's decision to stage the attack. On his now-disabled website, al-Awlaki praised Hasan's actions, describing him as a hero.
Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber"
According to a number of sources, Al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the convicted al-Qaeda attempted bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on December 25, 2009, had contacts. In January 2010, CNN reported that U.S. "security sources" said that there is concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was Abdulmutallab's recruiter and one of his trainers, and met with him prior to the attack. In February 2010, al-Awlaki admitted in an interview published in al-Jazeera that he taught and corresponded with Abdulmutallab, but denied having ordered the attack.
Representative Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said officials in the Obama administration and officials with access to law enforcement information told him the suspect "may have had contact [with al-Awlaki]".The Sunday Times established that Abdulmutallab first met al-Awlaki in 2005 in Yemen, while he was studying Arabic. During that time the suspect attended lectures by al-Awlaki.NPR reported that according to unnamed U.S. intelligence officials he attended a sermon by al-Awlaki at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, a former trustee of the mosque, expressed "grave misgivings" with regard to its stewardship. A spokesperson of the mosque stated that al-Awlaki had never spoken there or had even to his knowledge entered the building.
Abdulmutallab was also reported by CBS News, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph to have attended a talk by al-Awlaki at the East London Mosque, which al-Awlaki may have attended by video teleconference. The Sunday Telegraph later removed the report from its website following a complaint by the East London Mosque, which stated that "Anwar Al Awlaki did not deliver any talks at the ELM between 2005 and 2008, which is when the newspaper had falsely alleged that Abdullmutallab had attended such talks".
Investigators who searched flats connected to Abdulmutallab in London said that he was a "big fan" of al-Awlaki, as al-Awlaki's blog and website had repeatedly been visited from those locations.
According to federal sources, Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki repeatedly communicated with one another in the year prior to the attack. "Voice-to-voice communication" between the two was intercepted during the fall of 2009, and one government source said al-Awlaki "was in some way involved in facilitating [Abdulmutallab]'s transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things." NPR reported that intelligence officials suspected al-Awlaki may have told Abdulmutallab to go to Yemen for al-Qaeda training.
Abdulmutallab told the FBI that al-Awlaki was one of his al-Qaeda trainers in Yemen. Others reported that Abdulmutallab met with al-Awlaki in the weeks leading up to the attack. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to a U.S. intelligence official, intercepts and other information point to connections between the two:
Some of the information ... comes from Abdulmutallab, who ... said that he met with al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaeda members during an extended trip to Yemen this year and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the attack and in providing religious justification for it. Other intelligence linking the two became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation.
Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs, Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, said Yemeni investigators believe that Abdulmutallab traveled to Shabwa in October 2009. Investigators believe he obtained his explosives and received training there. He met there with al-Qaeda members in a house built by al-Awlaki. A top Yemen government official said the two met with each other.
In January 2010, al-Awlaki acknowledged that he met and spoke with Abdulmutallab in Yemen in the fall of 2009. In an interview, al-Awlaki said: "Umar Farouk is one of my students; I had communications with him. And I support what he did." He also said: "I did not tell him to do this operation, but I support it". Fox News reported in early February 2010 that Abdulmutallab told federal investigators that al-Awlaki directed him to carry out the bombing.
In June 2010 Michael Leiter, the Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said al-Awlaki had a "direct operational role" in the plot.
Sharif Mobley
Sharif Mobley had acknowledged contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. The Mobley family claims the contact was for spiritual guidance in further studies of Islam.
The Mobley family went to Yemen and resided there for several years. They decided to return to the United States and went to the U.S. Embassy to update the family travel documents. While waiting for their travel documents, Sharif Mobley was kidnapped by Yemen Security Services and shot on January 26, 2010. He was then held in Yemen's Central Prison. Mobley disappeared from the Central Prison on February 27, 2014. His current location is known to the U.S. Embassy in Yemen (currently closed 2015) but is withheld from his family and legal advisers based on U.S. State Department Regulations on "U.S. Citizens Missing Abroad".
All charges related to "terrorism/terrorist activity" were dropped by the Yemen government. There are no charges relating to allegations of "killing a guard during an escape attempt from the hospital" and there are no other legal proceedings against him in Yemen.
Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad, convicted of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, told interrogators that he was a "fan and follower" of al-Awlaki, and his writings were one of the inspirations for the attack. On May 6, 2010 ABC News reported that unknown sources told them Shahzad made contact with al-Awlaki over the internet, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Stabbing of British former minister Stephen Timms
Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed former British Cabinet Minister Stephen Timms in May 2010, and was found guilty of his attempted murder in November 2010, claimed to have become radicalized by listening to online sermons of al-Awlaki.
Seattle Weekly cartoonist death threat
In 2010, after Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, cartoonist Molly Norris at Seattle Weekly had to stop publishing, and at the suggestion of the FBI changed her name, moved, and went into hiding due to a fatwā issued by al-Awlaki calling for her death. In the June 2010 issue of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, al-Awlaki cursed her and eight others for "blasphemous caricatures" of Muhammad. "The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved", he wrote. Daniel Pipes observed in an article entitled "Dueling Fatwas", "Awlaki stands at an unprecedented crossroads of death declarations, with his targeting Norris even as the U.S. government targets him."
Cargo planes bomb plotThe Guardian, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph reported that U.S. and British counter-terrorism officials believed that al-Awlaki was behind the cargo plane PETN bombs that were sent from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010.Yemen bomb scare 'mastermind' lived in London | World news. The Guardian. Retrieved on October 1, 2011. When U.S. Homeland Security official John Brennan was asked about al-Awlaki's suspected involvement in the plot, he said: "Anybody associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a subject of concern." U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein said "al-Awlaki was behind the two bombs."
Final years
Al-Awlaki's father, tribe, and supporters denied his alleged associations with Al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism. Al-Awlaki's father proclaimed his son's innocence in an interview with CNN's Paula Newton, saying: "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son. He's not Osama bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not." Responding to a Yemeni official's assertions that his son had taken refuge with al-Qaeda, Nasser said: "He's dead wrong. What do you expect my son to do? There are missiles raining down on the village. He has to hide. But he is not hiding with al-Qaeda; our tribe is protecting him right now."
The Yemeni government attempted to get the tribal leaders to release al-Awlaki to their custody. They promised they would not turn him over to U.S. authorities for questioning. The governor of Shabwa said in January 2010 that al-Awlaki was on the move with members of al-Qaeda, including Fahd al-Quso, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole.
In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship. U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an "imminent threat". Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council. Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare. As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons. The authorization was nevertheless controversial.
By February 4, 2010, the New York Daily News reported that al-Awlaki was "now on a targeting list signed off on by the Obama administration". On April 6, The New York Times reported that President Obama had authorized the killing of al-Awlaki.
The al-Awalik tribe responded: "We warn against cooperating with America to kill Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. We will not stand by idly and watch." Al-Awlaki's tribe wrote that it would "not remain with arms crossed if a hair of Anwar al-Awlaki is touched, or if anyone plots or spies against him. Whoever risks denouncing our son (Awlaki) will be the target of Al-Awalik weapons", and gave warning "against co-operating with the Americans" in the capture or killing of al-Awlaki. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, announced that the Yemeni government had not received any evidence from the US, and that "Anwar al-Awlaki has always been looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist and shouldn't be considered as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism".
In a video clip bearing the imprint of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, issued on April 16 in al-Qaeda's monthly magazine Sada Al-Malahem, al-Awlaki said: "What am I accused of? Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?" In the video he also praises both Abdulmutallab and Hasan, and describes both as his "students".
In late April, Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA) introduced a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to withdraw al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship. By May, U.S. officials believed he had become directly involved in terrorist activities. Former colleague Abdul-Malik said he "is a terrorist, in my book", and advised shops not to carry any of his publications. In an editorial, Investor's Business Daily called al-Awlaki the "world's most dangerous man", and recommended that he be added to the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list, a bounty put on his head, that he be designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, charged with treason, and extradition papers filed with the Yemeni government. IBD criticized the Justice Department for stonewalling Senator Joe Lieberman's security panel's investigation of al-Awlaki's role in the Fort Hood massacre.
On July 16, the U.S. Treasury Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, called him "extraordinarily dangerous", and said al-Awlaki was involved in several organizational aspects of terrorism, including recruiting, training, fundraising, and planning individual attacks.
A few days later, the United Nations Security Council placed al-Awlaki on its UN Security Council Resolution 1267 list of individuals associated with al-Qaeda, describing him as a leader, recruiter, and trainer for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The resolution stipulates that U.N. members must freeze the assets of anyone on the list, and prevent them from travelling or obtaining weapons. The following week, Canadian banks were ordered to seize any assets belonging to al-Awlaki. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's senior counter-terrorism officer Gilles Michaud described him as a "major, major factor in radicalization". In September 2010, Jonathan Evans, the Director General of the United Kingdom's domestic security and counter-intelligence agency (MI5), said that al-Awlaki was the West's Public Enemy No 1.
In October 2010, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) urged YouTube to take down al-Awlaki's videos from its website, saying that by hosting al-Awlaki's messages, "We are facilitating the recruitment of homegrown terror." Pauline Neville-Jones, British security minister, said "These Web sites ... incite cold-blooded murder." YouTube began removing the material in November 2010.
Al-Awlaki was charged in absentia in Sana'a, Yemen, on November 2 with plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. Ali al-Saneaa, the head of the prosecutor's office, announced the charges during the trial of Hisham Assem, who had been accused of killing Jacques Spagnolo, an oil industry worker. He said that al-Awlaki and Assem had been in contact for months, and that al-Awlaki had encouraged Assem to commit terrorism. Al-Awlaki's lawyer said that his client was not connected to Spagnolo's death. On November 6, Yemeni Judge Mohsen Alwan ordered that al-Awlaki be caught "dead or alive".
In his book Ticking Time Bomb: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (2011), former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman described al-Awlaki, Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad, Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, and Pakistani-American Samir Khan as "virtual spiritual sanctioners" who use the internet to offer religious justification for Islamist terrorism.
Lawsuit against the US
In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said:
the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow.
Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010.
On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches.
On May 5, 2011, the United States tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died.
Death
On September 30, 2011, al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Al Jawf Governorate, Yemen, according to U.S. sources, the strike was carried out by Joint Special Operations Command, under the direction of the CIA. A witness said the group had stopped to eat breakfast while traveling to Ma'rib Governorate. The occupants of the vehicle spotted the drone and attempted to flee in the vehicle before Hellfire missiles were fired Yemen's Defense Ministry announced that al-Awlaki had been killed. Also killed was Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia, thought to be behind al-Qaeda's English-language web magazine Inspire. U.S. President Barack Obama said:
The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. He took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans ... and he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda. [The strike] is further proof that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.
Journalist and author Glenn Greenwald argued on Salon.com that killing al-Awlaki violated his First Amendment right of free speech and that doing so outside of a criminal proceeding violated the Constitution's due process clause, specifically citing the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force." He mentioned doubt among Yemeni experts about al-Awlaki's role in al-Qaeda, and called U.S. government accusations against him unverified and lacking in evidence.
In a letter dated May 22, 2013, to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, Patrick J. Leahy, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder wrote that
high-level U.S. government officials [...] concluded that al-Aulaqi posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Before carrying out the operation that killed al-Aulaqi, senior officials also determined, based on a careful evaluation of the circumstances at the time, that it was not feasible to capture al-Aulaqi. In addition, senior officials determined that the operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles, including the cardinal principles of (1) necessity – the requirement that the target have definite military value; (2) distinction – the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted; (3) proportionality – the notion that the anticipated collateral damage of an action cannot be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage; and (4) humanity – a principle that requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering. The operation was also undertaken consistent with Yemeni sovereignty. [...] The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was lawful, it was considered, and it was just.
On April 21, 2014, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the Obama administration must release documents justifying its drone killings of foreigners and Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki. In June 2014, the United States Department of Justice disclosed a 2010 memorandum written by the acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, David J. Barron. The memo stated that Anwar al-Awlaki was a significant threat with an infeasible probability of capture. Barron therefore justified the killing as legal, as "the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process". The New York Times Editorial Board dismissed the memo's rationale for al-Awlaki's killing, saying it "provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care", instead describing it as "a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result." A lawyer for the ACLU described the memo as "disturbing" and "ultimately an argument that the president can order targeted killings of Americans without ever having to account to anyone outside the executive branch."
Legacy
Seth Jones, who as a political scientist specializes in al-Qaida, considers that the continuing relevance of al-Awlaki is due to his fluency in the English language as well as his charisma, precising that "he had a disarming aura and unnerving confidence, with an easy smile and a soothing, eloquent voice. He stood a lanky six feet, one inch tall, weighed 160 pounds, and had a thick black beard, an oversized nose, and wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in a clear, almost hypnotic voice."
Awlaki's videos and writings remain highly popular on the internet, where they continue to be readily accessible. Those who viewed and still view his videos are estimated by journalist Scott Shane to number in the hundreds of thousands, while his father Dr. Nasser Awlaqi says that "five million preaching tapes of Anwar Awlaqi have been sold in the West." And thus, even following his death, Awlaki has continued to inspire his devotees to carry out terrorist attacks, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. According to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), 88 "extremists," 54 in the U.S. and 34 in Europe, have been influenced by Awlaki. Because "his work has inspired countless plots and attacks," CEP has "called on YouTube and other platforms to permanently ban Mr. Awlaki's material, including his early, mainstream lectures."
FOIA documents
During the FBI investigation of the 9/11 attacks, it was discovered that a few of the attackers had attended the mosques in San Diego and Falls Church with which al-Awlaki was associated. Interviews with members of the San Diego mosque showed that Nawaz al-Hazmi, one of the attackers, may have had a private conversation with him. On that basis he was placed under 24-hour surveillance. It was discovered that he regularly patronized prostitutes. It was through FBI interrogation of prostitutes and escort service operators that al-Awlaki was tipped off in 2002 about FBI surveillance. Shortly thereafter, he left the United States.
In January 2013, Fox News announced that FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request showed possible connections between al-Awlaki and the September 11 attackers. According to Judicial Watch, the documents show that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and Las Vegas. Judicial Watch further stated that al-Awlaki "was a central focus of the FBI's investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn't cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance."
When queried by Fox News, the FBI denied having evidence connecting al-Awlaki and the September 11 attacks: "The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents. The FBI and investigating bodies have not found evidence connecting Anwar al-Awlaki and the attack on September 11, 2001. The document referenced does not link Anwar al-Awlaki with any purchase of airline tickets for the hijackers."
Family
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki and Egyptian-born Gihan Mohsen Baker had a son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, born August 26, 1995, in Denver, who was an American citizen. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed on October 14, 2011, in Yemen at the age of 16 in an American drone strike. Nine other people were killed in the same CIA-initiated attack, including a 17-year-old cousin of Abdulrahman. According to his relatives, shortly before his father's death, Abdulrahman had left the family home in Sana'a and travelled to Shabwa in search of his father who was believed to be in hiding in that area (though he was actually hundreds of miles away at the time ). Abdulrahman was sitting in an open-air cafe in Shabwa when killed. According to U.S. officials, the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a mistake; the intended target was an Egyptian, Ibrahim al-Banna, who was not at the targeted location at the time of the attack. Human rights groups have raised questions as to why an American citizen was killed by the United States in a country with which the United States is not officially at war. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was not known to have any independent connection to terrorism.
Nasser al-Awlaki
Nasser al-Awlaki is the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki stated he believed his son had been wrongly accused and was not a member of Al Qaeda. After the deaths of his son and grandson, Nasser in an interview in Time magazine called the killings a crime and condemned U.S. President Obama directly, saying: "I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some, he may be that. To me and my family, he is nothing more than a child killer."
In 2013, Nasser al-Awlaki published an op-ed in The New York Times stating that two years after killing his grandson, the Obama administration still declines to provide an explanation. In 2012, Nasser al-Awlaki filed a lawsuit, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, challenging the constitutionality of the drone killings of his son and grandson. This lawsuit was dismissed in April 2014 by D.C. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
Tariq al-Dahab
Tariq al-Dahab, who led al-Qaeda insurgents in Yemen, was a brother-in-law of al-Awlaki. On February 16, 2012, the terrorist organization stated that he had been killed by agents, although media reports contain speculation that he was killed by his brother in a bloody family feud.
Nawar al-Awlaki
On January 29, 2017, Anwar al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen, was killed in a DEVGRU operation authorized by President Donald Trump."1 US service member killed, 3 wounded in Yemen raid" , WPVI-TV, 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA. January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
Islamic education
Al-Awlaki's Islamic education was primarily informal, and consisted of intermittent months with various scholars reading and contemplating Islamic scholarly works. Despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education, Al-Awlaki made a name for himself as a public speaker who released popular audio recordings.Some Muslim scholars said they did not understand alAwlaki's popularity, because while he spoke fluent English and could therefore reach a large non-Arabic-speaking audience, he lacked formal Islamic training and study.
Ideology
While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004, al-Awlaki was influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, described by The New York Times as an originator of the contemporary "anti-Western Jihadist movement". He read 150 to 200 pages a day of Qutb's works, and described himself as "so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly".
Terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann in 2009 referred to al-Awlaki as "one of the principal jihadi luminaries for would-be homegrown terrorists. His fluency with English, his unabashed advocacy of jihad and mujahideen organizations, and his Web-savvy approach are a powerful combination." He called al-Awlaki's lecture, "Constants on the Path of Jihad", which he says was based on a similar document written by al-Qaeda's founder, the "virtual bible for lone-wolf Muslim extremists". Philip Mudd, formerly of the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI's top intelligence adviser, called him "a magnetic character ... a powerful orator." He attracted young men to his lectures, especially US-based and UK-based Muslims.
U.S. officials and some U.S. media sources called al-Awlaki an Islamic fundamentalist and accused him of encouraging terrorism. According to documents recovered from bin Laden's hideout, the al-Qaeda leader was unsure about al-Awlaki's qualifications.
Works
The Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation said al-Awlaki's ability to write and speak in fluent English enabled him to incite English-speaking Muslims to terrorism. Al-Awlaki notes in 44 Ways to Support Jihad that most reading material on the subject is in Arabic.
Written works
44 Ways to Support Jihad: Essay (January 2009). In it, al-Awlaki states that "The hatred of kuffar is a central element of our military creed" and that all Muslims are obligated to participate in jihad, either by committing the acts themselves or supporting others who do so. He says all Muslims must remain physically fit so as to be prepared for conflict. According to U.S. officials, it is considered a key text for al-Qaeda members.
Al-Awlaki wrote for Jihad Recollections, an English language online publication published by Al-Fursan Media.
Allah is Preparing Us for Victory – short book (2009).
Lectures
Lectures on the book Constants on the Path of Jihad by Yusef al-Ayeri—concerns leaderless jihad.
In 2009, the UK government found 1,910 of his videos had been posted to YouTube. One of them had been viewed 164,420 times.
The Battle of Hearts and Minds The Dust Will Never Settle Down Dreams & Interpretations The Hereafter—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Makkan Period—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Medinan Period—Lecture in 2 Parts—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Lives of the Prophets (AS)—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (RA): His Life & Times—15 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Umar ibn al-Khattāb (RA): His Life & Times—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
25 Promises from Allah to the Believer—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Companions of the Ditch & Lessons from the Life of Musa (AS)—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Remembrance of Allah & the Greatest Ayah—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Stories from Hadith—4 CDs—Center for Islamic Information and Education ("CIIE")
Hellfire & The Day of Judgment—CD—CIIE
Quest for Truth: The Story of Salman Al-Farsi (RA)—CD—CIIE
Trials & Lessons for Muslim Minorities—CD—CIIE
Young Ayesha (RA) & Mothers of the Believers (RA)—CD—CIIE
Understanding the Quran—CD—CIIE
Lessons from the Companions (RA) Living as a Minority—CD—CIIE
Virtues of the Sahabah—video lecture series promoted by the al-Wasatiyyah Foundation
Website
Al-Awlaki maintained a website and blog on which he shared his views. On December 11, 2008, he said Muslims should not seek to "serve in the armies of the disbelievers and fight against his brothers".
In "44 Ways to Support Jihad", posted on his blog in February 2009, al-Awlaki encouraged others to "fight jihad", and explained how to give money to the mujahideen or their families. Al-Awlaki's sermon encourages others to conduct weapons training, and raise children "on the love of Jihad". Also that month, he wrote: "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies." He wrote as well: "We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword, whether the masses like it or not." On July 14, he said that Muslim countries should not offer military assistance to the US. "The blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders ... who sells his religion for a few dollars," he said. In blog post dated July 15, 2009, entitled "Fighting Against Government Armies in the Muslim World", al-Awlaki wrote, "Blessed are those who fight against [American soldiers], and blessed are those shuhada [martyrs] who are killed by them."
In a video posted to the internet on November 8, 2010, al-Awlaki called for Muslims to kill Americans "without hesitation", and overthrow Arab governments that cooperate with the US. "Don't consult with anyone in fighting the Americans, fighting the devil doesn't require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils", al-Awlaki said. That month, Intelligence Research Specialist Kevin Yorke of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division called him "the most dangerous man in the world".
See also
Church Committee
Executive Order 12333
Extrajudicial killing
International counter-terrorism activities of the CIA
Protocol I
References
Further reading
al-Ashanti, AbdulHaq and Sloan, Abu Ameenah AbdurRahman. (2011) A Critique of the Methodology of Anwar al-Awlaki and his Errors in the Fiqh of Jihad. London: Jamiah Media, 2011
External links
Ruling of Judge Bates in Al Aulaqi v Obama
Statements
Interviews
"Exclusive; Ray Suarez: My Post-9/11 Interview With Anwar al-Awlaki", PBS, October 30, 2001
"Al-Jazeera Satellite Network Interview with Yemeni-American Cleric Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki Regarding his Alleged Role in Radicalizing Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan", The NEFA Foundation, December 24, 2009
Media coverage
The imam's very curious story: A skirt-chasing mullah is just one more mystery for the 9/11 panel, Ragavan, Chitra, US News and World Report'', June 13, 2004
DBI.gov
1971 births
2011 deaths
20th-century imams
21st-century imams
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
Al-Qaeda propagandists
Assassinated al-Qaeda leaders
American al-Qaeda members
American expatriates in the United Kingdom
American expatriates in Yemen
American imams
American Islamists
American people of Yemeni descent
Colorado State University alumni
George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development alumni
People associated with the September 11 attacks
People from Las Cruces, New Mexico
San Diego State University alumni
Yemeni imams
Yemeni al-Qaeda members
Yemeni Sunni Muslim scholars of Islam
Yemeni Sunni Muslims
Deaths by drone strikes of the Central Intelligence Agency in Yemen
Islam-related controversies
People designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee
American male criminals
Yemeni criminals
Yemeni Islamists
Yemeni expatriates in the United Kingdom
Shafi'is
American Muslim activists
Assassinated Yemeni people
Yemeni propagandists
United States military killing of American civilians | false | [
"\"Did Anyone Approach You?\" is a song by the Norwegian band A-ha. It was the third single to be taken from their 2002 album Lifelines. It was recorded at The Alabaster Room in New York City sometime between June 2001 and January 2002.\n\nTrack listing\n \"Did Anyone Approach You? (Original Album Version)\" (4:11)\n \"Did Anyone Approach You? (Turner Remix)\" (3:43)\n \"Did Anyone Approach You? (Reamped)\" (4:51)\n \"Did Anyone Approach You? (Tore Johansson Remix)\" (5:55)\n \"Afternoon High (Demo Version)\" (4:40)\n \"Did Anyone Approach You? (Video Clip)\" (4:11)\n\nVideo\nThe video was filmed by Lauren Savoy, the wife of A-ha guitarist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy. It was shot at Ullevaal Stadion on 6 June 2002, the first concert on the band's Lifelines tour.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2002 singles\nA-ha songs\nSongs written by Paul Waaktaar-Savoy\nWarner Music Group singles\n2002 songs",
"Jack W. Robbins (1919–2005) was a principal prosecutor for the United States in the Pohl Trial. The Pohl Trial was the fourth of twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in Nuremberg, Germany, after the end of World War II. Robbins was the youngest and longest-surviving prosecutor for the trial.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Robbins' speech at the Robert H. Jackson Center on 6/7/04 in .WMA format\n Robbins Follows Jackson's Example In Nuremberg Prosecution\n Nazi Doctor Prosecutor To Speak At Center\n Robbins speaks for the Robert H. Jackson Center .WMV format\n\n1920 births\n2005 deaths\nNuremberg trials\nAmerican prosecutors\nAmerican expatriates in Germany"
] |
[
"Anwar al-Awlaki",
"Lawsuit against the US",
"what was the reason behind the lawsuit?",
"contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list.",
"why was he on the targeted kill list?",
"the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world.",
"what was his argument in the trial?",
"sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be \"targeted for death\".",
"what was the verdict?",
"Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit,",
"what happened after the lawsuit?",
"On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen.",
"did anyone speak at the trial?",
"I don't know."
] | C_bfe5daac479f47d7942846e4235d1cca_0 | was there any public response to the lawsuit? | 7 | Was there any public response to the lawsuit against the US? | Anwar al-Awlaki | In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said: the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow. Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the US Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010. On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the US Constitution committed to the political branches. On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi, al-Awlaqi; ; April 21 or 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded. US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's right to due process, including a trial.
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen. Growing up partially in the United States and partially in Yemen, he attended various universities across the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s while also working as an imam, despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education. Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a university lecturer after a brief stint as a public speaker in the United Kingdom. He was detained by Yemeni authorities in 2006, where he spent 18 months in prison before being released without facing trial. Following his release, Al-Awlaki's message started to become overtly supportive of violence, as he condemned United States foreign policy against Muslims.
The Yemeni government tried him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive". U.S. officials said that in 2009, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda, although they described his role as more "inspirational" than "operational." He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States. In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama due to his alleged terrorist activities. Al-Awlaki's father and civil rights groups challenged the order in court. Al-Awlaki was believed to be in hiding in southeast Yemen in the last years of his life. The U.S. deployed unmanned aircraft (drones) in Yemen to search for and kill him, firing at and failing to kill him at least once; he was successfully killed on September 30, 2011. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed by a CIA-led drone strike in Yemen. His daughter, 8-year old Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed during a raid against Al Qaeda ordered by President Donald Trump in 2017.<ref name="uk.reuters.com">Ghobari, Mohammed and Phil Stewart. "Commando dies in U.S. raid in Yemen, first military op OK'd by Trump", Reuters, January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.</ref> The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki's public statements and videos have been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than before his death.
Early life
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen, while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, was doing graduate work at U.S. universities. His father was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master's degree in agricultural economics at New Mexico State University in 1971, received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska, and worked at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1977. Nasser al-Awlaki served as Agriculture Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. He was also President of Sana'a University. Yemen's prime minister from 2007 to 2011, Ali Mohammed Mujur, was a relative.
The family returned to Yemen in 1978, when al-Awlaki was seven years old. He lived there for 11 years, and studied at Azal Modern School.
Life in the United States 1990–2002
Education
In 1991, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S. to attend college. He earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University (1994), where he was president of the Muslim Student Association.
In 1993, while still a college student in Colorado State's civil engineering program, al-Awlaki visited Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. He spent some time training with the mujahideen who had fought the Soviets. He was depressed by the country's poverty and hunger, and "wouldn't have gone with al-Qaeda," according to friends from Colorado State, who said he was profoundly affected by the trip. Mullah Mohammed Omar did not form the Taliban until 1994. When Al-Awlaki returned to campus, he showed increased interest in religion and politics. Al-Awlaki studied Education Leadership at San Diego State University, but did not complete his degree. He worked on a doctorate in Human Resource Development at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development from January to December 2001.
Time as imam
In 1994, al-Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen, and began service as a part-time imam of the Denver Islamic Society. In 1996, he was chastised by an elder for encouraging a Saudi student to fight in Chechnya against the Russians. He left Denver soon after, moving to San Diego.
From 1996 to 2000, al-Awlaki was imam of the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque in San Diego, California, where he had a following of 200–300 people. U.S. officials later alleged that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, attended his sermons and personally met him during this period. Hazmi later lived in Northern Virginia and attended al-Awlaki's mosque there. The 9/11 Commission Report said that the hijackers "reportedly respected [al-Awlaki] as a religious figure". While in San Diego, al-Awlaki volunteered with youth organizations, fished, discussed his travels with friends, and created a popular and lucrative series of recorded lectures.
In August 1996 and in April 1997, al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego and charged with soliciting prostitutes. The first time, in 1996, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was fined $400 and required to attend informational sessions about AIDS. The second time, in 1997, he pleaded guilty and was fined $240, ordered to perform 12 days of community service, and received three years' probation. From November 2001 to January 2002 the FBI observed him visiting a number of prostitutes, and interviewed them, establishing that he had paid for sex acts. No prosecution was brought.
In 1998 and 1999, he served as vice-president for the Charitable Society for Social Welfare. In 2004, the FBI described this group as a "front organization to funnel money to terrorists". Although the FBI investigated al-Awlaki from June 1999 through March 2000 for possible links to Hamas, the Bin Laden contact Ziyad Khaleel, and a visit by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, it did not find sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution. Al-Awlaki told reporters that he resigned from leading the San Diego mosque "after an uneventful four years," and took a brief sabbatical, traveling overseas to various countries.
In January 2001, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S., settling in the Washington metropolitan area. There, he was imam at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque near Falls Church, Virginia, and his services were attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. He led academic discussions frequented by FBI Director of Counter-Intelligence for the Middle East Gordon M. Snow. Al-Awlaki also served as the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, where he was hired by Esam Omeish. Omeish said in 2004 that he was convinced that al-Awlaki was not involved in terrorism.
His proficiency as a public speaker and command of the English language helped him attract followers who did not speak Arabic. "He was the magic bullet", according to the mosque spokesman Johari Abdul-Malik. "He had everything all in a box." "He had an allure. He was charming."
When police investigating the 9/11 attacks raided the Hamburg apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, they found the telephone number of al-Awlaki among bin al-Shibh's personal contacts. The FBI interviewed al-Awlaki four times in the eight days following the 9/11 attacks. One detective later told the 9/11 Commission he believed al-Awlaki "was at the center of the 9/11 story". And an FBI agent said, "if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been" him, since "someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused". One 9/11 Commission staff member said: "Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something? Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it." A separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks suggested that al-Awlaki may have been connected to the hijackers, according to its director, Eleanor Hill. In 2003, Representative Anna Eshoo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "In my view, he is more than a coincidental figure."
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki suggested in writing on the IslamOnline.net website that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible for the attacks, and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default".
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki was sought in Washington, D.C., by the media to answer questions about Islam, its rituals, and its relation to the attacks. He was interviewed by National Geographic, The New York Times, and other media. Al-Awlaki condemned the attacks. According to an NPR report in 2010, in 2001 al-Awlaki appeared to be a moderate who could "bridge the gap between the United States and the worldwide community of Muslims." The New York Times said at the time that he was "held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West." In 2010, Fox News and the New York Daily News reported that some months after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon employee invited al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary's Office of General Counsel. The U.S. Secretary of the Army had suggested that a moderate Muslim be invited to give a talk.
In 2002, al-Awlaki was the first imam to conduct a prayer service for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association at the U.S. Capitol. That year, Nidal Hasan visited al-Awlaki's mosque for his mother's funeral, at which al-Awlaki presided. In November 2009, Hasan killed 13 and wounded 32 in the Fort Hood shooting. Hasan usually attended a mosque in Maryland closer to where he lived while working at the Walter Reed Medical Center (2003–09).
Later in 2002, al-Awlaki posted an essay in Arabic on the Islam Today website titled "Why Muslims Love Death", lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. He expressed a similar opinion in a speech at a London mosque later that year. By July 2002, al-Awlaki was under investigation in the United States for having received money from the subject of a U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation. His name was added to the list of terrorism suspects.
Passport fraud issues
In June 2002, a Denver federal judge signed an arrest warrant for al-Awlaki for passport fraud. On October 9, the Denver U.S. Attorney's Office filed a motion to dismiss the complaint and vacate the arrest warrant. Prosecutors believed that they lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, according to U.S. Attorney Dave Gaouette, who authorized its withdrawal. Al-Awlaki had listed Yemen rather than the United States as his place of birth on his 1990 application for a U.S. Social Security number, soon after arriving in the US. Al-Awlaki used this documentation to obtain a passport in 1993. He later corrected his place of birth to Las Cruces, New Mexico. "The bizarre thing is if you put Yemen down (on the application), it would be harder to get a Social Security number than to say you are a native-born citizen of Las Cruces", Gaouette said.
Prosecutors could not charge him in October 2002, when he returned from a trip abroad, because a 10-year statute of limitations on lying to the Social Security Administration had expired. According to a 2012 investigative report by Fox News, the arrest warrant for passport fraud was still in effect on the morning of October 10, 2002, when FBI Agent Wade Ammerman ordered al-Awlaki's release. U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and several congressional committees urged FBI Director Robert Mueller to provide an explanation about the bureau's interactions with al-Awlaki, including why he was released from federal custody when there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The motion for rescinding the arrest warrant was approved by a magistrate judge on October 10 and filed on October 11.ABC News reported in 2009 that the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego disagreed with the decision to cancel the warrant. They were monitoring al-Awlaki and wanted to "look at him under a microscope". But U.S. Attorney Gaouette said that no objection had been raised to the rescinding of the warrant during a meeting that included Ray Fournier, the San Diego federal diplomatic security agent whose allegation had set in motion the effort to obtain a warrant. Gaouette said that if al-Awlaki had been convicted at the time, he would have faced about six months in custody.The New York Times suggested later that al-Awlaki had claimed birth in Yemen (his family's place of origin) to qualify for scholarship money granted to foreign citizens. U.S. Congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) wrote in May 2010 that by claiming to be foreign-born, al-Awlaki fraudulently obtained more than $20,000 in scholarship funds reserved for foreign students.
While living in Northern Virginia, al-Awlaki visited Ali al-Timimi, later known as a radical Islamic cleric. Al-Timimi was convicted in 2005 and is now serving a life sentence for leading the Virginia Jihad Network, inciting Muslim followers to fight with the Taliban against the US.
In the United Kingdom 2002–04
Al-Awlaki left the United States before the end of 2002, because of a "climate of fear and intimidation" according to Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.
He lived in the UK for several months, where he gave talks attended by up to 200 people. He urged young Muslim followers: "The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar [disbeliever]. Do not trust them! [Their leaders] are plotting to kill this religion. They're plotting night and day." "He was the main man who translated the jihad into English," said a student who attended his lectures in 2003.
He gave a series of lectures in December 2002 and January 2003 at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque, describing the rewards martyrs (Shahid) receive in paradise (Jannah). He began to gain supporters, particularly among young Muslims, and undertook a lecture tour of England and Scotland in 2002 in conjunction with the Muslim Association of Britain. He also lectured at "ExpoIslamia", an event held by Islamic Forum Europe. At the East London Mosque he told his audience: "A Muslim is a brother of a Muslim... he does not betray him, and he does not hand him over... You don't hand over a Muslim to the enemies."
In Britain's Parliament in 2003, Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, discussed the relationship between al-Awlaki and the Muslim Association of Britain, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front organization founded by Kemal el-Helbawy, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Return to Yemen 2004–11
Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004, where he lived in Shabwah Governorate with his wife and five children. He lectured at Iman University, headed by Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. The latter has been included on the UN 1267 Committee's list of individuals belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda. Al-Zindani denied having any influence over al-Awlaki, or that he had been his "direct teacher". Some believe that the school's curriculum deals mostly, if not exclusively, with radical Islamic studies, and promotes radicalism. American convert John Walker Lindh and other alumni have been associated with terrorist groups.
On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché. He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007. He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention.
His name was on a list of 100 prisoners whose release was sought by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. After 18 months in a Yemeni prison, al-Awlaki was released on December 12, 2007, following the intercession of his tribe. According to a Yemeni security official, he was released because he had repented. He moved to his family home in Saeed, a hamlet in the Shabwa mountains.
Moazzam Begg's Cageprisoners, an organization representing former Guantanamo detainees, campaigned for al-Awlaki's release when he was in prison in Yemen. Al-Awlaki told Begg in an interview shortly after his release that prior to his incarceration in Yemen, he had condemned the 9/11 attacks.
In December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them.
Al-Awlaki provided al-Qaeda members in Yemen with the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis, against the government. The tribal code required it to protect those who seek refuge and assistance. This imperative has greater force when the person is a member of the tribe or a tribesman's friend. The tribe's motto is "We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned." Al-Awlaki also reportedly helped negotiate deals with leaders of other tribes.
Sought by Yemeni authorities who were investigating his al-Qaeda ties, al-Awlaki went into hiding in approximately March 2009, according to his father. By December 2009, al-Awlaki was on the Yemeni government's most-wanted list. He was believed to be hiding in Yemen's Shabwa or Mareb regions, which are part of the so-called "triangle of evil". The area has attracted al-Qaeda militants, who seek refuge among local tribes unhappy with Yemen's central government.
Yemeni sources originally said al-Awlaki might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived. Pravda reported that the planes, using Saudi and U.S. intelligence, killed at least 30 al-Qaeda members from Yemen and abroad, and that an al-Awlaki house was "raided and demolished". On December 28 The Washington Post reported that U.S. and Yemeni officials said that al-Awlaki had been present at the meeting. Abdul Elah al-Shaya, a Yemeni journalist, said al-Awlaki called him on December 28 to report that he was well and had not attended the al-Qaeda meeting. Al-Shaya said that al-Awlaki was not tied to al-Qaeda.
In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence.
Reaching out to the United Kingdom
After 2006, al-Awlaki was banned from entering the United Kingdom. He broadcast lectures to mosques and other venues there via video-link from 2007 to 2009, on at least seven occasions at five locations in Britain. Noor Pro Media Events held a conference at the East London Mosque on January 1, 2009, showing a videotaped lecture by al-Awlaki; former Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve expressed concern over his being featured.
He gave video-link talks in England to an Islamic student society at the University of Westminster in September 2008, an arts center in East London in April 2009 (after the Tower Hamlets council gave its approval), worshippers at the Al Huda Mosque in Bradford, and a dinner of the Cageprisoners organization in September 2008 at the Wandsworth Civic Centre in South London. On August 23, 2009, al-Awlaki was banned by local authorities in Kensington and Chelsea, London, from speaking at Kensington Town Hall via videolink to a fundraiser dinner for Guantanamo detainees promoted by Cageprisoners. His videos, which discuss his Islamist theories, have circulated across the United Kingdom. Until February 2010, hundreds of audio tapes of his sermons were available at the Tower Hamlets public libraries. In 2009, the London-based Islam Channel carried advertisements for his DVDs and at least two of his video conference lectures.
Other connections
FBI agents identified al-Awlaki as a known, important "senior recruiter for al Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator. His name came up in a dozen terrorism plots in the US, UK, and Canada. The cases included suicide bombers in the 2005 London bombings, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2006 Toronto terrorism case, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2007 Fort Dix attack plot, the jihadist killer in the 2009 Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, and the 2010 Times Square bomber. In each case the suspects were devoted to al-Awlaki's message, which they listened to online and on CDs.
Al-Awlaki's recorded lectures were heard by Islamist fundamentalists in at least six terror cells in the UK through 2009. Michael Finton (Talib Islam), who attempted in September 2009 to bomb the Federal Building and the adjacent offices of Congressman Aaron Schock in Springfield, Illinois, admired al-Awlaki and quoted him on his Myspace page. In addition to his website, al-Awlaki had a Facebook fan page with "fans" in the US, many of whom were high school students. Al-Awlaki also set up a website and blog on which he shared his views.
Al-Awlaki influenced several other extremists to join terrorist organizations overseas and to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries. Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte, two American citizens from New Jersey who attempted to travel to Somalia in June 2010 to join the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al Shabaab, allegedly watched several al-Awlaki videos and sermons in which he warned of future attacks against Americans in the United States and abroad. Zachary Chesser, an American citizen who was arrested for attempting to provide material support to Al Shabaab, told federal authorities that he watched online videos featuring al-Awlaki and that he exchanged several e-mails with al-Awlaki. In July 2010, Paul Rockwood was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a list of 15 potential targets in the US, people he felt had desecrated Islam. Rockwood was a devoted follower of al-Awlaki, and had studied his works Constants on the Path to Jihad and 44 Ways to Jihad.
In October 2008, Charles Allen, U.S. Under-Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, warned that al-Awlaki "targets U.S. Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen." Responding to Allen, al-Awlaki wrote on his website in December 2008: "I would challenge him to come up with just one such lecture where I encourage 'terrorist attacks'".
Fort Hood shooter
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009. Even before the contents of the e-mails were revealed, terrorism expert Jarret Brachman said that Hasan's contacts with al-Awlaki should have raised "huge red flags", because of his influence on radical English-speaking jihadis. Charles Allen, no longer in government, noted that there was no work-related reason for Hasan to be in touch with al-Awlaki. Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel opined: "E-mailing a known al-Qaeda sympathizer should have set off alarm bells. Even if he was exchanging recipes, the bureau should have put out an alert." A DC-based Joint Terrorism Task Force operating under the FBI was notified of the e-mails and reviewed the information. Army employees were informed of the e-mails, but they didn't perceive any terrorist threat in Hasan's questions. Instead, they viewed them as general questions about spiritual guidance with regard to conflicts between Islam and military service and judged them to be consistent with legitimate mental health research about Muslims in the armed services. The assessment was that there was not sufficient information for a larger investigation. In one of the e-mails, Hasan wrote al-Awlaki: "I can't wait to join you [in the afterlife]". "It sounds like code words," said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a military analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. "That he's actually either offering himself up, or that he's already crossed that line in his own mind."
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea interviewed al-Awlaki in November 2009. Al-Awlaki acknowledged his correspondence with Hasan. He said he "neither ordered nor pressured ... Hasan to harm Americans." Al-Awlaki said Hasan first e-mailed him December 17, 2008, introducing himself by writing: "Do you remember me? I used to pray with you at the Virginia mosque." Hasan said he had become a devout Muslim around the time al-Awlaki was preaching at Dar al-Hijrah, in 2001 and 2002, and al-Awlaki said 'Maybe Nidal was affected by one of my lectures.'" He added: "It was clear from his e-mails that Nidal trusted me. Nidal told me: 'I speak with you about issues that I never speak with anyone else.'" Al-Awlaki said Hasan arrived at his own conclusions regarding the acceptability of violence in Islam and said he was not the one to initiate this. Shaea said, "Nidal was providing evidence to Anwar, not vice versa."
Asked whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target in his e-mails, Shaea declined to comment. Al-Awlaki said the shooting was acceptable in Islam, however, because it was a form of jihad, as the West began the hostilities with the Muslims. Al-Awlaki said he "blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were ... those who were trained and prepared to go to Iraq and Afghanistan".
Al-Awlaki's e-mail conversations with Hasan were not released, and he was not placed on the FBI Most Wanted list, indicted for treason, or officially named as a co-conspirator with Hasan. The U.S. government was reluctant to classify the Fort Hood shooting as a terrorist incident, or identify any motive. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2010 that al-Awlaki had not "played a direct role" in any of the attacks, and noted he had never been charged with a crime in the US.
One of his fellow officers at Fort Hood said Hasan was enthusiastic about al-Awlaki. Some investigators believe al-Awlaki's teachings may have been instrumental in Hasan's decision to stage the attack. On his now-disabled website, al-Awlaki praised Hasan's actions, describing him as a hero.
Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber"
According to a number of sources, Al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the convicted al-Qaeda attempted bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on December 25, 2009, had contacts. In January 2010, CNN reported that U.S. "security sources" said that there is concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was Abdulmutallab's recruiter and one of his trainers, and met with him prior to the attack. In February 2010, al-Awlaki admitted in an interview published in al-Jazeera that he taught and corresponded with Abdulmutallab, but denied having ordered the attack.
Representative Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said officials in the Obama administration and officials with access to law enforcement information told him the suspect "may have had contact [with al-Awlaki]".The Sunday Times established that Abdulmutallab first met al-Awlaki in 2005 in Yemen, while he was studying Arabic. During that time the suspect attended lectures by al-Awlaki.NPR reported that according to unnamed U.S. intelligence officials he attended a sermon by al-Awlaki at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, a former trustee of the mosque, expressed "grave misgivings" with regard to its stewardship. A spokesperson of the mosque stated that al-Awlaki had never spoken there or had even to his knowledge entered the building.
Abdulmutallab was also reported by CBS News, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph to have attended a talk by al-Awlaki at the East London Mosque, which al-Awlaki may have attended by video teleconference. The Sunday Telegraph later removed the report from its website following a complaint by the East London Mosque, which stated that "Anwar Al Awlaki did not deliver any talks at the ELM between 2005 and 2008, which is when the newspaper had falsely alleged that Abdullmutallab had attended such talks".
Investigators who searched flats connected to Abdulmutallab in London said that he was a "big fan" of al-Awlaki, as al-Awlaki's blog and website had repeatedly been visited from those locations.
According to federal sources, Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki repeatedly communicated with one another in the year prior to the attack. "Voice-to-voice communication" between the two was intercepted during the fall of 2009, and one government source said al-Awlaki "was in some way involved in facilitating [Abdulmutallab]'s transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things." NPR reported that intelligence officials suspected al-Awlaki may have told Abdulmutallab to go to Yemen for al-Qaeda training.
Abdulmutallab told the FBI that al-Awlaki was one of his al-Qaeda trainers in Yemen. Others reported that Abdulmutallab met with al-Awlaki in the weeks leading up to the attack. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to a U.S. intelligence official, intercepts and other information point to connections between the two:
Some of the information ... comes from Abdulmutallab, who ... said that he met with al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaeda members during an extended trip to Yemen this year and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the attack and in providing religious justification for it. Other intelligence linking the two became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation.
Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs, Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, said Yemeni investigators believe that Abdulmutallab traveled to Shabwa in October 2009. Investigators believe he obtained his explosives and received training there. He met there with al-Qaeda members in a house built by al-Awlaki. A top Yemen government official said the two met with each other.
In January 2010, al-Awlaki acknowledged that he met and spoke with Abdulmutallab in Yemen in the fall of 2009. In an interview, al-Awlaki said: "Umar Farouk is one of my students; I had communications with him. And I support what he did." He also said: "I did not tell him to do this operation, but I support it". Fox News reported in early February 2010 that Abdulmutallab told federal investigators that al-Awlaki directed him to carry out the bombing.
In June 2010 Michael Leiter, the Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said al-Awlaki had a "direct operational role" in the plot.
Sharif Mobley
Sharif Mobley had acknowledged contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. The Mobley family claims the contact was for spiritual guidance in further studies of Islam.
The Mobley family went to Yemen and resided there for several years. They decided to return to the United States and went to the U.S. Embassy to update the family travel documents. While waiting for their travel documents, Sharif Mobley was kidnapped by Yemen Security Services and shot on January 26, 2010. He was then held in Yemen's Central Prison. Mobley disappeared from the Central Prison on February 27, 2014. His current location is known to the U.S. Embassy in Yemen (currently closed 2015) but is withheld from his family and legal advisers based on U.S. State Department Regulations on "U.S. Citizens Missing Abroad".
All charges related to "terrorism/terrorist activity" were dropped by the Yemen government. There are no charges relating to allegations of "killing a guard during an escape attempt from the hospital" and there are no other legal proceedings against him in Yemen.
Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad, convicted of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, told interrogators that he was a "fan and follower" of al-Awlaki, and his writings were one of the inspirations for the attack. On May 6, 2010 ABC News reported that unknown sources told them Shahzad made contact with al-Awlaki over the internet, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Stabbing of British former minister Stephen Timms
Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed former British Cabinet Minister Stephen Timms in May 2010, and was found guilty of his attempted murder in November 2010, claimed to have become radicalized by listening to online sermons of al-Awlaki.
Seattle Weekly cartoonist death threat
In 2010, after Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, cartoonist Molly Norris at Seattle Weekly had to stop publishing, and at the suggestion of the FBI changed her name, moved, and went into hiding due to a fatwā issued by al-Awlaki calling for her death. In the June 2010 issue of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, al-Awlaki cursed her and eight others for "blasphemous caricatures" of Muhammad. "The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved", he wrote. Daniel Pipes observed in an article entitled "Dueling Fatwas", "Awlaki stands at an unprecedented crossroads of death declarations, with his targeting Norris even as the U.S. government targets him."
Cargo planes bomb plotThe Guardian, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph reported that U.S. and British counter-terrorism officials believed that al-Awlaki was behind the cargo plane PETN bombs that were sent from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010.Yemen bomb scare 'mastermind' lived in London | World news. The Guardian. Retrieved on October 1, 2011. When U.S. Homeland Security official John Brennan was asked about al-Awlaki's suspected involvement in the plot, he said: "Anybody associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a subject of concern." U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein said "al-Awlaki was behind the two bombs."
Final years
Al-Awlaki's father, tribe, and supporters denied his alleged associations with Al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism. Al-Awlaki's father proclaimed his son's innocence in an interview with CNN's Paula Newton, saying: "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son. He's not Osama bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not." Responding to a Yemeni official's assertions that his son had taken refuge with al-Qaeda, Nasser said: "He's dead wrong. What do you expect my son to do? There are missiles raining down on the village. He has to hide. But he is not hiding with al-Qaeda; our tribe is protecting him right now."
The Yemeni government attempted to get the tribal leaders to release al-Awlaki to their custody. They promised they would not turn him over to U.S. authorities for questioning. The governor of Shabwa said in January 2010 that al-Awlaki was on the move with members of al-Qaeda, including Fahd al-Quso, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole.
In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship. U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an "imminent threat". Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council. Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare. As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons. The authorization was nevertheless controversial.
By February 4, 2010, the New York Daily News reported that al-Awlaki was "now on a targeting list signed off on by the Obama administration". On April 6, The New York Times reported that President Obama had authorized the killing of al-Awlaki.
The al-Awalik tribe responded: "We warn against cooperating with America to kill Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. We will not stand by idly and watch." Al-Awlaki's tribe wrote that it would "not remain with arms crossed if a hair of Anwar al-Awlaki is touched, or if anyone plots or spies against him. Whoever risks denouncing our son (Awlaki) will be the target of Al-Awalik weapons", and gave warning "against co-operating with the Americans" in the capture or killing of al-Awlaki. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, announced that the Yemeni government had not received any evidence from the US, and that "Anwar al-Awlaki has always been looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist and shouldn't be considered as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism".
In a video clip bearing the imprint of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, issued on April 16 in al-Qaeda's monthly magazine Sada Al-Malahem, al-Awlaki said: "What am I accused of? Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?" In the video he also praises both Abdulmutallab and Hasan, and describes both as his "students".
In late April, Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA) introduced a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to withdraw al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship. By May, U.S. officials believed he had become directly involved in terrorist activities. Former colleague Abdul-Malik said he "is a terrorist, in my book", and advised shops not to carry any of his publications. In an editorial, Investor's Business Daily called al-Awlaki the "world's most dangerous man", and recommended that he be added to the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list, a bounty put on his head, that he be designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, charged with treason, and extradition papers filed with the Yemeni government. IBD criticized the Justice Department for stonewalling Senator Joe Lieberman's security panel's investigation of al-Awlaki's role in the Fort Hood massacre.
On July 16, the U.S. Treasury Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, called him "extraordinarily dangerous", and said al-Awlaki was involved in several organizational aspects of terrorism, including recruiting, training, fundraising, and planning individual attacks.
A few days later, the United Nations Security Council placed al-Awlaki on its UN Security Council Resolution 1267 list of individuals associated with al-Qaeda, describing him as a leader, recruiter, and trainer for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The resolution stipulates that U.N. members must freeze the assets of anyone on the list, and prevent them from travelling or obtaining weapons. The following week, Canadian banks were ordered to seize any assets belonging to al-Awlaki. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's senior counter-terrorism officer Gilles Michaud described him as a "major, major factor in radicalization". In September 2010, Jonathan Evans, the Director General of the United Kingdom's domestic security and counter-intelligence agency (MI5), said that al-Awlaki was the West's Public Enemy No 1.
In October 2010, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) urged YouTube to take down al-Awlaki's videos from its website, saying that by hosting al-Awlaki's messages, "We are facilitating the recruitment of homegrown terror." Pauline Neville-Jones, British security minister, said "These Web sites ... incite cold-blooded murder." YouTube began removing the material in November 2010.
Al-Awlaki was charged in absentia in Sana'a, Yemen, on November 2 with plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. Ali al-Saneaa, the head of the prosecutor's office, announced the charges during the trial of Hisham Assem, who had been accused of killing Jacques Spagnolo, an oil industry worker. He said that al-Awlaki and Assem had been in contact for months, and that al-Awlaki had encouraged Assem to commit terrorism. Al-Awlaki's lawyer said that his client was not connected to Spagnolo's death. On November 6, Yemeni Judge Mohsen Alwan ordered that al-Awlaki be caught "dead or alive".
In his book Ticking Time Bomb: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (2011), former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman described al-Awlaki, Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad, Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, and Pakistani-American Samir Khan as "virtual spiritual sanctioners" who use the internet to offer religious justification for Islamist terrorism.
Lawsuit against the US
In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said:
the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow.
Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010.
On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches.
On May 5, 2011, the United States tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died.
Death
On September 30, 2011, al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Al Jawf Governorate, Yemen, according to U.S. sources, the strike was carried out by Joint Special Operations Command, under the direction of the CIA. A witness said the group had stopped to eat breakfast while traveling to Ma'rib Governorate. The occupants of the vehicle spotted the drone and attempted to flee in the vehicle before Hellfire missiles were fired Yemen's Defense Ministry announced that al-Awlaki had been killed. Also killed was Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia, thought to be behind al-Qaeda's English-language web magazine Inspire. U.S. President Barack Obama said:
The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. He took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans ... and he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda. [The strike] is further proof that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.
Journalist and author Glenn Greenwald argued on Salon.com that killing al-Awlaki violated his First Amendment right of free speech and that doing so outside of a criminal proceeding violated the Constitution's due process clause, specifically citing the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force." He mentioned doubt among Yemeni experts about al-Awlaki's role in al-Qaeda, and called U.S. government accusations against him unverified and lacking in evidence.
In a letter dated May 22, 2013, to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, Patrick J. Leahy, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder wrote that
high-level U.S. government officials [...] concluded that al-Aulaqi posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Before carrying out the operation that killed al-Aulaqi, senior officials also determined, based on a careful evaluation of the circumstances at the time, that it was not feasible to capture al-Aulaqi. In addition, senior officials determined that the operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles, including the cardinal principles of (1) necessity – the requirement that the target have definite military value; (2) distinction – the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted; (3) proportionality – the notion that the anticipated collateral damage of an action cannot be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage; and (4) humanity – a principle that requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering. The operation was also undertaken consistent with Yemeni sovereignty. [...] The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was lawful, it was considered, and it was just.
On April 21, 2014, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the Obama administration must release documents justifying its drone killings of foreigners and Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki. In June 2014, the United States Department of Justice disclosed a 2010 memorandum written by the acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, David J. Barron. The memo stated that Anwar al-Awlaki was a significant threat with an infeasible probability of capture. Barron therefore justified the killing as legal, as "the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process". The New York Times Editorial Board dismissed the memo's rationale for al-Awlaki's killing, saying it "provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care", instead describing it as "a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result." A lawyer for the ACLU described the memo as "disturbing" and "ultimately an argument that the president can order targeted killings of Americans without ever having to account to anyone outside the executive branch."
Legacy
Seth Jones, who as a political scientist specializes in al-Qaida, considers that the continuing relevance of al-Awlaki is due to his fluency in the English language as well as his charisma, precising that "he had a disarming aura and unnerving confidence, with an easy smile and a soothing, eloquent voice. He stood a lanky six feet, one inch tall, weighed 160 pounds, and had a thick black beard, an oversized nose, and wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in a clear, almost hypnotic voice."
Awlaki's videos and writings remain highly popular on the internet, where they continue to be readily accessible. Those who viewed and still view his videos are estimated by journalist Scott Shane to number in the hundreds of thousands, while his father Dr. Nasser Awlaqi says that "five million preaching tapes of Anwar Awlaqi have been sold in the West." And thus, even following his death, Awlaki has continued to inspire his devotees to carry out terrorist attacks, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. According to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), 88 "extremists," 54 in the U.S. and 34 in Europe, have been influenced by Awlaki. Because "his work has inspired countless plots and attacks," CEP has "called on YouTube and other platforms to permanently ban Mr. Awlaki's material, including his early, mainstream lectures."
FOIA documents
During the FBI investigation of the 9/11 attacks, it was discovered that a few of the attackers had attended the mosques in San Diego and Falls Church with which al-Awlaki was associated. Interviews with members of the San Diego mosque showed that Nawaz al-Hazmi, one of the attackers, may have had a private conversation with him. On that basis he was placed under 24-hour surveillance. It was discovered that he regularly patronized prostitutes. It was through FBI interrogation of prostitutes and escort service operators that al-Awlaki was tipped off in 2002 about FBI surveillance. Shortly thereafter, he left the United States.
In January 2013, Fox News announced that FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request showed possible connections between al-Awlaki and the September 11 attackers. According to Judicial Watch, the documents show that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and Las Vegas. Judicial Watch further stated that al-Awlaki "was a central focus of the FBI's investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn't cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance."
When queried by Fox News, the FBI denied having evidence connecting al-Awlaki and the September 11 attacks: "The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents. The FBI and investigating bodies have not found evidence connecting Anwar al-Awlaki and the attack on September 11, 2001. The document referenced does not link Anwar al-Awlaki with any purchase of airline tickets for the hijackers."
Family
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki and Egyptian-born Gihan Mohsen Baker had a son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, born August 26, 1995, in Denver, who was an American citizen. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed on October 14, 2011, in Yemen at the age of 16 in an American drone strike. Nine other people were killed in the same CIA-initiated attack, including a 17-year-old cousin of Abdulrahman. According to his relatives, shortly before his father's death, Abdulrahman had left the family home in Sana'a and travelled to Shabwa in search of his father who was believed to be in hiding in that area (though he was actually hundreds of miles away at the time ). Abdulrahman was sitting in an open-air cafe in Shabwa when killed. According to U.S. officials, the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a mistake; the intended target was an Egyptian, Ibrahim al-Banna, who was not at the targeted location at the time of the attack. Human rights groups have raised questions as to why an American citizen was killed by the United States in a country with which the United States is not officially at war. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was not known to have any independent connection to terrorism.
Nasser al-Awlaki
Nasser al-Awlaki is the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki stated he believed his son had been wrongly accused and was not a member of Al Qaeda. After the deaths of his son and grandson, Nasser in an interview in Time magazine called the killings a crime and condemned U.S. President Obama directly, saying: "I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some, he may be that. To me and my family, he is nothing more than a child killer."
In 2013, Nasser al-Awlaki published an op-ed in The New York Times stating that two years after killing his grandson, the Obama administration still declines to provide an explanation. In 2012, Nasser al-Awlaki filed a lawsuit, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, challenging the constitutionality of the drone killings of his son and grandson. This lawsuit was dismissed in April 2014 by D.C. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
Tariq al-Dahab
Tariq al-Dahab, who led al-Qaeda insurgents in Yemen, was a brother-in-law of al-Awlaki. On February 16, 2012, the terrorist organization stated that he had been killed by agents, although media reports contain speculation that he was killed by his brother in a bloody family feud.
Nawar al-Awlaki
On January 29, 2017, Anwar al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen, was killed in a DEVGRU operation authorized by President Donald Trump."1 US service member killed, 3 wounded in Yemen raid" , WPVI-TV, 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA. January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
Islamic education
Al-Awlaki's Islamic education was primarily informal, and consisted of intermittent months with various scholars reading and contemplating Islamic scholarly works. Despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education, Al-Awlaki made a name for himself as a public speaker who released popular audio recordings.Some Muslim scholars said they did not understand alAwlaki's popularity, because while he spoke fluent English and could therefore reach a large non-Arabic-speaking audience, he lacked formal Islamic training and study.
Ideology
While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004, al-Awlaki was influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, described by The New York Times as an originator of the contemporary "anti-Western Jihadist movement". He read 150 to 200 pages a day of Qutb's works, and described himself as "so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly".
Terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann in 2009 referred to al-Awlaki as "one of the principal jihadi luminaries for would-be homegrown terrorists. His fluency with English, his unabashed advocacy of jihad and mujahideen organizations, and his Web-savvy approach are a powerful combination." He called al-Awlaki's lecture, "Constants on the Path of Jihad", which he says was based on a similar document written by al-Qaeda's founder, the "virtual bible for lone-wolf Muslim extremists". Philip Mudd, formerly of the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI's top intelligence adviser, called him "a magnetic character ... a powerful orator." He attracted young men to his lectures, especially US-based and UK-based Muslims.
U.S. officials and some U.S. media sources called al-Awlaki an Islamic fundamentalist and accused him of encouraging terrorism. According to documents recovered from bin Laden's hideout, the al-Qaeda leader was unsure about al-Awlaki's qualifications.
Works
The Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation said al-Awlaki's ability to write and speak in fluent English enabled him to incite English-speaking Muslims to terrorism. Al-Awlaki notes in 44 Ways to Support Jihad that most reading material on the subject is in Arabic.
Written works
44 Ways to Support Jihad: Essay (January 2009). In it, al-Awlaki states that "The hatred of kuffar is a central element of our military creed" and that all Muslims are obligated to participate in jihad, either by committing the acts themselves or supporting others who do so. He says all Muslims must remain physically fit so as to be prepared for conflict. According to U.S. officials, it is considered a key text for al-Qaeda members.
Al-Awlaki wrote for Jihad Recollections, an English language online publication published by Al-Fursan Media.
Allah is Preparing Us for Victory – short book (2009).
Lectures
Lectures on the book Constants on the Path of Jihad by Yusef al-Ayeri—concerns leaderless jihad.
In 2009, the UK government found 1,910 of his videos had been posted to YouTube. One of them had been viewed 164,420 times.
The Battle of Hearts and Minds The Dust Will Never Settle Down Dreams & Interpretations The Hereafter—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Makkan Period—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Medinan Period—Lecture in 2 Parts—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Lives of the Prophets (AS)—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (RA): His Life & Times—15 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Umar ibn al-Khattāb (RA): His Life & Times—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
25 Promises from Allah to the Believer—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Companions of the Ditch & Lessons from the Life of Musa (AS)—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Remembrance of Allah & the Greatest Ayah—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Stories from Hadith—4 CDs—Center for Islamic Information and Education ("CIIE")
Hellfire & The Day of Judgment—CD—CIIE
Quest for Truth: The Story of Salman Al-Farsi (RA)—CD—CIIE
Trials & Lessons for Muslim Minorities—CD—CIIE
Young Ayesha (RA) & Mothers of the Believers (RA)—CD—CIIE
Understanding the Quran—CD—CIIE
Lessons from the Companions (RA) Living as a Minority—CD—CIIE
Virtues of the Sahabah—video lecture series promoted by the al-Wasatiyyah Foundation
Website
Al-Awlaki maintained a website and blog on which he shared his views. On December 11, 2008, he said Muslims should not seek to "serve in the armies of the disbelievers and fight against his brothers".
In "44 Ways to Support Jihad", posted on his blog in February 2009, al-Awlaki encouraged others to "fight jihad", and explained how to give money to the mujahideen or their families. Al-Awlaki's sermon encourages others to conduct weapons training, and raise children "on the love of Jihad". Also that month, he wrote: "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies." He wrote as well: "We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword, whether the masses like it or not." On July 14, he said that Muslim countries should not offer military assistance to the US. "The blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders ... who sells his religion for a few dollars," he said. In blog post dated July 15, 2009, entitled "Fighting Against Government Armies in the Muslim World", al-Awlaki wrote, "Blessed are those who fight against [American soldiers], and blessed are those shuhada [martyrs] who are killed by them."
In a video posted to the internet on November 8, 2010, al-Awlaki called for Muslims to kill Americans "without hesitation", and overthrow Arab governments that cooperate with the US. "Don't consult with anyone in fighting the Americans, fighting the devil doesn't require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils", al-Awlaki said. That month, Intelligence Research Specialist Kevin Yorke of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division called him "the most dangerous man in the world".
See also
Church Committee
Executive Order 12333
Extrajudicial killing
International counter-terrorism activities of the CIA
Protocol I
References
Further reading
al-Ashanti, AbdulHaq and Sloan, Abu Ameenah AbdurRahman. (2011) A Critique of the Methodology of Anwar al-Awlaki and his Errors in the Fiqh of Jihad. London: Jamiah Media, 2011
External links
Ruling of Judge Bates in Al Aulaqi v Obama
Statements
Interviews
"Exclusive; Ray Suarez: My Post-9/11 Interview With Anwar al-Awlaki", PBS, October 30, 2001
"Al-Jazeera Satellite Network Interview with Yemeni-American Cleric Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki Regarding his Alleged Role in Radicalizing Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan", The NEFA Foundation, December 24, 2009
Media coverage
The imam's very curious story: A skirt-chasing mullah is just one more mystery for the 9/11 panel, Ragavan, Chitra, US News and World Report'', June 13, 2004
DBI.gov
1971 births
2011 deaths
20th-century imams
21st-century imams
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
Al-Qaeda propagandists
Assassinated al-Qaeda leaders
American al-Qaeda members
American expatriates in the United Kingdom
American expatriates in Yemen
American imams
American Islamists
American people of Yemeni descent
Colorado State University alumni
George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development alumni
People associated with the September 11 attacks
People from Las Cruces, New Mexico
San Diego State University alumni
Yemeni imams
Yemeni al-Qaeda members
Yemeni Sunni Muslim scholars of Islam
Yemeni Sunni Muslims
Deaths by drone strikes of the Central Intelligence Agency in Yemen
Islam-related controversies
People designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee
American male criminals
Yemeni criminals
Yemeni Islamists
Yemeni expatriates in the United Kingdom
Shafi'is
American Muslim activists
Assassinated Yemeni people
Yemeni propagandists
United States military killing of American civilians | false | [
"\"Say Goodbye\" is a single by American electronic dance music band Krewella. It was the first single released by Krewella since the departure of member Kris \"Rain Man\" Trindl. It was released on November 24, 2014 during a livestream in which viewers thought they were going to 'speak out' about the recent lawsuit involving band member Trindl.\n\nBackground\nIn September 2014, it was announced that member Rain Man was no longer a member of Krewella. Trindl claimed damages and wanted compensation from the Yousaf sisters in a total of $5 million, claiming they had kicked him out of the band unfairly. The case was finalized in October, 2015 however a response was not issued to the public. The lawsuit also states that the sisters conspired to kick him out of the group to reap high financial rewards whilst he was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and Rehab for his drinking problem. The Yousaf sisters Jahan and Yasmine then counter-sued stating that Trindl had resigned. They claimed that Trindl was having substance and alcohol problems as well as \"pretended to DJ\" onstage.\"\n\nDJ Deadmau5 called out the sisters multiple times on the lawsuit and their skills as DJ's. The Yousaf sisters changed their Facebook, Twitter, and SoundCloud accounts in late november; to black with the words \"Say Goodbye\" printed in a dark grey font so that it was hard to read. The sisters then announced a livestream in which they would \"speak out\" about the lawsuit. This was done by releasing \"Say Goodbye\" moments after the livestream onto iTunes, Spotify and other digital platforms. The lyrics in \"Say Goodbye\" are in reference to the lawsuit and Trindl. The fact that there was no real \"speaking out\" was met with negative views of the sisters, and the 40,000 people who watched the livestream felt \"jelted or betrayed\".The song was met with an instant of negative, and hateful criticism. Since the lawsuit in September the band have been under scrutiny by the public. It was heavily influenced by rock, which they called on their soundcloud page \"Emo 'n' Bass\", a reference to the drum and bass influences in the song.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences \n\nColumbia Records singles\n2014 singles\n2014 songs\nKrewella songs",
"SCEA v. Hotz was a lawsuit in the United States by Sony Computer Entertainment of America against George Hotz and associates of the group fail0verflow. It was about jailbreaking and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3.\n\nTimeline\n\nOn January 11, 2011, Sony sued George Hotz and fail0verflow members Hector Martin and Sven Peter on 8 claims, including violation of the DMCA, computer fraud, and copyright infringement. The law firm used by Sony was Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP. In response to the suit, Carnegie Mellon University professor David S. Touretzky mirrored Hotz's writings and issued a statement supporting that Hotz's publication is within his right to free speech.\n\nOn January 27, 2011, Sony's request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) was granted by the US District Court for the Northern District of California. This forbade him from distributing the jailbreak, helping or encouraging others to jailbreak, and distributing information they've learned during the creation of the jailbreak. It also ordered him to turn over computers and storage media used in the creation of the jailbreak to Sony's lawyers. Professor Touretzky's mirror was voluntarily censored following issue of the TRO, but Hotz's writings and software have been mirrored elsewhere.\n\nOn February 12, 2011, Hotz posted a one-minute diss track against Sony on his official YouTube channel in relation to the lawsuit.\n\nOn February 19, 2011, Hotz started a blog about the Sony lawsuit.\n\nOn March 6, 2011, the court issued an approval that Sony's lawyers were allowed access to all the IP addresses of all the people who visited geohot's blog for the purposes of establishing jurisdiction. Sony said the server logs would demonstrate that many of those who downloaded Hotz's hack reside in Northern California — thus making San Francisco a proper venue for the case.\n\nOn April 11, 2011, it was revealed that Hotz and Sony had reached a settlement out of court. This included a permanent injunction against Hotz doing any more hacking work on any Sony products to prevent any future firmware release from being decrypted.\n\nThe claims (filed in United States district court for Northern California, San Francisco) were:\n\nViolating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ()\nViolating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ()\nContributory copyright infringement ()\nViolating California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (§ 502)\nBreach of Contract (related to the PlayStation Network User Agreement)\nTortious interference\nMisappropriation\nTrespass\n\nAlleged Anonymous attacks in response to lawsuit\nIn an act of hacktivism, Anonymous announced their intent to attack Sony websites in response to Sony's lawsuit and, specifically due to Sony's gaining access to the IP addresses of all the people who visited geohot's blog, terming it an 'offense against free speech and internet freedom'. Although Anonymous admitted responsibility to subsequent attacks on the Sony websites, much speculation has arisen concerning a sustained collapse of the PlayStation Network in April 2011. Anonymous has denied any involvement in the PlayStation Network outage. However, Sony announced on May 4, 2011, \"We discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of our Sony Online Entertainment servers named \"Anonymous\" with the words \"We are Legion.\"\n\nSee also\n Electronic Frontier Foundation\n George Hotz\n Groklaw\n Illegal number\n Strategic lawsuit against public participation\n Forum shopping\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nhttp://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=SonyHotz\nhttp://community.us.playstation.com/t5/PlayStation-Network-Support/Questions-About-End-User-Safety-Concerning-New-Exploit/m-p/38690337\nhttps://blog.playstation.com/2011/04/11/settlement-in-george-hotz-case/\n\nAmerican bloggers\nSony litigation\nDigital Millennium Copyright Act case law\n2011 in United States case law\nVideo game controversies"
] |
[
"Anwar al-Awlaki",
"Lawsuit against the US",
"what was the reason behind the lawsuit?",
"contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list.",
"why was he on the targeted kill list?",
"the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world.",
"what was his argument in the trial?",
"sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be \"targeted for death\".",
"what was the verdict?",
"Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit,",
"what happened after the lawsuit?",
"On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen.",
"did anyone speak at the trial?",
"I don't know.",
"was there any public response to the lawsuit?",
"I don't know."
] | C_bfe5daac479f47d7942846e4235d1cca_0 | did anything else happen at the lawsuit? | 8 | Did anything else happen at the trial besides judge John D. Bates dismissing the lawsuit? | Anwar al-Awlaki | In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said: the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow. Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the US Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010. On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the US Constitution committed to the political branches. On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died. CANNOTANSWER | On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. | Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi, al-Awlaqi; ; April 21 or 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded. US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's right to due process, including a trial.
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen. Growing up partially in the United States and partially in Yemen, he attended various universities across the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s while also working as an imam, despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education. Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a university lecturer after a brief stint as a public speaker in the United Kingdom. He was detained by Yemeni authorities in 2006, where he spent 18 months in prison before being released without facing trial. Following his release, Al-Awlaki's message started to become overtly supportive of violence, as he condemned United States foreign policy against Muslims.
The Yemeni government tried him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive". U.S. officials said that in 2009, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda, although they described his role as more "inspirational" than "operational." He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States. In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama due to his alleged terrorist activities. Al-Awlaki's father and civil rights groups challenged the order in court. Al-Awlaki was believed to be in hiding in southeast Yemen in the last years of his life. The U.S. deployed unmanned aircraft (drones) in Yemen to search for and kill him, firing at and failing to kill him at least once; he was successfully killed on September 30, 2011. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed by a CIA-led drone strike in Yemen. His daughter, 8-year old Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed during a raid against Al Qaeda ordered by President Donald Trump in 2017.<ref name="uk.reuters.com">Ghobari, Mohammed and Phil Stewart. "Commando dies in U.S. raid in Yemen, first military op OK'd by Trump", Reuters, January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.</ref> The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki's public statements and videos have been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than before his death.
Early life
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen, while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, was doing graduate work at U.S. universities. His father was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master's degree in agricultural economics at New Mexico State University in 1971, received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska, and worked at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1977. Nasser al-Awlaki served as Agriculture Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. He was also President of Sana'a University. Yemen's prime minister from 2007 to 2011, Ali Mohammed Mujur, was a relative.
The family returned to Yemen in 1978, when al-Awlaki was seven years old. He lived there for 11 years, and studied at Azal Modern School.
Life in the United States 1990–2002
Education
In 1991, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S. to attend college. He earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University (1994), where he was president of the Muslim Student Association.
In 1993, while still a college student in Colorado State's civil engineering program, al-Awlaki visited Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. He spent some time training with the mujahideen who had fought the Soviets. He was depressed by the country's poverty and hunger, and "wouldn't have gone with al-Qaeda," according to friends from Colorado State, who said he was profoundly affected by the trip. Mullah Mohammed Omar did not form the Taliban until 1994. When Al-Awlaki returned to campus, he showed increased interest in religion and politics. Al-Awlaki studied Education Leadership at San Diego State University, but did not complete his degree. He worked on a doctorate in Human Resource Development at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development from January to December 2001.
Time as imam
In 1994, al-Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen, and began service as a part-time imam of the Denver Islamic Society. In 1996, he was chastised by an elder for encouraging a Saudi student to fight in Chechnya against the Russians. He left Denver soon after, moving to San Diego.
From 1996 to 2000, al-Awlaki was imam of the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque in San Diego, California, where he had a following of 200–300 people. U.S. officials later alleged that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, attended his sermons and personally met him during this period. Hazmi later lived in Northern Virginia and attended al-Awlaki's mosque there. The 9/11 Commission Report said that the hijackers "reportedly respected [al-Awlaki] as a religious figure". While in San Diego, al-Awlaki volunteered with youth organizations, fished, discussed his travels with friends, and created a popular and lucrative series of recorded lectures.
In August 1996 and in April 1997, al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego and charged with soliciting prostitutes. The first time, in 1996, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was fined $400 and required to attend informational sessions about AIDS. The second time, in 1997, he pleaded guilty and was fined $240, ordered to perform 12 days of community service, and received three years' probation. From November 2001 to January 2002 the FBI observed him visiting a number of prostitutes, and interviewed them, establishing that he had paid for sex acts. No prosecution was brought.
In 1998 and 1999, he served as vice-president for the Charitable Society for Social Welfare. In 2004, the FBI described this group as a "front organization to funnel money to terrorists". Although the FBI investigated al-Awlaki from June 1999 through March 2000 for possible links to Hamas, the Bin Laden contact Ziyad Khaleel, and a visit by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, it did not find sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution. Al-Awlaki told reporters that he resigned from leading the San Diego mosque "after an uneventful four years," and took a brief sabbatical, traveling overseas to various countries.
In January 2001, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S., settling in the Washington metropolitan area. There, he was imam at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque near Falls Church, Virginia, and his services were attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. He led academic discussions frequented by FBI Director of Counter-Intelligence for the Middle East Gordon M. Snow. Al-Awlaki also served as the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, where he was hired by Esam Omeish. Omeish said in 2004 that he was convinced that al-Awlaki was not involved in terrorism.
His proficiency as a public speaker and command of the English language helped him attract followers who did not speak Arabic. "He was the magic bullet", according to the mosque spokesman Johari Abdul-Malik. "He had everything all in a box." "He had an allure. He was charming."
When police investigating the 9/11 attacks raided the Hamburg apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, they found the telephone number of al-Awlaki among bin al-Shibh's personal contacts. The FBI interviewed al-Awlaki four times in the eight days following the 9/11 attacks. One detective later told the 9/11 Commission he believed al-Awlaki "was at the center of the 9/11 story". And an FBI agent said, "if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been" him, since "someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused". One 9/11 Commission staff member said: "Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something? Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it." A separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks suggested that al-Awlaki may have been connected to the hijackers, according to its director, Eleanor Hill. In 2003, Representative Anna Eshoo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "In my view, he is more than a coincidental figure."
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki suggested in writing on the IslamOnline.net website that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible for the attacks, and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default".
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki was sought in Washington, D.C., by the media to answer questions about Islam, its rituals, and its relation to the attacks. He was interviewed by National Geographic, The New York Times, and other media. Al-Awlaki condemned the attacks. According to an NPR report in 2010, in 2001 al-Awlaki appeared to be a moderate who could "bridge the gap between the United States and the worldwide community of Muslims." The New York Times said at the time that he was "held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West." In 2010, Fox News and the New York Daily News reported that some months after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon employee invited al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary's Office of General Counsel. The U.S. Secretary of the Army had suggested that a moderate Muslim be invited to give a talk.
In 2002, al-Awlaki was the first imam to conduct a prayer service for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association at the U.S. Capitol. That year, Nidal Hasan visited al-Awlaki's mosque for his mother's funeral, at which al-Awlaki presided. In November 2009, Hasan killed 13 and wounded 32 in the Fort Hood shooting. Hasan usually attended a mosque in Maryland closer to where he lived while working at the Walter Reed Medical Center (2003–09).
Later in 2002, al-Awlaki posted an essay in Arabic on the Islam Today website titled "Why Muslims Love Death", lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. He expressed a similar opinion in a speech at a London mosque later that year. By July 2002, al-Awlaki was under investigation in the United States for having received money from the subject of a U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation. His name was added to the list of terrorism suspects.
Passport fraud issues
In June 2002, a Denver federal judge signed an arrest warrant for al-Awlaki for passport fraud. On October 9, the Denver U.S. Attorney's Office filed a motion to dismiss the complaint and vacate the arrest warrant. Prosecutors believed that they lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, according to U.S. Attorney Dave Gaouette, who authorized its withdrawal. Al-Awlaki had listed Yemen rather than the United States as his place of birth on his 1990 application for a U.S. Social Security number, soon after arriving in the US. Al-Awlaki used this documentation to obtain a passport in 1993. He later corrected his place of birth to Las Cruces, New Mexico. "The bizarre thing is if you put Yemen down (on the application), it would be harder to get a Social Security number than to say you are a native-born citizen of Las Cruces", Gaouette said.
Prosecutors could not charge him in October 2002, when he returned from a trip abroad, because a 10-year statute of limitations on lying to the Social Security Administration had expired. According to a 2012 investigative report by Fox News, the arrest warrant for passport fraud was still in effect on the morning of October 10, 2002, when FBI Agent Wade Ammerman ordered al-Awlaki's release. U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and several congressional committees urged FBI Director Robert Mueller to provide an explanation about the bureau's interactions with al-Awlaki, including why he was released from federal custody when there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The motion for rescinding the arrest warrant was approved by a magistrate judge on October 10 and filed on October 11.ABC News reported in 2009 that the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego disagreed with the decision to cancel the warrant. They were monitoring al-Awlaki and wanted to "look at him under a microscope". But U.S. Attorney Gaouette said that no objection had been raised to the rescinding of the warrant during a meeting that included Ray Fournier, the San Diego federal diplomatic security agent whose allegation had set in motion the effort to obtain a warrant. Gaouette said that if al-Awlaki had been convicted at the time, he would have faced about six months in custody.The New York Times suggested later that al-Awlaki had claimed birth in Yemen (his family's place of origin) to qualify for scholarship money granted to foreign citizens. U.S. Congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) wrote in May 2010 that by claiming to be foreign-born, al-Awlaki fraudulently obtained more than $20,000 in scholarship funds reserved for foreign students.
While living in Northern Virginia, al-Awlaki visited Ali al-Timimi, later known as a radical Islamic cleric. Al-Timimi was convicted in 2005 and is now serving a life sentence for leading the Virginia Jihad Network, inciting Muslim followers to fight with the Taliban against the US.
In the United Kingdom 2002–04
Al-Awlaki left the United States before the end of 2002, because of a "climate of fear and intimidation" according to Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.
He lived in the UK for several months, where he gave talks attended by up to 200 people. He urged young Muslim followers: "The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar [disbeliever]. Do not trust them! [Their leaders] are plotting to kill this religion. They're plotting night and day." "He was the main man who translated the jihad into English," said a student who attended his lectures in 2003.
He gave a series of lectures in December 2002 and January 2003 at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque, describing the rewards martyrs (Shahid) receive in paradise (Jannah). He began to gain supporters, particularly among young Muslims, and undertook a lecture tour of England and Scotland in 2002 in conjunction with the Muslim Association of Britain. He also lectured at "ExpoIslamia", an event held by Islamic Forum Europe. At the East London Mosque he told his audience: "A Muslim is a brother of a Muslim... he does not betray him, and he does not hand him over... You don't hand over a Muslim to the enemies."
In Britain's Parliament in 2003, Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, discussed the relationship between al-Awlaki and the Muslim Association of Britain, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front organization founded by Kemal el-Helbawy, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Return to Yemen 2004–11
Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004, where he lived in Shabwah Governorate with his wife and five children. He lectured at Iman University, headed by Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. The latter has been included on the UN 1267 Committee's list of individuals belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda. Al-Zindani denied having any influence over al-Awlaki, or that he had been his "direct teacher". Some believe that the school's curriculum deals mostly, if not exclusively, with radical Islamic studies, and promotes radicalism. American convert John Walker Lindh and other alumni have been associated with terrorist groups.
On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché. He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007. He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention.
His name was on a list of 100 prisoners whose release was sought by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. After 18 months in a Yemeni prison, al-Awlaki was released on December 12, 2007, following the intercession of his tribe. According to a Yemeni security official, he was released because he had repented. He moved to his family home in Saeed, a hamlet in the Shabwa mountains.
Moazzam Begg's Cageprisoners, an organization representing former Guantanamo detainees, campaigned for al-Awlaki's release when he was in prison in Yemen. Al-Awlaki told Begg in an interview shortly after his release that prior to his incarceration in Yemen, he had condemned the 9/11 attacks.
In December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them.
Al-Awlaki provided al-Qaeda members in Yemen with the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis, against the government. The tribal code required it to protect those who seek refuge and assistance. This imperative has greater force when the person is a member of the tribe or a tribesman's friend. The tribe's motto is "We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned." Al-Awlaki also reportedly helped negotiate deals with leaders of other tribes.
Sought by Yemeni authorities who were investigating his al-Qaeda ties, al-Awlaki went into hiding in approximately March 2009, according to his father. By December 2009, al-Awlaki was on the Yemeni government's most-wanted list. He was believed to be hiding in Yemen's Shabwa or Mareb regions, which are part of the so-called "triangle of evil". The area has attracted al-Qaeda militants, who seek refuge among local tribes unhappy with Yemen's central government.
Yemeni sources originally said al-Awlaki might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived. Pravda reported that the planes, using Saudi and U.S. intelligence, killed at least 30 al-Qaeda members from Yemen and abroad, and that an al-Awlaki house was "raided and demolished". On December 28 The Washington Post reported that U.S. and Yemeni officials said that al-Awlaki had been present at the meeting. Abdul Elah al-Shaya, a Yemeni journalist, said al-Awlaki called him on December 28 to report that he was well and had not attended the al-Qaeda meeting. Al-Shaya said that al-Awlaki was not tied to al-Qaeda.
In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence.
Reaching out to the United Kingdom
After 2006, al-Awlaki was banned from entering the United Kingdom. He broadcast lectures to mosques and other venues there via video-link from 2007 to 2009, on at least seven occasions at five locations in Britain. Noor Pro Media Events held a conference at the East London Mosque on January 1, 2009, showing a videotaped lecture by al-Awlaki; former Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve expressed concern over his being featured.
He gave video-link talks in England to an Islamic student society at the University of Westminster in September 2008, an arts center in East London in April 2009 (after the Tower Hamlets council gave its approval), worshippers at the Al Huda Mosque in Bradford, and a dinner of the Cageprisoners organization in September 2008 at the Wandsworth Civic Centre in South London. On August 23, 2009, al-Awlaki was banned by local authorities in Kensington and Chelsea, London, from speaking at Kensington Town Hall via videolink to a fundraiser dinner for Guantanamo detainees promoted by Cageprisoners. His videos, which discuss his Islamist theories, have circulated across the United Kingdom. Until February 2010, hundreds of audio tapes of his sermons were available at the Tower Hamlets public libraries. In 2009, the London-based Islam Channel carried advertisements for his DVDs and at least two of his video conference lectures.
Other connections
FBI agents identified al-Awlaki as a known, important "senior recruiter for al Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator. His name came up in a dozen terrorism plots in the US, UK, and Canada. The cases included suicide bombers in the 2005 London bombings, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2006 Toronto terrorism case, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2007 Fort Dix attack plot, the jihadist killer in the 2009 Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, and the 2010 Times Square bomber. In each case the suspects were devoted to al-Awlaki's message, which they listened to online and on CDs.
Al-Awlaki's recorded lectures were heard by Islamist fundamentalists in at least six terror cells in the UK through 2009. Michael Finton (Talib Islam), who attempted in September 2009 to bomb the Federal Building and the adjacent offices of Congressman Aaron Schock in Springfield, Illinois, admired al-Awlaki and quoted him on his Myspace page. In addition to his website, al-Awlaki had a Facebook fan page with "fans" in the US, many of whom were high school students. Al-Awlaki also set up a website and blog on which he shared his views.
Al-Awlaki influenced several other extremists to join terrorist organizations overseas and to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries. Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte, two American citizens from New Jersey who attempted to travel to Somalia in June 2010 to join the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al Shabaab, allegedly watched several al-Awlaki videos and sermons in which he warned of future attacks against Americans in the United States and abroad. Zachary Chesser, an American citizen who was arrested for attempting to provide material support to Al Shabaab, told federal authorities that he watched online videos featuring al-Awlaki and that he exchanged several e-mails with al-Awlaki. In July 2010, Paul Rockwood was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a list of 15 potential targets in the US, people he felt had desecrated Islam. Rockwood was a devoted follower of al-Awlaki, and had studied his works Constants on the Path to Jihad and 44 Ways to Jihad.
In October 2008, Charles Allen, U.S. Under-Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, warned that al-Awlaki "targets U.S. Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen." Responding to Allen, al-Awlaki wrote on his website in December 2008: "I would challenge him to come up with just one such lecture where I encourage 'terrorist attacks'".
Fort Hood shooter
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009. Even before the contents of the e-mails were revealed, terrorism expert Jarret Brachman said that Hasan's contacts with al-Awlaki should have raised "huge red flags", because of his influence on radical English-speaking jihadis. Charles Allen, no longer in government, noted that there was no work-related reason for Hasan to be in touch with al-Awlaki. Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel opined: "E-mailing a known al-Qaeda sympathizer should have set off alarm bells. Even if he was exchanging recipes, the bureau should have put out an alert." A DC-based Joint Terrorism Task Force operating under the FBI was notified of the e-mails and reviewed the information. Army employees were informed of the e-mails, but they didn't perceive any terrorist threat in Hasan's questions. Instead, they viewed them as general questions about spiritual guidance with regard to conflicts between Islam and military service and judged them to be consistent with legitimate mental health research about Muslims in the armed services. The assessment was that there was not sufficient information for a larger investigation. In one of the e-mails, Hasan wrote al-Awlaki: "I can't wait to join you [in the afterlife]". "It sounds like code words," said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a military analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. "That he's actually either offering himself up, or that he's already crossed that line in his own mind."
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea interviewed al-Awlaki in November 2009. Al-Awlaki acknowledged his correspondence with Hasan. He said he "neither ordered nor pressured ... Hasan to harm Americans." Al-Awlaki said Hasan first e-mailed him December 17, 2008, introducing himself by writing: "Do you remember me? I used to pray with you at the Virginia mosque." Hasan said he had become a devout Muslim around the time al-Awlaki was preaching at Dar al-Hijrah, in 2001 and 2002, and al-Awlaki said 'Maybe Nidal was affected by one of my lectures.'" He added: "It was clear from his e-mails that Nidal trusted me. Nidal told me: 'I speak with you about issues that I never speak with anyone else.'" Al-Awlaki said Hasan arrived at his own conclusions regarding the acceptability of violence in Islam and said he was not the one to initiate this. Shaea said, "Nidal was providing evidence to Anwar, not vice versa."
Asked whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target in his e-mails, Shaea declined to comment. Al-Awlaki said the shooting was acceptable in Islam, however, because it was a form of jihad, as the West began the hostilities with the Muslims. Al-Awlaki said he "blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were ... those who were trained and prepared to go to Iraq and Afghanistan".
Al-Awlaki's e-mail conversations with Hasan were not released, and he was not placed on the FBI Most Wanted list, indicted for treason, or officially named as a co-conspirator with Hasan. The U.S. government was reluctant to classify the Fort Hood shooting as a terrorist incident, or identify any motive. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2010 that al-Awlaki had not "played a direct role" in any of the attacks, and noted he had never been charged with a crime in the US.
One of his fellow officers at Fort Hood said Hasan was enthusiastic about al-Awlaki. Some investigators believe al-Awlaki's teachings may have been instrumental in Hasan's decision to stage the attack. On his now-disabled website, al-Awlaki praised Hasan's actions, describing him as a hero.
Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber"
According to a number of sources, Al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the convicted al-Qaeda attempted bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on December 25, 2009, had contacts. In January 2010, CNN reported that U.S. "security sources" said that there is concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was Abdulmutallab's recruiter and one of his trainers, and met with him prior to the attack. In February 2010, al-Awlaki admitted in an interview published in al-Jazeera that he taught and corresponded with Abdulmutallab, but denied having ordered the attack.
Representative Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said officials in the Obama administration and officials with access to law enforcement information told him the suspect "may have had contact [with al-Awlaki]".The Sunday Times established that Abdulmutallab first met al-Awlaki in 2005 in Yemen, while he was studying Arabic. During that time the suspect attended lectures by al-Awlaki.NPR reported that according to unnamed U.S. intelligence officials he attended a sermon by al-Awlaki at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, a former trustee of the mosque, expressed "grave misgivings" with regard to its stewardship. A spokesperson of the mosque stated that al-Awlaki had never spoken there or had even to his knowledge entered the building.
Abdulmutallab was also reported by CBS News, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph to have attended a talk by al-Awlaki at the East London Mosque, which al-Awlaki may have attended by video teleconference. The Sunday Telegraph later removed the report from its website following a complaint by the East London Mosque, which stated that "Anwar Al Awlaki did not deliver any talks at the ELM between 2005 and 2008, which is when the newspaper had falsely alleged that Abdullmutallab had attended such talks".
Investigators who searched flats connected to Abdulmutallab in London said that he was a "big fan" of al-Awlaki, as al-Awlaki's blog and website had repeatedly been visited from those locations.
According to federal sources, Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki repeatedly communicated with one another in the year prior to the attack. "Voice-to-voice communication" between the two was intercepted during the fall of 2009, and one government source said al-Awlaki "was in some way involved in facilitating [Abdulmutallab]'s transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things." NPR reported that intelligence officials suspected al-Awlaki may have told Abdulmutallab to go to Yemen for al-Qaeda training.
Abdulmutallab told the FBI that al-Awlaki was one of his al-Qaeda trainers in Yemen. Others reported that Abdulmutallab met with al-Awlaki in the weeks leading up to the attack. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to a U.S. intelligence official, intercepts and other information point to connections between the two:
Some of the information ... comes from Abdulmutallab, who ... said that he met with al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaeda members during an extended trip to Yemen this year and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the attack and in providing religious justification for it. Other intelligence linking the two became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation.
Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs, Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, said Yemeni investigators believe that Abdulmutallab traveled to Shabwa in October 2009. Investigators believe he obtained his explosives and received training there. He met there with al-Qaeda members in a house built by al-Awlaki. A top Yemen government official said the two met with each other.
In January 2010, al-Awlaki acknowledged that he met and spoke with Abdulmutallab in Yemen in the fall of 2009. In an interview, al-Awlaki said: "Umar Farouk is one of my students; I had communications with him. And I support what he did." He also said: "I did not tell him to do this operation, but I support it". Fox News reported in early February 2010 that Abdulmutallab told federal investigators that al-Awlaki directed him to carry out the bombing.
In June 2010 Michael Leiter, the Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said al-Awlaki had a "direct operational role" in the plot.
Sharif Mobley
Sharif Mobley had acknowledged contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. The Mobley family claims the contact was for spiritual guidance in further studies of Islam.
The Mobley family went to Yemen and resided there for several years. They decided to return to the United States and went to the U.S. Embassy to update the family travel documents. While waiting for their travel documents, Sharif Mobley was kidnapped by Yemen Security Services and shot on January 26, 2010. He was then held in Yemen's Central Prison. Mobley disappeared from the Central Prison on February 27, 2014. His current location is known to the U.S. Embassy in Yemen (currently closed 2015) but is withheld from his family and legal advisers based on U.S. State Department Regulations on "U.S. Citizens Missing Abroad".
All charges related to "terrorism/terrorist activity" were dropped by the Yemen government. There are no charges relating to allegations of "killing a guard during an escape attempt from the hospital" and there are no other legal proceedings against him in Yemen.
Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad, convicted of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, told interrogators that he was a "fan and follower" of al-Awlaki, and his writings were one of the inspirations for the attack. On May 6, 2010 ABC News reported that unknown sources told them Shahzad made contact with al-Awlaki over the internet, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Stabbing of British former minister Stephen Timms
Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed former British Cabinet Minister Stephen Timms in May 2010, and was found guilty of his attempted murder in November 2010, claimed to have become radicalized by listening to online sermons of al-Awlaki.
Seattle Weekly cartoonist death threat
In 2010, after Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, cartoonist Molly Norris at Seattle Weekly had to stop publishing, and at the suggestion of the FBI changed her name, moved, and went into hiding due to a fatwā issued by al-Awlaki calling for her death. In the June 2010 issue of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, al-Awlaki cursed her and eight others for "blasphemous caricatures" of Muhammad. "The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved", he wrote. Daniel Pipes observed in an article entitled "Dueling Fatwas", "Awlaki stands at an unprecedented crossroads of death declarations, with his targeting Norris even as the U.S. government targets him."
Cargo planes bomb plotThe Guardian, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph reported that U.S. and British counter-terrorism officials believed that al-Awlaki was behind the cargo plane PETN bombs that were sent from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010.Yemen bomb scare 'mastermind' lived in London | World news. The Guardian. Retrieved on October 1, 2011. When U.S. Homeland Security official John Brennan was asked about al-Awlaki's suspected involvement in the plot, he said: "Anybody associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a subject of concern." U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein said "al-Awlaki was behind the two bombs."
Final years
Al-Awlaki's father, tribe, and supporters denied his alleged associations with Al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism. Al-Awlaki's father proclaimed his son's innocence in an interview with CNN's Paula Newton, saying: "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son. He's not Osama bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not." Responding to a Yemeni official's assertions that his son had taken refuge with al-Qaeda, Nasser said: "He's dead wrong. What do you expect my son to do? There are missiles raining down on the village. He has to hide. But he is not hiding with al-Qaeda; our tribe is protecting him right now."
The Yemeni government attempted to get the tribal leaders to release al-Awlaki to their custody. They promised they would not turn him over to U.S. authorities for questioning. The governor of Shabwa said in January 2010 that al-Awlaki was on the move with members of al-Qaeda, including Fahd al-Quso, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole.
In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship. U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an "imminent threat". Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council. Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare. As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons. The authorization was nevertheless controversial.
By February 4, 2010, the New York Daily News reported that al-Awlaki was "now on a targeting list signed off on by the Obama administration". On April 6, The New York Times reported that President Obama had authorized the killing of al-Awlaki.
The al-Awalik tribe responded: "We warn against cooperating with America to kill Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. We will not stand by idly and watch." Al-Awlaki's tribe wrote that it would "not remain with arms crossed if a hair of Anwar al-Awlaki is touched, or if anyone plots or spies against him. Whoever risks denouncing our son (Awlaki) will be the target of Al-Awalik weapons", and gave warning "against co-operating with the Americans" in the capture or killing of al-Awlaki. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, announced that the Yemeni government had not received any evidence from the US, and that "Anwar al-Awlaki has always been looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist and shouldn't be considered as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism".
In a video clip bearing the imprint of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, issued on April 16 in al-Qaeda's monthly magazine Sada Al-Malahem, al-Awlaki said: "What am I accused of? Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?" In the video he also praises both Abdulmutallab and Hasan, and describes both as his "students".
In late April, Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA) introduced a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to withdraw al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship. By May, U.S. officials believed he had become directly involved in terrorist activities. Former colleague Abdul-Malik said he "is a terrorist, in my book", and advised shops not to carry any of his publications. In an editorial, Investor's Business Daily called al-Awlaki the "world's most dangerous man", and recommended that he be added to the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list, a bounty put on his head, that he be designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, charged with treason, and extradition papers filed with the Yemeni government. IBD criticized the Justice Department for stonewalling Senator Joe Lieberman's security panel's investigation of al-Awlaki's role in the Fort Hood massacre.
On July 16, the U.S. Treasury Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, called him "extraordinarily dangerous", and said al-Awlaki was involved in several organizational aspects of terrorism, including recruiting, training, fundraising, and planning individual attacks.
A few days later, the United Nations Security Council placed al-Awlaki on its UN Security Council Resolution 1267 list of individuals associated with al-Qaeda, describing him as a leader, recruiter, and trainer for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The resolution stipulates that U.N. members must freeze the assets of anyone on the list, and prevent them from travelling or obtaining weapons. The following week, Canadian banks were ordered to seize any assets belonging to al-Awlaki. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's senior counter-terrorism officer Gilles Michaud described him as a "major, major factor in radicalization". In September 2010, Jonathan Evans, the Director General of the United Kingdom's domestic security and counter-intelligence agency (MI5), said that al-Awlaki was the West's Public Enemy No 1.
In October 2010, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) urged YouTube to take down al-Awlaki's videos from its website, saying that by hosting al-Awlaki's messages, "We are facilitating the recruitment of homegrown terror." Pauline Neville-Jones, British security minister, said "These Web sites ... incite cold-blooded murder." YouTube began removing the material in November 2010.
Al-Awlaki was charged in absentia in Sana'a, Yemen, on November 2 with plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. Ali al-Saneaa, the head of the prosecutor's office, announced the charges during the trial of Hisham Assem, who had been accused of killing Jacques Spagnolo, an oil industry worker. He said that al-Awlaki and Assem had been in contact for months, and that al-Awlaki had encouraged Assem to commit terrorism. Al-Awlaki's lawyer said that his client was not connected to Spagnolo's death. On November 6, Yemeni Judge Mohsen Alwan ordered that al-Awlaki be caught "dead or alive".
In his book Ticking Time Bomb: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (2011), former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman described al-Awlaki, Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad, Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, and Pakistani-American Samir Khan as "virtual spiritual sanctioners" who use the internet to offer religious justification for Islamist terrorism.
Lawsuit against the US
In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said:
the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow.
Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010.
On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches.
On May 5, 2011, the United States tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died.
Death
On September 30, 2011, al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Al Jawf Governorate, Yemen, according to U.S. sources, the strike was carried out by Joint Special Operations Command, under the direction of the CIA. A witness said the group had stopped to eat breakfast while traveling to Ma'rib Governorate. The occupants of the vehicle spotted the drone and attempted to flee in the vehicle before Hellfire missiles were fired Yemen's Defense Ministry announced that al-Awlaki had been killed. Also killed was Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia, thought to be behind al-Qaeda's English-language web magazine Inspire. U.S. President Barack Obama said:
The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. He took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans ... and he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda. [The strike] is further proof that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.
Journalist and author Glenn Greenwald argued on Salon.com that killing al-Awlaki violated his First Amendment right of free speech and that doing so outside of a criminal proceeding violated the Constitution's due process clause, specifically citing the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force." He mentioned doubt among Yemeni experts about al-Awlaki's role in al-Qaeda, and called U.S. government accusations against him unverified and lacking in evidence.
In a letter dated May 22, 2013, to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, Patrick J. Leahy, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder wrote that
high-level U.S. government officials [...] concluded that al-Aulaqi posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Before carrying out the operation that killed al-Aulaqi, senior officials also determined, based on a careful evaluation of the circumstances at the time, that it was not feasible to capture al-Aulaqi. In addition, senior officials determined that the operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles, including the cardinal principles of (1) necessity – the requirement that the target have definite military value; (2) distinction – the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted; (3) proportionality – the notion that the anticipated collateral damage of an action cannot be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage; and (4) humanity – a principle that requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering. The operation was also undertaken consistent with Yemeni sovereignty. [...] The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was lawful, it was considered, and it was just.
On April 21, 2014, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the Obama administration must release documents justifying its drone killings of foreigners and Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki. In June 2014, the United States Department of Justice disclosed a 2010 memorandum written by the acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, David J. Barron. The memo stated that Anwar al-Awlaki was a significant threat with an infeasible probability of capture. Barron therefore justified the killing as legal, as "the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process". The New York Times Editorial Board dismissed the memo's rationale for al-Awlaki's killing, saying it "provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care", instead describing it as "a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result." A lawyer for the ACLU described the memo as "disturbing" and "ultimately an argument that the president can order targeted killings of Americans without ever having to account to anyone outside the executive branch."
Legacy
Seth Jones, who as a political scientist specializes in al-Qaida, considers that the continuing relevance of al-Awlaki is due to his fluency in the English language as well as his charisma, precising that "he had a disarming aura and unnerving confidence, with an easy smile and a soothing, eloquent voice. He stood a lanky six feet, one inch tall, weighed 160 pounds, and had a thick black beard, an oversized nose, and wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in a clear, almost hypnotic voice."
Awlaki's videos and writings remain highly popular on the internet, where they continue to be readily accessible. Those who viewed and still view his videos are estimated by journalist Scott Shane to number in the hundreds of thousands, while his father Dr. Nasser Awlaqi says that "five million preaching tapes of Anwar Awlaqi have been sold in the West." And thus, even following his death, Awlaki has continued to inspire his devotees to carry out terrorist attacks, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. According to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), 88 "extremists," 54 in the U.S. and 34 in Europe, have been influenced by Awlaki. Because "his work has inspired countless plots and attacks," CEP has "called on YouTube and other platforms to permanently ban Mr. Awlaki's material, including his early, mainstream lectures."
FOIA documents
During the FBI investigation of the 9/11 attacks, it was discovered that a few of the attackers had attended the mosques in San Diego and Falls Church with which al-Awlaki was associated. Interviews with members of the San Diego mosque showed that Nawaz al-Hazmi, one of the attackers, may have had a private conversation with him. On that basis he was placed under 24-hour surveillance. It was discovered that he regularly patronized prostitutes. It was through FBI interrogation of prostitutes and escort service operators that al-Awlaki was tipped off in 2002 about FBI surveillance. Shortly thereafter, he left the United States.
In January 2013, Fox News announced that FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request showed possible connections between al-Awlaki and the September 11 attackers. According to Judicial Watch, the documents show that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and Las Vegas. Judicial Watch further stated that al-Awlaki "was a central focus of the FBI's investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn't cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance."
When queried by Fox News, the FBI denied having evidence connecting al-Awlaki and the September 11 attacks: "The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents. The FBI and investigating bodies have not found evidence connecting Anwar al-Awlaki and the attack on September 11, 2001. The document referenced does not link Anwar al-Awlaki with any purchase of airline tickets for the hijackers."
Family
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki and Egyptian-born Gihan Mohsen Baker had a son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, born August 26, 1995, in Denver, who was an American citizen. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed on October 14, 2011, in Yemen at the age of 16 in an American drone strike. Nine other people were killed in the same CIA-initiated attack, including a 17-year-old cousin of Abdulrahman. According to his relatives, shortly before his father's death, Abdulrahman had left the family home in Sana'a and travelled to Shabwa in search of his father who was believed to be in hiding in that area (though he was actually hundreds of miles away at the time ). Abdulrahman was sitting in an open-air cafe in Shabwa when killed. According to U.S. officials, the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a mistake; the intended target was an Egyptian, Ibrahim al-Banna, who was not at the targeted location at the time of the attack. Human rights groups have raised questions as to why an American citizen was killed by the United States in a country with which the United States is not officially at war. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was not known to have any independent connection to terrorism.
Nasser al-Awlaki
Nasser al-Awlaki is the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki stated he believed his son had been wrongly accused and was not a member of Al Qaeda. After the deaths of his son and grandson, Nasser in an interview in Time magazine called the killings a crime and condemned U.S. President Obama directly, saying: "I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some, he may be that. To me and my family, he is nothing more than a child killer."
In 2013, Nasser al-Awlaki published an op-ed in The New York Times stating that two years after killing his grandson, the Obama administration still declines to provide an explanation. In 2012, Nasser al-Awlaki filed a lawsuit, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, challenging the constitutionality of the drone killings of his son and grandson. This lawsuit was dismissed in April 2014 by D.C. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
Tariq al-Dahab
Tariq al-Dahab, who led al-Qaeda insurgents in Yemen, was a brother-in-law of al-Awlaki. On February 16, 2012, the terrorist organization stated that he had been killed by agents, although media reports contain speculation that he was killed by his brother in a bloody family feud.
Nawar al-Awlaki
On January 29, 2017, Anwar al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen, was killed in a DEVGRU operation authorized by President Donald Trump."1 US service member killed, 3 wounded in Yemen raid" , WPVI-TV, 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA. January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
Islamic education
Al-Awlaki's Islamic education was primarily informal, and consisted of intermittent months with various scholars reading and contemplating Islamic scholarly works. Despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education, Al-Awlaki made a name for himself as a public speaker who released popular audio recordings.Some Muslim scholars said they did not understand alAwlaki's popularity, because while he spoke fluent English and could therefore reach a large non-Arabic-speaking audience, he lacked formal Islamic training and study.
Ideology
While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004, al-Awlaki was influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, described by The New York Times as an originator of the contemporary "anti-Western Jihadist movement". He read 150 to 200 pages a day of Qutb's works, and described himself as "so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly".
Terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann in 2009 referred to al-Awlaki as "one of the principal jihadi luminaries for would-be homegrown terrorists. His fluency with English, his unabashed advocacy of jihad and mujahideen organizations, and his Web-savvy approach are a powerful combination." He called al-Awlaki's lecture, "Constants on the Path of Jihad", which he says was based on a similar document written by al-Qaeda's founder, the "virtual bible for lone-wolf Muslim extremists". Philip Mudd, formerly of the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI's top intelligence adviser, called him "a magnetic character ... a powerful orator." He attracted young men to his lectures, especially US-based and UK-based Muslims.
U.S. officials and some U.S. media sources called al-Awlaki an Islamic fundamentalist and accused him of encouraging terrorism. According to documents recovered from bin Laden's hideout, the al-Qaeda leader was unsure about al-Awlaki's qualifications.
Works
The Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation said al-Awlaki's ability to write and speak in fluent English enabled him to incite English-speaking Muslims to terrorism. Al-Awlaki notes in 44 Ways to Support Jihad that most reading material on the subject is in Arabic.
Written works
44 Ways to Support Jihad: Essay (January 2009). In it, al-Awlaki states that "The hatred of kuffar is a central element of our military creed" and that all Muslims are obligated to participate in jihad, either by committing the acts themselves or supporting others who do so. He says all Muslims must remain physically fit so as to be prepared for conflict. According to U.S. officials, it is considered a key text for al-Qaeda members.
Al-Awlaki wrote for Jihad Recollections, an English language online publication published by Al-Fursan Media.
Allah is Preparing Us for Victory – short book (2009).
Lectures
Lectures on the book Constants on the Path of Jihad by Yusef al-Ayeri—concerns leaderless jihad.
In 2009, the UK government found 1,910 of his videos had been posted to YouTube. One of them had been viewed 164,420 times.
The Battle of Hearts and Minds The Dust Will Never Settle Down Dreams & Interpretations The Hereafter—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Makkan Period—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Medinan Period—Lecture in 2 Parts—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Lives of the Prophets (AS)—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (RA): His Life & Times—15 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Umar ibn al-Khattāb (RA): His Life & Times—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
25 Promises from Allah to the Believer—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Companions of the Ditch & Lessons from the Life of Musa (AS)—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Remembrance of Allah & the Greatest Ayah—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Stories from Hadith—4 CDs—Center for Islamic Information and Education ("CIIE")
Hellfire & The Day of Judgment—CD—CIIE
Quest for Truth: The Story of Salman Al-Farsi (RA)—CD—CIIE
Trials & Lessons for Muslim Minorities—CD—CIIE
Young Ayesha (RA) & Mothers of the Believers (RA)—CD—CIIE
Understanding the Quran—CD—CIIE
Lessons from the Companions (RA) Living as a Minority—CD—CIIE
Virtues of the Sahabah—video lecture series promoted by the al-Wasatiyyah Foundation
Website
Al-Awlaki maintained a website and blog on which he shared his views. On December 11, 2008, he said Muslims should not seek to "serve in the armies of the disbelievers and fight against his brothers".
In "44 Ways to Support Jihad", posted on his blog in February 2009, al-Awlaki encouraged others to "fight jihad", and explained how to give money to the mujahideen or their families. Al-Awlaki's sermon encourages others to conduct weapons training, and raise children "on the love of Jihad". Also that month, he wrote: "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies." He wrote as well: "We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword, whether the masses like it or not." On July 14, he said that Muslim countries should not offer military assistance to the US. "The blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders ... who sells his religion for a few dollars," he said. In blog post dated July 15, 2009, entitled "Fighting Against Government Armies in the Muslim World", al-Awlaki wrote, "Blessed are those who fight against [American soldiers], and blessed are those shuhada [martyrs] who are killed by them."
In a video posted to the internet on November 8, 2010, al-Awlaki called for Muslims to kill Americans "without hesitation", and overthrow Arab governments that cooperate with the US. "Don't consult with anyone in fighting the Americans, fighting the devil doesn't require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils", al-Awlaki said. That month, Intelligence Research Specialist Kevin Yorke of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division called him "the most dangerous man in the world".
See also
Church Committee
Executive Order 12333
Extrajudicial killing
International counter-terrorism activities of the CIA
Protocol I
References
Further reading
al-Ashanti, AbdulHaq and Sloan, Abu Ameenah AbdurRahman. (2011) A Critique of the Methodology of Anwar al-Awlaki and his Errors in the Fiqh of Jihad. London: Jamiah Media, 2011
External links
Ruling of Judge Bates in Al Aulaqi v Obama
Statements
Interviews
"Exclusive; Ray Suarez: My Post-9/11 Interview With Anwar al-Awlaki", PBS, October 30, 2001
"Al-Jazeera Satellite Network Interview with Yemeni-American Cleric Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki Regarding his Alleged Role in Radicalizing Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan", The NEFA Foundation, December 24, 2009
Media coverage
The imam's very curious story: A skirt-chasing mullah is just one more mystery for the 9/11 panel, Ragavan, Chitra, US News and World Report'', June 13, 2004
DBI.gov
1971 births
2011 deaths
20th-century imams
21st-century imams
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
Al-Qaeda propagandists
Assassinated al-Qaeda leaders
American al-Qaeda members
American expatriates in the United Kingdom
American expatriates in Yemen
American imams
American Islamists
American people of Yemeni descent
Colorado State University alumni
George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development alumni
People associated with the September 11 attacks
People from Las Cruces, New Mexico
San Diego State University alumni
Yemeni imams
Yemeni al-Qaeda members
Yemeni Sunni Muslim scholars of Islam
Yemeni Sunni Muslims
Deaths by drone strikes of the Central Intelligence Agency in Yemen
Islam-related controversies
People designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee
American male criminals
Yemeni criminals
Yemeni Islamists
Yemeni expatriates in the United Kingdom
Shafi'is
American Muslim activists
Assassinated Yemeni people
Yemeni propagandists
United States military killing of American civilians | true | [
"\"Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour...\" (often shortened to \"Anything Can Happen\") is the second physical single, and third overall, by Enter Shikari and the second single to be released from their debut album Take to the Skies. It was released on 18 February 2007 for digital download and on 5 March 2007 on both CD and 7\" vinyl. It is the band's highest charting single, charting at #27 in the UK single chart, and number 1 on the UK indie chart. There are two remixes of the song, Colon Open Bracket Remix and Grayedout Mix. Both are up for download on their official download store.\n\nTrack listing\n\n CD\n \"Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour...\" (Rou, Enter Shikari) - 4:40\n \"Kickin' Back on the Surface of Your Cheek\" (Rou, Enter Shikari) - 3:50\n \"Keep It on Ice\" (Rou) - 2:51\n\n 7\"\n\n \"Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour...\" (Rou, Enter Shikari) - 4:40\n \"Kickin' Back on the Surface of Your Cheek\" (Rou, Enter Shikari) - 3:50\n\nOriginal version\nIn the original version of the song, a sample is heard from the introduction of the popular 1960s TV series Stingray in which the character says \"Anything can happen in the next half hour\". This is, however, not heard in the re-recorded version.\n\nChart performance\n\nPersonnel\n\nEnter Shikari\nRoughton \"Rou\" Reynolds - vocals, electronics\nLiam \"Rory\" Clewlow - guitar\nChris Batten - bass, vocals\nRob Rolfe - drums\nProduction\nEnter Shikari - production\nJohn Mitchell - recording\nBen Humphreys - recording\nMartin Giles - mastering\nKeaton Henson - illustration, design\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Video - \"Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour...\" video.\n Original Video - Original video using the 2004 EP version of the song.\n Stingray Introduction - The phrase can be heard at 0:44\n\n2007 singles\nEnter Shikari songs\nSong articles missing an audio sample\n2007 songs",
"Anything Can Happen is a 1952 comedy-drama film.\n\nAnything Can Happen may also refer to:\n\n Anything Can Happen (album), by Leon Russell, 1994\n \"Anything Can Happen\", a 2019 song by Saint Jhn \n Edhuvum Nadakkum ('Anything Can Happen'), a season of the Tamil TV series Marmadesam\n \"Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour\", or \"Anything Can Happen\", a 2007 song by Enter Shikari\n Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour (EP), 2004\n\nSee also\n \"Anything Could Happen\", a 2012 song by Ellie Goulding \n Anything Might Happen, 1934 British crime film\n Special Effects: Anything Can Happen, a 1996 American documentary film\n \"Anything Can Happen on Halloween\", a song from the 1986 film The Worst Witch \n Anything Can Happen in the Theatre, a musical revue of works by Maury Yeston\n \"The Anything Can Happen Recurrence\", an episode of The Big Bang Theory (season 7)\n The Anupam Kher Show - Kucch Bhi Ho Sakta Hai ('The Anupam Kher Show — Anything Can Happen') an Indian TV show"
] |
[
"Anwar al-Awlaki",
"Lawsuit against the US",
"what was the reason behind the lawsuit?",
"contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list.",
"why was he on the targeted kill list?",
"the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world.",
"what was his argument in the trial?",
"sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be \"targeted for death\".",
"what was the verdict?",
"Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit,",
"what happened after the lawsuit?",
"On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen.",
"did anyone speak at the trial?",
"I don't know.",
"was there any public response to the lawsuit?",
"I don't know.",
"did anything else happen at the lawsuit?",
"On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a \"targeted killing\" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants."
] | C_bfe5daac479f47d7942846e4235d1cca_0 | what members of the US government were involved in the lawsuit? | 9 | What members of the US government were involved in the lawsuit against the US? | Anwar al-Awlaki | In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said: the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow. Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the US Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010. On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the US Constitution committed to the political branches. On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died. CANNOTANSWER | President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates | Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi, al-Awlaqi; ; April 21 or 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded. US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's right to due process, including a trial.
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen. Growing up partially in the United States and partially in Yemen, he attended various universities across the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s while also working as an imam, despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education. Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a university lecturer after a brief stint as a public speaker in the United Kingdom. He was detained by Yemeni authorities in 2006, where he spent 18 months in prison before being released without facing trial. Following his release, Al-Awlaki's message started to become overtly supportive of violence, as he condemned United States foreign policy against Muslims.
The Yemeni government tried him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive". U.S. officials said that in 2009, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda, although they described his role as more "inspirational" than "operational." He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States. In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama due to his alleged terrorist activities. Al-Awlaki's father and civil rights groups challenged the order in court. Al-Awlaki was believed to be in hiding in southeast Yemen in the last years of his life. The U.S. deployed unmanned aircraft (drones) in Yemen to search for and kill him, firing at and failing to kill him at least once; he was successfully killed on September 30, 2011. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed by a CIA-led drone strike in Yemen. His daughter, 8-year old Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed during a raid against Al Qaeda ordered by President Donald Trump in 2017.<ref name="uk.reuters.com">Ghobari, Mohammed and Phil Stewart. "Commando dies in U.S. raid in Yemen, first military op OK'd by Trump", Reuters, January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.</ref> The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki's public statements and videos have been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than before his death.
Early life
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen, while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, was doing graduate work at U.S. universities. His father was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master's degree in agricultural economics at New Mexico State University in 1971, received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska, and worked at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1977. Nasser al-Awlaki served as Agriculture Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. He was also President of Sana'a University. Yemen's prime minister from 2007 to 2011, Ali Mohammed Mujur, was a relative.
The family returned to Yemen in 1978, when al-Awlaki was seven years old. He lived there for 11 years, and studied at Azal Modern School.
Life in the United States 1990–2002
Education
In 1991, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S. to attend college. He earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University (1994), where he was president of the Muslim Student Association.
In 1993, while still a college student in Colorado State's civil engineering program, al-Awlaki visited Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. He spent some time training with the mujahideen who had fought the Soviets. He was depressed by the country's poverty and hunger, and "wouldn't have gone with al-Qaeda," according to friends from Colorado State, who said he was profoundly affected by the trip. Mullah Mohammed Omar did not form the Taliban until 1994. When Al-Awlaki returned to campus, he showed increased interest in religion and politics. Al-Awlaki studied Education Leadership at San Diego State University, but did not complete his degree. He worked on a doctorate in Human Resource Development at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development from January to December 2001.
Time as imam
In 1994, al-Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen, and began service as a part-time imam of the Denver Islamic Society. In 1996, he was chastised by an elder for encouraging a Saudi student to fight in Chechnya against the Russians. He left Denver soon after, moving to San Diego.
From 1996 to 2000, al-Awlaki was imam of the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque in San Diego, California, where he had a following of 200–300 people. U.S. officials later alleged that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, attended his sermons and personally met him during this period. Hazmi later lived in Northern Virginia and attended al-Awlaki's mosque there. The 9/11 Commission Report said that the hijackers "reportedly respected [al-Awlaki] as a religious figure". While in San Diego, al-Awlaki volunteered with youth organizations, fished, discussed his travels with friends, and created a popular and lucrative series of recorded lectures.
In August 1996 and in April 1997, al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego and charged with soliciting prostitutes. The first time, in 1996, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was fined $400 and required to attend informational sessions about AIDS. The second time, in 1997, he pleaded guilty and was fined $240, ordered to perform 12 days of community service, and received three years' probation. From November 2001 to January 2002 the FBI observed him visiting a number of prostitutes, and interviewed them, establishing that he had paid for sex acts. No prosecution was brought.
In 1998 and 1999, he served as vice-president for the Charitable Society for Social Welfare. In 2004, the FBI described this group as a "front organization to funnel money to terrorists". Although the FBI investigated al-Awlaki from June 1999 through March 2000 for possible links to Hamas, the Bin Laden contact Ziyad Khaleel, and a visit by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, it did not find sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution. Al-Awlaki told reporters that he resigned from leading the San Diego mosque "after an uneventful four years," and took a brief sabbatical, traveling overseas to various countries.
In January 2001, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S., settling in the Washington metropolitan area. There, he was imam at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque near Falls Church, Virginia, and his services were attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. He led academic discussions frequented by FBI Director of Counter-Intelligence for the Middle East Gordon M. Snow. Al-Awlaki also served as the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, where he was hired by Esam Omeish. Omeish said in 2004 that he was convinced that al-Awlaki was not involved in terrorism.
His proficiency as a public speaker and command of the English language helped him attract followers who did not speak Arabic. "He was the magic bullet", according to the mosque spokesman Johari Abdul-Malik. "He had everything all in a box." "He had an allure. He was charming."
When police investigating the 9/11 attacks raided the Hamburg apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, they found the telephone number of al-Awlaki among bin al-Shibh's personal contacts. The FBI interviewed al-Awlaki four times in the eight days following the 9/11 attacks. One detective later told the 9/11 Commission he believed al-Awlaki "was at the center of the 9/11 story". And an FBI agent said, "if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been" him, since "someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused". One 9/11 Commission staff member said: "Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something? Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it." A separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks suggested that al-Awlaki may have been connected to the hijackers, according to its director, Eleanor Hill. In 2003, Representative Anna Eshoo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "In my view, he is more than a coincidental figure."
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki suggested in writing on the IslamOnline.net website that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible for the attacks, and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default".
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki was sought in Washington, D.C., by the media to answer questions about Islam, its rituals, and its relation to the attacks. He was interviewed by National Geographic, The New York Times, and other media. Al-Awlaki condemned the attacks. According to an NPR report in 2010, in 2001 al-Awlaki appeared to be a moderate who could "bridge the gap between the United States and the worldwide community of Muslims." The New York Times said at the time that he was "held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West." In 2010, Fox News and the New York Daily News reported that some months after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon employee invited al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary's Office of General Counsel. The U.S. Secretary of the Army had suggested that a moderate Muslim be invited to give a talk.
In 2002, al-Awlaki was the first imam to conduct a prayer service for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association at the U.S. Capitol. That year, Nidal Hasan visited al-Awlaki's mosque for his mother's funeral, at which al-Awlaki presided. In November 2009, Hasan killed 13 and wounded 32 in the Fort Hood shooting. Hasan usually attended a mosque in Maryland closer to where he lived while working at the Walter Reed Medical Center (2003–09).
Later in 2002, al-Awlaki posted an essay in Arabic on the Islam Today website titled "Why Muslims Love Death", lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. He expressed a similar opinion in a speech at a London mosque later that year. By July 2002, al-Awlaki was under investigation in the United States for having received money from the subject of a U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation. His name was added to the list of terrorism suspects.
Passport fraud issues
In June 2002, a Denver federal judge signed an arrest warrant for al-Awlaki for passport fraud. On October 9, the Denver U.S. Attorney's Office filed a motion to dismiss the complaint and vacate the arrest warrant. Prosecutors believed that they lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, according to U.S. Attorney Dave Gaouette, who authorized its withdrawal. Al-Awlaki had listed Yemen rather than the United States as his place of birth on his 1990 application for a U.S. Social Security number, soon after arriving in the US. Al-Awlaki used this documentation to obtain a passport in 1993. He later corrected his place of birth to Las Cruces, New Mexico. "The bizarre thing is if you put Yemen down (on the application), it would be harder to get a Social Security number than to say you are a native-born citizen of Las Cruces", Gaouette said.
Prosecutors could not charge him in October 2002, when he returned from a trip abroad, because a 10-year statute of limitations on lying to the Social Security Administration had expired. According to a 2012 investigative report by Fox News, the arrest warrant for passport fraud was still in effect on the morning of October 10, 2002, when FBI Agent Wade Ammerman ordered al-Awlaki's release. U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and several congressional committees urged FBI Director Robert Mueller to provide an explanation about the bureau's interactions with al-Awlaki, including why he was released from federal custody when there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The motion for rescinding the arrest warrant was approved by a magistrate judge on October 10 and filed on October 11.ABC News reported in 2009 that the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego disagreed with the decision to cancel the warrant. They were monitoring al-Awlaki and wanted to "look at him under a microscope". But U.S. Attorney Gaouette said that no objection had been raised to the rescinding of the warrant during a meeting that included Ray Fournier, the San Diego federal diplomatic security agent whose allegation had set in motion the effort to obtain a warrant. Gaouette said that if al-Awlaki had been convicted at the time, he would have faced about six months in custody.The New York Times suggested later that al-Awlaki had claimed birth in Yemen (his family's place of origin) to qualify for scholarship money granted to foreign citizens. U.S. Congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) wrote in May 2010 that by claiming to be foreign-born, al-Awlaki fraudulently obtained more than $20,000 in scholarship funds reserved for foreign students.
While living in Northern Virginia, al-Awlaki visited Ali al-Timimi, later known as a radical Islamic cleric. Al-Timimi was convicted in 2005 and is now serving a life sentence for leading the Virginia Jihad Network, inciting Muslim followers to fight with the Taliban against the US.
In the United Kingdom 2002–04
Al-Awlaki left the United States before the end of 2002, because of a "climate of fear and intimidation" according to Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.
He lived in the UK for several months, where he gave talks attended by up to 200 people. He urged young Muslim followers: "The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar [disbeliever]. Do not trust them! [Their leaders] are plotting to kill this religion. They're plotting night and day." "He was the main man who translated the jihad into English," said a student who attended his lectures in 2003.
He gave a series of lectures in December 2002 and January 2003 at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque, describing the rewards martyrs (Shahid) receive in paradise (Jannah). He began to gain supporters, particularly among young Muslims, and undertook a lecture tour of England and Scotland in 2002 in conjunction with the Muslim Association of Britain. He also lectured at "ExpoIslamia", an event held by Islamic Forum Europe. At the East London Mosque he told his audience: "A Muslim is a brother of a Muslim... he does not betray him, and he does not hand him over... You don't hand over a Muslim to the enemies."
In Britain's Parliament in 2003, Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, discussed the relationship between al-Awlaki and the Muslim Association of Britain, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front organization founded by Kemal el-Helbawy, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Return to Yemen 2004–11
Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004, where he lived in Shabwah Governorate with his wife and five children. He lectured at Iman University, headed by Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. The latter has been included on the UN 1267 Committee's list of individuals belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda. Al-Zindani denied having any influence over al-Awlaki, or that he had been his "direct teacher". Some believe that the school's curriculum deals mostly, if not exclusively, with radical Islamic studies, and promotes radicalism. American convert John Walker Lindh and other alumni have been associated with terrorist groups.
On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché. He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007. He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention.
His name was on a list of 100 prisoners whose release was sought by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. After 18 months in a Yemeni prison, al-Awlaki was released on December 12, 2007, following the intercession of his tribe. According to a Yemeni security official, he was released because he had repented. He moved to his family home in Saeed, a hamlet in the Shabwa mountains.
Moazzam Begg's Cageprisoners, an organization representing former Guantanamo detainees, campaigned for al-Awlaki's release when he was in prison in Yemen. Al-Awlaki told Begg in an interview shortly after his release that prior to his incarceration in Yemen, he had condemned the 9/11 attacks.
In December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them.
Al-Awlaki provided al-Qaeda members in Yemen with the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis, against the government. The tribal code required it to protect those who seek refuge and assistance. This imperative has greater force when the person is a member of the tribe or a tribesman's friend. The tribe's motto is "We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned." Al-Awlaki also reportedly helped negotiate deals with leaders of other tribes.
Sought by Yemeni authorities who were investigating his al-Qaeda ties, al-Awlaki went into hiding in approximately March 2009, according to his father. By December 2009, al-Awlaki was on the Yemeni government's most-wanted list. He was believed to be hiding in Yemen's Shabwa or Mareb regions, which are part of the so-called "triangle of evil". The area has attracted al-Qaeda militants, who seek refuge among local tribes unhappy with Yemen's central government.
Yemeni sources originally said al-Awlaki might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived. Pravda reported that the planes, using Saudi and U.S. intelligence, killed at least 30 al-Qaeda members from Yemen and abroad, and that an al-Awlaki house was "raided and demolished". On December 28 The Washington Post reported that U.S. and Yemeni officials said that al-Awlaki had been present at the meeting. Abdul Elah al-Shaya, a Yemeni journalist, said al-Awlaki called him on December 28 to report that he was well and had not attended the al-Qaeda meeting. Al-Shaya said that al-Awlaki was not tied to al-Qaeda.
In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence.
Reaching out to the United Kingdom
After 2006, al-Awlaki was banned from entering the United Kingdom. He broadcast lectures to mosques and other venues there via video-link from 2007 to 2009, on at least seven occasions at five locations in Britain. Noor Pro Media Events held a conference at the East London Mosque on January 1, 2009, showing a videotaped lecture by al-Awlaki; former Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve expressed concern over his being featured.
He gave video-link talks in England to an Islamic student society at the University of Westminster in September 2008, an arts center in East London in April 2009 (after the Tower Hamlets council gave its approval), worshippers at the Al Huda Mosque in Bradford, and a dinner of the Cageprisoners organization in September 2008 at the Wandsworth Civic Centre in South London. On August 23, 2009, al-Awlaki was banned by local authorities in Kensington and Chelsea, London, from speaking at Kensington Town Hall via videolink to a fundraiser dinner for Guantanamo detainees promoted by Cageprisoners. His videos, which discuss his Islamist theories, have circulated across the United Kingdom. Until February 2010, hundreds of audio tapes of his sermons were available at the Tower Hamlets public libraries. In 2009, the London-based Islam Channel carried advertisements for his DVDs and at least two of his video conference lectures.
Other connections
FBI agents identified al-Awlaki as a known, important "senior recruiter for al Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator. His name came up in a dozen terrorism plots in the US, UK, and Canada. The cases included suicide bombers in the 2005 London bombings, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2006 Toronto terrorism case, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2007 Fort Dix attack plot, the jihadist killer in the 2009 Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, and the 2010 Times Square bomber. In each case the suspects were devoted to al-Awlaki's message, which they listened to online and on CDs.
Al-Awlaki's recorded lectures were heard by Islamist fundamentalists in at least six terror cells in the UK through 2009. Michael Finton (Talib Islam), who attempted in September 2009 to bomb the Federal Building and the adjacent offices of Congressman Aaron Schock in Springfield, Illinois, admired al-Awlaki and quoted him on his Myspace page. In addition to his website, al-Awlaki had a Facebook fan page with "fans" in the US, many of whom were high school students. Al-Awlaki also set up a website and blog on which he shared his views.
Al-Awlaki influenced several other extremists to join terrorist organizations overseas and to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries. Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte, two American citizens from New Jersey who attempted to travel to Somalia in June 2010 to join the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al Shabaab, allegedly watched several al-Awlaki videos and sermons in which he warned of future attacks against Americans in the United States and abroad. Zachary Chesser, an American citizen who was arrested for attempting to provide material support to Al Shabaab, told federal authorities that he watched online videos featuring al-Awlaki and that he exchanged several e-mails with al-Awlaki. In July 2010, Paul Rockwood was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a list of 15 potential targets in the US, people he felt had desecrated Islam. Rockwood was a devoted follower of al-Awlaki, and had studied his works Constants on the Path to Jihad and 44 Ways to Jihad.
In October 2008, Charles Allen, U.S. Under-Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, warned that al-Awlaki "targets U.S. Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen." Responding to Allen, al-Awlaki wrote on his website in December 2008: "I would challenge him to come up with just one such lecture where I encourage 'terrorist attacks'".
Fort Hood shooter
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009. Even before the contents of the e-mails were revealed, terrorism expert Jarret Brachman said that Hasan's contacts with al-Awlaki should have raised "huge red flags", because of his influence on radical English-speaking jihadis. Charles Allen, no longer in government, noted that there was no work-related reason for Hasan to be in touch with al-Awlaki. Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel opined: "E-mailing a known al-Qaeda sympathizer should have set off alarm bells. Even if he was exchanging recipes, the bureau should have put out an alert." A DC-based Joint Terrorism Task Force operating under the FBI was notified of the e-mails and reviewed the information. Army employees were informed of the e-mails, but they didn't perceive any terrorist threat in Hasan's questions. Instead, they viewed them as general questions about spiritual guidance with regard to conflicts between Islam and military service and judged them to be consistent with legitimate mental health research about Muslims in the armed services. The assessment was that there was not sufficient information for a larger investigation. In one of the e-mails, Hasan wrote al-Awlaki: "I can't wait to join you [in the afterlife]". "It sounds like code words," said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a military analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. "That he's actually either offering himself up, or that he's already crossed that line in his own mind."
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea interviewed al-Awlaki in November 2009. Al-Awlaki acknowledged his correspondence with Hasan. He said he "neither ordered nor pressured ... Hasan to harm Americans." Al-Awlaki said Hasan first e-mailed him December 17, 2008, introducing himself by writing: "Do you remember me? I used to pray with you at the Virginia mosque." Hasan said he had become a devout Muslim around the time al-Awlaki was preaching at Dar al-Hijrah, in 2001 and 2002, and al-Awlaki said 'Maybe Nidal was affected by one of my lectures.'" He added: "It was clear from his e-mails that Nidal trusted me. Nidal told me: 'I speak with you about issues that I never speak with anyone else.'" Al-Awlaki said Hasan arrived at his own conclusions regarding the acceptability of violence in Islam and said he was not the one to initiate this. Shaea said, "Nidal was providing evidence to Anwar, not vice versa."
Asked whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target in his e-mails, Shaea declined to comment. Al-Awlaki said the shooting was acceptable in Islam, however, because it was a form of jihad, as the West began the hostilities with the Muslims. Al-Awlaki said he "blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were ... those who were trained and prepared to go to Iraq and Afghanistan".
Al-Awlaki's e-mail conversations with Hasan were not released, and he was not placed on the FBI Most Wanted list, indicted for treason, or officially named as a co-conspirator with Hasan. The U.S. government was reluctant to classify the Fort Hood shooting as a terrorist incident, or identify any motive. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2010 that al-Awlaki had not "played a direct role" in any of the attacks, and noted he had never been charged with a crime in the US.
One of his fellow officers at Fort Hood said Hasan was enthusiastic about al-Awlaki. Some investigators believe al-Awlaki's teachings may have been instrumental in Hasan's decision to stage the attack. On his now-disabled website, al-Awlaki praised Hasan's actions, describing him as a hero.
Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber"
According to a number of sources, Al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the convicted al-Qaeda attempted bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on December 25, 2009, had contacts. In January 2010, CNN reported that U.S. "security sources" said that there is concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was Abdulmutallab's recruiter and one of his trainers, and met with him prior to the attack. In February 2010, al-Awlaki admitted in an interview published in al-Jazeera that he taught and corresponded with Abdulmutallab, but denied having ordered the attack.
Representative Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said officials in the Obama administration and officials with access to law enforcement information told him the suspect "may have had contact [with al-Awlaki]".The Sunday Times established that Abdulmutallab first met al-Awlaki in 2005 in Yemen, while he was studying Arabic. During that time the suspect attended lectures by al-Awlaki.NPR reported that according to unnamed U.S. intelligence officials he attended a sermon by al-Awlaki at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, a former trustee of the mosque, expressed "grave misgivings" with regard to its stewardship. A spokesperson of the mosque stated that al-Awlaki had never spoken there or had even to his knowledge entered the building.
Abdulmutallab was also reported by CBS News, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph to have attended a talk by al-Awlaki at the East London Mosque, which al-Awlaki may have attended by video teleconference. The Sunday Telegraph later removed the report from its website following a complaint by the East London Mosque, which stated that "Anwar Al Awlaki did not deliver any talks at the ELM between 2005 and 2008, which is when the newspaper had falsely alleged that Abdullmutallab had attended such talks".
Investigators who searched flats connected to Abdulmutallab in London said that he was a "big fan" of al-Awlaki, as al-Awlaki's blog and website had repeatedly been visited from those locations.
According to federal sources, Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki repeatedly communicated with one another in the year prior to the attack. "Voice-to-voice communication" between the two was intercepted during the fall of 2009, and one government source said al-Awlaki "was in some way involved in facilitating [Abdulmutallab]'s transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things." NPR reported that intelligence officials suspected al-Awlaki may have told Abdulmutallab to go to Yemen for al-Qaeda training.
Abdulmutallab told the FBI that al-Awlaki was one of his al-Qaeda trainers in Yemen. Others reported that Abdulmutallab met with al-Awlaki in the weeks leading up to the attack. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to a U.S. intelligence official, intercepts and other information point to connections between the two:
Some of the information ... comes from Abdulmutallab, who ... said that he met with al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaeda members during an extended trip to Yemen this year and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the attack and in providing religious justification for it. Other intelligence linking the two became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation.
Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs, Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, said Yemeni investigators believe that Abdulmutallab traveled to Shabwa in October 2009. Investigators believe he obtained his explosives and received training there. He met there with al-Qaeda members in a house built by al-Awlaki. A top Yemen government official said the two met with each other.
In January 2010, al-Awlaki acknowledged that he met and spoke with Abdulmutallab in Yemen in the fall of 2009. In an interview, al-Awlaki said: "Umar Farouk is one of my students; I had communications with him. And I support what he did." He also said: "I did not tell him to do this operation, but I support it". Fox News reported in early February 2010 that Abdulmutallab told federal investigators that al-Awlaki directed him to carry out the bombing.
In June 2010 Michael Leiter, the Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said al-Awlaki had a "direct operational role" in the plot.
Sharif Mobley
Sharif Mobley had acknowledged contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. The Mobley family claims the contact was for spiritual guidance in further studies of Islam.
The Mobley family went to Yemen and resided there for several years. They decided to return to the United States and went to the U.S. Embassy to update the family travel documents. While waiting for their travel documents, Sharif Mobley was kidnapped by Yemen Security Services and shot on January 26, 2010. He was then held in Yemen's Central Prison. Mobley disappeared from the Central Prison on February 27, 2014. His current location is known to the U.S. Embassy in Yemen (currently closed 2015) but is withheld from his family and legal advisers based on U.S. State Department Regulations on "U.S. Citizens Missing Abroad".
All charges related to "terrorism/terrorist activity" were dropped by the Yemen government. There are no charges relating to allegations of "killing a guard during an escape attempt from the hospital" and there are no other legal proceedings against him in Yemen.
Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad, convicted of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, told interrogators that he was a "fan and follower" of al-Awlaki, and his writings were one of the inspirations for the attack. On May 6, 2010 ABC News reported that unknown sources told them Shahzad made contact with al-Awlaki over the internet, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Stabbing of British former minister Stephen Timms
Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed former British Cabinet Minister Stephen Timms in May 2010, and was found guilty of his attempted murder in November 2010, claimed to have become radicalized by listening to online sermons of al-Awlaki.
Seattle Weekly cartoonist death threat
In 2010, after Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, cartoonist Molly Norris at Seattle Weekly had to stop publishing, and at the suggestion of the FBI changed her name, moved, and went into hiding due to a fatwā issued by al-Awlaki calling for her death. In the June 2010 issue of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, al-Awlaki cursed her and eight others for "blasphemous caricatures" of Muhammad. "The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved", he wrote. Daniel Pipes observed in an article entitled "Dueling Fatwas", "Awlaki stands at an unprecedented crossroads of death declarations, with his targeting Norris even as the U.S. government targets him."
Cargo planes bomb plotThe Guardian, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph reported that U.S. and British counter-terrorism officials believed that al-Awlaki was behind the cargo plane PETN bombs that were sent from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010.Yemen bomb scare 'mastermind' lived in London | World news. The Guardian. Retrieved on October 1, 2011. When U.S. Homeland Security official John Brennan was asked about al-Awlaki's suspected involvement in the plot, he said: "Anybody associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a subject of concern." U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein said "al-Awlaki was behind the two bombs."
Final years
Al-Awlaki's father, tribe, and supporters denied his alleged associations with Al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism. Al-Awlaki's father proclaimed his son's innocence in an interview with CNN's Paula Newton, saying: "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son. He's not Osama bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not." Responding to a Yemeni official's assertions that his son had taken refuge with al-Qaeda, Nasser said: "He's dead wrong. What do you expect my son to do? There are missiles raining down on the village. He has to hide. But he is not hiding with al-Qaeda; our tribe is protecting him right now."
The Yemeni government attempted to get the tribal leaders to release al-Awlaki to their custody. They promised they would not turn him over to U.S. authorities for questioning. The governor of Shabwa said in January 2010 that al-Awlaki was on the move with members of al-Qaeda, including Fahd al-Quso, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole.
In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship. U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an "imminent threat". Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council. Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare. As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons. The authorization was nevertheless controversial.
By February 4, 2010, the New York Daily News reported that al-Awlaki was "now on a targeting list signed off on by the Obama administration". On April 6, The New York Times reported that President Obama had authorized the killing of al-Awlaki.
The al-Awalik tribe responded: "We warn against cooperating with America to kill Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. We will not stand by idly and watch." Al-Awlaki's tribe wrote that it would "not remain with arms crossed if a hair of Anwar al-Awlaki is touched, or if anyone plots or spies against him. Whoever risks denouncing our son (Awlaki) will be the target of Al-Awalik weapons", and gave warning "against co-operating with the Americans" in the capture or killing of al-Awlaki. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, announced that the Yemeni government had not received any evidence from the US, and that "Anwar al-Awlaki has always been looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist and shouldn't be considered as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism".
In a video clip bearing the imprint of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, issued on April 16 in al-Qaeda's monthly magazine Sada Al-Malahem, al-Awlaki said: "What am I accused of? Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?" In the video he also praises both Abdulmutallab and Hasan, and describes both as his "students".
In late April, Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA) introduced a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to withdraw al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship. By May, U.S. officials believed he had become directly involved in terrorist activities. Former colleague Abdul-Malik said he "is a terrorist, in my book", and advised shops not to carry any of his publications. In an editorial, Investor's Business Daily called al-Awlaki the "world's most dangerous man", and recommended that he be added to the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list, a bounty put on his head, that he be designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, charged with treason, and extradition papers filed with the Yemeni government. IBD criticized the Justice Department for stonewalling Senator Joe Lieberman's security panel's investigation of al-Awlaki's role in the Fort Hood massacre.
On July 16, the U.S. Treasury Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, called him "extraordinarily dangerous", and said al-Awlaki was involved in several organizational aspects of terrorism, including recruiting, training, fundraising, and planning individual attacks.
A few days later, the United Nations Security Council placed al-Awlaki on its UN Security Council Resolution 1267 list of individuals associated with al-Qaeda, describing him as a leader, recruiter, and trainer for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The resolution stipulates that U.N. members must freeze the assets of anyone on the list, and prevent them from travelling or obtaining weapons. The following week, Canadian banks were ordered to seize any assets belonging to al-Awlaki. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's senior counter-terrorism officer Gilles Michaud described him as a "major, major factor in radicalization". In September 2010, Jonathan Evans, the Director General of the United Kingdom's domestic security and counter-intelligence agency (MI5), said that al-Awlaki was the West's Public Enemy No 1.
In October 2010, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) urged YouTube to take down al-Awlaki's videos from its website, saying that by hosting al-Awlaki's messages, "We are facilitating the recruitment of homegrown terror." Pauline Neville-Jones, British security minister, said "These Web sites ... incite cold-blooded murder." YouTube began removing the material in November 2010.
Al-Awlaki was charged in absentia in Sana'a, Yemen, on November 2 with plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. Ali al-Saneaa, the head of the prosecutor's office, announced the charges during the trial of Hisham Assem, who had been accused of killing Jacques Spagnolo, an oil industry worker. He said that al-Awlaki and Assem had been in contact for months, and that al-Awlaki had encouraged Assem to commit terrorism. Al-Awlaki's lawyer said that his client was not connected to Spagnolo's death. On November 6, Yemeni Judge Mohsen Alwan ordered that al-Awlaki be caught "dead or alive".
In his book Ticking Time Bomb: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (2011), former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman described al-Awlaki, Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad, Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, and Pakistani-American Samir Khan as "virtual spiritual sanctioners" who use the internet to offer religious justification for Islamist terrorism.
Lawsuit against the US
In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said:
the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow.
Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010.
On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches.
On May 5, 2011, the United States tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died.
Death
On September 30, 2011, al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Al Jawf Governorate, Yemen, according to U.S. sources, the strike was carried out by Joint Special Operations Command, under the direction of the CIA. A witness said the group had stopped to eat breakfast while traveling to Ma'rib Governorate. The occupants of the vehicle spotted the drone and attempted to flee in the vehicle before Hellfire missiles were fired Yemen's Defense Ministry announced that al-Awlaki had been killed. Also killed was Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia, thought to be behind al-Qaeda's English-language web magazine Inspire. U.S. President Barack Obama said:
The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. He took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans ... and he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda. [The strike] is further proof that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.
Journalist and author Glenn Greenwald argued on Salon.com that killing al-Awlaki violated his First Amendment right of free speech and that doing so outside of a criminal proceeding violated the Constitution's due process clause, specifically citing the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force." He mentioned doubt among Yemeni experts about al-Awlaki's role in al-Qaeda, and called U.S. government accusations against him unverified and lacking in evidence.
In a letter dated May 22, 2013, to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, Patrick J. Leahy, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder wrote that
high-level U.S. government officials [...] concluded that al-Aulaqi posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Before carrying out the operation that killed al-Aulaqi, senior officials also determined, based on a careful evaluation of the circumstances at the time, that it was not feasible to capture al-Aulaqi. In addition, senior officials determined that the operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles, including the cardinal principles of (1) necessity – the requirement that the target have definite military value; (2) distinction – the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted; (3) proportionality – the notion that the anticipated collateral damage of an action cannot be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage; and (4) humanity – a principle that requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering. The operation was also undertaken consistent with Yemeni sovereignty. [...] The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was lawful, it was considered, and it was just.
On April 21, 2014, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the Obama administration must release documents justifying its drone killings of foreigners and Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki. In June 2014, the United States Department of Justice disclosed a 2010 memorandum written by the acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, David J. Barron. The memo stated that Anwar al-Awlaki was a significant threat with an infeasible probability of capture. Barron therefore justified the killing as legal, as "the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process". The New York Times Editorial Board dismissed the memo's rationale for al-Awlaki's killing, saying it "provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care", instead describing it as "a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result." A lawyer for the ACLU described the memo as "disturbing" and "ultimately an argument that the president can order targeted killings of Americans without ever having to account to anyone outside the executive branch."
Legacy
Seth Jones, who as a political scientist specializes in al-Qaida, considers that the continuing relevance of al-Awlaki is due to his fluency in the English language as well as his charisma, precising that "he had a disarming aura and unnerving confidence, with an easy smile and a soothing, eloquent voice. He stood a lanky six feet, one inch tall, weighed 160 pounds, and had a thick black beard, an oversized nose, and wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in a clear, almost hypnotic voice."
Awlaki's videos and writings remain highly popular on the internet, where they continue to be readily accessible. Those who viewed and still view his videos are estimated by journalist Scott Shane to number in the hundreds of thousands, while his father Dr. Nasser Awlaqi says that "five million preaching tapes of Anwar Awlaqi have been sold in the West." And thus, even following his death, Awlaki has continued to inspire his devotees to carry out terrorist attacks, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. According to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), 88 "extremists," 54 in the U.S. and 34 in Europe, have been influenced by Awlaki. Because "his work has inspired countless plots and attacks," CEP has "called on YouTube and other platforms to permanently ban Mr. Awlaki's material, including his early, mainstream lectures."
FOIA documents
During the FBI investigation of the 9/11 attacks, it was discovered that a few of the attackers had attended the mosques in San Diego and Falls Church with which al-Awlaki was associated. Interviews with members of the San Diego mosque showed that Nawaz al-Hazmi, one of the attackers, may have had a private conversation with him. On that basis he was placed under 24-hour surveillance. It was discovered that he regularly patronized prostitutes. It was through FBI interrogation of prostitutes and escort service operators that al-Awlaki was tipped off in 2002 about FBI surveillance. Shortly thereafter, he left the United States.
In January 2013, Fox News announced that FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request showed possible connections between al-Awlaki and the September 11 attackers. According to Judicial Watch, the documents show that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and Las Vegas. Judicial Watch further stated that al-Awlaki "was a central focus of the FBI's investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn't cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance."
When queried by Fox News, the FBI denied having evidence connecting al-Awlaki and the September 11 attacks: "The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents. The FBI and investigating bodies have not found evidence connecting Anwar al-Awlaki and the attack on September 11, 2001. The document referenced does not link Anwar al-Awlaki with any purchase of airline tickets for the hijackers."
Family
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki and Egyptian-born Gihan Mohsen Baker had a son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, born August 26, 1995, in Denver, who was an American citizen. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed on October 14, 2011, in Yemen at the age of 16 in an American drone strike. Nine other people were killed in the same CIA-initiated attack, including a 17-year-old cousin of Abdulrahman. According to his relatives, shortly before his father's death, Abdulrahman had left the family home in Sana'a and travelled to Shabwa in search of his father who was believed to be in hiding in that area (though he was actually hundreds of miles away at the time ). Abdulrahman was sitting in an open-air cafe in Shabwa when killed. According to U.S. officials, the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a mistake; the intended target was an Egyptian, Ibrahim al-Banna, who was not at the targeted location at the time of the attack. Human rights groups have raised questions as to why an American citizen was killed by the United States in a country with which the United States is not officially at war. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was not known to have any independent connection to terrorism.
Nasser al-Awlaki
Nasser al-Awlaki is the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki stated he believed his son had been wrongly accused and was not a member of Al Qaeda. After the deaths of his son and grandson, Nasser in an interview in Time magazine called the killings a crime and condemned U.S. President Obama directly, saying: "I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some, he may be that. To me and my family, he is nothing more than a child killer."
In 2013, Nasser al-Awlaki published an op-ed in The New York Times stating that two years after killing his grandson, the Obama administration still declines to provide an explanation. In 2012, Nasser al-Awlaki filed a lawsuit, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, challenging the constitutionality of the drone killings of his son and grandson. This lawsuit was dismissed in April 2014 by D.C. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
Tariq al-Dahab
Tariq al-Dahab, who led al-Qaeda insurgents in Yemen, was a brother-in-law of al-Awlaki. On February 16, 2012, the terrorist organization stated that he had been killed by agents, although media reports contain speculation that he was killed by his brother in a bloody family feud.
Nawar al-Awlaki
On January 29, 2017, Anwar al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen, was killed in a DEVGRU operation authorized by President Donald Trump."1 US service member killed, 3 wounded in Yemen raid" , WPVI-TV, 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA. January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
Islamic education
Al-Awlaki's Islamic education was primarily informal, and consisted of intermittent months with various scholars reading and contemplating Islamic scholarly works. Despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education, Al-Awlaki made a name for himself as a public speaker who released popular audio recordings.Some Muslim scholars said they did not understand alAwlaki's popularity, because while he spoke fluent English and could therefore reach a large non-Arabic-speaking audience, he lacked formal Islamic training and study.
Ideology
While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004, al-Awlaki was influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, described by The New York Times as an originator of the contemporary "anti-Western Jihadist movement". He read 150 to 200 pages a day of Qutb's works, and described himself as "so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly".
Terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann in 2009 referred to al-Awlaki as "one of the principal jihadi luminaries for would-be homegrown terrorists. His fluency with English, his unabashed advocacy of jihad and mujahideen organizations, and his Web-savvy approach are a powerful combination." He called al-Awlaki's lecture, "Constants on the Path of Jihad", which he says was based on a similar document written by al-Qaeda's founder, the "virtual bible for lone-wolf Muslim extremists". Philip Mudd, formerly of the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI's top intelligence adviser, called him "a magnetic character ... a powerful orator." He attracted young men to his lectures, especially US-based and UK-based Muslims.
U.S. officials and some U.S. media sources called al-Awlaki an Islamic fundamentalist and accused him of encouraging terrorism. According to documents recovered from bin Laden's hideout, the al-Qaeda leader was unsure about al-Awlaki's qualifications.
Works
The Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation said al-Awlaki's ability to write and speak in fluent English enabled him to incite English-speaking Muslims to terrorism. Al-Awlaki notes in 44 Ways to Support Jihad that most reading material on the subject is in Arabic.
Written works
44 Ways to Support Jihad: Essay (January 2009). In it, al-Awlaki states that "The hatred of kuffar is a central element of our military creed" and that all Muslims are obligated to participate in jihad, either by committing the acts themselves or supporting others who do so. He says all Muslims must remain physically fit so as to be prepared for conflict. According to U.S. officials, it is considered a key text for al-Qaeda members.
Al-Awlaki wrote for Jihad Recollections, an English language online publication published by Al-Fursan Media.
Allah is Preparing Us for Victory – short book (2009).
Lectures
Lectures on the book Constants on the Path of Jihad by Yusef al-Ayeri—concerns leaderless jihad.
In 2009, the UK government found 1,910 of his videos had been posted to YouTube. One of them had been viewed 164,420 times.
The Battle of Hearts and Minds The Dust Will Never Settle Down Dreams & Interpretations The Hereafter—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Makkan Period—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Medinan Period—Lecture in 2 Parts—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Lives of the Prophets (AS)—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (RA): His Life & Times—15 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Umar ibn al-Khattāb (RA): His Life & Times—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
25 Promises from Allah to the Believer—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Companions of the Ditch & Lessons from the Life of Musa (AS)—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Remembrance of Allah & the Greatest Ayah—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Stories from Hadith—4 CDs—Center for Islamic Information and Education ("CIIE")
Hellfire & The Day of Judgment—CD—CIIE
Quest for Truth: The Story of Salman Al-Farsi (RA)—CD—CIIE
Trials & Lessons for Muslim Minorities—CD—CIIE
Young Ayesha (RA) & Mothers of the Believers (RA)—CD—CIIE
Understanding the Quran—CD—CIIE
Lessons from the Companions (RA) Living as a Minority—CD—CIIE
Virtues of the Sahabah—video lecture series promoted by the al-Wasatiyyah Foundation
Website
Al-Awlaki maintained a website and blog on which he shared his views. On December 11, 2008, he said Muslims should not seek to "serve in the armies of the disbelievers and fight against his brothers".
In "44 Ways to Support Jihad", posted on his blog in February 2009, al-Awlaki encouraged others to "fight jihad", and explained how to give money to the mujahideen or their families. Al-Awlaki's sermon encourages others to conduct weapons training, and raise children "on the love of Jihad". Also that month, he wrote: "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies." He wrote as well: "We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword, whether the masses like it or not." On July 14, he said that Muslim countries should not offer military assistance to the US. "The blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders ... who sells his religion for a few dollars," he said. In blog post dated July 15, 2009, entitled "Fighting Against Government Armies in the Muslim World", al-Awlaki wrote, "Blessed are those who fight against [American soldiers], and blessed are those shuhada [martyrs] who are killed by them."
In a video posted to the internet on November 8, 2010, al-Awlaki called for Muslims to kill Americans "without hesitation", and overthrow Arab governments that cooperate with the US. "Don't consult with anyone in fighting the Americans, fighting the devil doesn't require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils", al-Awlaki said. That month, Intelligence Research Specialist Kevin Yorke of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division called him "the most dangerous man in the world".
See also
Church Committee
Executive Order 12333
Extrajudicial killing
International counter-terrorism activities of the CIA
Protocol I
References
Further reading
al-Ashanti, AbdulHaq and Sloan, Abu Ameenah AbdurRahman. (2011) A Critique of the Methodology of Anwar al-Awlaki and his Errors in the Fiqh of Jihad. London: Jamiah Media, 2011
External links
Ruling of Judge Bates in Al Aulaqi v Obama
Statements
Interviews
"Exclusive; Ray Suarez: My Post-9/11 Interview With Anwar al-Awlaki", PBS, October 30, 2001
"Al-Jazeera Satellite Network Interview with Yemeni-American Cleric Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki Regarding his Alleged Role in Radicalizing Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan", The NEFA Foundation, December 24, 2009
Media coverage
The imam's very curious story: A skirt-chasing mullah is just one more mystery for the 9/11 panel, Ragavan, Chitra, US News and World Report'', June 13, 2004
DBI.gov
1971 births
2011 deaths
20th-century imams
21st-century imams
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
Al-Qaeda propagandists
Assassinated al-Qaeda leaders
American al-Qaeda members
American expatriates in the United Kingdom
American expatriates in Yemen
American imams
American Islamists
American people of Yemeni descent
Colorado State University alumni
George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development alumni
People associated with the September 11 attacks
People from Las Cruces, New Mexico
San Diego State University alumni
Yemeni imams
Yemeni al-Qaeda members
Yemeni Sunni Muslim scholars of Islam
Yemeni Sunni Muslims
Deaths by drone strikes of the Central Intelligence Agency in Yemen
Islam-related controversies
People designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee
American male criminals
Yemeni criminals
Yemeni Islamists
Yemeni expatriates in the United Kingdom
Shafi'is
American Muslim activists
Assassinated Yemeni people
Yemeni propagandists
United States military killing of American civilians | true | [
"Alfred A. Green (24 February 1828 – 3 March 1899) was a Canadian–born political and civic figure in nineteenth–century California. He also served in the Mexican–American War.\n\nSee also: Merced Manor, San Francisco\n\nBiography\nAlfred A. Green was born in Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada. He served in the California legislature and during the Mexican–American War served in the US Army. He came to San Francisco as a member of Colonel Stevenson's regiment In 1847. He was a member of The Society of California Pioneers. Green was instrumental in defeating several fraudulent land grants in early San Francisco. In 1853 he served as a member of the Sonoma Town Council.\n\nIn 1862 he was living on Montgomery Street (between Pacific Street and Broadway Street) with his brother Benjamin S. Green according to the San Francisco Directory.\n\nGreen was involved in a lawsuit with the Mexican government regarding the San Rafael de la Zanja land grant (around 20,000 acres in what is now the US state of Arizona) in the late 1880s.\n\nHe died in San Francisco on 3 March 1899, of stomach cancer.\n\nBibliography\n Life and Adventures of a 47er of California, 1878, California\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican military personnel of the Mexican–American War\nMembers of the California State Legislature\nPeople from Miramichi, New Brunswick\n1899 deaths\n1828 births\n19th-century American politicians",
"The Academic and Research Network of Slovenia () is a public institute in Slovenia, established in May 1992. Its main task is development, operation and management of the communication and information network for education and research. ARNES also operates the Slovenian Internet Exchange.\n\nThe members of its management board are appointed by the Government of Slovenia.\n\nAlso a part of ARNES, is SI-CERT, the Slovenian Computer Emergency Response Team. It was established in 1994 and has been led by Gorazd Božič. SI-CERT was involved in the take-down of the recordings of the Government of Slovenia's closed session recordings leaked in December 2011 on YouTube. The recordings were taken down by YouTube after the copyright-related lawsuit threat by SI-CERT. It has not been involved in the investigation of the leak.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n ARNES\n\nComputer security organizations\nEducation in Slovenia\nInformation technology institutes\nInternet service providers of Slovenia\nInternet in Slovenia\nNational research and education networks\nOrganizations based in Ljubljana\nOrganizations established in 1992\nTelecommunications in Slovenia"
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[
"Anwar al-Awlaki",
"Lawsuit against the US",
"what was the reason behind the lawsuit?",
"contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list.",
"why was he on the targeted kill list?",
"the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world.",
"what was his argument in the trial?",
"sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be \"targeted for death\".",
"what was the verdict?",
"Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit,",
"what happened after the lawsuit?",
"On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen.",
"did anyone speak at the trial?",
"I don't know.",
"was there any public response to the lawsuit?",
"I don't know.",
"did anything else happen at the lawsuit?",
"On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a \"targeted killing\" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants.",
"what members of the US government were involved in the lawsuit?",
"President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates"
] | C_bfe5daac479f47d7942846e4235d1cca_0 | did the media report on the lawsuit? | 10 | Did the media report on the lawsuit against the US? | Anwar al-Awlaki | In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said: the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow. Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the US Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010. On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which US citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the US Constitution committed to the political branches. On May 5, 2011, the US tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi, al-Awlaqi; ; April 21 or 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded. US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's right to due process, including a trial.
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen. Growing up partially in the United States and partially in Yemen, he attended various universities across the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s while also working as an imam, despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education. Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a university lecturer after a brief stint as a public speaker in the United Kingdom. He was detained by Yemeni authorities in 2006, where he spent 18 months in prison before being released without facing trial. Following his release, Al-Awlaki's message started to become overtly supportive of violence, as he condemned United States foreign policy against Muslims.
The Yemeni government tried him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive". U.S. officials said that in 2009, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda, although they described his role as more "inspirational" than "operational." He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States. In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama due to his alleged terrorist activities. Al-Awlaki's father and civil rights groups challenged the order in court. Al-Awlaki was believed to be in hiding in southeast Yemen in the last years of his life. The U.S. deployed unmanned aircraft (drones) in Yemen to search for and kill him, firing at and failing to kill him at least once; he was successfully killed on September 30, 2011. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed by a CIA-led drone strike in Yemen. His daughter, 8-year old Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed during a raid against Al Qaeda ordered by President Donald Trump in 2017.<ref name="uk.reuters.com">Ghobari, Mohammed and Phil Stewart. "Commando dies in U.S. raid in Yemen, first military op OK'd by Trump", Reuters, January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.</ref> The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki's public statements and videos have been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than before his death.
Early life
Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen, while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, was doing graduate work at U.S. universities. His father was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master's degree in agricultural economics at New Mexico State University in 1971, received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska, and worked at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1977. Nasser al-Awlaki served as Agriculture Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. He was also President of Sana'a University. Yemen's prime minister from 2007 to 2011, Ali Mohammed Mujur, was a relative.
The family returned to Yemen in 1978, when al-Awlaki was seven years old. He lived there for 11 years, and studied at Azal Modern School.
Life in the United States 1990–2002
Education
In 1991, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S. to attend college. He earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University (1994), where he was president of the Muslim Student Association.
In 1993, while still a college student in Colorado State's civil engineering program, al-Awlaki visited Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. He spent some time training with the mujahideen who had fought the Soviets. He was depressed by the country's poverty and hunger, and "wouldn't have gone with al-Qaeda," according to friends from Colorado State, who said he was profoundly affected by the trip. Mullah Mohammed Omar did not form the Taliban until 1994. When Al-Awlaki returned to campus, he showed increased interest in religion and politics. Al-Awlaki studied Education Leadership at San Diego State University, but did not complete his degree. He worked on a doctorate in Human Resource Development at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development from January to December 2001.
Time as imam
In 1994, al-Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen, and began service as a part-time imam of the Denver Islamic Society. In 1996, he was chastised by an elder for encouraging a Saudi student to fight in Chechnya against the Russians. He left Denver soon after, moving to San Diego.
From 1996 to 2000, al-Awlaki was imam of the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque in San Diego, California, where he had a following of 200–300 people. U.S. officials later alleged that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, attended his sermons and personally met him during this period. Hazmi later lived in Northern Virginia and attended al-Awlaki's mosque there. The 9/11 Commission Report said that the hijackers "reportedly respected [al-Awlaki] as a religious figure". While in San Diego, al-Awlaki volunteered with youth organizations, fished, discussed his travels with friends, and created a popular and lucrative series of recorded lectures.
In August 1996 and in April 1997, al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego and charged with soliciting prostitutes. The first time, in 1996, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was fined $400 and required to attend informational sessions about AIDS. The second time, in 1997, he pleaded guilty and was fined $240, ordered to perform 12 days of community service, and received three years' probation. From November 2001 to January 2002 the FBI observed him visiting a number of prostitutes, and interviewed them, establishing that he had paid for sex acts. No prosecution was brought.
In 1998 and 1999, he served as vice-president for the Charitable Society for Social Welfare. In 2004, the FBI described this group as a "front organization to funnel money to terrorists". Although the FBI investigated al-Awlaki from June 1999 through March 2000 for possible links to Hamas, the Bin Laden contact Ziyad Khaleel, and a visit by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, it did not find sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution. Al-Awlaki told reporters that he resigned from leading the San Diego mosque "after an uneventful four years," and took a brief sabbatical, traveling overseas to various countries.
In January 2001, al-Awlaki returned to the U.S., settling in the Washington metropolitan area. There, he was imam at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque near Falls Church, Virginia, and his services were attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. He led academic discussions frequented by FBI Director of Counter-Intelligence for the Middle East Gordon M. Snow. Al-Awlaki also served as the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, where he was hired by Esam Omeish. Omeish said in 2004 that he was convinced that al-Awlaki was not involved in terrorism.
His proficiency as a public speaker and command of the English language helped him attract followers who did not speak Arabic. "He was the magic bullet", according to the mosque spokesman Johari Abdul-Malik. "He had everything all in a box." "He had an allure. He was charming."
When police investigating the 9/11 attacks raided the Hamburg apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, they found the telephone number of al-Awlaki among bin al-Shibh's personal contacts. The FBI interviewed al-Awlaki four times in the eight days following the 9/11 attacks. One detective later told the 9/11 Commission he believed al-Awlaki "was at the center of the 9/11 story". And an FBI agent said, "if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been" him, since "someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused". One 9/11 Commission staff member said: "Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something? Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it." A separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks suggested that al-Awlaki may have been connected to the hijackers, according to its director, Eleanor Hill. In 2003, Representative Anna Eshoo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "In my view, he is more than a coincidental figure."
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki suggested in writing on the IslamOnline.net website that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible for the attacks, and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default".
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki was sought in Washington, D.C., by the media to answer questions about Islam, its rituals, and its relation to the attacks. He was interviewed by National Geographic, The New York Times, and other media. Al-Awlaki condemned the attacks. According to an NPR report in 2010, in 2001 al-Awlaki appeared to be a moderate who could "bridge the gap between the United States and the worldwide community of Muslims." The New York Times said at the time that he was "held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West." In 2010, Fox News and the New York Daily News reported that some months after the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon employee invited al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary's Office of General Counsel. The U.S. Secretary of the Army had suggested that a moderate Muslim be invited to give a talk.
In 2002, al-Awlaki was the first imam to conduct a prayer service for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association at the U.S. Capitol. That year, Nidal Hasan visited al-Awlaki's mosque for his mother's funeral, at which al-Awlaki presided. In November 2009, Hasan killed 13 and wounded 32 in the Fort Hood shooting. Hasan usually attended a mosque in Maryland closer to where he lived while working at the Walter Reed Medical Center (2003–09).
Later in 2002, al-Awlaki posted an essay in Arabic on the Islam Today website titled "Why Muslims Love Death", lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. He expressed a similar opinion in a speech at a London mosque later that year. By July 2002, al-Awlaki was under investigation in the United States for having received money from the subject of a U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation. His name was added to the list of terrorism suspects.
Passport fraud issues
In June 2002, a Denver federal judge signed an arrest warrant for al-Awlaki for passport fraud. On October 9, the Denver U.S. Attorney's Office filed a motion to dismiss the complaint and vacate the arrest warrant. Prosecutors believed that they lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, according to U.S. Attorney Dave Gaouette, who authorized its withdrawal. Al-Awlaki had listed Yemen rather than the United States as his place of birth on his 1990 application for a U.S. Social Security number, soon after arriving in the US. Al-Awlaki used this documentation to obtain a passport in 1993. He later corrected his place of birth to Las Cruces, New Mexico. "The bizarre thing is if you put Yemen down (on the application), it would be harder to get a Social Security number than to say you are a native-born citizen of Las Cruces", Gaouette said.
Prosecutors could not charge him in October 2002, when he returned from a trip abroad, because a 10-year statute of limitations on lying to the Social Security Administration had expired. According to a 2012 investigative report by Fox News, the arrest warrant for passport fraud was still in effect on the morning of October 10, 2002, when FBI Agent Wade Ammerman ordered al-Awlaki's release. U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and several congressional committees urged FBI Director Robert Mueller to provide an explanation about the bureau's interactions with al-Awlaki, including why he was released from federal custody when there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The motion for rescinding the arrest warrant was approved by a magistrate judge on October 10 and filed on October 11.ABC News reported in 2009 that the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego disagreed with the decision to cancel the warrant. They were monitoring al-Awlaki and wanted to "look at him under a microscope". But U.S. Attorney Gaouette said that no objection had been raised to the rescinding of the warrant during a meeting that included Ray Fournier, the San Diego federal diplomatic security agent whose allegation had set in motion the effort to obtain a warrant. Gaouette said that if al-Awlaki had been convicted at the time, he would have faced about six months in custody.The New York Times suggested later that al-Awlaki had claimed birth in Yemen (his family's place of origin) to qualify for scholarship money granted to foreign citizens. U.S. Congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) wrote in May 2010 that by claiming to be foreign-born, al-Awlaki fraudulently obtained more than $20,000 in scholarship funds reserved for foreign students.
While living in Northern Virginia, al-Awlaki visited Ali al-Timimi, later known as a radical Islamic cleric. Al-Timimi was convicted in 2005 and is now serving a life sentence for leading the Virginia Jihad Network, inciting Muslim followers to fight with the Taliban against the US.
In the United Kingdom 2002–04
Al-Awlaki left the United States before the end of 2002, because of a "climate of fear and intimidation" according to Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.
He lived in the UK for several months, where he gave talks attended by up to 200 people. He urged young Muslim followers: "The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar [disbeliever]. Do not trust them! [Their leaders] are plotting to kill this religion. They're plotting night and day." "He was the main man who translated the jihad into English," said a student who attended his lectures in 2003.
He gave a series of lectures in December 2002 and January 2003 at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque, describing the rewards martyrs (Shahid) receive in paradise (Jannah). He began to gain supporters, particularly among young Muslims, and undertook a lecture tour of England and Scotland in 2002 in conjunction with the Muslim Association of Britain. He also lectured at "ExpoIslamia", an event held by Islamic Forum Europe. At the East London Mosque he told his audience: "A Muslim is a brother of a Muslim... he does not betray him, and he does not hand him over... You don't hand over a Muslim to the enemies."
In Britain's Parliament in 2003, Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, discussed the relationship between al-Awlaki and the Muslim Association of Britain, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front organization founded by Kemal el-Helbawy, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Return to Yemen 2004–11
Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004, where he lived in Shabwah Governorate with his wife and five children. He lectured at Iman University, headed by Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. The latter has been included on the UN 1267 Committee's list of individuals belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda. Al-Zindani denied having any influence over al-Awlaki, or that he had been his "direct teacher". Some believe that the school's curriculum deals mostly, if not exclusively, with radical Islamic studies, and promotes radicalism. American convert John Walker Lindh and other alumni have been associated with terrorist groups.
On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché. He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007. He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention.
His name was on a list of 100 prisoners whose release was sought by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen. After 18 months in a Yemeni prison, al-Awlaki was released on December 12, 2007, following the intercession of his tribe. According to a Yemeni security official, he was released because he had repented. He moved to his family home in Saeed, a hamlet in the Shabwa mountains.
Moazzam Begg's Cageprisoners, an organization representing former Guantanamo detainees, campaigned for al-Awlaki's release when he was in prison in Yemen. Al-Awlaki told Begg in an interview shortly after his release that prior to his incarceration in Yemen, he had condemned the 9/11 attacks.
In December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them.
Al-Awlaki provided al-Qaeda members in Yemen with the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis, against the government. The tribal code required it to protect those who seek refuge and assistance. This imperative has greater force when the person is a member of the tribe or a tribesman's friend. The tribe's motto is "We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned." Al-Awlaki also reportedly helped negotiate deals with leaders of other tribes.
Sought by Yemeni authorities who were investigating his al-Qaeda ties, al-Awlaki went into hiding in approximately March 2009, according to his father. By December 2009, al-Awlaki was on the Yemeni government's most-wanted list. He was believed to be hiding in Yemen's Shabwa or Mareb regions, which are part of the so-called "triangle of evil". The area has attracted al-Qaeda militants, who seek refuge among local tribes unhappy with Yemen's central government.
Yemeni sources originally said al-Awlaki might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived. Pravda reported that the planes, using Saudi and U.S. intelligence, killed at least 30 al-Qaeda members from Yemen and abroad, and that an al-Awlaki house was "raided and demolished". On December 28 The Washington Post reported that U.S. and Yemeni officials said that al-Awlaki had been present at the meeting. Abdul Elah al-Shaya, a Yemeni journalist, said al-Awlaki called him on December 28 to report that he was well and had not attended the al-Qaeda meeting. Al-Shaya said that al-Awlaki was not tied to al-Qaeda.
In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence.
Reaching out to the United Kingdom
After 2006, al-Awlaki was banned from entering the United Kingdom. He broadcast lectures to mosques and other venues there via video-link from 2007 to 2009, on at least seven occasions at five locations in Britain. Noor Pro Media Events held a conference at the East London Mosque on January 1, 2009, showing a videotaped lecture by al-Awlaki; former Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve expressed concern over his being featured.
He gave video-link talks in England to an Islamic student society at the University of Westminster in September 2008, an arts center in East London in April 2009 (after the Tower Hamlets council gave its approval), worshippers at the Al Huda Mosque in Bradford, and a dinner of the Cageprisoners organization in September 2008 at the Wandsworth Civic Centre in South London. On August 23, 2009, al-Awlaki was banned by local authorities in Kensington and Chelsea, London, from speaking at Kensington Town Hall via videolink to a fundraiser dinner for Guantanamo detainees promoted by Cageprisoners. His videos, which discuss his Islamist theories, have circulated across the United Kingdom. Until February 2010, hundreds of audio tapes of his sermons were available at the Tower Hamlets public libraries. In 2009, the London-based Islam Channel carried advertisements for his DVDs and at least two of his video conference lectures.
Other connections
FBI agents identified al-Awlaki as a known, important "senior recruiter for al Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator. His name came up in a dozen terrorism plots in the US, UK, and Canada. The cases included suicide bombers in the 2005 London bombings, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2006 Toronto terrorism case, radical Islamic terrorists in the 2007 Fort Dix attack plot, the jihadist killer in the 2009 Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, and the 2010 Times Square bomber. In each case the suspects were devoted to al-Awlaki's message, which they listened to online and on CDs.
Al-Awlaki's recorded lectures were heard by Islamist fundamentalists in at least six terror cells in the UK through 2009. Michael Finton (Talib Islam), who attempted in September 2009 to bomb the Federal Building and the adjacent offices of Congressman Aaron Schock in Springfield, Illinois, admired al-Awlaki and quoted him on his Myspace page. In addition to his website, al-Awlaki had a Facebook fan page with "fans" in the US, many of whom were high school students. Al-Awlaki also set up a website and blog on which he shared his views.
Al-Awlaki influenced several other extremists to join terrorist organizations overseas and to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries. Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte, two American citizens from New Jersey who attempted to travel to Somalia in June 2010 to join the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al Shabaab, allegedly watched several al-Awlaki videos and sermons in which he warned of future attacks against Americans in the United States and abroad. Zachary Chesser, an American citizen who was arrested for attempting to provide material support to Al Shabaab, told federal authorities that he watched online videos featuring al-Awlaki and that he exchanged several e-mails with al-Awlaki. In July 2010, Paul Rockwood was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a list of 15 potential targets in the US, people he felt had desecrated Islam. Rockwood was a devoted follower of al-Awlaki, and had studied his works Constants on the Path to Jihad and 44 Ways to Jihad.
In October 2008, Charles Allen, U.S. Under-Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, warned that al-Awlaki "targets U.S. Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen." Responding to Allen, al-Awlaki wrote on his website in December 2008: "I would challenge him to come up with just one such lecture where I encourage 'terrorist attacks'".
Fort Hood shooter
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009. Even before the contents of the e-mails were revealed, terrorism expert Jarret Brachman said that Hasan's contacts with al-Awlaki should have raised "huge red flags", because of his influence on radical English-speaking jihadis. Charles Allen, no longer in government, noted that there was no work-related reason for Hasan to be in touch with al-Awlaki. Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel opined: "E-mailing a known al-Qaeda sympathizer should have set off alarm bells. Even if he was exchanging recipes, the bureau should have put out an alert." A DC-based Joint Terrorism Task Force operating under the FBI was notified of the e-mails and reviewed the information. Army employees were informed of the e-mails, but they didn't perceive any terrorist threat in Hasan's questions. Instead, they viewed them as general questions about spiritual guidance with regard to conflicts between Islam and military service and judged them to be consistent with legitimate mental health research about Muslims in the armed services. The assessment was that there was not sufficient information for a larger investigation. In one of the e-mails, Hasan wrote al-Awlaki: "I can't wait to join you [in the afterlife]". "It sounds like code words," said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a military analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. "That he's actually either offering himself up, or that he's already crossed that line in his own mind."
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea interviewed al-Awlaki in November 2009. Al-Awlaki acknowledged his correspondence with Hasan. He said he "neither ordered nor pressured ... Hasan to harm Americans." Al-Awlaki said Hasan first e-mailed him December 17, 2008, introducing himself by writing: "Do you remember me? I used to pray with you at the Virginia mosque." Hasan said he had become a devout Muslim around the time al-Awlaki was preaching at Dar al-Hijrah, in 2001 and 2002, and al-Awlaki said 'Maybe Nidal was affected by one of my lectures.'" He added: "It was clear from his e-mails that Nidal trusted me. Nidal told me: 'I speak with you about issues that I never speak with anyone else.'" Al-Awlaki said Hasan arrived at his own conclusions regarding the acceptability of violence in Islam and said he was not the one to initiate this. Shaea said, "Nidal was providing evidence to Anwar, not vice versa."
Asked whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target in his e-mails, Shaea declined to comment. Al-Awlaki said the shooting was acceptable in Islam, however, because it was a form of jihad, as the West began the hostilities with the Muslims. Al-Awlaki said he "blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were ... those who were trained and prepared to go to Iraq and Afghanistan".
Al-Awlaki's e-mail conversations with Hasan were not released, and he was not placed on the FBI Most Wanted list, indicted for treason, or officially named as a co-conspirator with Hasan. The U.S. government was reluctant to classify the Fort Hood shooting as a terrorist incident, or identify any motive. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2010 that al-Awlaki had not "played a direct role" in any of the attacks, and noted he had never been charged with a crime in the US.
One of his fellow officers at Fort Hood said Hasan was enthusiastic about al-Awlaki. Some investigators believe al-Awlaki's teachings may have been instrumental in Hasan's decision to stage the attack. On his now-disabled website, al-Awlaki praised Hasan's actions, describing him as a hero.
Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber"
According to a number of sources, Al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the convicted al-Qaeda attempted bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on December 25, 2009, had contacts. In January 2010, CNN reported that U.S. "security sources" said that there is concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was Abdulmutallab's recruiter and one of his trainers, and met with him prior to the attack. In February 2010, al-Awlaki admitted in an interview published in al-Jazeera that he taught and corresponded with Abdulmutallab, but denied having ordered the attack.
Representative Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said officials in the Obama administration and officials with access to law enforcement information told him the suspect "may have had contact [with al-Awlaki]".The Sunday Times established that Abdulmutallab first met al-Awlaki in 2005 in Yemen, while he was studying Arabic. During that time the suspect attended lectures by al-Awlaki.NPR reported that according to unnamed U.S. intelligence officials he attended a sermon by al-Awlaki at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, a former trustee of the mosque, expressed "grave misgivings" with regard to its stewardship. A spokesperson of the mosque stated that al-Awlaki had never spoken there or had even to his knowledge entered the building.
Abdulmutallab was also reported by CBS News, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph to have attended a talk by al-Awlaki at the East London Mosque, which al-Awlaki may have attended by video teleconference. The Sunday Telegraph later removed the report from its website following a complaint by the East London Mosque, which stated that "Anwar Al Awlaki did not deliver any talks at the ELM between 2005 and 2008, which is when the newspaper had falsely alleged that Abdullmutallab had attended such talks".
Investigators who searched flats connected to Abdulmutallab in London said that he was a "big fan" of al-Awlaki, as al-Awlaki's blog and website had repeatedly been visited from those locations.
According to federal sources, Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki repeatedly communicated with one another in the year prior to the attack. "Voice-to-voice communication" between the two was intercepted during the fall of 2009, and one government source said al-Awlaki "was in some way involved in facilitating [Abdulmutallab]'s transportation or trip through Yemen. It could be training, a host of things." NPR reported that intelligence officials suspected al-Awlaki may have told Abdulmutallab to go to Yemen for al-Qaeda training.
Abdulmutallab told the FBI that al-Awlaki was one of his al-Qaeda trainers in Yemen. Others reported that Abdulmutallab met with al-Awlaki in the weeks leading up to the attack. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to a U.S. intelligence official, intercepts and other information point to connections between the two:
Some of the information ... comes from Abdulmutallab, who ... said that he met with al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaeda members during an extended trip to Yemen this year and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the attack and in providing religious justification for it. Other intelligence linking the two became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation.
Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs, Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, said Yemeni investigators believe that Abdulmutallab traveled to Shabwa in October 2009. Investigators believe he obtained his explosives and received training there. He met there with al-Qaeda members in a house built by al-Awlaki. A top Yemen government official said the two met with each other.
In January 2010, al-Awlaki acknowledged that he met and spoke with Abdulmutallab in Yemen in the fall of 2009. In an interview, al-Awlaki said: "Umar Farouk is one of my students; I had communications with him. And I support what he did." He also said: "I did not tell him to do this operation, but I support it". Fox News reported in early February 2010 that Abdulmutallab told federal investigators that al-Awlaki directed him to carry out the bombing.
In June 2010 Michael Leiter, the Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said al-Awlaki had a "direct operational role" in the plot.
Sharif Mobley
Sharif Mobley had acknowledged contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. The Mobley family claims the contact was for spiritual guidance in further studies of Islam.
The Mobley family went to Yemen and resided there for several years. They decided to return to the United States and went to the U.S. Embassy to update the family travel documents. While waiting for their travel documents, Sharif Mobley was kidnapped by Yemen Security Services and shot on January 26, 2010. He was then held in Yemen's Central Prison. Mobley disappeared from the Central Prison on February 27, 2014. His current location is known to the U.S. Embassy in Yemen (currently closed 2015) but is withheld from his family and legal advisers based on U.S. State Department Regulations on "U.S. Citizens Missing Abroad".
All charges related to "terrorism/terrorist activity" were dropped by the Yemen government. There are no charges relating to allegations of "killing a guard during an escape attempt from the hospital" and there are no other legal proceedings against him in Yemen.
Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad, convicted of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, told interrogators that he was a "fan and follower" of al-Awlaki, and his writings were one of the inspirations for the attack. On May 6, 2010 ABC News reported that unknown sources told them Shahzad made contact with al-Awlaki over the internet, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Stabbing of British former minister Stephen Timms
Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed former British Cabinet Minister Stephen Timms in May 2010, and was found guilty of his attempted murder in November 2010, claimed to have become radicalized by listening to online sermons of al-Awlaki.
Seattle Weekly cartoonist death threat
In 2010, after Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, cartoonist Molly Norris at Seattle Weekly had to stop publishing, and at the suggestion of the FBI changed her name, moved, and went into hiding due to a fatwā issued by al-Awlaki calling for her death. In the June 2010 issue of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, al-Awlaki cursed her and eight others for "blasphemous caricatures" of Muhammad. "The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved", he wrote. Daniel Pipes observed in an article entitled "Dueling Fatwas", "Awlaki stands at an unprecedented crossroads of death declarations, with his targeting Norris even as the U.S. government targets him."
Cargo planes bomb plotThe Guardian, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph reported that U.S. and British counter-terrorism officials believed that al-Awlaki was behind the cargo plane PETN bombs that were sent from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010.Yemen bomb scare 'mastermind' lived in London | World news. The Guardian. Retrieved on October 1, 2011. When U.S. Homeland Security official John Brennan was asked about al-Awlaki's suspected involvement in the plot, he said: "Anybody associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a subject of concern." U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein said "al-Awlaki was behind the two bombs."
Final years
Al-Awlaki's father, tribe, and supporters denied his alleged associations with Al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism. Al-Awlaki's father proclaimed his son's innocence in an interview with CNN's Paula Newton, saying: "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son. He's not Osama bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not." Responding to a Yemeni official's assertions that his son had taken refuge with al-Qaeda, Nasser said: "He's dead wrong. What do you expect my son to do? There are missiles raining down on the village. He has to hide. But he is not hiding with al-Qaeda; our tribe is protecting him right now."
The Yemeni government attempted to get the tribal leaders to release al-Awlaki to their custody. They promised they would not turn him over to U.S. authorities for questioning. The governor of Shabwa said in January 2010 that al-Awlaki was on the move with members of al-Qaeda, including Fahd al-Quso, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole.
In January 2010, White House lawyers debated whether or not it was legal to kill al-Awlaki, given his U.S. citizenship. U.S. officials stated that international law allows targeted killing in the event that the subject is an "imminent threat". Because he was a U.S. citizen, his killing had to be approved by the National Security Council. Such action against a U.S. citizen is extremely rare. As a military enemy of the US, al-Awlaki was not subject to Executive Order 11905, which bans assassination for political reasons. The authorization was nevertheless controversial.
By February 4, 2010, the New York Daily News reported that al-Awlaki was "now on a targeting list signed off on by the Obama administration". On April 6, The New York Times reported that President Obama had authorized the killing of al-Awlaki.
The al-Awalik tribe responded: "We warn against cooperating with America to kill Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. We will not stand by idly and watch." Al-Awlaki's tribe wrote that it would "not remain with arms crossed if a hair of Anwar al-Awlaki is touched, or if anyone plots or spies against him. Whoever risks denouncing our son (Awlaki) will be the target of Al-Awalik weapons", and gave warning "against co-operating with the Americans" in the capture or killing of al-Awlaki. Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni foreign minister, announced that the Yemeni government had not received any evidence from the US, and that "Anwar al-Awlaki has always been looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist and shouldn't be considered as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism".
In a video clip bearing the imprint of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, issued on April 16 in al-Qaeda's monthly magazine Sada Al-Malahem, al-Awlaki said: "What am I accused of? Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?" In the video he also praises both Abdulmutallab and Hasan, and describes both as his "students".
In late April, Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA) introduced a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to withdraw al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship. By May, U.S. officials believed he had become directly involved in terrorist activities. Former colleague Abdul-Malik said he "is a terrorist, in my book", and advised shops not to carry any of his publications. In an editorial, Investor's Business Daily called al-Awlaki the "world's most dangerous man", and recommended that he be added to the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list, a bounty put on his head, that he be designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, charged with treason, and extradition papers filed with the Yemeni government. IBD criticized the Justice Department for stonewalling Senator Joe Lieberman's security panel's investigation of al-Awlaki's role in the Fort Hood massacre.
On July 16, the U.S. Treasury Department added him to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, called him "extraordinarily dangerous", and said al-Awlaki was involved in several organizational aspects of terrorism, including recruiting, training, fundraising, and planning individual attacks.
A few days later, the United Nations Security Council placed al-Awlaki on its UN Security Council Resolution 1267 list of individuals associated with al-Qaeda, describing him as a leader, recruiter, and trainer for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The resolution stipulates that U.N. members must freeze the assets of anyone on the list, and prevent them from travelling or obtaining weapons. The following week, Canadian banks were ordered to seize any assets belonging to al-Awlaki. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police's senior counter-terrorism officer Gilles Michaud described him as a "major, major factor in radicalization". In September 2010, Jonathan Evans, the Director General of the United Kingdom's domestic security and counter-intelligence agency (MI5), said that al-Awlaki was the West's Public Enemy No 1.
In October 2010, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) urged YouTube to take down al-Awlaki's videos from its website, saying that by hosting al-Awlaki's messages, "We are facilitating the recruitment of homegrown terror." Pauline Neville-Jones, British security minister, said "These Web sites ... incite cold-blooded murder." YouTube began removing the material in November 2010.
Al-Awlaki was charged in absentia in Sana'a, Yemen, on November 2 with plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. Ali al-Saneaa, the head of the prosecutor's office, announced the charges during the trial of Hisham Assem, who had been accused of killing Jacques Spagnolo, an oil industry worker. He said that al-Awlaki and Assem had been in contact for months, and that al-Awlaki had encouraged Assem to commit terrorism. Al-Awlaki's lawyer said that his client was not connected to Spagnolo's death. On November 6, Yemeni Judge Mohsen Alwan ordered that al-Awlaki be caught "dead or alive".
In his book Ticking Time Bomb: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (2011), former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman described al-Awlaki, Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad, Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, and Pakistani-American Samir Khan as "virtual spiritual sanctioners" who use the internet to offer religious justification for Islamist terrorism.
Lawsuit against the US
In July 2010, al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union to represent his son in a lawsuit that sought to remove Anwar from the targeted killing list. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said:
the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow.
Lawyers for Specially Designated Global Terrorists must obtain a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department before they can represent their clients in court. The lawyers were granted the license on August 4, 2010.
On August 30, 2010, the groups filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit in an 83-page ruling, holding that the father did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that his claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches.
On May 5, 2011, the United States tried but failed to kill al-Awlaki by firing a missile from an unmanned drone at a car in Yemen. A Yemeni security official said that two al-Qaeda operatives in the car died.
Death
On September 30, 2011, al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Al Jawf Governorate, Yemen, according to U.S. sources, the strike was carried out by Joint Special Operations Command, under the direction of the CIA. A witness said the group had stopped to eat breakfast while traveling to Ma'rib Governorate. The occupants of the vehicle spotted the drone and attempted to flee in the vehicle before Hellfire missiles were fired Yemen's Defense Ministry announced that al-Awlaki had been killed. Also killed was Samir Khan, an American born in Saudi Arabia, thought to be behind al-Qaeda's English-language web magazine Inspire. U.S. President Barack Obama said:
The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. He took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans ... and he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda. [The strike] is further proof that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.
Journalist and author Glenn Greenwald argued on Salon.com that killing al-Awlaki violated his First Amendment right of free speech and that doing so outside of a criminal proceeding violated the Constitution's due process clause, specifically citing the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force." He mentioned doubt among Yemeni experts about al-Awlaki's role in al-Qaeda, and called U.S. government accusations against him unverified and lacking in evidence.
In a letter dated May 22, 2013, to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, Patrick J. Leahy, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder wrote that
high-level U.S. government officials [...] concluded that al-Aulaqi posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Before carrying out the operation that killed al-Aulaqi, senior officials also determined, based on a careful evaluation of the circumstances at the time, that it was not feasible to capture al-Aulaqi. In addition, senior officials determined that the operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles, including the cardinal principles of (1) necessity – the requirement that the target have definite military value; (2) distinction – the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted; (3) proportionality – the notion that the anticipated collateral damage of an action cannot be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage; and (4) humanity – a principle that requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering. The operation was also undertaken consistent with Yemeni sovereignty. [...] The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was lawful, it was considered, and it was just.
On April 21, 2014, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the Obama administration must release documents justifying its drone killings of foreigners and Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki. In June 2014, the United States Department of Justice disclosed a 2010 memorandum written by the acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, David J. Barron. The memo stated that Anwar al-Awlaki was a significant threat with an infeasible probability of capture. Barron therefore justified the killing as legal, as "the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process". The New York Times Editorial Board dismissed the memo's rationale for al-Awlaki's killing, saying it "provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care", instead describing it as "a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result." A lawyer for the ACLU described the memo as "disturbing" and "ultimately an argument that the president can order targeted killings of Americans without ever having to account to anyone outside the executive branch."
Legacy
Seth Jones, who as a political scientist specializes in al-Qaida, considers that the continuing relevance of al-Awlaki is due to his fluency in the English language as well as his charisma, precising that "he had a disarming aura and unnerving confidence, with an easy smile and a soothing, eloquent voice. He stood a lanky six feet, one inch tall, weighed 160 pounds, and had a thick black beard, an oversized nose, and wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in a clear, almost hypnotic voice."
Awlaki's videos and writings remain highly popular on the internet, where they continue to be readily accessible. Those who viewed and still view his videos are estimated by journalist Scott Shane to number in the hundreds of thousands, while his father Dr. Nasser Awlaqi says that "five million preaching tapes of Anwar Awlaqi have been sold in the West." And thus, even following his death, Awlaki has continued to inspire his devotees to carry out terrorist attacks, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. According to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), 88 "extremists," 54 in the U.S. and 34 in Europe, have been influenced by Awlaki. Because "his work has inspired countless plots and attacks," CEP has "called on YouTube and other platforms to permanently ban Mr. Awlaki's material, including his early, mainstream lectures."
FOIA documents
During the FBI investigation of the 9/11 attacks, it was discovered that a few of the attackers had attended the mosques in San Diego and Falls Church with which al-Awlaki was associated. Interviews with members of the San Diego mosque showed that Nawaz al-Hazmi, one of the attackers, may have had a private conversation with him. On that basis he was placed under 24-hour surveillance. It was discovered that he regularly patronized prostitutes. It was through FBI interrogation of prostitutes and escort service operators that al-Awlaki was tipped off in 2002 about FBI surveillance. Shortly thereafter, he left the United States.
In January 2013, Fox News announced that FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request showed possible connections between al-Awlaki and the September 11 attackers. According to Judicial Watch, the documents show that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and Las Vegas. Judicial Watch further stated that al-Awlaki "was a central focus of the FBI's investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn't cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance."
When queried by Fox News, the FBI denied having evidence connecting al-Awlaki and the September 11 attacks: "The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents. The FBI and investigating bodies have not found evidence connecting Anwar al-Awlaki and the attack on September 11, 2001. The document referenced does not link Anwar al-Awlaki with any purchase of airline tickets for the hijackers."
Family
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki and Egyptian-born Gihan Mohsen Baker had a son, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, born August 26, 1995, in Denver, who was an American citizen. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed on October 14, 2011, in Yemen at the age of 16 in an American drone strike. Nine other people were killed in the same CIA-initiated attack, including a 17-year-old cousin of Abdulrahman. According to his relatives, shortly before his father's death, Abdulrahman had left the family home in Sana'a and travelled to Shabwa in search of his father who was believed to be in hiding in that area (though he was actually hundreds of miles away at the time ). Abdulrahman was sitting in an open-air cafe in Shabwa when killed. According to U.S. officials, the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a mistake; the intended target was an Egyptian, Ibrahim al-Banna, who was not at the targeted location at the time of the attack. Human rights groups have raised questions as to why an American citizen was killed by the United States in a country with which the United States is not officially at war. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was not known to have any independent connection to terrorism.
Nasser al-Awlaki
Nasser al-Awlaki is the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki stated he believed his son had been wrongly accused and was not a member of Al Qaeda. After the deaths of his son and grandson, Nasser in an interview in Time magazine called the killings a crime and condemned U.S. President Obama directly, saying: "I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some, he may be that. To me and my family, he is nothing more than a child killer."
In 2013, Nasser al-Awlaki published an op-ed in The New York Times stating that two years after killing his grandson, the Obama administration still declines to provide an explanation. In 2012, Nasser al-Awlaki filed a lawsuit, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, challenging the constitutionality of the drone killings of his son and grandson. This lawsuit was dismissed in April 2014 by D.C. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
Tariq al-Dahab
Tariq al-Dahab, who led al-Qaeda insurgents in Yemen, was a brother-in-law of al-Awlaki. On February 16, 2012, the terrorist organization stated that he had been killed by agents, although media reports contain speculation that he was killed by his brother in a bloody family feud.
Nawar al-Awlaki
On January 29, 2017, Anwar al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen, was killed in a DEVGRU operation authorized by President Donald Trump."1 US service member killed, 3 wounded in Yemen raid" , WPVI-TV, 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA. January 29, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
Islamic education
Al-Awlaki's Islamic education was primarily informal, and consisted of intermittent months with various scholars reading and contemplating Islamic scholarly works. Despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education, Al-Awlaki made a name for himself as a public speaker who released popular audio recordings.Some Muslim scholars said they did not understand alAwlaki's popularity, because while he spoke fluent English and could therefore reach a large non-Arabic-speaking audience, he lacked formal Islamic training and study.
Ideology
While imprisoned in Yemen after 2004, al-Awlaki was influenced by the works of Sayyid Qutb, described by The New York Times as an originator of the contemporary "anti-Western Jihadist movement". He read 150 to 200 pages a day of Qutb's works, and described himself as "so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly".
Terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann in 2009 referred to al-Awlaki as "one of the principal jihadi luminaries for would-be homegrown terrorists. His fluency with English, his unabashed advocacy of jihad and mujahideen organizations, and his Web-savvy approach are a powerful combination." He called al-Awlaki's lecture, "Constants on the Path of Jihad", which he says was based on a similar document written by al-Qaeda's founder, the "virtual bible for lone-wolf Muslim extremists". Philip Mudd, formerly of the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI's top intelligence adviser, called him "a magnetic character ... a powerful orator." He attracted young men to his lectures, especially US-based and UK-based Muslims.
U.S. officials and some U.S. media sources called al-Awlaki an Islamic fundamentalist and accused him of encouraging terrorism. According to documents recovered from bin Laden's hideout, the al-Qaeda leader was unsure about al-Awlaki's qualifications.
Works
The Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation said al-Awlaki's ability to write and speak in fluent English enabled him to incite English-speaking Muslims to terrorism. Al-Awlaki notes in 44 Ways to Support Jihad that most reading material on the subject is in Arabic.
Written works
44 Ways to Support Jihad: Essay (January 2009). In it, al-Awlaki states that "The hatred of kuffar is a central element of our military creed" and that all Muslims are obligated to participate in jihad, either by committing the acts themselves or supporting others who do so. He says all Muslims must remain physically fit so as to be prepared for conflict. According to U.S. officials, it is considered a key text for al-Qaeda members.
Al-Awlaki wrote for Jihad Recollections, an English language online publication published by Al-Fursan Media.
Allah is Preparing Us for Victory – short book (2009).
Lectures
Lectures on the book Constants on the Path of Jihad by Yusef al-Ayeri—concerns leaderless jihad.
In 2009, the UK government found 1,910 of his videos had been posted to YouTube. One of them had been viewed 164,420 times.
The Battle of Hearts and Minds The Dust Will Never Settle Down Dreams & Interpretations The Hereafter—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Makkan Period—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Life of Muhammad: Medinan Period—Lecture in 2 Parts—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Lives of the Prophets (AS)—16 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (RA): His Life & Times—15 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
Umar ibn al-Khattāb (RA): His Life & Times—18 CDs—Al Basheer Productions
25 Promises from Allah to the Believer—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Companions of the Ditch & Lessons from the Life of Musa (AS)—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Remembrance of Allah & the Greatest Ayah—2 CDs—Noor Productions
Stories from Hadith—4 CDs—Center for Islamic Information and Education ("CIIE")
Hellfire & The Day of Judgment—CD—CIIE
Quest for Truth: The Story of Salman Al-Farsi (RA)—CD—CIIE
Trials & Lessons for Muslim Minorities—CD—CIIE
Young Ayesha (RA) & Mothers of the Believers (RA)—CD—CIIE
Understanding the Quran—CD—CIIE
Lessons from the Companions (RA) Living as a Minority—CD—CIIE
Virtues of the Sahabah—video lecture series promoted by the al-Wasatiyyah Foundation
Website
Al-Awlaki maintained a website and blog on which he shared his views. On December 11, 2008, he said Muslims should not seek to "serve in the armies of the disbelievers and fight against his brothers".
In "44 Ways to Support Jihad", posted on his blog in February 2009, al-Awlaki encouraged others to "fight jihad", and explained how to give money to the mujahideen or their families. Al-Awlaki's sermon encourages others to conduct weapons training, and raise children "on the love of Jihad". Also that month, he wrote: "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies." He wrote as well: "We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword, whether the masses like it or not." On July 14, he said that Muslim countries should not offer military assistance to the US. "The blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders ... who sells his religion for a few dollars," he said. In blog post dated July 15, 2009, entitled "Fighting Against Government Armies in the Muslim World", al-Awlaki wrote, "Blessed are those who fight against [American soldiers], and blessed are those shuhada [martyrs] who are killed by them."
In a video posted to the internet on November 8, 2010, al-Awlaki called for Muslims to kill Americans "without hesitation", and overthrow Arab governments that cooperate with the US. "Don't consult with anyone in fighting the Americans, fighting the devil doesn't require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils", al-Awlaki said. That month, Intelligence Research Specialist Kevin Yorke of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division called him "the most dangerous man in the world".
See also
Church Committee
Executive Order 12333
Extrajudicial killing
International counter-terrorism activities of the CIA
Protocol I
References
Further reading
al-Ashanti, AbdulHaq and Sloan, Abu Ameenah AbdurRahman. (2011) A Critique of the Methodology of Anwar al-Awlaki and his Errors in the Fiqh of Jihad. London: Jamiah Media, 2011
External links
Ruling of Judge Bates in Al Aulaqi v Obama
Statements
Interviews
"Exclusive; Ray Suarez: My Post-9/11 Interview With Anwar al-Awlaki", PBS, October 30, 2001
"Al-Jazeera Satellite Network Interview with Yemeni-American Cleric Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki Regarding his Alleged Role in Radicalizing Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan", The NEFA Foundation, December 24, 2009
Media coverage
The imam's very curious story: A skirt-chasing mullah is just one more mystery for the 9/11 panel, Ragavan, Chitra, US News and World Report'', June 13, 2004
DBI.gov
1971 births
2011 deaths
20th-century imams
21st-century imams
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
Al-Qaeda propagandists
Assassinated al-Qaeda leaders
American al-Qaeda members
American expatriates in the United Kingdom
American expatriates in Yemen
American imams
American Islamists
American people of Yemeni descent
Colorado State University alumni
George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development alumni
People associated with the September 11 attacks
People from Las Cruces, New Mexico
San Diego State University alumni
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Yemeni al-Qaeda members
Yemeni Sunni Muslim scholars of Islam
Yemeni Sunni Muslims
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Islam-related controversies
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Assassinated Yemeni people
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United States military killing of American civilians | false | [
"Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press is a 2017 Netflix documentary directed by Brian Knappenberger. The documentary is themed around the effects of big money on American journalism. The documentary focuses on two incidents: Peter Thiel financing wrestler Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media, and casino owner Sheldon Adelson's secret purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.\n\nSynopsis \nThe film starts with the legal proceedings of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, who (with the financial backing of billionaire Peter Thiel) had filed a lawsuit against Gawker Media, seeking $100 million in damages for releasing a sex tape featuring him and Heather Clem. Gawker Media subsequently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as a direct result of the lawsuit. Thiel had reportedly wanted to bring Gawker down for having published an article nine years earlier which outed him as gay.\n\nThe film then covers an incident where casino mogul Sheldon Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal, while keeping his identity as the buyer a secret, even to the journalists employed by the company. The management also did not reveal the new owner of the company to the employees, and denied that the Adelson family was involved when asked about the possibility. Adelson himself had also denied his ownership in an interview with CNN. This caused a couple of its journalists to start investigating it on their own by calling their contacts. They eventually uncovered that Sheldon Adelson was indeed the new owner, and after publishing an article with the revelation, were forced to step down.\n\nReception \nNobody Speak has mostly been well received by critics. It holds an 89% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 6.8/10 based on 23 reviews. The film has a score of 69 on Metacritic, indicating generally favourable reviews.\n\nReferences\n\nNetflix original documentary films\nDocumentary films about the media\nDocumentary films about journalism",
"John \"Little Caesar\" Acropolis (1909 – August 26, 1952) was an American labor leader. He served as president of Local 456 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Westchester County, NY from 1946 until his death.\n\nBackground\nAcropolis was orphaned at age three and raised in a series of charitable institutions. He attended Colgate University where he played on the basketball team.\n\nAcropolis became interested in union issues while working as a truck driver during summer break from college. He joined Local 456 and was first elected as a union officer in the early 1940s.\n\nDeath\nAfter becoming president of Local 456, Acropolis challenged the Genovese crime family over its control of certain garbage carting contracts in the suburbs of New York City. He expanded the size of his local to more than 2,000 members.\nAcropolis was killed in 1952 by an unknown assailant who fired two bullets into his head. The case has not been solved.\n\nIn October, 2008, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Yonkers, New York Police Department, demanding access to the department's file on the investigation into the death of Acropolis. The City of Yonkers said it would fight the lawsuit, claiming that because the investigation was still technically active, the case file was not subject to Freedom of Information laws.\n\nSee also\nList of unsolved murders\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNY Journal News report on NYCLU lawsuit\nNYCLU Press Release and link to lawsuit\nWCBS-TV report on lawsuit and Acropolis killing\nNY Journal News report on 50th anniversary of Acropolis murder\n\n1909 births\n1952 deaths\nAmerican murder victims\nColgate University alumni\nDeaths by firearm in New York (state)\nInternational Brotherhood of Teamsters people\nMale murder victims\nPeople murdered in New York (state)\nTrade unionists from New York (state)\nUnsolved murders in the United States\nColgate Raiders men's basketball players\n 1952 murders in the United States"
] |
[
"Kurt Gödel",
"Studying in Vienna"
] | C_1d6c9f76ff3e42c48d9abe5d49b3da30_0 | In Vienna, where did Godel Study? | 1 | In Vienna, where did Kurt Gödel study? | Kurt Gödel | At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences." Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system? This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER | the University of Vienna. | Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Early life and education
Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
Career
Incompleteness theorem
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.
Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".
Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.
in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography
Important publications
In German:
1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.
In English:
1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.
In English translation:
Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
"My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
"The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
Volume I: Publications 1929–1936 / Paperback: ,
Volume II: Publications 1938–1974 / Paperback: ,
Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures / Paperback: ,
Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III
See also
Gödel machine
Gödel fuzzy logic
Gödel–Löb logic
Gödel Prize
Infinite-valued logic
List of Austrian scientists
List of pioneers in computer science
Mathematical Platonism
Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
Primitive recursive functional
Strange loop
Tarski's undefinability theorem
World Logic Day
Notes
References
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Further reading
Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
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Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka,
Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):
External links
Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
Gödel photo gallery.
Kurt Gödel
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
1906 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century Austrian mathematicians
American relativity theorists
American Protestants
American logicians
American people of Moravian-German descent
Analytic philosophers
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian logicians
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Austrian philosophers
Austrian Protestants
Austro-Hungarian mathematicians
Burials at Princeton Cemetery
Deaths by starvation
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
National Medal of Science laureates
Ontologists
Scientists from Brno
People from the Margraviate of Moravia
People with acquired American citizenship
People with paranoid personality disorder
Platonists
Princeton University faculty
Protestant philosophers
Set theorists
Vienna Circle
University of Notre Dame faculty
University of Vienna alumni
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy | true | [
"Kurt Gödel (28 April 1906 – 14 January 1978) was an Austrian (later American) logician, mathematician and philosopher.\n\nGodel or similar may also refer to:\nGödel (programming language)\n3366 Gödel, a main belt asteroid discovered in 1985\nGödel, Kastamonu, a village in the Kastamonu Province, Turkey\nGodel (river), at Föhr, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany\nGodel Iceport, at the coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica\n\nOther people with the surname Godel include:\nGaston Godel (1914−2004), Swiss race walker\nVahé Godel (born 1931), Swiss writer\nArkadiusz Godel (born 1952), Polish fencer\nJon Godel, 21st-century British journalist\n\nSee also\nGodel mouthpiece, a scuba mouthpiece with a snorkel attached",
"Vahé Godel (born 16 August 1931, in Geneva) is a French Swiss writer, translator and scholar of Armenian literature. He is the son of Robert Godel, a noted linguist and expert on the Armenian language, and Meline Papazian, an Armenian from Bursa. While being a well-known writer in his own right in his native Switzerland, Vahé Godel has also translated numerous Armenian poets, both past and present. His translations include: Odes et lamentations by Grégoire de Narek, Tous les désirs de l'âme by Grégoire de Narek and Nahabed Koutchag, Le chant du pain by Daniel Varoujan, J’apporterai des pierres and Erevan by Marine Petrossian.\n\nHis brother Armen Godel is an actor and director.\n\nReferences\n\nPeople from Geneva\n1931 births\nSwiss male poets\nSwiss translators\nLiving people\n20th-century Swiss poets\n20th-century male writers"
] |
[
"Kurt Gödel",
"Studying in Vienna",
"In Vienna, where did Godel Study?",
"the University of Vienna."
] | C_1d6c9f76ff3e42c48d9abe5d49b3da30_0 | What year did he start studying? | 2 | What year did Kurt Gödel start studying? | Kurt Gödel | At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences." Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system? This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER | At the age of 18, | Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Early life and education
Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
Career
Incompleteness theorem
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.
Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".
Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.
in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography
Important publications
In German:
1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.
In English:
1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.
In English translation:
Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
"My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
"The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
Volume I: Publications 1929–1936 / Paperback: ,
Volume II: Publications 1938–1974 / Paperback: ,
Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures / Paperback: ,
Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III
See also
Gödel machine
Gödel fuzzy logic
Gödel–Löb logic
Gödel Prize
Infinite-valued logic
List of Austrian scientists
List of pioneers in computer science
Mathematical Platonism
Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
Primitive recursive functional
Strange loop
Tarski's undefinability theorem
World Logic Day
Notes
References
.
.
Further reading
Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
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Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka,
Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):
External links
Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
Gödel photo gallery.
Kurt Gödel
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
1906 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century Austrian mathematicians
American relativity theorists
American Protestants
American logicians
American people of Moravian-German descent
Analytic philosophers
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian logicians
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Austrian philosophers
Austrian Protestants
Austro-Hungarian mathematicians
Burials at Princeton Cemetery
Deaths by starvation
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
National Medal of Science laureates
Ontologists
Scientists from Brno
People from the Margraviate of Moravia
People with acquired American citizenship
People with paranoid personality disorder
Platonists
Princeton University faculty
Protestant philosophers
Set theorists
Vienna Circle
University of Notre Dame faculty
University of Vienna alumni
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy | true | [
"The 1959 NCAA College Division football rankings are from the United Press International poll of College Division head coaches. The 1959 NCAA College Division football season was the second year UPI published a poll in what was termed the \"Small College\" division. The Associated Press did not start their version of the poll until 1960. The Top 10 included the team's record while the \"Second 10\" did not.\n\nLegend\n\nThe UPI coaches poll\n\nReferences\n\nRankings\nNCAA College Division football rankings",
"The 1958 NCAA College Division football rankings are from the United Press International poll of College Division head coaches. The 1958 NCAA College Division football season was the first year UPI published a poll in what was termed the \"Small College\" division. The Associated Press did not start their version of the poll until 1960. In most of the weekly polls, the Top 10 included the team's record while the \"Second 10\" did not. Individual team records in the Top 10 were sometimes missing as well.\n\nLegend\n\nThe UPI coaches poll\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nRankings\nNCAA College Division football rankings"
] |
[
"Kurt Gödel",
"Studying in Vienna",
"In Vienna, where did Godel Study?",
"the University of Vienna.",
"What year did he start studying?",
"At the age of 18,"
] | C_1d6c9f76ff3e42c48d9abe5d49b3da30_0 | What was his major, or field of study? | 3 | What was Kurt Gödel's major, or field of study at the University of Vienna? | Kurt Gödel | At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences." Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system? This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER | initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. | Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Early life and education
Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
Career
Incompleteness theorem
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.
Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".
Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.
in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography
Important publications
In German:
1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.
In English:
1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.
In English translation:
Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
"My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
"The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
Volume I: Publications 1929–1936 / Paperback: ,
Volume II: Publications 1938–1974 / Paperback: ,
Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures / Paperback: ,
Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III
See also
Gödel machine
Gödel fuzzy logic
Gödel–Löb logic
Gödel Prize
Infinite-valued logic
List of Austrian scientists
List of pioneers in computer science
Mathematical Platonism
Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
Primitive recursive functional
Strange loop
Tarski's undefinability theorem
World Logic Day
Notes
References
.
.
Further reading
Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
.
.
.
.
Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka,
Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):
External links
Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
Gödel photo gallery.
Kurt Gödel
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
1906 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century Austrian mathematicians
American relativity theorists
American Protestants
American logicians
American people of Moravian-German descent
Analytic philosophers
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian logicians
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Austrian philosophers
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Burials at Princeton Cemetery
Deaths by starvation
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
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Scientists from Brno
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People with acquired American citizenship
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Vienna Circle
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University of Vienna alumni
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy | true | [
"Paedology (paidology) is the study of children's behavior and development (as distinct from pedagogy, the art or science of teaching, and pediatrics, the field of medicine relating to children). Pedology is not commonly recognized as a distinct field of study; therefore, many people who would be described as pedologists are instead described as pedagogues, psychologists, pediatricians, etc. Another factor that contributes to paedology's lack of recognition as a distinct field of study is because one could make contributions to the field of pedology while also making contributions to other fields. For example. Jean Piaget made contributions to the study of pedology in his theories of the cognitive development of children; however, Piaget has more commonly been recognized as a developmental psychologist.\n\nOrigins of Paedology\n\nThe origins of this trend in psychology and pedagogy go back to the end of the 18th century with the separation of a branch of psychology that would form the basis of pedagogy, a pedagogic psychology or \"experimental pedagogic psychology\", \"experimental pedagogy\", \"experimental education\".\n\nG. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) fostered pedology as a separate study, and also became instrumental in the development of modern educational psychology. An American researcher, Oscar Chrisman, proposed the term \"pedology\" in 1893. At the end of the 19th century, pedology as a comprehensive study of the child came to prominence in Europe as an attempt to create a study of children in the manner of natural sciences. In 1909 Professor Kazimierz Twardowski organized a Pedological Society in Lviv, Austro-Hungary (now Ukraine). In 1910 a similar society was organized in Kraków. In 1911 the first World Congress in Pedology took place in Brussels, Belgium, with attendants from 22 countries.\n\nWorld War I (1914-1918) effectively put an end to the development of this study in Western Europe.\n\nSince pedology as a branch of science never reached its maturity, there is no common established understanding as to the scope or instruments of pedology.\n\nBowie State University in Bowie, Maryland became the first university in the United States to offer a bachelor's degree in pedology. A 2014 document from the university refers to \"the pedology major (now known as child and adolescent studies)\". At many universities in the United States, pedological study is generally classified under the major \"child development.\"\n\nPedology in the Soviet Union\nIn Imperial Russia a prominent developer of the field was Aleksandr Nechayev (Александр Петрович Нечаев) in St. Petersburg, who in 1901 created the laboratory of experimental pedagogical psychology. Soviet pedology is traditionally thought to be founded by the efforts of Vladimir Bekhterev; in particular, in 1918 he founded the Institute of Pedology as part of psychological institutions united into the Institute for Study of Brain and Psychical Activity.\n\nThis science was intensively pursued in 1920s-1930s in the Soviet Union. A journal Pedologiya (\"Педология\") was issued. Lev Vygotsky was one of its prominent supporters.\n\nWhile many works of pedologists were of considerable value, the approach was severely criticized for over-enthusiastic but poorly grounded approach of testing for predicting a child's mental development, in addition to estimating its status.\n\nIt was officially banned in 1936 after a special decree of VKP(b) Central Committee \"On Pedological Perversions in the System of Narkomproses\" on July 4, 1936.\n\nReferences \n\nDepaepe, M. (1985). \"Science, technology, and paedology: The concept of science at the Faculte Internationale de Pedologie in Brussels (1912-1914).\" Scientia Paedogica Experimentalis, 1, 14-28.\nDepaepe, M. (1992). \"Experimental Research in Education 1890-1940: historical processes behind the development of a discipline in western Europe and the United States.\" Aspects of Education, Journal of the Institute of Education, University of Hull, 42, pp. 67–93.\nDepaepe, M. (1993). \"Zum Wohl des Kindes? Pädologie, pädagogische Psychologie und experimentelle Pädagogik in Europa und den USA, 1890-1940.\" Leuven: Universitaire Pers/Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag.\n\nExternal links\n\nP.Ya.Shvartsman, I.V.Kuznetsova, Pedology: A Repressed Science\n\nSocial sciences\nChild development\nPedagogy",
"Gardner Army Airfield auxiliary fields were a number of airfields used during World War II to support the Gardner Army Airfield. May 12, 1943 the US Army leased 1,396.36 acres for Gardner Field, located 9 miles southeast of Taft, California. Gardner Army Airfield was named after Major John H. Gardner, a World War I aviator hero. The Army built three runways to support training activities need for World War II. From Gardner Army Airfield the United States Army Air Corps's Western Flying Training Command started training the needed pilots. To support the training of the many pilots, Gardner Army Airfield operated a number of auxiliary airfields. Some auxiliary fields were no more than a landing strip, others were other operation airfield that supported the training at the Gardner Army Airfield. The Vultee BT-13 Valiant and Boeing-Stearman Model 75 were the most common planes used for training at Gardner Army Airfields, but large bombers were trained also. Gardner Army Airfield auxiliary fields were:\n\nParker Field\n\nParker Field or Parker Field Aux No. 1 was located near Lakeview, California and Taft, California at , in Kern County. Parker Field was 6 miles northwest of Gardner Army Airfield and 22 miles southwest of Bakersfield, California. In 1941 the Army leased the 300 acre land from the County and built a 3,000' square asphalt landing mat, so planes could land in almost any direction. Parker Field had few improvement and was mostly used for training in landing and take off. The Parker Field was closed on March 10, 1945. Parker Field was just north of what is now California State Route 166, the site is now back to farmland and no trace remains of the airfield.\n\nKern Field\n\nKern Field or Taft-Kern Field Auxiliary Field No. 2 or Taft-Kern Field Auxiliary Field No. 2 at \n with an elevation of 444 feet. Kern Field was 25 miles south of Bakersfield and 198 miles east of Gardner Army Airfield. In 1941 the US Army built on the 250 acre site a landing mat that was 3,000 feet by 3,000. The Army built two runways in a unique cross shaped. Taft Field had many improvements and was used often for training in landing and take off. Kern Field closed on February 28, 1945. Kern Field was just north of what is now California State Route 166 and west of the Interstate 5 in Lakeview, California. The site is now back to farmland and no trace remains of the airfield.\n\nAllen Field\nAllen Field or Allen Field Aux No. 3 was located near Lakeview, California and 6 miles west of Mettler, California at , in Kern County. Parker Field was 14 miles northwest of Gardner Army Airfield and 26 miles south of Bakersfield, California. In 1941 the Army leased the 260 acre land from the County and built a 3,000' square asphalt landing mat. Parker Field had few improvement and was mostly used for training in landing and take off. The Parker Field was closed on March 10, 1945. Parker Field was just south of what is now California State Route 166 and just west of the Interstate 5, the site is now back to farmland and no trace remains of the airfield.\n\nConners Field\n\nConners Field or Conners Field Aux No. 4 was located 20 miles east of the City of Taft in Kern County at . Conners Field was 20 miles east of Gardner Army Airfield and 20 miles south of Bakersfield. In 1941 the Army leased the 250 acre land from the County and built a 3,000' square asphalt landing mat, so planes could land in almost any direction. Conners Field had few improvements and was mostly used for training in landing and take off. The Parker Field was closed in October 1950. Conners Field was just south of what is now California State Route 223 and east of Interstate 5. The site is now back to farmland and no trace remains of the airfield.\n\nTaft Field\nTaft Field or Taft Field Aux No. 5 or Taft-Kern Field was 5 miles east of the city of Taft, California and 16.5 miles east of Maricopa, California at in Kern County. Taft Field was 2 miles southeast of Gardner Army Airfield and 20 miles southwest of Bakersfield. In 1941 the Army acquired the 250 acre land from the private parties. The Taft Field was closed on 27 September 1945. Taft Field was east of what is now California State Route 33 and north of California State Route 166, the site is now back to farmland and a faint trace of the outline of the airfield remains.\n\nCuyama Field\n\nCuyama Field Cuyama Field Aux No. 6 was 1.6 miles northwest of Ventucopa, California an 14 miles southeast of New Cuyama, California in the Cuyama Valley at in Santa Barbara. Cuyama Field was 14 miles northwest of Gardner Army Airfield and 50 miles southwest of Bakersfield, California. In 1941 the Army received a permit for the 48 acre land from the U.S. Forest Service and built a 4,5000 foot northwest/southeast asphalt runway at an elevation of 2749 feet. Cuyama Field had no improvements and was for bombers to train in landing and take off. The Cuyama Field was closed on 30 November 1946 and returned to the U.S. Forest Service. Parker Field was just east of what is now California State Route 33 and 6 miles south of the California State Route 166, the site is now farmland and no trace remains of the runway.\n\nSee also\n\nCalifornia World War II Army Airfields\nCalifornia during World War II\nAmerican Theater (1939–1945)\nDesert Training Center\nMilitary history of the United States during World War II\nUnited States home front during World War II\nMinter Army Airfield auxiliary fields\nChico Army Airfield auxiliary fields\n\nReferences\n\n Shaw, Frederick J. (2004), Locating Air Force Base Sites History's Legacy, Air Force History and Museums Program, United States Air Force, Washington DC, 2004.\n Manning, Thomas A. (2005), History of Air Education and Training Command, 1942–2002. Office of History and Research, Headquarters, AETC, Randolph AFB, Texas ASIN: B000NYX3PC\n\n1940s in California\nUnited States in World War II"
] |
[
"Kurt Gödel",
"Studying in Vienna",
"In Vienna, where did Godel Study?",
"the University of Vienna.",
"What year did he start studying?",
"At the age of 18,",
"What was his major, or field of study?",
"initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy."
] | C_1d6c9f76ff3e42c48d9abe5d49b3da30_0 | Did he change to another field of study? | 4 | Did Kurt Gödel change to another field of study, aside from theoretical physics mathematics and philosophy? | Kurt Gödel | At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences." Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system? This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER | he became interested in mathematical logic. | Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Early life and education
Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
Career
Incompleteness theorem
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.
Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".
Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.
in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography
Important publications
In German:
1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.
In English:
1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.
In English translation:
Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
"My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
"The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
Volume I: Publications 1929–1936 / Paperback: ,
Volume II: Publications 1938–1974 / Paperback: ,
Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures / Paperback: ,
Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III
See also
Gödel machine
Gödel fuzzy logic
Gödel–Löb logic
Gödel Prize
Infinite-valued logic
List of Austrian scientists
List of pioneers in computer science
Mathematical Platonism
Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
Primitive recursive functional
Strange loop
Tarski's undefinability theorem
World Logic Day
Notes
References
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Further reading
Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
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Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka,
Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):
External links
Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
Gödel photo gallery.
Kurt Gödel
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
1906 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century Austrian mathematicians
American relativity theorists
American Protestants
American logicians
American people of Moravian-German descent
Analytic philosophers
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian logicians
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Austrian philosophers
Austrian Protestants
Austro-Hungarian mathematicians
Burials at Princeton Cemetery
Deaths by starvation
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
National Medal of Science laureates
Ontologists
Scientists from Brno
People from the Margraviate of Moravia
People with acquired American citizenship
People with paranoid personality disorder
Platonists
Princeton University faculty
Protestant philosophers
Set theorists
Vienna Circle
University of Notre Dame faculty
University of Vienna alumni
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy | true | [
"Forced compliance theory is a paradigm that is closely related to cognitive dissonance theory. It emerged in the field of social psychology.\n\nForced compliance theory is the idea that authority or some other perceived higher-ranking person can force a lower-ranked individual to make statements or perform acts that violate their better judgment. It focuses on the goal of altering an individual's attitude through persuasion and authority.\n\nFestinger and Carlsmith \nLeon Festinger and James M. Carlsmith (1959) conducted an experiment entitled \"Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance\". This study involved 71 male students from Stanford University, of which 11 students were disqualified. The students were asked to perform a tedious task involving using one hand to turn small spools a quarter clockwise turn. The purpose was to make the task uninteresting and unexciting enough that none of the participants could possibly find it enjoyable.\n\nThe experimental condition involved telling the subject before the experiment started that it would be fun, while the control condition did not set any expectations for the task. The control subjects were asked to go to a room to be interviewed. The experimental condition involved giving either $1 or $20 to try to convince the next participant that the experiment was fun.\n\nThe results showed a significant difference between the groups in how much they reported to enjoy the experiment. Another large difference was observed between the $1 and $20 groups. However, no significant difference emerged between the $20 group and control group. The results indicate that when an individual is motivated by reward to say something contrary to their private belief, their private belief tended to change as a result. When the reward was small, (beyond what is necessary to elicit the desired behaviour) the magnitude of the dissonance was higher and as a consequence so was the pressure to reduce the dissonance. \n\nIn summary, the study demonstrated that when individuals experience a conflict of cognition they will tend to shift their private belief to reduce dissonance.\n\nCognitive dissonance theory \nForced compliance theory is essentially a subset of cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance theory describes the unpleasant feeling that results from believing two contrary ideas at the same time. It is most persuasive when it comes to feelings and thoughts about oneself. It is also a strong motivational tool in influencing us to choose one action or thought over another.\n\nForced compliance theory is being used as a mechanism to help aid in projections of cognitive dissonance theory.\n\nSupporting research\n\nStudy 1 \nHelmreich and Collins conducted an experiment entitled \"Studies in Forced Compliance: Commitment and Magnitude of Inducement to Comply as Determinants of Opinion Change\". This study consisted of sixty-sixty male college students who were asked to record a counter-attitudinal statement concerning a serious issue. Variables included multiple levels of commitment. These levels included making an anonymous audio recording, a non-anonymous video recording, and a non-anonymous video recording with no chance to withdraw their statement. Half of the participants were asked to make the recording, while the other half was asked to make the counter statement.\n\nThe participants were paid for their tasks. For the two highest levels of commitment (identified video recordings) participants who received low pay exhibited more attitude change. However, within the lower commitment level (anonymous audio recording) participants, higher pay yielded more attitude change.\n\nStudy 2 \nAshmore and Collins conducted an experiment called \"Studies in Forced Compliance: X. Attitude Change and Commitment to Maintain Publicly a Counter-attitudinal Position\".\n\nIn this study, researchers manipulated three variables that were expected to influence attitude change under compulsion. These three variables were public-private, true-persuasive, and high-low financial motivation.\n\nAt the beginning of the study, \"public\" subjects signed a document in which they vowed to preserve their counter-attitudinal position outside of the study. Results showed that public subjects were more likely to exhibit attitude change than private subjects.\n\nStudy 3 \nFrench researchers Beauvois, Bungert and Mariette conducted a study entitled \"Forced Compliance: Commitment to Compliance and Commitment to Activity\". This study consisted of two experiments. One involved 200 adolescents and adults and another involved 176 high school-aged participants.\n\nThe study built on previous research that stated when individuals are not granted the freedom to agree or disagree with the task, signs of dissonance are not detected.\n\nReferences \n\nPersuasion",
"Homer Garner Barnett (1906 in Bisbee, Arizona – May 9, 1985) was an American anthropologist and teacher.\n\nEducation \n\nHe began his studies at Stanford in civil engineering but soon quit to rethink his major. When he returned to Stanford it was as a liberal arts major with an emphasis on philosophy. He graduated in 1927. He later attended the University of California, Berkeley for his Ph.D., granted in 1938. His specialization was culture change and applied anthropology.\n\nAs a student, Barnett did field work among the American Indians of Oregon, Washington, and northwestern California, particularly the Yurok, Hupa, Yakima, and several small groups of the Oregon coast. Some research concerned diverse ethnological matters but focused primarily on the Indian Shaker religion and the potlatch. The latter was the subject of his doctoral dissertation.\n\nTeaching \n\nIn 1939 after receiving his Ph.D. he began working at the University of New Mexico as the field director of the Jemez Archeological Field School. Soon after this position ended he moved on to the University of Oregon. Here he became the second member of the Anthropology department, along with Luther Cressman. After serving for a few years during World War II, Barnett returned to the University of Oregon and continued to study Pacific cultures.\n\nFrom 1947 to 1948, Barnett conducted field research on the indigenous people of Palau.\n\nBarnett continued to study American Indians in California and the Pacific Northwest and displaced communities in the Pacific. He served as a visiting lecturer for the American Anthropological Association from 1960 until 1961. He spoke at college campuses that did not have anthropology departments, trying to spread his knowledge of anthropology.\nBarnett became an emeritus professor at the University of Oregon in 1971 and officially retired in 1974. After his retirement Barnett worked on writings and publications up until the time of his death May 9, 1985.\n\nWorld War II \n\nDuring World War II he stopped teaching to participate in the Far Eastern Language and Area Training Program of the University of California at Berkeley. Here he trained volunteer service men to effectively gain information from native informants to help the war effort. In 1944 he began working with the Ethnogeographic Board to provide scientific information about human and natural resources of world areas. He later began working with the War Document Survey in the Pacific to give advice about documents that the U.S. government was acquiring from other governments during the war.\n\nSelect bibliography \n Culture element distributions. VII: Oregon coast, 1937\n Gulf of Georgia Salish, 1939\n Innovation: the basis of cultural change, 1953\n The Coast Salish of British Columbia, 1955\n Anthropology in administration, 1956\n Indian Shakers; a messianic cult of the Pacific Northwest, 1957\n Peace and progress in New Guinea, 1959\n Being a Palauan, 1959\n Palauan society, a study of contemporary native life in the Palau Islands, 1959\n Application to the National Science Foundation for research funds in support of a project entitled a comparative study of cultural change and stability in displaced communities, 1962\n The nature and function of the potlatch, 1968\n The Yakima Indians in 1942, 1969\n Qualitative science, 1983 ()\n Culture processes, 1992\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Homer G. Barnett papers at the University of Oregon\n Register to the Papers of Homer Barnett, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution\n\n1906 births\n1985 deaths\nPeople from Bisbee, Arizona\nAmerican anthropologists\nCultural anthropologists\nEthnographers\nStanford University alumni\nUC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni\nUniversity of Oregon faculty\nWriters from Arizona\n20th-century American writers\n20th-century American male writers\n20th-century anthropologists"
] |
[
"Kurt Gödel",
"Studying in Vienna",
"In Vienna, where did Godel Study?",
"the University of Vienna.",
"What year did he start studying?",
"At the age of 18,",
"What was his major, or field of study?",
"initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.",
"Did he change to another field of study?",
"he became interested in mathematical logic."
] | C_1d6c9f76ff3e42c48d9abe5d49b3da30_0 | When did he graduate? | 5 | When did Kurt Gödel graduate from the University of Vienna? | Kurt Gödel | At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences." Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system? This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER | ). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. | Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Early life and education
Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
Career
Incompleteness theorem
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.
Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".
Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.
in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography
Important publications
In German:
1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.
In English:
1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.
In English translation:
Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
"My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
"The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
Volume I: Publications 1929–1936 / Paperback: ,
Volume II: Publications 1938–1974 / Paperback: ,
Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures / Paperback: ,
Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III
See also
Gödel machine
Gödel fuzzy logic
Gödel–Löb logic
Gödel Prize
Infinite-valued logic
List of Austrian scientists
List of pioneers in computer science
Mathematical Platonism
Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
Primitive recursive functional
Strange loop
Tarski's undefinability theorem
World Logic Day
Notes
References
.
.
Further reading
Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
.
.
.
.
Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka,
Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):
External links
Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
Gödel photo gallery.
Kurt Gödel
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
1906 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century Austrian mathematicians
American relativity theorists
American Protestants
American logicians
American people of Moravian-German descent
Analytic philosophers
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian logicians
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Austrian philosophers
Austrian Protestants
Austro-Hungarian mathematicians
Burials at Princeton Cemetery
Deaths by starvation
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
National Medal of Science laureates
Ontologists
Scientists from Brno
People from the Margraviate of Moravia
People with acquired American citizenship
People with paranoid personality disorder
Platonists
Princeton University faculty
Protestant philosophers
Set theorists
Vienna Circle
University of Notre Dame faculty
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Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy | false | [
"This is a list of people associated with the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science.\n\nNotable faculty\n\nAlumni\n(*did not graduate)\n\nNobel laureates\n\nPulitzer Prize winners\n\nOther\n\n(*did not graduate)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNew York University\n\nLists of people by university or college in New York City\n\nNew York University-related lists",
"Most presidents of the United States received a college education, even most of the earliest. Of the first seven presidents, five were college graduates. College degrees have set the presidents apart from the general population, and presidents have held degrees even though it was quite rare and unnecessary for practicing most occupations, including law. Of the 45 individuals to have been the president, 25 of them graduated from a private undergraduate college, nine graduated from a public undergraduate college, and 12 held no degree. Every president since 1953 has had a bachelor's degree, reflecting the increasing importance of higher education in the United States.\n\nList by university attended\n\nDid not graduate from college \n\nGeorge Washington (Although the death of Washington's father ended his formal schooling, he received a surveyor's certificate from the College of William and Mary. Washington believed strongly in formal education, and his will left money and/or stocks to support three educational institutions.)\nJames Monroe (attended the College of William and Mary, but dropped out to fight in the Revolutionary War)\nAndrew Jackson\nMartin Van Buren\nWilliam Henry Harrison (attended Hampden Sydney College for three years but did not graduate and then attended University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine but never received a degree)\nZachary Taylor\nMillard Fillmore (founded the University at Buffalo)\nAbraham Lincoln (had only about a year of formal schooling of any kind)\nAndrew Johnson (no formal schooling of any kind)\nGrover Cleveland\nWilliam McKinley (attended Allegheny College, but did not graduate; also attended Albany Law School, but also did not graduate)\nHarry S. Truman (went to business college and law school, but did not graduate)\n\nUndergraduate \n\nA.JFK enrolled, but did not attend\n\nAdditional undergraduate information\nSome presidents attended more than one institution. George Washington never attended college, though The College of William & Mary did issue him a surveyor's certificate. Two presidents have attended a foreign college at the undergraduate level: John Quincy Adams at Leiden University and Bill Clinton at the University of Oxford (John F. Kennedy intended to study at the London School of Economics, but failed to attend as he fell ill before classes began.)\n\nThree presidents have attended the United States Service academies: Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, while Jimmy Carter graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. No presidents have graduated from the United States Coast Guard Academy or the much newer U.S. Air Force Academy. Eisenhower also graduated from the Army Command and General Staff College, Army Industrial College and Army War College. These were not degree granting institutions when Eisenhower attended, but were part of his professional education as a career soldier.\n\nGraduate school\nA total of 20 presidents attended some form of graduate school (including professional schools). Among them, eleven presidents received a graduate degree during their lifetimes; two more received graduate degrees posthumously.\n\nBusiness school\n\nGraduate School\n\nMedical school\n\nLaw school \n\nSeveral presidents who were lawyers did not attend law school, but became lawyers after independent study under the tutelage of established attorneys. Some had attended college before beginning their legal studies, and several studied law without first having attended college. Presidents who were lawyers but did not attend law school include: John Adams; Thomas Jefferson; James Madison; James Monroe; John Quincy Adams; Andrew Jackson; Martin Van Buren; John Tyler; James K. Polk; Millard Fillmore; James Buchanan; Abraham Lincoln; James A. Garfield; Grover Cleveland; Benjamin Harrison; and Calvin Coolidge.\n\nPresidents who were admitted to the bar after a combination of law school and independent study include; Franklin Pierce; Chester A. Arthur; William McKinley; and Woodrow Wilson.\n\nList by graduate degree earned\n\nPh.D. (doctorate)\n\nM.B.A. (Master of Business Administration)\n\nM.A. (Master of Arts)\n\nNote: John Adams and John Quincy Adams, along with George W. Bush are the only presidents to date to attain Master’s degrees.\n\nJ.D. or LL.B. (law degree)\n\nNote: Hayes, Taft, Nixon and Ford were awarded LL.B. degrees. When U.S. law schools began to use the J.D. as the professional law degree in the 1960s, previous graduates had the choice of converting their LL.B. degrees to a J.D. Duke University Law School made the change in 1968, and Yale Law School in 1971. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom attended Columbia Law School but withdrew before graduating, were awarded posthumous J.D. degrees in 2008.\n\nList by president\n\nOther academic associations\n\nFaculty member\n\nSchool rector or president\n\nSchool trustee or governor\n\nSee also\n List of prime ministers of Australia by education\n List of prime ministers of Canada by academic degrees\n List of presidents of the Philippines by education\n List of prime ministers of the United Kingdom by education\n\nReferences\n\nCollege education\nUnited States education-related lists"
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] | C_1d6c9f76ff3e42c48d9abe5d49b3da30_0 | did he earn any honors? | 6 | did Kurt Gödel earn any honors? | Kurt Gödel | At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences." Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system? This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER | His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. | Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Early life and education
Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
Career
Incompleteness theorem
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.
Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".
Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.
in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography
Important publications
In German:
1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.
In English:
1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.
In English translation:
Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
"My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
"The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
Volume I: Publications 1929–1936 / Paperback: ,
Volume II: Publications 1938–1974 / Paperback: ,
Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures / Paperback: ,
Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III
See also
Gödel machine
Gödel fuzzy logic
Gödel–Löb logic
Gödel Prize
Infinite-valued logic
List of Austrian scientists
List of pioneers in computer science
Mathematical Platonism
Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
Primitive recursive functional
Strange loop
Tarski's undefinability theorem
World Logic Day
Notes
References
.
.
Further reading
Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
.
.
.
.
Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka,
Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):
External links
Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
Gödel photo gallery.
Kurt Gödel
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
1906 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century Austrian mathematicians
American relativity theorists
American Protestants
American logicians
American people of Moravian-German descent
Analytic philosophers
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian logicians
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Austrian philosophers
Austrian Protestants
Austro-Hungarian mathematicians
Burials at Princeton Cemetery
Deaths by starvation
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
National Medal of Science laureates
Ontologists
Scientists from Brno
People from the Margraviate of Moravia
People with acquired American citizenship
People with paranoid personality disorder
Platonists
Princeton University faculty
Protestant philosophers
Set theorists
Vienna Circle
University of Notre Dame faculty
University of Vienna alumni
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy | false | [
"Michael Plooy (born 16 June 1984) is a professional Dutch darts player who plays in Professional Darts Corporation events.\n\nHe tried to earn a PDC Tour Card in 2017, but didn't earn enough points to qualify. He did qualify for three PDC European Tour events, although he didn't win a game in any of them.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nProfile and stats on Darts Database\n\n1984 births\nLiving people\nDutch darts players",
"James E. Bracken (March 12, 1918 – April 19, 2008) was an American Thoroughbred horse racing trainer based in Florida.\n\nBackground\nBracken began his career in horse racing in 1935 at Jefferson Downs Racetrack in New Orleans. He began as a galloper before becoming a jockey, and while that did not last long he was able to become a jockey agent. Among his clients were several future Hall of Fame inductees including John Adams, Bill Hartack, Bill Shoemaker, Jacinto Vásquez and Walter Blum.\n\nIn 1976, at age 48, Bracken embarked on a career that would see him earn Calder Race Course Hall of Fame honors.\n\nReferences\n\n1918 births\n2008 deaths\nAmerican horse trainers\nPeople from Charleston, Missouri"
] |
[
"Kurt Gödel",
"Studying in Vienna",
"In Vienna, where did Godel Study?",
"the University of Vienna.",
"What year did he start studying?",
"At the age of 18,",
"What was his major, or field of study?",
"initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.",
"Did he change to another field of study?",
"he became interested in mathematical logic.",
"When did he graduate?",
"). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930.",
"did he earn any honors?",
"His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science."
] | C_1d6c9f76ff3e42c48d9abe5d49b3da30_0 | Did he join any clubs during school? | 7 | Did Kurt Gödel join any clubs during school? | Kurt Gödel | At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences." Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system? This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Early life and education
Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
Career
Incompleteness theorem
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.
Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".
Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.
in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography
Important publications
In German:
1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.
In English:
1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.
In English translation:
Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
"My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
"The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
Volume I: Publications 1929–1936 / Paperback: ,
Volume II: Publications 1938–1974 / Paperback: ,
Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures / Paperback: ,
Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III
See also
Gödel machine
Gödel fuzzy logic
Gödel–Löb logic
Gödel Prize
Infinite-valued logic
List of Austrian scientists
List of pioneers in computer science
Mathematical Platonism
Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
Primitive recursive functional
Strange loop
Tarski's undefinability theorem
World Logic Day
Notes
References
.
.
Further reading
Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
.
.
.
.
Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka,
Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):
External links
Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
Gödel photo gallery.
Kurt Gödel
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
1906 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century Austrian mathematicians
American relativity theorists
American Protestants
American logicians
American people of Moravian-German descent
Analytic philosophers
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian logicians
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Austrian philosophers
Austrian Protestants
Austro-Hungarian mathematicians
Burials at Princeton Cemetery
Deaths by starvation
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
National Medal of Science laureates
Ontologists
Scientists from Brno
People from the Margraviate of Moravia
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[
"Kurt Gödel",
"Studying in Vienna",
"In Vienna, where did Godel Study?",
"the University of Vienna.",
"What year did he start studying?",
"At the age of 18,",
"What was his major, or field of study?",
"initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.",
"Did he change to another field of study?",
"he became interested in mathematical logic.",
"When did he graduate?",
"). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930.",
"did he earn any honors?",
"His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.",
"Did he join any clubs during school?",
"I don't know."
] | C_1d6c9f76ff3e42c48d9abe5d49b3da30_0 | Did he have any professors he admired? | 8 | Did Kurt Gödel have any professors he admired? | Kurt Gödel | At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences." Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system? This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER | Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. | Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
Early life and education
Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).
Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.
In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.
Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."
Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"
This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.
Career
Incompleteness theorem
In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.
Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.
In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.
In his two-page paper (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).
Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck. This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.
In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.
In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.
Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.
He married (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.
Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.
Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.
Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.
His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.
Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".
Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.
On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.
Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.
During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).
He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.
Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.
Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.
Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".
Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."
In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."
Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.
in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography
Important publications
In German:
1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.
In English:
1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.
In English translation:
Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
"My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
"The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
Volume I: Publications 1929–1936 / Paperback: ,
Volume II: Publications 1938–1974 / Paperback: ,
Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures / Paperback: ,
Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III
See also
Gödel machine
Gödel fuzzy logic
Gödel–Löb logic
Gödel Prize
Infinite-valued logic
List of Austrian scientists
List of pioneers in computer science
Mathematical Platonism
Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
Primitive recursive functional
Strange loop
Tarski's undefinability theorem
World Logic Day
Notes
References
.
.
Further reading
Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
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Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka,
Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):
External links
Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
Gödel photo gallery.
Kurt Gödel
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
1906 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century Austrian mathematicians
American relativity theorists
American Protestants
American logicians
American people of Moravian-German descent
Analytic philosophers
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austrian logicians
Austrian people of Moravian-German descent
Austrian philosophers
Austrian Protestants
Austro-Hungarian mathematicians
Burials at Princeton Cemetery
Deaths by starvation
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
National Medal of Science laureates
Ontologists
Scientists from Brno
People from the Margraviate of Moravia
People with acquired American citizenship
People with paranoid personality disorder
Platonists
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Protestant philosophers
Set theorists
Vienna Circle
University of Notre Dame faculty
University of Vienna alumni
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy | false | [
"John Smith D.D. (baptised 14 October 1711 – 17 June 1795) was a British academic and astronomer.\n\nHis father was an attorney named Henry Smith and his mother was Elizabeth Johnson. He was born in Coltishall, Norfolk and was educated at Norwich School and Eton.\n\nHe was admitted to Caius College, Cambridge University in 1732. He received a B.A. in 1735/6 and an M.A. in 1739.\n\nHe was successively dean (1744–1749), bursar (1750–1753), and president of the college (1754–1764). He was Master of Caius from 1764 to 1795, and Lowndean Professor of Astronomy from 1771 to 1795.\n\nHe was ordained in 1739. He installed a transit telescope above his college ante-chapel.\n\nHe did not seem to have left any scientific papers or given any lectures.\n\nOffices Held\n\nExternal links\n\nReferences\n\n1711 births\n1795 deaths\nPeople educated at Norwich School\nMasters of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge\nLowndean Professors of Astronomy and Geometry\nPeople from Coltishall",
"Academic ranks in Egypt are the titles, relative importance and power of professors, researchers, and administrative personnel held in academia.\n\nOverview\n MOA'ED (معيد), or Teaching Assistant- also called demonstrator- (must have a bachelor's degree; usually graduated top of the class).\n MODARESS MOSAED (مدرس مساعد), Assistant Lecturer (must have a master's degree)\n MODARESS (مدرس), Lecturer (must have a PhD degree)\n OSTATH MOSAED (the \"TH\" pronounced like in the word \"THE\") MOSAED (أستاذ مساعد), equivalent to associate professor.\n OSTATH (أستاذ) (the \"TH\" pronounced like in the word \"THE\"), equivalent to professor (usually after minimum of five years serving as OSTATH MOSAED as well as publishing certain number of research papers)\n OSTATH MOTAFAREGH (أستاذ متفرغ), equivalent to professor emeritus.\n\nProfessorship\nPublic universities have five ranks for faculty members: معيد (Mu`īd ; equivalent to teaching assistant), مدرس مساعد (Mudarris musā`id; equivalent to senior teaching assistant), مدرس(Mudarris; equivalent to assistant professor), أستاذ مساعد('Ustāḏ musā`id; equivalent to associate professor), and أستاذ('Ustāḏ; equivalent to professor)\n\nTeaching assistant: Academic departments hire teaching assistants by either directly hiring the top ranking students of the most recent graduates, or publishing advertisements. Once hired, a teaching assistant must obtain a master's degree within five years of commencing employment. Otherwise, s/he must either leave the university, or be transferred to any administrative department that s/he is qualified for. Teaching assistants duties include preparing and delivering tutorial and lab sessions, preparing assignments and term projects requirements, preparing and conducting laboratory examinations, and tutorial quizzes, and co-supervising graduation projects.\n\nSenior teaching assistant: After a teaching assistant obtains a master's degree, s/he is promoted to a senior teaching assistant. Usually, the duties do not change, but the salary increases slightly. To keep her/his post, a senior teaching assistant must obtain a doctoral degree within five years. Otherwise, s/he must either leave the university, or be transferred to any administrative department that s/he is qualified for.\n\nAssistant professor: Once a senior teaching assistant obtains a doctorate, s/he is hired as an assistant professor, and receives tenureship. Assistant professors duties include delivering lectures, supervising graduation projects, master's theses, and doctoral dissertations.\n\nAssociate professor: After at least five years, an assistant professor can apply for a promotion to the rank of associate professor. The decision is based on the scholarly contributions of the applicant, in terms of publications and theses and dissertations supervised.\n\nProfessor: After at least five years, an associate professor can apply for a promotion to the rank of a professor. The decision is based on the scholarly contributions of the applicant, in terms of publications and theses and dissertations supervised.\n\nAcademic duties of associate professors and professors are nearly the same as assistant professors. However, only associate professors and professors can assume senior administrative posts like a department chair, a college vice dean, and a college dean.\n\nReferences\n\nAcademic ranks\nAcademia in Egypt"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence"
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Who had the largest influence on Huxley? | 1 | Who had the largest influence on Julian Huxley? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
Critics of creationism
Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
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English humanists
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English people of Cornish descent
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Ethologists
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Julian
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People educated at Eton College
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Royal Army Service Corps officers | true | [
"Ends and Means (an Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization) is a book of essays written by Aldous Huxley. It was published in 1937. The book contains illuminating tracts on war, religion, nationalism and ethics, and was cited as a major influence on Thomas Merton in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. \n\nEssay collections by Aldous Huxley\n1937 non-fiction books\nChatto & Windus books\nEnglish essay collections",
"James Huxley (1614 – ) was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons in 1660.\n\nHuxley was the son of George Huxley of Edmonton where he was baptised on 6 November, 1614. He was admitted at Gray's Inn in 1633. In 1640 he obtained a mortgage on the estate of Dornford in the parish of Wootton, West Oxfordshire. The owners tried to sell the property to Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, but the sale became a matter of dispute and Cary died. In 1653 Huxley paid off the various parties and acquired Dornford.\n\nHuxley also lived at Oxford in a substantial house next to Pembroke College, Oxford and became a freeman of Oxford on 14 March, 1660. In 1660, he was elected Member of Parliament for Oxford in the Convention Parliament.\n\nHuxley married Elizabeth Barkham, daughter of Sir William Barkham. They had daughters Jane who married Sir Nicholas Pelham and Elizabeth who married Robert Cressett of Upton Cressett.\n\nReferences\n\n1614 births\n1672 deaths\nEnglish MPs 1660\nMembers of Gray's Inn\nYear of death uncertain\nPeople from Oxford"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,"
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Did Huxley was influence from his family? | 2 | Did Julian Huxley was influence from his family? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
Critics of creationism
Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
English atheists
English humanists
English eugenicists
English people of Cornish descent
English science writers
English sceptics
Ethologists
Evolutionary biologists
Fellows of New College, Oxford
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fullerian Professors of Physiology
Julian
Intelligence Corps officers
Kalinga Prize recipients
Knights Bachelor
Modern synthesis (20th century)
People educated at Eton College
People with bipolar disorder
Rice University faculty
Secular humanists
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Writers from London
UNESCO Directors-General
Zoo directors
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Royal Army Service Corps officers | false | [
"Sir Leonard George Holden Huxley (29 May 1902 – 4 September 1988) was an Australian physicist.\n\nHuxley was born in London, the eldest son of George Hamborough and Lilian Huxley. He was a second-cousin once removed of Thomas Huxley. His family migrated from England to Australia in 1905 when he was three, and settled in Tasmania, where Huxley showed great academic and sporting promise while attending The Hutchins School. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to New College, Oxford while in his second year at the University of Tasmania and obtained a D.Phil. from Oxford in 1928. On 5 October 1929 he married Ella Mary Child 'Molly' Copeland who was reading history at Somerville College.\n\nHuxley was a physicist at the Australian Radio Research Board, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research 1929 to 1931; Lecturer in Physics, University College, Leicester 1932 to 1940; Principal Scientific Officer, Ministry of Aircraft Production, UK 1940 to 1946; Reader in Electromagnetism, University of Birmingham 1946 to 1949; Professor of Physics, University of Adelaide 1949 to 1960; and Vice-Chancellor, Australian National University 1960 to 1967.\n\nHuxley was president of the Australian Branch of the Institute of Physics (UK) 1954 to 1955; and president of the Australian Institute of Physics 1962 to 1965.\n\nHe was elected a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1953, and knighted in 1964.\n\nHuxley died in London at the age of 86.\n\nSee also\nHuxley family\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n \n \n \n\n1902 births\n1988 deaths\nAustralian physicists\nAcademics of the University of Leicester\nAustralian Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire\nAustralian Rhodes Scholars\nFellows of the Australian Academy of Science\nAlumni of New College, Oxford\nLeonard\nAcademics of the University of Birmingham\nEnglish emigrants to Australia\nVice-Chancellors of the Australian National University",
"Juliette Huxley, Lady Huxley (1896–1994), born Marie Juliette Baillot, was a Swiss-French sculptor and writer. She provided lifelong support to her husband, British naturalist Julian Huxley.\n\nBiography\n\nBaillot was born in Auvernier, Switzerland, on 6 December 1896 to Alphonse Baillot, a lawyer, and Mélanie Antonia Ortlieb. \n\nAround 1915 she began working as a tutor to the daughter of Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington. It was there in 1916 that she met Aldous Huxley and his brother Julian Huxley. She and Julian were married in 1919 and had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016). Julian Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and Juliette's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on her to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.\n\nIn 1930 her husband told her that he wanted to have an open marriage, and he went on to have a number of affairs. In 1936 he had a relationship, of which Juliette was aware, with poet May Sarton. Sarton went on to have a brief physical relationship with Juliette, which became over time what Sarton later described as a romance and as a true union of souls. Julian was not aware of this relationship, and Juliette broke it off during a week they spent together in Paris in 1948 because of Sarton's threat to tell him. After his death they resumed their correspondence. Sarton's letters to and from Juliette, whom she described as the incomparable one, were published in 1999. \n\nJuliette accompanied her husband throughout his career and travelled extensively. In 1963 she published Wild Lives of Africa based on these travels. In 1986 she published her autobiography Leaves of the Tulip Tree.\n\nJuliette learned to sculpt from Alan Best, whom she had hired to teach her son when he was immobilised following a bicycle accident, and she later had an apprenticeship with John Skeaping at the Central School.\n\nShe became Lady Huxley on the award of a knighthood to her husband in 1958.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Juliette Huxley papers at Rice University \n Photographs of Juliette Baillot by Ottoline Morell at the National Portrait Gallery\n\n1886 births\n1994 deaths\nSwiss-French people\nSwiss women writers\nSwiss women sculptors\nHuxley family"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know."
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | What did Huxley believe? | 3 | What did Julian Huxley believe? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
Critics of creationism
Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
English atheists
English humanists
English eugenicists
English people of Cornish descent
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Ethologists
Evolutionary biologists
Fellows of New College, Oxford
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Royal Army Service Corps officers | true | [
"Literature and Science, published in September 1963, was Aldous Huxley's last book - he died two months after it was published. In it, he strives to harmonize the scientific and artistic realms. He argues that language is what divides the two realms and makes communication between them difficult. He analyzes the ways in which scientists and fiction writers use language differently to achieve their desired effects. Although he concedes that many differences in language use are inevitable, he urges both camps to seek mutual understanding and appreciation. He directs his argument primarily to fiction writers: \"Whether we like it or not,” he tells them, “ours is the Age of Science.\"\n\nHuxley was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley (known as Charles Darwin's \"bulldog\"), and the grand-nephew of the English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold.\n\nScientific Specialization \nIn Literature and Science, Huxley bemoans the disregard for science shown by many if not most literary contemporaries. He dismisses as \"literary cowardice\" the artists' professed bewilderment in an era when \"Science has become an affair of specialists. Incapable any longer of understanding what it is all about, the man of letters, we are told, has no choice but to ignore contemporary science altogether.\" Huxley takes T.S. Eliot to task for his retreat into \"the traditional raw material of English poetical feeling and poetical expression\" in Eliot's depictions of nature in The Waste Land. For Eliot and others, Huxley writes, \"From their writings you would be hard put to it to infer the simple historical fact that they are the contemporaries of Einstein and Heisenberg, of computers, electron microscopes and the discovery of the molecular basis of heredity....\"\n\nScience As Method \nHuxley had written decades earlier in Along the Road that \"If I could be born again and choose what I should be in my next existence, I should desire to be a man of science....\" But in Literature and Science, as scholars have noted, the later Huxley strongly qualified that earlier aspiration in his pursuit of a grand philosophical synthesis. Milton Birnbaum wrote in 1971 that Huxley \"never embraced science as a satisfactory way to gauge the nature of ultimate reality.\" Yet, Birnbaum adds that Huxley \"always favored the methodology of science in the attainment of knowledge....\" In Literature and Science, Huxley writes that \"The precondition of any fruitful relationship between literature and science is knowledge.\" For the literary artist, Huxley writes, \"a thorough and detailed knowledge of any branch of science is impossible. It is also unnecessary. All that is necessary, so far as the man of letters is concerned, is a general knowledge of science...and an appreciation of the ways in which scientific information and scientific modes of thought are relevant to individual experience....\" Included in James Sexton's Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley is a \"My dear Tom\" letter that Huxley wrote to Eliot: \"I venture to recommend\" Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity, \"by far the best thing on 'semantics' and the problem of the relations between words and things, ever produced.\"\n\nHope for the Future \nAlthough Huxley remains best known for his early novel Brave New World, scholars agree that the strength in his later writing belongs to his non-fiction prose. George Woodcock writes of \"Huxley's diminution as a novelist,\" noting that \"...even if Huxley the artist died after Eyeless in Gaza, Huxley the prose craftsman remained as much alive as ever.\" Harold H. Watts notes that Huxley's books \"...in this final and extended period of his life\" are \"the work of a man who is meditating on the central problems of many modern men.\" In Literature and Science, Huxley, acknowledging that \"it will be difficult to incorporate the hypotheses of science into harmonious, moving and persuasive works of art,\" nevertheless expresses the hope that \"sooner or later the necessary means will be discovered, the appropriate weapons will be forged, the long-awaited pioneer of genius will turn up and...point out the way.\"\n\nReferences\n\n1963 essays\nEssays about literature\nBooks by Aldous Huxley\nHarper & Row books",
"Huxley may refer to:\n\nPeople\n Huxley (surname)\n The British Huxley family\n Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), British biologist known as \"Darwin's Bulldog\"\n Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), British writer, author of Brave New World, grandson of Thomas Huxley\n Julian Huxley (1887–1975), British biologist, brother of Aldous Huxley\n Andrew Huxley (1917–2012), British biologist, brother of Aldous Huxley\n Anthony Huxley (1920–1992), British botanist, son of Julian Huxley\n Francis Huxley (1923–2016), British botanist, anthropologist and author, son of Julian Huxley\n\nGeography\n Huxley, Alberta, Canada\n Huxley, Cheshire, England\n Huxley, Iowa, United States\n Huxley, Texas, United States\n Huxley River, New Zealand\n Mount Huxley (disambiguation)\n\nEducation\n Huxley College of the Environment, a college of Western Washington University\n\nOther\n Huxley (lunar crater)\n Huxley (Martian crater)\n Huxley (video game), an MMOFPS by Webzen Games Inc.\n Huxley Pig, an animated television series\n Huxley, the third generation of 3D printers from the RepRap Project\n Huxley, the main antagonist in The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland\n\nSee also\n Huxley Stakes, a horse race run at Chester, England"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,"
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Did Huxley believe in God? | 4 | Did Julian Huxley believe in God? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution. | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
Critics of creationism
Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
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Royal Army Service Corps officers | false | [
"The Perennial Philosophy is a comparative study of mysticism by the British writer and novelist Aldous Huxley. Its title derives from the theological tradition of perennial philosophy.\n\nSocial and political context\n\nThe Perennial Philosophy was first published in 1945 immediately after the Second World War by Harper & Brothers in the United States (1946 by Chatto & Windus in the United Kingdom). The jacket text of the British first edition explains:\n\nThe book offers readers, who are assumed to be familiar with the Christian religion and the Bible, a fresh approach employing Eastern and Western mysticism:\n\nThe final paragraph of the jacket text states:\n\nScope of the book\n\nIn the words of poet and anthologist John Robert Colombo:\n\nStyle of the book\n\nHuxley deliberately chose less well-known quotations because \"familiarity with traditionally hallowed writings tends to breed, not indeed contempt, but ... a kind of reverential insensibility, ... an inward deafness to the meaning of the sacred words.\" So, for example, Chapter 5 on \"Charity\" takes just one quotation from the Bible, combining it with less familiar sources:\n\n\"He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.\"1 John iv\n\n\"By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thought never.\"The Cloud of Unknowing\n\n\"The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.\"Jalal-uddin Rumi\"\n\nHuxley then explains: \"We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge ...\"\n\nHuxley is quite vague with his references: \"No specific sources are given.\"\n\nStructure of the book\n\nThe book's structure consists of:\n\n A brief Introduction by Huxley, of just over 5 pages.\n Twenty-seven chapters (each of about 10 pages) of quotations from sages and saints on specific topics, with \"short connecting commentaries.\" The chapters are not grouped in any way though there is a kind of order from the nature of the Ground at the beginning, down to practical exercises at the end. The Acknowledgements list 27 books from which quotations have been taken. The chapter titles are:\n\n That Art Thou\n The Nature of the Ground\n Personality, Sanctity, Divine Incarnation\n God in the World\n Charity\n Mortification, Non-Attachment, Right Livelihood\n Truth\n Religion and Temperament\n Self-Knowledge\n Grace and Free Will\n Good and Evil\n Time and Eternity\n Salvation, Deliverance, Enlightenment\n Immortality and Survival\n Silence\n Prayer\n Suffering\n Faith\n God is not mocked\n Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (\"The practice of religion leads people to practice evil.\")\n Idolatry\n Emotionalism\n The Miraculous\n Ritual, Symbol, Sacrament\n Spiritual Exercises\n Perseverance and Regularity\n Contemplation, Action, and Social Utility\n\n A detailed Bibliography of just over 6 pages.\n A detailed Index (two columns of small print, pages).\n\nCritical reception\n\nIn the United States\nThe Perennial Philosophy was widely reviewed when first published in 1945, with articles appearing in Book Week, Booklist, The Christian Century, Bull VA Kirkus' Bookshop Serv., The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Saturday Review of Literature, Springfield Republican, New York Herald Tribune, and the Wilson Bulletin.\n\nThe New York Times wrote that, \"Perhaps Mr. Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy has, at this time, written the most needed book in the world.\" The Times described the book as an:\n\nThe Times also stated that, \"It is important to say that even an agnostic, even a behaviorist-materialist ... can read this book with joy. It is the masterpiece of all anthologies.\"\n\nSimilarly, forty years later Huston Smith, a religious scholar, wrote that, in The Perennial Philosophy:\n\nNot all the reception was so positive. Chad Walsh, writing in the Journal of Bible and Religion in 1948, spoke of Huxley's distinguished family background, only to continue:\n\nIn the United Kingdom\nIn the United Kingdom, reviewers admired the comprehensiveness of Huxley's survey but questioned his other-worldliness and were hostile to his belief in the paranormal.\n\nC. E. M. Joad wrote in New Statesman and Society that, although the book was a mine of learning and Huxley's commentary was profound, readers would be surprised to find that he had adopted a series of peculiar beliefs such as the curative power of relics and spiritual presences incarnated in sacramental objects. Joad pointed out that, if the argument of the book is correct, only those who have undergone the religious experiences upon which it is based are properly able to assess its worth. Further, he found that the book was dogmatic and intolerant, \"in which pretty well everything we want to do is wrong.\"\n\nFinally, Joad asserted that Huxley's mistake was in his \"intellectual whole-hoggery\" and that he was led by ideas untempered by ordinary human experience.\n\nIn the journal Philosophy, the Anglican priest Rev. W. R. Inge remarked on the book's well chosen quotations and called it \"probably the most important treatise we have had on mysticism for many years.\" He saw it as evidence that Huxley was now a mystical philosopher, which he regarded as an encouraging sign. Inge pointed out conflicts between religions and within religion and agreed that a rapprochement must be through mystical religion. However, he wondered if the book, with its transcendence of the personality and detachment from worldly concerns, might not be more Buddhist than Christian. He concluded his review by calling into question Huxley's belief in psychical phenomena.\n\nElsewhere\n\nCanadian author John Robert Colombo wrote that as a young man he, like many others in the 1950s, was swept away with enthusiasm for \"the coveted volume\" :\n\n{{blockquote|Everyone interested in consciousness studies has heard of his study called The Perennial Philosophy. It bears such a prescient and memorable title. His use of the title has preempted its use by any other author, neuropsychologist, Traditionalist, or enthusiast for the New Age. The book so nobly named did much to romanticise the notion of \"perennialism\" and to cast into the shade such long-established timid Christian notions of “ecumenicism” (Protestants dialoguing with Catholics, etc.) or \"inter-faith\" meetings (Christians encountering non-Christians, etc.). Who would care about the beliefs of Baptists when one could care about the practices of Tibetans?}}\n\nColombo also stated that:\n\nHuxley's view of perennial philosophy\n\nHuxley's Introduction to The Perennial Philosophy begins:\n\nIn the next paragraph, Huxley summarises the problem more succinctly, saying: \"Knowledge is a function of being.\" In other words, if you are not suited to knowing something, you do not know it. This makes knowing the Ground of All Being difficult, in Huxley's view. Therefore, he concludes his Introduction with:\n\nSee also\n Perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis)\n The Teachings of the Mystics – A book by Walter T. Stace with a similar thesis\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nPublication dataThe Perennial Philosophy'', 1945, Harper & Brothers\nHarper Perennial 1990 edition: \nHarper Modern Classics 2004 edition: \nAudio Scholar 1995 audio cassette edition:\n\nExternal links \nThe Perennial Philosophy at Internet Archive.\n\n1945 non-fiction books\nBooks by Aldous Huxley\nPhilosophy of religion literature\nMysticism texts\nChatto & Windus books\nHarper & Brothers books\nReligious pluralism\nNeo-Vedanta",
"Mount Huxley is a name shared by a number of places:\n\nMount Huxley (Alaska), a mountain peak in the Saint Elias Mountains\nMount Huxley (Antarctica), a mountain in Antarctica\nMount Huxley (California), a mountain in California\nMount Huxley (Tasmania), a mountain in Australia\nMount Huxley (Western Australia), another mountain in Australia"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,",
"Did Huxley believe in God?",
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Where did Huxley study? | 5 | Where did Julian Huxley study? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
Critics of creationism
Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
English atheists
English humanists
English eugenicists
English people of Cornish descent
English science writers
English sceptics
Ethologists
Evolutionary biologists
Fellows of New College, Oxford
Fellows of the Royal Society
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Julian
Intelligence Corps officers
Kalinga Prize recipients
Knights Bachelor
Modern synthesis (20th century)
People educated at Eton College
People with bipolar disorder
Rice University faculty
Secular humanists
Secretaries of the Zoological Society of London
Writers from London
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Royal Army Service Corps officers | true | [
"Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics is a book by Aldous Huxley published in 1941. It is a biography of François Leclerc du Tremblay, the French monk who served as advisor to Cardinal de Richelieu and was referred to by others as l'éminence grise.\n\nReferences\n \n\n1941 non-fiction books\nBooks by Aldous Huxley\nChatto & Windus books",
"Huxley may refer to:\n\nPeople\n Huxley (surname)\n The British Huxley family\n Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), British biologist known as \"Darwin's Bulldog\"\n Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), British writer, author of Brave New World, grandson of Thomas Huxley\n Julian Huxley (1887–1975), British biologist, brother of Aldous Huxley\n Andrew Huxley (1917–2012), British biologist, brother of Aldous Huxley\n Anthony Huxley (1920–1992), British botanist, son of Julian Huxley\n Francis Huxley (1923–2016), British botanist, anthropologist and author, son of Julian Huxley\n\nGeography\n Huxley, Alberta, Canada\n Huxley, Cheshire, England\n Huxley, Iowa, United States\n Huxley, Texas, United States\n Huxley River, New Zealand\n Mount Huxley (disambiguation)\n\nEducation\n Huxley College of the Environment, a college of Western Washington University\n\nOther\n Huxley (lunar crater)\n Huxley (Martian crater)\n Huxley (video game), an MMOFPS by Webzen Games Inc.\n Huxley Pig, an animated television series\n Huxley, the third generation of 3D printers from the RepRap Project\n Huxley, the main antagonist in The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland\n\nSee also\n Huxley Stakes, a horse race run at Chester, England"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,",
"Did Huxley believe in God?",
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution.",
"Where did Huxley study?",
"Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir."
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Did Huxley do any public speaking? | 6 | Did Julian Huxley do any public speaking? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
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"Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He has become known as \"Darwin's Bulldog\" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.\n\nThe stories regarding Huxley's famous debate in 1860 with Samuel Wilberforce were a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution and in his own career, although historians think that the surviving story of the debate is a later fabrication. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated about whether humans were closely related to apes.\n\nHuxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. Instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, he fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.\n\nHuxley coined the term \"agnosticism\" in 1869 and elaborated on it in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not.\n\nHuxley had little formal schooling and was virtually self-taught. He became perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the later 19th century. He worked on invertebrates, clarifying relationships between groups previously little understood. Later, he worked on vertebrates, especially on the relationship between apes and humans. After comparing Archaeopteryx with Compsognathus, he concluded that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs, a theory widely accepted today.\n\nThe tendency has been for this fine anatomical work to be overshadowed by his energetic and controversial activity in favour of evolution, and by his extensive public work on scientific education, both of which had significant effects on society in Britain and elsewhere. Huxley's 1893 Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics” is exceedingly influential in China; the Chinese translation of Huxley's lecture even transformed the Chinese translation of Darwin's Origin of Species.\n\nEarly life \nThomas Henry Huxley was born in Ealing, which was then a village in Middlesex. He was the second youngest of eight children of George Huxley and Rachel Withers. His parents were members of the Church of England but he sympathized with noncomformists. Like some other British scientists of the nineteenth century such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Huxley was brought up in a literate middle-class family which had fallen on hard times. His father was a mathematics teacher at Ealing School until it closed, putting the family into financial difficulties. As a result, Thomas left school at the age of 10, after only two years of formal schooling.\n\nDespite this unenviable start, Huxley was determined to educate himself. He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. At first he read Thomas Carlyle, James Hutton's Geology, and Hamilton's Logic. In his teens he taught himself German, eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. He learned Latin, and enough Greek to read Aristotle in the original.\n\nLater on, as a young adult, he made himself an expert, first on invertebrates, and later on vertebrates, all self-taught. He was skilled in drawing and did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his later debates and writing on science and religion his grasp of theology was better than many of his clerical opponents. Huxley, a boy who left school at ten, became one of the most knowledgeable men in Britain.\n\nHe was apprenticed for short periods to several medical practitioners: at 13 to his brother-in-law John Cooke in Coventry, who passed him on to Thomas Chandler, notable for his experiments using mesmerism for medical purposes. Chandler's practice was in London's Rotherhithe amidst the squalor endured by the Dickensian poor. Here Thomas would have seen poverty, crime and rampant disease at its worst. Next, another brother-in-law took him on: John Salt, his eldest sister's husband. Now 16, Huxley entered Sydenham College (behind University College Hospital), a cut-price anatomy school whose founder, Marshall Hall, discovered the reflex arc. All this time Huxley continued his programme of reading, which more than made up for his lack of formal schooling.\n\nA year later, buoyed by excellent results and a silver medal prize in the Apothecaries' yearly competition, Huxley was admitted to study at Charing Cross Hospital, where he obtained a small scholarship. At Charing Cross, he was taught by Thomas Wharton Jones, Professor of Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery at University College London. Jones had been Robert Knox's assistant when Knox bought cadavers from Burke and Hare. The young Wharton Jones, who acted as go-between, was exonerated of crime, but thought it best to leave Scotland. He was a fine teacher, up-to-date in physiology and also an ophthalmic surgeon. In 1845, under Wharton Jones' guidance, Huxley published his first scientific paper demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognised layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as Huxley's layer. No doubt remembering this, and of course knowing his merit, later in life Huxley organised a pension for his old tutor.\n\nAt twenty he passed his First M.B. examination at the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology. However, he did not present himself for the final (Second M.B.) exams and consequently did not qualify with a university degree. His apprenticeships and exam results formed a sufficient basis for his application to the Royal Navy.\n\nVoyage of the Rattlesnake \nAged 20, Huxley was too young to apply to the Royal College of Surgeons for a licence to practise, yet he was 'deep in debt'. So, at a friend's suggestion, he applied for an appointment in the Royal Navy. He had references on character and certificates showing the time spent on his apprenticeship and on requirements such as dissection and pharmacy. Sir William Burnett, the Physician General of the Navy, interviewed him and arranged for the College of Surgeons to test his competence (by means of a viva voce).\n\nFinally Huxley was made Assistant Surgeon ('surgeon's mate', but in practice marine naturalist) to HMS Rattlesnake, about to set sail on a voyage of discovery and surveying to New Guinea and Australia. The Rattlesnake left England on 3 December 1846 and, once it arrived in the southern hemisphere, Huxley devoted his time to the study of marine invertebrates. He began to send details of his discoveries back to England, where publication was arranged by Edward Forbes FRS (who had also been a pupil of Knox). Both before and after the voyage Forbes was something of a mentor to Huxley.\n\nHuxley's paper \"On the anatomy and the affinities of the family of Medusae\" was published in 1849 by the Royal Society in its Philosophical Transactions. Huxley united the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps with the Medusae to form a class to which he subsequently gave the name of Hydrozoa. The connection he made was that all the members of the class consisted of two cell layers, enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of the phylum now called the Cnidaria. He compared this feature to the serous and mucous structures of embryos of higher animals. When at last he got a grant from the Royal Society for the printing of plates, Huxley was able to summarise this work in The Oceanic Hydrozoa, published by the Ray Society in 1859.\n\nThe value of Huxley's work was recognised and, on returning to England in 1850, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not only received the Royal Society Medal but was also elected to the Council. He met Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Tyndall, who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, so he might work on the specimens he collected and the observations he made during the voyage of the Rattlesnake. He solved the problem of Appendicularia, whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Peter Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign. It and the Ascidians are both, as Huxley showed, tunicates, today regarded as a sister group to the vertebrates in the phylum Chordata. Other papers on the morphology of the cephalopods and on brachiopods and rotifers are also noteworthy. The Rattlesnakes official naturalist, John MacGillivray, did some work on botany, and proved surprisingly good at notating Australian aboriginal languages. He wrote up the voyage in the standard Victorian two volume format.\n\nLater life \nHuxley effectively resigned from the navy (by refusing to return to active service) and, in July 1854, he became Professor of Natural History at the Royal School of Mines and naturalist to the British Geological Survey in the following year. In addition, he was Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution 1855–58 and 1865–67; Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons 1863–69; President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1869–1870; President of the Quekett Microscopical Club 1878; President of the Royal Society 1883–85; Inspector of Fisheries 1881–85; and President of the Marine Biological Association 1884–1890. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1869.\n\nThe thirty-one years during which Huxley occupied the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines included work on vertebrate palaeontology and on many projects to advance the place of science in British life. Huxley retired in 1885, after a bout of depressive illness which started in 1884. He resigned the presidency of the Royal Society in mid-term, the Inspectorship of Fisheries, and his chair (as soon as he decently could) and took six months' leave. His pension was a fairly handsome £1200 a year.\n\nIn 1890, he moved from London to Eastbourne where he edited the nine volumes of his Collected Essays. In 1894 he heard of Eugene Dubois' discovery in Java of the remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (now known as Homo erectus). Finally, in 1895, he died of a heart attack (after contracting influenza and pneumonia), and was buried in North London at East Finchley. This small family plot had been purchased upon the death of his beloved eldest son Noel, who died of scarlet fever in 1860; Huxley's wife Henrietta Anne née Heathorn and son Noel are also buried there. No invitations were sent out, but two hundred people turned up for the ceremony; they included Joseph Dalton Hooker, William Henry Flower, Mulford B. Foster, Edwin Lankester, Joseph Lister and, apparently, Henry James.\n\nHuxley and his wife had five daughters and three sons:\n\nPublic duties and awards \nFrom 1870 onwards, Huxley was to some extent drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. He served on eight Royal Commissions, from 1862 to 1884. From 1871 to 1880 he was a Secretary of the Royal Society and from 1883 to 1885 he was president. He was president of the Geological Society from 1868 to 1870. In 1870, he was president of the British Association at Liverpool and, in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board. He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1877 to 1879. He was the leading person amongst those who reformed the Royal Society, persuaded government about science, and established scientific education in British schools and universities. Before him, science was mostly a gentleman's occupation; after him, science was a profession.\n\nHe was awarded the highest honours then open to British men of science. The Royal Society, who had elected him as Fellow when he was 25 (1851), awarded him the Royal Medal the next year (1852), a year before Charles Darwin got the same award. He was the youngest biologist to receive such recognition. Then later in life came the Copley Medal in 1888 and the Darwin Medal in 1894; the Geological Society awarded him the Wollaston Medal in 1876; the Linnean Society awarded him the Linnean Medal in 1890. There were many other elections and appointments to eminent scientific bodies; these and his many academic awards are listed in the Life and Letters. He turned down many other appointments, notably the Linacre chair in zoology at Oxford and the Mastership of University College, Oxford.\n\nIn 1873 the King of Sweden made Huxley, Hooker and Tyndall Knights of the Order of the Polar Star: they could wear the insignia but not use the title in Britain. Huxley collected many honorary memberships of foreign societies, academic awards and honorary doctorates from Britain and Germany. He also became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1892.\n\nAs recognition of his many public services he was given a pension by the state, and was appointed Privy Councillor in 1892.\n\nDespite his many achievements he was given no award by the British state until late in life. In this he did better than Darwin, who got no award of any kind from the state. (Darwin's proposed knighthood was vetoed by ecclesiastical advisers, including Wilberforce) Perhaps Huxley had commented too often on his dislike of honours, or perhaps his many assaults on the traditional beliefs of organised religion made enemies in the establishment—he had vigorous debates in print with Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Balfour, and his relationship with Lord Salisbury was less than tranquil.\n\nHuxley was for about thirty years evolution's most effective advocate, and for some Huxley was \"the premier advocate of science in the nineteenth century [for] the whole English-speaking world\".\n\nThough he had many admirers and disciples, his retirement and later death left British zoology somewhat bereft of leadership. He had, directly or indirectly, guided the careers and appointments of the next generation, but none were of his stature. The loss of Francis Balfour in 1882, climbing the Alps just after he was appointed to a chair at Cambridge, was a tragedy. Huxley thought he was \"the only man who can carry out my work\": the deaths of Balfour and W. K. Clifford were \"the greatest losses to science in our time\".\n\nVertebrate palaeontology \n\nThe first half of Huxley's career as a palaeontologist is marked by a rather strange predilection for 'persistent types', in which he seemed to argue that evolutionary advancement (in the sense of major new groups of animals and plants) was rare or absent in the Phanerozoic. In the same vein, he tended to push the origin of major groups such as birds and mammals back into the Palaeozoic era, and to claim that no order of plants had ever gone extinct.\n\nMuch paper has been consumed by historians of science ruminating on this strange and somewhat unclear idea. Huxley was wrong to pitch the loss of orders in the Phanerozoic as low as 7%, and he did not estimate the number of new orders which evolved. Persistent types sat rather uncomfortably next to Darwin's more fluid ideas; despite his intelligence, it took Huxley a surprisingly long time to appreciate some of the implications of evolution. However, gradually Huxley moved away from this conservative style of thinking as his understanding of palaeontology, and the discipline itself, developed.\n\nHuxley's detailed anatomical work was, as always, first-rate and productive. His work on fossil fish shows his distinctive approach: whereas pre-Darwinian naturalists collected, identified and classified, Huxley worked mainly to reveal the evolutionary relationships between groups.\n\nThe lobed-finned fish (such as coelacanths and lung fish) have paired appendages whose internal skeleton is attached to the shoulder or pelvis by a single bone, the humerus or femur. His interest in these fish brought him close to the origin of tetrapods, one of the most important areas of vertebrate palaeontology.\n\nThe study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating the fundamental affinity of birds and reptiles, which he united under the title of Sauropsida. His papers on Archaeopteryx and the origin of birds were of great interest then and still are.\n\nApart from his interest in persuading the world that man was a primate, and had descended from the same stock as the apes, Huxley did little work on mammals, with one exception. On his tour of America Huxley was shown the remarkable series of fossil horses, discovered by O. C. Marsh, in Yale's Peabody Museum. An Easterner, Marsh was America's first professor of palaeontology, but also one who had come west into hostile Indian territory in search of fossils, hunted buffalo, and met Red Cloud (in 1874). Funded by his uncle George Peabody, Marsh had made some remarkable discoveries: the huge Cretaceous aquatic bird Hesperornis, and the dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River were worth the trip by themselves, but the horse fossils were really special. After a week with Marsh and his fossils, Huxley wrote excitedly, \"The collection of fossils is the most wonderful thing I ever saw.\"\n\nThe collection at that time went from the small four-toed forest-dwelling Orohippus from the Eocene through three-toed species such as Miohippus to species more like the modern horse. By looking at their teeth he could see that, as the size grew larger and the toes reduced, the teeth changed from those of a browser to those of a grazer. All such changes could be explained by a general alteration in habitat from forest to grassland. And, it is now known, that is what did happen over large areas of North America from the Eocene to the Pleistocene: the ultimate causative agent was global temperature reduction (see Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum). The modern account of the evolution of the horse has many other members, and the overall appearance of the tree of descent is more like a bush than a straight line.\n\nThe horse series also strongly suggested that the process was gradual, and that the origin of the modern horse lay in North America, not in Eurasia. If so, then something must have happened to horses in North America, since none were there when Europeans arrived. The experience with Marsh was enough for Huxley to give credence to Darwin's gradualism, and to introduce the story of the horse into his lecture series.\n\nMarsh's and Huxley's conclusions were initially quite different. However, Marsh carefully showed Huxley his complete sequence of fossils. As Marsh put it, Huxley \"then informed me that all this was new to him and that my facts demonstrated the evolution of the horse beyond question, and for the first time indicated the direct line of descent of an existing animal. With the generosity of true greatness, he gave up his own opinions in the face of new truth, and took my conclusions as the basis of his famous New York lecture on the horse.\"\n\nSupport of Darwin\n\nHuxley was originally not persuaded of \"development theory\", as evolution was once called. This can be seen in his savage review of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book which contained some quite pertinent arguments in favour of evolution. Huxley had also rejected Lamarck's theory of transmutation, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support it. All this scepticism was brought together in a lecture to the Royal Institution, which made Darwin anxious enough to set about an effort to change young Huxley's mind. It was the kind of thing Darwin did with his closest scientific friends, but he must have had some particular intuition about Huxley, who was from all accounts a most impressive person even as a young man.\n\nHuxley was therefore one of the small group who knew about Darwin's ideas before they were published (the group included Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell). The first publication by Darwin of his ideas came when Wallace sent Darwin his famous paper on natural selection, which was presented by Lyell and Hooker to the Linnean Society in 1858 alongside excerpts from Darwin's notebook and a Darwin letter to Asa Gray. Huxley's famous response to the idea of natural selection was \"How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!\" However, he never conclusively made up his mind about whether natural selection was the main method for evolution, though he did admit it was a hypothesis which was a good working basis.\n\nLogically speaking, the prior question was whether evolution had taken place at all. It is to this question that much of Darwin's On the Origin of Species was devoted. Its publication in 1859 completely convinced Huxley of evolution and it was this and no doubt his admiration of Darwin's way of amassing and using evidence that formed the basis of his support for Darwin in the debates that followed the book's publication.\n\nHuxley's support started with his anonymous favourable review of the Origin in the Times for 26 December 1859, and continued with articles in several periodicals, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860. At the same time, Richard Owen, whilst writing an extremely hostile anonymous review of the Origin in the Edinburgh Review, also primed Samuel Wilberforce who wrote one in the Quarterly Review, running to 17,000 words. The authorship of this latter review was not known for sure until Wilberforce's son wrote his biography. So it can be said that, just as Darwin groomed Huxley, so Owen groomed Wilberforce; and both the proxies fought public battles on behalf of their principals as much as themselves. Though we do not know the exact words of the Oxford debate, we do know what Huxley thought of the review in the Quarterly:\n\nSince Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a \"flighty\" person, who endeavours \"to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,\" and whose \"mode of dealing with nature\" is reprobated as \"utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.\"\n\nIf I confine my retrospect of the reception of the Origin of Species to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article...A more complete version is available in Wikiquote\n\nSince his death, Huxley has become known as \"Darwin's Bulldog\", taken to refer to his pluck and courage in debate, and to his perceived role in protecting the older man. The sobriquet appears to be Huxley's own invention, although of unknown date, and it was not current in his lifetime.\n\nWhile the second half of Darwin's life was lived mainly within his family, the younger and combative Huxley operated mainly out in the world at large. A letter from Huxley to Ernst Haeckel (2 November 1871) states: \"The dogs have been snapping at [Darwin's] heels too much of late.\"\n\nDebate with Wilberforce\n\nFamously, Huxley responded to Wilberforce in the debate at the British Association meeting, on Saturday 30 June 1860 at the Oxford University Museum. Huxley's presence there had been encouraged on the previous evening when he met Robert Chambers, the Scottish publisher and author of Vestiges, who was walking the streets of Oxford in a dispirited state, and begged for assistance. The debate followed the presentation of a paper by John William Draper, and was chaired by Darwin's former botany tutor John Stevens Henslow. Darwin's theory was opposed by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and those supporting Darwin included Huxley and their mutual friends Hooker and Lubbock. The platform featured Brodie and Professor Beale, and Robert FitzRoy, who had been captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin's voyage, spoke against Darwin.\n\nWilberforce had a track record against evolution as far back as the previous Oxford B.A. meeting in 1847 when he attacked Chambers' Vestiges. For the more challenging task of opposing the Origin, and the implication that man descended from apes, he had been assiduously coached by Richard OwenOwen stayed with him the night before the debate. On the day, Wilberforce repeated some of the arguments from his Quarterly Review article (written but not yet published), then ventured onto slippery ground. His famous jibe at Huxley (as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side) was probably unplanned, and certainly unwise. Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to suppress debatethe exact wording is not certainwas widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play.\n\nThe letters of Alfred Newton include one to his brother giving an eyewitness account of the debate, and written less than a month afterwards. Other eyewitnesses, with one or two exceptions (Hooker especially thought he had made the best points), give similar accounts, at varying dates after the event. The general view was and still is that Huxley got much the better of the exchange, though Wilberforce himself thought he had done quite well. In the absence of a verbatim report, differing perceptions are difficult to judge fairly; Huxley wrote a detailed account for Darwin, a letter which does not survive; however, a letter to his friend Frederick Daniel Dyster does survive with an account just three months after the event.\n\nOne effect of the debate was to hugely increase Huxley's visibility amongst educated people, through the accounts in newspapers and periodicals. Another consequence was to alert him to the importance of public debate: a lesson he never forgot. A third effect was to serve notice that Darwinian ideas could not be easily dismissed: on the contrary, they would be vigorously defended against orthodox authority. A fourth effect was to promote professionalism in science, with its implied need for scientific education. A fifth consequence was indirect: as Wilberforce had feared, a defence of evolution did undermine literal belief in the Old Testament, especially the Book of Genesis. Many of the liberal clergy at the meeting were quite pleased with the outcome of the debate; they were supporters, perhaps, of the controversial Essays and Reviews. Thus, both on the side of science and on that of religion, the debate was important and its outcome significant. (see also below)\n\nThat Huxley and Wilberforce remained on courteous terms after the debate (and able to work together on projects such as the Metropolitan Board of Education) says something about both men, whereas Huxley and Owen were never reconciled.\n\nMan's place in nature\n\nFor nearly a decade his work was directed mainly to the relationship of man to the apes. This led him directly into a clash with Richard Owen, a man widely disliked for his behaviour whilst also being admired for his capability. The struggle was to culminate in some severe defeats for Owen. Huxley's Croonian Lecture, delivered before the Royal Society in 1858 on The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull was the start. In this, he rejected Owen's theory that the bones of the skull and the spine were homologous, an opinion previously held by Goethe and Lorenz Oken.\n\nFrom 1860–63 Huxley developed his ideas, presenting them in lectures to working men, students and the general public, followed by publication. Also in 1862 a series of talks to working men was printed lecture by lecture as pamphlets, later bound up as a little green book; the first copies went on sale in December. Other lectures grew into Huxley's most famous work Evidence as to Man's place in Nature (1863) where he addressed the key issues long before Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man in 1871.\n\nAlthough Darwin did not publish his Descent of Man until 1871, the general debate on this topic had started years before (there was even a precursor debate in the 18th century between Monboddo and Buffon). Darwin had dropped a hint when, in the conclusion to the Origin, he wrote: \"In the distant future... light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history\". Not so distant, as it turned out. A key event had already occurred in 1857 when Richard Owen presented (to the Linnean Society) his theory that man was marked off from all other mammals by possessing features of the brain peculiar to the genus Homo. Having reached this opinion, Owen separated man from all other mammals in a subclass of its own. No other biologist held such an extreme view. Darwin reacted \"Man...as distinct from a chimpanzee [as] an ape from a platypus... I cannot swallow that!\" Neither could Huxley, who was able to demonstrate that Owen's idea was completely wrong.\n\nThe subject was raised at the 1860 BA Oxford meeting, when Huxley flatly contradicted Owen, and promised a later demonstration of the facts. In fact, a number of demonstrations were held in London and the provinces. In 1862 at the Cambridge meeting of the B.A. Huxley's friend William Flower gave a public dissection to show that the same structures (the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and hippocampus minor) were indeed present in apes. The debate was widely publicised, and parodied as the Great Hippocampus Question. It was seen as one of Owen's greatest blunders, revealing Huxley as not only dangerous in debate, but also a better anatomist.\n\nOwen conceded that there was something that could be called a hippocampus minor in the apes, but stated that it was much less developed and that such a presence did not detract from the overall distinction of simple brain size.\n\nHuxley's ideas on this topic were summed up in January 1861 in the first issue (new series) of his own journal, the Natural History Review: \"the most violent scientific paper he had ever composed\". This paper was reprinted in 1863 as chapter 2 of Man's Place in Nature, with an addendum giving his account of the Owen/Huxley controversy about the ape brain. In his Collected Essays this addendum was removed.\n\nThe extended argument on the ape brain, partly in debate and partly in print, backed by dissections and demonstrations, was a landmark in Huxley's career. It was highly important in asserting his dominance of comparative anatomy, and in the long run more influential in establishing evolution amongst biologists than was the debate with Wilberforce. It also marked the start of Owen's decline in the esteem of his fellow biologists.\n\nThe following was written by Huxley to Rolleston before the BA meeting in 1861:\n\"My dear Rolleston... The obstinate reiteration of erroneous assertions can only be nullified by as persistent an appeal to facts; and I greatly regret that my engagements do not permit me to be present at the British Association in order to assist personally at what, I believe, will be the seventh public demonstration during the past twelve months of the untruth of the three assertions, that the posterior lobe of the cerebrum, the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle, and the hippocampus minor, are peculiar to man and do not exist in the apes. I shall be obliged if you will read this letter to the Section\" Yours faithfully, Thos. H. Huxley.\n\nDuring those years there was also work on human fossil anatomy and anthropology. In 1862 he examined the Neanderthal skull-cap, which had been discovered in 1857. It was the first pre-sapiens discovery of a fossil man, and it was immediately clear to him that the brain case was surprisingly large. Huxley also started to dabble in physical anthropology, and classified the human races into nine categories, along with placing them under four general categorisations as Australoid, Negroid, Xanthochroic and Mongoloid. Such classifications depended mainly on physical appearance and certain xanatomical characteristics.\n\nNatural selection\nHuxley was certainly not slavish in his dealings with Darwin. As shown in every biography, they had quite different and rather complementary characters. Important also, Darwin was a field naturalist, but Huxley was an anatomist, so there was a difference in their experience of nature. Lastly, Darwin's views on science were different from Huxley's views. For Darwin, natural selection was the best way to explain evolution because it explained a huge range of natural history facts and observations: it solved problems. Huxley, on the other hand, was an empiricist who trusted what he could see, and some things are not easily seen. With this in mind, one can appreciate the debate between them, Darwin writing his letters, Huxley never going quite so far as to say he thought Darwin was right.\n\nHuxley's reservations on natural selection were of the type \"until selection and breeding can be seen to give rise to varieties which are infertile with each other, natural selection cannot be proved\". Huxley's position on selection was agnostic; yet he gave no credence to any other theory. Despite this concern about evidence, Huxley saw that if evolution came about through variation, reproduction and selection then other things would also be subject to the same pressures. This included ideas because they are invented, imitated and selected by humans: ‘The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.’ This is the same idea as meme theory put forward by Richard Dawkins in 1976.\n\nDarwin's part in the discussion came mostly in letters, as was his wont, along the lines: \"The empirical evidence you call for is both impossible in practical terms, and in any event unnecessary. It's the same as asking to see every step in the transformation (or the splitting) of one species into another. My way so many issues are clarified and problems solved; no other theory does nearly so well\".\n\nHuxley's reservation, as Helena Cronin has so aptly remarked, was contagious: \"it spread itself for years among all kinds of doubters of Darwinism\". One reason for this doubt was that comparative anatomy could address the question of descent, but not the question of mechanism.\n\nPallbearer\nHuxley was a pallbearer at the funeral of Charles Darwin on 26 April 1882.\n\nThe X Club\n\nIn November 1864, Huxley succeeded in launching a dining club, the X Club, composed of like-minded people working to advance the cause of science; not surprisingly, the club consisted of most of his closest friends. There were nine members, who decided at their first meeting that there should be no more. The members were: Huxley, John Tyndall, J. D. Hooker, John Lubbock (banker, biologist and neighbour of Darwin), Herbert Spencer (social philosopher and sub-editor of the Economist), William Spottiswoode (mathematician and the Queen's Printer), Thomas Hirst (Professor of Physics at University College London), Edward Frankland (the new Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution) and George Busk, zoologist and palaeontologist (formerly surgeon for HMS Dreadnought). All except Spencer were Fellows of the Royal Society. Tyndall was a particularly close friend; for many years they met regularly and discussed issues of the day. On more than one occasion Huxley joined Tyndall in the latter's trips into the Alps and helped with his investigations in glaciology.\n\nThere were also some quite significant X-Club satellites such as William Flower and George Rolleston, (Huxley protegés), and liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster. Guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time.\n\nThey would dine early on first Thursdays at a hotel, planning what to do; high on the agenda was to change the way the Royal Society Council did business. It was no coincidence that the Council met later that same evening. First item for the Xs was to get the Copley Medal for Darwin, which they managed after quite a struggle.\n\nThe next step was to acquire a journal to spread their ideas. This was the weekly Reader, which they bought, revamped and redirected. Huxley had already become part-owner of the Natural History Review bolstered by the support of Lubbock, Rolleston, Busk and Carpenter (X-clubbers and satellites). The journal was switched to pro-Darwinian lines and relaunched in January 1861. After a stream of good articles the NHR failed after four years; but it had helped at a critical time for the establishment of evolution. The Reader also failed, despite its broader appeal which included art and literature as well as science. The periodical market was quite crowded at the time, but most probably the critical factor was Huxley's time; he was simply over-committed, and could not afford to hire full-time editors. This occurred often in his life: Huxley took on too many ventures, and was not so astute as Darwin at getting others to do work for him.\n\nHowever, the experience gained with the Reader was put to good use when the X Club put their weight behind the founding of Nature in 1869. This time no mistakes were made: above all there was a permanent editor (though not full-time), Norman Lockyer, who served until 1919, a year before his death. In 1925, to celebrate his centenary, Nature issued a supplement devoted to Huxley.\n\nThe peak of the X Club's influence was from 1873 to 1885 as Hooker, Spottiswoode and Huxley were Presidents of the Royal Society in succession. Spencer resigned in 1889 after a dispute with Huxley over state support for science. After 1892 it was just an excuse for the surviving members to meet. Hooker died in 1911, and Lubbock (now Lord Avebury) was the last surviving member.\n\nHuxley was also an active member of the Metaphysical Society, which ran from 1869 to 1880. It was formed around a nucleus of clergy and expanded to include all kinds of opinions. Tyndall and Huxley later joined The Club (founded by Dr. Johnson) when they could be sure that Owen would not turn up.\n\nEducational influence\nWhen Huxley himself was young there were virtually no degrees in British universities in the biological sciences and few courses. Most biologists of his day either were self-taught or took medical degrees. When he retired there were established chairs in biological disciplines in most universities, and a broad consensus on the curricula to be followed. Huxley was the single most influential person in this transformation.\n\nSchool of Mines and Zoology\nIn the early 1870s the Royal School of Mines moved to new quarters in South Kensington; ultimately it would become one of the constituent parts of Imperial College London. The move gave Huxley the chance to give more prominence to laboratory work in biology teaching, an idea suggested by practice in German universities. In the main, the method was based on the use of carefully chosen types, and depended on the dissection of anatomy, supplemented by microscopy, museum specimens and some elementary physiology at the hands of Foster.\n\nThe typical day would start with Huxley lecturing at 9am, followed by a program of laboratory work supervised by his demonstrators. Huxley's demonstrators were picked men—all became leaders of biology in Britain in later life, spreading Huxley's ideas as well as their own. Michael Foster became Professor of Physiology at Cambridge; E. Ray Lankester became Jodrell Professor of Zoology at University College London (1875–91), Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford (1891–98) and Director of the Natural History Museum (1898–1907); S.H. Vines became Professor of Botany at Cambridge; W.T. Thiselton-Dyer became Hooker's successor at Kew (he was already Hooker's son-in-law!); T. Jeffery Parker became Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College, Cardiff; and William Rutherford became the Professor of Physiology at Edinburgh. William Flower, Conservator to the Hunterian Museum, and THH's assistant in many dissections, became Sir William Flower, Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and, later, Director of the Natural History Museum. It's a remarkable list of disciples, especially when contrasted with Owen who, in a longer professional life than Huxley, left no disciples at all. \"No one fact tells so strongly against Owen... as that he has never reared one pupil or follower\".\n\nHuxley's courses for students were so much narrower than the man himself that many were bewildered by the contrast: \"The teaching of zoology by use of selected animal types has come in for much criticism\"; Looking back in 1914 to his time as a student, Sir Arthur Shipley said \"Darwin's later works all dealt with living organisms, yet our obsession was with the dead, with bodies preserved, and cut into the most refined slices\". E.W MacBride said \"Huxley... would persist in looking at animals as material structures and not as living, active beings; in a word... he was a necrologist. To put it simply, Huxley preferred to teach what he had actually seen with his own eyes.\n\nThis largely morphological program of comparative anatomy remained at the core of most biological education for a hundred years until the advent of cell and molecular biology and interest in evolutionary ecology forced a fundamental rethink. It is an interesting fact that the methods of the field naturalists who led the way in developing the theory of evolution (Darwin, Wallace, Fritz Müller, Henry Bates) were scarcely represented at all in Huxley's program. Ecological investigation of life in its environment was virtually non-existent, and theory, evolutionary or otherwise, was at a discount. Michael Ruse finds no mention of evolution or Darwinism in any of the exams set by Huxley, and confirms the lecture content based on two complete sets of lecture notes.\n\nSince Darwin, Wallace and Bates did not hold teaching posts at any stage of their adult careers (and Műller never returned from Brazil) the imbalance in Huxley's program went uncorrected. It is surely strange that Huxley's courses did not contain an account of the evidence collected by those naturalists of life in the tropics; evidence which they had found so convincing, and which caused their views on evolution by natural selection to be so similar. Adrian Desmond suggests that \"[biology] had to be simple, synthetic and assimilable [because] it was to train teachers and had no other heuristic function\". That must be part of the reason; indeed it does help to explain the stultifying nature of much school biology. But zoology as taught at all levels became far too much the product of one man.\n\nHuxley was comfortable with comparative anatomy, at which he was the greatest master of the day. He was not an all-round naturalist like Darwin, who had shown clearly enough how to weave together detailed factual information and subtle arguments across the vast web of life. Huxley chose, in his teaching (and to some extent in his research) to take a more straightforward course, concentrating on his personal strengths.\n\nSchools and the Bible\nHuxley was also a major influence in the direction taken by British schools: in November 1870 he was voted onto the London School Board. In primary schooling, he advocated a wide range of disciplines, similar to what is taught today: reading, writing, arithmetic, art, science, music, etc. In secondary education he recommended two years of basic liberal studies followed by two years of some upper-division work, focusing on a more specific area of study. A practical example of the latter is his famous 1868 lecture On a Piece of Chalk which was first published as an essay in Macmillan's Magazine in London later that year. The piece reconstructs the geological history of Britain from a simple piece of chalk and demonstrates science as \"organized common sense\".\n\nHuxley supported the reading of the Bible in schools. This may seem out of step with his agnostic convictions, but he believed that the Bible's significant moral teachings and superb use of language were relevant to English life. \"I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches\".\nHowever, what Huxley proposed was to create an edited version of the Bible, shorn of \"shortcomings and errors... statements to which men of science absolutely and entirely demur... These tender children [should] not be taught that which you do not yourselves believe\". The Board voted against his idea, but it also voted against the idea that public money should be used to support students attending church schools. Vigorous debate took place on such points, and the debates were minuted in detail. Huxley said \"I will never be a party to enabling the State to sweep the children of this country into denominational schools\". The Act of Parliament which founded board schools permitted the reading of the Bible, but did not permit any denominational doctrine to be taught.\n\nIt may be right to see Huxley's life and work as contributing to the secularisation of British society which gradually occurred over the following century. Ernst Mayr said \"It can hardly be doubted that [biology] has helped to undermine traditional beliefs and value systems\"—and Huxley more than anyone else was responsible for this trend in Britain. Some modern Christian apologists consider Huxley the father of antitheism, though he himself maintained that he was an agnostic, not an atheist. He was, however, a lifelong and determined opponent of almost all organised religion throughout his life, especially the \"Roman Church... carefully calculated for the destruction of all that is highest in the moral nature, in the intellectual freedom, and in the political freedom of mankind\". In the same line of thought, in an article in Popular Science, Huxley used the expression \"the so-called Christianity of Catholicism\", explaining: \"I say 'so-called' not by way of offense, but as a protest against the monstruous assumption that Catholic Christianity is explicitly or implicitly contained in any trust-worthy record of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.\"\n\nOriginally coining the term in 1869, Huxley elaborated on \"agnosticism\" in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not. Huxley statesAgnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle... the fundamental axiom of modern science... In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration... In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. Use of that term has continued to the present day (see Thomas Henry Huxley and agnosticism). Much of Huxley's agnosticism is influenced by Kantian views on human perception and the ability to rely on rational evidence rather than belief systems.\n\nIn 1893, during preparation for the second Romanes Lecture, Huxley expressed his disappointment at the shortcomings of 'liberal' theology, describing its doctrines as 'popular illusions', and the teachings they replaced 'faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth'.\n\nVladimir Lenin remarked that for Huxley \"agnosticism serves as a fig-leaf for materialism\". (See also the Debate with Wilberforce above.)\n\nAdult education\n\nHuxley's interest in education went still further than school and university classrooms; he made a great effort to reach interested adults of all kinds: after all, he himself was largely self-educated. There were his lecture courses for working men, many of which were published afterwards, and there was the use he made of journalism, partly to earn money but mostly to reach out to the literate public. For most of his adult life he wrote for periodicals—the Westminster Review, the Saturday Review, the Reader, the Pall Mall Gazette, Macmillan's Magazine, the Contemporary Review. Germany was still ahead in formal science education, but interested people in Victorian Britain could use their initiative and find out what was going on by reading periodicals and using the lending libraries.\n\nIn 1868 Huxley became Principal of the South London Working Men's College in Blackfriars Road. The moving spirit was a portmanteau worker, Wm. Rossiter, who did most of the work; the funds were put up mainly by F.D. Maurice's Christian Socialists. At sixpence for a course and a penny for a lecture by Huxley, this was some bargain; and so was the free library organised by the college, an idea which was widely copied. Huxley thought, and said, that the men who attended were as good as any country squire.\n\nThe technique of printing his more popular lectures in periodicals which were sold to the general public was extremely effective. A good example was \"The Physical Basis of Life\", a lecture given in Edinburgh on 8 November 1868. Its theme—that vital action is nothing more than \"the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it\"—shocked the audience, though that was nothing compared to the uproar when it was published in the Fortnightly Review for February 1869. John Morley, the editor, said \"No article that had appeared in any periodical for a generation had caused such a sensation\". The issue was reprinted seven times and protoplasm became a household word; Punch added 'Professor Protoplasm' to his other soubriquets.\n\nThe topic had been stimulated by Huxley seeing the cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells, which is indeed a sensational sight. For these audiences Huxley's claim that this activity should not be explained by words such as vitality, but by the working of its constituent chemicals, was surprising and shocking. Today we would perhaps emphasise the extraordinary structural arrangement of those chemicals as the key to understanding what cells do, but little of that was known in the nineteenth century.\n\nWhen the Archbishop of York thought this 'new philosophy' was based on Auguste Comte's positivism, Huxley corrected him: \"Comte's philosophy [is just] Catholicism minus Christianity\" (Huxley 1893 vol 1 of Collected Essays Methods & Results 156). A later version was \"[positivism is] sheer Popery with M. Comte in the chair of St Peter, and with the names of the saints changed\". (lecture on The scientific aspects of positivism Huxley 1870 Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews p. 149). Huxley's dismissal of positivism damaged it so severely that Comte's ideas withered in Britain.\n\nHuxley and the humanities\nDuring his life, and especially in the last ten years after retirement, Huxley wrote on many issues relating to the humanities.\n\nPerhaps the best known of these topics is Evolution and Ethics, which deals with the question of whether biology has anything particular to say about moral philosophy. Both Huxley and his grandson Julian Huxley gave Romanes Lectures on this theme. For a start, Huxley dismisses religion as a source of moral authority. Next, he believes the mental characteristics of man are as much a product of evolution as the physical aspects. Thus, our emotions, our intellect, our tendency to prefer living in groups and spend resources on raising our young are part and parcel of our evolution, and therefore inherited.\n\nDespite this, the details of our values and ethics are not inherited: they are partly determined by our culture, and partly chosen by ourselves. Morality and duty are often at war with natural instincts; ethics cannot be derived from the struggle for existence: \"Of moral purpose I see not a trace in nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture.\" It is therefore our responsibility to make ethical choices (see Ethics and Evolutionary ethics). This seems to put Huxley as a compatibilist in the Free Will vs Determinism debate. In this argument Huxley is diametrically opposed to his old friend Herbert Spencer.\n\nHuxley's dissection of Rousseau's views on man and society is another example of his later work. The essay undermines Rousseau's ideas on man as a preliminary to undermining his ideas on the ownership of property. Characteristic is: \"The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.\"\n\nHuxley's method of argumentation (his strategy and tactics of persuasion in speech and print) is itself much studied. His career included controversial debates with scientists, clerics and politicians; persuasive discussions with Royal Commissions and other public bodies; lectures and articles for the general public, and a mass of detailed letter-writing to friends and other correspondents. A large number of textbooks have excerpted his prose for anthologies.\n\nRoyal and other commissions\nHuxley worked on ten Royal and other commissions (titles somewhat shortened here). The Royal Commission is the senior investigative forum in the British constitution. A rough analysis shows that five commissions involved science and scientific education; three involved medicine and three involved fisheries. Several involve difficult ethical and legal issues. All deal with possible changes to law and/or administrative practice.\n\nRoyal Commissions\n1862: Trawling for herrings on the coast of Scotland.\n1863–65: Sea fisheries of the United Kingdom.\n1870–71: The Contagious Diseases Acts.\n1870–75: Scientific instruction and the advancement of science.\n1876: The practice of subjugating live animals to scientific experiments (vivisection).\n1876–78: The universities of Scotland.\n1881–82: The Medical Acts. [i.e. the legal framework for medicine]\n1884: Trawl, net and beam trawl fishing.\n\nOther commissions\n1866: On the Royal College of Science for Ireland.\n1868: On science and art instruction in Ireland.\n\nFamily \n\nIn 1855, he married Henrietta Anne Heathorn (1825–1915), an English émigrée whom he had met in Sydney. They kept correspondence until he was able to send for her. They had five daughters and three sons:\n\n Noel Huxley (1856–60), died aged 4.\n Jessie Oriana Huxley (1858 −1927), married architect Fred Waller in 1877.\n Marian Huxley (1859–87), married artist John Collier in 1879.\n Leonard Huxley, (1860–1933) author, father of Julian, Aldous and Andrew Huxley.\n Rachel Huxley (1862–1934) married civil engineer Alfred Eckersley in 1884; he died 1895. They were parents of the physicist Thomas Eckersley and the first BBC Chief Engineer Peter Eckersley.\n Henrietta (Nettie) Huxley (1863–1940), married Harold Roller, travelled Europe as a singer.\n Henry Huxley (1865–1946), became a fashionable general practitioner in London.\n Ethel Huxley (1866–1941), married artist John Collier (widower of sister) in 1889.\n\nHuxley's relationships with his relatives and children were genial by the standards of the day—so long as they lived their lives in an honourable manner, which some did not. After his mother, his eldest sister Lizzie was the most important person in his life until his own marriage. He remained on good terms with his children, more than can be said of many Victorian fathers. This excerpt from a letter to Jessie, his eldest daughter is full of affection:\n\"Dearest Jess, You are a badly used young person—you are; and nothing short of that conviction would get a letter out of your still worse used Pater, the bête noir of whose existence is letter-writing. Catch me discussing the Afghan question with you, you little pepper-pot! No, not if I know it...\" [goes on nevertheless to give strong opinions of the Afghans, at that time causing plenty of trouble to the British Raj—see Second Anglo-Afghan War] \"There, you plague—ever your affec. Daddy, THH.\" (letter 7 December 1878, Huxley L 1900)\n\nHuxley's descendants include children of Leonard Huxley:\n\n Sir Julian Huxley FRS was the first Director of UNESCO and a notable evolutionary biologist and humanist.\n Aldous Huxley was a famous author (Brave New World 1932, Eyeless in Gaza 1936, The Doors of Perception 1954).\n Sir Andrew Huxley OM PRS won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963. He was the second Huxley to become President of the Royal Society.\n\nOther significant descendants of Huxley, such as Sir Crispin Tickell, are treated in the Huxley family.\n\nMental problems in the family\nBiographers have sometimes noted the occurrence of mental illness in the Huxley family. His father became \"sunk in worse than childish imbecility of mind\", and later died in Barming Asylum; brother George suffered from \"extreme mental anxiety\" and died in 1863 leaving serious debts. Brother James, a well known psychiatrist and Superintendent of Kent County Asylum, was at 55 \"as near mad as any sane man can be\". His favourite daughter, the artistically talented Mady (Marian), who became the first wife of artist John Collier, was troubled by mental illness for years. She died of pneumonia in her mid-twenties.\n\nAbout Huxley himself we have a more complete record. As a young apprentice to a medical practitioner, aged thirteen or fourteen, Huxley was taken to watch a post-mortem dissection. Afterwards he sank into a \"deep lethargy\" and, though Huxley ascribed this to dissection poisoning, Bibby and others may be right to suspect that emotional shock precipitated the depression. Huxley recuperated on a farm, looking thin and ill.\n\nThe next episode we know of in Huxley's life when he suffered a debilitating depression was on the third voyage of HMS Rattlesnake in 1848. Huxley had further periods of depression at the end of 1871, and again in 1873. Finally, in 1884 he sank into another depression, and this time it precipitated his decision to retire in 1885, at the age of 60. This is enough to indicate the way depression (or perhaps a moderate bi-polar disorder) interfered with his life, yet unlike some of the other family members, he was able to function extremely well at other times.\n\nThe problems continued sporadically into the third generation. Two of Leonard's sons suffered serious depression: Trevennen committed suicide in 1914 and Julian suffered a breakdown in 1913, and five more later in life.\n\nSatires \n\nDarwin's ideas and Huxley's controversies gave rise to many cartoons and satires. It was the debate about man's place in nature that roused such widespread comment: cartoons are so numerous as to be almost impossible to count; Darwin's head on a monkey's body is one of the visual clichés of the age. The \"Great Hippocampus Question\" attracted particular attention:\n\n \"Monkeyana\" (Punch vol. 40, 18 May 1861). Signed 'Gorilla', this turned out to be by Sir Philip Egerton MP, amateur naturalist, fossil fish collector and Richard Owen's patron. The last two stanzas include a reference to Huxley's comment that \"Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.\": Next HUXLEY repliesThat OWEN he liesAnd garbles his Latin quotation;That his facts are not new,His mistakes not a few,Detrimental to his reputation.To twice slay the slainBy dint of the Brain(Thus HUXLEY concludes his review)Is but labour in vain,unproductive of gain,And so I shall bid you \"Adieu\"!\n \"The Gorilla's Dilemma\" (Punch 1862, vol. 43, p. 164). First two lines: Say am I a man or a brother,Or only an anthropoid ape?\n Report of a sad case recently tried before the Lord Mayor, Owen versus Huxley. Lord Mayor asks whether either side is known to the police: Policeman X—Huxley, your Worship, I take to be a young hand, but very vicious; but Owen I have seen before. He got into trouble with an old bone man, called Mantell, who never could be off complaining as Owen prigged his bones. People did say that the old man never got over it, and Owen worritted him to death; but I don't think it was so bad as that. Hears as Owen takes the chair at a crib in Bloomsbury. I don't think it will be a harmonic meeting altogether. And Huxley hangs out in Jermyn Street. (Tom Huxley's 'low set' included Hooker 'in the green and vegetable line' and 'Charlie Darwin, the pigeon-fancier'; Owen's 'crib in Bloomsbury' was the British Museum, of which Natural History was but one department. Jermyn Street is known for its shops of men's clothing, possibly implying that Huxley was a dandy.)\n\n The Water Babies, a fairy tale for a land baby by Charles Kingsley (serialised in Macmillan's Magazine 1862–63, published in book form, with additions, in 1863). Kingsley had been among first to give a favourable review to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, having \"long since... learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species\", and the story includes a satire on the reaction to Darwin's theory, with the main scientific participants appearing, including Richard Owen and Huxley. In 1892 Thomas Henry Huxley's five-year-old grandson Julian saw the illustration by Edward Linley Sambourne (right) and wrote his grandfather a letter asking: Dear Grandpater—Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Could I see it some day?—Your loving Julian. Huxley wrote back: My dear Julian—I could never make sure about that Water Baby... My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did—There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the Water Babies where other folks can see nothing.\n\nRacism debate \nIn October 2021, an independent history group reviewing colonial links told Imperial College London that, because Huxley \"might now be called racist\", it should remove a bust of him and rename its Huxley Building. The group of 21 academics had been launched in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, to address Imperial’s \"links to the British Empire\" and build a \"fully inclusive organisation\". It reported that Huxley's paper \"Emancipation - Black and White\" \"espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence\" which helped feed ideas around eugenics, which \"falls far short of Imperial’s modern values\" and that his theories \"might now be called 'racist' in as much as he used racial divisions and hierarchical categorisation in his attempt to understand their origins in his studies of human evolution\". Imperial's provost, Ian Walmsley, responded that Imperial would \"confront, not cover up, uncomfortable or awkward aspects of our past\" and this was \"very much not a 'cancel culture' approach\". Students would be consulted before management decided on any action to be taken.\n\nA critical response noted that Huxley was a public, longstanding abolitionist who wrote 'the most complete demonstration of the specific diversity of the types of mankind will nowise constrain science to spread her ægis over their [slaveholders'] atrocities' and \"the North is justified in any expenditure of blood or of money, which shall eradicate a system hopelessly inconsistent with the moral elevation, the political freedom, or the economical progress of the American people\"; a major opponent of the racist position of polygenism as well as the position that some human races were transitional (in 1867 Huxley said, \"there was no shade of justification for the assertion that any existing modification of mankind now known was to be considered as an intermediate form between man and the animals next below him in the scale of the fauna of the world\"); a vehement opponent of the scientific racist James Hunt; and a political radical who believed in granting equal rights and the vote to both Blacks and women.\n\nCultural references\n Huxley appears alongside Charles Darwin and Samuel Wilberforce in the play Darwin in Malibu, written by Crispin Whittell, and is portrayed by Toby Jones in the 2009 film Creation.\n Huxley is referred to as the tutor of the main character, Edward Prendick, in H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The Island of Dr Moreau, published in 1896.\n Horse Feathers (1932 Marx Brothers film)—Groucho Marx is Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff, Dean of Huxley College, while its rival team is Darwin College.\n Huxley's statement, \"Logical consequences are the Scarecrows of fools and the Beacons of wise men\", is quoted by the escape artist character Charles Evan Jeffers, a man with an ironically educated and dignified air about him, played by Roscoe Lee Browne, in the eleventh episode of Season One of Barney Miller.\n\nSee also\n European and American voyages of scientific exploration\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n . (despite its chaotic organisation, this little book contains some nuggets that are well worth sifting)\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n .\n .(Chapter 18 deals with Huxley and natural selection)\n\nFurther reading\nBiographies\n Ashforth, Albert. Thomas Henry Huxley. Twayne, New York 1969.\n Ayres, Clarence. Huxley. Norton, New York 1932.\n Clodd, Edward. Thomas Henry Huxley. Blackwood, Edinburgh 1902.\n Huxley, Leonard. Thomas Henry Huxley: a character sketch. Watts, London 1920.\n Irvine, William. Apes, Angels and Victorians. New York 1955.\n Irvine, William. Thomas Henry Huxley. Longmans, London 1960.\n Mitchell, P. Chalmers. Thomas Henry Huxley: a sketch of his life and work London 1901. Available at Project Gutenberg.\n Voorhees, Irving Wilson. The teachings of Thomas Henry Huxley. Broadway, New York 1907.\n\nExternal links\n\n \n Thomas H. Huxley on the Embryo Project Encyclopedia\n The Huxley File at Clark University—Lists his publications, contains much of his writing.\n \n Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–1895) National Library of Australia, Trove, People and Organisation record for Thomas Huxley\n \n Science in the Making Huxley's papers in the Royal Society's archives\n \n \n Huxley review: Darwin on the origin of species The Times, 26 December 1859, p. 8–9.\n Huxley review: Time and life: Mr Darwin's \"Origin of species.\" Macmillan's Magazine 1: 1859 p. 142–148.\n Huxley review: Darwin on the origin of Species, Westminster Review, 17 (n.s.) April 1860 p. 541–570.\n\n \n \n\n \n \n\n1825 births\n1895 deaths\n19th-century anthropologists\n19th-century British zoologists\n19th-century English non-fiction writers\n19th-century British translators\nAcademics of Imperial College London\nAlumni of Charing Cross Medical School\nAlumni of University College London\nBiological evolution\nBritish anthropologists\nBritish carcinologists\nBritish evolutionary biologists\nBurials at East Finchley Cemetery\nCharles Darwin\nComparative anatomy\nCorresponding members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences\nEnglish agnostics\nEnglish anthropologists\nEnglish anatomists\nEnglish palaeontologists\nEnglish sceptics\nEnglish taxonomists\nEnglish translators\nEnglish zoologists\nThomas Henry\nKnights of the Order of the Polar Star\nFellows of the Linnean Society of London\nFellows of the Royal Society\nForeign associates of the National Academy of Sciences\nFullerian Professors of Physiology\nMembers of the London School Board\nMembers of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom\nMembers of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences\nPaleozoologists\nPeople from Ealing\nPresidents of the Royal Society\nRecipients of the Copley Medal\nRectors of the University of Aberdeen\nRoyal Medal winners\nTranslators from German\nVictorian writers\nWollaston Medal winners\nDeans of the Royal College of Science",
"Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005) was an epidemiologist and anthropologist, as well as an educator and author. His work ranged from promoting universal health care to establishing standards of care for nursing home patients and the mentally ill to investigating the question of what is a socially sanctionable drug.\n\nBackground\nHuxley was born in London as the son of British author Aldous Huxley and his Belgian wife Maria Nijs. He was educated at Dartington Hall School.\n\nResettling in the United States with his father in 1937, Huxley attended the Fountain Valley School of Colorado and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. He received a master's degree in public health from Harvard University. He worked for the Milbank Memorial Fund, a New York-based foundation, and from 1963 to 1983, with a brief intermission, worked at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington. In 1968, he briefly served as director of seminars at the Smithsonian Institution.\n\nIn April 1950 Huxley married Ellen Hovde, a documentary filmmaker. The couple had two children, Trevenen Huxley (b. 20 October 1951) and Tessa Huxley (b. October 1953), and divorced in 1961. On 22 March 1963 he wed Judith Wallet Bordage , freelance writer and food columnist at the Washington Post. She died in 1983. He then married Franziska Reed in 1986. She survived him. \n\nHuxley died of cardiac shock in Reading, Pennsylvania, in February 2005 at the age of 84.\n\nPublications\n\nReferences\n\nMatthew\n1920 births\n2005 deaths\nHarvard School of Public Health alumni\nPeople educated at Dartington Hall School\nUniversity of California, Berkeley alumni\nBritish emigrants to the United States"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,",
"Did Huxley believe in God?",
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution.",
"Where did Huxley study?",
"Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir.",
"Did Huxley do any public speaking?",
"selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation."
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Did Huxley serve on any public boards? | 7 | Did Julian Huxley serve on any public boards? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
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1975 deaths
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"Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He has become known as \"Darwin's Bulldog\" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.\n\nThe stories regarding Huxley's famous debate in 1860 with Samuel Wilberforce were a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution and in his own career, although historians think that the surviving story of the debate is a later fabrication. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated about whether humans were closely related to apes.\n\nHuxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. Instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, he fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.\n\nHuxley coined the term \"agnosticism\" in 1869 and elaborated on it in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not.\n\nHuxley had little formal schooling and was virtually self-taught. He became perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the later 19th century. He worked on invertebrates, clarifying relationships between groups previously little understood. Later, he worked on vertebrates, especially on the relationship between apes and humans. After comparing Archaeopteryx with Compsognathus, he concluded that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs, a theory widely accepted today.\n\nThe tendency has been for this fine anatomical work to be overshadowed by his energetic and controversial activity in favour of evolution, and by his extensive public work on scientific education, both of which had significant effects on society in Britain and elsewhere. Huxley's 1893 Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics” is exceedingly influential in China; the Chinese translation of Huxley's lecture even transformed the Chinese translation of Darwin's Origin of Species.\n\nEarly life \nThomas Henry Huxley was born in Ealing, which was then a village in Middlesex. He was the second youngest of eight children of George Huxley and Rachel Withers. His parents were members of the Church of England but he sympathized with noncomformists. Like some other British scientists of the nineteenth century such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Huxley was brought up in a literate middle-class family which had fallen on hard times. His father was a mathematics teacher at Ealing School until it closed, putting the family into financial difficulties. As a result, Thomas left school at the age of 10, after only two years of formal schooling.\n\nDespite this unenviable start, Huxley was determined to educate himself. He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. At first he read Thomas Carlyle, James Hutton's Geology, and Hamilton's Logic. In his teens he taught himself German, eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. He learned Latin, and enough Greek to read Aristotle in the original.\n\nLater on, as a young adult, he made himself an expert, first on invertebrates, and later on vertebrates, all self-taught. He was skilled in drawing and did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his later debates and writing on science and religion his grasp of theology was better than many of his clerical opponents. Huxley, a boy who left school at ten, became one of the most knowledgeable men in Britain.\n\nHe was apprenticed for short periods to several medical practitioners: at 13 to his brother-in-law John Cooke in Coventry, who passed him on to Thomas Chandler, notable for his experiments using mesmerism for medical purposes. Chandler's practice was in London's Rotherhithe amidst the squalor endured by the Dickensian poor. Here Thomas would have seen poverty, crime and rampant disease at its worst. Next, another brother-in-law took him on: John Salt, his eldest sister's husband. Now 16, Huxley entered Sydenham College (behind University College Hospital), a cut-price anatomy school whose founder, Marshall Hall, discovered the reflex arc. All this time Huxley continued his programme of reading, which more than made up for his lack of formal schooling.\n\nA year later, buoyed by excellent results and a silver medal prize in the Apothecaries' yearly competition, Huxley was admitted to study at Charing Cross Hospital, where he obtained a small scholarship. At Charing Cross, he was taught by Thomas Wharton Jones, Professor of Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery at University College London. Jones had been Robert Knox's assistant when Knox bought cadavers from Burke and Hare. The young Wharton Jones, who acted as go-between, was exonerated of crime, but thought it best to leave Scotland. He was a fine teacher, up-to-date in physiology and also an ophthalmic surgeon. In 1845, under Wharton Jones' guidance, Huxley published his first scientific paper demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognised layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as Huxley's layer. No doubt remembering this, and of course knowing his merit, later in life Huxley organised a pension for his old tutor.\n\nAt twenty he passed his First M.B. examination at the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology. However, he did not present himself for the final (Second M.B.) exams and consequently did not qualify with a university degree. His apprenticeships and exam results formed a sufficient basis for his application to the Royal Navy.\n\nVoyage of the Rattlesnake \nAged 20, Huxley was too young to apply to the Royal College of Surgeons for a licence to practise, yet he was 'deep in debt'. So, at a friend's suggestion, he applied for an appointment in the Royal Navy. He had references on character and certificates showing the time spent on his apprenticeship and on requirements such as dissection and pharmacy. Sir William Burnett, the Physician General of the Navy, interviewed him and arranged for the College of Surgeons to test his competence (by means of a viva voce).\n\nFinally Huxley was made Assistant Surgeon ('surgeon's mate', but in practice marine naturalist) to HMS Rattlesnake, about to set sail on a voyage of discovery and surveying to New Guinea and Australia. The Rattlesnake left England on 3 December 1846 and, once it arrived in the southern hemisphere, Huxley devoted his time to the study of marine invertebrates. He began to send details of his discoveries back to England, where publication was arranged by Edward Forbes FRS (who had also been a pupil of Knox). Both before and after the voyage Forbes was something of a mentor to Huxley.\n\nHuxley's paper \"On the anatomy and the affinities of the family of Medusae\" was published in 1849 by the Royal Society in its Philosophical Transactions. Huxley united the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps with the Medusae to form a class to which he subsequently gave the name of Hydrozoa. The connection he made was that all the members of the class consisted of two cell layers, enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of the phylum now called the Cnidaria. He compared this feature to the serous and mucous structures of embryos of higher animals. When at last he got a grant from the Royal Society for the printing of plates, Huxley was able to summarise this work in The Oceanic Hydrozoa, published by the Ray Society in 1859.\n\nThe value of Huxley's work was recognised and, on returning to England in 1850, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not only received the Royal Society Medal but was also elected to the Council. He met Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Tyndall, who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, so he might work on the specimens he collected and the observations he made during the voyage of the Rattlesnake. He solved the problem of Appendicularia, whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Peter Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign. It and the Ascidians are both, as Huxley showed, tunicates, today regarded as a sister group to the vertebrates in the phylum Chordata. Other papers on the morphology of the cephalopods and on brachiopods and rotifers are also noteworthy. The Rattlesnakes official naturalist, John MacGillivray, did some work on botany, and proved surprisingly good at notating Australian aboriginal languages. He wrote up the voyage in the standard Victorian two volume format.\n\nLater life \nHuxley effectively resigned from the navy (by refusing to return to active service) and, in July 1854, he became Professor of Natural History at the Royal School of Mines and naturalist to the British Geological Survey in the following year. In addition, he was Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution 1855–58 and 1865–67; Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons 1863–69; President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1869–1870; President of the Quekett Microscopical Club 1878; President of the Royal Society 1883–85; Inspector of Fisheries 1881–85; and President of the Marine Biological Association 1884–1890. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1869.\n\nThe thirty-one years during which Huxley occupied the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines included work on vertebrate palaeontology and on many projects to advance the place of science in British life. Huxley retired in 1885, after a bout of depressive illness which started in 1884. He resigned the presidency of the Royal Society in mid-term, the Inspectorship of Fisheries, and his chair (as soon as he decently could) and took six months' leave. His pension was a fairly handsome £1200 a year.\n\nIn 1890, he moved from London to Eastbourne where he edited the nine volumes of his Collected Essays. In 1894 he heard of Eugene Dubois' discovery in Java of the remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (now known as Homo erectus). Finally, in 1895, he died of a heart attack (after contracting influenza and pneumonia), and was buried in North London at East Finchley. This small family plot had been purchased upon the death of his beloved eldest son Noel, who died of scarlet fever in 1860; Huxley's wife Henrietta Anne née Heathorn and son Noel are also buried there. No invitations were sent out, but two hundred people turned up for the ceremony; they included Joseph Dalton Hooker, William Henry Flower, Mulford B. Foster, Edwin Lankester, Joseph Lister and, apparently, Henry James.\n\nHuxley and his wife had five daughters and three sons:\n\nPublic duties and awards \nFrom 1870 onwards, Huxley was to some extent drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. He served on eight Royal Commissions, from 1862 to 1884. From 1871 to 1880 he was a Secretary of the Royal Society and from 1883 to 1885 he was president. He was president of the Geological Society from 1868 to 1870. In 1870, he was president of the British Association at Liverpool and, in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board. He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1877 to 1879. He was the leading person amongst those who reformed the Royal Society, persuaded government about science, and established scientific education in British schools and universities. Before him, science was mostly a gentleman's occupation; after him, science was a profession.\n\nHe was awarded the highest honours then open to British men of science. The Royal Society, who had elected him as Fellow when he was 25 (1851), awarded him the Royal Medal the next year (1852), a year before Charles Darwin got the same award. He was the youngest biologist to receive such recognition. Then later in life came the Copley Medal in 1888 and the Darwin Medal in 1894; the Geological Society awarded him the Wollaston Medal in 1876; the Linnean Society awarded him the Linnean Medal in 1890. There were many other elections and appointments to eminent scientific bodies; these and his many academic awards are listed in the Life and Letters. He turned down many other appointments, notably the Linacre chair in zoology at Oxford and the Mastership of University College, Oxford.\n\nIn 1873 the King of Sweden made Huxley, Hooker and Tyndall Knights of the Order of the Polar Star: they could wear the insignia but not use the title in Britain. Huxley collected many honorary memberships of foreign societies, academic awards and honorary doctorates from Britain and Germany. He also became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1892.\n\nAs recognition of his many public services he was given a pension by the state, and was appointed Privy Councillor in 1892.\n\nDespite his many achievements he was given no award by the British state until late in life. In this he did better than Darwin, who got no award of any kind from the state. (Darwin's proposed knighthood was vetoed by ecclesiastical advisers, including Wilberforce) Perhaps Huxley had commented too often on his dislike of honours, or perhaps his many assaults on the traditional beliefs of organised religion made enemies in the establishment—he had vigorous debates in print with Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Balfour, and his relationship with Lord Salisbury was less than tranquil.\n\nHuxley was for about thirty years evolution's most effective advocate, and for some Huxley was \"the premier advocate of science in the nineteenth century [for] the whole English-speaking world\".\n\nThough he had many admirers and disciples, his retirement and later death left British zoology somewhat bereft of leadership. He had, directly or indirectly, guided the careers and appointments of the next generation, but none were of his stature. The loss of Francis Balfour in 1882, climbing the Alps just after he was appointed to a chair at Cambridge, was a tragedy. Huxley thought he was \"the only man who can carry out my work\": the deaths of Balfour and W. K. Clifford were \"the greatest losses to science in our time\".\n\nVertebrate palaeontology \n\nThe first half of Huxley's career as a palaeontologist is marked by a rather strange predilection for 'persistent types', in which he seemed to argue that evolutionary advancement (in the sense of major new groups of animals and plants) was rare or absent in the Phanerozoic. In the same vein, he tended to push the origin of major groups such as birds and mammals back into the Palaeozoic era, and to claim that no order of plants had ever gone extinct.\n\nMuch paper has been consumed by historians of science ruminating on this strange and somewhat unclear idea. Huxley was wrong to pitch the loss of orders in the Phanerozoic as low as 7%, and he did not estimate the number of new orders which evolved. Persistent types sat rather uncomfortably next to Darwin's more fluid ideas; despite his intelligence, it took Huxley a surprisingly long time to appreciate some of the implications of evolution. However, gradually Huxley moved away from this conservative style of thinking as his understanding of palaeontology, and the discipline itself, developed.\n\nHuxley's detailed anatomical work was, as always, first-rate and productive. His work on fossil fish shows his distinctive approach: whereas pre-Darwinian naturalists collected, identified and classified, Huxley worked mainly to reveal the evolutionary relationships between groups.\n\nThe lobed-finned fish (such as coelacanths and lung fish) have paired appendages whose internal skeleton is attached to the shoulder or pelvis by a single bone, the humerus or femur. His interest in these fish brought him close to the origin of tetrapods, one of the most important areas of vertebrate palaeontology.\n\nThe study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating the fundamental affinity of birds and reptiles, which he united under the title of Sauropsida. His papers on Archaeopteryx and the origin of birds were of great interest then and still are.\n\nApart from his interest in persuading the world that man was a primate, and had descended from the same stock as the apes, Huxley did little work on mammals, with one exception. On his tour of America Huxley was shown the remarkable series of fossil horses, discovered by O. C. Marsh, in Yale's Peabody Museum. An Easterner, Marsh was America's first professor of palaeontology, but also one who had come west into hostile Indian territory in search of fossils, hunted buffalo, and met Red Cloud (in 1874). Funded by his uncle George Peabody, Marsh had made some remarkable discoveries: the huge Cretaceous aquatic bird Hesperornis, and the dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River were worth the trip by themselves, but the horse fossils were really special. After a week with Marsh and his fossils, Huxley wrote excitedly, \"The collection of fossils is the most wonderful thing I ever saw.\"\n\nThe collection at that time went from the small four-toed forest-dwelling Orohippus from the Eocene through three-toed species such as Miohippus to species more like the modern horse. By looking at their teeth he could see that, as the size grew larger and the toes reduced, the teeth changed from those of a browser to those of a grazer. All such changes could be explained by a general alteration in habitat from forest to grassland. And, it is now known, that is what did happen over large areas of North America from the Eocene to the Pleistocene: the ultimate causative agent was global temperature reduction (see Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum). The modern account of the evolution of the horse has many other members, and the overall appearance of the tree of descent is more like a bush than a straight line.\n\nThe horse series also strongly suggested that the process was gradual, and that the origin of the modern horse lay in North America, not in Eurasia. If so, then something must have happened to horses in North America, since none were there when Europeans arrived. The experience with Marsh was enough for Huxley to give credence to Darwin's gradualism, and to introduce the story of the horse into his lecture series.\n\nMarsh's and Huxley's conclusions were initially quite different. However, Marsh carefully showed Huxley his complete sequence of fossils. As Marsh put it, Huxley \"then informed me that all this was new to him and that my facts demonstrated the evolution of the horse beyond question, and for the first time indicated the direct line of descent of an existing animal. With the generosity of true greatness, he gave up his own opinions in the face of new truth, and took my conclusions as the basis of his famous New York lecture on the horse.\"\n\nSupport of Darwin\n\nHuxley was originally not persuaded of \"development theory\", as evolution was once called. This can be seen in his savage review of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book which contained some quite pertinent arguments in favour of evolution. Huxley had also rejected Lamarck's theory of transmutation, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support it. All this scepticism was brought together in a lecture to the Royal Institution, which made Darwin anxious enough to set about an effort to change young Huxley's mind. It was the kind of thing Darwin did with his closest scientific friends, but he must have had some particular intuition about Huxley, who was from all accounts a most impressive person even as a young man.\n\nHuxley was therefore one of the small group who knew about Darwin's ideas before they were published (the group included Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell). The first publication by Darwin of his ideas came when Wallace sent Darwin his famous paper on natural selection, which was presented by Lyell and Hooker to the Linnean Society in 1858 alongside excerpts from Darwin's notebook and a Darwin letter to Asa Gray. Huxley's famous response to the idea of natural selection was \"How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!\" However, he never conclusively made up his mind about whether natural selection was the main method for evolution, though he did admit it was a hypothesis which was a good working basis.\n\nLogically speaking, the prior question was whether evolution had taken place at all. It is to this question that much of Darwin's On the Origin of Species was devoted. Its publication in 1859 completely convinced Huxley of evolution and it was this and no doubt his admiration of Darwin's way of amassing and using evidence that formed the basis of his support for Darwin in the debates that followed the book's publication.\n\nHuxley's support started with his anonymous favourable review of the Origin in the Times for 26 December 1859, and continued with articles in several periodicals, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860. At the same time, Richard Owen, whilst writing an extremely hostile anonymous review of the Origin in the Edinburgh Review, also primed Samuel Wilberforce who wrote one in the Quarterly Review, running to 17,000 words. The authorship of this latter review was not known for sure until Wilberforce's son wrote his biography. So it can be said that, just as Darwin groomed Huxley, so Owen groomed Wilberforce; and both the proxies fought public battles on behalf of their principals as much as themselves. Though we do not know the exact words of the Oxford debate, we do know what Huxley thought of the review in the Quarterly:\n\nSince Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a \"flighty\" person, who endeavours \"to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,\" and whose \"mode of dealing with nature\" is reprobated as \"utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.\"\n\nIf I confine my retrospect of the reception of the Origin of Species to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article...A more complete version is available in Wikiquote\n\nSince his death, Huxley has become known as \"Darwin's Bulldog\", taken to refer to his pluck and courage in debate, and to his perceived role in protecting the older man. The sobriquet appears to be Huxley's own invention, although of unknown date, and it was not current in his lifetime.\n\nWhile the second half of Darwin's life was lived mainly within his family, the younger and combative Huxley operated mainly out in the world at large. A letter from Huxley to Ernst Haeckel (2 November 1871) states: \"The dogs have been snapping at [Darwin's] heels too much of late.\"\n\nDebate with Wilberforce\n\nFamously, Huxley responded to Wilberforce in the debate at the British Association meeting, on Saturday 30 June 1860 at the Oxford University Museum. Huxley's presence there had been encouraged on the previous evening when he met Robert Chambers, the Scottish publisher and author of Vestiges, who was walking the streets of Oxford in a dispirited state, and begged for assistance. The debate followed the presentation of a paper by John William Draper, and was chaired by Darwin's former botany tutor John Stevens Henslow. Darwin's theory was opposed by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and those supporting Darwin included Huxley and their mutual friends Hooker and Lubbock. The platform featured Brodie and Professor Beale, and Robert FitzRoy, who had been captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin's voyage, spoke against Darwin.\n\nWilberforce had a track record against evolution as far back as the previous Oxford B.A. meeting in 1847 when he attacked Chambers' Vestiges. For the more challenging task of opposing the Origin, and the implication that man descended from apes, he had been assiduously coached by Richard OwenOwen stayed with him the night before the debate. On the day, Wilberforce repeated some of the arguments from his Quarterly Review article (written but not yet published), then ventured onto slippery ground. His famous jibe at Huxley (as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side) was probably unplanned, and certainly unwise. Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to suppress debatethe exact wording is not certainwas widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play.\n\nThe letters of Alfred Newton include one to his brother giving an eyewitness account of the debate, and written less than a month afterwards. Other eyewitnesses, with one or two exceptions (Hooker especially thought he had made the best points), give similar accounts, at varying dates after the event. The general view was and still is that Huxley got much the better of the exchange, though Wilberforce himself thought he had done quite well. In the absence of a verbatim report, differing perceptions are difficult to judge fairly; Huxley wrote a detailed account for Darwin, a letter which does not survive; however, a letter to his friend Frederick Daniel Dyster does survive with an account just three months after the event.\n\nOne effect of the debate was to hugely increase Huxley's visibility amongst educated people, through the accounts in newspapers and periodicals. Another consequence was to alert him to the importance of public debate: a lesson he never forgot. A third effect was to serve notice that Darwinian ideas could not be easily dismissed: on the contrary, they would be vigorously defended against orthodox authority. A fourth effect was to promote professionalism in science, with its implied need for scientific education. A fifth consequence was indirect: as Wilberforce had feared, a defence of evolution did undermine literal belief in the Old Testament, especially the Book of Genesis. Many of the liberal clergy at the meeting were quite pleased with the outcome of the debate; they were supporters, perhaps, of the controversial Essays and Reviews. Thus, both on the side of science and on that of religion, the debate was important and its outcome significant. (see also below)\n\nThat Huxley and Wilberforce remained on courteous terms after the debate (and able to work together on projects such as the Metropolitan Board of Education) says something about both men, whereas Huxley and Owen were never reconciled.\n\nMan's place in nature\n\nFor nearly a decade his work was directed mainly to the relationship of man to the apes. This led him directly into a clash with Richard Owen, a man widely disliked for his behaviour whilst also being admired for his capability. The struggle was to culminate in some severe defeats for Owen. Huxley's Croonian Lecture, delivered before the Royal Society in 1858 on The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull was the start. In this, he rejected Owen's theory that the bones of the skull and the spine were homologous, an opinion previously held by Goethe and Lorenz Oken.\n\nFrom 1860–63 Huxley developed his ideas, presenting them in lectures to working men, students and the general public, followed by publication. Also in 1862 a series of talks to working men was printed lecture by lecture as pamphlets, later bound up as a little green book; the first copies went on sale in December. Other lectures grew into Huxley's most famous work Evidence as to Man's place in Nature (1863) where he addressed the key issues long before Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man in 1871.\n\nAlthough Darwin did not publish his Descent of Man until 1871, the general debate on this topic had started years before (there was even a precursor debate in the 18th century between Monboddo and Buffon). Darwin had dropped a hint when, in the conclusion to the Origin, he wrote: \"In the distant future... light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history\". Not so distant, as it turned out. A key event had already occurred in 1857 when Richard Owen presented (to the Linnean Society) his theory that man was marked off from all other mammals by possessing features of the brain peculiar to the genus Homo. Having reached this opinion, Owen separated man from all other mammals in a subclass of its own. No other biologist held such an extreme view. Darwin reacted \"Man...as distinct from a chimpanzee [as] an ape from a platypus... I cannot swallow that!\" Neither could Huxley, who was able to demonstrate that Owen's idea was completely wrong.\n\nThe subject was raised at the 1860 BA Oxford meeting, when Huxley flatly contradicted Owen, and promised a later demonstration of the facts. In fact, a number of demonstrations were held in London and the provinces. In 1862 at the Cambridge meeting of the B.A. Huxley's friend William Flower gave a public dissection to show that the same structures (the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and hippocampus minor) were indeed present in apes. The debate was widely publicised, and parodied as the Great Hippocampus Question. It was seen as one of Owen's greatest blunders, revealing Huxley as not only dangerous in debate, but also a better anatomist.\n\nOwen conceded that there was something that could be called a hippocampus minor in the apes, but stated that it was much less developed and that such a presence did not detract from the overall distinction of simple brain size.\n\nHuxley's ideas on this topic were summed up in January 1861 in the first issue (new series) of his own journal, the Natural History Review: \"the most violent scientific paper he had ever composed\". This paper was reprinted in 1863 as chapter 2 of Man's Place in Nature, with an addendum giving his account of the Owen/Huxley controversy about the ape brain. In his Collected Essays this addendum was removed.\n\nThe extended argument on the ape brain, partly in debate and partly in print, backed by dissections and demonstrations, was a landmark in Huxley's career. It was highly important in asserting his dominance of comparative anatomy, and in the long run more influential in establishing evolution amongst biologists than was the debate with Wilberforce. It also marked the start of Owen's decline in the esteem of his fellow biologists.\n\nThe following was written by Huxley to Rolleston before the BA meeting in 1861:\n\"My dear Rolleston... The obstinate reiteration of erroneous assertions can only be nullified by as persistent an appeal to facts; and I greatly regret that my engagements do not permit me to be present at the British Association in order to assist personally at what, I believe, will be the seventh public demonstration during the past twelve months of the untruth of the three assertions, that the posterior lobe of the cerebrum, the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle, and the hippocampus minor, are peculiar to man and do not exist in the apes. I shall be obliged if you will read this letter to the Section\" Yours faithfully, Thos. H. Huxley.\n\nDuring those years there was also work on human fossil anatomy and anthropology. In 1862 he examined the Neanderthal skull-cap, which had been discovered in 1857. It was the first pre-sapiens discovery of a fossil man, and it was immediately clear to him that the brain case was surprisingly large. Huxley also started to dabble in physical anthropology, and classified the human races into nine categories, along with placing them under four general categorisations as Australoid, Negroid, Xanthochroic and Mongoloid. Such classifications depended mainly on physical appearance and certain xanatomical characteristics.\n\nNatural selection\nHuxley was certainly not slavish in his dealings with Darwin. As shown in every biography, they had quite different and rather complementary characters. Important also, Darwin was a field naturalist, but Huxley was an anatomist, so there was a difference in their experience of nature. Lastly, Darwin's views on science were different from Huxley's views. For Darwin, natural selection was the best way to explain evolution because it explained a huge range of natural history facts and observations: it solved problems. Huxley, on the other hand, was an empiricist who trusted what he could see, and some things are not easily seen. With this in mind, one can appreciate the debate between them, Darwin writing his letters, Huxley never going quite so far as to say he thought Darwin was right.\n\nHuxley's reservations on natural selection were of the type \"until selection and breeding can be seen to give rise to varieties which are infertile with each other, natural selection cannot be proved\". Huxley's position on selection was agnostic; yet he gave no credence to any other theory. Despite this concern about evidence, Huxley saw that if evolution came about through variation, reproduction and selection then other things would also be subject to the same pressures. This included ideas because they are invented, imitated and selected by humans: ‘The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.’ This is the same idea as meme theory put forward by Richard Dawkins in 1976.\n\nDarwin's part in the discussion came mostly in letters, as was his wont, along the lines: \"The empirical evidence you call for is both impossible in practical terms, and in any event unnecessary. It's the same as asking to see every step in the transformation (or the splitting) of one species into another. My way so many issues are clarified and problems solved; no other theory does nearly so well\".\n\nHuxley's reservation, as Helena Cronin has so aptly remarked, was contagious: \"it spread itself for years among all kinds of doubters of Darwinism\". One reason for this doubt was that comparative anatomy could address the question of descent, but not the question of mechanism.\n\nPallbearer\nHuxley was a pallbearer at the funeral of Charles Darwin on 26 April 1882.\n\nThe X Club\n\nIn November 1864, Huxley succeeded in launching a dining club, the X Club, composed of like-minded people working to advance the cause of science; not surprisingly, the club consisted of most of his closest friends. There were nine members, who decided at their first meeting that there should be no more. The members were: Huxley, John Tyndall, J. D. Hooker, John Lubbock (banker, biologist and neighbour of Darwin), Herbert Spencer (social philosopher and sub-editor of the Economist), William Spottiswoode (mathematician and the Queen's Printer), Thomas Hirst (Professor of Physics at University College London), Edward Frankland (the new Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution) and George Busk, zoologist and palaeontologist (formerly surgeon for HMS Dreadnought). All except Spencer were Fellows of the Royal Society. Tyndall was a particularly close friend; for many years they met regularly and discussed issues of the day. On more than one occasion Huxley joined Tyndall in the latter's trips into the Alps and helped with his investigations in glaciology.\n\nThere were also some quite significant X-Club satellites such as William Flower and George Rolleston, (Huxley protegés), and liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster. Guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time.\n\nThey would dine early on first Thursdays at a hotel, planning what to do; high on the agenda was to change the way the Royal Society Council did business. It was no coincidence that the Council met later that same evening. First item for the Xs was to get the Copley Medal for Darwin, which they managed after quite a struggle.\n\nThe next step was to acquire a journal to spread their ideas. This was the weekly Reader, which they bought, revamped and redirected. Huxley had already become part-owner of the Natural History Review bolstered by the support of Lubbock, Rolleston, Busk and Carpenter (X-clubbers and satellites). The journal was switched to pro-Darwinian lines and relaunched in January 1861. After a stream of good articles the NHR failed after four years; but it had helped at a critical time for the establishment of evolution. The Reader also failed, despite its broader appeal which included art and literature as well as science. The periodical market was quite crowded at the time, but most probably the critical factor was Huxley's time; he was simply over-committed, and could not afford to hire full-time editors. This occurred often in his life: Huxley took on too many ventures, and was not so astute as Darwin at getting others to do work for him.\n\nHowever, the experience gained with the Reader was put to good use when the X Club put their weight behind the founding of Nature in 1869. This time no mistakes were made: above all there was a permanent editor (though not full-time), Norman Lockyer, who served until 1919, a year before his death. In 1925, to celebrate his centenary, Nature issued a supplement devoted to Huxley.\n\nThe peak of the X Club's influence was from 1873 to 1885 as Hooker, Spottiswoode and Huxley were Presidents of the Royal Society in succession. Spencer resigned in 1889 after a dispute with Huxley over state support for science. After 1892 it was just an excuse for the surviving members to meet. Hooker died in 1911, and Lubbock (now Lord Avebury) was the last surviving member.\n\nHuxley was also an active member of the Metaphysical Society, which ran from 1869 to 1880. It was formed around a nucleus of clergy and expanded to include all kinds of opinions. Tyndall and Huxley later joined The Club (founded by Dr. Johnson) when they could be sure that Owen would not turn up.\n\nEducational influence\nWhen Huxley himself was young there were virtually no degrees in British universities in the biological sciences and few courses. Most biologists of his day either were self-taught or took medical degrees. When he retired there were established chairs in biological disciplines in most universities, and a broad consensus on the curricula to be followed. Huxley was the single most influential person in this transformation.\n\nSchool of Mines and Zoology\nIn the early 1870s the Royal School of Mines moved to new quarters in South Kensington; ultimately it would become one of the constituent parts of Imperial College London. The move gave Huxley the chance to give more prominence to laboratory work in biology teaching, an idea suggested by practice in German universities. In the main, the method was based on the use of carefully chosen types, and depended on the dissection of anatomy, supplemented by microscopy, museum specimens and some elementary physiology at the hands of Foster.\n\nThe typical day would start with Huxley lecturing at 9am, followed by a program of laboratory work supervised by his demonstrators. Huxley's demonstrators were picked men—all became leaders of biology in Britain in later life, spreading Huxley's ideas as well as their own. Michael Foster became Professor of Physiology at Cambridge; E. Ray Lankester became Jodrell Professor of Zoology at University College London (1875–91), Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford (1891–98) and Director of the Natural History Museum (1898–1907); S.H. Vines became Professor of Botany at Cambridge; W.T. Thiselton-Dyer became Hooker's successor at Kew (he was already Hooker's son-in-law!); T. Jeffery Parker became Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College, Cardiff; and William Rutherford became the Professor of Physiology at Edinburgh. William Flower, Conservator to the Hunterian Museum, and THH's assistant in many dissections, became Sir William Flower, Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and, later, Director of the Natural History Museum. It's a remarkable list of disciples, especially when contrasted with Owen who, in a longer professional life than Huxley, left no disciples at all. \"No one fact tells so strongly against Owen... as that he has never reared one pupil or follower\".\n\nHuxley's courses for students were so much narrower than the man himself that many were bewildered by the contrast: \"The teaching of zoology by use of selected animal types has come in for much criticism\"; Looking back in 1914 to his time as a student, Sir Arthur Shipley said \"Darwin's later works all dealt with living organisms, yet our obsession was with the dead, with bodies preserved, and cut into the most refined slices\". E.W MacBride said \"Huxley... would persist in looking at animals as material structures and not as living, active beings; in a word... he was a necrologist. To put it simply, Huxley preferred to teach what he had actually seen with his own eyes.\n\nThis largely morphological program of comparative anatomy remained at the core of most biological education for a hundred years until the advent of cell and molecular biology and interest in evolutionary ecology forced a fundamental rethink. It is an interesting fact that the methods of the field naturalists who led the way in developing the theory of evolution (Darwin, Wallace, Fritz Müller, Henry Bates) were scarcely represented at all in Huxley's program. Ecological investigation of life in its environment was virtually non-existent, and theory, evolutionary or otherwise, was at a discount. Michael Ruse finds no mention of evolution or Darwinism in any of the exams set by Huxley, and confirms the lecture content based on two complete sets of lecture notes.\n\nSince Darwin, Wallace and Bates did not hold teaching posts at any stage of their adult careers (and Műller never returned from Brazil) the imbalance in Huxley's program went uncorrected. It is surely strange that Huxley's courses did not contain an account of the evidence collected by those naturalists of life in the tropics; evidence which they had found so convincing, and which caused their views on evolution by natural selection to be so similar. Adrian Desmond suggests that \"[biology] had to be simple, synthetic and assimilable [because] it was to train teachers and had no other heuristic function\". That must be part of the reason; indeed it does help to explain the stultifying nature of much school biology. But zoology as taught at all levels became far too much the product of one man.\n\nHuxley was comfortable with comparative anatomy, at which he was the greatest master of the day. He was not an all-round naturalist like Darwin, who had shown clearly enough how to weave together detailed factual information and subtle arguments across the vast web of life. Huxley chose, in his teaching (and to some extent in his research) to take a more straightforward course, concentrating on his personal strengths.\n\nSchools and the Bible\nHuxley was also a major influence in the direction taken by British schools: in November 1870 he was voted onto the London School Board. In primary schooling, he advocated a wide range of disciplines, similar to what is taught today: reading, writing, arithmetic, art, science, music, etc. In secondary education he recommended two years of basic liberal studies followed by two years of some upper-division work, focusing on a more specific area of study. A practical example of the latter is his famous 1868 lecture On a Piece of Chalk which was first published as an essay in Macmillan's Magazine in London later that year. The piece reconstructs the geological history of Britain from a simple piece of chalk and demonstrates science as \"organized common sense\".\n\nHuxley supported the reading of the Bible in schools. This may seem out of step with his agnostic convictions, but he believed that the Bible's significant moral teachings and superb use of language were relevant to English life. \"I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches\".\nHowever, what Huxley proposed was to create an edited version of the Bible, shorn of \"shortcomings and errors... statements to which men of science absolutely and entirely demur... These tender children [should] not be taught that which you do not yourselves believe\". The Board voted against his idea, but it also voted against the idea that public money should be used to support students attending church schools. Vigorous debate took place on such points, and the debates were minuted in detail. Huxley said \"I will never be a party to enabling the State to sweep the children of this country into denominational schools\". The Act of Parliament which founded board schools permitted the reading of the Bible, but did not permit any denominational doctrine to be taught.\n\nIt may be right to see Huxley's life and work as contributing to the secularisation of British society which gradually occurred over the following century. Ernst Mayr said \"It can hardly be doubted that [biology] has helped to undermine traditional beliefs and value systems\"—and Huxley more than anyone else was responsible for this trend in Britain. Some modern Christian apologists consider Huxley the father of antitheism, though he himself maintained that he was an agnostic, not an atheist. He was, however, a lifelong and determined opponent of almost all organised religion throughout his life, especially the \"Roman Church... carefully calculated for the destruction of all that is highest in the moral nature, in the intellectual freedom, and in the political freedom of mankind\". In the same line of thought, in an article in Popular Science, Huxley used the expression \"the so-called Christianity of Catholicism\", explaining: \"I say 'so-called' not by way of offense, but as a protest against the monstruous assumption that Catholic Christianity is explicitly or implicitly contained in any trust-worthy record of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.\"\n\nOriginally coining the term in 1869, Huxley elaborated on \"agnosticism\" in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not. Huxley statesAgnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle... the fundamental axiom of modern science... In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration... In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. Use of that term has continued to the present day (see Thomas Henry Huxley and agnosticism). Much of Huxley's agnosticism is influenced by Kantian views on human perception and the ability to rely on rational evidence rather than belief systems.\n\nIn 1893, during preparation for the second Romanes Lecture, Huxley expressed his disappointment at the shortcomings of 'liberal' theology, describing its doctrines as 'popular illusions', and the teachings they replaced 'faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth'.\n\nVladimir Lenin remarked that for Huxley \"agnosticism serves as a fig-leaf for materialism\". (See also the Debate with Wilberforce above.)\n\nAdult education\n\nHuxley's interest in education went still further than school and university classrooms; he made a great effort to reach interested adults of all kinds: after all, he himself was largely self-educated. There were his lecture courses for working men, many of which were published afterwards, and there was the use he made of journalism, partly to earn money but mostly to reach out to the literate public. For most of his adult life he wrote for periodicals—the Westminster Review, the Saturday Review, the Reader, the Pall Mall Gazette, Macmillan's Magazine, the Contemporary Review. Germany was still ahead in formal science education, but interested people in Victorian Britain could use their initiative and find out what was going on by reading periodicals and using the lending libraries.\n\nIn 1868 Huxley became Principal of the South London Working Men's College in Blackfriars Road. The moving spirit was a portmanteau worker, Wm. Rossiter, who did most of the work; the funds were put up mainly by F.D. Maurice's Christian Socialists. At sixpence for a course and a penny for a lecture by Huxley, this was some bargain; and so was the free library organised by the college, an idea which was widely copied. Huxley thought, and said, that the men who attended were as good as any country squire.\n\nThe technique of printing his more popular lectures in periodicals which were sold to the general public was extremely effective. A good example was \"The Physical Basis of Life\", a lecture given in Edinburgh on 8 November 1868. Its theme—that vital action is nothing more than \"the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it\"—shocked the audience, though that was nothing compared to the uproar when it was published in the Fortnightly Review for February 1869. John Morley, the editor, said \"No article that had appeared in any periodical for a generation had caused such a sensation\". The issue was reprinted seven times and protoplasm became a household word; Punch added 'Professor Protoplasm' to his other soubriquets.\n\nThe topic had been stimulated by Huxley seeing the cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells, which is indeed a sensational sight. For these audiences Huxley's claim that this activity should not be explained by words such as vitality, but by the working of its constituent chemicals, was surprising and shocking. Today we would perhaps emphasise the extraordinary structural arrangement of those chemicals as the key to understanding what cells do, but little of that was known in the nineteenth century.\n\nWhen the Archbishop of York thought this 'new philosophy' was based on Auguste Comte's positivism, Huxley corrected him: \"Comte's philosophy [is just] Catholicism minus Christianity\" (Huxley 1893 vol 1 of Collected Essays Methods & Results 156). A later version was \"[positivism is] sheer Popery with M. Comte in the chair of St Peter, and with the names of the saints changed\". (lecture on The scientific aspects of positivism Huxley 1870 Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews p. 149). Huxley's dismissal of positivism damaged it so severely that Comte's ideas withered in Britain.\n\nHuxley and the humanities\nDuring his life, and especially in the last ten years after retirement, Huxley wrote on many issues relating to the humanities.\n\nPerhaps the best known of these topics is Evolution and Ethics, which deals with the question of whether biology has anything particular to say about moral philosophy. Both Huxley and his grandson Julian Huxley gave Romanes Lectures on this theme. For a start, Huxley dismisses religion as a source of moral authority. Next, he believes the mental characteristics of man are as much a product of evolution as the physical aspects. Thus, our emotions, our intellect, our tendency to prefer living in groups and spend resources on raising our young are part and parcel of our evolution, and therefore inherited.\n\nDespite this, the details of our values and ethics are not inherited: they are partly determined by our culture, and partly chosen by ourselves. Morality and duty are often at war with natural instincts; ethics cannot be derived from the struggle for existence: \"Of moral purpose I see not a trace in nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture.\" It is therefore our responsibility to make ethical choices (see Ethics and Evolutionary ethics). This seems to put Huxley as a compatibilist in the Free Will vs Determinism debate. In this argument Huxley is diametrically opposed to his old friend Herbert Spencer.\n\nHuxley's dissection of Rousseau's views on man and society is another example of his later work. The essay undermines Rousseau's ideas on man as a preliminary to undermining his ideas on the ownership of property. Characteristic is: \"The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.\"\n\nHuxley's method of argumentation (his strategy and tactics of persuasion in speech and print) is itself much studied. His career included controversial debates with scientists, clerics and politicians; persuasive discussions with Royal Commissions and other public bodies; lectures and articles for the general public, and a mass of detailed letter-writing to friends and other correspondents. A large number of textbooks have excerpted his prose for anthologies.\n\nRoyal and other commissions\nHuxley worked on ten Royal and other commissions (titles somewhat shortened here). The Royal Commission is the senior investigative forum in the British constitution. A rough analysis shows that five commissions involved science and scientific education; three involved medicine and three involved fisheries. Several involve difficult ethical and legal issues. All deal with possible changes to law and/or administrative practice.\n\nRoyal Commissions\n1862: Trawling for herrings on the coast of Scotland.\n1863–65: Sea fisheries of the United Kingdom.\n1870–71: The Contagious Diseases Acts.\n1870–75: Scientific instruction and the advancement of science.\n1876: The practice of subjugating live animals to scientific experiments (vivisection).\n1876–78: The universities of Scotland.\n1881–82: The Medical Acts. [i.e. the legal framework for medicine]\n1884: Trawl, net and beam trawl fishing.\n\nOther commissions\n1866: On the Royal College of Science for Ireland.\n1868: On science and art instruction in Ireland.\n\nFamily \n\nIn 1855, he married Henrietta Anne Heathorn (1825–1915), an English émigrée whom he had met in Sydney. They kept correspondence until he was able to send for her. They had five daughters and three sons:\n\n Noel Huxley (1856–60), died aged 4.\n Jessie Oriana Huxley (1858 −1927), married architect Fred Waller in 1877.\n Marian Huxley (1859–87), married artist John Collier in 1879.\n Leonard Huxley, (1860–1933) author, father of Julian, Aldous and Andrew Huxley.\n Rachel Huxley (1862–1934) married civil engineer Alfred Eckersley in 1884; he died 1895. They were parents of the physicist Thomas Eckersley and the first BBC Chief Engineer Peter Eckersley.\n Henrietta (Nettie) Huxley (1863–1940), married Harold Roller, travelled Europe as a singer.\n Henry Huxley (1865–1946), became a fashionable general practitioner in London.\n Ethel Huxley (1866–1941), married artist John Collier (widower of sister) in 1889.\n\nHuxley's relationships with his relatives and children were genial by the standards of the day—so long as they lived their lives in an honourable manner, which some did not. After his mother, his eldest sister Lizzie was the most important person in his life until his own marriage. He remained on good terms with his children, more than can be said of many Victorian fathers. This excerpt from a letter to Jessie, his eldest daughter is full of affection:\n\"Dearest Jess, You are a badly used young person—you are; and nothing short of that conviction would get a letter out of your still worse used Pater, the bête noir of whose existence is letter-writing. Catch me discussing the Afghan question with you, you little pepper-pot! No, not if I know it...\" [goes on nevertheless to give strong opinions of the Afghans, at that time causing plenty of trouble to the British Raj—see Second Anglo-Afghan War] \"There, you plague—ever your affec. Daddy, THH.\" (letter 7 December 1878, Huxley L 1900)\n\nHuxley's descendants include children of Leonard Huxley:\n\n Sir Julian Huxley FRS was the first Director of UNESCO and a notable evolutionary biologist and humanist.\n Aldous Huxley was a famous author (Brave New World 1932, Eyeless in Gaza 1936, The Doors of Perception 1954).\n Sir Andrew Huxley OM PRS won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963. He was the second Huxley to become President of the Royal Society.\n\nOther significant descendants of Huxley, such as Sir Crispin Tickell, are treated in the Huxley family.\n\nMental problems in the family\nBiographers have sometimes noted the occurrence of mental illness in the Huxley family. His father became \"sunk in worse than childish imbecility of mind\", and later died in Barming Asylum; brother George suffered from \"extreme mental anxiety\" and died in 1863 leaving serious debts. Brother James, a well known psychiatrist and Superintendent of Kent County Asylum, was at 55 \"as near mad as any sane man can be\". His favourite daughter, the artistically talented Mady (Marian), who became the first wife of artist John Collier, was troubled by mental illness for years. She died of pneumonia in her mid-twenties.\n\nAbout Huxley himself we have a more complete record. As a young apprentice to a medical practitioner, aged thirteen or fourteen, Huxley was taken to watch a post-mortem dissection. Afterwards he sank into a \"deep lethargy\" and, though Huxley ascribed this to dissection poisoning, Bibby and others may be right to suspect that emotional shock precipitated the depression. Huxley recuperated on a farm, looking thin and ill.\n\nThe next episode we know of in Huxley's life when he suffered a debilitating depression was on the third voyage of HMS Rattlesnake in 1848. Huxley had further periods of depression at the end of 1871, and again in 1873. Finally, in 1884 he sank into another depression, and this time it precipitated his decision to retire in 1885, at the age of 60. This is enough to indicate the way depression (or perhaps a moderate bi-polar disorder) interfered with his life, yet unlike some of the other family members, he was able to function extremely well at other times.\n\nThe problems continued sporadically into the third generation. Two of Leonard's sons suffered serious depression: Trevennen committed suicide in 1914 and Julian suffered a breakdown in 1913, and five more later in life.\n\nSatires \n\nDarwin's ideas and Huxley's controversies gave rise to many cartoons and satires. It was the debate about man's place in nature that roused such widespread comment: cartoons are so numerous as to be almost impossible to count; Darwin's head on a monkey's body is one of the visual clichés of the age. The \"Great Hippocampus Question\" attracted particular attention:\n\n \"Monkeyana\" (Punch vol. 40, 18 May 1861). Signed 'Gorilla', this turned out to be by Sir Philip Egerton MP, amateur naturalist, fossil fish collector and Richard Owen's patron. The last two stanzas include a reference to Huxley's comment that \"Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.\": Next HUXLEY repliesThat OWEN he liesAnd garbles his Latin quotation;That his facts are not new,His mistakes not a few,Detrimental to his reputation.To twice slay the slainBy dint of the Brain(Thus HUXLEY concludes his review)Is but labour in vain,unproductive of gain,And so I shall bid you \"Adieu\"!\n \"The Gorilla's Dilemma\" (Punch 1862, vol. 43, p. 164). First two lines: Say am I a man or a brother,Or only an anthropoid ape?\n Report of a sad case recently tried before the Lord Mayor, Owen versus Huxley. Lord Mayor asks whether either side is known to the police: Policeman X—Huxley, your Worship, I take to be a young hand, but very vicious; but Owen I have seen before. He got into trouble with an old bone man, called Mantell, who never could be off complaining as Owen prigged his bones. People did say that the old man never got over it, and Owen worritted him to death; but I don't think it was so bad as that. Hears as Owen takes the chair at a crib in Bloomsbury. I don't think it will be a harmonic meeting altogether. And Huxley hangs out in Jermyn Street. (Tom Huxley's 'low set' included Hooker 'in the green and vegetable line' and 'Charlie Darwin, the pigeon-fancier'; Owen's 'crib in Bloomsbury' was the British Museum, of which Natural History was but one department. Jermyn Street is known for its shops of men's clothing, possibly implying that Huxley was a dandy.)\n\n The Water Babies, a fairy tale for a land baby by Charles Kingsley (serialised in Macmillan's Magazine 1862–63, published in book form, with additions, in 1863). Kingsley had been among first to give a favourable review to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, having \"long since... learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species\", and the story includes a satire on the reaction to Darwin's theory, with the main scientific participants appearing, including Richard Owen and Huxley. In 1892 Thomas Henry Huxley's five-year-old grandson Julian saw the illustration by Edward Linley Sambourne (right) and wrote his grandfather a letter asking: Dear Grandpater—Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Could I see it some day?—Your loving Julian. Huxley wrote back: My dear Julian—I could never make sure about that Water Baby... My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did—There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the Water Babies where other folks can see nothing.\n\nRacism debate \nIn October 2021, an independent history group reviewing colonial links told Imperial College London that, because Huxley \"might now be called racist\", it should remove a bust of him and rename its Huxley Building. The group of 21 academics had been launched in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, to address Imperial’s \"links to the British Empire\" and build a \"fully inclusive organisation\". It reported that Huxley's paper \"Emancipation - Black and White\" \"espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence\" which helped feed ideas around eugenics, which \"falls far short of Imperial’s modern values\" and that his theories \"might now be called 'racist' in as much as he used racial divisions and hierarchical categorisation in his attempt to understand their origins in his studies of human evolution\". Imperial's provost, Ian Walmsley, responded that Imperial would \"confront, not cover up, uncomfortable or awkward aspects of our past\" and this was \"very much not a 'cancel culture' approach\". Students would be consulted before management decided on any action to be taken.\n\nA critical response noted that Huxley was a public, longstanding abolitionist who wrote 'the most complete demonstration of the specific diversity of the types of mankind will nowise constrain science to spread her ægis over their [slaveholders'] atrocities' and \"the North is justified in any expenditure of blood or of money, which shall eradicate a system hopelessly inconsistent with the moral elevation, the political freedom, or the economical progress of the American people\"; a major opponent of the racist position of polygenism as well as the position that some human races were transitional (in 1867 Huxley said, \"there was no shade of justification for the assertion that any existing modification of mankind now known was to be considered as an intermediate form between man and the animals next below him in the scale of the fauna of the world\"); a vehement opponent of the scientific racist James Hunt; and a political radical who believed in granting equal rights and the vote to both Blacks and women.\n\nCultural references\n Huxley appears alongside Charles Darwin and Samuel Wilberforce in the play Darwin in Malibu, written by Crispin Whittell, and is portrayed by Toby Jones in the 2009 film Creation.\n Huxley is referred to as the tutor of the main character, Edward Prendick, in H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The Island of Dr Moreau, published in 1896.\n Horse Feathers (1932 Marx Brothers film)—Groucho Marx is Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff, Dean of Huxley College, while its rival team is Darwin College.\n Huxley's statement, \"Logical consequences are the Scarecrows of fools and the Beacons of wise men\", is quoted by the escape artist character Charles Evan Jeffers, a man with an ironically educated and dignified air about him, played by Roscoe Lee Browne, in the eleventh episode of Season One of Barney Miller.\n\nSee also\n European and American voyages of scientific exploration\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n . (despite its chaotic organisation, this little book contains some nuggets that are well worth sifting)\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n .\n .(Chapter 18 deals with Huxley and natural selection)\n\nFurther reading\nBiographies\n Ashforth, Albert. Thomas Henry Huxley. Twayne, New York 1969.\n Ayres, Clarence. Huxley. Norton, New York 1932.\n Clodd, Edward. Thomas Henry Huxley. Blackwood, Edinburgh 1902.\n Huxley, Leonard. Thomas Henry Huxley: a character sketch. Watts, London 1920.\n Irvine, William. Apes, Angels and Victorians. New York 1955.\n Irvine, William. Thomas Henry Huxley. Longmans, London 1960.\n Mitchell, P. Chalmers. Thomas Henry Huxley: a sketch of his life and work London 1901. Available at Project Gutenberg.\n Voorhees, Irving Wilson. The teachings of Thomas Henry Huxley. Broadway, New York 1907.\n\nExternal links\n\n \n Thomas H. Huxley on the Embryo Project Encyclopedia\n The Huxley File at Clark University—Lists his publications, contains much of his writing.\n \n Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–1895) National Library of Australia, Trove, People and Organisation record for Thomas Huxley\n \n Science in the Making Huxley's papers in the Royal Society's archives\n \n \n Huxley review: Darwin on the origin of species The Times, 26 December 1859, p. 8–9.\n Huxley review: Time and life: Mr Darwin's \"Origin of species.\" Macmillan's Magazine 1: 1859 p. 142–148.\n Huxley review: Darwin on the origin of Species, Westminster Review, 17 (n.s.) April 1860 p. 541–570.\n\n \n \n\n \n \n\n1825 births\n1895 deaths\n19th-century anthropologists\n19th-century British zoologists\n19th-century English non-fiction writers\n19th-century British translators\nAcademics of Imperial College London\nAlumni of Charing Cross Medical School\nAlumni of University College London\nBiological evolution\nBritish anthropologists\nBritish carcinologists\nBritish evolutionary biologists\nBurials at East Finchley Cemetery\nCharles Darwin\nComparative anatomy\nCorresponding members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences\nEnglish agnostics\nEnglish anthropologists\nEnglish anatomists\nEnglish palaeontologists\nEnglish sceptics\nEnglish taxonomists\nEnglish translators\nEnglish zoologists\nThomas Henry\nKnights of the Order of the Polar Star\nFellows of the Linnean Society of London\nFellows of the Royal Society\nForeign associates of the National Academy of Sciences\nFullerian Professors of Physiology\nMembers of the London School Board\nMembers of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom\nMembers of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences\nPaleozoologists\nPeople from Ealing\nPresidents of the Royal Society\nRecipients of the Copley Medal\nRectors of the University of Aberdeen\nRoyal Medal winners\nTranslators from German\nVictorian writers\nWollaston Medal winners\nDeans of the Royal College of Science",
"George Huxley ( 1687–1744), of Stoke, Buckinghamshire, was a British politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1722 to 1741.\n \nHuxley was the eldest son of Thomas Huxley of Bow, Middlesex, and his wife Arabella Becher, daughter of Sir William Becher of Howbury, Bedfordshire. He was admitted at Clare College, Cambridge on 3 May 1704 and at Middle Temple on 15 May 1704.\n\nHuxley was elected Member of Parliament for Bedford in a contest at the 1722 general election. In 1725 he was appointed a Commissioner of victualling but lost his seat at the by-election on 28 May 1725 following his appointment. The Government brought him in as MP for Newport (Isle of Wight) at a by-election on 1 February 1726 and he voted with the Administration in all recorded divisions. He was re-elected at the 1727 general election. In 1729 he was appointed muster-master general with a salary of £800. He was returned unopposed at the 1734 general election. He did not stand in 1741\n\nHuxley died on 19 July 1744. He had one son.\n\nReferences\n\n.\n\n1680s births\n1744 deaths\nMembers of Parliament for Newport (Isle of Wight)\nBritish MPs 1722–1727\nBritish MPs 1727–1734\nBritish MPs 1734–1741"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,",
"Did Huxley believe in God?",
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution.",
"Where did Huxley study?",
"Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir.",
"Did Huxley do any public speaking?",
"selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation.",
"Did Huxley serve on any public boards?",
"administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial"
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | What was he able to influence in Africa? | 8 | What was Julian Huxley able to influence in Africa? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
Critics of creationism
Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
English atheists
English humanists
English eugenicists
English people of Cornish descent
English science writers
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Ethologists
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Julian
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Royal Army Service Corps officers | false | [
"John Roscoe (1861–1932) was an Anglican missionary to East Africa. He conducted anthropological data collection of the Africans he encountered on mission. \n\nRoscoe was born in 1861, during the height of the Victorian era. Roscoe's career heavily echoed the Victorian notion of improving natives under British rule. He studied civil engineering before joining the Anglican Church Missionary Society. In 1884, on mission, he travelled to what became the Uganda Protectorate, and lived there among several African tribes until 1909. From his experiences in Africa, Roscoe wrote Twenty-Five Years in East Africa, which was published in 1921. He intended the book to be an anthropological reference for Britons.\n\nThe trajectory of Roscoe’s career seems to mimic that of David Livingstone, and indeed, Livingstone was a prominent influence on Roscoe. Though Roscoe’s attitude toward Africa’s salvation was more pragmatic and less fervent than that of Livingstone, reflective of his later imperial era in which the British had already established their presence in Africa, he recognized Livingstone’s contributions to British endeavours on the continent. He directly cited Livingstone’s “excellent work in exposing [slavery],” and references and expands upon Livingstone’s ideas of how to best approach the continent. Like Livingstone, Roscoe believed that Christianity would benefit the Africans, and like Livingstone, Roscoe also believed that the scientific study of Africa was necessary.\n\nReferences\n\n1861 births\n1932 deaths\nEnglish Anglican missionaries\nEnglish anthropologists\nAnglican missionaries in Uganda\nUganda Protectorate people",
"François Christiaan Erasmus (19 January 1896 – 1 July 1967) was a South African National Party politician and Minister of Defence from June 1948 to 1959 as well as Minister of Justice from 1959 to August 1961.\n\nEarly life\n\nHe was born on 19 January 1896 at Houtenbeck in the Merweville district of the Cape Colony to Marthinus Frederik Erasmus and his wife Hester Maria Jacoba Maritz.\n\nFamily life\n\nErasmus first married Christina Wiese of Melsetter in the then Southern Rhodesia. They had a son and a daughter. On 9 January 1946 he married Cornelia Margaretha (Corrie) Naudé of Lydenburg. They had three daughters.\n\nCareer \n\nIn 1927 he was appointed Deputy Attorney-General of South West Africa. Afterwards he entered politics and was elected to Parliament in 1933. He joined D F Malan's cabinet as the Minister of Defence in 1948. He was widely considered to be incompetent and was very unpopular because of his broad changes to the military to remove what he called the \"British Influence\". This included the removal of items such as the Red Tabs (Rooi Luise) and the retrenchment or firing of numerous English-speaking officers and the appointment of Afrikaner ones in their place.\n\nAfter his term as Minister of Justice he was appointed Ambassador to Italy.\n\nA Strike Craft of the South African Navy was named after him.\n\nReferences \n\n1896 births\n1967 deaths\nAfrikaner people\nDefence ministers of South Africa\nJustice ministers of South Africa\nNational Party (South Africa) politicians\nAmbassadors of South Africa to Italy\nSouth African lawyers\n20th-century lawyers"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,",
"Did Huxley believe in God?",
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution.",
"Where did Huxley study?",
"Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir.",
"Did Huxley do any public speaking?",
"selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation.",
"Did Huxley serve on any public boards?",
"administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial",
"What was he able to influence in Africa?",
"administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO,"
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | What work did Huxley do in Europe? | 9 | What work did Julian Huxley do in Europe? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
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"Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He has become known as \"Darwin's Bulldog\" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.\n\nThe stories regarding Huxley's famous debate in 1860 with Samuel Wilberforce were a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution and in his own career, although historians think that the surviving story of the debate is a later fabrication. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated about whether humans were closely related to apes.\n\nHuxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. Instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, he fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.\n\nHuxley coined the term \"agnosticism\" in 1869 and elaborated on it in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not.\n\nHuxley had little formal schooling and was virtually self-taught. He became perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the later 19th century. He worked on invertebrates, clarifying relationships between groups previously little understood. Later, he worked on vertebrates, especially on the relationship between apes and humans. After comparing Archaeopteryx with Compsognathus, he concluded that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs, a theory widely accepted today.\n\nThe tendency has been for this fine anatomical work to be overshadowed by his energetic and controversial activity in favour of evolution, and by his extensive public work on scientific education, both of which had significant effects on society in Britain and elsewhere. Huxley's 1893 Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics” is exceedingly influential in China; the Chinese translation of Huxley's lecture even transformed the Chinese translation of Darwin's Origin of Species.\n\nEarly life \nThomas Henry Huxley was born in Ealing, which was then a village in Middlesex. He was the second youngest of eight children of George Huxley and Rachel Withers. His parents were members of the Church of England but he sympathized with noncomformists. Like some other British scientists of the nineteenth century such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Huxley was brought up in a literate middle-class family which had fallen on hard times. His father was a mathematics teacher at Ealing School until it closed, putting the family into financial difficulties. As a result, Thomas left school at the age of 10, after only two years of formal schooling.\n\nDespite this unenviable start, Huxley was determined to educate himself. He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. At first he read Thomas Carlyle, James Hutton's Geology, and Hamilton's Logic. In his teens he taught himself German, eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. He learned Latin, and enough Greek to read Aristotle in the original.\n\nLater on, as a young adult, he made himself an expert, first on invertebrates, and later on vertebrates, all self-taught. He was skilled in drawing and did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his later debates and writing on science and religion his grasp of theology was better than many of his clerical opponents. Huxley, a boy who left school at ten, became one of the most knowledgeable men in Britain.\n\nHe was apprenticed for short periods to several medical practitioners: at 13 to his brother-in-law John Cooke in Coventry, who passed him on to Thomas Chandler, notable for his experiments using mesmerism for medical purposes. Chandler's practice was in London's Rotherhithe amidst the squalor endured by the Dickensian poor. Here Thomas would have seen poverty, crime and rampant disease at its worst. Next, another brother-in-law took him on: John Salt, his eldest sister's husband. Now 16, Huxley entered Sydenham College (behind University College Hospital), a cut-price anatomy school whose founder, Marshall Hall, discovered the reflex arc. All this time Huxley continued his programme of reading, which more than made up for his lack of formal schooling.\n\nA year later, buoyed by excellent results and a silver medal prize in the Apothecaries' yearly competition, Huxley was admitted to study at Charing Cross Hospital, where he obtained a small scholarship. At Charing Cross, he was taught by Thomas Wharton Jones, Professor of Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery at University College London. Jones had been Robert Knox's assistant when Knox bought cadavers from Burke and Hare. The young Wharton Jones, who acted as go-between, was exonerated of crime, but thought it best to leave Scotland. He was a fine teacher, up-to-date in physiology and also an ophthalmic surgeon. In 1845, under Wharton Jones' guidance, Huxley published his first scientific paper demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognised layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as Huxley's layer. No doubt remembering this, and of course knowing his merit, later in life Huxley organised a pension for his old tutor.\n\nAt twenty he passed his First M.B. examination at the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology. However, he did not present himself for the final (Second M.B.) exams and consequently did not qualify with a university degree. His apprenticeships and exam results formed a sufficient basis for his application to the Royal Navy.\n\nVoyage of the Rattlesnake \nAged 20, Huxley was too young to apply to the Royal College of Surgeons for a licence to practise, yet he was 'deep in debt'. So, at a friend's suggestion, he applied for an appointment in the Royal Navy. He had references on character and certificates showing the time spent on his apprenticeship and on requirements such as dissection and pharmacy. Sir William Burnett, the Physician General of the Navy, interviewed him and arranged for the College of Surgeons to test his competence (by means of a viva voce).\n\nFinally Huxley was made Assistant Surgeon ('surgeon's mate', but in practice marine naturalist) to HMS Rattlesnake, about to set sail on a voyage of discovery and surveying to New Guinea and Australia. The Rattlesnake left England on 3 December 1846 and, once it arrived in the southern hemisphere, Huxley devoted his time to the study of marine invertebrates. He began to send details of his discoveries back to England, where publication was arranged by Edward Forbes FRS (who had also been a pupil of Knox). Both before and after the voyage Forbes was something of a mentor to Huxley.\n\nHuxley's paper \"On the anatomy and the affinities of the family of Medusae\" was published in 1849 by the Royal Society in its Philosophical Transactions. Huxley united the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps with the Medusae to form a class to which he subsequently gave the name of Hydrozoa. The connection he made was that all the members of the class consisted of two cell layers, enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of the phylum now called the Cnidaria. He compared this feature to the serous and mucous structures of embryos of higher animals. When at last he got a grant from the Royal Society for the printing of plates, Huxley was able to summarise this work in The Oceanic Hydrozoa, published by the Ray Society in 1859.\n\nThe value of Huxley's work was recognised and, on returning to England in 1850, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not only received the Royal Society Medal but was also elected to the Council. He met Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Tyndall, who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, so he might work on the specimens he collected and the observations he made during the voyage of the Rattlesnake. He solved the problem of Appendicularia, whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Peter Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign. It and the Ascidians are both, as Huxley showed, tunicates, today regarded as a sister group to the vertebrates in the phylum Chordata. Other papers on the morphology of the cephalopods and on brachiopods and rotifers are also noteworthy. The Rattlesnakes official naturalist, John MacGillivray, did some work on botany, and proved surprisingly good at notating Australian aboriginal languages. He wrote up the voyage in the standard Victorian two volume format.\n\nLater life \nHuxley effectively resigned from the navy (by refusing to return to active service) and, in July 1854, he became Professor of Natural History at the Royal School of Mines and naturalist to the British Geological Survey in the following year. In addition, he was Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution 1855–58 and 1865–67; Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons 1863–69; President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1869–1870; President of the Quekett Microscopical Club 1878; President of the Royal Society 1883–85; Inspector of Fisheries 1881–85; and President of the Marine Biological Association 1884–1890. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1869.\n\nThe thirty-one years during which Huxley occupied the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines included work on vertebrate palaeontology and on many projects to advance the place of science in British life. Huxley retired in 1885, after a bout of depressive illness which started in 1884. He resigned the presidency of the Royal Society in mid-term, the Inspectorship of Fisheries, and his chair (as soon as he decently could) and took six months' leave. His pension was a fairly handsome £1200 a year.\n\nIn 1890, he moved from London to Eastbourne where he edited the nine volumes of his Collected Essays. In 1894 he heard of Eugene Dubois' discovery in Java of the remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (now known as Homo erectus). Finally, in 1895, he died of a heart attack (after contracting influenza and pneumonia), and was buried in North London at East Finchley. This small family plot had been purchased upon the death of his beloved eldest son Noel, who died of scarlet fever in 1860; Huxley's wife Henrietta Anne née Heathorn and son Noel are also buried there. No invitations were sent out, but two hundred people turned up for the ceremony; they included Joseph Dalton Hooker, William Henry Flower, Mulford B. Foster, Edwin Lankester, Joseph Lister and, apparently, Henry James.\n\nHuxley and his wife had five daughters and three sons:\n\nPublic duties and awards \nFrom 1870 onwards, Huxley was to some extent drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. He served on eight Royal Commissions, from 1862 to 1884. From 1871 to 1880 he was a Secretary of the Royal Society and from 1883 to 1885 he was president. He was president of the Geological Society from 1868 to 1870. In 1870, he was president of the British Association at Liverpool and, in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board. He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1877 to 1879. He was the leading person amongst those who reformed the Royal Society, persuaded government about science, and established scientific education in British schools and universities. Before him, science was mostly a gentleman's occupation; after him, science was a profession.\n\nHe was awarded the highest honours then open to British men of science. The Royal Society, who had elected him as Fellow when he was 25 (1851), awarded him the Royal Medal the next year (1852), a year before Charles Darwin got the same award. He was the youngest biologist to receive such recognition. Then later in life came the Copley Medal in 1888 and the Darwin Medal in 1894; the Geological Society awarded him the Wollaston Medal in 1876; the Linnean Society awarded him the Linnean Medal in 1890. There were many other elections and appointments to eminent scientific bodies; these and his many academic awards are listed in the Life and Letters. He turned down many other appointments, notably the Linacre chair in zoology at Oxford and the Mastership of University College, Oxford.\n\nIn 1873 the King of Sweden made Huxley, Hooker and Tyndall Knights of the Order of the Polar Star: they could wear the insignia but not use the title in Britain. Huxley collected many honorary memberships of foreign societies, academic awards and honorary doctorates from Britain and Germany. He also became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1892.\n\nAs recognition of his many public services he was given a pension by the state, and was appointed Privy Councillor in 1892.\n\nDespite his many achievements he was given no award by the British state until late in life. In this he did better than Darwin, who got no award of any kind from the state. (Darwin's proposed knighthood was vetoed by ecclesiastical advisers, including Wilberforce) Perhaps Huxley had commented too often on his dislike of honours, or perhaps his many assaults on the traditional beliefs of organised religion made enemies in the establishment—he had vigorous debates in print with Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Balfour, and his relationship with Lord Salisbury was less than tranquil.\n\nHuxley was for about thirty years evolution's most effective advocate, and for some Huxley was \"the premier advocate of science in the nineteenth century [for] the whole English-speaking world\".\n\nThough he had many admirers and disciples, his retirement and later death left British zoology somewhat bereft of leadership. He had, directly or indirectly, guided the careers and appointments of the next generation, but none were of his stature. The loss of Francis Balfour in 1882, climbing the Alps just after he was appointed to a chair at Cambridge, was a tragedy. Huxley thought he was \"the only man who can carry out my work\": the deaths of Balfour and W. K. Clifford were \"the greatest losses to science in our time\".\n\nVertebrate palaeontology \n\nThe first half of Huxley's career as a palaeontologist is marked by a rather strange predilection for 'persistent types', in which he seemed to argue that evolutionary advancement (in the sense of major new groups of animals and plants) was rare or absent in the Phanerozoic. In the same vein, he tended to push the origin of major groups such as birds and mammals back into the Palaeozoic era, and to claim that no order of plants had ever gone extinct.\n\nMuch paper has been consumed by historians of science ruminating on this strange and somewhat unclear idea. Huxley was wrong to pitch the loss of orders in the Phanerozoic as low as 7%, and he did not estimate the number of new orders which evolved. Persistent types sat rather uncomfortably next to Darwin's more fluid ideas; despite his intelligence, it took Huxley a surprisingly long time to appreciate some of the implications of evolution. However, gradually Huxley moved away from this conservative style of thinking as his understanding of palaeontology, and the discipline itself, developed.\n\nHuxley's detailed anatomical work was, as always, first-rate and productive. His work on fossil fish shows his distinctive approach: whereas pre-Darwinian naturalists collected, identified and classified, Huxley worked mainly to reveal the evolutionary relationships between groups.\n\nThe lobed-finned fish (such as coelacanths and lung fish) have paired appendages whose internal skeleton is attached to the shoulder or pelvis by a single bone, the humerus or femur. His interest in these fish brought him close to the origin of tetrapods, one of the most important areas of vertebrate palaeontology.\n\nThe study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating the fundamental affinity of birds and reptiles, which he united under the title of Sauropsida. His papers on Archaeopteryx and the origin of birds were of great interest then and still are.\n\nApart from his interest in persuading the world that man was a primate, and had descended from the same stock as the apes, Huxley did little work on mammals, with one exception. On his tour of America Huxley was shown the remarkable series of fossil horses, discovered by O. C. Marsh, in Yale's Peabody Museum. An Easterner, Marsh was America's first professor of palaeontology, but also one who had come west into hostile Indian territory in search of fossils, hunted buffalo, and met Red Cloud (in 1874). Funded by his uncle George Peabody, Marsh had made some remarkable discoveries: the huge Cretaceous aquatic bird Hesperornis, and the dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River were worth the trip by themselves, but the horse fossils were really special. After a week with Marsh and his fossils, Huxley wrote excitedly, \"The collection of fossils is the most wonderful thing I ever saw.\"\n\nThe collection at that time went from the small four-toed forest-dwelling Orohippus from the Eocene through three-toed species such as Miohippus to species more like the modern horse. By looking at their teeth he could see that, as the size grew larger and the toes reduced, the teeth changed from those of a browser to those of a grazer. All such changes could be explained by a general alteration in habitat from forest to grassland. And, it is now known, that is what did happen over large areas of North America from the Eocene to the Pleistocene: the ultimate causative agent was global temperature reduction (see Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum). The modern account of the evolution of the horse has many other members, and the overall appearance of the tree of descent is more like a bush than a straight line.\n\nThe horse series also strongly suggested that the process was gradual, and that the origin of the modern horse lay in North America, not in Eurasia. If so, then something must have happened to horses in North America, since none were there when Europeans arrived. The experience with Marsh was enough for Huxley to give credence to Darwin's gradualism, and to introduce the story of the horse into his lecture series.\n\nMarsh's and Huxley's conclusions were initially quite different. However, Marsh carefully showed Huxley his complete sequence of fossils. As Marsh put it, Huxley \"then informed me that all this was new to him and that my facts demonstrated the evolution of the horse beyond question, and for the first time indicated the direct line of descent of an existing animal. With the generosity of true greatness, he gave up his own opinions in the face of new truth, and took my conclusions as the basis of his famous New York lecture on the horse.\"\n\nSupport of Darwin\n\nHuxley was originally not persuaded of \"development theory\", as evolution was once called. This can be seen in his savage review of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book which contained some quite pertinent arguments in favour of evolution. Huxley had also rejected Lamarck's theory of transmutation, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support it. All this scepticism was brought together in a lecture to the Royal Institution, which made Darwin anxious enough to set about an effort to change young Huxley's mind. It was the kind of thing Darwin did with his closest scientific friends, but he must have had some particular intuition about Huxley, who was from all accounts a most impressive person even as a young man.\n\nHuxley was therefore one of the small group who knew about Darwin's ideas before they were published (the group included Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell). The first publication by Darwin of his ideas came when Wallace sent Darwin his famous paper on natural selection, which was presented by Lyell and Hooker to the Linnean Society in 1858 alongside excerpts from Darwin's notebook and a Darwin letter to Asa Gray. Huxley's famous response to the idea of natural selection was \"How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!\" However, he never conclusively made up his mind about whether natural selection was the main method for evolution, though he did admit it was a hypothesis which was a good working basis.\n\nLogically speaking, the prior question was whether evolution had taken place at all. It is to this question that much of Darwin's On the Origin of Species was devoted. Its publication in 1859 completely convinced Huxley of evolution and it was this and no doubt his admiration of Darwin's way of amassing and using evidence that formed the basis of his support for Darwin in the debates that followed the book's publication.\n\nHuxley's support started with his anonymous favourable review of the Origin in the Times for 26 December 1859, and continued with articles in several periodicals, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860. At the same time, Richard Owen, whilst writing an extremely hostile anonymous review of the Origin in the Edinburgh Review, also primed Samuel Wilberforce who wrote one in the Quarterly Review, running to 17,000 words. The authorship of this latter review was not known for sure until Wilberforce's son wrote his biography. So it can be said that, just as Darwin groomed Huxley, so Owen groomed Wilberforce; and both the proxies fought public battles on behalf of their principals as much as themselves. Though we do not know the exact words of the Oxford debate, we do know what Huxley thought of the review in the Quarterly:\n\nSince Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a \"flighty\" person, who endeavours \"to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,\" and whose \"mode of dealing with nature\" is reprobated as \"utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.\"\n\nIf I confine my retrospect of the reception of the Origin of Species to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article...A more complete version is available in Wikiquote\n\nSince his death, Huxley has become known as \"Darwin's Bulldog\", taken to refer to his pluck and courage in debate, and to his perceived role in protecting the older man. The sobriquet appears to be Huxley's own invention, although of unknown date, and it was not current in his lifetime.\n\nWhile the second half of Darwin's life was lived mainly within his family, the younger and combative Huxley operated mainly out in the world at large. A letter from Huxley to Ernst Haeckel (2 November 1871) states: \"The dogs have been snapping at [Darwin's] heels too much of late.\"\n\nDebate with Wilberforce\n\nFamously, Huxley responded to Wilberforce in the debate at the British Association meeting, on Saturday 30 June 1860 at the Oxford University Museum. Huxley's presence there had been encouraged on the previous evening when he met Robert Chambers, the Scottish publisher and author of Vestiges, who was walking the streets of Oxford in a dispirited state, and begged for assistance. The debate followed the presentation of a paper by John William Draper, and was chaired by Darwin's former botany tutor John Stevens Henslow. Darwin's theory was opposed by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and those supporting Darwin included Huxley and their mutual friends Hooker and Lubbock. The platform featured Brodie and Professor Beale, and Robert FitzRoy, who had been captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin's voyage, spoke against Darwin.\n\nWilberforce had a track record against evolution as far back as the previous Oxford B.A. meeting in 1847 when he attacked Chambers' Vestiges. For the more challenging task of opposing the Origin, and the implication that man descended from apes, he had been assiduously coached by Richard OwenOwen stayed with him the night before the debate. On the day, Wilberforce repeated some of the arguments from his Quarterly Review article (written but not yet published), then ventured onto slippery ground. His famous jibe at Huxley (as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side) was probably unplanned, and certainly unwise. Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to suppress debatethe exact wording is not certainwas widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play.\n\nThe letters of Alfred Newton include one to his brother giving an eyewitness account of the debate, and written less than a month afterwards. Other eyewitnesses, with one or two exceptions (Hooker especially thought he had made the best points), give similar accounts, at varying dates after the event. The general view was and still is that Huxley got much the better of the exchange, though Wilberforce himself thought he had done quite well. In the absence of a verbatim report, differing perceptions are difficult to judge fairly; Huxley wrote a detailed account for Darwin, a letter which does not survive; however, a letter to his friend Frederick Daniel Dyster does survive with an account just three months after the event.\n\nOne effect of the debate was to hugely increase Huxley's visibility amongst educated people, through the accounts in newspapers and periodicals. Another consequence was to alert him to the importance of public debate: a lesson he never forgot. A third effect was to serve notice that Darwinian ideas could not be easily dismissed: on the contrary, they would be vigorously defended against orthodox authority. A fourth effect was to promote professionalism in science, with its implied need for scientific education. A fifth consequence was indirect: as Wilberforce had feared, a defence of evolution did undermine literal belief in the Old Testament, especially the Book of Genesis. Many of the liberal clergy at the meeting were quite pleased with the outcome of the debate; they were supporters, perhaps, of the controversial Essays and Reviews. Thus, both on the side of science and on that of religion, the debate was important and its outcome significant. (see also below)\n\nThat Huxley and Wilberforce remained on courteous terms after the debate (and able to work together on projects such as the Metropolitan Board of Education) says something about both men, whereas Huxley and Owen were never reconciled.\n\nMan's place in nature\n\nFor nearly a decade his work was directed mainly to the relationship of man to the apes. This led him directly into a clash with Richard Owen, a man widely disliked for his behaviour whilst also being admired for his capability. The struggle was to culminate in some severe defeats for Owen. Huxley's Croonian Lecture, delivered before the Royal Society in 1858 on The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull was the start. In this, he rejected Owen's theory that the bones of the skull and the spine were homologous, an opinion previously held by Goethe and Lorenz Oken.\n\nFrom 1860–63 Huxley developed his ideas, presenting them in lectures to working men, students and the general public, followed by publication. Also in 1862 a series of talks to working men was printed lecture by lecture as pamphlets, later bound up as a little green book; the first copies went on sale in December. Other lectures grew into Huxley's most famous work Evidence as to Man's place in Nature (1863) where he addressed the key issues long before Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man in 1871.\n\nAlthough Darwin did not publish his Descent of Man until 1871, the general debate on this topic had started years before (there was even a precursor debate in the 18th century between Monboddo and Buffon). Darwin had dropped a hint when, in the conclusion to the Origin, he wrote: \"In the distant future... light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history\". Not so distant, as it turned out. A key event had already occurred in 1857 when Richard Owen presented (to the Linnean Society) his theory that man was marked off from all other mammals by possessing features of the brain peculiar to the genus Homo. Having reached this opinion, Owen separated man from all other mammals in a subclass of its own. No other biologist held such an extreme view. Darwin reacted \"Man...as distinct from a chimpanzee [as] an ape from a platypus... I cannot swallow that!\" Neither could Huxley, who was able to demonstrate that Owen's idea was completely wrong.\n\nThe subject was raised at the 1860 BA Oxford meeting, when Huxley flatly contradicted Owen, and promised a later demonstration of the facts. In fact, a number of demonstrations were held in London and the provinces. In 1862 at the Cambridge meeting of the B.A. Huxley's friend William Flower gave a public dissection to show that the same structures (the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and hippocampus minor) were indeed present in apes. The debate was widely publicised, and parodied as the Great Hippocampus Question. It was seen as one of Owen's greatest blunders, revealing Huxley as not only dangerous in debate, but also a better anatomist.\n\nOwen conceded that there was something that could be called a hippocampus minor in the apes, but stated that it was much less developed and that such a presence did not detract from the overall distinction of simple brain size.\n\nHuxley's ideas on this topic were summed up in January 1861 in the first issue (new series) of his own journal, the Natural History Review: \"the most violent scientific paper he had ever composed\". This paper was reprinted in 1863 as chapter 2 of Man's Place in Nature, with an addendum giving his account of the Owen/Huxley controversy about the ape brain. In his Collected Essays this addendum was removed.\n\nThe extended argument on the ape brain, partly in debate and partly in print, backed by dissections and demonstrations, was a landmark in Huxley's career. It was highly important in asserting his dominance of comparative anatomy, and in the long run more influential in establishing evolution amongst biologists than was the debate with Wilberforce. It also marked the start of Owen's decline in the esteem of his fellow biologists.\n\nThe following was written by Huxley to Rolleston before the BA meeting in 1861:\n\"My dear Rolleston... The obstinate reiteration of erroneous assertions can only be nullified by as persistent an appeal to facts; and I greatly regret that my engagements do not permit me to be present at the British Association in order to assist personally at what, I believe, will be the seventh public demonstration during the past twelve months of the untruth of the three assertions, that the posterior lobe of the cerebrum, the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle, and the hippocampus minor, are peculiar to man and do not exist in the apes. I shall be obliged if you will read this letter to the Section\" Yours faithfully, Thos. H. Huxley.\n\nDuring those years there was also work on human fossil anatomy and anthropology. In 1862 he examined the Neanderthal skull-cap, which had been discovered in 1857. It was the first pre-sapiens discovery of a fossil man, and it was immediately clear to him that the brain case was surprisingly large. Huxley also started to dabble in physical anthropology, and classified the human races into nine categories, along with placing them under four general categorisations as Australoid, Negroid, Xanthochroic and Mongoloid. Such classifications depended mainly on physical appearance and certain xanatomical characteristics.\n\nNatural selection\nHuxley was certainly not slavish in his dealings with Darwin. As shown in every biography, they had quite different and rather complementary characters. Important also, Darwin was a field naturalist, but Huxley was an anatomist, so there was a difference in their experience of nature. Lastly, Darwin's views on science were different from Huxley's views. For Darwin, natural selection was the best way to explain evolution because it explained a huge range of natural history facts and observations: it solved problems. Huxley, on the other hand, was an empiricist who trusted what he could see, and some things are not easily seen. With this in mind, one can appreciate the debate between them, Darwin writing his letters, Huxley never going quite so far as to say he thought Darwin was right.\n\nHuxley's reservations on natural selection were of the type \"until selection and breeding can be seen to give rise to varieties which are infertile with each other, natural selection cannot be proved\". Huxley's position on selection was agnostic; yet he gave no credence to any other theory. Despite this concern about evidence, Huxley saw that if evolution came about through variation, reproduction and selection then other things would also be subject to the same pressures. This included ideas because they are invented, imitated and selected by humans: ‘The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.’ This is the same idea as meme theory put forward by Richard Dawkins in 1976.\n\nDarwin's part in the discussion came mostly in letters, as was his wont, along the lines: \"The empirical evidence you call for is both impossible in practical terms, and in any event unnecessary. It's the same as asking to see every step in the transformation (or the splitting) of one species into another. My way so many issues are clarified and problems solved; no other theory does nearly so well\".\n\nHuxley's reservation, as Helena Cronin has so aptly remarked, was contagious: \"it spread itself for years among all kinds of doubters of Darwinism\". One reason for this doubt was that comparative anatomy could address the question of descent, but not the question of mechanism.\n\nPallbearer\nHuxley was a pallbearer at the funeral of Charles Darwin on 26 April 1882.\n\nThe X Club\n\nIn November 1864, Huxley succeeded in launching a dining club, the X Club, composed of like-minded people working to advance the cause of science; not surprisingly, the club consisted of most of his closest friends. There were nine members, who decided at their first meeting that there should be no more. The members were: Huxley, John Tyndall, J. D. Hooker, John Lubbock (banker, biologist and neighbour of Darwin), Herbert Spencer (social philosopher and sub-editor of the Economist), William Spottiswoode (mathematician and the Queen's Printer), Thomas Hirst (Professor of Physics at University College London), Edward Frankland (the new Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution) and George Busk, zoologist and palaeontologist (formerly surgeon for HMS Dreadnought). All except Spencer were Fellows of the Royal Society. Tyndall was a particularly close friend; for many years they met regularly and discussed issues of the day. On more than one occasion Huxley joined Tyndall in the latter's trips into the Alps and helped with his investigations in glaciology.\n\nThere were also some quite significant X-Club satellites such as William Flower and George Rolleston, (Huxley protegés), and liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster. Guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time.\n\nThey would dine early on first Thursdays at a hotel, planning what to do; high on the agenda was to change the way the Royal Society Council did business. It was no coincidence that the Council met later that same evening. First item for the Xs was to get the Copley Medal for Darwin, which they managed after quite a struggle.\n\nThe next step was to acquire a journal to spread their ideas. This was the weekly Reader, which they bought, revamped and redirected. Huxley had already become part-owner of the Natural History Review bolstered by the support of Lubbock, Rolleston, Busk and Carpenter (X-clubbers and satellites). The journal was switched to pro-Darwinian lines and relaunched in January 1861. After a stream of good articles the NHR failed after four years; but it had helped at a critical time for the establishment of evolution. The Reader also failed, despite its broader appeal which included art and literature as well as science. The periodical market was quite crowded at the time, but most probably the critical factor was Huxley's time; he was simply over-committed, and could not afford to hire full-time editors. This occurred often in his life: Huxley took on too many ventures, and was not so astute as Darwin at getting others to do work for him.\n\nHowever, the experience gained with the Reader was put to good use when the X Club put their weight behind the founding of Nature in 1869. This time no mistakes were made: above all there was a permanent editor (though not full-time), Norman Lockyer, who served until 1919, a year before his death. In 1925, to celebrate his centenary, Nature issued a supplement devoted to Huxley.\n\nThe peak of the X Club's influence was from 1873 to 1885 as Hooker, Spottiswoode and Huxley were Presidents of the Royal Society in succession. Spencer resigned in 1889 after a dispute with Huxley over state support for science. After 1892 it was just an excuse for the surviving members to meet. Hooker died in 1911, and Lubbock (now Lord Avebury) was the last surviving member.\n\nHuxley was also an active member of the Metaphysical Society, which ran from 1869 to 1880. It was formed around a nucleus of clergy and expanded to include all kinds of opinions. Tyndall and Huxley later joined The Club (founded by Dr. Johnson) when they could be sure that Owen would not turn up.\n\nEducational influence\nWhen Huxley himself was young there were virtually no degrees in British universities in the biological sciences and few courses. Most biologists of his day either were self-taught or took medical degrees. When he retired there were established chairs in biological disciplines in most universities, and a broad consensus on the curricula to be followed. Huxley was the single most influential person in this transformation.\n\nSchool of Mines and Zoology\nIn the early 1870s the Royal School of Mines moved to new quarters in South Kensington; ultimately it would become one of the constituent parts of Imperial College London. The move gave Huxley the chance to give more prominence to laboratory work in biology teaching, an idea suggested by practice in German universities. In the main, the method was based on the use of carefully chosen types, and depended on the dissection of anatomy, supplemented by microscopy, museum specimens and some elementary physiology at the hands of Foster.\n\nThe typical day would start with Huxley lecturing at 9am, followed by a program of laboratory work supervised by his demonstrators. Huxley's demonstrators were picked men—all became leaders of biology in Britain in later life, spreading Huxley's ideas as well as their own. Michael Foster became Professor of Physiology at Cambridge; E. Ray Lankester became Jodrell Professor of Zoology at University College London (1875–91), Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford (1891–98) and Director of the Natural History Museum (1898–1907); S.H. Vines became Professor of Botany at Cambridge; W.T. Thiselton-Dyer became Hooker's successor at Kew (he was already Hooker's son-in-law!); T. Jeffery Parker became Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College, Cardiff; and William Rutherford became the Professor of Physiology at Edinburgh. William Flower, Conservator to the Hunterian Museum, and THH's assistant in many dissections, became Sir William Flower, Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and, later, Director of the Natural History Museum. It's a remarkable list of disciples, especially when contrasted with Owen who, in a longer professional life than Huxley, left no disciples at all. \"No one fact tells so strongly against Owen... as that he has never reared one pupil or follower\".\n\nHuxley's courses for students were so much narrower than the man himself that many were bewildered by the contrast: \"The teaching of zoology by use of selected animal types has come in for much criticism\"; Looking back in 1914 to his time as a student, Sir Arthur Shipley said \"Darwin's later works all dealt with living organisms, yet our obsession was with the dead, with bodies preserved, and cut into the most refined slices\". E.W MacBride said \"Huxley... would persist in looking at animals as material structures and not as living, active beings; in a word... he was a necrologist. To put it simply, Huxley preferred to teach what he had actually seen with his own eyes.\n\nThis largely morphological program of comparative anatomy remained at the core of most biological education for a hundred years until the advent of cell and molecular biology and interest in evolutionary ecology forced a fundamental rethink. It is an interesting fact that the methods of the field naturalists who led the way in developing the theory of evolution (Darwin, Wallace, Fritz Müller, Henry Bates) were scarcely represented at all in Huxley's program. Ecological investigation of life in its environment was virtually non-existent, and theory, evolutionary or otherwise, was at a discount. Michael Ruse finds no mention of evolution or Darwinism in any of the exams set by Huxley, and confirms the lecture content based on two complete sets of lecture notes.\n\nSince Darwin, Wallace and Bates did not hold teaching posts at any stage of their adult careers (and Műller never returned from Brazil) the imbalance in Huxley's program went uncorrected. It is surely strange that Huxley's courses did not contain an account of the evidence collected by those naturalists of life in the tropics; evidence which they had found so convincing, and which caused their views on evolution by natural selection to be so similar. Adrian Desmond suggests that \"[biology] had to be simple, synthetic and assimilable [because] it was to train teachers and had no other heuristic function\". That must be part of the reason; indeed it does help to explain the stultifying nature of much school biology. But zoology as taught at all levels became far too much the product of one man.\n\nHuxley was comfortable with comparative anatomy, at which he was the greatest master of the day. He was not an all-round naturalist like Darwin, who had shown clearly enough how to weave together detailed factual information and subtle arguments across the vast web of life. Huxley chose, in his teaching (and to some extent in his research) to take a more straightforward course, concentrating on his personal strengths.\n\nSchools and the Bible\nHuxley was also a major influence in the direction taken by British schools: in November 1870 he was voted onto the London School Board. In primary schooling, he advocated a wide range of disciplines, similar to what is taught today: reading, writing, arithmetic, art, science, music, etc. In secondary education he recommended two years of basic liberal studies followed by two years of some upper-division work, focusing on a more specific area of study. A practical example of the latter is his famous 1868 lecture On a Piece of Chalk which was first published as an essay in Macmillan's Magazine in London later that year. The piece reconstructs the geological history of Britain from a simple piece of chalk and demonstrates science as \"organized common sense\".\n\nHuxley supported the reading of the Bible in schools. This may seem out of step with his agnostic convictions, but he believed that the Bible's significant moral teachings and superb use of language were relevant to English life. \"I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches\".\nHowever, what Huxley proposed was to create an edited version of the Bible, shorn of \"shortcomings and errors... statements to which men of science absolutely and entirely demur... These tender children [should] not be taught that which you do not yourselves believe\". The Board voted against his idea, but it also voted against the idea that public money should be used to support students attending church schools. Vigorous debate took place on such points, and the debates were minuted in detail. Huxley said \"I will never be a party to enabling the State to sweep the children of this country into denominational schools\". The Act of Parliament which founded board schools permitted the reading of the Bible, but did not permit any denominational doctrine to be taught.\n\nIt may be right to see Huxley's life and work as contributing to the secularisation of British society which gradually occurred over the following century. Ernst Mayr said \"It can hardly be doubted that [biology] has helped to undermine traditional beliefs and value systems\"—and Huxley more than anyone else was responsible for this trend in Britain. Some modern Christian apologists consider Huxley the father of antitheism, though he himself maintained that he was an agnostic, not an atheist. He was, however, a lifelong and determined opponent of almost all organised religion throughout his life, especially the \"Roman Church... carefully calculated for the destruction of all that is highest in the moral nature, in the intellectual freedom, and in the political freedom of mankind\". In the same line of thought, in an article in Popular Science, Huxley used the expression \"the so-called Christianity of Catholicism\", explaining: \"I say 'so-called' not by way of offense, but as a protest against the monstruous assumption that Catholic Christianity is explicitly or implicitly contained in any trust-worthy record of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.\"\n\nOriginally coining the term in 1869, Huxley elaborated on \"agnosticism\" in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not. Huxley statesAgnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle... the fundamental axiom of modern science... In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration... In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. Use of that term has continued to the present day (see Thomas Henry Huxley and agnosticism). Much of Huxley's agnosticism is influenced by Kantian views on human perception and the ability to rely on rational evidence rather than belief systems.\n\nIn 1893, during preparation for the second Romanes Lecture, Huxley expressed his disappointment at the shortcomings of 'liberal' theology, describing its doctrines as 'popular illusions', and the teachings they replaced 'faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth'.\n\nVladimir Lenin remarked that for Huxley \"agnosticism serves as a fig-leaf for materialism\". (See also the Debate with Wilberforce above.)\n\nAdult education\n\nHuxley's interest in education went still further than school and university classrooms; he made a great effort to reach interested adults of all kinds: after all, he himself was largely self-educated. There were his lecture courses for working men, many of which were published afterwards, and there was the use he made of journalism, partly to earn money but mostly to reach out to the literate public. For most of his adult life he wrote for periodicals—the Westminster Review, the Saturday Review, the Reader, the Pall Mall Gazette, Macmillan's Magazine, the Contemporary Review. Germany was still ahead in formal science education, but interested people in Victorian Britain could use their initiative and find out what was going on by reading periodicals and using the lending libraries.\n\nIn 1868 Huxley became Principal of the South London Working Men's College in Blackfriars Road. The moving spirit was a portmanteau worker, Wm. Rossiter, who did most of the work; the funds were put up mainly by F.D. Maurice's Christian Socialists. At sixpence for a course and a penny for a lecture by Huxley, this was some bargain; and so was the free library organised by the college, an idea which was widely copied. Huxley thought, and said, that the men who attended were as good as any country squire.\n\nThe technique of printing his more popular lectures in periodicals which were sold to the general public was extremely effective. A good example was \"The Physical Basis of Life\", a lecture given in Edinburgh on 8 November 1868. Its theme—that vital action is nothing more than \"the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it\"—shocked the audience, though that was nothing compared to the uproar when it was published in the Fortnightly Review for February 1869. John Morley, the editor, said \"No article that had appeared in any periodical for a generation had caused such a sensation\". The issue was reprinted seven times and protoplasm became a household word; Punch added 'Professor Protoplasm' to his other soubriquets.\n\nThe topic had been stimulated by Huxley seeing the cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells, which is indeed a sensational sight. For these audiences Huxley's claim that this activity should not be explained by words such as vitality, but by the working of its constituent chemicals, was surprising and shocking. Today we would perhaps emphasise the extraordinary structural arrangement of those chemicals as the key to understanding what cells do, but little of that was known in the nineteenth century.\n\nWhen the Archbishop of York thought this 'new philosophy' was based on Auguste Comte's positivism, Huxley corrected him: \"Comte's philosophy [is just] Catholicism minus Christianity\" (Huxley 1893 vol 1 of Collected Essays Methods & Results 156). A later version was \"[positivism is] sheer Popery with M. Comte in the chair of St Peter, and with the names of the saints changed\". (lecture on The scientific aspects of positivism Huxley 1870 Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews p. 149). Huxley's dismissal of positivism damaged it so severely that Comte's ideas withered in Britain.\n\nHuxley and the humanities\nDuring his life, and especially in the last ten years after retirement, Huxley wrote on many issues relating to the humanities.\n\nPerhaps the best known of these topics is Evolution and Ethics, which deals with the question of whether biology has anything particular to say about moral philosophy. Both Huxley and his grandson Julian Huxley gave Romanes Lectures on this theme. For a start, Huxley dismisses religion as a source of moral authority. Next, he believes the mental characteristics of man are as much a product of evolution as the physical aspects. Thus, our emotions, our intellect, our tendency to prefer living in groups and spend resources on raising our young are part and parcel of our evolution, and therefore inherited.\n\nDespite this, the details of our values and ethics are not inherited: they are partly determined by our culture, and partly chosen by ourselves. Morality and duty are often at war with natural instincts; ethics cannot be derived from the struggle for existence: \"Of moral purpose I see not a trace in nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture.\" It is therefore our responsibility to make ethical choices (see Ethics and Evolutionary ethics). This seems to put Huxley as a compatibilist in the Free Will vs Determinism debate. In this argument Huxley is diametrically opposed to his old friend Herbert Spencer.\n\nHuxley's dissection of Rousseau's views on man and society is another example of his later work. The essay undermines Rousseau's ideas on man as a preliminary to undermining his ideas on the ownership of property. Characteristic is: \"The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.\"\n\nHuxley's method of argumentation (his strategy and tactics of persuasion in speech and print) is itself much studied. His career included controversial debates with scientists, clerics and politicians; persuasive discussions with Royal Commissions and other public bodies; lectures and articles for the general public, and a mass of detailed letter-writing to friends and other correspondents. A large number of textbooks have excerpted his prose for anthologies.\n\nRoyal and other commissions\nHuxley worked on ten Royal and other commissions (titles somewhat shortened here). The Royal Commission is the senior investigative forum in the British constitution. A rough analysis shows that five commissions involved science and scientific education; three involved medicine and three involved fisheries. Several involve difficult ethical and legal issues. All deal with possible changes to law and/or administrative practice.\n\nRoyal Commissions\n1862: Trawling for herrings on the coast of Scotland.\n1863–65: Sea fisheries of the United Kingdom.\n1870–71: The Contagious Diseases Acts.\n1870–75: Scientific instruction and the advancement of science.\n1876: The practice of subjugating live animals to scientific experiments (vivisection).\n1876–78: The universities of Scotland.\n1881–82: The Medical Acts. [i.e. the legal framework for medicine]\n1884: Trawl, net and beam trawl fishing.\n\nOther commissions\n1866: On the Royal College of Science for Ireland.\n1868: On science and art instruction in Ireland.\n\nFamily \n\nIn 1855, he married Henrietta Anne Heathorn (1825–1915), an English émigrée whom he had met in Sydney. They kept correspondence until he was able to send for her. They had five daughters and three sons:\n\n Noel Huxley (1856–60), died aged 4.\n Jessie Oriana Huxley (1858 −1927), married architect Fred Waller in 1877.\n Marian Huxley (1859–87), married artist John Collier in 1879.\n Leonard Huxley, (1860–1933) author, father of Julian, Aldous and Andrew Huxley.\n Rachel Huxley (1862–1934) married civil engineer Alfred Eckersley in 1884; he died 1895. They were parents of the physicist Thomas Eckersley and the first BBC Chief Engineer Peter Eckersley.\n Henrietta (Nettie) Huxley (1863–1940), married Harold Roller, travelled Europe as a singer.\n Henry Huxley (1865–1946), became a fashionable general practitioner in London.\n Ethel Huxley (1866–1941), married artist John Collier (widower of sister) in 1889.\n\nHuxley's relationships with his relatives and children were genial by the standards of the day—so long as they lived their lives in an honourable manner, which some did not. After his mother, his eldest sister Lizzie was the most important person in his life until his own marriage. He remained on good terms with his children, more than can be said of many Victorian fathers. This excerpt from a letter to Jessie, his eldest daughter is full of affection:\n\"Dearest Jess, You are a badly used young person—you are; and nothing short of that conviction would get a letter out of your still worse used Pater, the bête noir of whose existence is letter-writing. Catch me discussing the Afghan question with you, you little pepper-pot! No, not if I know it...\" [goes on nevertheless to give strong opinions of the Afghans, at that time causing plenty of trouble to the British Raj—see Second Anglo-Afghan War] \"There, you plague—ever your affec. Daddy, THH.\" (letter 7 December 1878, Huxley L 1900)\n\nHuxley's descendants include children of Leonard Huxley:\n\n Sir Julian Huxley FRS was the first Director of UNESCO and a notable evolutionary biologist and humanist.\n Aldous Huxley was a famous author (Brave New World 1932, Eyeless in Gaza 1936, The Doors of Perception 1954).\n Sir Andrew Huxley OM PRS won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963. He was the second Huxley to become President of the Royal Society.\n\nOther significant descendants of Huxley, such as Sir Crispin Tickell, are treated in the Huxley family.\n\nMental problems in the family\nBiographers have sometimes noted the occurrence of mental illness in the Huxley family. His father became \"sunk in worse than childish imbecility of mind\", and later died in Barming Asylum; brother George suffered from \"extreme mental anxiety\" and died in 1863 leaving serious debts. Brother James, a well known psychiatrist and Superintendent of Kent County Asylum, was at 55 \"as near mad as any sane man can be\". His favourite daughter, the artistically talented Mady (Marian), who became the first wife of artist John Collier, was troubled by mental illness for years. She died of pneumonia in her mid-twenties.\n\nAbout Huxley himself we have a more complete record. As a young apprentice to a medical practitioner, aged thirteen or fourteen, Huxley was taken to watch a post-mortem dissection. Afterwards he sank into a \"deep lethargy\" and, though Huxley ascribed this to dissection poisoning, Bibby and others may be right to suspect that emotional shock precipitated the depression. Huxley recuperated on a farm, looking thin and ill.\n\nThe next episode we know of in Huxley's life when he suffered a debilitating depression was on the third voyage of HMS Rattlesnake in 1848. Huxley had further periods of depression at the end of 1871, and again in 1873. Finally, in 1884 he sank into another depression, and this time it precipitated his decision to retire in 1885, at the age of 60. This is enough to indicate the way depression (or perhaps a moderate bi-polar disorder) interfered with his life, yet unlike some of the other family members, he was able to function extremely well at other times.\n\nThe problems continued sporadically into the third generation. Two of Leonard's sons suffered serious depression: Trevennen committed suicide in 1914 and Julian suffered a breakdown in 1913, and five more later in life.\n\nSatires \n\nDarwin's ideas and Huxley's controversies gave rise to many cartoons and satires. It was the debate about man's place in nature that roused such widespread comment: cartoons are so numerous as to be almost impossible to count; Darwin's head on a monkey's body is one of the visual clichés of the age. The \"Great Hippocampus Question\" attracted particular attention:\n\n \"Monkeyana\" (Punch vol. 40, 18 May 1861). Signed 'Gorilla', this turned out to be by Sir Philip Egerton MP, amateur naturalist, fossil fish collector and Richard Owen's patron. The last two stanzas include a reference to Huxley's comment that \"Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.\": Next HUXLEY repliesThat OWEN he liesAnd garbles his Latin quotation;That his facts are not new,His mistakes not a few,Detrimental to his reputation.To twice slay the slainBy dint of the Brain(Thus HUXLEY concludes his review)Is but labour in vain,unproductive of gain,And so I shall bid you \"Adieu\"!\n \"The Gorilla's Dilemma\" (Punch 1862, vol. 43, p. 164). First two lines: Say am I a man or a brother,Or only an anthropoid ape?\n Report of a sad case recently tried before the Lord Mayor, Owen versus Huxley. Lord Mayor asks whether either side is known to the police: Policeman X—Huxley, your Worship, I take to be a young hand, but very vicious; but Owen I have seen before. He got into trouble with an old bone man, called Mantell, who never could be off complaining as Owen prigged his bones. People did say that the old man never got over it, and Owen worritted him to death; but I don't think it was so bad as that. Hears as Owen takes the chair at a crib in Bloomsbury. I don't think it will be a harmonic meeting altogether. And Huxley hangs out in Jermyn Street. (Tom Huxley's 'low set' included Hooker 'in the green and vegetable line' and 'Charlie Darwin, the pigeon-fancier'; Owen's 'crib in Bloomsbury' was the British Museum, of which Natural History was but one department. Jermyn Street is known for its shops of men's clothing, possibly implying that Huxley was a dandy.)\n\n The Water Babies, a fairy tale for a land baby by Charles Kingsley (serialised in Macmillan's Magazine 1862–63, published in book form, with additions, in 1863). Kingsley had been among first to give a favourable review to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, having \"long since... learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species\", and the story includes a satire on the reaction to Darwin's theory, with the main scientific participants appearing, including Richard Owen and Huxley. In 1892 Thomas Henry Huxley's five-year-old grandson Julian saw the illustration by Edward Linley Sambourne (right) and wrote his grandfather a letter asking: Dear Grandpater—Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Could I see it some day?—Your loving Julian. Huxley wrote back: My dear Julian—I could never make sure about that Water Baby... My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did—There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the Water Babies where other folks can see nothing.\n\nRacism debate \nIn October 2021, an independent history group reviewing colonial links told Imperial College London that, because Huxley \"might now be called racist\", it should remove a bust of him and rename its Huxley Building. The group of 21 academics had been launched in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, to address Imperial’s \"links to the British Empire\" and build a \"fully inclusive organisation\". It reported that Huxley's paper \"Emancipation - Black and White\" \"espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence\" which helped feed ideas around eugenics, which \"falls far short of Imperial’s modern values\" and that his theories \"might now be called 'racist' in as much as he used racial divisions and hierarchical categorisation in his attempt to understand their origins in his studies of human evolution\". Imperial's provost, Ian Walmsley, responded that Imperial would \"confront, not cover up, uncomfortable or awkward aspects of our past\" and this was \"very much not a 'cancel culture' approach\". Students would be consulted before management decided on any action to be taken.\n\nA critical response noted that Huxley was a public, longstanding abolitionist who wrote 'the most complete demonstration of the specific diversity of the types of mankind will nowise constrain science to spread her ægis over their [slaveholders'] atrocities' and \"the North is justified in any expenditure of blood or of money, which shall eradicate a system hopelessly inconsistent with the moral elevation, the political freedom, or the economical progress of the American people\"; a major opponent of the racist position of polygenism as well as the position that some human races were transitional (in 1867 Huxley said, \"there was no shade of justification for the assertion that any existing modification of mankind now known was to be considered as an intermediate form between man and the animals next below him in the scale of the fauna of the world\"); a vehement opponent of the scientific racist James Hunt; and a political radical who believed in granting equal rights and the vote to both Blacks and women.\n\nCultural references\n Huxley appears alongside Charles Darwin and Samuel Wilberforce in the play Darwin in Malibu, written by Crispin Whittell, and is portrayed by Toby Jones in the 2009 film Creation.\n Huxley is referred to as the tutor of the main character, Edward Prendick, in H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The Island of Dr Moreau, published in 1896.\n Horse Feathers (1932 Marx Brothers film)—Groucho Marx is Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff, Dean of Huxley College, while its rival team is Darwin College.\n Huxley's statement, \"Logical consequences are the Scarecrows of fools and the Beacons of wise men\", is quoted by the escape artist character Charles Evan Jeffers, a man with an ironically educated and dignified air about him, played by Roscoe Lee Browne, in the eleventh episode of Season One of Barney Miller.\n\nSee also\n European and American voyages of scientific exploration\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n . (despite its chaotic organisation, this little book contains some nuggets that are well worth sifting)\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n .\n .(Chapter 18 deals with Huxley and natural selection)\n\nFurther reading\nBiographies\n Ashforth, Albert. Thomas Henry Huxley. Twayne, New York 1969.\n Ayres, Clarence. Huxley. Norton, New York 1932.\n Clodd, Edward. Thomas Henry Huxley. Blackwood, Edinburgh 1902.\n Huxley, Leonard. Thomas Henry Huxley: a character sketch. Watts, London 1920.\n Irvine, William. Apes, Angels and Victorians. New York 1955.\n Irvine, William. Thomas Henry Huxley. Longmans, London 1960.\n Mitchell, P. Chalmers. Thomas Henry Huxley: a sketch of his life and work London 1901. Available at Project Gutenberg.\n Voorhees, Irving Wilson. The teachings of Thomas Henry Huxley. Broadway, New York 1907.\n\nExternal links\n\n \n Thomas H. Huxley on the Embryo Project Encyclopedia\n The Huxley File at Clark University—Lists his publications, contains much of his writing.\n \n Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–1895) National Library of Australia, Trove, People and Organisation record for Thomas Huxley\n \n Science in the Making Huxley's papers in the Royal Society's archives\n \n \n Huxley review: Darwin on the origin of species The Times, 26 December 1859, p. 8–9.\n Huxley review: Time and life: Mr Darwin's \"Origin of species.\" Macmillan's Magazine 1: 1859 p. 142–148.\n Huxley review: Darwin on the origin of Species, Westminster Review, 17 (n.s.) April 1860 p. 541–570.\n\n \n \n\n \n \n\n1825 births\n1895 deaths\n19th-century anthropologists\n19th-century British zoologists\n19th-century English non-fiction writers\n19th-century British translators\nAcademics of Imperial College London\nAlumni of Charing Cross Medical School\nAlumni of University College London\nBiological evolution\nBritish anthropologists\nBritish carcinologists\nBritish evolutionary biologists\nBurials at East Finchley Cemetery\nCharles Darwin\nComparative anatomy\nCorresponding members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences\nEnglish agnostics\nEnglish anthropologists\nEnglish anatomists\nEnglish palaeontologists\nEnglish sceptics\nEnglish taxonomists\nEnglish translators\nEnglish zoologists\nThomas Henry\nKnights of the Order of the Polar Star\nFellows of the Linnean Society of London\nFellows of the Royal Society\nForeign associates of the National Academy of Sciences\nFullerian Professors of Physiology\nMembers of the London School Board\nMembers of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom\nMembers of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences\nPaleozoologists\nPeople from Ealing\nPresidents of the Royal Society\nRecipients of the Copley Medal\nRectors of the University of Aberdeen\nRoyal Medal winners\nTranslators from German\nVictorian writers\nWollaston Medal winners\nDeans of the Royal College of Science",
"Robert William Huxley, known as Robb Huxley (born December 4, 1945) is a British vocalist, guitarist and musician. He is widely regarded as a pioneer of Israeli rock due to his work in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s with his band, The Churchills, and with prominent Israeli artists such as Arik Einstein.\n\nEarly life\nHuxley was born in Gloucester, England and educated at Sir Thomas Rich’s Grammar School. After leaving school in 1962, he joined a local band, the Vendettas, as vocalist in 1963.\n\nProfessional career\nAfter the Vendettas, Huxley moved on to join the Whirlwinds as lead singer under the name \"Robb Gayle\".\n\nAfter a recording audition with Joe Meek, the Whirlwinds changed their name to the Saxons and dyed their hair blond. While still semi-pro they released a single through Joe Meek in 1965; an instrumental written by Pete Holder and Robb Huxley titled \"Saxon Warcry\".\n\nIn December 1965, Joe Meek summoned the Saxons to London to work professionally as his house band, renamed The Tornados. They were also known as the New Tornados. During their short association with Joe Meek, they put out two singles. “Pop-Art Goes Mozart” / “Too Much in Love to Hear” and “Is that a Ship I Hear” / “Do You Come Here Often”. Both singles were released in 1966. Nowadays “Do you Come Here Often” is recognized as being the first ever openly “gay” song to be released on record.\n\nAlmost a year after Joe Meek’s death in a shooting incident at his Holloway Road studio, with only Robb Huxley and Dave Watts remaining from the original line up, the Tornados left for a tour of Israel.\n\nEarly in February 1968 in Tel-Aviv, the Tornados disbanded, which ended Joe Meek’s succession of Tornados.\n\nIn Israel\n\nHuxley remained in Israel and played with a three piece group called Purple Ass Baboon for a short time. The group was probably the first ever “punk” style band to play in Israel.\n\nHuxley met up with Stan Solomon, Canadian singer with the Israeli band The Churchills and was invited to join the band when two members were subscripted into the Israeli army.\n\nHuxley and Solomon went on to write the music for the Churchills’ only album, which was written in part for the Israeli film, A Woman’s Case. The vinyl album is acclaimed today to be the rarest psychedelic record in the world, and is also recognized for its musical content.\n\nHuxley went on to write for Israeli singers, the most prominent being Arik Einstein who had a hit “Akhinoam Lo Yoda'at\" (\"Akhinoam Doesn't Know\", eng. \"When You’re Gone\") which Huxley had written for the Churchills.\n\nHuxley and Einstein collaborated on an album of children’s songs, with melodies written by Huxley and lyrics by Einstein.\n\nAfter Stan Solomon quit the Churchills in 1969, the band became Arik Einstein’s backing band. They were also joined by singer Danny Shoshan, a former bass player and vocalist from the Lions.\n\nIn 1970, they recorded an album, Junkies, Monkeys and Donkeys at Red Bus Records in London, with music written by Huxley and Shoshan and changed their name to Jericho Jones. They went on to record a second album under the name of Jericho, again with Huxley / Shoshan compositions.\n\nIn 1972, bass player Miki Gavrielov and drummer Ami Trebich returned to Israel. Shoshan took over the bass with Huxley and Haim Romano on guitars. They took on British drummer Chris Perry. They put out two singles, but after a tour of South Africa in 1973, Jericho disbanded due to management, personal and record label problems.\n\nHuxley's work in Israel, particularly with the Churchills and with Einstein, made him become widely regarded as one of the pioneers of Israeli rock.\n\nHuxley moved to Miami in 1974, where he still lives with his Israeli wife.\n\nExternal links\n Official Site\n\n1945 births\nLiving people\nEnglish male singers\nPeople from Gloucester\nBeat musicians\nThe Tornados members"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,",
"Did Huxley believe in God?",
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution.",
"Where did Huxley study?",
"Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir.",
"Did Huxley do any public speaking?",
"selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation.",
"Did Huxley serve on any public boards?",
"administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial",
"What was he able to influence in Africa?",
"administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO,",
"What work did Huxley do in Europe?",
"Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In"
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Did Huxley help with post world war II revival? | 10 | Did Julian Huxley help with post world war II revival? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
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Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
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English humanists
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Royal Army Service Corps officers | true | [
"Parthenon Huxley (born January 19, 1956) is an American musician, singer, songwriter and producer who is known for his solo albums and for his involvement in ELO Part II and The Orchestra, both of which are latter-day offshoots of the 1970s-80s symphonic rock band Electric Light Orchestra. He has also made cameo appearances in several films including Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and The Flintstones.\n\nEarly life \nHuxley was born Richard Willett Miller in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and grew up in New Jersey and Athens, Greece before moving to North Carolina to attend UNC-Chapel Hill. His stage name (now legal name) honors two of his varied interests: his love for Greece, and the British writer Aldous Huxley. He began his recording career as guitarist on Matt Barrett's EP The Ruse (Moonlight Records), produced by Don Dixon and Mitch Easter.\n\nThe Blazers, P. Hux and VeG\nHis touring career began as a member of the Chapel Hill, NC rock band The Blazers, which consisted of Huxley (credited under his original name Rick Miller), Sherman Tate (lead & harmony vocals, rhythm guitar), Ronnie Taylor (drums & percussion) and Lee Gildersleeve (bass). The band recorded one album, How to Rock: Ten Easy Lessons (Moonlight Records, 1980) again produced by Don Dixon.\n\nHis first solo recording (released under the pseudonym \"Rick Rock\") was the self-produced, self-financed single \"Buddha, Buddha\" / \"Sputnik\" (Big Groovy, 1983). Despite its modest recording budget of US $400 \"Buddha, Buddha\" was named one of the ten best records ever made in North Carolina by the Greensboro Record. During this period Huxley also toured as guitarist with Don Dixon under the name Me & Dixon. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1987 and signed with Columbia Records; the following year he recorded his first solo album, Sunny Nights (Columbia 1988), produced by Huxley and Paul McCartney producer David Kahne. Three of its tracks (\"Double Our Numbers\", \"Guest Host for the Holy Ghost\" and \"Chance to Be Loved\") were released as singles during that year. Although the album received favorable reviews (Rolling Stone Magazine called it a \"monumental debut\"), it did not sell well and this ended his association with Columbia.\n\nIt was five years before Huxley's next album; in the intervening period he co-produced the two solo albums by Eels frontman E, 1992's A Man Called E and 1994's Broken Toy Shop. The first single from A Man Called E (\"Hello Cruel World\" – co-written by Huxley) reached #8 on the Modern Rock chart. Huxley also produced an eponymous album with power pop singer Kyle Vincent (Carport/Hollywood Records). The album's first single, \"Wake Me Up (When the World's Worth Waking Up For)\" reached #101 on Billboard's singles chart and stayed there for eight weeks, setting a curious record for \"bubbling under\" the Hot 100.\n\nHuxley's next album, Deluxe, was credited to P. Hux, a power-pop trio comprising Huxley, Gordon Townsend (drums, vocals) and Rob Miller (bass, vocals). The album was released in the US in 1995 on the Black Olive label, and was also released in Japan, Australia and France (where it was retitled Every Minute). The songs on the album were largely inspired by Huxley's recent marriage to screenwriter Janet Heaney. The album was well received by critics and was voted as 1995 Album of the Year by Audites Magazine. A single from the album, \"Every Minute\" appeared on the Rhino Records compilation Poptopia! Power Pop Classics of the '90s.\n\nHuxley's next recording was the self-titled album recorded by Huxley's side-project VeG (1997), another three-piece group with Winston Watson (drums, lap steel) and Paul Martinez (bass, background vocals). Watson was Bob Dylan's drummer for five years in the '90s.\n\nELO Part II and The Orchestra\nIn January 1997, Huxley's wife, Janet, died, and it was several years before he resumed his solo career. In the meantime, he joined Electric Light Orchestra Part II in January 1999, replacing singer-guitarist Phil Bates, and he toured with them through the year. In November that year Bev Bevan played his last show with the band; in early 2000 he issued a press statement announcing that the group had dissolved, and he then sold his 50% share of the rights to the ELO name back to the group's founder, Jeff Lynne. The remaining members then recruited drummer Gordon Townsend and, following legal action by Lynne, renamed itself The Orchestra. Later in 2001 year he recorded with The Orchestra for their album No Rewind, which featured four songs written or co-written by Huxley: \"Jewel and Johnny\", \"Can't Wait to See You\", \"Over London Skies\" and \"Before We Go.\" The band continued to tour with this lineup until 2007, when Huxley left the band to spend more time with his family. Huxley was replaced by Bates, who rejoined The Orchestra after a nine year absence.\n\nIn October 2011, Phil Bates again left the band and the revolving door saw Huxley return as Orchestra guitarist and singer. With Huxley back on board, The Orchestra completed a successful 17-date tour of Eastern Europe in December 2011.\n\nMeanwhile, Huxley had restarted his solo career in 2001 with two albums. The second P. Hux studio album, Purgatory Falls, was a deeply personal and sometimes harrowing song-cycle that chronicled the devastating experience of his wife's untimely death. Huxley signed with Universal and a single \"I Loved Everything\" reached #1 on Rolling Stone Magazine's Exclusive Download Chart. This was followed by a solo live album, Live in Your Living Room. Later in 2001 year he recorded with The Orchestra for their album No Rewind, which featured four songs written or co-written by Huxley: \"Jewel and Johnny\", \"Can't Wait to See You\", \"Over London Skies\" and \"Before We Go.\"\n\nHuxley followed No Rewind with another solo acoustic live album In Your Parlour (Nine18 Records) in 2003 and then began work on Homemade Spaceship, an album of ELO covers commissioned by Lakeshore Records of Hollywood, CA. Homemade Spaceship: The Music of ELO as Performed by P. Hux was awarded 2005 Tribute Album of the Year by Just Plain Folks, the world's largest online musicians community.\n\nLater career \n\nHuxley moved to Maryland in 2004 where he began work on the third P. Hux studio album, Kiss the Monster. It was released in 2007 by English label Voiceprint in conjunction with Nine18 (Huxley's imprint) and BeanBagOne, a label owned by Huxley's American manager David Bean of Carmel, California. Kiss the Monster was nominated for 'Album of the Year' by Just Plain Folks.\n\nIn 2006 Nine18/Not Lame Records released Mile High Fan an album of songs recorded in Los Angeles in the late 80s and early 90s. Tracks from \"Mile High Fan\" had originally been intended for the follow-up to 1988's \"Sunny Nights\".\n\nIn 2011, Huxley released Tracks & Treasure Vol. 1 a collection of songs that had appeared on compilations as well as previously unreleased master recordings. The album featured performances by McCartney guitarist Rusty Anderson, Go-Go's drummer Gina Schock, ELO/ELO Part II/The Orchestra violinist Mik Kaminski, and others. The album's title was a pun, referencing \"trash and treasure\" days in Maryland.\n\nOn April 2, 2013, Nine18 Records issued Thank You Bethesda, a collection of all new songs that Huxley considers some of his best work. A successful Kickstarter campaign in the fall of 2012 aided in the album's post-production and release. The 24-page CD booklet contains names and pictures of Huxley's Kickstarter supporters.\n\nIn Fall 2015, Nine18 Records released P. Hux Live Deluxe, a remastered 1996 recording of the original P. Hux lineup captured live in Durham, North Carolina.\n\nOn September 18, 2018, Nine18 Records released This Is The One, Huxley's most recent collection of all new songs and featuring the singles \"Just Sayin'\" and \"Running Home To You.\" The album's songs and sounds were hailed by well known fans of Huxley, including Don Dixon, Al Stewart, McCartney guitarist Rusty Anderson and many more.\n\nDiscography\n\nStudio albums\nSunny Nights (1988)\nDeluxe (1995)\nVeG (1997)\nNo Rewind (2001)\nPurgatory Falls (2001)\nHomemade Spaceship: The Music of ELO as Performed by P. Hux (2005)\nMile High Fan (2006)\nKiss the Monster (2007)\nTracks & Treasure Vol.1 (2011)\nThank You Bethesda (2013)\nThis Is The One (2018)\n\nSingles\n\"Buddha, Buddha\" b/w \"Sputnik\" (1982) (as Rick Rock)\n\"Chance to Be Loved\" (1988)\n\"Double Our Numbers\" (1988)\n\"Guest Host for the Holy Ghost\" (1988)\n\"It'll Be Alright\" (1995)\n\"Every Minute\" (1995)\n\"Here Comes the Savior\" (1995)\n\"I Loved Everything\" (2001)\n\"Love Is The Greatest Thing\" (2014)\n\"Just Sayin'\" (2018)\n\nLive albums\nLive in Your Living Room (2001)\nIn Your Parlour (2003)\nLive Deluxe (2015)\n\nReferences\n\n1956 births\nLiving people\nMusicians from Baton Rouge, Louisiana\nElectric Light Orchestra\nEels (band) members\nAmerican male singer-songwriters\nAmerican rock singers\nAmerican rock songwriters\nAmerican rock guitarists\nAmerican male guitarists\nRecord producers from California\nGuitarists from Los Angeles\nGuitarists from Louisiana\n20th-century American guitarists\nSinger-songwriters from California\nSinger-songwriters from Louisiana",
"The Aldea Linda Residential Historic District is a historic district in Tucson, Arizona, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. The listing included 15 contributing buildings.\n\nThe area was developed around 1947 by future state governor Sam Goddard. It has 22 large lots with houses set back from street.\n\nIt includes the entire Aldea Linda subdivision, including the 4700-5000 blocks of E. Calle Jabali, E. 22nd St., and the 1100 block of S. Swan Rd. Its 2009 National Register nomination describes it as:an absolutely unique and precious enclave .... The neighborhood combines high quality, post-World War II residences, one art school, a church complex, and vacant land in a natural, creosote desert setting. In the midst of dense urban development, Aldea Linda's uniqueness comes from its small size, intact deed restrictions, curvilinear cul-de-sac layout, large lots, creosote desert setting, and post- World War II architecture. Its period of significance is 1947-1964. Aldea Linda's land was acquired in 1946 by Samuel P. Goddard, Jr. (future governor of Arizona) and his wife, Julia Hatch Goddard. Today's subdivision contains very good examples of prevalent post-World War II contemporary styles, the Ranch and Modern, and a few, regionally appropriate, Sonoran Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival style buildings.\n\nReferences\n\nHistoric districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Arizona\nNational Register of Historic Places in Pima County, Arizona\nMission Revival architecture in Arizona\nSonoran Revival architecture\nBuildings and structures completed in 1947"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,",
"Did Huxley believe in God?",
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution.",
"Where did Huxley study?",
"Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir.",
"Did Huxley do any public speaking?",
"selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation.",
"Did Huxley serve on any public boards?",
"administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial",
"What was he able to influence in Africa?",
"administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO,",
"What work did Huxley do in Europe?",
"Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In",
"Did Huxley help with post world war II revival?",
"he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed."
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Was Huxley's efforts appreciated? | 11 | Was Julian Huxley's efforts in the post-World War II revival of education appreciated? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
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Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
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Royal Army Service Corps officers | false | [
"Leonard Huxley (11 December 1860 – 2 May 1933) was an English schoolteacher, writer and editor.\n\nBiography\n\nFamily \n\nHuxley's father was the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley, commonly referred to as 'Darwin's bulldog'. He was educated at University College School, London, the University of St Andrews, and Balliol College, Oxford. He first married Julia Arnold who founded a school. She was the daughter of the academic Tom Arnold. She was a sister of the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward, niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, and granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School (immortalised as a character in Tom Brown's Schooldays).\n\nTheir four children included the biologist Julian Huxley (1887–1975) and the writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). Their middle son, Noel Trevenen (born in 1889), committed suicide in 1914. Their daughter, Margaret Arnold Huxley, was born in 1899. Julia Arnold died of cancer in 1908. \n\nAfter the death of his first wife, Leonard married Rosalind Bruce, and had two further sons. The elder of these was David Bruce Huxley (1915–1992), whose daughter Angela married George Pember Darwin, son of the physicist Charles Galton Darwin. The younger was the 1963 Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Andrew Huxley (1917–2012).\n\nWork \nHuxley's major biographies were the three volumes of Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley and the two volumes of Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM GCSI. He also published Thomas Henry Huxley: a character sketch, and a short biography of Darwin. He was assistant master at Charterhouse School between 1884 and 1901. He was then the assistant editor of Cornhill Magazine between 1901 and 1916, becoming its editor in 1916.\n\n 1900 Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. 2 vols.\n 1912 Thoughts on education drawn from the writings of Matthew Arnold (editor).\n 1913 Scott's last expedition (editor). 2 vols.\n 1918 Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM, GCSI. 2 vols.\n 1920 Anniversaries, and other poems.\n 1920 Thomas Henry Huxley: a character sketch.\n 1920 Charles Darwin.\n 1924 Jane Welsh Carlyle: letters to her family 1839–1863 (editor).\n 1926 Progress and the unfit.\n 1926 Sheaves from the Cornhill. \n 1930 Elizabeth Barrett Browning: letters to her sister 1846–1859 (editor).\n\nExternal links \n\n \n \n \n\n1860 births\n1933 deaths\nLeonard\nAlumni of the University of St Andrews\nPeople educated at University College School\nEnglish writers",
"Sir Leonard George Holden Huxley (29 May 1902 – 4 September 1988) was an Australian physicist.\n\nHuxley was born in London, the eldest son of George Hamborough and Lilian Huxley. He was a second-cousin once removed of Thomas Huxley. His family migrated from England to Australia in 1905 when he was three, and settled in Tasmania, where Huxley showed great academic and sporting promise while attending The Hutchins School. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to New College, Oxford while in his second year at the University of Tasmania and obtained a D.Phil. from Oxford in 1928. On 5 October 1929 he married Ella Mary Child 'Molly' Copeland who was reading history at Somerville College.\n\nHuxley was a physicist at the Australian Radio Research Board, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research 1929 to 1931; Lecturer in Physics, University College, Leicester 1932 to 1940; Principal Scientific Officer, Ministry of Aircraft Production, UK 1940 to 1946; Reader in Electromagnetism, University of Birmingham 1946 to 1949; Professor of Physics, University of Adelaide 1949 to 1960; and Vice-Chancellor, Australian National University 1960 to 1967.\n\nHuxley was president of the Australian Branch of the Institute of Physics (UK) 1954 to 1955; and president of the Australian Institute of Physics 1962 to 1965.\n\nHe was elected a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1953, and knighted in 1964.\n\nHuxley died in London at the age of 86.\n\nSee also\nHuxley family\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n \n \n \n\n1902 births\n1988 deaths\nAustralian physicists\nAcademics of the University of Leicester\nAustralian Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire\nAustralian Rhodes Scholars\nFellows of the Australian Academy of Science\nAlumni of New College, Oxford\nLeonard\nAcademics of the University of Birmingham\nEnglish emigrants to Australia\nVice-Chancellors of the Australian National University"
] |
[
"Julian Huxley",
"Personal influence",
"Who had the largest influence on Huxley?",
"evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful,",
"Did Huxley was influence from his family?",
"I don't know.",
"What did Huxley believe?",
"natural selection was the main driving force of evolution,",
"Did Huxley believe in God?",
"Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution.",
"Where did Huxley study?",
"Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir.",
"Did Huxley do any public speaking?",
"selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation.",
"Did Huxley serve on any public boards?",
"administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial",
"What was he able to influence in Africa?",
"administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO,",
"What work did Huxley do in Europe?",
"Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In",
"Did Huxley help with post world war II revival?",
"he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed.",
"Was Huxley's efforts appreciated?",
"about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World"
] | C_1d8973ebd9bd40888a12499f9436bcd9_1 | Did Huxley ever travel to Asia? | 12 | Did Julian Huxley ever travel to Asia? | Julian Huxley | In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these fine scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right. In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wild-life conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists. "Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion... and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution." CANNOTANSWER | murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any | Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award from the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population.
Life
Personal life
Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was raised Anglican but eventually became an advocate of Agnosticism, a word he coined. Thomas was also a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution.
Huxley's father was a writer and an editor Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold Huxley, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899–1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired half-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley.
In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well.
Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life.
Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
Early career
Huxley grew up at the family home in Surrey, England, where he showed an early interest in nature, as he was given lessons by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley. When he heard his grandfather talking at dinner about the lack of parental care in fish, Julian piped up with "What about the stickleback, Gran'pater?". His grandfather also took him to visit Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew. At the age of thirteen Huxley attended Eton College as a King's Scholar, and continued to develop scientific interests; his grandfather had influenced the school to build science laboratories much earlier. At Eton he developed an interest in ornithology, guided by science master W. D. "Piggy" Hill. "Piggy was a genius as a teacher ... I have always been grateful to him." In 1905 Huxley won a scholarship in Zoology to Balliol College, Oxford and took up the place in 1906 after spending the summer in Germany. He developed a particular interest in embryology and protozoa and developed a friendship with the ornithologist William Warde Fowler. In the autumn term of his final year, 1908, his mother died from cancer at the age of 46. In his final year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Holyrood". In 1909 he graduated with first class honours, and spent that July at the international gathering for the centenary of Darwin's birth, held at the University of Cambridge.
Huxley was awarded a scholarship to spend a year at the Naples Marine Biological Station, where he developed his interest in developmental biology by investigating sea squirts and sea urchins. In 1910 he was appointed as Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Oxford, and started on the systematic observation of the courtship habits of water birds, such as the common redshank (a wader) and grebes (which are divers). Bird watching in childhood had given Huxley his interest in ornithology, and he helped devise systems for the surveying and conservation of birds. His particular interest was bird behaviour, especially the courtship of water birds. His 1914 paper on the great crested grebe, later published as a book, was a landmark in avian ethology; his invention of vivid labels for the rituals (such as 'penguin dance', 'plesiosaurus race' etc.) made the ideas memorable and interesting to the general reader.
In 1912 Huxley was asked by Edgar Odell Lovett to set up the Department of Biology at the newly created Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, which he accepted, planning to start the following year. Huxley made an exploratory trip to the United States in September 1912, visiting a number of leading universities as well as the Rice Institute. At T. H. Morgan's fly lab (Columbia University) he invited H. J. Muller to join him at Rice. Muller agreed to be his deputy, hurried to complete his PhD and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year. At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work.
Before taking up the post of Assistant Professor at the Rice Institute, Huxley spent a year in Germany preparing for his demanding new job. Working in a laboratory just months before the outbreak of World War I, Huxley overheard fellow academics comment on a passing aircraft "it will not be long before those planes are flying over England".
One pleasure of Huxley's life in Texas was the sight of his first hummingbird, though his visit to Edward Avery McIlhenny's estate on Avery Island in Louisiana was more significant. The McIlhennys and their Avery cousins owned the entire island, and the McIlhenny branch used it to produce their famous Tabasco sauce. Birds were one of McIlhenny's passions, however, and around 1895 he had set up a private sanctuary on the Island, called Bird City. There Huxley found egrets, herons and bitterns. These water birds, like the grebes, exhibit mutual courtship, with the pairs displaying to each other, and with the secondary sexual characteristics equally developed in both sexes.
In September 1916 Huxley returned to England from Texas to assist in the war effort. He was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 25 May 1917, and was transferred to the General List, working in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 26 January 1918, first in Sussex, and then in northern Italy. He was advanced in grade within the Intelligence Corps on 3 May 1918, relinquished his intelligence appointment on 10 January 1919 and was demobilised five days later, retaining his rank. After the war he became a Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was made Senior Demonstrator in the University Department of Zoology. In fact, Huxley took the place of his old tutor Geoffrey Smith, who had been killed in the battle of the Somme on the Western Front. The ecological geneticist E. B. Ford always remembered his openness and encouragement at the start of his career.
In 1925 Huxley moved to King's College London as Professor of Zoology, but in 1927, to the amazement of his colleagues and on the prodding of H. G. Wells whom he had promised 1,000 words a day, he resigned his chair to work full-time with Wells and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life (see below). For some time Huxley retained his room at King's College, continuing as Honorary Lecturer in the Zoology Department, and from 1927 to 1931 he was also Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, where he gave an annual lectures series, but this marked the end of his life as a university academic.
In 1929, after finishing work on The Science of Life, Huxley visited East Africa to advise the Colonial Office on education in British East Africa (for the most part Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika). He discovered that the wildlife on the Serengeti plain was almost undisturbed because the tsetse fly (the vector for the trypanosome parasite which causes sleeping sickness in humans) prevented human settlement there. He tells about these experiences in Africa view (1931), and so does his wife. She reveals that he fell in love with an 18-year-old American girl on board ship (when Juliette was not present), and then presented Juliette with his ideas for an open marriage: "What Julian really wanted was… a definite freedom from the conventional bonds of marriage." The couple separated for a while; Julian travelled to the US, hoping to land a suitable appointment and, in due course, to marry Miss Weldmeier. He left no account of what transpired, but he was evidently not successful, and returned to England to resume his marriage in 1931. For the next couple of years Huxley still angled for an appointment in the US, without success.
Mid career
As the 1930s started, Huxley travelled widely and took part in a variety of activities which were partly scientific and partly political. In 1931 Huxley visited the USSR at the invitation of Intourist, where initially he admired the results of social and economic planning on a large scale. Later, back in the United Kingdom, he became a founding member of the think tank Political and Economic Planning.
In the 1930s Huxley visited Kenya and other East African countries to see the conservation work, including the creation of national parks.
In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. From 1933 to 1938 he was a member of the committee for Lord Hailey's African Survey.
In 1935 Huxley was appointed secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and spent much of the next seven years running the society and its zoological gardens, the London Zoo and Whipsnade Park, alongside his writing and research. The previous Director, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, had been in post for many years, and had skillfully avoided conflict with the Fellows and Council. Things were rather different when Huxley arrived. Huxley was not a skilled administrator; his wife said "He was impatient… and lacked tact". He instituted a number of changes and innovations, more than some approved of. For example, Huxley introduced a whole range of ideas designed to make the Zoo child-friendly. Today, this would pass without comment; but then it was more controversial. He fenced off the Fellows' Lawn to establish Pets Corner; he appointed new assistant curators, encouraging them to talk to children; he initiated the Zoo Magazine. Fellows and their guests had the privilege of free entry on Sundays, a closed day to the general public. Today, that would be unthinkable, and Sundays are now open to the public. Huxley's mild suggestion (that the guests should pay) encroached on territory the Fellows thought was theirs by right.
In 1941 Huxley was invited to the United States on a lecturing tour, and generated some controversy by saying that he thought the United States should join World War II: a few weeks later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the US joined the war, he found it difficult to get a passage back to the UK, and his lecture tour was extended. The Council of the Zoological Society—"a curious assemblage… of wealthy amateurs, self-perpetuating and autocratic"—uneasy with their secretary, used this as an opportunity to remove him. This they did by abolishing his post "to save expenses". Since Huxley had taken a half-salary cut at the start of the war, and no salary at all whilst he was in America, the council's action was widely read as a personal attack on Huxley. A public controversy ensued, but eventually the Council got its way.
In 1943 he was asked by the British government to join the Colonial Commission on Higher Education. The commission's remit was to survey the West African Commonwealth countries for suitable locations for the creation of universities. There he acquired a disease, went down with hepatitis, and had a serious mental breakdown. He was completely disabled, treated with ECT, and took a full year to recover. He was 55.
Later career
Huxley, a lifelong internationalist with a concern for education, got involved in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and became the organization's first director-general in 1946. His term of office, six years in the Charter, was cut down to two years at the behest of the American delegation. The reasons are not known for sure, but his left-wing tendencies and humanism were likely factors. In a fortnight he dashed off a 60-page booklet on the purpose and philosophy of UNESCO, eventually printed and issued as an official document. There were, however, many conservative opponents of his scientific humanism. His idea of restraining population growth with birth control was anathema to both the Catholic Church and the Comintern/Cominform. In its first few years UNESCO was dynamic and broke new ground; since Huxley it has become larger, more bureaucratic and stable. The personal and social side of the years in Paris are well described by his wife.
Huxley's internationalist and conservation interests also led him, with Victor Stolan, Sir Peter Scott, Max Nicholson and Guy Mountfort, to set up the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature under its former name of the World Wildlife Fund).
Another post-war activity was Huxley's attack on the Soviet politico-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who had espoused a Lamarckian heredity, made unscientific pronouncements on agriculture, used his influence to destroy classical genetics in Russia and to move genuine scientists from their posts. In 1940, the leading botanical geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, and Lysenko replaced him as director of the Institute of Genetics. In 1941, Vavilov was tried, found guilty of 'sabotage' and sentenced to death. Reprieved, he died in jail of malnutrition in 1943. Lysenko's machinations were the cause of his arrest. Worse still, Lysenkoism not only denied proven genetic facts, it stopped the artificial selection of crops on Darwinian principles. This may have contributed to the regular shortage of food from the Soviet agricultural system (Soviet famines). Huxley, who had twice visited the Soviet Union, was originally not anti-communist, but the ruthless adoption of Lysenkoism by Joseph Stalin ended his tolerant attitude. Lysenko ended his days in a Soviet mental hospital, and Vavilov's reputation was posthumously restored in 1955.
In the 1950s Huxley played a role in bringing to the English-speaking public the work of the French Jesuit-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who he believed had been unfairly treated by the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy. Both men believed in evolution, but differed in its interpretation as Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian, whilst Huxley was an atheist. Huxley wrote the foreword to The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and was bitterly attacked by his rationalist friends for doing so.
On Huxley's death at 87 on 14 February 1975, John Owen (Director of National Parks for Tanganyika) wrote "Julian Huxley was one of the world's great men… he played a seminal role in wild life conservation in [East] Africa in the early days… [and in] the far-reaching influence he exerted [on] the international community".
In addition to his international and humanist concerns, his research interests covered evolution in all its aspects, ethology, embryology, genetics, anthropology and to some extent the infant field of cell biology. Julian's eminence as an advocate for evolution, and especially his contribution to the modern evolutionary synthesis, led to his awards of the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. 1958 was the centenary anniversary of the joint presentation On the tendency of species to form varieties; and the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection by Darwin and Wallace.
Huxley was a friend and mentor of the biologists and Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and taught and encouraged many others. In general, he was more of an all-round naturalist than his famous grandfather, and contributed much to the acceptance of natural selection. His outlook was international, and somewhat idealistic: his interest in progress and evolutionary humanism runs through much of his published work. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Special themes
Evolution
Huxley and biologist August Weismann insisted on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. Huxley was a major player in the mid-twentieth century modern evolutionary synthesis. He was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public, with a focus on three aspects in particular.
Personal influence
In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by saltation (jumps). These opinions are now standard.Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s. Charles Elton (ecology), Alister Hardy (marine biology) and John Baker (cytology) all became highly successful, and Baker eventually wrote Huxley's Royal Society obituary memoir. Perhaps the most significant was Edmund Brisco Ford, who founded a field of research called ecological genetics, which played a role in the evolutionary synthesis. Another important disciple was Gavin de Beer, who wrote on evolution and development, and became Director of the Natural History Museum. Both these scholars had attended Huxley's lectures on genetics, experimental zoology (including embryology) and ethology. Later, they became his collaborators, and then leaders in their own right.
In an era when scientists did not travel so frequently as today, Huxley was an exception, for he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the United States. He was therefore able to learn from and influence other scientists, naturalists and administrators. In the US he was able to meet other evolutionists at a critical time in the reassessment of natural selection. In Africa he was able to influence colonial administrators about education and wildlife conservation. In Europe, through UNESCO, he was at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. In Russia, however, his experiences were mixed. His initially favourable view was changed by his growing awareness of Stalin's murderous repression, and the Lysenko affair. There seems little evidence that he had any effect on the Soviet Union, and the same could be said for some other Western scientists."Marxist-Leninism had become a dogmatic religion… and like all dogmatic religions, it had turned from reform to persecution."
Evolutionary synthesis
Huxley was one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis which took place around the time of World War II. The synthesis of genetic and population ideas produced a consensus which reigned in biology from about 1940, and which is still broadly tenable.
"The most informative episode in the history of evolutionary biology was the establishment of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis'." The synthesis was brought about "not by one side being proved right and the others wrong, but by the exchange of the most viable components of the previously competing research strategies". Ernst Mayr, 1980.
Huxley's first 'trial run' was the treatment of evolution in the Science of Life (1929–30), and in 1936 he published a long and significant paper for the British Association. In 1938 came three lengthy reviews on major evolutionary topics. Two of these papers were on the subject of sexual selection, an idea of Darwin's whose standing has been revived in recent times. Huxley thought that sexual selection was "…merely an aspect of natural selection which… is concerned with characters which subserve mating, and are usually sex-limited". This rather grudging acceptance of sexual selection was influenced by his studies on the courtship of the great crested grebe (and other birds that pair for life): the courtship takes place mostly after mate selection, not before.
Now it was time for Huxley to tackle the subject of evolution at full length, in what became the defining work of his life. His role was that of a synthesiser, and it helped that he had met many of the other participants. His book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was written whilst he was secretary to the Zoological Society, and made use of his remarkable collection of reprints covering the first part of the century. It was published in 1942. Reviews of the book in learned journals were little short of ecstatic; the American Naturalist called it "The outstanding evolutionary treatise of the decade, perhaps of the century. The approach is thoroughly scientific; the command of basic information amazing".
Huxley's main co-respondents in the modern evolutionary synthesis are usually listed as Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Bernhard Rensch, Ledyard Stebbins and the population geneticists J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. However, at the time of Huxley's book several of these had yet to make their distinctive contribution. Certainly, for Huxley, E. B. Ford and his co-workers in ecological genetics were at least as important; and Cyril Darlington, the chromosome expert, was a notable source of facts and ideas.An analysis of the 'authorities cited' index of Evolution the modern synthesis shows indirectly those whom Huxley regarded as the most important contributors to the synthesis up to 1941 (the book was published in 1942, and references go up to 1941). The authorities cited 20 or more times are:Darlington, Darwin, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Ford, Goldschmidt, Haldane, J. S. Huxley, Muller, Rensch, Turrill, Wright.This list contains a few surprises. Goldschmidt was an influential geneticist who advocated evolution by saltation, and was sometimes mentioned in disagreement. Turrill provided Huxley with botanical information. The list omits three key members of the synthesis who are listed above: Mayr, Stebbins the botanist and Simpson the palaeontologist. Mayr gets 16 citations and more in the two later editions; all three published outstanding and relevant books some years later, and their contribution to the synthesis is unquestionable. Their lesser weight in Huxley's citations was caused by the early publication date of his book. Huxley's book is not strong in palaeontology, which illustrates perfectly why Simpson's later works were such an important contribution.
It was Huxley who coined the terms the new synthesis and evolutionary synthesis; he also invented the term cline in 1938 to refer to species whose members fall into a series of sub-species with continuous change in characters over a geographical area. The classic example of a cline is the circle of subspecies of the gull Larus round the Arctic zone. This cline is an example of a ring species.Some of Huxley's last contributions to the evolutionary synthesis were on the subject of ecological genetics. He noted how surprisingly widespread polymorphism is in nature, with visible morphism much more prevalent in some groups than others. The immense diversity of colour and pattern in small bivalve molluscs, brittlestars, sea-anemones, tubicular polychaetes and various grasshoppers is perhaps maintained by making recognition by predators more difficult.
Evolutionary progress
Although Huxley believed that on a broad view evolution led to advances in organisation, he rejected classical Aristotelian teleology: "The ordinary man, or at least the ordinary poet, philosopher and theologian, always was anxious to find purpose in the evolutionary process. I believe this reasoning to be totally false.". Huxley coined the phrase Progress without a goal to summarise his case in Evolution the modern synthesis that evolutionary progress was "a raising of the upper level of biological efficiency, this being defined as increased control over and independence of the environment." In Evolution in action he wrote thatNatural selection plus time produces biological improvement… 'Improvement' is not yet a recognised technical term in biology … however, living things are improved during evolution… Darwin was not afraid to use the word for the results of natural selection in general… I believe that improvement can become one of the key concepts in evolutionary biology.Can it be scientifically defined? Improvements in biological machinery… the limbs and teeth of grazing horses… the increase in brain-power… The eyes of a dragon-fly, which can see all round [it] in every direction, are an improvement over the mere microscopic eye-spots of early forms of life. [Over] the whole range of evolutionary time we see general advance—improvement in all the main properties of life, including its general organization. 'Advance' is thus a useful term for long-term improvement in some general property of life. [But] improvement is not universal. Lower forms manage to survive alongside higher".Huxley's views on progressive evolution were similar to those of G. Ledyard Stebbins and Bernhard Rensch, and were challenged in the latter part of the twentieth century with objections from Cladists, among others, to any suggestion that one group could be scientifically described as 'advanced' and another as 'primitive'. Modern assessments of these views have been surveyed in Nitecki and Dawkins.
Secular humanism
Huxley's humanism came from his appreciation that mankind was in charge of its own destiny (at least in principle), and this raised the need for a sense of direction and a system of ethics. His grandfather T. H. Huxley, when faced with similar problems, had promoted agnosticism, but Julian chose humanism as being more directed to supplying a basis for ethics. Julian's thinking went along these lines: "The critical point in the evolution of man… was when he acquired the use of [language]… Man's development is potentially open… He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience by way of tradition, which… largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection as the agent of change." Both Huxley and his grandfather gave Romanes Lectures on the possible connection between evolution and ethics (see evolutionary ethics). Huxley's views on God could be described as being that of an agnostic atheist.
Huxley had a close association with the British rationalist and secular humanist movements. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1927 until his death, and on the formation of the British Humanist Association in 1963 became its first President, to be succeeded by AJ Ayer in 1965. He was also closely involved with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Many of Huxley's books address humanist themes. In 1962 Huxley accepted the American Humanist Association's annual "Humanist of the Year" award.
Huxley also presided over the founding Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and served with John Dewey, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann on the founding advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York.
Religious naturalism
Huxley wrote that "There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion;… I believe that [a] drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern." Some believe the appropriate label for these views is religious naturalism.
Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.
Parapsychology
Huxley took interest in investigating the claims of parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1928. After investigation he found the field to be unscientific and full of charlatans. In 1934, he joined the International Institute for Psychical Research but resigned after a few months due to its members' spiritualist bias and non-scientific approach to the subject.
After attending séances, Huxley concluded that the phenomena could be explained "either by natural causes, or, more usually by fraud". Huxley, Harold Dearden and others were judges for a group formed by the Sunday Chronicle to investigate the materialization medium Harold Evans. During a séance Evans was exposed as a fraud. He was caught masquerading as a spirit, in a white nightshirt.
In 1952, Huxley wrote the foreword to Donovan Rawcliffe's The Psychology of the Occult.
Eugenics and race
Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and was Vice-President (1937–1944) and President (1959–1962). He thought eugenics was important for removing undesirable variants from the human gene pool, though after World War II he believed race was a meaningless concept in biology, and its application to humans was highly inconsistent.
Huxley was an outspoken critic of the most extreme eugenicism in the 1920s and 1930s (the stimulus for which was the greater fertility of the 'feckless' poor compared to the 'responsible' prosperous classes). He was, nevertheless, a leading figure in the eugenics movement (see, for example, Eugenics manifesto). He gave the Galton memorial lecture twice, in 1936 and 1962. In his writing he used this argument several times: "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" The agricultural analogy appears over and over again as it did in the writings of many American eugenicists.
Huxley was one of many intellectuals at the time who believed that the lowest class in society was genetically inferior. In this passage, from 1941, he investigates a hypothetical scenario where Social Darwinism, capitalism, nationalism and the class society is taken for granted:
If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.
Here, he does not demean the working class in general, but aims for "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". The sentiment is not at all atypical of the time, and similar views were held by many geneticists (William E. Castle, C. B. Davenport, H. J. Muller are examples), and by other prominent intellectuals.
However, Huxley advocated a completely different alternative, in which the lower classes are ensured a nutritious diet, education and facilities for recreation:
We must therefore concentrate on producing a single equalized environment; and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desirable. Equally clearly, this should include the following items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the great majority of the population, until all should be provided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and recreation; and upward equalization of educational opportunity. ... we know from various sources that raising the standard of life among the poorest classes almost invariably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far, therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which it may now have.
Concerning a public health and racial policy in general, Huxley wrote that "…unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …" and remarked how biology should be the chief tool for rendering social politics scientific.
In the opinion of Duvall, "His views fell well within the spectrum of opinion acceptable to the English liberal intellectual elite. He shared Natures enthusiasm for birth control, and 'voluntary' sterilization." However, the word 'English' in this passage is unnecessary: such views were widespread. Duvall comments that Huxley's enthusiasm for centralised social and economic planning and anti-industrial values was common to leftist ideologists during the inter-war years. Towards the end of his life, Huxley himself must have recognised how unpopular these views became after the end of World War II. In the two volumes of his autobiography, there is no mention of eugenics in the index, nor is Galton mentioned; and the subject has also been omitted from many of the obituaries and biographies. An exception is the proceedings of a conference organised by the British Eugenics Society.
In response to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, he was asked to write We Europeans with the ethnologist A. C. Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders and the historian of science Charles Singer. Huxley suggested the word 'race' be replaced with ethnic group. After the Second World War, he was instrumental in producing the UNESCO statement The Race Question, which asserted that:
A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens"… "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cult groups do not necessary coincide with racial groups: the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connexion with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups"… "Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of present-day mankind into three major divisions, as follows: The Mongoloid Division; The Negroid Division; The Caucasoid Division." … "Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews are not races … The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. The biological differences between ethnic groups should be disregarded from the standpoint of social acceptance and social action. The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoint is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man ...
Huxley won the second Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for We Europeans in 1937.
In 1951, Huxley coined the term transhumanism for the view that humans should better themselves through science and technology, possibly including eugenics, but also, importantly, the improvement of the social environment.
Public life and popularisation
Huxley was a capable and willing popularizer of science. Well over half his books are addressed to an educated general audience, and he wrote often in periodicals and newspapers. The most extensive bibliography of Huxley lists some of these ephemeral articles, though there are others unrecorded.
These articles, some reissued as Essays of a Biologist (1923), probably led to the invitation from H. G. Wells to help write a comprehensive work on biology for a general readership, The Science of Life. This work was published in stages in 1929–30, and in one volume in 1931. Of this Robert Olby said "Book IV The essence of the controversies about evolution offers perhaps the clearest, most readable, succinct and informative popular account of the subject ever penned. It was here that he first expounded his own version of what later developed into the evolutionary synthesis". In his memoirs, Huxley says that he made almost £10,000 from the book.
In 1934 Huxley collaborated with the naturalist Ronald Lockley to create for Alexander Korda the world's first natural history documentary The Private Life of the Gannets. For the film, shot with the support of the Royal Navy around Grassholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, they won an Oscar for best documentary.
Huxley had given talks on the radio since the 1920s, followed by written versions in The Listener. In later life, he became known to an even wider audience through television. In 1939 the BBC asked him to be a regular panelist on a Home Service general knowledge show, The Brains Trust, in which he and other panelists were asked to discuss questions submitted by listeners. The show was commissioned to keep up war time morale, by preventing the war from "disrupting the normal discussion of interesting ideas". The audience was not large for this somewhat elite programme; however, listener research ranked Huxley the most popular member of the Brains Trust from 1941 to 1944.
Later, he was a regular panelist on one of the BBC's first quiz shows (1955) Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in which participants were asked to talk about objects chosen from museum and university collections.
In 1937 Huxley was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life.
In his essay The Crowded World Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation. Based on variable rates of compound interest, Huxley predicted a probable world population of 6 billion by 2000. The United Nations Population Fund marked 12 October 1999 as The Day of Six Billion.
There is a public house named after Sir Julian in Selsdon, London Borough of Croydon, close to the Selsdon Wood Nature Reserve which he helped establish.
Terms coined
Clade (1957): a monophyletic taxon; a single species and its descendants
Cline (1938): a gradient of gene frequencies in a population, along a given transect
Ethnic group (1936): as opposed to race
Evolutionary grade (1959): a level of evolutionary advance, in contrast to a clade
Mentifact (1955): objects which consist of ideas in people's minds
Morph (1942): as more correct and simpler than polymorph
Ritualization (1914): formalised activities in bird behaviour, caused by inherited behaviour chains
Sociofact (1955): objects which consist of interactions between members of a social group
Transhumanism (1957): the transforming of human beings
Titles and phrases
Religion Without Revelation (1927, 1957)
The New Systematics (1940)
The Uniqueness of Man (1941)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
Evolution as a Process (1954)
Essays of a Humanist (1964)
The Future of Man (1966)
Selected works
Articles
"Transhumanism." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1968): 73-76. .
"Huxley gives the outline of what he believes future humanity could – and should – look like. By pointing out the numerous limitations and feebleness the human nature is – at the time – prone to, and by confronting them with the possibilities humankind has, Huxley expresses the need to research and put into use all possible measures that would enable man achieve utmost perfection."
Books
The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge University Press (1912)
Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914) "A landmark in ethology."
Essays of a Biologist (1923)
Essays in Popular Science (1926)
The Stream of Life (1926)
The Tissue-Culture King (1926) [short story]
Animal Biology, with J. B. S. Haldane (1927)
Religion Without Revelation (1927) [Revised ed. 1957]
Ants (1929)
Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and its Possibilities, with H. G. & G. P. Wells (1929–30)
First issued in 31 fortnightly parts published by Amalgamated Press, 1929–31, bound up in three volumes as publication proceeded. First issued in one volume by Cassell in 1931, reprinted 1934, 1937, popular edition, fully revised, 1938. Published as separate volumes by Cassell 1934–37: I The Living Body. II Patterns of life (1934). III Evolution—fact and theory. IV Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex. V The history and adventure of life. VI The drama of life. VII How animals behave (1937). VIII Man's mind and behaviour. IX Biology and the human race. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 1934, 1939; and by The Literary Guild 1934. Three of the Cassell spin-off books were also published by Doubleday in 1932: Evolution, fact and theory; The human mind and the behavior of Man; Reproduction, genetics and the development of sex.
Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour (1930)
An Introduction to Science with Edward Andrade (1931–34)
What Dare I Think?: The Challenge of Modern Science to Human Action and Belief. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1931)
Africa View (1931)
Captive Shrew and Other Poems (1932)
Problems of Relative Growth (1932) (on allometry)
A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932)
If I Were Dictator. London: Methuen; New York: Harper (1934)
Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934)
Elements of Experimental Embryology, with Gavin de Beer (1934)
Thomas Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake (1935)
We Europeans, with A.C. Haddon (1936)
Animal Language (1938) [Reprinted 1964] Photographs and audio recordings of animal calls by Ylla.
Present Standing of the Theory of Sexual Selection. In: Gavin de Beer (ed). Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1938): 11-42.
Living Thoughts of Darwin (1939)
New Systematics. Oxford (1940)
"...this multi-author volume, edited by Huxley, is one of the foundation stones of the 'Modern synthesis', with essays on taxonomy, evolution, natural selection, Mendelian genetics and population genetics."
Democracy Marches. London: Chatto & Windus with Hogarth Press; New York: Harper (1941). Foreword by Lord Horder. .
The Uniqueness of Man. London: Chatto & Windus (1941) (Reprinted 1943)
Published in U.S. as Man Stands Alone. New York: Harper (1941)
On Living in a Revolution. New York: Harper (1944)
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin (1942); New York: Harper (1943)
"Summarizes research on all topics relevant to the modern synthesis of evolution and Mendelian genetics up to the Second World War."
Reprinted (1943), (1944), (1945), (1948), (1955).
2nd ed. (1963) New introduction and bibliography by the author.
3rd ed. (1974) New introduction and bibliography by nine contributors.
New ed. (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. Foreword by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
Evolutionary Ethics (1943)
TVA: Adventure in Planning (1944)
Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943. London: Pilot.
Published in U.S. as Touchstone for Ethics New York: Harper (1947) with text from T. H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley.
Man in the Modern World (1947) Essays selected from The Uniqueness of Man (1941) and On Living in a Revolution (1944)
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus
Published in U.S. as Heredity, East and West. New York: Schuman (1949).
Evolution in Action (1953)
Evolution as a Process with Hardy A. C. and Ford E. B. (editors). London: Allen & Unwin (1954)
From an Antique Land: Ancient and Modern in the Middle East (1954)
Revised ed. (1966)
Kingdom of the Beasts with W. Suschitzky (1956)
Biological Aspects of Cancer (1957)
New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Harper (1957)
Reprinted as Knowledge, Morality, Destiny. New York: New American Library (1960) .
Reprinted as "Knowledge, Morality, Destiny, I." Psychiatry, vol. 14, no. 2 (1960): 129-140. . .
The Treasure House of Wild Life 13 Nov, More meat from game than cattle 13 Nov, Cropping the wild protein 20 Nov, Wild life as a World Asset, second page 27 Nov; The Observer newspaper articles that led to the setting up of the World Wildlife Fund (1960)
The Humanist Frame (editor) (1961)
The Coming New Religion of Humanism (1962)
Essays of a Humanist (1964) [reprinted 1966, 1969, 1992]. .
The Human Crisis (1964)
Darwin and his World with Bernard Kettlewell (1965)
Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume. (editor) (1965)
The Future of Man: evolutionary Aspects. (1966)
The Wonderful World of Evolution (1969)
Memories (autobiography).
volume 1 (1970)
volume 2 (1973)
Mitchell Beazley Atlas of World Wildlife. London: Mitchell Beazley & Zoological Society of London (1973)
Republished as The Atlas of World Wildlife. Cape Town: Purnell (1973)
Notes
References
Biographies
Baker John R. 1978. Julian Huxley, scientist and world citizen, 1887–1975. UNESCO, Paris.
Clark, Ronald W. 1960. Sir Julian Huxley. Phoenix, London.
Clark, Ronald W. 1968. The Huxleys. Heinemann, London.
Dronamraju, Krishna R. 1993. If I am to be remembered: the life & work of Julian Huxley, with selected correspondence. World Scientific, Singapore.
Green, Jens-Peter 1981. Krise und Hoffnung, der Evolutionshumanismus Julian Huxleys. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Huxley, Julian. 1970, 1973. Memories and Memories II. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Huxley, Juliette 1986. Leaves of the tulip tree. Murray, London [her autobiography includes much about Julian]
Keynes, Milo and Harrison, G. Ainsworth (eds) 1989. Evolutionary studies: a centenary celebration of the life of Julian Huxley. Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1987. Macmillan, London.
Biography of Julian Huxley by Chloé Maurel in the Biographical Dictionary of SG IOs:
Chloé Maurel, L'Unesco de 1945 à 1974, PhD history, université Paris 1, 2005: [archive] (on J. Huxley, p. 47–65)
Olby, Robert 2004. Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (2680 words)
Waters, C. Kenneth and Van Helden, Albert (eds) 1993. Julian Huxley: biologist and statesman of science. Rice University Press, Houston. [scholarly articles by historians of science on Huxley's work and ideas]
External links
Short biography.
A Guide to the Papers of Julian Sorell Huxley by Sarah C. Bates and Mary G. Winkler. Houston, Tex.: Woodson Research Center, Rice University. Rev. ed. (June 1987) [February 1984]. . "...with the assistance of Christina Riquelmy."
Julian Huxley’s philosophy. By John Toye and Richard Toye. In 60 Years of Science at UNESCO 1945–2005, UNESCO, 2006.
One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins of UNESCO. By John Toye and Richard Toye. History, 95, 319: 308–331, 2010
"Guide to the Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, 1899–1980" (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)—"Julian Huxley papers documenting his career as a biologist and a leading intellectual. 180 boxes of materials ranging in date from 1899–1980." Extent: 91 linear feet.
"Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Essays of a Biologist (1923) at Project Gutenberg
"The New Divination" in Essays of a Humanist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Fullerian Professorships
Archival material at
1887 births
1975 deaths
Academics of King's College London
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British Army personnel of World War I
British officials of the United Nations
Critics of creationism
Critics of Lamarckism
Critics of parapsychology
Developmental biologists
English atheists
English humanists
English eugenicists
English people of Cornish descent
English science writers
English sceptics
Ethologists
Evolutionary biologists
Fellows of New College, Oxford
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fullerian Professors of Physiology
Julian
Intelligence Corps officers
Kalinga Prize recipients
Knights Bachelor
Modern synthesis (20th century)
People educated at Eton College
People with bipolar disorder
Rice University faculty
Secular humanists
Secretaries of the Zoological Society of London
Writers from London
UNESCO Directors-General
Zoo directors
20th-century British zoologists
Royal Army Service Corps officers | true | [
"Beyond the Mexique Bay is a travel book by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1934. In it, he describes his experiences traveling through the Caribbean to Guatemala and southern Mexico in 1933.\n\nExternal links\nFree download of the book at archive.org\n\n1934 non-fiction books\nBooks by Aldous Huxley\nBritish travel books\nBooks about Mexico\nBooks about the Caribbean\nChatto & Windus books\nEnglish non-fiction books",
"Robert William Huxley, known as Robb Huxley (born December 4, 1945) is a British vocalist, guitarist and musician. He is widely regarded as a pioneer of Israeli rock due to his work in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s with his band, The Churchills, and with prominent Israeli artists such as Arik Einstein.\n\nEarly life\nHuxley was born in Gloucester, England and educated at Sir Thomas Rich’s Grammar School. After leaving school in 1962, he joined a local band, the Vendettas, as vocalist in 1963.\n\nProfessional career\nAfter the Vendettas, Huxley moved on to join the Whirlwinds as lead singer under the name \"Robb Gayle\".\n\nAfter a recording audition with Joe Meek, the Whirlwinds changed their name to the Saxons and dyed their hair blond. While still semi-pro they released a single through Joe Meek in 1965; an instrumental written by Pete Holder and Robb Huxley titled \"Saxon Warcry\".\n\nIn December 1965, Joe Meek summoned the Saxons to London to work professionally as his house band, renamed The Tornados. They were also known as the New Tornados. During their short association with Joe Meek, they put out two singles. “Pop-Art Goes Mozart” / “Too Much in Love to Hear” and “Is that a Ship I Hear” / “Do You Come Here Often”. Both singles were released in 1966. Nowadays “Do you Come Here Often” is recognized as being the first ever openly “gay” song to be released on record.\n\nAlmost a year after Joe Meek’s death in a shooting incident at his Holloway Road studio, with only Robb Huxley and Dave Watts remaining from the original line up, the Tornados left for a tour of Israel.\n\nEarly in February 1968 in Tel-Aviv, the Tornados disbanded, which ended Joe Meek’s succession of Tornados.\n\nIn Israel\n\nHuxley remained in Israel and played with a three piece group called Purple Ass Baboon for a short time. The group was probably the first ever “punk” style band to play in Israel.\n\nHuxley met up with Stan Solomon, Canadian singer with the Israeli band The Churchills and was invited to join the band when two members were subscripted into the Israeli army.\n\nHuxley and Solomon went on to write the music for the Churchills’ only album, which was written in part for the Israeli film, A Woman’s Case. The vinyl album is acclaimed today to be the rarest psychedelic record in the world, and is also recognized for its musical content.\n\nHuxley went on to write for Israeli singers, the most prominent being Arik Einstein who had a hit “Akhinoam Lo Yoda'at\" (\"Akhinoam Doesn't Know\", eng. \"When You’re Gone\") which Huxley had written for the Churchills.\n\nHuxley and Einstein collaborated on an album of children’s songs, with melodies written by Huxley and lyrics by Einstein.\n\nAfter Stan Solomon quit the Churchills in 1969, the band became Arik Einstein’s backing band. They were also joined by singer Danny Shoshan, a former bass player and vocalist from the Lions.\n\nIn 1970, they recorded an album, Junkies, Monkeys and Donkeys at Red Bus Records in London, with music written by Huxley and Shoshan and changed their name to Jericho Jones. They went on to record a second album under the name of Jericho, again with Huxley / Shoshan compositions.\n\nIn 1972, bass player Miki Gavrielov and drummer Ami Trebich returned to Israel. Shoshan took over the bass with Huxley and Haim Romano on guitars. They took on British drummer Chris Perry. They put out two singles, but after a tour of South Africa in 1973, Jericho disbanded due to management, personal and record label problems.\n\nHuxley's work in Israel, particularly with the Churchills and with Einstein, made him become widely regarded as one of the pioneers of Israeli rock.\n\nHuxley moved to Miami in 1974, where he still lives with his Israeli wife.\n\nExternal links\n Official Site\n\n1945 births\nLiving people\nEnglish male singers\nPeople from Gloucester\nBeat musicians\nThe Tornados members"
] |
[
"Jenny from the Block",
"Music video"
] | C_5f7088f923384c43a1f1a151978e4523_0 | Who directed the video? | 1 | Who directed the Jenny from the Block video? | Jenny from the Block | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18-20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002. The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool. Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing." CANNOTANSWER | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. | "Jenny from the Block" is a song by American singer Jennifer Lopez, which features American rappers Jadakiss and Styles P, both members of The LOX. It was released by Epic Records on September 26, 2002, as the lead single from her third studio album This Is Me... Then (2002). The song, first leaked online, was written by Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Rooney and Oliver, along with Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, produced the song.
"Jenny from the Block" is a R&B and old school hip hop song, which lyrically is about Lopez’s desire, despite her level of fame and fortune, to remain humble and true to her roots in The Bronx. The song was noted by critics for using a large amount of musical samples from songs such as 20th Century Steel Band's song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth" (1975) and Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987), and "Hi-Jack" by Enoch Light.
While some critics praised the song and theme, others disregarded the lyrics as "silly" and "laughable". Despite this, the song became a commercial success, topping the charts in Canada, reaching number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and charting within the top ten of several major music markets. The song's music video also caused controversy. It featured Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Ben Affleck, who later credited the video with nearly "ruining his career", in several raunchy scenes through the paparazzi's point of view. The song has been referenced in popular culture and since its release, Lopez has been referred to as "Jenny from the Block" in the media.
Background and release
This Is Me... Then was released in November 2002. However, "Jenny from the Block" featuring rappers Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX was leaked by a pop station in Hartford, Connecticut, and later distributed to other stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. In response, Lopez and Epic Records pushed forward the album's release date to November 26. Unlike her previous studio albums: On the 6 (1999) and J.Lo (2001), Lopez had a more "hands-on" role on This Is Me... Then. The album also had more of an adult-R&B sound. Musically, majority of the songs on This Is Me... Then were lyrically "dedicated" to her relationship with then-fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. The Age newspaper said the album was a "declaration" of love for Affleck. During an interview, Lopez said "I wrote a lot of songs inspired, in a way, by what I was going through at the time that this album was being made, and he [Affleck] was definitely a big part of that." Several critics highlighted that the album showed how "smitten" she was, and that the content was borderline "annoying".
During the production of the album, Affleck and Lopez were a prominent super couple in the media, and were dubbed "Bennifer". Lopez stated "We try to make the best of it I'm not saying there's not times that we wish [we] could just be going to the movies and come out and there's not a crowd there waiting. You just want to spend your Sunday afternoon not working, but at the same time we both love what we do. If that's something that's part of it, then that's fine. We feel the love and we're very happy about it." The overexposure from the media and public interest in their relationship resulted in less admiration for their work and negatively affected their careers, in particular affecting the video for "Jenny from the Block".
Production and lyrics
"Jenny from the Block" is an uptempo R&B and old school hip hop song. It was produced by Troy Oliver, written by Andre Deyo, remixed by Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier, and contained samples by Enoch Light, Lawrence Parker, Scott Sterling and Michael Oliver. Trackmasters produced the song alongside Oliver and Cory Rooney. The song "intones her modest childhood roots", with Lopez singing in the chorus: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the Block / Used to have a little now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from". She implores the listener not to be fooled by the types of rocks that she now possesses, because she is still Jennifer from the same block. She now owns many rocks and despite this, she still knows where she comes from. At the start of her career, J.Lo's first big break was as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block.
"Jenny from the Block" samples a number of songs. The opening line of the track, "Children grow and women producing, men go working, some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living", is derived from 20th Century Steel Band's 1975 song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth". It also contains an interpolation of Enoch Light's "Hi-Jack" (1975), and samples Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987). Trackmasters allegedly incorporated the sample of The Beatnuts' song "Watch Out Now" from their album A Musical Massacre (1999), which also sampled "Hi-Jack", on the track. Believing Lopez and the song's producers had stolen their sample of "Hi-Jack" without consent, they subsequently insulted Lopez on the song "Confused Rappers", from their album Milk Me (2004). The group said: "Anybody familiar with our music who heard Jenny From The Block knew it was a Beatnuts beat. There’s no getting around it. That’s a straight-up bite. It’s the same drums, the same flute, the same tempo... everything is our idea. If we never flipped that sample, there would be no Jenny From The Block."
Critical response
"Jenny from the Block" generated a polarized reception among music critics and pop music fans, with some applauding it as a "strong self statement" and homage to Lopez's roots, and others dismissing it as "silly". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine called the song "infectious", but noted that it is "more like a disease than a chunky casserole". Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly was favorable, writing: "Lopez insists that fame hasn't changed her, and seduced by the breezy pleasure of her new music, we're almost inclined to believe her". Arion Berger of Rolling Stone opined that the song "is worth listening to — its windup/wind-down chorus is as sly and curvy as Lopez". On a list of "17 of the Best Songs About NYC", Time magazine placed "Jenny from the Block" at number twelve. Complex magazine praised the inclusion of the "South Bronx" sample, writing: "After becoming a full-blown superstar whose entire life was different in every way, J. Lo was still trying to convince us she was "real" and still the same old girl from the block. What better way to connect to her roots musically than to put on for her hometown with the greatest Bronx anthem ever put to wax, BDP's "South Bronx"?"
Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the song an unfavorable review, calling it "silly" and describing the lyrics as "laughable". James Poletti of Yahoo! Music was also negative, calling it "agonizing" and a "cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture". Writing for The Village Voice, Jon Caramanica was highly unfavorable of "Jenny from the Block", stating that "Jenny aims to fast-talk herself into authenticity". AOL Radio deemed it one of the "100 Worst Songs Ever" in 2010, remarking: "Yup, just your average girl, willing to risk a national TV gig over the size of her 'dressing-room compound.'" In a countdown of "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever", VH1 and Blender ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number thirty-three. Her Campus included the song on a list of "15 Songs We're Embarrassed to Still Know All the Lyrics To". In a television special titled The 100 Most Annoying Pop Songs...We Hate To Love, BBC ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number one-hundred. On a similar special for Channel 4 titled The 100 Worst Pop Records, the song was named the tenth worst song ever. Amy Sciarretto of PopCrush observed in 2012: "'Jenny From the Block' is quite a polarizing track (...) Either you love the 'J. Lo' tune because it's boastful and oozes confidence or you hate it because it's cheesy and makes use of flutes."
Chart performance
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Jenny from the Block" debuted at number 67 for the week of October 12, 2002. By its third week on the Hot 100, the song had propelled to the top twenty, reaching number 17. For the Billboard issue dated November 23, 2002, it entered the top ten of the Hot 100, jumping to number eight. It also reached the top ten of the Hot 100 Airplay chart, at number nine. The following week, the song continued climbing the Hot 100, moving to number six, while also reaching the top five of the Hot 100 Airplay chart.
By December 14, it peaked at three on the Hot 100, where it remained for three weeks, and also jumped to three on the Airplay chart. Three weeks later, on December 28, "Jenny from the Block" remained stalling at three on the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart. For three weeks it had been blocked from the top spot of both charts by Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Missy Elliott's "Work It". It peaked at two on the US Mainstream Top 40 Pop Songs and 22 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
In Australia, "Jenny from the Block" made its debut inside the top ten at number eight on December 1, 2002. On January 5, 2003, it moved to its peak of five, where it remained for two weeks, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. The song peaked atop the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, becoming her third number-one there following "If You Had My Love" (1999) and "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (2001). In Italy, it debuted at its peak of number four on December 21, and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks, all of which it remained in the top ten for; exiting on March 6, 2003. In New Zealand, it debuted at 49 on November 11, 2002; it peaked at number six on December 8 and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold by RIANZ for sales of 7,500 copies. It peaked at number two in Spain on December 24, 2002.
In the United Kingdom it peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming her ninth top-ten hit in Britain, as well as her fourth song to peak at three. In April 2020, the song was certified gold for shipments of over 400,000 copies in the country, her third after If You Had My Love and Get Right.
In Norway, the song debuted at number six and peaked at five. It has been certified Platinum there for sales of 10,000 copies.
Music video
The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18–20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002.
The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool.
Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing."
Live performances
"Jenny from the Block" was performed at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards on August 20, 2018. The song was performed by Lopez during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Impact
"Jenny from the Block" is considered one of Lopez's signature songs and most iconic single. The lyrical content of country artist Faith Hill's 2005 song "Mississippi Girl" was considered to be influenced by the song, with Rolling Stone describing it as "country music's version" of the single; Billboard called it "a countrified 'Jenny from the Block'". Other songs that were noted to have followed the theme of "Jenny from the Block" were Gwen Stefani's "Orange County Girl" and Fergie's "Glamorous".
Mexican-American recording artist Becky G recorded a cover version of the song, entitled "Becky from the Block". The song's accompanying music video was shot in Inglewood, California. Lopez made a cameo appearance towards the end of the music video. The lyrics of this version are significantly different from the original. Entertainment Tonight described the version to have "give[n] Jenny's NY-based tune a West Coast slant". Australian rapper Iggy Azalea referenced the song in her verse from Lopez's 2014 song "Booty", stating: "The last time the world seen a booty this good, it was on Jenny from the block." In her 2018 single, "Dinero" featuring DJ Khaled, American rapper Cardi B ends her verse by referencing rapper's and Lopez's beginnings: "Two bad bitches that came from the Bronx, Cardi from the pole and Jenny from the block". Rapper Drake, who Lopez was believed to have been romantically involved with in the past, references her and the song in his 2018 single "In My Feelings", stating: "From the block like you Jenny/ I know you special, girl, 'cause I know too many."
Ben Affleck's appearance in the song's music video became notorious, having been released at the peak of the couple's "frenzied" tabloid coverage. Paper magazine wrote: "Love makes people do crazy things, and that's our only explanation for this." Their relationship received widespread media coverage. They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They broke up in January 2004. Lopez later described the split as her "first real heartbreak" and attributed it in part to Affleck's discomfort with the media scrutiny. During an interview in 2008, Affleck stated that he nearly "ruined" his career by starring in the clip, "If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I've moved on." He also stated: "It not only makes me look like a petulant fool (to blame Lopez), but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly? For the record, did she hurt my career? No." In response, Latina magazine wrote: "Riiiigght. So it wasn't a string of bad movies starting with Reindeer Games in 2000 and a general lack of on-screen appeal that ruined your career, right Ben? It was a music video. What else can we blame on a music video? Global warming?" Following Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony, she was reportedly attempting to have the music video blocked from television networks such as VH1 and MTV.
In the past decade since the song's release, Lopez has been nicknamed "Jenny from The Block" in the media, a name news reporters and journalists often use. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards in 2011, comedian Ricky Gervais referenced the song: "She's just Jenny from the block. If the block in question is that one on Rodeo Drive between Cartier and Prada." In October 2015, a video clip filmed in Afghanistan years ago surfaced online of two U.S. Marines singing "Jenny from the Block" moments before being fired at by the Taliban.
Track listings
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
Cover versions
Becky G ("Becky from the Block")
Becky G released a cover version of the song with rewritten lyrics, titled "Becky from the Block" with Gomez rap-singing about her life before fame. Lopez appeared in Gomez's music video for the song, which has over 82 million views on YouTube as of February 2021. The song is Gomez's official debut single, and third overall after three collaborations.
Track listing
References
External links
2002 singles
American hip hop songs
Canadian Singles Chart number-one singles
Number-one singles in Hungary
Number-one singles in Poland
Jadakiss songs
Jennifer Lopez songs
Music videos directed by Francis Lawrence
Sampling controversies
Songs written by Jennifer Lopez
Songs written by Troy Oliver
Songs written by Andre Deyo
Styles P songs
Songs written by Fernando Arbex
Songs written by Samuel Barnes (songwriter)
Song recordings produced by Cory Rooney
2002 songs
Songs written by Jean-Claude Olivier
Songs about musicians
Songs about celebrities
Cultural depictions of musicians | true | [
"MaryAnn Tanedo is an American film and music video producer who began her career in the mid 1990s.\n\nCareer\nTanedo’s early producing credits include the music video for Moby & Gwen Stefani’s \"South Side\" (2000) which won the 2001 MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video, as well as the Grammy-nominated video for Jamiroquai's “Feels Just Like It Should” (2005), both directed by Joseph Kahn.\n\nIn 2010 she joined Simon Cowell and Joseph Kahn to produce a five-minute documentary music video for \"Everybody Hurts\", the charity single to raise money for the victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.\n\nHer film producing credits include the 2011 horror/comedy feature Detention directed by Joseph Kahn and the 2014 drama Pony, written and directed by Candice Carella. In 2017, Tanedo and Carella rejoined to produce the short film, Three Days in the Hole, the story of a young girl captured by ISIS and sold into slavery. The film was inspired by the true stories of Yezidi women who have suffered atrocities at the hands of ISIS.\n\nIn 2017, Tanedo produced 12 Round Gun, a boxing themed feature, written and directed by Sam Upton, starring Sam Upton, Jared Abrahamson, and Mark Boone Junior. In 2019, 12 Round Gun was added to the Netflix streaming catalog.\n\nAwards and nominations \nIn 2001, Tanedo was nominated for the Academy of Country Music's Video of the Year Award for Faith Hill's \"The Way You Love Me\", directed by Joseph Kahn. In 2004, she was awarded a Latin Grammy for Best Music Video for Robi Rosa's “Más y Más” directed by Angela Alvarado. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Tanedo won two Moonman awards- one for Best Hip-Hop Video for Eminem's \"We Made You\" and another for Best Pop Video for Britney Spears' \"Womanizer\", both directed by Joseph Kahn. In 2011, Tanedo was nominated for a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video for \"Love the Way You Lie\" by Eminem and Rihanna, directed by Joseph Kahn.\n\nThe 2014 short drama, Pony, produced by Tanedo, written and directed by Candice Carella, received the Award of Excellence at the 2016 Canada International Film Festival, a Gold Lion for Best Screenplay at the 2015 London Film Festival, and a Silver Award for Best Narrative Short at the 2015 International Independent Film Awards. Three Days in the Hole (2017) was nominated for awards at the Hollywood Film Festival and the Rome International Film festival. 12 Round Gun received the award for Best Drama Feature Film at the 2017 Mindfield Film Festival Los Angeles and Best Narrative Feature at the 2018 Cinema at the Edge Independent Film Festival.\n\nFilmography \n 12 Round Gun, written and directed by Sam Upton (2017)\n LA: CARS + MUSIC, directed by Van Alpert (2017)\n Three Days in the Hole, written by Candice Carella and Desmond Nakano, directed by Candice Carella (2017)\n Pony, written and directed by Candice Carella (2014)\n Detention, written by Joseph Kahn and Mark Palermo, directed by Joseph Kahn (2011)\n The Stone Cutter, written and directed by Stephen Erickson (2000)\n\nReferences \n\nAmerican women film producers\nAmerican film producers\nAmerican music video producers\nGrammy Award winners\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)",
"\"Missed the Boat\" is a song by American indie rock band Modest Mouse and is the sixth track on their 2007 album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The song was released as the second single from that album and peaked at #24 in Billboard's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart.\n\nJames Mercer of The Shins sings backup vocals on \"Missed the Boat\".\n\nMusic video\nIn 2007, Apple Inc. and Modest Mouse asked fans to direct and film a video for the song. The contest ended on May 22, 2007. Christopher Mills, who also directed the \"Float On\" video, directed the green screen sequences used in the contest. The winning video, directed by Walter Robot, that is Christopher Louie and Bill Barminski, shows a robot who directed himself in a video about a robot who runs away from home.\n\nAnother video, shown on MTV2 and Fuse TV, features segued segments of other submitted videos, with the winning video only appearing for five seconds.\n\nChart performance\n\nPopular culture\nThis song appears in the Scrubs episode \"My Waste of Time\" at the end of the show.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Modest Mouse at MySpace\n \n\nModest Mouse songs\n2007 songs\nSongs written by Johnny Marr\nSongs written by Isaac Brock (musician)\nSongs written by Jeremiah Green\nSongs written by Eric Judy\nSongs written by Joe Plummer\nSongs written by Tom Peloso"
] |
[
"Jenny from the Block",
"Music video",
"Who directed the video?",
"The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence."
] | C_5f7088f923384c43a1f1a151978e4523_0 | What was the video about? | 2 | What was the Jenny from the Block video about? | Jenny from the Block | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18-20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002. The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool. Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing." CANNOTANSWER | The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. | "Jenny from the Block" is a song by American singer Jennifer Lopez, which features American rappers Jadakiss and Styles P, both members of The LOX. It was released by Epic Records on September 26, 2002, as the lead single from her third studio album This Is Me... Then (2002). The song, first leaked online, was written by Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Rooney and Oliver, along with Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, produced the song.
"Jenny from the Block" is a R&B and old school hip hop song, which lyrically is about Lopez’s desire, despite her level of fame and fortune, to remain humble and true to her roots in The Bronx. The song was noted by critics for using a large amount of musical samples from songs such as 20th Century Steel Band's song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth" (1975) and Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987), and "Hi-Jack" by Enoch Light.
While some critics praised the song and theme, others disregarded the lyrics as "silly" and "laughable". Despite this, the song became a commercial success, topping the charts in Canada, reaching number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and charting within the top ten of several major music markets. The song's music video also caused controversy. It featured Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Ben Affleck, who later credited the video with nearly "ruining his career", in several raunchy scenes through the paparazzi's point of view. The song has been referenced in popular culture and since its release, Lopez has been referred to as "Jenny from the Block" in the media.
Background and release
This Is Me... Then was released in November 2002. However, "Jenny from the Block" featuring rappers Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX was leaked by a pop station in Hartford, Connecticut, and later distributed to other stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. In response, Lopez and Epic Records pushed forward the album's release date to November 26. Unlike her previous studio albums: On the 6 (1999) and J.Lo (2001), Lopez had a more "hands-on" role on This Is Me... Then. The album also had more of an adult-R&B sound. Musically, majority of the songs on This Is Me... Then were lyrically "dedicated" to her relationship with then-fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. The Age newspaper said the album was a "declaration" of love for Affleck. During an interview, Lopez said "I wrote a lot of songs inspired, in a way, by what I was going through at the time that this album was being made, and he [Affleck] was definitely a big part of that." Several critics highlighted that the album showed how "smitten" she was, and that the content was borderline "annoying".
During the production of the album, Affleck and Lopez were a prominent super couple in the media, and were dubbed "Bennifer". Lopez stated "We try to make the best of it I'm not saying there's not times that we wish [we] could just be going to the movies and come out and there's not a crowd there waiting. You just want to spend your Sunday afternoon not working, but at the same time we both love what we do. If that's something that's part of it, then that's fine. We feel the love and we're very happy about it." The overexposure from the media and public interest in their relationship resulted in less admiration for their work and negatively affected their careers, in particular affecting the video for "Jenny from the Block".
Production and lyrics
"Jenny from the Block" is an uptempo R&B and old school hip hop song. It was produced by Troy Oliver, written by Andre Deyo, remixed by Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier, and contained samples by Enoch Light, Lawrence Parker, Scott Sterling and Michael Oliver. Trackmasters produced the song alongside Oliver and Cory Rooney. The song "intones her modest childhood roots", with Lopez singing in the chorus: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the Block / Used to have a little now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from". She implores the listener not to be fooled by the types of rocks that she now possesses, because she is still Jennifer from the same block. She now owns many rocks and despite this, she still knows where she comes from. At the start of her career, J.Lo's first big break was as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block.
"Jenny from the Block" samples a number of songs. The opening line of the track, "Children grow and women producing, men go working, some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living", is derived from 20th Century Steel Band's 1975 song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth". It also contains an interpolation of Enoch Light's "Hi-Jack" (1975), and samples Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987). Trackmasters allegedly incorporated the sample of The Beatnuts' song "Watch Out Now" from their album A Musical Massacre (1999), which also sampled "Hi-Jack", on the track. Believing Lopez and the song's producers had stolen their sample of "Hi-Jack" without consent, they subsequently insulted Lopez on the song "Confused Rappers", from their album Milk Me (2004). The group said: "Anybody familiar with our music who heard Jenny From The Block knew it was a Beatnuts beat. There’s no getting around it. That’s a straight-up bite. It’s the same drums, the same flute, the same tempo... everything is our idea. If we never flipped that sample, there would be no Jenny From The Block."
Critical response
"Jenny from the Block" generated a polarized reception among music critics and pop music fans, with some applauding it as a "strong self statement" and homage to Lopez's roots, and others dismissing it as "silly". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine called the song "infectious", but noted that it is "more like a disease than a chunky casserole". Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly was favorable, writing: "Lopez insists that fame hasn't changed her, and seduced by the breezy pleasure of her new music, we're almost inclined to believe her". Arion Berger of Rolling Stone opined that the song "is worth listening to — its windup/wind-down chorus is as sly and curvy as Lopez". On a list of "17 of the Best Songs About NYC", Time magazine placed "Jenny from the Block" at number twelve. Complex magazine praised the inclusion of the "South Bronx" sample, writing: "After becoming a full-blown superstar whose entire life was different in every way, J. Lo was still trying to convince us she was "real" and still the same old girl from the block. What better way to connect to her roots musically than to put on for her hometown with the greatest Bronx anthem ever put to wax, BDP's "South Bronx"?"
Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the song an unfavorable review, calling it "silly" and describing the lyrics as "laughable". James Poletti of Yahoo! Music was also negative, calling it "agonizing" and a "cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture". Writing for The Village Voice, Jon Caramanica was highly unfavorable of "Jenny from the Block", stating that "Jenny aims to fast-talk herself into authenticity". AOL Radio deemed it one of the "100 Worst Songs Ever" in 2010, remarking: "Yup, just your average girl, willing to risk a national TV gig over the size of her 'dressing-room compound.'" In a countdown of "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever", VH1 and Blender ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number thirty-three. Her Campus included the song on a list of "15 Songs We're Embarrassed to Still Know All the Lyrics To". In a television special titled The 100 Most Annoying Pop Songs...We Hate To Love, BBC ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number one-hundred. On a similar special for Channel 4 titled The 100 Worst Pop Records, the song was named the tenth worst song ever. Amy Sciarretto of PopCrush observed in 2012: "'Jenny From the Block' is quite a polarizing track (...) Either you love the 'J. Lo' tune because it's boastful and oozes confidence or you hate it because it's cheesy and makes use of flutes."
Chart performance
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Jenny from the Block" debuted at number 67 for the week of October 12, 2002. By its third week on the Hot 100, the song had propelled to the top twenty, reaching number 17. For the Billboard issue dated November 23, 2002, it entered the top ten of the Hot 100, jumping to number eight. It also reached the top ten of the Hot 100 Airplay chart, at number nine. The following week, the song continued climbing the Hot 100, moving to number six, while also reaching the top five of the Hot 100 Airplay chart.
By December 14, it peaked at three on the Hot 100, where it remained for three weeks, and also jumped to three on the Airplay chart. Three weeks later, on December 28, "Jenny from the Block" remained stalling at three on the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart. For three weeks it had been blocked from the top spot of both charts by Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Missy Elliott's "Work It". It peaked at two on the US Mainstream Top 40 Pop Songs and 22 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
In Australia, "Jenny from the Block" made its debut inside the top ten at number eight on December 1, 2002. On January 5, 2003, it moved to its peak of five, where it remained for two weeks, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. The song peaked atop the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, becoming her third number-one there following "If You Had My Love" (1999) and "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (2001). In Italy, it debuted at its peak of number four on December 21, and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks, all of which it remained in the top ten for; exiting on March 6, 2003. In New Zealand, it debuted at 49 on November 11, 2002; it peaked at number six on December 8 and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold by RIANZ for sales of 7,500 copies. It peaked at number two in Spain on December 24, 2002.
In the United Kingdom it peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming her ninth top-ten hit in Britain, as well as her fourth song to peak at three. In April 2020, the song was certified gold for shipments of over 400,000 copies in the country, her third after If You Had My Love and Get Right.
In Norway, the song debuted at number six and peaked at five. It has been certified Platinum there for sales of 10,000 copies.
Music video
The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18–20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002.
The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool.
Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing."
Live performances
"Jenny from the Block" was performed at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards on August 20, 2018. The song was performed by Lopez during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Impact
"Jenny from the Block" is considered one of Lopez's signature songs and most iconic single. The lyrical content of country artist Faith Hill's 2005 song "Mississippi Girl" was considered to be influenced by the song, with Rolling Stone describing it as "country music's version" of the single; Billboard called it "a countrified 'Jenny from the Block'". Other songs that were noted to have followed the theme of "Jenny from the Block" were Gwen Stefani's "Orange County Girl" and Fergie's "Glamorous".
Mexican-American recording artist Becky G recorded a cover version of the song, entitled "Becky from the Block". The song's accompanying music video was shot in Inglewood, California. Lopez made a cameo appearance towards the end of the music video. The lyrics of this version are significantly different from the original. Entertainment Tonight described the version to have "give[n] Jenny's NY-based tune a West Coast slant". Australian rapper Iggy Azalea referenced the song in her verse from Lopez's 2014 song "Booty", stating: "The last time the world seen a booty this good, it was on Jenny from the block." In her 2018 single, "Dinero" featuring DJ Khaled, American rapper Cardi B ends her verse by referencing rapper's and Lopez's beginnings: "Two bad bitches that came from the Bronx, Cardi from the pole and Jenny from the block". Rapper Drake, who Lopez was believed to have been romantically involved with in the past, references her and the song in his 2018 single "In My Feelings", stating: "From the block like you Jenny/ I know you special, girl, 'cause I know too many."
Ben Affleck's appearance in the song's music video became notorious, having been released at the peak of the couple's "frenzied" tabloid coverage. Paper magazine wrote: "Love makes people do crazy things, and that's our only explanation for this." Their relationship received widespread media coverage. They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They broke up in January 2004. Lopez later described the split as her "first real heartbreak" and attributed it in part to Affleck's discomfort with the media scrutiny. During an interview in 2008, Affleck stated that he nearly "ruined" his career by starring in the clip, "If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I've moved on." He also stated: "It not only makes me look like a petulant fool (to blame Lopez), but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly? For the record, did she hurt my career? No." In response, Latina magazine wrote: "Riiiigght. So it wasn't a string of bad movies starting with Reindeer Games in 2000 and a general lack of on-screen appeal that ruined your career, right Ben? It was a music video. What else can we blame on a music video? Global warming?" Following Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony, she was reportedly attempting to have the music video blocked from television networks such as VH1 and MTV.
In the past decade since the song's release, Lopez has been nicknamed "Jenny from The Block" in the media, a name news reporters and journalists often use. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards in 2011, comedian Ricky Gervais referenced the song: "She's just Jenny from the block. If the block in question is that one on Rodeo Drive between Cartier and Prada." In October 2015, a video clip filmed in Afghanistan years ago surfaced online of two U.S. Marines singing "Jenny from the Block" moments before being fired at by the Taliban.
Track listings
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
Cover versions
Becky G ("Becky from the Block")
Becky G released a cover version of the song with rewritten lyrics, titled "Becky from the Block" with Gomez rap-singing about her life before fame. Lopez appeared in Gomez's music video for the song, which has over 82 million views on YouTube as of February 2021. The song is Gomez's official debut single, and third overall after three collaborations.
Track listing
References
External links
2002 singles
American hip hop songs
Canadian Singles Chart number-one singles
Number-one singles in Hungary
Number-one singles in Poland
Jadakiss songs
Jennifer Lopez songs
Music videos directed by Francis Lawrence
Sampling controversies
Songs written by Jennifer Lopez
Songs written by Troy Oliver
Songs written by Andre Deyo
Styles P songs
Songs written by Fernando Arbex
Songs written by Samuel Barnes (songwriter)
Song recordings produced by Cory Rooney
2002 songs
Songs written by Jean-Claude Olivier
Songs about musicians
Songs about celebrities
Cultural depictions of musicians | true | [
"\"What What (In the Butt)\" is a viral video created by Andrew Swant and Bobby Ciraldo for the song of the same name by Samwell. It is known for its numerous blatant and camp references to homosexuality and anal sex. The lyrics of the song, a production of Mike Stasny, mostly revolve around the title. The video was made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and uploaded on Valentine's Day 2007 to YouTube. As of October 2021, the video has over 72 million views.\n\nThemes and imagery\nOn 5 March 2007, with regard to the Christian imagery in the video, Samwell said, in an interview with KROQ-FM, that the opening image is \"not a cross, but a flaming symbol that [he] just happened to use\". According to Stasny, however: \"[Samwell] wanted it because he's a Christian but he doesn't do Christian morality. For him, having a burning cross is a way to pay respect to his beliefs.\"\n\nThe video also parodies the flower petal scene from the movie American Beauty (1999).\n\nOn April 8, 2007, Brownmark Films released an interview with Samwell, in which he discussed the public reception of the song at length.\n\nPerformances and appearances\nIn April 2008, Samwell appeared on the BBC television show Lily Allen and Friends for an interview and performed a live version of \"What What (In the Butt)\" with choreographed dancers. The video was also featured in episode #53 of ADD-TV in Manhattan. \"What What (In the Butt)\" was an official selection at the Milwaukee International Film Festival and the Mix Brasil Film Festival.\n\nIn June 2010 Samwell appeared on an episode of Comedy Central's Tosh.0, television show about viral videos. The segment told the story of how the \"What What\" video was created, followed by an acoustic duet version of the song by Samwell and Josh Homme, lead singer for Queens Of The Stone Age and guitar player for Kyuss.\n\nIn 2009, the creators of the video, and Samwell himself, claimed that a feature film called What What (In the Butt): The Movie was in the works.\n\nOn November 12, 2010, Brownmark Films filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against MTV Networks, South Park Studios, and Viacom for their use of \"What What in the Butt\" in a 2008 South Park episode. In July 2011, a federal judge decided that South Park's use of the video fell under the fair use exception to copyright law, and thus the defendants did not owe damages. The decision was unusual in a copyright lawsuit because it was made on a motion to dismiss, before summary judgment. The appeal was dismissed by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on June 7, 2012. Additionally, the district court awarded attorneys' fees to the defendants because the lawsuit was \"objectively unreasonable\".\n\nIn January 2013, a behind-the-scenes video was released which showed footage from the original 2006 green screen shoot.\n\nIn popular culture\nIn the April 2, 2008 episode of South Park, \"Canada on Strike\", the boys post a viral video on \"YouToob\" (a fictional version of YouTube) of Butters performing \"What What (In the Butt)\".\nIn October 2011 a porn parody of Comedy Central's Tosh.0 was released called Tosh Porn Oh. The film (porn star Dane Cross' directorial debut) contained a segment based on the \"What What (In the Butt)\" video with Samwell replaced by the pornographic actress Skin Diamond. The segment features a recreation of the original video which, according to the end credits, was fully licensed by Brownmark Films.\nThe \"What What\" song surfaced on an episode of Sweden’s Got Talent in which four naked young men danced to the song.\nThe creators of the \"What What\" video projected images of Samwell's iconic pink zeppelin onto buildings in Los Angeles for the five-year anniversary of the project.\n\nSee also\nLGBT hip hop\n\"In the Bush\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n Official website\n \"What What\" re-created segment on South Park\n Blogcritics Magazine interview with the creators of the video\n \n\nViral videos\nSongs about buttocks\nSongs about sexuality\nLGBT-related songs\n2007 YouTube videos\n2007 songs\nInternet memes introduced in 2007\nMusic memes",
"\"What I Go to School For\" is the debut single of English pop punk band Busted. It was written by James Bourne, Charlie Simpson, Matt Willis, Steve Robson, and John McLaughlin and produced by Steve Robson. The song was inspired by a teacher that Matt Willis had a crush on at school.\n\nThe song was released on 16 September 2002 and reached number three on the UK Singles Chart. A young Jade Ewen (who would later join girl group Sugababes) appears in the music video.\n\nBackground\nMatt Willis told the Essex Chronicle that the song came about after a night out in TOTs 2000 (now known as Talk nightclub) in James Bourne's hometown of Southend-on-Sea. \"We were too young, we got drunk and went to TOTs,\" Willis said. \"Then we walked home and continued drinking on the way – it took us ages. When we got back to James' house, we went to his bedroom and just picked up the guitar and that’s when we started writing What I Go to School For.\"\n\nIn 2003, the real-life inspiration for the song was revealed to be Willis' former teacher Michelle Blair, who made a surprise appearance on The Frank Skinner Show on ITV during an interview with Willis. Blair, who was 28 and had been married for three years at the time of her appearance on The Frank Skinner Show, was Willis' dance teacher at the Sylvia Young Theatre School when Willis was 15. Speaking about the surprise appearance with Willis on the show, Blair said: \"It was hilarious – he looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him up. I only found out the song was about me after it came out – it's really flattering.\" Blair said that at the time she was not aware of her pupil's crush on her, but that she did remember him from the dance classes: \"He was quite cheeky and charming and always had something to say in class. He used to tell us he was in a band, but I never dreamed they were going to be this big and I certainly hadn't a clue I was going to feature in one of their songs!\"\n\nCommenting on the veracity of these events as portrayed in the song, Blair said: \"I think he's used a bit of artistic licence in the song. It was a dance class so we never used any pencils but I suppose he had ample opportunity to look at my bum. There was never any tree outside my bedroom window though – I think I might have noticed a Peeping Tom.\" Reflecting on his time under the tutelage of Miss Blair, Willis said, \"She was kind of nice and there was always something really sexy about her.\" Being identified as the object of adolescent lust, and the subject of a pop song, hasn't caused any friction with her husband, according to Blair: \"My husband thinks its (sic) hilarious and takes the mickey. I don't think he's really worried I'm going to run off with a pop star. I'm proud of them. Looking back it was obvious Matt had what it takes.\"\n\nOn 29 October 2012, Michelle Blair appeared as the correct answer in the \"line-up\" section of BBC Two panel Never Mind the Buzzcocks.\n\nMusical\nWhat I Go to School For became the title of a musical theatre production produced by Youth Music Theatre UK following the story of Busted from their origins in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, through to their break-up in 2005. The musical was written by Elliot Davis with songs from the Busted albums and new music by James Bourne. It was directed by Steven Dexter and played at the Theatre Royal, Brighton in 2016.\n\nMusic video\nThe video for the song features model Lorna Roberts as Miss McKenzie, the object of the band's desire. Then 14-year-old Jade Ewen, who later joined the Sugababes, appears in the video as a schoolgirl. The filming of the What I Go To School For video was later parodied in the video for the Busted song Nineties.\n\nTrack listings\n\nUK CD1 and Australian CD single\n \"What I Go to School For\" (single version) – 3:30\n \"What I Go to School For\" (acoustic version) – 3:26\n \"What I Go to School For\" (alternative version) – 3:31\n \"What I Go to School For\" (instrumental mix) – 3:28\n \"What I Go to School For\" (CD-ROM video)\n\nUK CD2\n \"What I Go to School For\" (single version)\n \"Brown Eyed Girl\"\n Interactvie interview (CD-ROM video)\n\nUK cassette single\n \"What I Go to School For\"\n \"Dawson's Geek\"\n \"What I Go to School For\" (acoustic version)\n\nUS enhanced CD single\n \"What I Go to School For\" (radio version)\n \"What I Go to School For\" (album version)\n \"What I Go to School For\" (CD-ROM video)\n\nCharts and certifications\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nRelease history\n\nCover versions\n \"What I Go to School For\" was parodied by the Amateur Transplants on their 2004 album Fitness to Practice.\n The Jonas Brothers covered the song for their 2006 album It's About Time.\n\nReferences\n\n2002 debut singles\n2002 songs\nBusted (band) songs\nIsland Records singles\nSongs about school\nSongs written by Charlie Simpson\nSongs written by James Bourne\nSongs written by Matt Willis\nSongs written by Steve Robson\nUniversal Records singles"
] |
[
"Jenny from the Block",
"Music video",
"Who directed the video?",
"The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence.",
"What was the video about?",
"The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck."
] | C_5f7088f923384c43a1f1a151978e4523_0 | Where was the video filmed? | 3 | Where was the Jenny from the Block video filmed? | Jenny from the Block | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18-20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002. The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool. Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing." CANNOTANSWER | The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA | "Jenny from the Block" is a song by American singer Jennifer Lopez, which features American rappers Jadakiss and Styles P, both members of The LOX. It was released by Epic Records on September 26, 2002, as the lead single from her third studio album This Is Me... Then (2002). The song, first leaked online, was written by Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Rooney and Oliver, along with Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, produced the song.
"Jenny from the Block" is a R&B and old school hip hop song, which lyrically is about Lopez’s desire, despite her level of fame and fortune, to remain humble and true to her roots in The Bronx. The song was noted by critics for using a large amount of musical samples from songs such as 20th Century Steel Band's song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth" (1975) and Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987), and "Hi-Jack" by Enoch Light.
While some critics praised the song and theme, others disregarded the lyrics as "silly" and "laughable". Despite this, the song became a commercial success, topping the charts in Canada, reaching number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and charting within the top ten of several major music markets. The song's music video also caused controversy. It featured Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Ben Affleck, who later credited the video with nearly "ruining his career", in several raunchy scenes through the paparazzi's point of view. The song has been referenced in popular culture and since its release, Lopez has been referred to as "Jenny from the Block" in the media.
Background and release
This Is Me... Then was released in November 2002. However, "Jenny from the Block" featuring rappers Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX was leaked by a pop station in Hartford, Connecticut, and later distributed to other stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. In response, Lopez and Epic Records pushed forward the album's release date to November 26. Unlike her previous studio albums: On the 6 (1999) and J.Lo (2001), Lopez had a more "hands-on" role on This Is Me... Then. The album also had more of an adult-R&B sound. Musically, majority of the songs on This Is Me... Then were lyrically "dedicated" to her relationship with then-fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. The Age newspaper said the album was a "declaration" of love for Affleck. During an interview, Lopez said "I wrote a lot of songs inspired, in a way, by what I was going through at the time that this album was being made, and he [Affleck] was definitely a big part of that." Several critics highlighted that the album showed how "smitten" she was, and that the content was borderline "annoying".
During the production of the album, Affleck and Lopez were a prominent super couple in the media, and were dubbed "Bennifer". Lopez stated "We try to make the best of it I'm not saying there's not times that we wish [we] could just be going to the movies and come out and there's not a crowd there waiting. You just want to spend your Sunday afternoon not working, but at the same time we both love what we do. If that's something that's part of it, then that's fine. We feel the love and we're very happy about it." The overexposure from the media and public interest in their relationship resulted in less admiration for their work and negatively affected their careers, in particular affecting the video for "Jenny from the Block".
Production and lyrics
"Jenny from the Block" is an uptempo R&B and old school hip hop song. It was produced by Troy Oliver, written by Andre Deyo, remixed by Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier, and contained samples by Enoch Light, Lawrence Parker, Scott Sterling and Michael Oliver. Trackmasters produced the song alongside Oliver and Cory Rooney. The song "intones her modest childhood roots", with Lopez singing in the chorus: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the Block / Used to have a little now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from". She implores the listener not to be fooled by the types of rocks that she now possesses, because she is still Jennifer from the same block. She now owns many rocks and despite this, she still knows where she comes from. At the start of her career, J.Lo's first big break was as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block.
"Jenny from the Block" samples a number of songs. The opening line of the track, "Children grow and women producing, men go working, some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living", is derived from 20th Century Steel Band's 1975 song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth". It also contains an interpolation of Enoch Light's "Hi-Jack" (1975), and samples Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987). Trackmasters allegedly incorporated the sample of The Beatnuts' song "Watch Out Now" from their album A Musical Massacre (1999), which also sampled "Hi-Jack", on the track. Believing Lopez and the song's producers had stolen their sample of "Hi-Jack" without consent, they subsequently insulted Lopez on the song "Confused Rappers", from their album Milk Me (2004). The group said: "Anybody familiar with our music who heard Jenny From The Block knew it was a Beatnuts beat. There’s no getting around it. That’s a straight-up bite. It’s the same drums, the same flute, the same tempo... everything is our idea. If we never flipped that sample, there would be no Jenny From The Block."
Critical response
"Jenny from the Block" generated a polarized reception among music critics and pop music fans, with some applauding it as a "strong self statement" and homage to Lopez's roots, and others dismissing it as "silly". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine called the song "infectious", but noted that it is "more like a disease than a chunky casserole". Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly was favorable, writing: "Lopez insists that fame hasn't changed her, and seduced by the breezy pleasure of her new music, we're almost inclined to believe her". Arion Berger of Rolling Stone opined that the song "is worth listening to — its windup/wind-down chorus is as sly and curvy as Lopez". On a list of "17 of the Best Songs About NYC", Time magazine placed "Jenny from the Block" at number twelve. Complex magazine praised the inclusion of the "South Bronx" sample, writing: "After becoming a full-blown superstar whose entire life was different in every way, J. Lo was still trying to convince us she was "real" and still the same old girl from the block. What better way to connect to her roots musically than to put on for her hometown with the greatest Bronx anthem ever put to wax, BDP's "South Bronx"?"
Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the song an unfavorable review, calling it "silly" and describing the lyrics as "laughable". James Poletti of Yahoo! Music was also negative, calling it "agonizing" and a "cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture". Writing for The Village Voice, Jon Caramanica was highly unfavorable of "Jenny from the Block", stating that "Jenny aims to fast-talk herself into authenticity". AOL Radio deemed it one of the "100 Worst Songs Ever" in 2010, remarking: "Yup, just your average girl, willing to risk a national TV gig over the size of her 'dressing-room compound.'" In a countdown of "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever", VH1 and Blender ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number thirty-three. Her Campus included the song on a list of "15 Songs We're Embarrassed to Still Know All the Lyrics To". In a television special titled The 100 Most Annoying Pop Songs...We Hate To Love, BBC ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number one-hundred. On a similar special for Channel 4 titled The 100 Worst Pop Records, the song was named the tenth worst song ever. Amy Sciarretto of PopCrush observed in 2012: "'Jenny From the Block' is quite a polarizing track (...) Either you love the 'J. Lo' tune because it's boastful and oozes confidence or you hate it because it's cheesy and makes use of flutes."
Chart performance
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Jenny from the Block" debuted at number 67 for the week of October 12, 2002. By its third week on the Hot 100, the song had propelled to the top twenty, reaching number 17. For the Billboard issue dated November 23, 2002, it entered the top ten of the Hot 100, jumping to number eight. It also reached the top ten of the Hot 100 Airplay chart, at number nine. The following week, the song continued climbing the Hot 100, moving to number six, while also reaching the top five of the Hot 100 Airplay chart.
By December 14, it peaked at three on the Hot 100, where it remained for three weeks, and also jumped to three on the Airplay chart. Three weeks later, on December 28, "Jenny from the Block" remained stalling at three on the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart. For three weeks it had been blocked from the top spot of both charts by Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Missy Elliott's "Work It". It peaked at two on the US Mainstream Top 40 Pop Songs and 22 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
In Australia, "Jenny from the Block" made its debut inside the top ten at number eight on December 1, 2002. On January 5, 2003, it moved to its peak of five, where it remained for two weeks, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. The song peaked atop the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, becoming her third number-one there following "If You Had My Love" (1999) and "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (2001). In Italy, it debuted at its peak of number four on December 21, and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks, all of which it remained in the top ten for; exiting on March 6, 2003. In New Zealand, it debuted at 49 on November 11, 2002; it peaked at number six on December 8 and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold by RIANZ for sales of 7,500 copies. It peaked at number two in Spain on December 24, 2002.
In the United Kingdom it peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming her ninth top-ten hit in Britain, as well as her fourth song to peak at three. In April 2020, the song was certified gold for shipments of over 400,000 copies in the country, her third after If You Had My Love and Get Right.
In Norway, the song debuted at number six and peaked at five. It has been certified Platinum there for sales of 10,000 copies.
Music video
The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18–20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002.
The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool.
Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing."
Live performances
"Jenny from the Block" was performed at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards on August 20, 2018. The song was performed by Lopez during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Impact
"Jenny from the Block" is considered one of Lopez's signature songs and most iconic single. The lyrical content of country artist Faith Hill's 2005 song "Mississippi Girl" was considered to be influenced by the song, with Rolling Stone describing it as "country music's version" of the single; Billboard called it "a countrified 'Jenny from the Block'". Other songs that were noted to have followed the theme of "Jenny from the Block" were Gwen Stefani's "Orange County Girl" and Fergie's "Glamorous".
Mexican-American recording artist Becky G recorded a cover version of the song, entitled "Becky from the Block". The song's accompanying music video was shot in Inglewood, California. Lopez made a cameo appearance towards the end of the music video. The lyrics of this version are significantly different from the original. Entertainment Tonight described the version to have "give[n] Jenny's NY-based tune a West Coast slant". Australian rapper Iggy Azalea referenced the song in her verse from Lopez's 2014 song "Booty", stating: "The last time the world seen a booty this good, it was on Jenny from the block." In her 2018 single, "Dinero" featuring DJ Khaled, American rapper Cardi B ends her verse by referencing rapper's and Lopez's beginnings: "Two bad bitches that came from the Bronx, Cardi from the pole and Jenny from the block". Rapper Drake, who Lopez was believed to have been romantically involved with in the past, references her and the song in his 2018 single "In My Feelings", stating: "From the block like you Jenny/ I know you special, girl, 'cause I know too many."
Ben Affleck's appearance in the song's music video became notorious, having been released at the peak of the couple's "frenzied" tabloid coverage. Paper magazine wrote: "Love makes people do crazy things, and that's our only explanation for this." Their relationship received widespread media coverage. They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They broke up in January 2004. Lopez later described the split as her "first real heartbreak" and attributed it in part to Affleck's discomfort with the media scrutiny. During an interview in 2008, Affleck stated that he nearly "ruined" his career by starring in the clip, "If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I've moved on." He also stated: "It not only makes me look like a petulant fool (to blame Lopez), but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly? For the record, did she hurt my career? No." In response, Latina magazine wrote: "Riiiigght. So it wasn't a string of bad movies starting with Reindeer Games in 2000 and a general lack of on-screen appeal that ruined your career, right Ben? It was a music video. What else can we blame on a music video? Global warming?" Following Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony, she was reportedly attempting to have the music video blocked from television networks such as VH1 and MTV.
In the past decade since the song's release, Lopez has been nicknamed "Jenny from The Block" in the media, a name news reporters and journalists often use. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards in 2011, comedian Ricky Gervais referenced the song: "She's just Jenny from the block. If the block in question is that one on Rodeo Drive between Cartier and Prada." In October 2015, a video clip filmed in Afghanistan years ago surfaced online of two U.S. Marines singing "Jenny from the Block" moments before being fired at by the Taliban.
Track listings
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
Cover versions
Becky G ("Becky from the Block")
Becky G released a cover version of the song with rewritten lyrics, titled "Becky from the Block" with Gomez rap-singing about her life before fame. Lopez appeared in Gomez's music video for the song, which has over 82 million views on YouTube as of February 2021. The song is Gomez's official debut single, and third overall after three collaborations.
Track listing
References
External links
2002 singles
American hip hop songs
Canadian Singles Chart number-one singles
Number-one singles in Hungary
Number-one singles in Poland
Jadakiss songs
Jennifer Lopez songs
Music videos directed by Francis Lawrence
Sampling controversies
Songs written by Jennifer Lopez
Songs written by Troy Oliver
Songs written by Andre Deyo
Styles P songs
Songs written by Fernando Arbex
Songs written by Samuel Barnes (songwriter)
Song recordings produced by Cory Rooney
2002 songs
Songs written by Jean-Claude Olivier
Songs about musicians
Songs about celebrities
Cultural depictions of musicians | true | [
"Young Love is the third studio album by Irish pop duo Jedward. The album was released on 22 June 2012. In January 2012, Jedward began recording material for their third studio album, including their 2012 Eurovision Song Contest entry \"Waterline\". This recording was done at Wendy House Productions, in West London. The rest of the album was recorded in March at a studio in Sweden. Young Love is a concept album recounting the story of a relationship, from its beginning to end. In 2012 the album was given Gold certification in Ireland.\n\nSingles\n \"Waterline\" was released as the album's lead single on 24 February 2012. It also served as the duo's entry for Ireland in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest. The song premiered on 9 February 2012 to positive reception. \"Waterline\" was not formally named as a track of Young Love until May. The single has two music videos - one produced by RTÉ, using footage of Jedward's Eurosong experience, and a second, filmed by John and Edward themselves, whilst on holiday in Tokyo, which serves as the official video.\n \"Young Love\" was released as the album's second single on 15 June 2012. A music video for the track premiered on 13 June, having been filmed in the Olympia theatre in Dublin, Ireland. The single received a digital release only.\n \"Luminous\" was released as the album's third single on 12 October 2012, having been announced for released as a single on 27 June. The music video was funded and filmed by the duo's record label, Universal Music Ireland, and was directed by Alex Grazioli, with a science-fiction and fantasy theme. The single was released worldwide across the week beginning on October 15, 2012.\n\nMusic videos\nAs well as videos for the album's three singles, John and Edward have also released music videos for other tracks from the album.\n\n In April 2012, the duo uploaded home made video previews of several album tracks to their YouTube account. These included the title track \"Young Love\", \"What's Your Number\", \"Happens In the Dark\", \"POV\", \"Can't Forget You\" and \"Luminous\".\n \"A Girl Like You\" was accompanied by a music video in June 2012, which the twins filmed themselves while working in Orlando, Florida. The video features the duo skateboarding and buying snacks and drinks from local convenience shops.\n \"How Did You Know\" was accompanied by a music video in October 2012, which the twins filmed themselves in St-Tropez, France. The video was filmed over the course of three days, and makes use of a multi-camera lens operation.\n The \"Happens in the Dark\" video premiered in March 2013, having been filmed by the duo themselves. The video was filmed in January 2013 in Toronto, Canada. The twins then previewed a clip from the video on MuchMusic. The video features the duo arriving and performing at a local house party.\n The \"What's Your Number\" video premiered in April 2013 on Channel V Australia. It was filmed earlier in the month in New York City and features the twins walking around Brooklyn, Coney Island and travelling in a subway car.\n A video for \"P.O.V\" was released online in May 2013. Filmed in Madame Tussaud's in Sydney in April, the video has the twins dancing and singing along with their song.\n The \"Can't Forget You\" video was released in November 2013. It was filmed in California and features locations in and around El Mirage Lake, previously used in for the Backstreet Boys' \"Incomplete\" and Demi Lovato's \"Skyscraper\" music videos.\n\nTrack listing\n\nChart performance\nThe album debuted at number one on the Irish Albums Chart, thus becoming the twins' third consecutive album to debut at the top spot of their home country's album chart. Despite minimal promotion outside Ireland, the album debuted at number 63 on the United Kingdom Albums Chart, with sales of 2,241 copies in the country during its first week of release. The album also charted at number eight on the Estonian album charts.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nJedward albums\nUniversal Music Group albums\n2012 albums",
"Everything Dies is a single by American gothic metal band Type O Negative from their fall 1999 release World Coming Down. It was a successful single for the band making #37 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks.\n\nMusic video\nA music video was filmed for the song, featuring the band and singer Peter Steele in various settings, as well as footage of a family having dinner with the members of the family slowly fading away. In the end of the music video, Peter Steele goes underwater, possibly drowning himself. Part of the video was filmed in a shipyard where Steele's father - who died a few years before the album was recorded - used to work.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Type O Negative Everything Dies Official video YouTube\n\n1999 singles\n1999 songs\nType O Negative songs\nSongs in memory of deceased persons\nSongs written by Peter Steele\nRoadrunner Records singles"
] |
[
"Jenny from the Block",
"Music video",
"Who directed the video?",
"The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence.",
"What was the video about?",
"The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck.",
"Where was the video filmed?",
"The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA"
] | C_5f7088f923384c43a1f1a151978e4523_0 | What are some of the video scenes? | 4 | What are some of the Jenny from the Block video scenes? | Jenny from the Block | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18-20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002. The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool. Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing." CANNOTANSWER | begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. | "Jenny from the Block" is a song by American singer Jennifer Lopez, which features American rappers Jadakiss and Styles P, both members of The LOX. It was released by Epic Records on September 26, 2002, as the lead single from her third studio album This Is Me... Then (2002). The song, first leaked online, was written by Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Rooney and Oliver, along with Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, produced the song.
"Jenny from the Block" is a R&B and old school hip hop song, which lyrically is about Lopez’s desire, despite her level of fame and fortune, to remain humble and true to her roots in The Bronx. The song was noted by critics for using a large amount of musical samples from songs such as 20th Century Steel Band's song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth" (1975) and Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987), and "Hi-Jack" by Enoch Light.
While some critics praised the song and theme, others disregarded the lyrics as "silly" and "laughable". Despite this, the song became a commercial success, topping the charts in Canada, reaching number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and charting within the top ten of several major music markets. The song's music video also caused controversy. It featured Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Ben Affleck, who later credited the video with nearly "ruining his career", in several raunchy scenes through the paparazzi's point of view. The song has been referenced in popular culture and since its release, Lopez has been referred to as "Jenny from the Block" in the media.
Background and release
This Is Me... Then was released in November 2002. However, "Jenny from the Block" featuring rappers Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX was leaked by a pop station in Hartford, Connecticut, and later distributed to other stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. In response, Lopez and Epic Records pushed forward the album's release date to November 26. Unlike her previous studio albums: On the 6 (1999) and J.Lo (2001), Lopez had a more "hands-on" role on This Is Me... Then. The album also had more of an adult-R&B sound. Musically, majority of the songs on This Is Me... Then were lyrically "dedicated" to her relationship with then-fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. The Age newspaper said the album was a "declaration" of love for Affleck. During an interview, Lopez said "I wrote a lot of songs inspired, in a way, by what I was going through at the time that this album was being made, and he [Affleck] was definitely a big part of that." Several critics highlighted that the album showed how "smitten" she was, and that the content was borderline "annoying".
During the production of the album, Affleck and Lopez were a prominent super couple in the media, and were dubbed "Bennifer". Lopez stated "We try to make the best of it I'm not saying there's not times that we wish [we] could just be going to the movies and come out and there's not a crowd there waiting. You just want to spend your Sunday afternoon not working, but at the same time we both love what we do. If that's something that's part of it, then that's fine. We feel the love and we're very happy about it." The overexposure from the media and public interest in their relationship resulted in less admiration for their work and negatively affected their careers, in particular affecting the video for "Jenny from the Block".
Production and lyrics
"Jenny from the Block" is an uptempo R&B and old school hip hop song. It was produced by Troy Oliver, written by Andre Deyo, remixed by Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier, and contained samples by Enoch Light, Lawrence Parker, Scott Sterling and Michael Oliver. Trackmasters produced the song alongside Oliver and Cory Rooney. The song "intones her modest childhood roots", with Lopez singing in the chorus: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the Block / Used to have a little now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from". She implores the listener not to be fooled by the types of rocks that she now possesses, because she is still Jennifer from the same block. She now owns many rocks and despite this, she still knows where she comes from. At the start of her career, J.Lo's first big break was as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block.
"Jenny from the Block" samples a number of songs. The opening line of the track, "Children grow and women producing, men go working, some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living", is derived from 20th Century Steel Band's 1975 song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth". It also contains an interpolation of Enoch Light's "Hi-Jack" (1975), and samples Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987). Trackmasters allegedly incorporated the sample of The Beatnuts' song "Watch Out Now" from their album A Musical Massacre (1999), which also sampled "Hi-Jack", on the track. Believing Lopez and the song's producers had stolen their sample of "Hi-Jack" without consent, they subsequently insulted Lopez on the song "Confused Rappers", from their album Milk Me (2004). The group said: "Anybody familiar with our music who heard Jenny From The Block knew it was a Beatnuts beat. There’s no getting around it. That’s a straight-up bite. It’s the same drums, the same flute, the same tempo... everything is our idea. If we never flipped that sample, there would be no Jenny From The Block."
Critical response
"Jenny from the Block" generated a polarized reception among music critics and pop music fans, with some applauding it as a "strong self statement" and homage to Lopez's roots, and others dismissing it as "silly". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine called the song "infectious", but noted that it is "more like a disease than a chunky casserole". Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly was favorable, writing: "Lopez insists that fame hasn't changed her, and seduced by the breezy pleasure of her new music, we're almost inclined to believe her". Arion Berger of Rolling Stone opined that the song "is worth listening to — its windup/wind-down chorus is as sly and curvy as Lopez". On a list of "17 of the Best Songs About NYC", Time magazine placed "Jenny from the Block" at number twelve. Complex magazine praised the inclusion of the "South Bronx" sample, writing: "After becoming a full-blown superstar whose entire life was different in every way, J. Lo was still trying to convince us she was "real" and still the same old girl from the block. What better way to connect to her roots musically than to put on for her hometown with the greatest Bronx anthem ever put to wax, BDP's "South Bronx"?"
Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the song an unfavorable review, calling it "silly" and describing the lyrics as "laughable". James Poletti of Yahoo! Music was also negative, calling it "agonizing" and a "cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture". Writing for The Village Voice, Jon Caramanica was highly unfavorable of "Jenny from the Block", stating that "Jenny aims to fast-talk herself into authenticity". AOL Radio deemed it one of the "100 Worst Songs Ever" in 2010, remarking: "Yup, just your average girl, willing to risk a national TV gig over the size of her 'dressing-room compound.'" In a countdown of "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever", VH1 and Blender ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number thirty-three. Her Campus included the song on a list of "15 Songs We're Embarrassed to Still Know All the Lyrics To". In a television special titled The 100 Most Annoying Pop Songs...We Hate To Love, BBC ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number one-hundred. On a similar special for Channel 4 titled The 100 Worst Pop Records, the song was named the tenth worst song ever. Amy Sciarretto of PopCrush observed in 2012: "'Jenny From the Block' is quite a polarizing track (...) Either you love the 'J. Lo' tune because it's boastful and oozes confidence or you hate it because it's cheesy and makes use of flutes."
Chart performance
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Jenny from the Block" debuted at number 67 for the week of October 12, 2002. By its third week on the Hot 100, the song had propelled to the top twenty, reaching number 17. For the Billboard issue dated November 23, 2002, it entered the top ten of the Hot 100, jumping to number eight. It also reached the top ten of the Hot 100 Airplay chart, at number nine. The following week, the song continued climbing the Hot 100, moving to number six, while also reaching the top five of the Hot 100 Airplay chart.
By December 14, it peaked at three on the Hot 100, where it remained for three weeks, and also jumped to three on the Airplay chart. Three weeks later, on December 28, "Jenny from the Block" remained stalling at three on the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart. For three weeks it had been blocked from the top spot of both charts by Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Missy Elliott's "Work It". It peaked at two on the US Mainstream Top 40 Pop Songs and 22 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
In Australia, "Jenny from the Block" made its debut inside the top ten at number eight on December 1, 2002. On January 5, 2003, it moved to its peak of five, where it remained for two weeks, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. The song peaked atop the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, becoming her third number-one there following "If You Had My Love" (1999) and "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (2001). In Italy, it debuted at its peak of number four on December 21, and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks, all of which it remained in the top ten for; exiting on March 6, 2003. In New Zealand, it debuted at 49 on November 11, 2002; it peaked at number six on December 8 and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold by RIANZ for sales of 7,500 copies. It peaked at number two in Spain on December 24, 2002.
In the United Kingdom it peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming her ninth top-ten hit in Britain, as well as her fourth song to peak at three. In April 2020, the song was certified gold for shipments of over 400,000 copies in the country, her third after If You Had My Love and Get Right.
In Norway, the song debuted at number six and peaked at five. It has been certified Platinum there for sales of 10,000 copies.
Music video
The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18–20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002.
The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool.
Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing."
Live performances
"Jenny from the Block" was performed at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards on August 20, 2018. The song was performed by Lopez during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Impact
"Jenny from the Block" is considered one of Lopez's signature songs and most iconic single. The lyrical content of country artist Faith Hill's 2005 song "Mississippi Girl" was considered to be influenced by the song, with Rolling Stone describing it as "country music's version" of the single; Billboard called it "a countrified 'Jenny from the Block'". Other songs that were noted to have followed the theme of "Jenny from the Block" were Gwen Stefani's "Orange County Girl" and Fergie's "Glamorous".
Mexican-American recording artist Becky G recorded a cover version of the song, entitled "Becky from the Block". The song's accompanying music video was shot in Inglewood, California. Lopez made a cameo appearance towards the end of the music video. The lyrics of this version are significantly different from the original. Entertainment Tonight described the version to have "give[n] Jenny's NY-based tune a West Coast slant". Australian rapper Iggy Azalea referenced the song in her verse from Lopez's 2014 song "Booty", stating: "The last time the world seen a booty this good, it was on Jenny from the block." In her 2018 single, "Dinero" featuring DJ Khaled, American rapper Cardi B ends her verse by referencing rapper's and Lopez's beginnings: "Two bad bitches that came from the Bronx, Cardi from the pole and Jenny from the block". Rapper Drake, who Lopez was believed to have been romantically involved with in the past, references her and the song in his 2018 single "In My Feelings", stating: "From the block like you Jenny/ I know you special, girl, 'cause I know too many."
Ben Affleck's appearance in the song's music video became notorious, having been released at the peak of the couple's "frenzied" tabloid coverage. Paper magazine wrote: "Love makes people do crazy things, and that's our only explanation for this." Their relationship received widespread media coverage. They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They broke up in January 2004. Lopez later described the split as her "first real heartbreak" and attributed it in part to Affleck's discomfort with the media scrutiny. During an interview in 2008, Affleck stated that he nearly "ruined" his career by starring in the clip, "If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I've moved on." He also stated: "It not only makes me look like a petulant fool (to blame Lopez), but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly? For the record, did she hurt my career? No." In response, Latina magazine wrote: "Riiiigght. So it wasn't a string of bad movies starting with Reindeer Games in 2000 and a general lack of on-screen appeal that ruined your career, right Ben? It was a music video. What else can we blame on a music video? Global warming?" Following Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony, she was reportedly attempting to have the music video blocked from television networks such as VH1 and MTV.
In the past decade since the song's release, Lopez has been nicknamed "Jenny from The Block" in the media, a name news reporters and journalists often use. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards in 2011, comedian Ricky Gervais referenced the song: "She's just Jenny from the block. If the block in question is that one on Rodeo Drive between Cartier and Prada." In October 2015, a video clip filmed in Afghanistan years ago surfaced online of two U.S. Marines singing "Jenny from the Block" moments before being fired at by the Taliban.
Track listings
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
Cover versions
Becky G ("Becky from the Block")
Becky G released a cover version of the song with rewritten lyrics, titled "Becky from the Block" with Gomez rap-singing about her life before fame. Lopez appeared in Gomez's music video for the song, which has over 82 million views on YouTube as of February 2021. The song is Gomez's official debut single, and third overall after three collaborations.
Track listing
References
External links
2002 singles
American hip hop songs
Canadian Singles Chart number-one singles
Number-one singles in Hungary
Number-one singles in Poland
Jadakiss songs
Jennifer Lopez songs
Music videos directed by Francis Lawrence
Sampling controversies
Songs written by Jennifer Lopez
Songs written by Troy Oliver
Songs written by Andre Deyo
Styles P songs
Songs written by Fernando Arbex
Songs written by Samuel Barnes (songwriter)
Song recordings produced by Cory Rooney
2002 songs
Songs written by Jean-Claude Olivier
Songs about musicians
Songs about celebrities
Cultural depictions of musicians | true | [
"Big Ones You Can Look At is a VHS and Laserdisc featuring music videos by the American band Aerosmith. It was released on November 1, 1994. In addition, there are outtakes and band interviews. Running time is 100 minutes. The suggestive title comes from – and is a companion to – the 1994 compilation album Big Ones.\n\nA DVD release (out of print, unknown if official or not) was released in Brazil with Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo and 5.1 Surround sound tracks and quality better than the VHS and Laserdisc releases.\n\nSome scenes from the Pump era were culled from the band's previous video compilation The Making of Pump. Along with the band members, various individuals make cameo appearances during the outtakes and making-of segments, including Marty Callner, John Kalodner, and Hank Azaria. The behind the scenes segment for \"Eat the Rich\" includes the band's collaboration with Melvin Liufau, Wesey Mamea, Liainaiala Tagaloa, Mapuhi T. Tekurio, and Aladd Alationa Teofilo, playing the log drums.\n\nAmong the notable actors appearing in the videos include: Alicia Silverstone, Liv Tyler, Edward Furlong, Stephen Dorff, Josh Holloway, Jason London, Brandi Brandt, Kristin Dattilo, Lesley Ann Warren, and Nicholas Guest.\n\nTrack listing \nOpening/meet the band\nOfficial video: \"Deuces Are Wild\"\nThe making of the \"Livin' on the Edge\" video\nOfficial video: \"Livin' on the Edge\"\nBehind the scenes during the recording of \"Eat the Rich\"\nOfficial video: Eat the Rich\"\nThe making of the \"Cryin'\" video\nOfficial video: \"Cryin'\"\nThe making of the \"Amazing\" video\nOfficial video: \"Amazing\"\nThe making of the \"Crazy\" video\nOfficial video: \"Crazy\" (Director's cut)\nBehind the scenes during the recording of \"Love in an Elevator\"\nOfficial video: \"Love in an Elevator\"\nBehind the scenes during the recording of \"Janie's Got a Gun\"\nOfficial video: \"Water Song/Janie's Got a Gun\"\nOfficial studio video: \"What It Takes (The Recording Of)\"\nOuttakes - On tour\nOfficial video: \"Dulcimer Stomp/The Other Side\"\nOuttakes - Photo session\nOfficial video: \"Dude (Looks Like a Lady)\"\nBehind the scenes at the recording of The Simpsons (\"Flaming Moe's\" episode)\nOfficial video: \"Angel\"\nOuttakes - Men of the world\nOfficial video: \"Rag Doll\" (Video)\nOuttakes/End credits\n\nWorks cited\nBig Ones You Can Look At - VHS, 1994\nDiscogs - Big Ones You Can Look At\n\nAerosmith video albums\n1994 video albums\nMusic video compilation albums\n1994 compilation albums\nAerosmith compilation albums\nGeffen Records video albums",
"\"Grand Unification Part 1\" is the second single from the Fightstar album Grand Unification. There are two videos to this song. One of the videos is a mixture of Fightstar playing in a, what would seem to be some sort of cave or room, as well as scenes from Dragonball Z. The second video is the band playing in the same sort of cave/room but without the Dragonball Z scenes. It has since been revealed that the location used was the same as that used by The Prodigy in the controversial video for their song Firestarter, and this has been interpreted as a tribute on the part of Fightstar to The Prodigy.\n\nMuch like Paint Your Target, there are 2 recorded versions of Grand Unification Part 1. One, recorded by Chris Sheldon, was released as a single and appeared on the Dragonball Z version of the video. The other version, which appears on Grand Unification, was recorded by Colin Richardson and appeared on the video without the Dragonball Z scenes.\n\nTrack listing \nCD\n \"Grand Unification Pt. 1\"\n \"The Days I Recall Being Wonderful\" (Last Days of April Cover)\n \"Waste A Moment\" (Acoustic)\n\n7\" Vinyl:\n \"Grand Unification Pt. 1\"\n \"Palahniuk's Laughter\" (Live)\n\n \nDVD\n \"Grand Unification Pt. 1\" (Video)\n \"Take You Home\"\n 10 minutes of Japan footage\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n2005 singles\nFightstar songs\nSongs written by Alex Westaway\nSongs written by Charlie Simpson\n2005 songs"
] |
[
"Jenny from the Block",
"Music video",
"Who directed the video?",
"The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence.",
"What was the video about?",
"The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck.",
"Where was the video filmed?",
"The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA",
"What are some of the video scenes?",
"begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment."
] | C_5f7088f923384c43a1f1a151978e4523_0 | How was it reviewed by critics? | 5 | How was the Jenny from the Block video reviewed by critics? | Jenny from the Block | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18-20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002. The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool. Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing." CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | "Jenny from the Block" is a song by American singer Jennifer Lopez, which features American rappers Jadakiss and Styles P, both members of The LOX. It was released by Epic Records on September 26, 2002, as the lead single from her third studio album This Is Me... Then (2002). The song, first leaked online, was written by Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Rooney and Oliver, along with Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, produced the song.
"Jenny from the Block" is a R&B and old school hip hop song, which lyrically is about Lopez’s desire, despite her level of fame and fortune, to remain humble and true to her roots in The Bronx. The song was noted by critics for using a large amount of musical samples from songs such as 20th Century Steel Band's song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth" (1975) and Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987), and "Hi-Jack" by Enoch Light.
While some critics praised the song and theme, others disregarded the lyrics as "silly" and "laughable". Despite this, the song became a commercial success, topping the charts in Canada, reaching number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and charting within the top ten of several major music markets. The song's music video also caused controversy. It featured Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Ben Affleck, who later credited the video with nearly "ruining his career", in several raunchy scenes through the paparazzi's point of view. The song has been referenced in popular culture and since its release, Lopez has been referred to as "Jenny from the Block" in the media.
Background and release
This Is Me... Then was released in November 2002. However, "Jenny from the Block" featuring rappers Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX was leaked by a pop station in Hartford, Connecticut, and later distributed to other stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. In response, Lopez and Epic Records pushed forward the album's release date to November 26. Unlike her previous studio albums: On the 6 (1999) and J.Lo (2001), Lopez had a more "hands-on" role on This Is Me... Then. The album also had more of an adult-R&B sound. Musically, majority of the songs on This Is Me... Then were lyrically "dedicated" to her relationship with then-fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. The Age newspaper said the album was a "declaration" of love for Affleck. During an interview, Lopez said "I wrote a lot of songs inspired, in a way, by what I was going through at the time that this album was being made, and he [Affleck] was definitely a big part of that." Several critics highlighted that the album showed how "smitten" she was, and that the content was borderline "annoying".
During the production of the album, Affleck and Lopez were a prominent super couple in the media, and were dubbed "Bennifer". Lopez stated "We try to make the best of it I'm not saying there's not times that we wish [we] could just be going to the movies and come out and there's not a crowd there waiting. You just want to spend your Sunday afternoon not working, but at the same time we both love what we do. If that's something that's part of it, then that's fine. We feel the love and we're very happy about it." The overexposure from the media and public interest in their relationship resulted in less admiration for their work and negatively affected their careers, in particular affecting the video for "Jenny from the Block".
Production and lyrics
"Jenny from the Block" is an uptempo R&B and old school hip hop song. It was produced by Troy Oliver, written by Andre Deyo, remixed by Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier, and contained samples by Enoch Light, Lawrence Parker, Scott Sterling and Michael Oliver. Trackmasters produced the song alongside Oliver and Cory Rooney. The song "intones her modest childhood roots", with Lopez singing in the chorus: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the Block / Used to have a little now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from". She implores the listener not to be fooled by the types of rocks that she now possesses, because she is still Jennifer from the same block. She now owns many rocks and despite this, she still knows where she comes from. At the start of her career, J.Lo's first big break was as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block.
"Jenny from the Block" samples a number of songs. The opening line of the track, "Children grow and women producing, men go working, some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living", is derived from 20th Century Steel Band's 1975 song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth". It also contains an interpolation of Enoch Light's "Hi-Jack" (1975), and samples Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987). Trackmasters allegedly incorporated the sample of The Beatnuts' song "Watch Out Now" from their album A Musical Massacre (1999), which also sampled "Hi-Jack", on the track. Believing Lopez and the song's producers had stolen their sample of "Hi-Jack" without consent, they subsequently insulted Lopez on the song "Confused Rappers", from their album Milk Me (2004). The group said: "Anybody familiar with our music who heard Jenny From The Block knew it was a Beatnuts beat. There’s no getting around it. That’s a straight-up bite. It’s the same drums, the same flute, the same tempo... everything is our idea. If we never flipped that sample, there would be no Jenny From The Block."
Critical response
"Jenny from the Block" generated a polarized reception among music critics and pop music fans, with some applauding it as a "strong self statement" and homage to Lopez's roots, and others dismissing it as "silly". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine called the song "infectious", but noted that it is "more like a disease than a chunky casserole". Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly was favorable, writing: "Lopez insists that fame hasn't changed her, and seduced by the breezy pleasure of her new music, we're almost inclined to believe her". Arion Berger of Rolling Stone opined that the song "is worth listening to — its windup/wind-down chorus is as sly and curvy as Lopez". On a list of "17 of the Best Songs About NYC", Time magazine placed "Jenny from the Block" at number twelve. Complex magazine praised the inclusion of the "South Bronx" sample, writing: "After becoming a full-blown superstar whose entire life was different in every way, J. Lo was still trying to convince us she was "real" and still the same old girl from the block. What better way to connect to her roots musically than to put on for her hometown with the greatest Bronx anthem ever put to wax, BDP's "South Bronx"?"
Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the song an unfavorable review, calling it "silly" and describing the lyrics as "laughable". James Poletti of Yahoo! Music was also negative, calling it "agonizing" and a "cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture". Writing for The Village Voice, Jon Caramanica was highly unfavorable of "Jenny from the Block", stating that "Jenny aims to fast-talk herself into authenticity". AOL Radio deemed it one of the "100 Worst Songs Ever" in 2010, remarking: "Yup, just your average girl, willing to risk a national TV gig over the size of her 'dressing-room compound.'" In a countdown of "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever", VH1 and Blender ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number thirty-three. Her Campus included the song on a list of "15 Songs We're Embarrassed to Still Know All the Lyrics To". In a television special titled The 100 Most Annoying Pop Songs...We Hate To Love, BBC ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number one-hundred. On a similar special for Channel 4 titled The 100 Worst Pop Records, the song was named the tenth worst song ever. Amy Sciarretto of PopCrush observed in 2012: "'Jenny From the Block' is quite a polarizing track (...) Either you love the 'J. Lo' tune because it's boastful and oozes confidence or you hate it because it's cheesy and makes use of flutes."
Chart performance
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Jenny from the Block" debuted at number 67 for the week of October 12, 2002. By its third week on the Hot 100, the song had propelled to the top twenty, reaching number 17. For the Billboard issue dated November 23, 2002, it entered the top ten of the Hot 100, jumping to number eight. It also reached the top ten of the Hot 100 Airplay chart, at number nine. The following week, the song continued climbing the Hot 100, moving to number six, while also reaching the top five of the Hot 100 Airplay chart.
By December 14, it peaked at three on the Hot 100, where it remained for three weeks, and also jumped to three on the Airplay chart. Three weeks later, on December 28, "Jenny from the Block" remained stalling at three on the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart. For three weeks it had been blocked from the top spot of both charts by Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Missy Elliott's "Work It". It peaked at two on the US Mainstream Top 40 Pop Songs and 22 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
In Australia, "Jenny from the Block" made its debut inside the top ten at number eight on December 1, 2002. On January 5, 2003, it moved to its peak of five, where it remained for two weeks, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. The song peaked atop the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, becoming her third number-one there following "If You Had My Love" (1999) and "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (2001). In Italy, it debuted at its peak of number four on December 21, and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks, all of which it remained in the top ten for; exiting on March 6, 2003. In New Zealand, it debuted at 49 on November 11, 2002; it peaked at number six on December 8 and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold by RIANZ for sales of 7,500 copies. It peaked at number two in Spain on December 24, 2002.
In the United Kingdom it peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming her ninth top-ten hit in Britain, as well as her fourth song to peak at three. In April 2020, the song was certified gold for shipments of over 400,000 copies in the country, her third after If You Had My Love and Get Right.
In Norway, the song debuted at number six and peaked at five. It has been certified Platinum there for sales of 10,000 copies.
Music video
The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18–20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002.
The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool.
Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing."
Live performances
"Jenny from the Block" was performed at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards on August 20, 2018. The song was performed by Lopez during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Impact
"Jenny from the Block" is considered one of Lopez's signature songs and most iconic single. The lyrical content of country artist Faith Hill's 2005 song "Mississippi Girl" was considered to be influenced by the song, with Rolling Stone describing it as "country music's version" of the single; Billboard called it "a countrified 'Jenny from the Block'". Other songs that were noted to have followed the theme of "Jenny from the Block" were Gwen Stefani's "Orange County Girl" and Fergie's "Glamorous".
Mexican-American recording artist Becky G recorded a cover version of the song, entitled "Becky from the Block". The song's accompanying music video was shot in Inglewood, California. Lopez made a cameo appearance towards the end of the music video. The lyrics of this version are significantly different from the original. Entertainment Tonight described the version to have "give[n] Jenny's NY-based tune a West Coast slant". Australian rapper Iggy Azalea referenced the song in her verse from Lopez's 2014 song "Booty", stating: "The last time the world seen a booty this good, it was on Jenny from the block." In her 2018 single, "Dinero" featuring DJ Khaled, American rapper Cardi B ends her verse by referencing rapper's and Lopez's beginnings: "Two bad bitches that came from the Bronx, Cardi from the pole and Jenny from the block". Rapper Drake, who Lopez was believed to have been romantically involved with in the past, references her and the song in his 2018 single "In My Feelings", stating: "From the block like you Jenny/ I know you special, girl, 'cause I know too many."
Ben Affleck's appearance in the song's music video became notorious, having been released at the peak of the couple's "frenzied" tabloid coverage. Paper magazine wrote: "Love makes people do crazy things, and that's our only explanation for this." Their relationship received widespread media coverage. They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They broke up in January 2004. Lopez later described the split as her "first real heartbreak" and attributed it in part to Affleck's discomfort with the media scrutiny. During an interview in 2008, Affleck stated that he nearly "ruined" his career by starring in the clip, "If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I've moved on." He also stated: "It not only makes me look like a petulant fool (to blame Lopez), but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly? For the record, did she hurt my career? No." In response, Latina magazine wrote: "Riiiigght. So it wasn't a string of bad movies starting with Reindeer Games in 2000 and a general lack of on-screen appeal that ruined your career, right Ben? It was a music video. What else can we blame on a music video? Global warming?" Following Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony, she was reportedly attempting to have the music video blocked from television networks such as VH1 and MTV.
In the past decade since the song's release, Lopez has been nicknamed "Jenny from The Block" in the media, a name news reporters and journalists often use. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards in 2011, comedian Ricky Gervais referenced the song: "She's just Jenny from the block. If the block in question is that one on Rodeo Drive between Cartier and Prada." In October 2015, a video clip filmed in Afghanistan years ago surfaced online of two U.S. Marines singing "Jenny from the Block" moments before being fired at by the Taliban.
Track listings
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
Cover versions
Becky G ("Becky from the Block")
Becky G released a cover version of the song with rewritten lyrics, titled "Becky from the Block" with Gomez rap-singing about her life before fame. Lopez appeared in Gomez's music video for the song, which has over 82 million views on YouTube as of February 2021. The song is Gomez's official debut single, and third overall after three collaborations.
Track listing
References
External links
2002 singles
American hip hop songs
Canadian Singles Chart number-one singles
Number-one singles in Hungary
Number-one singles in Poland
Jadakiss songs
Jennifer Lopez songs
Music videos directed by Francis Lawrence
Sampling controversies
Songs written by Jennifer Lopez
Songs written by Troy Oliver
Songs written by Andre Deyo
Styles P songs
Songs written by Fernando Arbex
Songs written by Samuel Barnes (songwriter)
Song recordings produced by Cory Rooney
2002 songs
Songs written by Jean-Claude Olivier
Songs about musicians
Songs about celebrities
Cultural depictions of musicians | false | [
"The Holocaust Kid is a semi-autobiographical novel by Sonia Pilcer.\n\nPlot summary\nThe book has fifteen stories that is loosely based on the life of author Sonia Pilcer. Zosha Palovsky, who prefers to call herself Zoe, was born in Europe in a camp for DPs. She moved to New York City with her parents, Genia and Heniek, when she was a toddler. Zoe reconciles her dreams with her parents' experiences. The first story called Do You Deserve To Lie is narrated by Zoe who works for a movie magazine and does things that her parents doesn't appreciate. Two stories tell about how Genia was saved from the gas chambers and how she met Heniek after the war. In another story, it talks about how Heniek escaped from Auschwitz. Other stories have to do with Zoe appreciating her parents more, marrying, and going on vacation with her parents.\n\nReception\nIt was reviewed by Kirkus Reviews.\nIt was reviewed by Publishers Weekly.\nIt was reviewed by Booklist.\n\nReferences\n\n2002 American novels\nPersonal accounts of the Holocaust\nAmerican autobiographical novels",
"Elizabeth Moody (1737 Kingston upon Thames - 1814) was a British poet, and literary critic.\n\nLife\nElizabeth Greenly was the daughter of a wealthy lawyer, who died when she was 13, but left a legacy for her family. \nA book-lover from an early age, she was well read in English, French, and Italian literature. \nFor many years she privately circulated verse in a circle that included Edward Lovibond and George Hardinge. \nShe remained unmarried until the age of 40 when, in 1777, she wed the dissenting clergyman Christopher Lake Moody (1753–1915), vicar of Turnham Green.\n\nLiterary Accomplishments\nMoody reviewed books for Monthly Review, a job she likely came to through her husband, as Christopher reviewed for them as well. The Moody's were dissenting Presbyterians, as was the Monthly Review'''s editor, Ralph Griffiths, and this is how they came to know him both personally and professionally. She also reviewed books for the weekly newspaper, The St. James's Chronicle in which her husband owned a share. She and her husband also contributed poetry to the weekly St. James's Chronicle.\n\nWorks\n Poetical Trifles'', 1798, printed by H. Baldwin and Son; for T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1798\n\nAnthologies\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\"Elizabeth Moody\", Literary Encyclopedia\n\nBritish poets\nPeople from Kingston upon Thames\n1737 births\n1814 deaths\nBritish literary critics\nWomen literary critics"
] |
[
"Jenny from the Block",
"Music video",
"Who directed the video?",
"The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence.",
"What was the video about?",
"The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck.",
"Where was the video filmed?",
"The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA",
"What are some of the video scenes?",
"begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment.",
"How was it reviewed by critics?",
"I don't know."
] | C_5f7088f923384c43a1f1a151978e4523_0 | What did people think of the video? | 6 | What did people think of the Jenny from the Block video? | Jenny from the Block | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18-20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002. The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool. Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing." CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | "Jenny from the Block" is a song by American singer Jennifer Lopez, which features American rappers Jadakiss and Styles P, both members of The LOX. It was released by Epic Records on September 26, 2002, as the lead single from her third studio album This Is Me... Then (2002). The song, first leaked online, was written by Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Rooney and Oliver, along with Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, produced the song.
"Jenny from the Block" is a R&B and old school hip hop song, which lyrically is about Lopez’s desire, despite her level of fame and fortune, to remain humble and true to her roots in The Bronx. The song was noted by critics for using a large amount of musical samples from songs such as 20th Century Steel Band's song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth" (1975) and Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987), and "Hi-Jack" by Enoch Light.
While some critics praised the song and theme, others disregarded the lyrics as "silly" and "laughable". Despite this, the song became a commercial success, topping the charts in Canada, reaching number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and charting within the top ten of several major music markets. The song's music video also caused controversy. It featured Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Ben Affleck, who later credited the video with nearly "ruining his career", in several raunchy scenes through the paparazzi's point of view. The song has been referenced in popular culture and since its release, Lopez has been referred to as "Jenny from the Block" in the media.
Background and release
This Is Me... Then was released in November 2002. However, "Jenny from the Block" featuring rappers Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX was leaked by a pop station in Hartford, Connecticut, and later distributed to other stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. In response, Lopez and Epic Records pushed forward the album's release date to November 26. Unlike her previous studio albums: On the 6 (1999) and J.Lo (2001), Lopez had a more "hands-on" role on This Is Me... Then. The album also had more of an adult-R&B sound. Musically, majority of the songs on This Is Me... Then were lyrically "dedicated" to her relationship with then-fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. The Age newspaper said the album was a "declaration" of love for Affleck. During an interview, Lopez said "I wrote a lot of songs inspired, in a way, by what I was going through at the time that this album was being made, and he [Affleck] was definitely a big part of that." Several critics highlighted that the album showed how "smitten" she was, and that the content was borderline "annoying".
During the production of the album, Affleck and Lopez were a prominent super couple in the media, and were dubbed "Bennifer". Lopez stated "We try to make the best of it I'm not saying there's not times that we wish [we] could just be going to the movies and come out and there's not a crowd there waiting. You just want to spend your Sunday afternoon not working, but at the same time we both love what we do. If that's something that's part of it, then that's fine. We feel the love and we're very happy about it." The overexposure from the media and public interest in their relationship resulted in less admiration for their work and negatively affected their careers, in particular affecting the video for "Jenny from the Block".
Production and lyrics
"Jenny from the Block" is an uptempo R&B and old school hip hop song. It was produced by Troy Oliver, written by Andre Deyo, remixed by Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier, and contained samples by Enoch Light, Lawrence Parker, Scott Sterling and Michael Oliver. Trackmasters produced the song alongside Oliver and Cory Rooney. The song "intones her modest childhood roots", with Lopez singing in the chorus: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the Block / Used to have a little now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from". She implores the listener not to be fooled by the types of rocks that she now possesses, because she is still Jennifer from the same block. She now owns many rocks and despite this, she still knows where she comes from. At the start of her career, J.Lo's first big break was as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block.
"Jenny from the Block" samples a number of songs. The opening line of the track, "Children grow and women producing, men go working, some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living", is derived from 20th Century Steel Band's 1975 song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth". It also contains an interpolation of Enoch Light's "Hi-Jack" (1975), and samples Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987). Trackmasters allegedly incorporated the sample of The Beatnuts' song "Watch Out Now" from their album A Musical Massacre (1999), which also sampled "Hi-Jack", on the track. Believing Lopez and the song's producers had stolen their sample of "Hi-Jack" without consent, they subsequently insulted Lopez on the song "Confused Rappers", from their album Milk Me (2004). The group said: "Anybody familiar with our music who heard Jenny From The Block knew it was a Beatnuts beat. There’s no getting around it. That’s a straight-up bite. It’s the same drums, the same flute, the same tempo... everything is our idea. If we never flipped that sample, there would be no Jenny From The Block."
Critical response
"Jenny from the Block" generated a polarized reception among music critics and pop music fans, with some applauding it as a "strong self statement" and homage to Lopez's roots, and others dismissing it as "silly". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine called the song "infectious", but noted that it is "more like a disease than a chunky casserole". Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly was favorable, writing: "Lopez insists that fame hasn't changed her, and seduced by the breezy pleasure of her new music, we're almost inclined to believe her". Arion Berger of Rolling Stone opined that the song "is worth listening to — its windup/wind-down chorus is as sly and curvy as Lopez". On a list of "17 of the Best Songs About NYC", Time magazine placed "Jenny from the Block" at number twelve. Complex magazine praised the inclusion of the "South Bronx" sample, writing: "After becoming a full-blown superstar whose entire life was different in every way, J. Lo was still trying to convince us she was "real" and still the same old girl from the block. What better way to connect to her roots musically than to put on for her hometown with the greatest Bronx anthem ever put to wax, BDP's "South Bronx"?"
Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the song an unfavorable review, calling it "silly" and describing the lyrics as "laughable". James Poletti of Yahoo! Music was also negative, calling it "agonizing" and a "cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture". Writing for The Village Voice, Jon Caramanica was highly unfavorable of "Jenny from the Block", stating that "Jenny aims to fast-talk herself into authenticity". AOL Radio deemed it one of the "100 Worst Songs Ever" in 2010, remarking: "Yup, just your average girl, willing to risk a national TV gig over the size of her 'dressing-room compound.'" In a countdown of "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever", VH1 and Blender ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number thirty-three. Her Campus included the song on a list of "15 Songs We're Embarrassed to Still Know All the Lyrics To". In a television special titled The 100 Most Annoying Pop Songs...We Hate To Love, BBC ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number one-hundred. On a similar special for Channel 4 titled The 100 Worst Pop Records, the song was named the tenth worst song ever. Amy Sciarretto of PopCrush observed in 2012: "'Jenny From the Block' is quite a polarizing track (...) Either you love the 'J. Lo' tune because it's boastful and oozes confidence or you hate it because it's cheesy and makes use of flutes."
Chart performance
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Jenny from the Block" debuted at number 67 for the week of October 12, 2002. By its third week on the Hot 100, the song had propelled to the top twenty, reaching number 17. For the Billboard issue dated November 23, 2002, it entered the top ten of the Hot 100, jumping to number eight. It also reached the top ten of the Hot 100 Airplay chart, at number nine. The following week, the song continued climbing the Hot 100, moving to number six, while also reaching the top five of the Hot 100 Airplay chart.
By December 14, it peaked at three on the Hot 100, where it remained for three weeks, and also jumped to three on the Airplay chart. Three weeks later, on December 28, "Jenny from the Block" remained stalling at three on the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart. For three weeks it had been blocked from the top spot of both charts by Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Missy Elliott's "Work It". It peaked at two on the US Mainstream Top 40 Pop Songs and 22 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
In Australia, "Jenny from the Block" made its debut inside the top ten at number eight on December 1, 2002. On January 5, 2003, it moved to its peak of five, where it remained for two weeks, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. The song peaked atop the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, becoming her third number-one there following "If You Had My Love" (1999) and "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (2001). In Italy, it debuted at its peak of number four on December 21, and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks, all of which it remained in the top ten for; exiting on March 6, 2003. In New Zealand, it debuted at 49 on November 11, 2002; it peaked at number six on December 8 and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold by RIANZ for sales of 7,500 copies. It peaked at number two in Spain on December 24, 2002.
In the United Kingdom it peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming her ninth top-ten hit in Britain, as well as her fourth song to peak at three. In April 2020, the song was certified gold for shipments of over 400,000 copies in the country, her third after If You Had My Love and Get Right.
In Norway, the song debuted at number six and peaked at five. It has been certified Platinum there for sales of 10,000 copies.
Music video
The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18–20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002.
The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool.
Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing."
Live performances
"Jenny from the Block" was performed at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards on August 20, 2018. The song was performed by Lopez during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Impact
"Jenny from the Block" is considered one of Lopez's signature songs and most iconic single. The lyrical content of country artist Faith Hill's 2005 song "Mississippi Girl" was considered to be influenced by the song, with Rolling Stone describing it as "country music's version" of the single; Billboard called it "a countrified 'Jenny from the Block'". Other songs that were noted to have followed the theme of "Jenny from the Block" were Gwen Stefani's "Orange County Girl" and Fergie's "Glamorous".
Mexican-American recording artist Becky G recorded a cover version of the song, entitled "Becky from the Block". The song's accompanying music video was shot in Inglewood, California. Lopez made a cameo appearance towards the end of the music video. The lyrics of this version are significantly different from the original. Entertainment Tonight described the version to have "give[n] Jenny's NY-based tune a West Coast slant". Australian rapper Iggy Azalea referenced the song in her verse from Lopez's 2014 song "Booty", stating: "The last time the world seen a booty this good, it was on Jenny from the block." In her 2018 single, "Dinero" featuring DJ Khaled, American rapper Cardi B ends her verse by referencing rapper's and Lopez's beginnings: "Two bad bitches that came from the Bronx, Cardi from the pole and Jenny from the block". Rapper Drake, who Lopez was believed to have been romantically involved with in the past, references her and the song in his 2018 single "In My Feelings", stating: "From the block like you Jenny/ I know you special, girl, 'cause I know too many."
Ben Affleck's appearance in the song's music video became notorious, having been released at the peak of the couple's "frenzied" tabloid coverage. Paper magazine wrote: "Love makes people do crazy things, and that's our only explanation for this." Their relationship received widespread media coverage. They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They broke up in January 2004. Lopez later described the split as her "first real heartbreak" and attributed it in part to Affleck's discomfort with the media scrutiny. During an interview in 2008, Affleck stated that he nearly "ruined" his career by starring in the clip, "If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I've moved on." He also stated: "It not only makes me look like a petulant fool (to blame Lopez), but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly? For the record, did she hurt my career? No." In response, Latina magazine wrote: "Riiiigght. So it wasn't a string of bad movies starting with Reindeer Games in 2000 and a general lack of on-screen appeal that ruined your career, right Ben? It was a music video. What else can we blame on a music video? Global warming?" Following Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony, she was reportedly attempting to have the music video blocked from television networks such as VH1 and MTV.
In the past decade since the song's release, Lopez has been nicknamed "Jenny from The Block" in the media, a name news reporters and journalists often use. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards in 2011, comedian Ricky Gervais referenced the song: "She's just Jenny from the block. If the block in question is that one on Rodeo Drive between Cartier and Prada." In October 2015, a video clip filmed in Afghanistan years ago surfaced online of two U.S. Marines singing "Jenny from the Block" moments before being fired at by the Taliban.
Track listings
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
Cover versions
Becky G ("Becky from the Block")
Becky G released a cover version of the song with rewritten lyrics, titled "Becky from the Block" with Gomez rap-singing about her life before fame. Lopez appeared in Gomez's music video for the song, which has over 82 million views on YouTube as of February 2021. The song is Gomez's official debut single, and third overall after three collaborations.
Track listing
References
External links
2002 singles
American hip hop songs
Canadian Singles Chart number-one singles
Number-one singles in Hungary
Number-one singles in Poland
Jadakiss songs
Jennifer Lopez songs
Music videos directed by Francis Lawrence
Sampling controversies
Songs written by Jennifer Lopez
Songs written by Troy Oliver
Songs written by Andre Deyo
Styles P songs
Songs written by Fernando Arbex
Songs written by Samuel Barnes (songwriter)
Song recordings produced by Cory Rooney
2002 songs
Songs written by Jean-Claude Olivier
Songs about musicians
Songs about celebrities
Cultural depictions of musicians | false | [
"Ray Hunt (August 31, 1929 – March 12, 2009) was an American horse trainer and clinician of significant influence in the natural horsemanship field. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.\n\nNatural horsemanship\nHunt is widely regarded as one of the original proponents of what became known as natural horsemanship. His views about horse-human relations were embraced by inspirational writers about human relations. Lance Secretan wrote that \"We may respect a leader, but the ones we love are servant-leaders.\" In the beginning, Hunt said,\"I was working in the mind of a lot of people who didnt want to believe the horse had a mind. Get a bigger bit. Get a bigger stick. That was their approach.\" \n\nRay Hunt is said to be Tom Dorrance's best-known student. They met around 1960, at a fair in Elko, Nevada. While Dorrance avoided media attention and clinics, by the mid 1970s Hunt was giving clinics far and wide. Ray Hunt is famous for starting each clinic with the statement \"I'm here for the horse, to help him get a better deal.\" He also liked to say \"make the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy.\" His philosophy has been interpreted as \"If you get bucked off or kicked or bitten, you obviously did something wrong . . . The horse, on the other hand, is never wrong\".\n\nThe idea that \"the horse is never wrong\" is often misunderstood by people who think Ray was talking about the horse's behaviour, he was rather meaning the horse's reaction to human behaviour. The horse always interprets human actions in the moment, they don't think about the past or future in the way that people do. So, their reactions to what is happening in the moment is always pure, they reflect what the human did with the utmost integrity. If we want to change the horse, we should first change ourselves. As Ray said \"it's easy to change the horse, but it's hard to change the human\".\n\nRay Hunt was a mentor and teacher of Buck Brannaman.\n\nWorks\n1978 Think Harmony with Horses: An In-depth Study of Horse/man Relationship\n1992 Turning loose with Ray Hunt (video)\n1996 Colt starting with Ray Hunt (video)\n2001 The Fort Worth Benefit with Ray Hunt (video)\nBack To The Beginning (video)\nRay Hunt Appreciation Clinic: 2005 Western Horseman of the Year (video)\nRay Hunt: Cowboy Logic\n\nSee also\nTom and Bill Dorrance\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nExternal links\nOfficial website\n\nAmerican horse trainers\n1929 births\n2009 deaths",
"\"Think About You\" is a song by Australian singer-songwriter Delta Goodrem. It was released on 16 February 2018. The song debuted on the ARIA singles chart at number 32, and later peaked at number 19, becoming Goodrem's 21st top 20 hit in Australia.\n\nUpon release, Goodrem said: \"As a songwriter, I look at the message that I want to convey in a song, in this case, and after working on a number of different projects, I genuinely went into the writing session with an open mind that it didn't have to come with as much gravity in the sentiment, it just has to feel good. Every chapter of my career has been different and right now, with this song, I want people to just have fun.\"\n\nPromotion\nThe song was teased over the course of several days across Goodrem's social media accounts, with snippets of the song being paired with scenes of Goodrem moving around at a photoshoot. Goodrem also did a performance as part of Channel V's Island Parties series to promote the song. She also did a series of radio interviews on all the major commercial stations around Australia.\n\nReception\nJamie Velevski from Amnplify said \"The upbeat, seductive track puts the songstress into a new spotlight as the use of sensual sounds and soft tones throughout the background are characteristics unseen to the artists' previous work.\" Adding that \"with the team that put together Niall Horan's global hit \"Slow Hands\", there's no denying that this fresh mature sound for Delta will also make waves.\" Mike Wass from Idolator called the song \"a sexy, uptempo banger.\"\n\nMusic video\nOn February 16, Goodrem uploaded a video titled \"Think About You (The Look Book)\" to her Vevo page. It features monochrome footage of her at the photo shoot which produced the cover art for the single. As of 10 November 2019, the video has more than 711, 000 views.\n\nAnother music video was filmed in early 2018. Goodrem teased the video on her Instagram with a dance rehearsal video. The video was eventually scrapped for unknown reasons.\n\nTrack listing\nCD single / digital download \n\"Think About You\" – 3:09\n\nOlsen Remix \n\"Think About You\" – 3:29\n\nVersions single \n\"Think About You (John Gibbons Remix)\" – 3:19\n\"Think About You (Initial Talk Remix)\" – 3:35\n\"Think About You (Acoustic)\" – 4:04\n\nCharts\n\nCertifications\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2018 singles\n2018 songs\nDelta Goodrem songs\nSongs written by Delta Goodrem\nSongs written by Julian Bunetta\nSongs written by John Ryan (musician)\nSong recordings produced by Julian Bunetta"
] |
[
"Jenny from the Block",
"Music video",
"Who directed the video?",
"The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence.",
"What was the video about?",
"The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck.",
"Where was the video filmed?",
"The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA",
"What are some of the video scenes?",
"begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment.",
"How was it reviewed by critics?",
"I don't know.",
"What did people think of the video?",
"I don't know."
] | C_5f7088f923384c43a1f1a151978e4523_0 | When was the video shot? | 7 | When was the Jenny from the Block video shot? | Jenny from the Block | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18-20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002. The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool. Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing." CANNOTANSWER | from October 18-20, 2002. | "Jenny from the Block" is a song by American singer Jennifer Lopez, which features American rappers Jadakiss and Styles P, both members of The LOX. It was released by Epic Records on September 26, 2002, as the lead single from her third studio album This Is Me... Then (2002). The song, first leaked online, was written by Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Rooney and Oliver, along with Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, produced the song.
"Jenny from the Block" is a R&B and old school hip hop song, which lyrically is about Lopez’s desire, despite her level of fame and fortune, to remain humble and true to her roots in The Bronx. The song was noted by critics for using a large amount of musical samples from songs such as 20th Century Steel Band's song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth" (1975) and Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987), and "Hi-Jack" by Enoch Light.
While some critics praised the song and theme, others disregarded the lyrics as "silly" and "laughable". Despite this, the song became a commercial success, topping the charts in Canada, reaching number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and charting within the top ten of several major music markets. The song's music video also caused controversy. It featured Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Ben Affleck, who later credited the video with nearly "ruining his career", in several raunchy scenes through the paparazzi's point of view. The song has been referenced in popular culture and since its release, Lopez has been referred to as "Jenny from the Block" in the media.
Background and release
This Is Me... Then was released in November 2002. However, "Jenny from the Block" featuring rappers Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX was leaked by a pop station in Hartford, Connecticut, and later distributed to other stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. In response, Lopez and Epic Records pushed forward the album's release date to November 26. Unlike her previous studio albums: On the 6 (1999) and J.Lo (2001), Lopez had a more "hands-on" role on This Is Me... Then. The album also had more of an adult-R&B sound. Musically, majority of the songs on This Is Me... Then were lyrically "dedicated" to her relationship with then-fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. The Age newspaper said the album was a "declaration" of love for Affleck. During an interview, Lopez said "I wrote a lot of songs inspired, in a way, by what I was going through at the time that this album was being made, and he [Affleck] was definitely a big part of that." Several critics highlighted that the album showed how "smitten" she was, and that the content was borderline "annoying".
During the production of the album, Affleck and Lopez were a prominent super couple in the media, and were dubbed "Bennifer". Lopez stated "We try to make the best of it I'm not saying there's not times that we wish [we] could just be going to the movies and come out and there's not a crowd there waiting. You just want to spend your Sunday afternoon not working, but at the same time we both love what we do. If that's something that's part of it, then that's fine. We feel the love and we're very happy about it." The overexposure from the media and public interest in their relationship resulted in less admiration for their work and negatively affected their careers, in particular affecting the video for "Jenny from the Block".
Production and lyrics
"Jenny from the Block" is an uptempo R&B and old school hip hop song. It was produced by Troy Oliver, written by Andre Deyo, remixed by Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier, and contained samples by Enoch Light, Lawrence Parker, Scott Sterling and Michael Oliver. Trackmasters produced the song alongside Oliver and Cory Rooney. The song "intones her modest childhood roots", with Lopez singing in the chorus: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the Block / Used to have a little now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from". She implores the listener not to be fooled by the types of rocks that she now possesses, because she is still Jennifer from the same block. She now owns many rocks and despite this, she still knows where she comes from. At the start of her career, J.Lo's first big break was as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block.
"Jenny from the Block" samples a number of songs. The opening line of the track, "Children grow and women producing, men go working, some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living", is derived from 20th Century Steel Band's 1975 song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth". It also contains an interpolation of Enoch Light's "Hi-Jack" (1975), and samples Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987). Trackmasters allegedly incorporated the sample of The Beatnuts' song "Watch Out Now" from their album A Musical Massacre (1999), which also sampled "Hi-Jack", on the track. Believing Lopez and the song's producers had stolen their sample of "Hi-Jack" without consent, they subsequently insulted Lopez on the song "Confused Rappers", from their album Milk Me (2004). The group said: "Anybody familiar with our music who heard Jenny From The Block knew it was a Beatnuts beat. There’s no getting around it. That’s a straight-up bite. It’s the same drums, the same flute, the same tempo... everything is our idea. If we never flipped that sample, there would be no Jenny From The Block."
Critical response
"Jenny from the Block" generated a polarized reception among music critics and pop music fans, with some applauding it as a "strong self statement" and homage to Lopez's roots, and others dismissing it as "silly". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine called the song "infectious", but noted that it is "more like a disease than a chunky casserole". Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly was favorable, writing: "Lopez insists that fame hasn't changed her, and seduced by the breezy pleasure of her new music, we're almost inclined to believe her". Arion Berger of Rolling Stone opined that the song "is worth listening to — its windup/wind-down chorus is as sly and curvy as Lopez". On a list of "17 of the Best Songs About NYC", Time magazine placed "Jenny from the Block" at number twelve. Complex magazine praised the inclusion of the "South Bronx" sample, writing: "After becoming a full-blown superstar whose entire life was different in every way, J. Lo was still trying to convince us she was "real" and still the same old girl from the block. What better way to connect to her roots musically than to put on for her hometown with the greatest Bronx anthem ever put to wax, BDP's "South Bronx"?"
Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the song an unfavorable review, calling it "silly" and describing the lyrics as "laughable". James Poletti of Yahoo! Music was also negative, calling it "agonizing" and a "cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture". Writing for The Village Voice, Jon Caramanica was highly unfavorable of "Jenny from the Block", stating that "Jenny aims to fast-talk herself into authenticity". AOL Radio deemed it one of the "100 Worst Songs Ever" in 2010, remarking: "Yup, just your average girl, willing to risk a national TV gig over the size of her 'dressing-room compound.'" In a countdown of "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever", VH1 and Blender ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number thirty-three. Her Campus included the song on a list of "15 Songs We're Embarrassed to Still Know All the Lyrics To". In a television special titled The 100 Most Annoying Pop Songs...We Hate To Love, BBC ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number one-hundred. On a similar special for Channel 4 titled The 100 Worst Pop Records, the song was named the tenth worst song ever. Amy Sciarretto of PopCrush observed in 2012: "'Jenny From the Block' is quite a polarizing track (...) Either you love the 'J. Lo' tune because it's boastful and oozes confidence or you hate it because it's cheesy and makes use of flutes."
Chart performance
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Jenny from the Block" debuted at number 67 for the week of October 12, 2002. By its third week on the Hot 100, the song had propelled to the top twenty, reaching number 17. For the Billboard issue dated November 23, 2002, it entered the top ten of the Hot 100, jumping to number eight. It also reached the top ten of the Hot 100 Airplay chart, at number nine. The following week, the song continued climbing the Hot 100, moving to number six, while also reaching the top five of the Hot 100 Airplay chart.
By December 14, it peaked at three on the Hot 100, where it remained for three weeks, and also jumped to three on the Airplay chart. Three weeks later, on December 28, "Jenny from the Block" remained stalling at three on the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart. For three weeks it had been blocked from the top spot of both charts by Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Missy Elliott's "Work It". It peaked at two on the US Mainstream Top 40 Pop Songs and 22 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
In Australia, "Jenny from the Block" made its debut inside the top ten at number eight on December 1, 2002. On January 5, 2003, it moved to its peak of five, where it remained for two weeks, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. The song peaked atop the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, becoming her third number-one there following "If You Had My Love" (1999) and "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (2001). In Italy, it debuted at its peak of number four on December 21, and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks, all of which it remained in the top ten for; exiting on March 6, 2003. In New Zealand, it debuted at 49 on November 11, 2002; it peaked at number six on December 8 and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold by RIANZ for sales of 7,500 copies. It peaked at number two in Spain on December 24, 2002.
In the United Kingdom it peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming her ninth top-ten hit in Britain, as well as her fourth song to peak at three. In April 2020, the song was certified gold for shipments of over 400,000 copies in the country, her third after If You Had My Love and Get Right.
In Norway, the song debuted at number six and peaked at five. It has been certified Platinum there for sales of 10,000 copies.
Music video
The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18–20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002.
The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool.
Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing."
Live performances
"Jenny from the Block" was performed at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards on August 20, 2018. The song was performed by Lopez during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Impact
"Jenny from the Block" is considered one of Lopez's signature songs and most iconic single. The lyrical content of country artist Faith Hill's 2005 song "Mississippi Girl" was considered to be influenced by the song, with Rolling Stone describing it as "country music's version" of the single; Billboard called it "a countrified 'Jenny from the Block'". Other songs that were noted to have followed the theme of "Jenny from the Block" were Gwen Stefani's "Orange County Girl" and Fergie's "Glamorous".
Mexican-American recording artist Becky G recorded a cover version of the song, entitled "Becky from the Block". The song's accompanying music video was shot in Inglewood, California. Lopez made a cameo appearance towards the end of the music video. The lyrics of this version are significantly different from the original. Entertainment Tonight described the version to have "give[n] Jenny's NY-based tune a West Coast slant". Australian rapper Iggy Azalea referenced the song in her verse from Lopez's 2014 song "Booty", stating: "The last time the world seen a booty this good, it was on Jenny from the block." In her 2018 single, "Dinero" featuring DJ Khaled, American rapper Cardi B ends her verse by referencing rapper's and Lopez's beginnings: "Two bad bitches that came from the Bronx, Cardi from the pole and Jenny from the block". Rapper Drake, who Lopez was believed to have been romantically involved with in the past, references her and the song in his 2018 single "In My Feelings", stating: "From the block like you Jenny/ I know you special, girl, 'cause I know too many."
Ben Affleck's appearance in the song's music video became notorious, having been released at the peak of the couple's "frenzied" tabloid coverage. Paper magazine wrote: "Love makes people do crazy things, and that's our only explanation for this." Their relationship received widespread media coverage. They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They broke up in January 2004. Lopez later described the split as her "first real heartbreak" and attributed it in part to Affleck's discomfort with the media scrutiny. During an interview in 2008, Affleck stated that he nearly "ruined" his career by starring in the clip, "If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I've moved on." He also stated: "It not only makes me look like a petulant fool (to blame Lopez), but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly? For the record, did she hurt my career? No." In response, Latina magazine wrote: "Riiiigght. So it wasn't a string of bad movies starting with Reindeer Games in 2000 and a general lack of on-screen appeal that ruined your career, right Ben? It was a music video. What else can we blame on a music video? Global warming?" Following Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony, she was reportedly attempting to have the music video blocked from television networks such as VH1 and MTV.
In the past decade since the song's release, Lopez has been nicknamed "Jenny from The Block" in the media, a name news reporters and journalists often use. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards in 2011, comedian Ricky Gervais referenced the song: "She's just Jenny from the block. If the block in question is that one on Rodeo Drive between Cartier and Prada." In October 2015, a video clip filmed in Afghanistan years ago surfaced online of two U.S. Marines singing "Jenny from the Block" moments before being fired at by the Taliban.
Track listings
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
Cover versions
Becky G ("Becky from the Block")
Becky G released a cover version of the song with rewritten lyrics, titled "Becky from the Block" with Gomez rap-singing about her life before fame. Lopez appeared in Gomez's music video for the song, which has over 82 million views on YouTube as of February 2021. The song is Gomez's official debut single, and third overall after three collaborations.
Track listing
References
External links
2002 singles
American hip hop songs
Canadian Singles Chart number-one singles
Number-one singles in Hungary
Number-one singles in Poland
Jadakiss songs
Jennifer Lopez songs
Music videos directed by Francis Lawrence
Sampling controversies
Songs written by Jennifer Lopez
Songs written by Troy Oliver
Songs written by Andre Deyo
Styles P songs
Songs written by Fernando Arbex
Songs written by Samuel Barnes (songwriter)
Song recordings produced by Cory Rooney
2002 songs
Songs written by Jean-Claude Olivier
Songs about musicians
Songs about celebrities
Cultural depictions of musicians | false | [
"\"Chillin'\" is Tego Calderón's second single for his album The Underdog/El Subestimado. The single got a lot of airplay when it was released, and features reggaeton superstar Don Omar. The song is known to be pure reggae, and the video was shot in Jamaica, the birthplace of reggae music.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video for \"Chillin'\" was the album's second music video. The video was directed by Scott Franklin. During the time the video got directed, Tego Calderón was working on his European tour, and did a lot of work with Don Omar.\n\nThe music video was shot in Jamaica, which reflects the song, because Jamaica is the birthplace of reggae, and the song is pure reggae and dancehall. Tego Calderón and Don Omar also reflect the song's lyrics by doing the act of \"chilling\" in Jamaica. The video is shot along the beach, and in various touristic parts of the island.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Tego Calderon's official website\n\n2006 singles\nDon Omar songs\nTego Calderón songs\n2006 songs\nSongs written by Don Omar\nAtlantic Records singles",
"\"Sonne\" (English: Sun) is the first single from the 2012 Schiller album Sonne with German band Unheilig and vocals by Unheilig singer Bernd Heinrich Graf (Der Graf). The single was officially released on 21 September 2012, peaking at number 12 in the German singles chart in 2012. To this day, it's the highest entry of Schiller in the German Singles Chart. The single includes the song ″Klangwelten″. The cover art work shows a graphic of the sun. The music video was shot in Spain.\n\nTrack listing\n\nMaxi single\n\nDownload single\n\nCredits \n\n Music written by Christopher von Deylen\n Lyrics written by Der Graf\n\nMusic video\n\nAlternative video \n\nThe alternative video was made of sun images made by Schiller fans from all over the world. It was released some days before the official music video was released.\n\nOfficial music video \n\nThe official music video for \"Sonne\" was produced by AVA Studios GmbH and was shot in 2012 in Spain by German director Oliver Sommer. Director of photography was Francisco Domínguez. Digital film compositor was Danny Winter. It has a length of 4:27 minutes. The video features an unknown Spanish woman and a Spanish man. Even though Christopher von Deylen took part in the video shot, he and Der Graf were placed virtually into the music video by being shown on television screens placed in the desert. The music video was shot in the desert of Tabernas (Almería, Spain) in the south of Spain.\n\nCharts \n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Official music video of Sonne\n The music video of Sonne\n Sonne Alternative Video\n Sonne live\n The single on Discogs\n\n2012 singles\n2012 songs\nIsland Records singles\nMusic videos directed by Oliver Sommer\nMusic videos shot in Spain\nSchiller (band) songs\nSongs written by Christopher von Deylen\nUnheilig songs"
] |
[
"Jenny from the Block",
"Music video",
"Who directed the video?",
"The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence.",
"What was the video about?",
"The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck.",
"Where was the video filmed?",
"The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA",
"What are some of the video scenes?",
"begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment.",
"How was it reviewed by critics?",
"I don't know.",
"What did people think of the video?",
"I don't know.",
"When was the video shot?",
"from October 18-20, 2002."
] | C_5f7088f923384c43a1f1a151978e4523_0 | What show did it premier on? | 8 | What show did the Jenny from the Block video premier on? | Jenny from the Block | The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18-20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002. The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool. Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing." CANNOTANSWER | It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, | "Jenny from the Block" is a song by American singer Jennifer Lopez, which features American rappers Jadakiss and Styles P, both members of The LOX. It was released by Epic Records on September 26, 2002, as the lead single from her third studio album This Is Me... Then (2002). The song, first leaked online, was written by Lopez, Troy Oliver, Mr. Deyo, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Cory Rooney. Rooney and Oliver, along with Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, produced the song.
"Jenny from the Block" is a R&B and old school hip hop song, which lyrically is about Lopez’s desire, despite her level of fame and fortune, to remain humble and true to her roots in The Bronx. The song was noted by critics for using a large amount of musical samples from songs such as 20th Century Steel Band's song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth" (1975) and Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987), and "Hi-Jack" by Enoch Light.
While some critics praised the song and theme, others disregarded the lyrics as "silly" and "laughable". Despite this, the song became a commercial success, topping the charts in Canada, reaching number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and charting within the top ten of several major music markets. The song's music video also caused controversy. It featured Lopez and her boyfriend at the time, Ben Affleck, who later credited the video with nearly "ruining his career", in several raunchy scenes through the paparazzi's point of view. The song has been referenced in popular culture and since its release, Lopez has been referred to as "Jenny from the Block" in the media.
Background and release
This Is Me... Then was released in November 2002. However, "Jenny from the Block" featuring rappers Jadakiss and Styles P of The LOX was leaked by a pop station in Hartford, Connecticut, and later distributed to other stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. In response, Lopez and Epic Records pushed forward the album's release date to November 26. Unlike her previous studio albums: On the 6 (1999) and J.Lo (2001), Lopez had a more "hands-on" role on This Is Me... Then. The album also had more of an adult-R&B sound. Musically, majority of the songs on This Is Me... Then were lyrically "dedicated" to her relationship with then-fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. The Age newspaper said the album was a "declaration" of love for Affleck. During an interview, Lopez said "I wrote a lot of songs inspired, in a way, by what I was going through at the time that this album was being made, and he [Affleck] was definitely a big part of that." Several critics highlighted that the album showed how "smitten" she was, and that the content was borderline "annoying".
During the production of the album, Affleck and Lopez were a prominent super couple in the media, and were dubbed "Bennifer". Lopez stated "We try to make the best of it I'm not saying there's not times that we wish [we] could just be going to the movies and come out and there's not a crowd there waiting. You just want to spend your Sunday afternoon not working, but at the same time we both love what we do. If that's something that's part of it, then that's fine. We feel the love and we're very happy about it." The overexposure from the media and public interest in their relationship resulted in less admiration for their work and negatively affected their careers, in particular affecting the video for "Jenny from the Block".
Production and lyrics
"Jenny from the Block" is an uptempo R&B and old school hip hop song. It was produced by Troy Oliver, written by Andre Deyo, remixed by Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier, and contained samples by Enoch Light, Lawrence Parker, Scott Sterling and Michael Oliver. Trackmasters produced the song alongside Oliver and Cory Rooney. The song "intones her modest childhood roots", with Lopez singing in the chorus: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the Block / Used to have a little now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from". She implores the listener not to be fooled by the types of rocks that she now possesses, because she is still Jennifer from the same block. She now owns many rocks and despite this, she still knows where she comes from. At the start of her career, J.Lo's first big break was as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block.
"Jenny from the Block" samples a number of songs. The opening line of the track, "Children grow and women producing, men go working, some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living", is derived from 20th Century Steel Band's 1975 song "Heaven and Hell Is on Earth". It also contains an interpolation of Enoch Light's "Hi-Jack" (1975), and samples Boogie Down Productions' "South Bronx" (1987). Trackmasters allegedly incorporated the sample of The Beatnuts' song "Watch Out Now" from their album A Musical Massacre (1999), which also sampled "Hi-Jack", on the track. Believing Lopez and the song's producers had stolen their sample of "Hi-Jack" without consent, they subsequently insulted Lopez on the song "Confused Rappers", from their album Milk Me (2004). The group said: "Anybody familiar with our music who heard Jenny From The Block knew it was a Beatnuts beat. There’s no getting around it. That’s a straight-up bite. It’s the same drums, the same flute, the same tempo... everything is our idea. If we never flipped that sample, there would be no Jenny From The Block."
Critical response
"Jenny from the Block" generated a polarized reception among music critics and pop music fans, with some applauding it as a "strong self statement" and homage to Lopez's roots, and others dismissing it as "silly". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine called the song "infectious", but noted that it is "more like a disease than a chunky casserole". Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly was favorable, writing: "Lopez insists that fame hasn't changed her, and seduced by the breezy pleasure of her new music, we're almost inclined to believe her". Arion Berger of Rolling Stone opined that the song "is worth listening to — its windup/wind-down chorus is as sly and curvy as Lopez". On a list of "17 of the Best Songs About NYC", Time magazine placed "Jenny from the Block" at number twelve. Complex magazine praised the inclusion of the "South Bronx" sample, writing: "After becoming a full-blown superstar whose entire life was different in every way, J. Lo was still trying to convince us she was "real" and still the same old girl from the block. What better way to connect to her roots musically than to put on for her hometown with the greatest Bronx anthem ever put to wax, BDP's "South Bronx"?"
Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the song an unfavorable review, calling it "silly" and describing the lyrics as "laughable". James Poletti of Yahoo! Music was also negative, calling it "agonizing" and a "cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture". Writing for The Village Voice, Jon Caramanica was highly unfavorable of "Jenny from the Block", stating that "Jenny aims to fast-talk herself into authenticity". AOL Radio deemed it one of the "100 Worst Songs Ever" in 2010, remarking: "Yup, just your average girl, willing to risk a national TV gig over the size of her 'dressing-room compound.'" In a countdown of "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever", VH1 and Blender ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number thirty-three. Her Campus included the song on a list of "15 Songs We're Embarrassed to Still Know All the Lyrics To". In a television special titled The 100 Most Annoying Pop Songs...We Hate To Love, BBC ranked "Jenny from the Block" at number one-hundred. On a similar special for Channel 4 titled The 100 Worst Pop Records, the song was named the tenth worst song ever. Amy Sciarretto of PopCrush observed in 2012: "'Jenny From the Block' is quite a polarizing track (...) Either you love the 'J. Lo' tune because it's boastful and oozes confidence or you hate it because it's cheesy and makes use of flutes."
Chart performance
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Jenny from the Block" debuted at number 67 for the week of October 12, 2002. By its third week on the Hot 100, the song had propelled to the top twenty, reaching number 17. For the Billboard issue dated November 23, 2002, it entered the top ten of the Hot 100, jumping to number eight. It also reached the top ten of the Hot 100 Airplay chart, at number nine. The following week, the song continued climbing the Hot 100, moving to number six, while also reaching the top five of the Hot 100 Airplay chart.
By December 14, it peaked at three on the Hot 100, where it remained for three weeks, and also jumped to three on the Airplay chart. Three weeks later, on December 28, "Jenny from the Block" remained stalling at three on the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart. For three weeks it had been blocked from the top spot of both charts by Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Missy Elliott's "Work It". It peaked at two on the US Mainstream Top 40 Pop Songs and 22 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
In Australia, "Jenny from the Block" made its debut inside the top ten at number eight on December 1, 2002. On January 5, 2003, it moved to its peak of five, where it remained for two weeks, and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. The song peaked atop the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, becoming her third number-one there following "If You Had My Love" (1999) and "Love Don't Cost a Thing" (2001). In Italy, it debuted at its peak of number four on December 21, and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks, all of which it remained in the top ten for; exiting on March 6, 2003. In New Zealand, it debuted at 49 on November 11, 2002; it peaked at number six on December 8 and spent a total of sixteen weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold by RIANZ for sales of 7,500 copies. It peaked at number two in Spain on December 24, 2002.
In the United Kingdom it peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming her ninth top-ten hit in Britain, as well as her fourth song to peak at three. In April 2020, the song was certified gold for shipments of over 400,000 copies in the country, her third after If You Had My Love and Get Right.
In Norway, the song debuted at number six and peaked at five. It has been certified Platinum there for sales of 10,000 copies.
Music video
The song's accompanying music video was directed by Francis Lawrence. Its theme revolves around the media invading Lopez's life, particularly her relationship with then-boyfriend, Ben Affleck. The video was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, CA from October 18–20, 2002. It premiered on MTV's TRL on November 5, 2002, and on BET's 106 & Park on December 9, 2002.
The video begins with surveillance camera footage of Lopez and Affleck in their apartment. Lopez is then shown dancing in the apartment to music on her Mp3 player, which is captured by the paparazzi. She is also seen performing the song (clothed in different outfits) amid bright lights on the streets of New York City with Jadakiss and Styles P. Separate scenes depict Lopez and Affleck on a yacht, sun baking, and swimming in the ocean. Footage of the couple having lunch at a restaurant and stopping at a gas station is also captured by the paparazzi. Lopez later visits a jewelry store, and sings "Loving You" in a recording studio. Finally, the couple are shown spending time together by a pool.
Speaking of the video, Melissa Ng of The Spectator wrote: "Before celebrities become stars, they dream about gaining fame, fortune, and being in the spotlight [sic] Jennifer Lopez released a video for her single, Jenny From the Block. The video is basically about how she cannot find privacy with her fiance Ben Affleck. A lot of glamour is associated with fame and fortune; however, along with that glamour comes the loss of privacy." Speaking of the video, Justine Ashley Costanza of International Business Times wrote in 2012: "Back when Lopez was engaged to the wholesome actor, she decided it would be best to make a video about how hard their lives were. Poor J-Lo couldn't lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture. It's not easy being overly wealthy superstars. The video's premise shows Lopez dealing with the perils of fame the only way she knows how...by taking off most of what she's wearing."
Live performances
"Jenny from the Block" was performed at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards on August 20, 2018. The song was performed by Lopez during the Super Bowl LIV halftime show.
Impact
"Jenny from the Block" is considered one of Lopez's signature songs and most iconic single. The lyrical content of country artist Faith Hill's 2005 song "Mississippi Girl" was considered to be influenced by the song, with Rolling Stone describing it as "country music's version" of the single; Billboard called it "a countrified 'Jenny from the Block'". Other songs that were noted to have followed the theme of "Jenny from the Block" were Gwen Stefani's "Orange County Girl" and Fergie's "Glamorous".
Mexican-American recording artist Becky G recorded a cover version of the song, entitled "Becky from the Block". The song's accompanying music video was shot in Inglewood, California. Lopez made a cameo appearance towards the end of the music video. The lyrics of this version are significantly different from the original. Entertainment Tonight described the version to have "give[n] Jenny's NY-based tune a West Coast slant". Australian rapper Iggy Azalea referenced the song in her verse from Lopez's 2014 song "Booty", stating: "The last time the world seen a booty this good, it was on Jenny from the block." In her 2018 single, "Dinero" featuring DJ Khaled, American rapper Cardi B ends her verse by referencing rapper's and Lopez's beginnings: "Two bad bitches that came from the Bronx, Cardi from the pole and Jenny from the block". Rapper Drake, who Lopez was believed to have been romantically involved with in the past, references her and the song in his 2018 single "In My Feelings", stating: "From the block like you Jenny/ I know you special, girl, 'cause I know too many."
Ben Affleck's appearance in the song's music video became notorious, having been released at the peak of the couple's "frenzied" tabloid coverage. Paper magazine wrote: "Love makes people do crazy things, and that's our only explanation for this." Their relationship received widespread media coverage. They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They broke up in January 2004. Lopez later described the split as her "first real heartbreak" and attributed it in part to Affleck's discomfort with the media scrutiny. During an interview in 2008, Affleck stated that he nearly "ruined" his career by starring in the clip, "If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I've moved on." He also stated: "It not only makes me look like a petulant fool (to blame Lopez), but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly? For the record, did she hurt my career? No." In response, Latina magazine wrote: "Riiiigght. So it wasn't a string of bad movies starting with Reindeer Games in 2000 and a general lack of on-screen appeal that ruined your career, right Ben? It was a music video. What else can we blame on a music video? Global warming?" Following Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony, she was reportedly attempting to have the music video blocked from television networks such as VH1 and MTV.
In the past decade since the song's release, Lopez has been nicknamed "Jenny from The Block" in the media, a name news reporters and journalists often use. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards in 2011, comedian Ricky Gervais referenced the song: "She's just Jenny from the block. If the block in question is that one on Rodeo Drive between Cartier and Prada." In October 2015, a video clip filmed in Afghanistan years ago surfaced online of two U.S. Marines singing "Jenny from the Block" moments before being fired at by the Taliban.
Track listings
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
Cover versions
Becky G ("Becky from the Block")
Becky G released a cover version of the song with rewritten lyrics, titled "Becky from the Block" with Gomez rap-singing about her life before fame. Lopez appeared in Gomez's music video for the song, which has over 82 million views on YouTube as of February 2021. The song is Gomez's official debut single, and third overall after three collaborations.
Track listing
References
External links
2002 singles
American hip hop songs
Canadian Singles Chart number-one singles
Number-one singles in Hungary
Number-one singles in Poland
Jadakiss songs
Jennifer Lopez songs
Music videos directed by Francis Lawrence
Sampling controversies
Songs written by Jennifer Lopez
Songs written by Troy Oliver
Songs written by Andre Deyo
Styles P songs
Songs written by Fernando Arbex
Songs written by Samuel Barnes (songwriter)
Song recordings produced by Cory Rooney
2002 songs
Songs written by Jean-Claude Olivier
Songs about musicians
Songs about celebrities
Cultural depictions of musicians | true | [
"Premier League Matchday (formerly Soccer Central and Soccer Central Matchday) is a soccer news show, made by Rogers Media, shown on Sportsnet most Saturdays before and after Premier League matches. The show features Canadians Gerry Dobson and Craig Forrest. Before August 2012, the show was known as Soccer Central, but was renamed because of the introduction of the show Soccer Central. The name was changed again before the 2013-14 Premier League season.\n\nFocus\nBefore Premier League matches, Dobson and Forrest preview the upcoming matches. After words, they review the past matches and speak about Canadian and World football.\n\nSoccer on Canadian television\nSportsnet shows\nPremier League on television\n2010s Canadian sports television series",
"Premier Soccer Saturday (formerly The Premiership) was the principal weekly club association football programme on RTÉ television.\n\nIn June 2013, RTÉ Sport confirmed that due to cost-cutting initiatives to save the station up to €1.3m a year, it would no longer have the Irish rights to television coverage of the Premier League, with the 2012-13 Premier League season being the final season shown on RTÉ Sport.\n\nThe programme was broadcast on RTÉ Two every Saturday evening between 19:30 and 21:00 and occasionally on Sunday (when there was an important game played that day) during the English league soccer season, showing highlights of Premier League football matches. When the show was aired on a day other than Saturday, it used the appropriately customised title (e.g. Premier Soccer Sunday). The programme only showed English association football, as Monday Night Soccer covered Irish association football.\n\nHistory\nThe programme was first broadcast in September 1998 as The Premiership. Between August 2004 and May 2007, RTÉ also had the broadcasting rights to 15 live Premier League matches on Saturday afternoons (kick off: 15:00). These programmes were called Premiership Live. Setanta Sports obtained exclusive rights to the games from the 2007–08 season onwards.\n\nThe show was reformatted or not broadcast on several occasions during the 2010 snowstorms in Great Britain and Ireland. For example, on Saturday 18 December 2010, the show's format was changed to show extended highlights of the only two Premiership games that were played. And, on Sunday 19 December 2010, a proposed Premier Soccer Soccer Sunday special was cancelled.\n\nOne feature introduced to Premier Soccer Saturday involved fans providing match analysis. When this segment, nicknamed \"fanalysts\", was aired, the shows were extended to over 2 hours.\n\nOn 30 April 2012, there was a special Premier Soccer Monday that showed highlights of the Manchester Derby between the top two teams of that year's Premier League. Because the game, which was won by Man City, began at 19:45, the highlights show ran from 23:00 to 00:00.\n\nIn May 2013, RTÉ Head of sport Ryle Nugent announced that RTÉ Sport would not pay for the rights of Premier League to show highlights. Therefore, Premier Soccer Saturday/Sunday was finished.\n\nPresenters\nThe programme was most recently presented on a rotational basis between Peter Collins and Darragh Maloney. Bill O'Herlihy was previously the sole presenter of the program.\n\nContributors\nPundits that sometimes featured on the show included Eamon Dunphy, Johnny Giles, Ray Houghton, Trevor Steven, Kenny Cunningham, Ronnie Whelan, Liam Brady, Richard Sadlier and Graeme Souness.\n\nFormer Prime Minister Bertie Ahern made an appearance on the show in 2001, providing analysis on a Manchester United game, of whom he is a lifelong supporter.\n\nCommentary on the match highlights and reports were provided by, amongst others, George Hamilton, Ger Canning, Joanne Cantwell, and Jimmy Magee.\n\nReferences\n\n1990s Irish television series\n2000s Irish television series\nIrish sports television series\nRTÉ Sport\nRTÉ original programming\n1998 Irish television series debuts\n2013 Irish television series endings\nAssociation football on Irish television\nSaturday events"
] |
[
"Alfred Adler",
"Influence on depth psychology"
] | C_771fdf6f2d324abd93b0453bc13b64b3_0 | What did Alfred write? | 1 | What did Alfred Adler write? | Alfred Adler | In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there". He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum. He also imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world. This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "... honorable errors. Though one rejects the content of Adler's views, one can recognize their consistency and significance". Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach. Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991); and thus to be one of the three great psychologists/philosophers of the twentieth century. CANNOTANSWER | Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" | Alfred Adler (; ; 7 February 1870 – 28 May 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology" (Orgler 1976).
Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and to carry psychiatry into the community. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
Early life
Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870 at Mariahilfer Straße 208 in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna, a modern part of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, the 15th district of the city. He was second of the seven children of a Jewish couple, Pauline (Beer) and Leopold Adler. Leopold Adler was a Hungarian-born grain merchant. Alfred's younger brother died in the bed next to him when Alfred was only three years old, and throughout his childhood, he maintained a rivalry with his older brother. This rivalry was spurred on because Adler believed his mother preferred his brother over him. Despite his good relationship with his father, he still struggled with feelings of inferiority in his relationship with his mother.
Alfred was an active, popular child and an average student who was also known for the competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund. Early on, he developed rickets, which kept Alfred from walking until he was four years old. At the age of four, he developed pneumonia and heard a doctor say to his father, "Your boy is lost". Along with being run over twice and witnessing his younger brother's death, this sickness contributed to his overall fear of death. At that point, he decided to be a physician. He was very interested in the subjects of psychology, sociology and philosophy. After studying at University of Vienna, he specialized as an eye doctor, and later in neurology and psychiatry.
Career
Adler began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater, a combination of amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into "organ inferiorities" and "compensation".
In his early career, Adler wrote an article in the defense of Freud's theory after reading one of Freud's most well known works, The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1902, because of his defense article, Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group that included Rudolf Reitler and Wilhelm Stekel. The group, the "Wednesday Society" (Mittwochsgesellschaft), met regularly on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home and was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement, expanding over time to include many more members. Each week a member would present a paper and after a short break of coffee and cakes, the group would discuss it. The main members were Otto Rank, Max Eitingon, Wilhelm Stekel, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs, Fritz Wittels, Max Graf, and Sandor Ferenczi. In 1908, Adler presented his paper, "The aggressive instinct in life and in neurosis", at a time when Freud believed that early sexual development was the primary determinant of the making of character, with which Adler took issue. Adler proposed that the sexual and aggressive drives were "two originally separate instincts which merge later on". Freud at the time disagreed with this idea.
When Freud in 1920 proposed his dual instinct theory of libido and aggressive drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, without citing Adler, he was reproached that Adler had proposed the aggressive drive in his 1908 paper (Eissler, 1971). Freud later commented in a 1923 footnote he added to the Little Hans case that, "I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an aggressive instinct" (1909, p. 140, 2), while pointing out that his conception of an aggressive drive differs from that of Adler. A long-serving member of the group, he made many more beyond this 1908 pivotal contribution to the group, and Adler became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society eight years later (1910). He remained a member of the Society until 1911, when he and a group of his supporters formally disengaged from Freud's circle, the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis (preceding Carl Jung's split in 1914).
This departure suited both Freud and Adler, since they had grown to dislike each other. During his association with Freud, Adler frequently maintained his own ideas which often diverged from Freud's. While Adler is often referred to as "a pupil of Freud", in fact this was never true; they were colleagues, Freud referring to him in print in 1909 as "My colleague Dr Alfred Adler". The association of Adler and Freud lasted a total of 9 years, and they never saw each other after the separation. Freud continued to dislike Adler even after the separation and tended to do so with other defectors from psychoanalysis. Even after Adler's death, Freud maintained his distaste for him. When conversing with a colleague over the matter, he stated, "I don't understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jewish boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis." In 1929 Adler showed a reporter with the New York Herald a copy of the faded postcard that Freud had sent him in 1902. He wanted to prove that he had never been a disciple of Freud's but rather that Freud had sought him out to share his ideas.
Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912 after his break from the psychoanalytic movement. Adler's group initially included some orthodox Nietzschean adherents (who believed that Adler's ideas on power and inferiority were closer to Nietzsche than Freud's). Their enmity aside, Adler retained a lifelong admiration for Freud's ideas on dreams and credited him with creating a scientific approach to their clinical utilization (Fiebert, 1997). Nevertheless, even regarding dream interpretation, Adler had his own theoretical and clinical approach. The primary differences between Adler and Freud centered on Adler's contention that the social realm (exteriority) is as important to psychology as is the internal realm (interiority). The dynamics of power and compensation extend beyond sexuality, and gender and politics can be as important as libido. Moreover, Freud did not share Adler's socialist beliefs, the latter's wife being for example an intimate friend of many of the Russian Marxists such as Leon Trotsky.
The Adlerian school
Following Adler's break from Freud, he enjoyed considerable success and celebrity in building an independent school of psychotherapy and a unique personality theory. He traveled and lectured for a period of 25 years promoting his socially oriented approach. His intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of social equality. Adler's efforts were halted by World War I, during which he served as a doctor with the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the conclusion of the war, his influence increased greatly. In the 1920s, he established a number of child guidance clinics. From 1921 onwards, he was a frequent lecturer in Europe and the United States, becoming a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. His clinical treatment methods for adults were aimed at uncovering the hidden purpose of symptoms using the therapeutic functions of insight and meaning.
Adler was concerned with the overcoming of the superiority/inferiority dynamic and was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favor of two chairs. This allows the clinician and patient to sit together more or less as equals. Clinically, Adler's methods are not limited to treatment after-the-fact but extend to the realm of prevention by preempting future problems in the child. Prevention strategies include encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect (especially corporal punishment). Adler's popularity was related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas. He often wrote for the lay public. Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task-oriented. These "Life tasks" are occupation/work, society/friendship, and love/sexuality. Their success depends on cooperation. The tasks of life are not to be considered in isolation since, as Adler famously commented, "they all throw cross-lights on one another".
In his bestselling book, Man's Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl compared his own "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (after Freud's and Adler's schools) to Adler's analysis:
Emigration
In the early 1930s, after most of Adler's Austrian clinics had been closed due to his Jewish heritage (despite his conversion to Christianity), Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in the US. Adler died from a heart attack in 1937 in Aberdeen, Scotland, during a lecture tour, although his remains went missing and were unaccounted for until 2007. His death was a temporary blow to the influence of his ideas, although a number of them were subsequently taken up by neo-Freudians. Through the work of Rudolf Dreikurs in the United States and many other adherents worldwide, Adlerian ideas and approaches remain strong and viable more than 70 years after Adler's death.
Around the world there are various organizations promoting Adler's orientation towards mental and social well-being. These include the International Committee of Adlerian Summer Schools and Institutes (ICASSI), the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology (NASAP) and the International Association for Individual Psychology. Teaching institutes and programs exist in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, and Wales.
Basic principles
Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger (The Philosophy of 'As if') and the literature of Dostoyevsky. While still a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society he developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation that was the prototype for his later turn to phenomenology and the development of his famous concept, the inferiority complex.
Adler was also influenced by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts (who coined the term "holism"). Adler's School, known as "Individual Psychology"—an arcane reference to the Latin individuals meaning indivisibility, a term intended to emphasize holism—is both a social and community psychology as well as a depth psychology. Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents, teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with others. He was a social idealist, and was known as a socialist in his early years of association with psychoanalysis (1902–1911).
Adler was pragmatic and believed that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology. Adler was also an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world, believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles. These styles could form the basis of psychic compensation and lead to mental health difficulties. Adler also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior long before Anna Freud wrote about the same phenomena in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
Adlerian-based scholarly, clinical and social practices focus on the following topics:
Social interest and community feeling
Holism and the creative self
Fictional finalism, teleology, and goal constructs
Psychological and social encouragement
Inferiority, superiority and compensation
Life style/style of life
Early recollections (a projective technique)
Family constellation and birth order
Life tasks and social embeddedness
The conscious and unconscious realms
Private logic and common sense (based in part on Kant's "")
Symptoms and neurosis
Safeguarding behavior
Guilt and guilt feelings
Socratic questioning
Dream interpretation
Child and adolescent psychology
Democratic approaches to parenting and families
Adlerian approaches to classroom management
Leadership and organizational psychology
Adler created Adlerian Therapy, because he believed that one's psyche should be studied in the context of that person's environment.
Adler's approach to personality
In one of his earliest and most famous publications, "Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation," Adler outlined the basics for what would be the beginning foundation of his personality theory. The article focuses mainly on the topics of organ inferiority and compensation. Organ inferiority is when one organ, or portion of the body, is weaker than the rest. Adler postulated that the body's other organs would work together in order to compensate for the weakness of this "inferior" organ. When compensation occurs, other areas of the body make up for the function lacking in the inferior portion. In some cases, the weakness may be overcompensated transforming it into a strength. An example would be an individual with a weak leg becoming a great runner later on. As his theory progressed, the idea of organ inferiority was replaced with feelings of inferiority instead. As Adler's theory progressed, he continued evolving his theory and key ideas.
Adler's book, Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Character) defines his earlier key ideas. He argued that human personality could be explained teleologically: parts of the individual's unconscious self ideally work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness). The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the individual overcompensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse.
Common therapeutic tools include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions.
Psychodynamics and teleology
Adler maintained that human psychology is psychodynamic in nature. Unlike Freud's metapsychology that emphasizes instinctual demands, human psychology is guided by goals and fueled by a yet unknown creative force. Like Freud's instincts, Adler's fictive goals are largely unconscious. These goals have a "teleological" function. Constructivist Adlerians, influenced by neo-Kantian and Nietzschean ideas, view these "teleological" goals as "fictions" in the sense that Hans Vaihinger spoke of (fictio). Usually there is a fictional final goal which can be deciphered alongside of innumerable sub-goals. The inferiority/superiority dynamic is constantly at work through various forms of compensation and overcompensation. For example, in anorexia nervosa the fictive final goal is to "be perfectly thin" (overcompensation on the basis of a feeling of inferiority). Hence, the fictive final goal can serve a persecutory function that is ever-present in subjectivity (though its trace springs are usually unconscious). The end goal of being "thin" is fictive however since it can never be subjectively achieved.
Teleology serves another vital function for Adlerians. Chilon's "hora telos" ("see the end, consider the consequences") provides for both healthy and maladaptive psychodynamics. Here we also find Adler's emphasis on personal responsibility in mentally healthy subjects who seek their own and the social good.
Constructivism and metaphysics
The metaphysical thread of Adlerian theory does not problematize the notion of teleology since concepts such as eternity (an ungraspable end where time ceases to exist) match the religious aspects that are held in tandem. In contrast, the constructivist Adlerian threads (either humanist/modernist or postmodern in variant) seek to raise insight of the force of unconscious fictions– which carry all of the inevitability of 'fate'– so long as one does not understand them. Here, 'teleology' itself is fictive yet experienced as quite real. This aspect of Adler's theory is somewhat analogous to the principles developed in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Therapy (CT). Both Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck credit Adler as a major precursor to REBT and CT. Ellis in particular was a member of the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology and served as an editorial board member for the Adlerian Journal Individual Psychology.
As a psychodynamic system, Adlerians excavate the past of a client/patient in order to alter their future and increase integration into community in the 'here-and-now'. The 'here-and-now' aspects are especially relevant to those Adlerians who emphasize humanism and/or existentialism in their approaches.
Holism
Metaphysical Adlerians emphasize a spiritual holism in keeping with what Jan Smuts articulated (Smuts coined the term "holism"), that is, the spiritual sense of one-ness that holism usually implies (etymology of holism: from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) Smuts believed that evolution involves a progressive series of lesser wholes integrating into larger ones. Whilst Smuts' text Holism and Evolution is thought to be a work of science, it actually attempts to unify evolution with a higher metaphysical principle (holism). The sense of connection and one-ness revered in various religious traditions (among these, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Buddhism and Baha'i) finds a strong complement in Adler's thought.
The pragmatic and materialist aspects to contextualizing members of communities, the construction of communities and the socio-historical-political forces that shape communities matter a great deal when it comes to understanding an individual's psychological make-up and functioning. This aspect of Adlerian psychology holds a high level of synergy with the field of community psychology, especially given Adler's concern for what he called "the absolute truth and logic of communal life". However, Adlerian psychology, unlike community psychology, is holistically concerned with both prevention and clinical treatment after-the-fact. Hence, Adler can be considered the "first community psychologist", a discourse that formalized in the decades following Adler's death (King & Shelley, 2008).
Adlerian psychology, Carl Jung's analytical psychology, Gestalt therapy and Karen Horney's psychodynamic approach are holistic schools of psychology. These discourses eschew a reductive approach to understanding human psychology and psychopathology.
Typology
Adler developed a scheme of so-called personality types, which were however always to be taken as provisional or heuristic since he did not, in essence, believe in personality types, and at different times proposed different and equally tentative systems. The danger with typology is to lose sight of the individual's uniqueness and to gaze reductively, acts that Adler opposed. Nevertheless, he intended to illustrate patterns that could denote a characteristic governed under the overall style of life. Hence American Adlerians such as Harold Mosak have made use of Adler's typology in this provisional sense:
The Getting or Leaning They are sensitive people who have developed a shell around themselves which protects them, but they must rely on others to carry them through life's difficulties. They have low energy levels and so become dependent. When overwhelmed, they develop what we typically think of as neurotic symptoms: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, general anxiety, hysteria, amnesias, and so on, depending on individual details of their lifestyle.
The Avoiding types are those that hate being defeated. They may be successful, but have not taken any risks getting there. They are likely to have low social contact in fear of rejection or defeat in any way.
The Ruling or Dominant type strive for power and are willing to manipulate situations and people, anything to get their way. People of this type are also prone to anti-social behavior.
The Socially Useful types are those who are very outgoing and very active. They have a lot of social contact and strive to make changes for the good.
These 'types' are typically formed in childhood and are expressions of the Style of Life.
The importance of memories
Adler placed great emphasis upon the interpretation of early memories in working with patients and school children, writing that, "Among all psychic expressions, some of the most revealing are the individual's memories." Adler viewed memories as expressions of "private logic" and as metaphors for an individual's personal philosophy of life or "lifestyle". He maintained that memories are never incidental or trivial; rather, they are chosen reminders: "(A person's) memories are the reminders she carries about with her of her limitations and of the meanings of events. There are no 'chance' memories. Out of the incalculable number of impressions that an individual receives, she chooses to remember only those which she considers, however dimly, to have a bearing on her problems."
On birth order
Adler often emphasized one's psychological birth order as having an influence on the style of life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up. Birth order referred to the placement of siblings within the family. It is important to note the difference between psychological and ordinal birth order (e.g. in some families, a second child might behave like a firstborn, in which case they are considered to be an ordinal secondborn but a psychological firstborn). Mosak, H.H. & Maniacci, M. P. (1999). A primer of Adlerian Psychology. Taylor and Francis. Adler believed that the firstborn child would be in a favorable position, enjoying the full attention of the eager new parents until the arrival of a second child. This second child would cause the first born to suffer feelings of dethronement, no longer being the center of attention. Adler (1908) believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction which he reasoned was a compensation for the feelings of excessive responsibility "the weight of the world on one's shoulders" (e.g. having to look after the younger ones) and the melancholic loss of that once supremely pampered position. As a result, he predicted that this child was the most likely to end up in jail or an asylum. Youngest children would tend to be overindulged, leading to poor social empathy. Consequently, the middle child, who would experience neither dethronement nor overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful individual yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel squeezed-out. Adler himself was the third (some sources credit second) in a family of six children.
Adler never produced any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles, nor did he feel the need to. Yet the value of the hypothesis was to extend the importance of siblings in marking the psychology of the individual beyond Freud's more limited emphasis on the mother and father. Hence, Adlerians spend time therapeutically mapping the influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients. The idiographic approach entails an excavation of the phenomenology of one's birth order position for likely influence on the subject's Style of Life. In sum, the subjective experiences of sibling positionality and inter-relations are important in terms of the dynamics of psychology, for Adlerian therapists and personality theorists, not the cookbook predictions that may or may not have been objectively true in Adler's time.
For Adler, birth order answered the question, "Why do children, who are raised in the same family, grow up with very different personalities?" While a strict geneticist, believing siblings are raised in a shared environment, may claim any differences in personality would be caused by subtle variations in the individuals' genetics, Adler showed through his birth order theory that children do not grow up in the same shared environment, but the oldest child grows up in a family where they have younger siblings, the middle child with older and younger siblings, and the youngest with older siblings. The position in the family constellation, Adler said, is the reason for these differences in personality and not genetics: a point later taken up by Eric Berne.
On addiction
Adler's insight into birth order, compensation and issues relating to the individuals' perception of community also led him to investigate the causes and treatment of substance abuse disorders, particularly alcoholism and morphinism, which already were serious social problems of his time. Adler's work with addicts was significant since most other prominent proponents of psychoanalysis invested relatively little time and thought into this widespread ill of the modern and post-modern age. In addition to applying his individual psychology approach of organ inferiority, for example, to the onset and causes of addictive behaviors, he also tried to find a clear relationship of drug cravings to sexual gratification or their substitutions. Early pharmaco-therapeutic interventions with non-addictive substances, such as neuphyllin were used, since withdrawal symptoms were explained by a form of "water-poisoning" that made the use of diuretics necessary.
Adler and his wife's pragmatic approach, and the seemingly high success rates of their treatment were based on their ideas of social functioning and well-being. Clearly, life style choices and situations were emphasized, for example the need for relaxation or the negative effects of early childhood conflicts were examined, which compared to other authoritarian or religious treatment regimens, were clearly modern approaches. Certainly some of his observations, for example that psychopaths were more likely to be drug addicts are not compatible with current methodologies and theories of substance abuse treatment, but the self-centered attributes of the illness and the clear escapism from social responsibilities by pathological addicts put Adler's treatment modalities clearly into a modern contextual reasoning.
On homosexuality
Adler's ideas regarding non-heterosexual sexuality and various social forms of deviance have long been controversial. Along with prostitution and criminality, Adler had classified 'homosexuals' as falling among the "failures of life". In 1917, he began his writings on homosexuality with a 52-page magazine, and sporadically published more thoughts throughout the rest of his life.
The Dutch psychologist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg underlines how Alfred Adler came to his conclusions for, in 1917, Adler believed that he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own gender. This point of view differed from Freud's theory that homosexuality is rooted in narcissism or Jung's view of expressions of contrasexuality vis-à-vis the archetypes of the Anima and Animus.
There is evidence that Adler may have moved towards abandoning the hypothesis. Towards the end of Adler's life, in the mid-1930s, his opinion towards homosexuality began to shift. Elizabeth H. McDowell, a New York state family social worker recalls undertaking supervision with Adler on a young man who was "living in sin" with an older man in New York City. Adler asked her, "Is he happy, would you say?" "Oh yes," McDowell replied. Adler then stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone."
According to Phyllis Bottome, who wrote Adler's Biography (after Adler himself laid upon her that task): "He always treated homosexuality as lack of courage. These were but ways of obtaining a slight release for a physical need while avoiding a greater obligation. A transient partner of your own sex is a better known road and requires less courage than a permanent contact with an "unknown" sex.... Adler taught that men cannot be judged from within by their "possessions," as he used to call nerves, glands, traumas, drives et cetera, since both judge and prisoner are liable to misconstrue what is invisible and incalculable; but that he can be judged, with no danger from introspection, by how he measures up to the three common life tasks set before every human being between the cradle and the grave: work (employment), love or marriage (intimacy), and social contact (friendships.)"
Parent education
Adler emphasized both treatment and prevention. With regard to psychodynamic psychology, Adlerians emphasize the foundational importance of childhood in developing personality and any tendency towards various forms of psychopathology. The best way to inoculate against what are now termed "personality disorders" (what Adler had called the "neurotic character"), or a tendency to various neurotic conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.), is to train a child to be and feel an equal part of the family. The responsibility of the optimal development of the child is not limited to the mother or father, but rather includes teachers and society more broadly. Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so on require training in parent education to complement the work of the family in fostering a democratic character. When a child does not feel equal and is enacted upon (abused through pampering or neglect) he or she is likely to develop inferiority or superiority complexes and various concomitant compensation strategies. These strategies exact a social toll by seeding higher divorce rates, the breakdown of the family, criminal tendencies, and subjective suffering in the various guises of psychopathology. Adlerians have long promoted parent education groups, especially those influenced by the famous Austrian/American Adlerian Rudolf Dreikurs (Dreikurs & Soltz, 1964).
Spirituality, ecology and community
In a late work, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1938), Adler turns to the subject of metaphysics, where he integrates Jan Smuts' evolutionary holism with the ideas of teleology and community: "sub specie aeternitatis". Unabashedly, he argues his vision of society: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the ultimate fulfillment of evolution." Adler follows this pronouncement with a defense of metaphysics:
This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a community feeling whereby one feels he or she belongs with others and has also developed an ecological connection with nature (plants, animals, the crust of this earth) and the cosmos as a whole, sub specie aeternitatis. Clearly, Adler himself had little problem with adopting a metaphysical and spiritual point of view to support his theories.
Death and cremation
Adler died suddenly in Aberdeen, Scotland, in May 1937, during a three-week visit to the University of Aberdeen. While walking down the street, he was seen to collapse and lie motionless on the pavement. As a man ran over to him and loosened his collar, Adler mumbled "Kurt", the name of his son and died. The autopsy performed determined his death was caused by a degeneration of the heart muscle. His body was cremated at Warriston Crematorium in Edinburgh but the ashes were never reclaimed. In 2007, his ashes were rediscovered in a casket at Warriston Crematorium and returned to Vienna for burial in 2011.
Use of Adler's work without attribution
Much of Adler's theories have been absorbed into modern psychology without attribution. Psychohistorian Henri F. Ellenberger writes, "It would not be easy to find another author from which so much has been borrowed on all sides without acknowledgement than Alfred Adler." Ellenberger posits several theories for "the discrepancy between greatness of achievement, massive rejection of person and work, and wide-scale, quiet plagiarism..." These include Adler's "imperfect" style of writing and demeanor, his "capacity to create a new obviousness," and his lack of a large and well organized following.
Influence on depth psychology
In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there". He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum. He also imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world.
This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "honorable errors". Though one rejects the content of Adler's views, one can recognize their consistency and significance." Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later Neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach.
Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991); and thus to be one of the three great psychologists/philosophers of the twentieth century.
Personal life
During his college years, he had become attached to a group of socialist students, among which he had found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist from Russia studying in Vienna. Because Raissa was a militant socialist, she had a large impact on Adler's early publications and ultimately his theory of personality. They married in 1897 and had four children, two of whom, his daughter Alexandra and his son Kurt, became psychiatrists. Their children were writer, psychiatrist and Socialist activist Alexandra Adler; psychiatrist Kurt Adler; writer and activist Valentine Adler; and Cornelia "Nelly" Adler. Raissa, Adler's wife, died at 89 in New York City on April 21,1962.
Author and journalist Margot Adler (1946-2014) was Adler's granddaughter.
Artistic and cultural references
The two main characters in the novel Plant Teacher engage in a session of Adlerian lifestyle interpretation, including early memory interpretation.
In the episode Something About Dr. Mary of the television series Frasier, Frasier recalls having to "pass under a dangerously unbalanced portrait of Alfred Adler" during his studies at Harvard.
He appears as a character in the Young Indiana Jones chronicles.
English-language Adlerian journals
North America
The Journal of Individual Psychology (University of Texas Press)
The Canadian Journal of Adlerian Psychology (Adlerian Psychology Association of British Columbia)
United Kingdom
Adlerian Yearbook (Adlerian Society, UK)
Publications
Alfred Adler's key publications were The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927), & What Life Could Mean to You (1931). Other important publications are The Pattern of Life (1930), The Science of Living (1930), The Neurotic Constitution (1917), The Problems of Neurosis (1930). In his lifetime, Adler published more than 300 books and articles.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published a twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, covering his writings from 1898–1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1. Volume 12 provides comprehensive overviews of Adler's mature theory and contemporary Adlerian practice.
Volume 1 : The Neurotic Character — 1907
Volume 2 : Journal Articles 1898–1909
Volume 3 : Journal Articles 1910–1913
Volume 4 : Journal Articles 1914–1920
Volume 5 : Journal Articles 1921–1926
Volume 6 : Journal Articles 1927–1931
Volume 7 : Journal Articles 1931–1937
Volume 8 : Lectures to Physicians & Medical Students
Volume 9 : Case Histories
Volume 10 : Case Readings & Demonstrations
Volume 11 : Education for Prevention
Volume 12 : The General System of Individual Psychology
Other key Adlerian texts
Adler, A. (1964). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. .
Adler, A. (1979). Superiority and Social Interest: A Collection of Later Writings. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. .
See also
Adlerian
Classical Adlerian psychology
Neo-Adlerian
Notes
References
Adler, A. (1908). Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und der Neurose. Fortsch. Med. 26: 577–584.
Adler, A. (1938). Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind. J. Linton and R. Vaughan (Trans.). London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Adler, A. (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Dreikurs, R. & Soltz, V. (1964). Children the Challenge. New York: Hawthorn Books.
Ehrenwald, J. (1991, 1976). The History of Psychotherapy: From healing magic to encounter. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.
Eissler, K.R. (1971). Death Drive, Ambivalence, and Narcissism. Psychoanal. St. Child, 26: 25–78.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Fiebert, M. S. (1997). In and out of Freud's shadow: A chronology of Adler's relationship with Freud. Individual Psychology, 53(3), 241–269.
Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press, Vol. 10, pp. 3–149.
King, R. & Shelley, C. (2008). Community Feeling and Social Interest: Adlerian Parallels, Synergy, and Differences with the Field of Community Psychology. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 18, 96–107.
Manaster, G. J., Painter, G., Deutsch, D., & Overholt, B. J. (Eds.). (1977). Alfred Adler: As We Remember Him. Chicago: North American Society of Adlerian Psychology.
Shelley, C. (Ed.). (1998). Contemporary Perspectives on Psychotherapy and Homosexualities. London: Free Association Books.
Slavik, S. & King, R. (2007). Adlerian therapeutic strategy. The Canadian Journal of Adlerian Psychology, 37(1), 3–16.
Gantschacher, H. (ARBOS 2007). Witness and Victim of the Apocalypse, chapter 13 page 12 and chapter 14 page 6.
Orgler, H. (1996). Alfred Adler, 22 (1), pg. 67–68.
Further reading
Orgler, Hertha, Alfred Adler, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, V. 22 (1), 1976-Spring, p. 67
Phyllis Bottome (1939). Alfred Adler: A Biography. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York.
Phyllis Bottome (1939). Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom. London: Faber and Faber. 3rd Ed. 1957.
Carlson, J., Watts, R. E., & Maniacci, M. (2005). Adlerian Therapy: Theory and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. .
Dinkmeyer, D., Sr., & Dreikurs, R. (2000). Encouraging Children to Learn. Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. .
Rudolf Dreikurs (1935): An Introduction to Individual Psychology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co. Ltd. (new edition 1983: London & New York: Routledge), .
Grey, L. (1998). Alfred Adler: The Forgotten Prophet: A Vision for the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Praeger. .
Handlbauer, B. (1998). The Freud-Adler Controversy. Oxford, UK: Oneworld. .
Hoffman, E. (1994). The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology. New York: Addison-Wesley Co. .
Lehrer, R. (1999). "Adler and Nietzsche". In: J. Golomb, W. Santaniello, and R. Lehrer. (Eds.). Nietzsche and Depth Psychology. (pp. 229–246). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. .
Mosak, H. H. & Di Pietro, R. (2005). Early Recollections: Interpretive Method and Application. New York: Routledge. .
Oberst, U. E. and Stewart, A. E. (2003). Adlerian Psychotherapy: An Advanced Approach to Individual Psychology. New York: Brunner-Routledge. .
Orgler, H. (1963). Alfred Adler: The Man and His Work: Triumph Over the Inferiority Complex. New York: Liveright.
Orgler, H. (1996). Alfred Adler, 22 (1), pg. 67–68.
Josef Rattner (1983): Alfred Adler: Life and Literature. Ungar Pub. Co. .
Slavik, S. & Carlson, J. (Eds.). (2005). Readings in the Theory of Individual Psychology. New York: Routledge. .
Manès Sperber (1974). Masks of Loneliness: Alfred Adler in Perspective. New York: Macmillan. .
Stepansky, P. E. (1983). In Freud's Shadow: Adler in Context. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. .
Watts, R. E. (2003). Adlerian, cognitive, and constructivist therapies: An integrative dialogue. New York: Springer. .
Watts, R. E., & Carlson, J. (1999). Interventions and strategies in counseling and psychotherapy. New York: Accelerated Development/Routledge. .
Way, Lewis (1950): Adler's Place in Psychology. London: Allen & Unwin.
Way, Lewis (1956): Alfred Adler: An Introduction to his Psychology. London: Pelican.
West, G. K. (1975). Kierkegaard and Adler. Tallahassee: Florida State University.
External links
International Association of Individual Psychology
Psychology Articles
The Adlerian Society (UK) and the Institute for Individual Psychology
The North American Society of Adlerian Psychology
Institutul de Psihologie si Psihoterapie Adleriana Romania
Centro de Estudios Adlerianos Uruguay
Classical Adlerian Psychology according to Alfred Adlers Institutes in San Francisco and Northwestern Washington
AdlerPedia
Hong Kong Society of Adlerian Psychology
New Concept Coaching & Training Institute
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"The Yugtun or Alaska script is a syllabary invented around the year 1900 by Uyaquq to write the Central Alaskan Yup'ik language. Uyaquq, who was monolingual in Yup'ik but had a son who was literate in English, initially used indigenous pictograms as a form of proto-writing that served as a mnemonic in preaching the Bible. However, when he realized that this did not allow him to reproduce the exact words of a passage the way the Latin alphabet did for English-speaking missionaries, he and his assistants developed it until it became a full syllabary. Although Uyaquq never learned English or the Latin alphabet, he was influenced by both. The syllable kut, for example, resembles the cursive form of the English word good.\n\nThe Yup'ik language is now generally written in the Latin alphabet.\n\nBibliography\nAlbertine Gaur, 2000. Literacy and the Politics of Writing, \n Alfred Schmitt, 1951. Die Alaska-Schrift und ihre schriftgeschichtliche Bedeutung, Simons, Marburg\n Alfred Schmitt, 1981. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Schrift. Eine Schriftentwicklung um 1900 in Alaska, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden (Reprint der Ausgabe Leipzig 1940), \nVol. 1 Text, vol. 2. Abbildungen\n\nReferences\n\nSyllabary writing systems\nYupik languages\nConstructed scripts\nWriting systems of the Americas\nWriting systems introduced in 1900",
"Alfred Abraham Knopf Sr. (September 12, 1892 August 11, 1984) was an American publisher of the 20th century, and founder of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. His contemporaries included the likes of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, and (of the previous generation) Frank Nelson Doubleday, J. Henry Harper and Henry Holt. Knopf paid special attention to the quality of printing, binding, and design in his books, and earned a reputation as a purist in both content and presentation.\n\nBiography\nKnopf was born into a Jewish family in New York City. His father, Samuel Knopf, was an advertising executive and financial consultant, his mother was Ida Japhe, a school teacher. Samuel Knopf was originally from Warsaw, Poland, but came to New York with his parents, where he worked his way up the directorship at a small mercantile bank. Alfred's mother, Ida, was from a Latvian Jewish family who settled in New York. For a time Knopf's parents lived in the Midwest and in Virginia. Ida committed suicide when Alfred was five years old and his sister Sophia was almost two. That same day, Alfred's father had filed for divorce in which he named Ida as an adulteress. His father later married Lillian Harris, who had a daughter, Bertha, from a previous marriage. With Lillian, Samuel had another son, Edwin H. Knopf, who worked for Alfred briefly, then became a film director and producer.\n\nAlfred attended Columbia University, where he was a pre-law student and a member of the Peithologian Society (a debating and literary club) and the Boar's Head Society. He began to show an interest in publishing during his senior year, becoming advertising manager of an undergraduate magazine. His interest in publishing was allegedly fostered by a correspondence with British author John Galsworthy. Galsworthy was the subject of Knopf's senior thesis and after visiting Galsworthy in England, Knopf gave up his plans for a law career, and upon his return went into publishing.\n\nKnopf was introduced to his future wife and business partner, Blanche Knopf, at a party at the Lawrence Athletic Club in 1911. Their relationship was built on their mutual interest in books. Blanche said of their relationship, \"Alfred had realized I read books constantly and he had never met a girl who did ... I saw him and [all we did was] talk books, and nobody liked him--my family least of all. But I did, because I had someone to talk books to and we talked of making books...We decided we would get married and make books and publish them.\" Alfred and Blanche were married on April 4, 1916.\n\nKnopf worked as a clerk at Doubleday (1912–1913), then as an editorial assistant to Mitchell Kennerley (1914).\n\nKnopf, along with Blanche Knopf, founded the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf in 1915. The company initially emphasized European, especially Russian, literature, hence the choice of the borzoi as a colophon. At that time European literature was largely neglected by American publishers; Knopf published authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, T.F Powys, Wyndham Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre. While Blanche was known as a superb editor, Alfred was always interested in more of the sales side than in editing.\n\nKnopf also published many American authors, including Conrad Aiken, James Baldwin, James M. Cain, Theodore Dreiser, Shirley Ann Grau, Dashiell Hammett, Langston Hughes, Vachel Lindsay, H.L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, John Updike, and Knopf's own favorite, Willa Cather. From 1924 to 1934, he published the famous literary magazine founded by Mencken and Nathan, The American Mercury. He often developed a personal friendship with his authors. Knopf's personal interest in the fields of history, sociology, and science led to close friendships in the academic community with such noted historians as Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Samuel Eliot Morison. A prominent Republican until Watergate, Knopf often drew legislators into lengthy correspondence by mail. He was also a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors from 1940 to 1946.\n\nKnopf himself was also an author. His writings include Some Random Recollections, Publishing Then and Now, Portrait of a Publisher, Blanche W. Knopf: July 30, 1894–June 4, 1966, and Sixty Photographs.\n\nWhen the Knopfs' son Alfred A. Knopf Jr. left the company in 1959 to found Atheneum Publishers, Alfred and Blanche became concerned about the eventual fate of their publishing house, which had always been a family business. The problem was solved in 1960, when Knopf merged with Random House, which was owned by the Knopfs' close friends Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. Knopf retained complete editorial control for five years, and then gave up only his right to veto other editors' manuscript selections. The editorial departments of the two companies remain separate, and Knopf, Inc., retains its distinctive character. Knopf called the merger \"a perfect marriage.\"\n\nRandom House itself eventually became a division of Bertelsmann AG, a large multinational media company. The Knopf imprint remains in existence.\n\nBlanche Knopf died in June 1966. Alfred remarried in April of the following year, to Helen Norcross Hedrick. He died of congestive heart failure on August 11, 1984, at his estate in Purchase, New York.\n\nPersonality\nKnopf had little enthusiasm for most of the changes that took place in the publishing industry during his lifetime. \"Too many books are published, and they are overpriced\", he told The Saturday Review. These are things \"about which all publishers agree, and about which no publisher does anything.\" The most fundamental change he noted was the increased importance of the editor. \"In the early days, things were quite simple. The books came in; we published them as written... A publisher was regarded and so, in turn, was the writer as a pro. A writer's job was to write a book and give it to you.\" And he remarked to Shenker: \"I guess business became more complicated and publishers less literate. It ceased to be the fact that publishers publish and authors write. Today authors submit manuscripts and editors write books.\" The editor is now hired largely to acquire books, \"and if he can't get good books, he usually takes what he can get books that are not so good. And then he sometimes wrecks himself trying to make a silk purse out of what can never become anything but a sow's ear.\"\n\nKnopf was generally unimpressed with current literature, though he admired John Hersey, John Updike, Jorge Amado, and a few other contemporary authors. In Publishing Then and Now he wrote: \"Frequently... our American author, whatever his age, experience in life, and technical knowledge, simply can't write. I don't mean that he is not the master of a prose style of elegance and distinction; I mean that he can't write simple straightforward and correct English. And here, only an exceptional editor will really help him.\" American authors are not very durable, he said in 1964, and \"there are no giants in Europe now.\" Though twelve Knopf authors had won Nobel Prizes, Knopf acknowledged that \"some Nobel Prize books aren't very good,\" calling Doctor Zhivago, for example, \"incredibly tedious ... If Krushchev had banned it for dullness instead of its political implications, he might have been in the clear.\"\n\nAmong other authors he rejected were Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Anne Frank, George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anaïs Nin. He turned down an early novel by Ursula K. Le Guin but encouraged her to keep writing.\n\nKnopf also lamented the \"shockingly bad taste\" that he felt characterizes much modern fiction, and warned of the danger of a \"legal backlash\" against pornography, and a possible revival of censorship.\n\nThis outspoken aspect of his character sometimes found voice in letters of complaint to hotels, restaurants, and stores that failed to meet his high standards. These letters grew increasingly frequent and more severe as he aged. One striking example is the six-year-long war of words he waged against the Eastman Kodak Company over a roll of lost film.\n\nBibliography\n John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Volume II: The Creation of an Industry, 1865–1919 (1975); Volume III: The Golden Age Between Two Wars, 1920–1940 (1978);\n Bennett Cerf, At Random, Random House, 1977;\n Alfred A. Knopf, Some Random Recollections, Typophiles, 1949; Publishing Then and Now, New York Public Library, 1964; Portrait of a Publisher, Typophiles, 1965;\n New Yorker, November 20, 1948, November 27, 1948, December 4, 1948;\n Saturday Review, August 29, 1964, November 29, 1975;\n Publishers Weekly, January 25, 1965, February 1, 1965, May 19, 1975;\n Current Biography, Wilson, 1966;\n New York Times, September 12, 1972, September 12, 1977;\n New York Times Book Review, February 24, 1974;\n Saturday Review/World, August 10, 1974;\n W, October 31-November 7, 1975;\n Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1984;\n New York Times, August 12, 1984;\n Chicago Tribune, August 13, 1984;\n Newsweek, August 20, 1984;\n Time, August 20, 1984.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAlfred A. Knopf archive at the University of Texas Austin\nA biography of Blanche W. Knopf, wife of Alfred A. Knopf\nTumblr page for Knopf\n\n1892 births\n1984 deaths\nAIGA medalists\nAmerican book publishers (people)\nAmerican people of Polish-Jewish descent\nColumbia College (New York) alumni\nNew York (state) Republicans\nPeople from Purchase, New York\nKnopf family"
] |
[
"Alfred Adler",
"Influence on depth psychology",
"What did Alfred write?",
"Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the \"Will to Power\""
] | C_771fdf6f2d324abd93b0453bc13b64b3_0 | What does the Will to Power mean? | 2 | What does the Will to Power mean? | Alfred Adler | In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there". He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum. He also imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world. This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "... honorable errors. Though one rejects the content of Adler's views, one can recognize their consistency and significance". Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach. Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991); and thus to be one of the three great psychologists/philosophers of the twentieth century. CANNOTANSWER | focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. | Alfred Adler (; ; 7 February 1870 – 28 May 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology" (Orgler 1976).
Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and to carry psychiatry into the community. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
Early life
Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870 at Mariahilfer Straße 208 in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna, a modern part of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, the 15th district of the city. He was second of the seven children of a Jewish couple, Pauline (Beer) and Leopold Adler. Leopold Adler was a Hungarian-born grain merchant. Alfred's younger brother died in the bed next to him when Alfred was only three years old, and throughout his childhood, he maintained a rivalry with his older brother. This rivalry was spurred on because Adler believed his mother preferred his brother over him. Despite his good relationship with his father, he still struggled with feelings of inferiority in his relationship with his mother.
Alfred was an active, popular child and an average student who was also known for the competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund. Early on, he developed rickets, which kept Alfred from walking until he was four years old. At the age of four, he developed pneumonia and heard a doctor say to his father, "Your boy is lost". Along with being run over twice and witnessing his younger brother's death, this sickness contributed to his overall fear of death. At that point, he decided to be a physician. He was very interested in the subjects of psychology, sociology and philosophy. After studying at University of Vienna, he specialized as an eye doctor, and later in neurology and psychiatry.
Career
Adler began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater, a combination of amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into "organ inferiorities" and "compensation".
In his early career, Adler wrote an article in the defense of Freud's theory after reading one of Freud's most well known works, The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1902, because of his defense article, Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group that included Rudolf Reitler and Wilhelm Stekel. The group, the "Wednesday Society" (Mittwochsgesellschaft), met regularly on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home and was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement, expanding over time to include many more members. Each week a member would present a paper and after a short break of coffee and cakes, the group would discuss it. The main members were Otto Rank, Max Eitingon, Wilhelm Stekel, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs, Fritz Wittels, Max Graf, and Sandor Ferenczi. In 1908, Adler presented his paper, "The aggressive instinct in life and in neurosis", at a time when Freud believed that early sexual development was the primary determinant of the making of character, with which Adler took issue. Adler proposed that the sexual and aggressive drives were "two originally separate instincts which merge later on". Freud at the time disagreed with this idea.
When Freud in 1920 proposed his dual instinct theory of libido and aggressive drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, without citing Adler, he was reproached that Adler had proposed the aggressive drive in his 1908 paper (Eissler, 1971). Freud later commented in a 1923 footnote he added to the Little Hans case that, "I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an aggressive instinct" (1909, p. 140, 2), while pointing out that his conception of an aggressive drive differs from that of Adler. A long-serving member of the group, he made many more beyond this 1908 pivotal contribution to the group, and Adler became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society eight years later (1910). He remained a member of the Society until 1911, when he and a group of his supporters formally disengaged from Freud's circle, the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis (preceding Carl Jung's split in 1914).
This departure suited both Freud and Adler, since they had grown to dislike each other. During his association with Freud, Adler frequently maintained his own ideas which often diverged from Freud's. While Adler is often referred to as "a pupil of Freud", in fact this was never true; they were colleagues, Freud referring to him in print in 1909 as "My colleague Dr Alfred Adler". The association of Adler and Freud lasted a total of 9 years, and they never saw each other after the separation. Freud continued to dislike Adler even after the separation and tended to do so with other defectors from psychoanalysis. Even after Adler's death, Freud maintained his distaste for him. When conversing with a colleague over the matter, he stated, "I don't understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jewish boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis." In 1929 Adler showed a reporter with the New York Herald a copy of the faded postcard that Freud had sent him in 1902. He wanted to prove that he had never been a disciple of Freud's but rather that Freud had sought him out to share his ideas.
Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912 after his break from the psychoanalytic movement. Adler's group initially included some orthodox Nietzschean adherents (who believed that Adler's ideas on power and inferiority were closer to Nietzsche than Freud's). Their enmity aside, Adler retained a lifelong admiration for Freud's ideas on dreams and credited him with creating a scientific approach to their clinical utilization (Fiebert, 1997). Nevertheless, even regarding dream interpretation, Adler had his own theoretical and clinical approach. The primary differences between Adler and Freud centered on Adler's contention that the social realm (exteriority) is as important to psychology as is the internal realm (interiority). The dynamics of power and compensation extend beyond sexuality, and gender and politics can be as important as libido. Moreover, Freud did not share Adler's socialist beliefs, the latter's wife being for example an intimate friend of many of the Russian Marxists such as Leon Trotsky.
The Adlerian school
Following Adler's break from Freud, he enjoyed considerable success and celebrity in building an independent school of psychotherapy and a unique personality theory. He traveled and lectured for a period of 25 years promoting his socially oriented approach. His intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of social equality. Adler's efforts were halted by World War I, during which he served as a doctor with the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the conclusion of the war, his influence increased greatly. In the 1920s, he established a number of child guidance clinics. From 1921 onwards, he was a frequent lecturer in Europe and the United States, becoming a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. His clinical treatment methods for adults were aimed at uncovering the hidden purpose of symptoms using the therapeutic functions of insight and meaning.
Adler was concerned with the overcoming of the superiority/inferiority dynamic and was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favor of two chairs. This allows the clinician and patient to sit together more or less as equals. Clinically, Adler's methods are not limited to treatment after-the-fact but extend to the realm of prevention by preempting future problems in the child. Prevention strategies include encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect (especially corporal punishment). Adler's popularity was related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas. He often wrote for the lay public. Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task-oriented. These "Life tasks" are occupation/work, society/friendship, and love/sexuality. Their success depends on cooperation. The tasks of life are not to be considered in isolation since, as Adler famously commented, "they all throw cross-lights on one another".
In his bestselling book, Man's Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl compared his own "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (after Freud's and Adler's schools) to Adler's analysis:
Emigration
In the early 1930s, after most of Adler's Austrian clinics had been closed due to his Jewish heritage (despite his conversion to Christianity), Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in the US. Adler died from a heart attack in 1937 in Aberdeen, Scotland, during a lecture tour, although his remains went missing and were unaccounted for until 2007. His death was a temporary blow to the influence of his ideas, although a number of them were subsequently taken up by neo-Freudians. Through the work of Rudolf Dreikurs in the United States and many other adherents worldwide, Adlerian ideas and approaches remain strong and viable more than 70 years after Adler's death.
Around the world there are various organizations promoting Adler's orientation towards mental and social well-being. These include the International Committee of Adlerian Summer Schools and Institutes (ICASSI), the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology (NASAP) and the International Association for Individual Psychology. Teaching institutes and programs exist in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, and Wales.
Basic principles
Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger (The Philosophy of 'As if') and the literature of Dostoyevsky. While still a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society he developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation that was the prototype for his later turn to phenomenology and the development of his famous concept, the inferiority complex.
Adler was also influenced by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts (who coined the term "holism"). Adler's School, known as "Individual Psychology"—an arcane reference to the Latin individuals meaning indivisibility, a term intended to emphasize holism—is both a social and community psychology as well as a depth psychology. Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents, teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with others. He was a social idealist, and was known as a socialist in his early years of association with psychoanalysis (1902–1911).
Adler was pragmatic and believed that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology. Adler was also an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world, believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles. These styles could form the basis of psychic compensation and lead to mental health difficulties. Adler also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior long before Anna Freud wrote about the same phenomena in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
Adlerian-based scholarly, clinical and social practices focus on the following topics:
Social interest and community feeling
Holism and the creative self
Fictional finalism, teleology, and goal constructs
Psychological and social encouragement
Inferiority, superiority and compensation
Life style/style of life
Early recollections (a projective technique)
Family constellation and birth order
Life tasks and social embeddedness
The conscious and unconscious realms
Private logic and common sense (based in part on Kant's "")
Symptoms and neurosis
Safeguarding behavior
Guilt and guilt feelings
Socratic questioning
Dream interpretation
Child and adolescent psychology
Democratic approaches to parenting and families
Adlerian approaches to classroom management
Leadership and organizational psychology
Adler created Adlerian Therapy, because he believed that one's psyche should be studied in the context of that person's environment.
Adler's approach to personality
In one of his earliest and most famous publications, "Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation," Adler outlined the basics for what would be the beginning foundation of his personality theory. The article focuses mainly on the topics of organ inferiority and compensation. Organ inferiority is when one organ, or portion of the body, is weaker than the rest. Adler postulated that the body's other organs would work together in order to compensate for the weakness of this "inferior" organ. When compensation occurs, other areas of the body make up for the function lacking in the inferior portion. In some cases, the weakness may be overcompensated transforming it into a strength. An example would be an individual with a weak leg becoming a great runner later on. As his theory progressed, the idea of organ inferiority was replaced with feelings of inferiority instead. As Adler's theory progressed, he continued evolving his theory and key ideas.
Adler's book, Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Character) defines his earlier key ideas. He argued that human personality could be explained teleologically: parts of the individual's unconscious self ideally work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness). The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the individual overcompensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse.
Common therapeutic tools include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions.
Psychodynamics and teleology
Adler maintained that human psychology is psychodynamic in nature. Unlike Freud's metapsychology that emphasizes instinctual demands, human psychology is guided by goals and fueled by a yet unknown creative force. Like Freud's instincts, Adler's fictive goals are largely unconscious. These goals have a "teleological" function. Constructivist Adlerians, influenced by neo-Kantian and Nietzschean ideas, view these "teleological" goals as "fictions" in the sense that Hans Vaihinger spoke of (fictio). Usually there is a fictional final goal which can be deciphered alongside of innumerable sub-goals. The inferiority/superiority dynamic is constantly at work through various forms of compensation and overcompensation. For example, in anorexia nervosa the fictive final goal is to "be perfectly thin" (overcompensation on the basis of a feeling of inferiority). Hence, the fictive final goal can serve a persecutory function that is ever-present in subjectivity (though its trace springs are usually unconscious). The end goal of being "thin" is fictive however since it can never be subjectively achieved.
Teleology serves another vital function for Adlerians. Chilon's "hora telos" ("see the end, consider the consequences") provides for both healthy and maladaptive psychodynamics. Here we also find Adler's emphasis on personal responsibility in mentally healthy subjects who seek their own and the social good.
Constructivism and metaphysics
The metaphysical thread of Adlerian theory does not problematize the notion of teleology since concepts such as eternity (an ungraspable end where time ceases to exist) match the religious aspects that are held in tandem. In contrast, the constructivist Adlerian threads (either humanist/modernist or postmodern in variant) seek to raise insight of the force of unconscious fictions– which carry all of the inevitability of 'fate'– so long as one does not understand them. Here, 'teleology' itself is fictive yet experienced as quite real. This aspect of Adler's theory is somewhat analogous to the principles developed in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Therapy (CT). Both Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck credit Adler as a major precursor to REBT and CT. Ellis in particular was a member of the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology and served as an editorial board member for the Adlerian Journal Individual Psychology.
As a psychodynamic system, Adlerians excavate the past of a client/patient in order to alter their future and increase integration into community in the 'here-and-now'. The 'here-and-now' aspects are especially relevant to those Adlerians who emphasize humanism and/or existentialism in their approaches.
Holism
Metaphysical Adlerians emphasize a spiritual holism in keeping with what Jan Smuts articulated (Smuts coined the term "holism"), that is, the spiritual sense of one-ness that holism usually implies (etymology of holism: from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) Smuts believed that evolution involves a progressive series of lesser wholes integrating into larger ones. Whilst Smuts' text Holism and Evolution is thought to be a work of science, it actually attempts to unify evolution with a higher metaphysical principle (holism). The sense of connection and one-ness revered in various religious traditions (among these, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Buddhism and Baha'i) finds a strong complement in Adler's thought.
The pragmatic and materialist aspects to contextualizing members of communities, the construction of communities and the socio-historical-political forces that shape communities matter a great deal when it comes to understanding an individual's psychological make-up and functioning. This aspect of Adlerian psychology holds a high level of synergy with the field of community psychology, especially given Adler's concern for what he called "the absolute truth and logic of communal life". However, Adlerian psychology, unlike community psychology, is holistically concerned with both prevention and clinical treatment after-the-fact. Hence, Adler can be considered the "first community psychologist", a discourse that formalized in the decades following Adler's death (King & Shelley, 2008).
Adlerian psychology, Carl Jung's analytical psychology, Gestalt therapy and Karen Horney's psychodynamic approach are holistic schools of psychology. These discourses eschew a reductive approach to understanding human psychology and psychopathology.
Typology
Adler developed a scheme of so-called personality types, which were however always to be taken as provisional or heuristic since he did not, in essence, believe in personality types, and at different times proposed different and equally tentative systems. The danger with typology is to lose sight of the individual's uniqueness and to gaze reductively, acts that Adler opposed. Nevertheless, he intended to illustrate patterns that could denote a characteristic governed under the overall style of life. Hence American Adlerians such as Harold Mosak have made use of Adler's typology in this provisional sense:
The Getting or Leaning They are sensitive people who have developed a shell around themselves which protects them, but they must rely on others to carry them through life's difficulties. They have low energy levels and so become dependent. When overwhelmed, they develop what we typically think of as neurotic symptoms: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, general anxiety, hysteria, amnesias, and so on, depending on individual details of their lifestyle.
The Avoiding types are those that hate being defeated. They may be successful, but have not taken any risks getting there. They are likely to have low social contact in fear of rejection or defeat in any way.
The Ruling or Dominant type strive for power and are willing to manipulate situations and people, anything to get their way. People of this type are also prone to anti-social behavior.
The Socially Useful types are those who are very outgoing and very active. They have a lot of social contact and strive to make changes for the good.
These 'types' are typically formed in childhood and are expressions of the Style of Life.
The importance of memories
Adler placed great emphasis upon the interpretation of early memories in working with patients and school children, writing that, "Among all psychic expressions, some of the most revealing are the individual's memories." Adler viewed memories as expressions of "private logic" and as metaphors for an individual's personal philosophy of life or "lifestyle". He maintained that memories are never incidental or trivial; rather, they are chosen reminders: "(A person's) memories are the reminders she carries about with her of her limitations and of the meanings of events. There are no 'chance' memories. Out of the incalculable number of impressions that an individual receives, she chooses to remember only those which she considers, however dimly, to have a bearing on her problems."
On birth order
Adler often emphasized one's psychological birth order as having an influence on the style of life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up. Birth order referred to the placement of siblings within the family. It is important to note the difference between psychological and ordinal birth order (e.g. in some families, a second child might behave like a firstborn, in which case they are considered to be an ordinal secondborn but a psychological firstborn). Mosak, H.H. & Maniacci, M. P. (1999). A primer of Adlerian Psychology. Taylor and Francis. Adler believed that the firstborn child would be in a favorable position, enjoying the full attention of the eager new parents until the arrival of a second child. This second child would cause the first born to suffer feelings of dethronement, no longer being the center of attention. Adler (1908) believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction which he reasoned was a compensation for the feelings of excessive responsibility "the weight of the world on one's shoulders" (e.g. having to look after the younger ones) and the melancholic loss of that once supremely pampered position. As a result, he predicted that this child was the most likely to end up in jail or an asylum. Youngest children would tend to be overindulged, leading to poor social empathy. Consequently, the middle child, who would experience neither dethronement nor overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful individual yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel squeezed-out. Adler himself was the third (some sources credit second) in a family of six children.
Adler never produced any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles, nor did he feel the need to. Yet the value of the hypothesis was to extend the importance of siblings in marking the psychology of the individual beyond Freud's more limited emphasis on the mother and father. Hence, Adlerians spend time therapeutically mapping the influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients. The idiographic approach entails an excavation of the phenomenology of one's birth order position for likely influence on the subject's Style of Life. In sum, the subjective experiences of sibling positionality and inter-relations are important in terms of the dynamics of psychology, for Adlerian therapists and personality theorists, not the cookbook predictions that may or may not have been objectively true in Adler's time.
For Adler, birth order answered the question, "Why do children, who are raised in the same family, grow up with very different personalities?" While a strict geneticist, believing siblings are raised in a shared environment, may claim any differences in personality would be caused by subtle variations in the individuals' genetics, Adler showed through his birth order theory that children do not grow up in the same shared environment, but the oldest child grows up in a family where they have younger siblings, the middle child with older and younger siblings, and the youngest with older siblings. The position in the family constellation, Adler said, is the reason for these differences in personality and not genetics: a point later taken up by Eric Berne.
On addiction
Adler's insight into birth order, compensation and issues relating to the individuals' perception of community also led him to investigate the causes and treatment of substance abuse disorders, particularly alcoholism and morphinism, which already were serious social problems of his time. Adler's work with addicts was significant since most other prominent proponents of psychoanalysis invested relatively little time and thought into this widespread ill of the modern and post-modern age. In addition to applying his individual psychology approach of organ inferiority, for example, to the onset and causes of addictive behaviors, he also tried to find a clear relationship of drug cravings to sexual gratification or their substitutions. Early pharmaco-therapeutic interventions with non-addictive substances, such as neuphyllin were used, since withdrawal symptoms were explained by a form of "water-poisoning" that made the use of diuretics necessary.
Adler and his wife's pragmatic approach, and the seemingly high success rates of their treatment were based on their ideas of social functioning and well-being. Clearly, life style choices and situations were emphasized, for example the need for relaxation or the negative effects of early childhood conflicts were examined, which compared to other authoritarian or religious treatment regimens, were clearly modern approaches. Certainly some of his observations, for example that psychopaths were more likely to be drug addicts are not compatible with current methodologies and theories of substance abuse treatment, but the self-centered attributes of the illness and the clear escapism from social responsibilities by pathological addicts put Adler's treatment modalities clearly into a modern contextual reasoning.
On homosexuality
Adler's ideas regarding non-heterosexual sexuality and various social forms of deviance have long been controversial. Along with prostitution and criminality, Adler had classified 'homosexuals' as falling among the "failures of life". In 1917, he began his writings on homosexuality with a 52-page magazine, and sporadically published more thoughts throughout the rest of his life.
The Dutch psychologist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg underlines how Alfred Adler came to his conclusions for, in 1917, Adler believed that he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own gender. This point of view differed from Freud's theory that homosexuality is rooted in narcissism or Jung's view of expressions of contrasexuality vis-à-vis the archetypes of the Anima and Animus.
There is evidence that Adler may have moved towards abandoning the hypothesis. Towards the end of Adler's life, in the mid-1930s, his opinion towards homosexuality began to shift. Elizabeth H. McDowell, a New York state family social worker recalls undertaking supervision with Adler on a young man who was "living in sin" with an older man in New York City. Adler asked her, "Is he happy, would you say?" "Oh yes," McDowell replied. Adler then stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone."
According to Phyllis Bottome, who wrote Adler's Biography (after Adler himself laid upon her that task): "He always treated homosexuality as lack of courage. These were but ways of obtaining a slight release for a physical need while avoiding a greater obligation. A transient partner of your own sex is a better known road and requires less courage than a permanent contact with an "unknown" sex.... Adler taught that men cannot be judged from within by their "possessions," as he used to call nerves, glands, traumas, drives et cetera, since both judge and prisoner are liable to misconstrue what is invisible and incalculable; but that he can be judged, with no danger from introspection, by how he measures up to the three common life tasks set before every human being between the cradle and the grave: work (employment), love or marriage (intimacy), and social contact (friendships.)"
Parent education
Adler emphasized both treatment and prevention. With regard to psychodynamic psychology, Adlerians emphasize the foundational importance of childhood in developing personality and any tendency towards various forms of psychopathology. The best way to inoculate against what are now termed "personality disorders" (what Adler had called the "neurotic character"), or a tendency to various neurotic conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.), is to train a child to be and feel an equal part of the family. The responsibility of the optimal development of the child is not limited to the mother or father, but rather includes teachers and society more broadly. Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so on require training in parent education to complement the work of the family in fostering a democratic character. When a child does not feel equal and is enacted upon (abused through pampering or neglect) he or she is likely to develop inferiority or superiority complexes and various concomitant compensation strategies. These strategies exact a social toll by seeding higher divorce rates, the breakdown of the family, criminal tendencies, and subjective suffering in the various guises of psychopathology. Adlerians have long promoted parent education groups, especially those influenced by the famous Austrian/American Adlerian Rudolf Dreikurs (Dreikurs & Soltz, 1964).
Spirituality, ecology and community
In a late work, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1938), Adler turns to the subject of metaphysics, where he integrates Jan Smuts' evolutionary holism with the ideas of teleology and community: "sub specie aeternitatis". Unabashedly, he argues his vision of society: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the ultimate fulfillment of evolution." Adler follows this pronouncement with a defense of metaphysics:
This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a community feeling whereby one feels he or she belongs with others and has also developed an ecological connection with nature (plants, animals, the crust of this earth) and the cosmos as a whole, sub specie aeternitatis. Clearly, Adler himself had little problem with adopting a metaphysical and spiritual point of view to support his theories.
Death and cremation
Adler died suddenly in Aberdeen, Scotland, in May 1937, during a three-week visit to the University of Aberdeen. While walking down the street, he was seen to collapse and lie motionless on the pavement. As a man ran over to him and loosened his collar, Adler mumbled "Kurt", the name of his son and died. The autopsy performed determined his death was caused by a degeneration of the heart muscle. His body was cremated at Warriston Crematorium in Edinburgh but the ashes were never reclaimed. In 2007, his ashes were rediscovered in a casket at Warriston Crematorium and returned to Vienna for burial in 2011.
Use of Adler's work without attribution
Much of Adler's theories have been absorbed into modern psychology without attribution. Psychohistorian Henri F. Ellenberger writes, "It would not be easy to find another author from which so much has been borrowed on all sides without acknowledgement than Alfred Adler." Ellenberger posits several theories for "the discrepancy between greatness of achievement, massive rejection of person and work, and wide-scale, quiet plagiarism..." These include Adler's "imperfect" style of writing and demeanor, his "capacity to create a new obviousness," and his lack of a large and well organized following.
Influence on depth psychology
In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there". He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum. He also imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world.
This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "honorable errors". Though one rejects the content of Adler's views, one can recognize their consistency and significance." Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later Neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach.
Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991); and thus to be one of the three great psychologists/philosophers of the twentieth century.
Personal life
During his college years, he had become attached to a group of socialist students, among which he had found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist from Russia studying in Vienna. Because Raissa was a militant socialist, she had a large impact on Adler's early publications and ultimately his theory of personality. They married in 1897 and had four children, two of whom, his daughter Alexandra and his son Kurt, became psychiatrists. Their children were writer, psychiatrist and Socialist activist Alexandra Adler; psychiatrist Kurt Adler; writer and activist Valentine Adler; and Cornelia "Nelly" Adler. Raissa, Adler's wife, died at 89 in New York City on April 21,1962.
Author and journalist Margot Adler (1946-2014) was Adler's granddaughter.
Artistic and cultural references
The two main characters in the novel Plant Teacher engage in a session of Adlerian lifestyle interpretation, including early memory interpretation.
In the episode Something About Dr. Mary of the television series Frasier, Frasier recalls having to "pass under a dangerously unbalanced portrait of Alfred Adler" during his studies at Harvard.
He appears as a character in the Young Indiana Jones chronicles.
English-language Adlerian journals
North America
The Journal of Individual Psychology (University of Texas Press)
The Canadian Journal of Adlerian Psychology (Adlerian Psychology Association of British Columbia)
United Kingdom
Adlerian Yearbook (Adlerian Society, UK)
Publications
Alfred Adler's key publications were The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927), & What Life Could Mean to You (1931). Other important publications are The Pattern of Life (1930), The Science of Living (1930), The Neurotic Constitution (1917), The Problems of Neurosis (1930). In his lifetime, Adler published more than 300 books and articles.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published a twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, covering his writings from 1898–1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1. Volume 12 provides comprehensive overviews of Adler's mature theory and contemporary Adlerian practice.
Volume 1 : The Neurotic Character — 1907
Volume 2 : Journal Articles 1898–1909
Volume 3 : Journal Articles 1910–1913
Volume 4 : Journal Articles 1914–1920
Volume 5 : Journal Articles 1921–1926
Volume 6 : Journal Articles 1927–1931
Volume 7 : Journal Articles 1931–1937
Volume 8 : Lectures to Physicians & Medical Students
Volume 9 : Case Histories
Volume 10 : Case Readings & Demonstrations
Volume 11 : Education for Prevention
Volume 12 : The General System of Individual Psychology
Other key Adlerian texts
Adler, A. (1964). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. .
Adler, A. (1979). Superiority and Social Interest: A Collection of Later Writings. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. .
See also
Adlerian
Classical Adlerian psychology
Neo-Adlerian
Notes
References
Adler, A. (1908). Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und der Neurose. Fortsch. Med. 26: 577–584.
Adler, A. (1938). Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind. J. Linton and R. Vaughan (Trans.). London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Adler, A. (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Dreikurs, R. & Soltz, V. (1964). Children the Challenge. New York: Hawthorn Books.
Ehrenwald, J. (1991, 1976). The History of Psychotherapy: From healing magic to encounter. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.
Eissler, K.R. (1971). Death Drive, Ambivalence, and Narcissism. Psychoanal. St. Child, 26: 25–78.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Fiebert, M. S. (1997). In and out of Freud's shadow: A chronology of Adler's relationship with Freud. Individual Psychology, 53(3), 241–269.
Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press, Vol. 10, pp. 3–149.
King, R. & Shelley, C. (2008). Community Feeling and Social Interest: Adlerian Parallels, Synergy, and Differences with the Field of Community Psychology. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 18, 96–107.
Manaster, G. J., Painter, G., Deutsch, D., & Overholt, B. J. (Eds.). (1977). Alfred Adler: As We Remember Him. Chicago: North American Society of Adlerian Psychology.
Shelley, C. (Ed.). (1998). Contemporary Perspectives on Psychotherapy and Homosexualities. London: Free Association Books.
Slavik, S. & King, R. (2007). Adlerian therapeutic strategy. The Canadian Journal of Adlerian Psychology, 37(1), 3–16.
Gantschacher, H. (ARBOS 2007). Witness and Victim of the Apocalypse, chapter 13 page 12 and chapter 14 page 6.
Orgler, H. (1996). Alfred Adler, 22 (1), pg. 67–68.
Further reading
Orgler, Hertha, Alfred Adler, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, V. 22 (1), 1976-Spring, p. 67
Phyllis Bottome (1939). Alfred Adler: A Biography. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York.
Phyllis Bottome (1939). Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom. London: Faber and Faber. 3rd Ed. 1957.
Carlson, J., Watts, R. E., & Maniacci, M. (2005). Adlerian Therapy: Theory and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. .
Dinkmeyer, D., Sr., & Dreikurs, R. (2000). Encouraging Children to Learn. Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. .
Rudolf Dreikurs (1935): An Introduction to Individual Psychology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co. Ltd. (new edition 1983: London & New York: Routledge), .
Grey, L. (1998). Alfred Adler: The Forgotten Prophet: A Vision for the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Praeger. .
Handlbauer, B. (1998). The Freud-Adler Controversy. Oxford, UK: Oneworld. .
Hoffman, E. (1994). The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology. New York: Addison-Wesley Co. .
Lehrer, R. (1999). "Adler and Nietzsche". In: J. Golomb, W. Santaniello, and R. Lehrer. (Eds.). Nietzsche and Depth Psychology. (pp. 229–246). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. .
Mosak, H. H. & Di Pietro, R. (2005). Early Recollections: Interpretive Method and Application. New York: Routledge. .
Oberst, U. E. and Stewart, A. E. (2003). Adlerian Psychotherapy: An Advanced Approach to Individual Psychology. New York: Brunner-Routledge. .
Orgler, H. (1963). Alfred Adler: The Man and His Work: Triumph Over the Inferiority Complex. New York: Liveright.
Orgler, H. (1996). Alfred Adler, 22 (1), pg. 67–68.
Josef Rattner (1983): Alfred Adler: Life and Literature. Ungar Pub. Co. .
Slavik, S. & Carlson, J. (Eds.). (2005). Readings in the Theory of Individual Psychology. New York: Routledge. .
Manès Sperber (1974). Masks of Loneliness: Alfred Adler in Perspective. New York: Macmillan. .
Stepansky, P. E. (1983). In Freud's Shadow: Adler in Context. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. .
Watts, R. E. (2003). Adlerian, cognitive, and constructivist therapies: An integrative dialogue. New York: Springer. .
Watts, R. E., & Carlson, J. (1999). Interventions and strategies in counseling and psychotherapy. New York: Accelerated Development/Routledge. .
Way, Lewis (1950): Adler's Place in Psychology. London: Allen & Unwin.
Way, Lewis (1956): Alfred Adler: An Introduction to his Psychology. London: Pelican.
West, G. K. (1975). Kierkegaard and Adler. Tallahassee: Florida State University.
External links
International Association of Individual Psychology
Psychology Articles
The Adlerian Society (UK) and the Institute for Individual Psychology
The North American Society of Adlerian Psychology
Institutul de Psihologie si Psihoterapie Adleriana Romania
Centro de Estudios Adlerianos Uruguay
Classical Adlerian Psychology according to Alfred Adlers Institutes in San Francisco and Northwestern Washington
AdlerPedia
Hong Kong Society of Adlerian Psychology
New Concept Coaching & Training Institute
1870 births
1937 deaths
Adlerian psychology
19th-century Austrian Jews
Jewish scientists
Austrian ophthalmologists
Austrian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Austrian psychiatrists
Austrian psychologists
Jewish psychiatrists
People from Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus
University of Vienna alumni | true | [
"In mathematics, generalized means (or power mean or Hölder mean from Otto Hölder) are a family of functions for aggregating sets of numbers. These include as special cases the Pythagorean means (arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means).\n\nDefinition\nIf is a non-zero real number, and are positive real numbers, then the generalized mean or power mean with exponent of these positive real numbers is:\n\n(See -norm). For we set it equal to the geometric mean (which is the limit of means with exponents approaching zero, as proved below):\n\nFurthermore, for a sequence of positive weights with sum we define the weighted power mean as:\n\nThe unweighted means correspond to setting all .\n\nSpecial cases \n\nA few particular values of yield special cases with their own names:\n\nProof of (geometric mean)\nWe can rewrite the definition of using the exponential function\n\nIn the limit , we can apply L'Hôpital's rule to the argument of the exponential function. Differentiating the numerator and denominator with respect to , we have\n\nBy the continuity of the exponential function, we can substitute back into the above relation to obtain\n\nas desired.\n\nProperties\n\nLet be a sequence of positive real numbers, then the following properties hold:\n\n.\n, where is a permutation operator.\n.\n.\n\nGeneralized mean inequality \n\nIn general, if , then\n\nand the two means are equal if and only if .\n\nThe inequality is true for real values of and , as well as positive and negative infinity values.\n\nIt follows from the fact that, for all real ,\n\nwhich can be proved using Jensen's inequality.\n\nIn particular, for in , the generalized mean inequality implies the Pythagorean means inequality as well as the inequality of arithmetic and geometric means.\n\nProof of power means inequality\nWe will prove weighted power means inequality, for the purpose of the proof we will assume the following without loss of generality:\n\nProof for unweighted power means is easily obtained by substituting .\n\nEquivalence of inequalities between means of opposite signs\nSuppose an average between power means with exponents and holds:\n\napplying this, then:\n\nWe raise both sides to the power of −1 (strictly decreasing function in positive reals):\n\nWe get the inequality for means with exponents and , and we can use the same reasoning backwards, thus proving the inequalities to be equivalent, which will be used in some of the later proofs.\n\nGeometric mean\nFor any and non-negative weights summing to 1, the following inequality holds:\n\nThe proof follows from Jensen's inequality, making use of the fact the logarithm is concave:\n\nBy applying the exponential function to both sides and observing that as a strictly increasing function it preserves the sign of the inequality, we get\n\nTaking th powers of the , we are done for the inequality with positive ; the case for negatives is identical.\n\nInequality between any two power means\nWe are to prove that for any the following inequality holds:\n\nif is negative, and is positive, the inequality is equivalent to the one proved above:\n\nThe proof for positive and is as follows: Define the following function: . is a power function, so it does have a second derivative:\n\nwhich is strictly positive within the domain of , since , so we know is convex.\n\nUsing this, and the Jensen's inequality we get:\n\nafter raising both side to the power of (an increasing function, since is positive) we get the inequality which was to be proven:\n\nUsing the previously shown equivalence we can prove the inequality for negative and by replacing them with and , respectively.\n\nGeneralized f-mean \n\nThe power mean could be generalized further to the generalized -mean:\n\nThis covers the geometric mean without using a limit with . The power mean is obtained for .\n\nApplications\n\nSignal processing\nA power mean serves a non-linear moving average which is shifted towards small signal values for small and emphasizes big signal values for big . Given an efficient implementation of a moving arithmetic mean called smooth one can implement a moving power mean according to the following Haskell code.\n\n powerSmooth :: Floating a => ([a] -> [a]) -> a -> [a] -> [a]\n powerSmooth smooth p = map (** recip p) . smooth . map (**p)\n\n For big it can serve as an envelope detector on a rectified signal.\n For small it can serve as a baseline detector on a mass spectrum.\n\nSee also\n Arithmetic–geometric mean\n Average\n Heronian mean\n Inequality of arithmetic and geometric means\n Lehmer mean – also a mean related to powers\n Minkowski distance\n Quasi-arithmetic mean – another name for the generalized f-mean mentioned above\n Root mean square\n\nNotes\n\nReferences and further reading \n P. S. Bullen: Handbook of Means and Their Inequalities. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2003, chapter III (The Power Means), pp. 175-265\n\nExternal links\nPower mean at MathWorld\nExamples of Generalized Mean\nA proof of the Generalized Mean on PlanetMath\n\nMeans\nInequalities\nArticles with example Haskell code",
"Mean time to recovery (MTTR) is the average time that a device will take to recover from any failure. Examples of such devices range from self-resetting fuses (where the MTTR would be very short, probably seconds), up to whole systems which have to be repaired or replaced.\n\nThe MTTR would usually be part of a maintenance contract, where the user would pay more for a system MTTR of which was 24 hours, than for one of, say, 7 days. This does not mean the supplier is guaranteeing to have the system up and running again within 24 hours (or 7 days) of being notified of the failure. It does mean the average repair time will tend towards 24 hours (or 7 days). A more useful maintenance contract measure is the maximum time to recovery which can be easily measured and the supplier held accountable.\n\nNote that some suppliers will interpret MTTR to mean 'mean time to respond' and others will take it to mean 'mean time to replace/repair/recover/resolve'. The former indicates that the supplier will acknowledge a problem and initiate mitigation within a certain timeframe. Some systems may have an MTTR of zero, which means that they have redundant components which can take over the instant the primary one fails, see RAID for example. However, the failed device involved in this redundant configuration still needs to be returned to service and hence the device itself has a non-zero MTTR even if the system as a whole (through redundancy) has an MTTR of zero. But, as long as service is maintained, this is a minor issue.\n\nSee also\n Mean time to repair\n Mean time between failures\n Mean down time\n Service-level agreement\n\nReferences \n\nFailure\nReliability engineering"
] |
[
"Alfred Adler",
"Influence on depth psychology",
"What did Alfred write?",
"Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the \"Will to Power\"",
"What does the Will to Power mean?",
"focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better."
] | C_771fdf6f2d324abd93b0453bc13b64b3_0 | Did people agree with his views? | 3 | Did people agree with Alfred Adler's views? | Alfred Adler | In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there". He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum. He also imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world. This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "... honorable errors. Though one rejects the content of Adler's views, one can recognize their consistency and significance". Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach. Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991); and thus to be one of the three great psychologists/philosophers of the twentieth century. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Alfred Adler (; ; 7 February 1870 – 28 May 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology" (Orgler 1976).
Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and to carry psychiatry into the community. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
Early life
Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870 at Mariahilfer Straße 208 in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna, a modern part of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, the 15th district of the city. He was second of the seven children of a Jewish couple, Pauline (Beer) and Leopold Adler. Leopold Adler was a Hungarian-born grain merchant. Alfred's younger brother died in the bed next to him when Alfred was only three years old, and throughout his childhood, he maintained a rivalry with his older brother. This rivalry was spurred on because Adler believed his mother preferred his brother over him. Despite his good relationship with his father, he still struggled with feelings of inferiority in his relationship with his mother.
Alfred was an active, popular child and an average student who was also known for the competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund. Early on, he developed rickets, which kept Alfred from walking until he was four years old. At the age of four, he developed pneumonia and heard a doctor say to his father, "Your boy is lost". Along with being run over twice and witnessing his younger brother's death, this sickness contributed to his overall fear of death. At that point, he decided to be a physician. He was very interested in the subjects of psychology, sociology and philosophy. After studying at University of Vienna, he specialized as an eye doctor, and later in neurology and psychiatry.
Career
Adler began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater, a combination of amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into "organ inferiorities" and "compensation".
In his early career, Adler wrote an article in the defense of Freud's theory after reading one of Freud's most well known works, The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1902, because of his defense article, Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group that included Rudolf Reitler and Wilhelm Stekel. The group, the "Wednesday Society" (Mittwochsgesellschaft), met regularly on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home and was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement, expanding over time to include many more members. Each week a member would present a paper and after a short break of coffee and cakes, the group would discuss it. The main members were Otto Rank, Max Eitingon, Wilhelm Stekel, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs, Fritz Wittels, Max Graf, and Sandor Ferenczi. In 1908, Adler presented his paper, "The aggressive instinct in life and in neurosis", at a time when Freud believed that early sexual development was the primary determinant of the making of character, with which Adler took issue. Adler proposed that the sexual and aggressive drives were "two originally separate instincts which merge later on". Freud at the time disagreed with this idea.
When Freud in 1920 proposed his dual instinct theory of libido and aggressive drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, without citing Adler, he was reproached that Adler had proposed the aggressive drive in his 1908 paper (Eissler, 1971). Freud later commented in a 1923 footnote he added to the Little Hans case that, "I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an aggressive instinct" (1909, p. 140, 2), while pointing out that his conception of an aggressive drive differs from that of Adler. A long-serving member of the group, he made many more beyond this 1908 pivotal contribution to the group, and Adler became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society eight years later (1910). He remained a member of the Society until 1911, when he and a group of his supporters formally disengaged from Freud's circle, the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis (preceding Carl Jung's split in 1914).
This departure suited both Freud and Adler, since they had grown to dislike each other. During his association with Freud, Adler frequently maintained his own ideas which often diverged from Freud's. While Adler is often referred to as "a pupil of Freud", in fact this was never true; they were colleagues, Freud referring to him in print in 1909 as "My colleague Dr Alfred Adler". The association of Adler and Freud lasted a total of 9 years, and they never saw each other after the separation. Freud continued to dislike Adler even after the separation and tended to do so with other defectors from psychoanalysis. Even after Adler's death, Freud maintained his distaste for him. When conversing with a colleague over the matter, he stated, "I don't understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jewish boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis." In 1929 Adler showed a reporter with the New York Herald a copy of the faded postcard that Freud had sent him in 1902. He wanted to prove that he had never been a disciple of Freud's but rather that Freud had sought him out to share his ideas.
Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912 after his break from the psychoanalytic movement. Adler's group initially included some orthodox Nietzschean adherents (who believed that Adler's ideas on power and inferiority were closer to Nietzsche than Freud's). Their enmity aside, Adler retained a lifelong admiration for Freud's ideas on dreams and credited him with creating a scientific approach to their clinical utilization (Fiebert, 1997). Nevertheless, even regarding dream interpretation, Adler had his own theoretical and clinical approach. The primary differences between Adler and Freud centered on Adler's contention that the social realm (exteriority) is as important to psychology as is the internal realm (interiority). The dynamics of power and compensation extend beyond sexuality, and gender and politics can be as important as libido. Moreover, Freud did not share Adler's socialist beliefs, the latter's wife being for example an intimate friend of many of the Russian Marxists such as Leon Trotsky.
The Adlerian school
Following Adler's break from Freud, he enjoyed considerable success and celebrity in building an independent school of psychotherapy and a unique personality theory. He traveled and lectured for a period of 25 years promoting his socially oriented approach. His intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of social equality. Adler's efforts were halted by World War I, during which he served as a doctor with the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the conclusion of the war, his influence increased greatly. In the 1920s, he established a number of child guidance clinics. From 1921 onwards, he was a frequent lecturer in Europe and the United States, becoming a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. His clinical treatment methods for adults were aimed at uncovering the hidden purpose of symptoms using the therapeutic functions of insight and meaning.
Adler was concerned with the overcoming of the superiority/inferiority dynamic and was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favor of two chairs. This allows the clinician and patient to sit together more or less as equals. Clinically, Adler's methods are not limited to treatment after-the-fact but extend to the realm of prevention by preempting future problems in the child. Prevention strategies include encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect (especially corporal punishment). Adler's popularity was related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas. He often wrote for the lay public. Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task-oriented. These "Life tasks" are occupation/work, society/friendship, and love/sexuality. Their success depends on cooperation. The tasks of life are not to be considered in isolation since, as Adler famously commented, "they all throw cross-lights on one another".
In his bestselling book, Man's Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl compared his own "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (after Freud's and Adler's schools) to Adler's analysis:
Emigration
In the early 1930s, after most of Adler's Austrian clinics had been closed due to his Jewish heritage (despite his conversion to Christianity), Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in the US. Adler died from a heart attack in 1937 in Aberdeen, Scotland, during a lecture tour, although his remains went missing and were unaccounted for until 2007. His death was a temporary blow to the influence of his ideas, although a number of them were subsequently taken up by neo-Freudians. Through the work of Rudolf Dreikurs in the United States and many other adherents worldwide, Adlerian ideas and approaches remain strong and viable more than 70 years after Adler's death.
Around the world there are various organizations promoting Adler's orientation towards mental and social well-being. These include the International Committee of Adlerian Summer Schools and Institutes (ICASSI), the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology (NASAP) and the International Association for Individual Psychology. Teaching institutes and programs exist in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, and Wales.
Basic principles
Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger (The Philosophy of 'As if') and the literature of Dostoyevsky. While still a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society he developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation that was the prototype for his later turn to phenomenology and the development of his famous concept, the inferiority complex.
Adler was also influenced by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts (who coined the term "holism"). Adler's School, known as "Individual Psychology"—an arcane reference to the Latin individuals meaning indivisibility, a term intended to emphasize holism—is both a social and community psychology as well as a depth psychology. Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents, teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with others. He was a social idealist, and was known as a socialist in his early years of association with psychoanalysis (1902–1911).
Adler was pragmatic and believed that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology. Adler was also an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world, believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles. These styles could form the basis of psychic compensation and lead to mental health difficulties. Adler also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior long before Anna Freud wrote about the same phenomena in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
Adlerian-based scholarly, clinical and social practices focus on the following topics:
Social interest and community feeling
Holism and the creative self
Fictional finalism, teleology, and goal constructs
Psychological and social encouragement
Inferiority, superiority and compensation
Life style/style of life
Early recollections (a projective technique)
Family constellation and birth order
Life tasks and social embeddedness
The conscious and unconscious realms
Private logic and common sense (based in part on Kant's "")
Symptoms and neurosis
Safeguarding behavior
Guilt and guilt feelings
Socratic questioning
Dream interpretation
Child and adolescent psychology
Democratic approaches to parenting and families
Adlerian approaches to classroom management
Leadership and organizational psychology
Adler created Adlerian Therapy, because he believed that one's psyche should be studied in the context of that person's environment.
Adler's approach to personality
In one of his earliest and most famous publications, "Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation," Adler outlined the basics for what would be the beginning foundation of his personality theory. The article focuses mainly on the topics of organ inferiority and compensation. Organ inferiority is when one organ, or portion of the body, is weaker than the rest. Adler postulated that the body's other organs would work together in order to compensate for the weakness of this "inferior" organ. When compensation occurs, other areas of the body make up for the function lacking in the inferior portion. In some cases, the weakness may be overcompensated transforming it into a strength. An example would be an individual with a weak leg becoming a great runner later on. As his theory progressed, the idea of organ inferiority was replaced with feelings of inferiority instead. As Adler's theory progressed, he continued evolving his theory and key ideas.
Adler's book, Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Character) defines his earlier key ideas. He argued that human personality could be explained teleologically: parts of the individual's unconscious self ideally work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness). The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the individual overcompensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse.
Common therapeutic tools include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions.
Psychodynamics and teleology
Adler maintained that human psychology is psychodynamic in nature. Unlike Freud's metapsychology that emphasizes instinctual demands, human psychology is guided by goals and fueled by a yet unknown creative force. Like Freud's instincts, Adler's fictive goals are largely unconscious. These goals have a "teleological" function. Constructivist Adlerians, influenced by neo-Kantian and Nietzschean ideas, view these "teleological" goals as "fictions" in the sense that Hans Vaihinger spoke of (fictio). Usually there is a fictional final goal which can be deciphered alongside of innumerable sub-goals. The inferiority/superiority dynamic is constantly at work through various forms of compensation and overcompensation. For example, in anorexia nervosa the fictive final goal is to "be perfectly thin" (overcompensation on the basis of a feeling of inferiority). Hence, the fictive final goal can serve a persecutory function that is ever-present in subjectivity (though its trace springs are usually unconscious). The end goal of being "thin" is fictive however since it can never be subjectively achieved.
Teleology serves another vital function for Adlerians. Chilon's "hora telos" ("see the end, consider the consequences") provides for both healthy and maladaptive psychodynamics. Here we also find Adler's emphasis on personal responsibility in mentally healthy subjects who seek their own and the social good.
Constructivism and metaphysics
The metaphysical thread of Adlerian theory does not problematize the notion of teleology since concepts such as eternity (an ungraspable end where time ceases to exist) match the religious aspects that are held in tandem. In contrast, the constructivist Adlerian threads (either humanist/modernist or postmodern in variant) seek to raise insight of the force of unconscious fictions– which carry all of the inevitability of 'fate'– so long as one does not understand them. Here, 'teleology' itself is fictive yet experienced as quite real. This aspect of Adler's theory is somewhat analogous to the principles developed in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Therapy (CT). Both Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck credit Adler as a major precursor to REBT and CT. Ellis in particular was a member of the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology and served as an editorial board member for the Adlerian Journal Individual Psychology.
As a psychodynamic system, Adlerians excavate the past of a client/patient in order to alter their future and increase integration into community in the 'here-and-now'. The 'here-and-now' aspects are especially relevant to those Adlerians who emphasize humanism and/or existentialism in their approaches.
Holism
Metaphysical Adlerians emphasize a spiritual holism in keeping with what Jan Smuts articulated (Smuts coined the term "holism"), that is, the spiritual sense of one-ness that holism usually implies (etymology of holism: from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) Smuts believed that evolution involves a progressive series of lesser wholes integrating into larger ones. Whilst Smuts' text Holism and Evolution is thought to be a work of science, it actually attempts to unify evolution with a higher metaphysical principle (holism). The sense of connection and one-ness revered in various religious traditions (among these, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Buddhism and Baha'i) finds a strong complement in Adler's thought.
The pragmatic and materialist aspects to contextualizing members of communities, the construction of communities and the socio-historical-political forces that shape communities matter a great deal when it comes to understanding an individual's psychological make-up and functioning. This aspect of Adlerian psychology holds a high level of synergy with the field of community psychology, especially given Adler's concern for what he called "the absolute truth and logic of communal life". However, Adlerian psychology, unlike community psychology, is holistically concerned with both prevention and clinical treatment after-the-fact. Hence, Adler can be considered the "first community psychologist", a discourse that formalized in the decades following Adler's death (King & Shelley, 2008).
Adlerian psychology, Carl Jung's analytical psychology, Gestalt therapy and Karen Horney's psychodynamic approach are holistic schools of psychology. These discourses eschew a reductive approach to understanding human psychology and psychopathology.
Typology
Adler developed a scheme of so-called personality types, which were however always to be taken as provisional or heuristic since he did not, in essence, believe in personality types, and at different times proposed different and equally tentative systems. The danger with typology is to lose sight of the individual's uniqueness and to gaze reductively, acts that Adler opposed. Nevertheless, he intended to illustrate patterns that could denote a characteristic governed under the overall style of life. Hence American Adlerians such as Harold Mosak have made use of Adler's typology in this provisional sense:
The Getting or Leaning They are sensitive people who have developed a shell around themselves which protects them, but they must rely on others to carry them through life's difficulties. They have low energy levels and so become dependent. When overwhelmed, they develop what we typically think of as neurotic symptoms: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, general anxiety, hysteria, amnesias, and so on, depending on individual details of their lifestyle.
The Avoiding types are those that hate being defeated. They may be successful, but have not taken any risks getting there. They are likely to have low social contact in fear of rejection or defeat in any way.
The Ruling or Dominant type strive for power and are willing to manipulate situations and people, anything to get their way. People of this type are also prone to anti-social behavior.
The Socially Useful types are those who are very outgoing and very active. They have a lot of social contact and strive to make changes for the good.
These 'types' are typically formed in childhood and are expressions of the Style of Life.
The importance of memories
Adler placed great emphasis upon the interpretation of early memories in working with patients and school children, writing that, "Among all psychic expressions, some of the most revealing are the individual's memories." Adler viewed memories as expressions of "private logic" and as metaphors for an individual's personal philosophy of life or "lifestyle". He maintained that memories are never incidental or trivial; rather, they are chosen reminders: "(A person's) memories are the reminders she carries about with her of her limitations and of the meanings of events. There are no 'chance' memories. Out of the incalculable number of impressions that an individual receives, she chooses to remember only those which she considers, however dimly, to have a bearing on her problems."
On birth order
Adler often emphasized one's psychological birth order as having an influence on the style of life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up. Birth order referred to the placement of siblings within the family. It is important to note the difference between psychological and ordinal birth order (e.g. in some families, a second child might behave like a firstborn, in which case they are considered to be an ordinal secondborn but a psychological firstborn). Mosak, H.H. & Maniacci, M. P. (1999). A primer of Adlerian Psychology. Taylor and Francis. Adler believed that the firstborn child would be in a favorable position, enjoying the full attention of the eager new parents until the arrival of a second child. This second child would cause the first born to suffer feelings of dethronement, no longer being the center of attention. Adler (1908) believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction which he reasoned was a compensation for the feelings of excessive responsibility "the weight of the world on one's shoulders" (e.g. having to look after the younger ones) and the melancholic loss of that once supremely pampered position. As a result, he predicted that this child was the most likely to end up in jail or an asylum. Youngest children would tend to be overindulged, leading to poor social empathy. Consequently, the middle child, who would experience neither dethronement nor overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful individual yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel squeezed-out. Adler himself was the third (some sources credit second) in a family of six children.
Adler never produced any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles, nor did he feel the need to. Yet the value of the hypothesis was to extend the importance of siblings in marking the psychology of the individual beyond Freud's more limited emphasis on the mother and father. Hence, Adlerians spend time therapeutically mapping the influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients. The idiographic approach entails an excavation of the phenomenology of one's birth order position for likely influence on the subject's Style of Life. In sum, the subjective experiences of sibling positionality and inter-relations are important in terms of the dynamics of psychology, for Adlerian therapists and personality theorists, not the cookbook predictions that may or may not have been objectively true in Adler's time.
For Adler, birth order answered the question, "Why do children, who are raised in the same family, grow up with very different personalities?" While a strict geneticist, believing siblings are raised in a shared environment, may claim any differences in personality would be caused by subtle variations in the individuals' genetics, Adler showed through his birth order theory that children do not grow up in the same shared environment, but the oldest child grows up in a family where they have younger siblings, the middle child with older and younger siblings, and the youngest with older siblings. The position in the family constellation, Adler said, is the reason for these differences in personality and not genetics: a point later taken up by Eric Berne.
On addiction
Adler's insight into birth order, compensation and issues relating to the individuals' perception of community also led him to investigate the causes and treatment of substance abuse disorders, particularly alcoholism and morphinism, which already were serious social problems of his time. Adler's work with addicts was significant since most other prominent proponents of psychoanalysis invested relatively little time and thought into this widespread ill of the modern and post-modern age. In addition to applying his individual psychology approach of organ inferiority, for example, to the onset and causes of addictive behaviors, he also tried to find a clear relationship of drug cravings to sexual gratification or their substitutions. Early pharmaco-therapeutic interventions with non-addictive substances, such as neuphyllin were used, since withdrawal symptoms were explained by a form of "water-poisoning" that made the use of diuretics necessary.
Adler and his wife's pragmatic approach, and the seemingly high success rates of their treatment were based on their ideas of social functioning and well-being. Clearly, life style choices and situations were emphasized, for example the need for relaxation or the negative effects of early childhood conflicts were examined, which compared to other authoritarian or religious treatment regimens, were clearly modern approaches. Certainly some of his observations, for example that psychopaths were more likely to be drug addicts are not compatible with current methodologies and theories of substance abuse treatment, but the self-centered attributes of the illness and the clear escapism from social responsibilities by pathological addicts put Adler's treatment modalities clearly into a modern contextual reasoning.
On homosexuality
Adler's ideas regarding non-heterosexual sexuality and various social forms of deviance have long been controversial. Along with prostitution and criminality, Adler had classified 'homosexuals' as falling among the "failures of life". In 1917, he began his writings on homosexuality with a 52-page magazine, and sporadically published more thoughts throughout the rest of his life.
The Dutch psychologist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg underlines how Alfred Adler came to his conclusions for, in 1917, Adler believed that he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own gender. This point of view differed from Freud's theory that homosexuality is rooted in narcissism or Jung's view of expressions of contrasexuality vis-à-vis the archetypes of the Anima and Animus.
There is evidence that Adler may have moved towards abandoning the hypothesis. Towards the end of Adler's life, in the mid-1930s, his opinion towards homosexuality began to shift. Elizabeth H. McDowell, a New York state family social worker recalls undertaking supervision with Adler on a young man who was "living in sin" with an older man in New York City. Adler asked her, "Is he happy, would you say?" "Oh yes," McDowell replied. Adler then stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone."
According to Phyllis Bottome, who wrote Adler's Biography (after Adler himself laid upon her that task): "He always treated homosexuality as lack of courage. These were but ways of obtaining a slight release for a physical need while avoiding a greater obligation. A transient partner of your own sex is a better known road and requires less courage than a permanent contact with an "unknown" sex.... Adler taught that men cannot be judged from within by their "possessions," as he used to call nerves, glands, traumas, drives et cetera, since both judge and prisoner are liable to misconstrue what is invisible and incalculable; but that he can be judged, with no danger from introspection, by how he measures up to the three common life tasks set before every human being between the cradle and the grave: work (employment), love or marriage (intimacy), and social contact (friendships.)"
Parent education
Adler emphasized both treatment and prevention. With regard to psychodynamic psychology, Adlerians emphasize the foundational importance of childhood in developing personality and any tendency towards various forms of psychopathology. The best way to inoculate against what are now termed "personality disorders" (what Adler had called the "neurotic character"), or a tendency to various neurotic conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.), is to train a child to be and feel an equal part of the family. The responsibility of the optimal development of the child is not limited to the mother or father, but rather includes teachers and society more broadly. Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so on require training in parent education to complement the work of the family in fostering a democratic character. When a child does not feel equal and is enacted upon (abused through pampering or neglect) he or she is likely to develop inferiority or superiority complexes and various concomitant compensation strategies. These strategies exact a social toll by seeding higher divorce rates, the breakdown of the family, criminal tendencies, and subjective suffering in the various guises of psychopathology. Adlerians have long promoted parent education groups, especially those influenced by the famous Austrian/American Adlerian Rudolf Dreikurs (Dreikurs & Soltz, 1964).
Spirituality, ecology and community
In a late work, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1938), Adler turns to the subject of metaphysics, where he integrates Jan Smuts' evolutionary holism with the ideas of teleology and community: "sub specie aeternitatis". Unabashedly, he argues his vision of society: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the ultimate fulfillment of evolution." Adler follows this pronouncement with a defense of metaphysics:
This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a community feeling whereby one feels he or she belongs with others and has also developed an ecological connection with nature (plants, animals, the crust of this earth) and the cosmos as a whole, sub specie aeternitatis. Clearly, Adler himself had little problem with adopting a metaphysical and spiritual point of view to support his theories.
Death and cremation
Adler died suddenly in Aberdeen, Scotland, in May 1937, during a three-week visit to the University of Aberdeen. While walking down the street, he was seen to collapse and lie motionless on the pavement. As a man ran over to him and loosened his collar, Adler mumbled "Kurt", the name of his son and died. The autopsy performed determined his death was caused by a degeneration of the heart muscle. His body was cremated at Warriston Crematorium in Edinburgh but the ashes were never reclaimed. In 2007, his ashes were rediscovered in a casket at Warriston Crematorium and returned to Vienna for burial in 2011.
Use of Adler's work without attribution
Much of Adler's theories have been absorbed into modern psychology without attribution. Psychohistorian Henri F. Ellenberger writes, "It would not be easy to find another author from which so much has been borrowed on all sides without acknowledgement than Alfred Adler." Ellenberger posits several theories for "the discrepancy between greatness of achievement, massive rejection of person and work, and wide-scale, quiet plagiarism..." These include Adler's "imperfect" style of writing and demeanor, his "capacity to create a new obviousness," and his lack of a large and well organized following.
Influence on depth psychology
In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there". He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum. He also imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world.
This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "honorable errors". Though one rejects the content of Adler's views, one can recognize their consistency and significance." Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later Neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach.
Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991); and thus to be one of the three great psychologists/philosophers of the twentieth century.
Personal life
During his college years, he had become attached to a group of socialist students, among which he had found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist from Russia studying in Vienna. Because Raissa was a militant socialist, she had a large impact on Adler's early publications and ultimately his theory of personality. They married in 1897 and had four children, two of whom, his daughter Alexandra and his son Kurt, became psychiatrists. Their children were writer, psychiatrist and Socialist activist Alexandra Adler; psychiatrist Kurt Adler; writer and activist Valentine Adler; and Cornelia "Nelly" Adler. Raissa, Adler's wife, died at 89 in New York City on April 21,1962.
Author and journalist Margot Adler (1946-2014) was Adler's granddaughter.
Artistic and cultural references
The two main characters in the novel Plant Teacher engage in a session of Adlerian lifestyle interpretation, including early memory interpretation.
In the episode Something About Dr. Mary of the television series Frasier, Frasier recalls having to "pass under a dangerously unbalanced portrait of Alfred Adler" during his studies at Harvard.
He appears as a character in the Young Indiana Jones chronicles.
English-language Adlerian journals
North America
The Journal of Individual Psychology (University of Texas Press)
The Canadian Journal of Adlerian Psychology (Adlerian Psychology Association of British Columbia)
United Kingdom
Adlerian Yearbook (Adlerian Society, UK)
Publications
Alfred Adler's key publications were The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927), & What Life Could Mean to You (1931). Other important publications are The Pattern of Life (1930), The Science of Living (1930), The Neurotic Constitution (1917), The Problems of Neurosis (1930). In his lifetime, Adler published more than 300 books and articles.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published a twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, covering his writings from 1898–1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1. Volume 12 provides comprehensive overviews of Adler's mature theory and contemporary Adlerian practice.
Volume 1 : The Neurotic Character — 1907
Volume 2 : Journal Articles 1898–1909
Volume 3 : Journal Articles 1910–1913
Volume 4 : Journal Articles 1914–1920
Volume 5 : Journal Articles 1921–1926
Volume 6 : Journal Articles 1927–1931
Volume 7 : Journal Articles 1931–1937
Volume 8 : Lectures to Physicians & Medical Students
Volume 9 : Case Histories
Volume 10 : Case Readings & Demonstrations
Volume 11 : Education for Prevention
Volume 12 : The General System of Individual Psychology
Other key Adlerian texts
Adler, A. (1964). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. .
Adler, A. (1979). Superiority and Social Interest: A Collection of Later Writings. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. .
See also
Adlerian
Classical Adlerian psychology
Neo-Adlerian
Notes
References
Adler, A. (1908). Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und der Neurose. Fortsch. Med. 26: 577–584.
Adler, A. (1938). Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind. J. Linton and R. Vaughan (Trans.). London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Adler, A. (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Dreikurs, R. & Soltz, V. (1964). Children the Challenge. New York: Hawthorn Books.
Ehrenwald, J. (1991, 1976). The History of Psychotherapy: From healing magic to encounter. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.
Eissler, K.R. (1971). Death Drive, Ambivalence, and Narcissism. Psychoanal. St. Child, 26: 25–78.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Fiebert, M. S. (1997). In and out of Freud's shadow: A chronology of Adler's relationship with Freud. Individual Psychology, 53(3), 241–269.
Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press, Vol. 10, pp. 3–149.
King, R. & Shelley, C. (2008). Community Feeling and Social Interest: Adlerian Parallels, Synergy, and Differences with the Field of Community Psychology. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 18, 96–107.
Manaster, G. J., Painter, G., Deutsch, D., & Overholt, B. J. (Eds.). (1977). Alfred Adler: As We Remember Him. Chicago: North American Society of Adlerian Psychology.
Shelley, C. (Ed.). (1998). Contemporary Perspectives on Psychotherapy and Homosexualities. London: Free Association Books.
Slavik, S. & King, R. (2007). Adlerian therapeutic strategy. The Canadian Journal of Adlerian Psychology, 37(1), 3–16.
Gantschacher, H. (ARBOS 2007). Witness and Victim of the Apocalypse, chapter 13 page 12 and chapter 14 page 6.
Orgler, H. (1996). Alfred Adler, 22 (1), pg. 67–68.
Further reading
Orgler, Hertha, Alfred Adler, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, V. 22 (1), 1976-Spring, p. 67
Phyllis Bottome (1939). Alfred Adler: A Biography. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York.
Phyllis Bottome (1939). Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom. London: Faber and Faber. 3rd Ed. 1957.
Carlson, J., Watts, R. E., & Maniacci, M. (2005). Adlerian Therapy: Theory and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. .
Dinkmeyer, D., Sr., & Dreikurs, R. (2000). Encouraging Children to Learn. Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. .
Rudolf Dreikurs (1935): An Introduction to Individual Psychology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co. Ltd. (new edition 1983: London & New York: Routledge), .
Grey, L. (1998). Alfred Adler: The Forgotten Prophet: A Vision for the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Praeger. .
Handlbauer, B. (1998). The Freud-Adler Controversy. Oxford, UK: Oneworld. .
Hoffman, E. (1994). The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology. New York: Addison-Wesley Co. .
Lehrer, R. (1999). "Adler and Nietzsche". In: J. Golomb, W. Santaniello, and R. Lehrer. (Eds.). Nietzsche and Depth Psychology. (pp. 229–246). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. .
Mosak, H. H. & Di Pietro, R. (2005). Early Recollections: Interpretive Method and Application. New York: Routledge. .
Oberst, U. E. and Stewart, A. E. (2003). Adlerian Psychotherapy: An Advanced Approach to Individual Psychology. New York: Brunner-Routledge. .
Orgler, H. (1963). Alfred Adler: The Man and His Work: Triumph Over the Inferiority Complex. New York: Liveright.
Orgler, H. (1996). Alfred Adler, 22 (1), pg. 67–68.
Josef Rattner (1983): Alfred Adler: Life and Literature. Ungar Pub. Co. .
Slavik, S. & Carlson, J. (Eds.). (2005). Readings in the Theory of Individual Psychology. New York: Routledge. .
Manès Sperber (1974). Masks of Loneliness: Alfred Adler in Perspective. New York: Macmillan. .
Stepansky, P. E. (1983). In Freud's Shadow: Adler in Context. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. .
Watts, R. E. (2003). Adlerian, cognitive, and constructivist therapies: An integrative dialogue. New York: Springer. .
Watts, R. E., & Carlson, J. (1999). Interventions and strategies in counseling and psychotherapy. New York: Accelerated Development/Routledge. .
Way, Lewis (1950): Adler's Place in Psychology. London: Allen & Unwin.
Way, Lewis (1956): Alfred Adler: An Introduction to his Psychology. London: Pelican.
West, G. K. (1975). Kierkegaard and Adler. Tallahassee: Florida State University.
External links
International Association of Individual Psychology
Psychology Articles
The Adlerian Society (UK) and the Institute for Individual Psychology
The North American Society of Adlerian Psychology
Institutul de Psihologie si Psihoterapie Adleriana Romania
Centro de Estudios Adlerianos Uruguay
Classical Adlerian Psychology according to Alfred Adlers Institutes in San Francisco and Northwestern Washington
AdlerPedia
Hong Kong Society of Adlerian Psychology
New Concept Coaching & Training Institute
1870 births
1937 deaths
Adlerian psychology
19th-century Austrian Jews
Jewish scientists
Austrian ophthalmologists
Austrian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Austrian psychiatrists
Austrian psychologists
Jewish psychiatrists
People from Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus
University of Vienna alumni | false | [
"Structured academic controversy is a type of cooperative learning strategy where controversial issues are learnt and discussed from multiple perspectives by small teams of students. It is a technique and a way discovered and designed especially for students to get engaged in a controversy and then guide them to seek consensus. Students in such teams learn about opinions and views of other people as well as put forth theirs and attempt to agree politely with what they are convinced and also try to convince people to what they disagree without hurting sentiments of the opponent teams.\n\nWorking of SAC\nThe activity of SAC begins with the selection of a topic by the instructor with varied viewpoints (e.g., Political reign should be or not be in the hands of the youth.). The topic for discussion once selected is then imported to students who decide and divide accordingly into pairs or form groups based on the ideas they share and agree, and assigned on advocacy in the pairs. The group either receives supporting documents or researches the topic in the time available to them.\n\nReferences\n \n \n\nStructured_Academic_Controversy",
"The Euskobarómetro (\"Basque-barometer\") is a sociological statistical survey in the Basque Country (País Vasco), an autonomous community of Spain. It is conducted by the Department of Political Science of the University of the Basque Country.\n\nTechnique\nThe poll does not cover Navarre or the Basque areas of France; where Basque nationalism is generally believed to be weaker than in the three provinces of the Basque Country autonomous community.\nIt is based on personal interviews at home.\n\nOn Basque separatism \nBecause the Spanish government has passed laws outlawing formal referendums about the possibility of Basque independence, the Euskobarómetro is one of the better gauges available of the extent of Basque separatist sentiment. According to the survey, a significant number of Basques support independence of their region from Spain, but rather few support the violence of groups such as ETA:\n\n 33% favor Basque independence, 31% federalism, 32% autonomy, 2% centralism. (2% undecided or not answering)\nAsked whether they agree or disagree with the statement, \"Today in Euskadi it is possible to defend all political aspirations and objectives without the necessity of resorting to violence\", 87% agree and only 4% disagree (9% undecided or not answering). In fact, 33% of those who identify politically with ETA-affiliated Batasuna agreed with the statement.\nAsked directly about their views of ETA, 60% rejected ETA totally and another 18% identified themselves as former ETA sympathizers who no longer support the group. Another 13% agreed with ETA's ends, but not their means. 3% said that their attitude towards ETA was mainly one of fear, 2% indifference. Only 2%, all identified with Batasuna, gave ETA support even as mild as \"justified, with criticism\". 2% were undecided or did not answer. Even within Batasuna, 63% rejected ETA's violence.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Official site (in Basque & Spanish)\n\nBasque politics\nUniversity of the Basque Country"
] |
[
"Alfred Adler",
"Influence on depth psychology",
"What did Alfred write?",
"Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the \"Will to Power\"",
"What does the Will to Power mean?",
"focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better.",
"Did people agree with his views?",
"I don't know."
] | C_771fdf6f2d324abd93b0453bc13b64b3_0 | What did alfred say about depth psychology? | 4 | What did Alfred Adler say about depth psychology? | Alfred Adler | In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there". He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum. He also imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world. This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "... honorable errors. Though one rejects the content of Adler's views, one can recognize their consistency and significance". Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach. Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991); and thus to be one of the three great psychologists/philosophers of the twentieth century. CANNOTANSWER | Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, | Alfred Adler (; ; 7 February 1870 – 28 May 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology" (Orgler 1976).
Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and to carry psychiatry into the community. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
Early life
Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870 at Mariahilfer Straße 208 in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna, a modern part of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, the 15th district of the city. He was second of the seven children of a Jewish couple, Pauline (Beer) and Leopold Adler. Leopold Adler was a Hungarian-born grain merchant. Alfred's younger brother died in the bed next to him when Alfred was only three years old, and throughout his childhood, he maintained a rivalry with his older brother. This rivalry was spurred on because Adler believed his mother preferred his brother over him. Despite his good relationship with his father, he still struggled with feelings of inferiority in his relationship with his mother.
Alfred was an active, popular child and an average student who was also known for the competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund. Early on, he developed rickets, which kept Alfred from walking until he was four years old. At the age of four, he developed pneumonia and heard a doctor say to his father, "Your boy is lost". Along with being run over twice and witnessing his younger brother's death, this sickness contributed to his overall fear of death. At that point, he decided to be a physician. He was very interested in the subjects of psychology, sociology and philosophy. After studying at University of Vienna, he specialized as an eye doctor, and later in neurology and psychiatry.
Career
Adler began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater, a combination of amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into "organ inferiorities" and "compensation".
In his early career, Adler wrote an article in the defense of Freud's theory after reading one of Freud's most well known works, The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1902, because of his defense article, Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group that included Rudolf Reitler and Wilhelm Stekel. The group, the "Wednesday Society" (Mittwochsgesellschaft), met regularly on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home and was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement, expanding over time to include many more members. Each week a member would present a paper and after a short break of coffee and cakes, the group would discuss it. The main members were Otto Rank, Max Eitingon, Wilhelm Stekel, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs, Fritz Wittels, Max Graf, and Sandor Ferenczi. In 1908, Adler presented his paper, "The aggressive instinct in life and in neurosis", at a time when Freud believed that early sexual development was the primary determinant of the making of character, with which Adler took issue. Adler proposed that the sexual and aggressive drives were "two originally separate instincts which merge later on". Freud at the time disagreed with this idea.
When Freud in 1920 proposed his dual instinct theory of libido and aggressive drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, without citing Adler, he was reproached that Adler had proposed the aggressive drive in his 1908 paper (Eissler, 1971). Freud later commented in a 1923 footnote he added to the Little Hans case that, "I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an aggressive instinct" (1909, p. 140, 2), while pointing out that his conception of an aggressive drive differs from that of Adler. A long-serving member of the group, he made many more beyond this 1908 pivotal contribution to the group, and Adler became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society eight years later (1910). He remained a member of the Society until 1911, when he and a group of his supporters formally disengaged from Freud's circle, the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis (preceding Carl Jung's split in 1914).
This departure suited both Freud and Adler, since they had grown to dislike each other. During his association with Freud, Adler frequently maintained his own ideas which often diverged from Freud's. While Adler is often referred to as "a pupil of Freud", in fact this was never true; they were colleagues, Freud referring to him in print in 1909 as "My colleague Dr Alfred Adler". The association of Adler and Freud lasted a total of 9 years, and they never saw each other after the separation. Freud continued to dislike Adler even after the separation and tended to do so with other defectors from psychoanalysis. Even after Adler's death, Freud maintained his distaste for him. When conversing with a colleague over the matter, he stated, "I don't understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jewish boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis." In 1929 Adler showed a reporter with the New York Herald a copy of the faded postcard that Freud had sent him in 1902. He wanted to prove that he had never been a disciple of Freud's but rather that Freud had sought him out to share his ideas.
Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912 after his break from the psychoanalytic movement. Adler's group initially included some orthodox Nietzschean adherents (who believed that Adler's ideas on power and inferiority were closer to Nietzsche than Freud's). Their enmity aside, Adler retained a lifelong admiration for Freud's ideas on dreams and credited him with creating a scientific approach to their clinical utilization (Fiebert, 1997). Nevertheless, even regarding dream interpretation, Adler had his own theoretical and clinical approach. The primary differences between Adler and Freud centered on Adler's contention that the social realm (exteriority) is as important to psychology as is the internal realm (interiority). The dynamics of power and compensation extend beyond sexuality, and gender and politics can be as important as libido. Moreover, Freud did not share Adler's socialist beliefs, the latter's wife being for example an intimate friend of many of the Russian Marxists such as Leon Trotsky.
The Adlerian school
Following Adler's break from Freud, he enjoyed considerable success and celebrity in building an independent school of psychotherapy and a unique personality theory. He traveled and lectured for a period of 25 years promoting his socially oriented approach. His intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of social equality. Adler's efforts were halted by World War I, during which he served as a doctor with the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the conclusion of the war, his influence increased greatly. In the 1920s, he established a number of child guidance clinics. From 1921 onwards, he was a frequent lecturer in Europe and the United States, becoming a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. His clinical treatment methods for adults were aimed at uncovering the hidden purpose of symptoms using the therapeutic functions of insight and meaning.
Adler was concerned with the overcoming of the superiority/inferiority dynamic and was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favor of two chairs. This allows the clinician and patient to sit together more or less as equals. Clinically, Adler's methods are not limited to treatment after-the-fact but extend to the realm of prevention by preempting future problems in the child. Prevention strategies include encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect (especially corporal punishment). Adler's popularity was related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas. He often wrote for the lay public. Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task-oriented. These "Life tasks" are occupation/work, society/friendship, and love/sexuality. Their success depends on cooperation. The tasks of life are not to be considered in isolation since, as Adler famously commented, "they all throw cross-lights on one another".
In his bestselling book, Man's Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl compared his own "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (after Freud's and Adler's schools) to Adler's analysis:
Emigration
In the early 1930s, after most of Adler's Austrian clinics had been closed due to his Jewish heritage (despite his conversion to Christianity), Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in the US. Adler died from a heart attack in 1937 in Aberdeen, Scotland, during a lecture tour, although his remains went missing and were unaccounted for until 2007. His death was a temporary blow to the influence of his ideas, although a number of them were subsequently taken up by neo-Freudians. Through the work of Rudolf Dreikurs in the United States and many other adherents worldwide, Adlerian ideas and approaches remain strong and viable more than 70 years after Adler's death.
Around the world there are various organizations promoting Adler's orientation towards mental and social well-being. These include the International Committee of Adlerian Summer Schools and Institutes (ICASSI), the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology (NASAP) and the International Association for Individual Psychology. Teaching institutes and programs exist in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, and Wales.
Basic principles
Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger (The Philosophy of 'As if') and the literature of Dostoyevsky. While still a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society he developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation that was the prototype for his later turn to phenomenology and the development of his famous concept, the inferiority complex.
Adler was also influenced by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts (who coined the term "holism"). Adler's School, known as "Individual Psychology"—an arcane reference to the Latin individuals meaning indivisibility, a term intended to emphasize holism—is both a social and community psychology as well as a depth psychology. Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents, teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with others. He was a social idealist, and was known as a socialist in his early years of association with psychoanalysis (1902–1911).
Adler was pragmatic and believed that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology. Adler was also an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world, believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles. These styles could form the basis of psychic compensation and lead to mental health difficulties. Adler also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior long before Anna Freud wrote about the same phenomena in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
Adlerian-based scholarly, clinical and social practices focus on the following topics:
Social interest and community feeling
Holism and the creative self
Fictional finalism, teleology, and goal constructs
Psychological and social encouragement
Inferiority, superiority and compensation
Life style/style of life
Early recollections (a projective technique)
Family constellation and birth order
Life tasks and social embeddedness
The conscious and unconscious realms
Private logic and common sense (based in part on Kant's "")
Symptoms and neurosis
Safeguarding behavior
Guilt and guilt feelings
Socratic questioning
Dream interpretation
Child and adolescent psychology
Democratic approaches to parenting and families
Adlerian approaches to classroom management
Leadership and organizational psychology
Adler created Adlerian Therapy, because he believed that one's psyche should be studied in the context of that person's environment.
Adler's approach to personality
In one of his earliest and most famous publications, "Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation," Adler outlined the basics for what would be the beginning foundation of his personality theory. The article focuses mainly on the topics of organ inferiority and compensation. Organ inferiority is when one organ, or portion of the body, is weaker than the rest. Adler postulated that the body's other organs would work together in order to compensate for the weakness of this "inferior" organ. When compensation occurs, other areas of the body make up for the function lacking in the inferior portion. In some cases, the weakness may be overcompensated transforming it into a strength. An example would be an individual with a weak leg becoming a great runner later on. As his theory progressed, the idea of organ inferiority was replaced with feelings of inferiority instead. As Adler's theory progressed, he continued evolving his theory and key ideas.
Adler's book, Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Character) defines his earlier key ideas. He argued that human personality could be explained teleologically: parts of the individual's unconscious self ideally work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness). The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the individual overcompensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse.
Common therapeutic tools include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions.
Psychodynamics and teleology
Adler maintained that human psychology is psychodynamic in nature. Unlike Freud's metapsychology that emphasizes instinctual demands, human psychology is guided by goals and fueled by a yet unknown creative force. Like Freud's instincts, Adler's fictive goals are largely unconscious. These goals have a "teleological" function. Constructivist Adlerians, influenced by neo-Kantian and Nietzschean ideas, view these "teleological" goals as "fictions" in the sense that Hans Vaihinger spoke of (fictio). Usually there is a fictional final goal which can be deciphered alongside of innumerable sub-goals. The inferiority/superiority dynamic is constantly at work through various forms of compensation and overcompensation. For example, in anorexia nervosa the fictive final goal is to "be perfectly thin" (overcompensation on the basis of a feeling of inferiority). Hence, the fictive final goal can serve a persecutory function that is ever-present in subjectivity (though its trace springs are usually unconscious). The end goal of being "thin" is fictive however since it can never be subjectively achieved.
Teleology serves another vital function for Adlerians. Chilon's "hora telos" ("see the end, consider the consequences") provides for both healthy and maladaptive psychodynamics. Here we also find Adler's emphasis on personal responsibility in mentally healthy subjects who seek their own and the social good.
Constructivism and metaphysics
The metaphysical thread of Adlerian theory does not problematize the notion of teleology since concepts such as eternity (an ungraspable end where time ceases to exist) match the religious aspects that are held in tandem. In contrast, the constructivist Adlerian threads (either humanist/modernist or postmodern in variant) seek to raise insight of the force of unconscious fictions– which carry all of the inevitability of 'fate'– so long as one does not understand them. Here, 'teleology' itself is fictive yet experienced as quite real. This aspect of Adler's theory is somewhat analogous to the principles developed in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Therapy (CT). Both Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck credit Adler as a major precursor to REBT and CT. Ellis in particular was a member of the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology and served as an editorial board member for the Adlerian Journal Individual Psychology.
As a psychodynamic system, Adlerians excavate the past of a client/patient in order to alter their future and increase integration into community in the 'here-and-now'. The 'here-and-now' aspects are especially relevant to those Adlerians who emphasize humanism and/or existentialism in their approaches.
Holism
Metaphysical Adlerians emphasize a spiritual holism in keeping with what Jan Smuts articulated (Smuts coined the term "holism"), that is, the spiritual sense of one-ness that holism usually implies (etymology of holism: from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) Smuts believed that evolution involves a progressive series of lesser wholes integrating into larger ones. Whilst Smuts' text Holism and Evolution is thought to be a work of science, it actually attempts to unify evolution with a higher metaphysical principle (holism). The sense of connection and one-ness revered in various religious traditions (among these, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Buddhism and Baha'i) finds a strong complement in Adler's thought.
The pragmatic and materialist aspects to contextualizing members of communities, the construction of communities and the socio-historical-political forces that shape communities matter a great deal when it comes to understanding an individual's psychological make-up and functioning. This aspect of Adlerian psychology holds a high level of synergy with the field of community psychology, especially given Adler's concern for what he called "the absolute truth and logic of communal life". However, Adlerian psychology, unlike community psychology, is holistically concerned with both prevention and clinical treatment after-the-fact. Hence, Adler can be considered the "first community psychologist", a discourse that formalized in the decades following Adler's death (King & Shelley, 2008).
Adlerian psychology, Carl Jung's analytical psychology, Gestalt therapy and Karen Horney's psychodynamic approach are holistic schools of psychology. These discourses eschew a reductive approach to understanding human psychology and psychopathology.
Typology
Adler developed a scheme of so-called personality types, which were however always to be taken as provisional or heuristic since he did not, in essence, believe in personality types, and at different times proposed different and equally tentative systems. The danger with typology is to lose sight of the individual's uniqueness and to gaze reductively, acts that Adler opposed. Nevertheless, he intended to illustrate patterns that could denote a characteristic governed under the overall style of life. Hence American Adlerians such as Harold Mosak have made use of Adler's typology in this provisional sense:
The Getting or Leaning They are sensitive people who have developed a shell around themselves which protects them, but they must rely on others to carry them through life's difficulties. They have low energy levels and so become dependent. When overwhelmed, they develop what we typically think of as neurotic symptoms: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, general anxiety, hysteria, amnesias, and so on, depending on individual details of their lifestyle.
The Avoiding types are those that hate being defeated. They may be successful, but have not taken any risks getting there. They are likely to have low social contact in fear of rejection or defeat in any way.
The Ruling or Dominant type strive for power and are willing to manipulate situations and people, anything to get their way. People of this type are also prone to anti-social behavior.
The Socially Useful types are those who are very outgoing and very active. They have a lot of social contact and strive to make changes for the good.
These 'types' are typically formed in childhood and are expressions of the Style of Life.
The importance of memories
Adler placed great emphasis upon the interpretation of early memories in working with patients and school children, writing that, "Among all psychic expressions, some of the most revealing are the individual's memories." Adler viewed memories as expressions of "private logic" and as metaphors for an individual's personal philosophy of life or "lifestyle". He maintained that memories are never incidental or trivial; rather, they are chosen reminders: "(A person's) memories are the reminders she carries about with her of her limitations and of the meanings of events. There are no 'chance' memories. Out of the incalculable number of impressions that an individual receives, she chooses to remember only those which she considers, however dimly, to have a bearing on her problems."
On birth order
Adler often emphasized one's psychological birth order as having an influence on the style of life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up. Birth order referred to the placement of siblings within the family. It is important to note the difference between psychological and ordinal birth order (e.g. in some families, a second child might behave like a firstborn, in which case they are considered to be an ordinal secondborn but a psychological firstborn). Mosak, H.H. & Maniacci, M. P. (1999). A primer of Adlerian Psychology. Taylor and Francis. Adler believed that the firstborn child would be in a favorable position, enjoying the full attention of the eager new parents until the arrival of a second child. This second child would cause the first born to suffer feelings of dethronement, no longer being the center of attention. Adler (1908) believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction which he reasoned was a compensation for the feelings of excessive responsibility "the weight of the world on one's shoulders" (e.g. having to look after the younger ones) and the melancholic loss of that once supremely pampered position. As a result, he predicted that this child was the most likely to end up in jail or an asylum. Youngest children would tend to be overindulged, leading to poor social empathy. Consequently, the middle child, who would experience neither dethronement nor overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful individual yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel squeezed-out. Adler himself was the third (some sources credit second) in a family of six children.
Adler never produced any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles, nor did he feel the need to. Yet the value of the hypothesis was to extend the importance of siblings in marking the psychology of the individual beyond Freud's more limited emphasis on the mother and father. Hence, Adlerians spend time therapeutically mapping the influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients. The idiographic approach entails an excavation of the phenomenology of one's birth order position for likely influence on the subject's Style of Life. In sum, the subjective experiences of sibling positionality and inter-relations are important in terms of the dynamics of psychology, for Adlerian therapists and personality theorists, not the cookbook predictions that may or may not have been objectively true in Adler's time.
For Adler, birth order answered the question, "Why do children, who are raised in the same family, grow up with very different personalities?" While a strict geneticist, believing siblings are raised in a shared environment, may claim any differences in personality would be caused by subtle variations in the individuals' genetics, Adler showed through his birth order theory that children do not grow up in the same shared environment, but the oldest child grows up in a family where they have younger siblings, the middle child with older and younger siblings, and the youngest with older siblings. The position in the family constellation, Adler said, is the reason for these differences in personality and not genetics: a point later taken up by Eric Berne.
On addiction
Adler's insight into birth order, compensation and issues relating to the individuals' perception of community also led him to investigate the causes and treatment of substance abuse disorders, particularly alcoholism and morphinism, which already were serious social problems of his time. Adler's work with addicts was significant since most other prominent proponents of psychoanalysis invested relatively little time and thought into this widespread ill of the modern and post-modern age. In addition to applying his individual psychology approach of organ inferiority, for example, to the onset and causes of addictive behaviors, he also tried to find a clear relationship of drug cravings to sexual gratification or their substitutions. Early pharmaco-therapeutic interventions with non-addictive substances, such as neuphyllin were used, since withdrawal symptoms were explained by a form of "water-poisoning" that made the use of diuretics necessary.
Adler and his wife's pragmatic approach, and the seemingly high success rates of their treatment were based on their ideas of social functioning and well-being. Clearly, life style choices and situations were emphasized, for example the need for relaxation or the negative effects of early childhood conflicts were examined, which compared to other authoritarian or religious treatment regimens, were clearly modern approaches. Certainly some of his observations, for example that psychopaths were more likely to be drug addicts are not compatible with current methodologies and theories of substance abuse treatment, but the self-centered attributes of the illness and the clear escapism from social responsibilities by pathological addicts put Adler's treatment modalities clearly into a modern contextual reasoning.
On homosexuality
Adler's ideas regarding non-heterosexual sexuality and various social forms of deviance have long been controversial. Along with prostitution and criminality, Adler had classified 'homosexuals' as falling among the "failures of life". In 1917, he began his writings on homosexuality with a 52-page magazine, and sporadically published more thoughts throughout the rest of his life.
The Dutch psychologist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg underlines how Alfred Adler came to his conclusions for, in 1917, Adler believed that he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own gender. This point of view differed from Freud's theory that homosexuality is rooted in narcissism or Jung's view of expressions of contrasexuality vis-à-vis the archetypes of the Anima and Animus.
There is evidence that Adler may have moved towards abandoning the hypothesis. Towards the end of Adler's life, in the mid-1930s, his opinion towards homosexuality began to shift. Elizabeth H. McDowell, a New York state family social worker recalls undertaking supervision with Adler on a young man who was "living in sin" with an older man in New York City. Adler asked her, "Is he happy, would you say?" "Oh yes," McDowell replied. Adler then stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone."
According to Phyllis Bottome, who wrote Adler's Biography (after Adler himself laid upon her that task): "He always treated homosexuality as lack of courage. These were but ways of obtaining a slight release for a physical need while avoiding a greater obligation. A transient partner of your own sex is a better known road and requires less courage than a permanent contact with an "unknown" sex.... Adler taught that men cannot be judged from within by their "possessions," as he used to call nerves, glands, traumas, drives et cetera, since both judge and prisoner are liable to misconstrue what is invisible and incalculable; but that he can be judged, with no danger from introspection, by how he measures up to the three common life tasks set before every human being between the cradle and the grave: work (employment), love or marriage (intimacy), and social contact (friendships.)"
Parent education
Adler emphasized both treatment and prevention. With regard to psychodynamic psychology, Adlerians emphasize the foundational importance of childhood in developing personality and any tendency towards various forms of psychopathology. The best way to inoculate against what are now termed "personality disorders" (what Adler had called the "neurotic character"), or a tendency to various neurotic conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.), is to train a child to be and feel an equal part of the family. The responsibility of the optimal development of the child is not limited to the mother or father, but rather includes teachers and society more broadly. Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so on require training in parent education to complement the work of the family in fostering a democratic character. When a child does not feel equal and is enacted upon (abused through pampering or neglect) he or she is likely to develop inferiority or superiority complexes and various concomitant compensation strategies. These strategies exact a social toll by seeding higher divorce rates, the breakdown of the family, criminal tendencies, and subjective suffering in the various guises of psychopathology. Adlerians have long promoted parent education groups, especially those influenced by the famous Austrian/American Adlerian Rudolf Dreikurs (Dreikurs & Soltz, 1964).
Spirituality, ecology and community
In a late work, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1938), Adler turns to the subject of metaphysics, where he integrates Jan Smuts' evolutionary holism with the ideas of teleology and community: "sub specie aeternitatis". Unabashedly, he argues his vision of society: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the ultimate fulfillment of evolution." Adler follows this pronouncement with a defense of metaphysics:
This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a community feeling whereby one feels he or she belongs with others and has also developed an ecological connection with nature (plants, animals, the crust of this earth) and the cosmos as a whole, sub specie aeternitatis. Clearly, Adler himself had little problem with adopting a metaphysical and spiritual point of view to support his theories.
Death and cremation
Adler died suddenly in Aberdeen, Scotland, in May 1937, during a three-week visit to the University of Aberdeen. While walking down the street, he was seen to collapse and lie motionless on the pavement. As a man ran over to him and loosened his collar, Adler mumbled "Kurt", the name of his son and died. The autopsy performed determined his death was caused by a degeneration of the heart muscle. His body was cremated at Warriston Crematorium in Edinburgh but the ashes were never reclaimed. In 2007, his ashes were rediscovered in a casket at Warriston Crematorium and returned to Vienna for burial in 2011.
Use of Adler's work without attribution
Much of Adler's theories have been absorbed into modern psychology without attribution. Psychohistorian Henri F. Ellenberger writes, "It would not be easy to find another author from which so much has been borrowed on all sides without acknowledgement than Alfred Adler." Ellenberger posits several theories for "the discrepancy between greatness of achievement, massive rejection of person and work, and wide-scale, quiet plagiarism..." These include Adler's "imperfect" style of writing and demeanor, his "capacity to create a new obviousness," and his lack of a large and well organized following.
Influence on depth psychology
In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there". He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum. He also imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world.
This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "honorable errors". Though one rejects the content of Adler's views, one can recognize their consistency and significance." Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later Neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach.
Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991); and thus to be one of the three great psychologists/philosophers of the twentieth century.
Personal life
During his college years, he had become attached to a group of socialist students, among which he had found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist from Russia studying in Vienna. Because Raissa was a militant socialist, she had a large impact on Adler's early publications and ultimately his theory of personality. They married in 1897 and had four children, two of whom, his daughter Alexandra and his son Kurt, became psychiatrists. Their children were writer, psychiatrist and Socialist activist Alexandra Adler; psychiatrist Kurt Adler; writer and activist Valentine Adler; and Cornelia "Nelly" Adler. Raissa, Adler's wife, died at 89 in New York City on April 21,1962.
Author and journalist Margot Adler (1946-2014) was Adler's granddaughter.
Artistic and cultural references
The two main characters in the novel Plant Teacher engage in a session of Adlerian lifestyle interpretation, including early memory interpretation.
In the episode Something About Dr. Mary of the television series Frasier, Frasier recalls having to "pass under a dangerously unbalanced portrait of Alfred Adler" during his studies at Harvard.
He appears as a character in the Young Indiana Jones chronicles.
English-language Adlerian journals
North America
The Journal of Individual Psychology (University of Texas Press)
The Canadian Journal of Adlerian Psychology (Adlerian Psychology Association of British Columbia)
United Kingdom
Adlerian Yearbook (Adlerian Society, UK)
Publications
Alfred Adler's key publications were The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927), & What Life Could Mean to You (1931). Other important publications are The Pattern of Life (1930), The Science of Living (1930), The Neurotic Constitution (1917), The Problems of Neurosis (1930). In his lifetime, Adler published more than 300 books and articles.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published a twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, covering his writings from 1898–1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1. Volume 12 provides comprehensive overviews of Adler's mature theory and contemporary Adlerian practice.
Volume 1 : The Neurotic Character — 1907
Volume 2 : Journal Articles 1898–1909
Volume 3 : Journal Articles 1910–1913
Volume 4 : Journal Articles 1914–1920
Volume 5 : Journal Articles 1921–1926
Volume 6 : Journal Articles 1927–1931
Volume 7 : Journal Articles 1931–1937
Volume 8 : Lectures to Physicians & Medical Students
Volume 9 : Case Histories
Volume 10 : Case Readings & Demonstrations
Volume 11 : Education for Prevention
Volume 12 : The General System of Individual Psychology
Other key Adlerian texts
Adler, A. (1964). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. .
Adler, A. (1979). Superiority and Social Interest: A Collection of Later Writings. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. .
See also
Adlerian
Classical Adlerian psychology
Neo-Adlerian
Notes
References
Adler, A. (1908). Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und der Neurose. Fortsch. Med. 26: 577–584.
Adler, A. (1938). Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind. J. Linton and R. Vaughan (Trans.). London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Adler, A. (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Dreikurs, R. & Soltz, V. (1964). Children the Challenge. New York: Hawthorn Books.
Ehrenwald, J. (1991, 1976). The History of Psychotherapy: From healing magic to encounter. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.
Eissler, K.R. (1971). Death Drive, Ambivalence, and Narcissism. Psychoanal. St. Child, 26: 25–78.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Fiebert, M. S. (1997). In and out of Freud's shadow: A chronology of Adler's relationship with Freud. Individual Psychology, 53(3), 241–269.
Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press, Vol. 10, pp. 3–149.
King, R. & Shelley, C. (2008). Community Feeling and Social Interest: Adlerian Parallels, Synergy, and Differences with the Field of Community Psychology. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 18, 96–107.
Manaster, G. J., Painter, G., Deutsch, D., & Overholt, B. J. (Eds.). (1977). Alfred Adler: As We Remember Him. Chicago: North American Society of Adlerian Psychology.
Shelley, C. (Ed.). (1998). Contemporary Perspectives on Psychotherapy and Homosexualities. London: Free Association Books.
Slavik, S. & King, R. (2007). Adlerian therapeutic strategy. The Canadian Journal of Adlerian Psychology, 37(1), 3–16.
Gantschacher, H. (ARBOS 2007). Witness and Victim of the Apocalypse, chapter 13 page 12 and chapter 14 page 6.
Orgler, H. (1996). Alfred Adler, 22 (1), pg. 67–68.
Further reading
Orgler, Hertha, Alfred Adler, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, V. 22 (1), 1976-Spring, p. 67
Phyllis Bottome (1939). Alfred Adler: A Biography. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York.
Phyllis Bottome (1939). Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom. London: Faber and Faber. 3rd Ed. 1957.
Carlson, J., Watts, R. E., & Maniacci, M. (2005). Adlerian Therapy: Theory and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. .
Dinkmeyer, D., Sr., & Dreikurs, R. (2000). Encouraging Children to Learn. Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. .
Rudolf Dreikurs (1935): An Introduction to Individual Psychology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co. Ltd. (new edition 1983: London & New York: Routledge), .
Grey, L. (1998). Alfred Adler: The Forgotten Prophet: A Vision for the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Praeger. .
Handlbauer, B. (1998). The Freud-Adler Controversy. Oxford, UK: Oneworld. .
Hoffman, E. (1994). The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology. New York: Addison-Wesley Co. .
Lehrer, R. (1999). "Adler and Nietzsche". In: J. Golomb, W. Santaniello, and R. Lehrer. (Eds.). Nietzsche and Depth Psychology. (pp. 229–246). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. .
Mosak, H. H. & Di Pietro, R. (2005). Early Recollections: Interpretive Method and Application. New York: Routledge. .
Oberst, U. E. and Stewart, A. E. (2003). Adlerian Psychotherapy: An Advanced Approach to Individual Psychology. New York: Brunner-Routledge. .
Orgler, H. (1963). Alfred Adler: The Man and His Work: Triumph Over the Inferiority Complex. New York: Liveright.
Orgler, H. (1996). Alfred Adler, 22 (1), pg. 67–68.
Josef Rattner (1983): Alfred Adler: Life and Literature. Ungar Pub. Co. .
Slavik, S. & Carlson, J. (Eds.). (2005). Readings in the Theory of Individual Psychology. New York: Routledge. .
Manès Sperber (1974). Masks of Loneliness: Alfred Adler in Perspective. New York: Macmillan. .
Stepansky, P. E. (1983). In Freud's Shadow: Adler in Context. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. .
Watts, R. E. (2003). Adlerian, cognitive, and constructivist therapies: An integrative dialogue. New York: Springer. .
Watts, R. E., & Carlson, J. (1999). Interventions and strategies in counseling and psychotherapy. New York: Accelerated Development/Routledge. .
Way, Lewis (1950): Adler's Place in Psychology. London: Allen & Unwin.
Way, Lewis (1956): Alfred Adler: An Introduction to his Psychology. London: Pelican.
West, G. K. (1975). Kierkegaard and Adler. Tallahassee: Florida State University.
External links
International Association of Individual Psychology
Psychology Articles
The Adlerian Society (UK) and the Institute for Individual Psychology
The North American Society of Adlerian Psychology
Institutul de Psihologie si Psihoterapie Adleriana Romania
Centro de Estudios Adlerianos Uruguay
Classical Adlerian Psychology according to Alfred Adlers Institutes in San Francisco and Northwestern Washington
AdlerPedia
Hong Kong Society of Adlerian Psychology
New Concept Coaching & Training Institute
1870 births
1937 deaths
Adlerian psychology
19th-century Austrian Jews
Jewish scientists
Austrian ophthalmologists
Austrian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Austrian psychiatrists
Austrian psychologists
Jewish psychiatrists
People from Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus
University of Vienna alumni | true | [
"Depth psychology (from the German term Tiefenpsychologie) refers to the practice and research of the science of the unconscious, covering both psychoanalysis and psychology. It is also defined as the psychological theory that explores the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, as well as the patterns and dynamics of motivation and the mind. The theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Alfred Adler are all considered its foundations.\n\nDevelopment \nThe term \"depth psychology\" was coined by Eugen Bleuler and refers to psychoanalytic approaches to therapy and research that take the unconscious into account. The term was rapidly accepted in the year of its proposal (1914) by Sigmund Freud, to cover a topographical view of the mind in terms of different psychic systems. He is considered to have revolutionized this field, which he viewed in his later years as his most significant work.\n\nSince the 1970s, depth psychology has come to refer to the ongoing development of theories and therapies pioneered by Pierre Janet, William James, and Carl Gustav Jung, as well as Freud. All explore relationships between the conscious and the unconscious (thus including both psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology).\n\nSummary of primary elements\n\nDepth psychology states that the psyche process is partly conscious, partly unconscious, and partly semi-conscious. In practice, depth psychology seeks to explore underlying motives as an approach to various mental disorders. Depth psychologists believe that the uncovering of deeper, often unconscious, motives are intrinsically healing in and of itself. It seeks knowledge of the deep layers underlying behavioral and cognitive processes.\n\nIn modern times, the initial work, development, theories, and therapies of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and Otto Rank have grown into three main perspectives on depth psychology:\n Psychoanalytic: Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott (among others); object relations theory; Neo-Freudianism\n Adlerian: Adler's individual psychology\n Jungian: Jung's analytical psychology; James Hillman's archetypal psychology\n\nPsychoanalytic view\n\nAdlerian view\n\nAdlerian psychology has been regarded as depth psychology due to its aim of discovering the buried unconscious phenomena. It is one of the first frameworks that approached the individual as a fundamentally social being, one that needs to be situated in a socio-cultural context in order to be understood. It is also described as a representation of the ego psychology and views the ego as an independent and creative entity that facilitates the interaction with social reality instead of merely a handmaiden of the id. \n\nThe Adlerian approach to psychoanalysis includes a set of tools that allows an individual to break through a self-centered way of life. For instance, it eliminates the core style of life and fictional final goal of a patient through Socratic method as opposed to counselling.\n\nJungian views\nMany scholars believe that Jung's most significant contribution to depth psychology was his conceptualization of the \"collective unconscious\". While Freud cited the conceptualization unconscious forces was limited to repressed or forgotten personal experiences, Jung emphasized the qualities that an individual share with other people. This is demonstrated in his notion that all minds, all lives, are ultimately embedded in some sort of myth-making in the form of themes or patterns. This myth-making or creation of a mythical image lies at the depth of the unconscious, where an individual's mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind. Mythology is therefore not a series of old explanations for natural events, but rather the richness and wonder of humanity played out in a symbolical, thematic, and patterned storytelling.\n\nThere is also the case of the Jungian archetypes. According to Jung, archetypes are primordial elements of the Collective Unconscious. They form the unchanging context from which the contents of cyclic and sequent changes derive their meanings. Duration is the secret of action. He also stated that the psyche spontaneously generates mythico-religious symbolism or themes, and is therefore spiritual or metaphysical, as well as instinctive, in nature. An implication of this is that the choice of whether to be a spiritual person may be beyond the individual, whether and how we apply it, including to nonspiritual aspirations.\n\nAnother Jungian position in depth psychology involves his belief that the unconscious contains repressed experiences and other personal-level issues in its \"upper\" layers and \"transpersonal\" (e.g. collective, non-I, archetypal) forces in its depths. The semi-conscious contains or is, an aware pattern of personality, including everything in a spectrum from individual vanity to the personality of the workplace.\n\nCriticism\nFredric Jameson considers postmodernism to reject depth models such as Freud's, in favor of a set of multiple surfaces consisting of intertextual discourses and practices.\n\nSee also\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nExternal links\n\n Depth Psychology as a Theoretical Approach\n Depth Psychology List: Find or List depth psychology oriented therapists, coaches, and practitioners of various types\n The C.G. Jung Page\n Depth Psychology Alliance: Online Community for exploring Depth Psychology topics, news, discussion, events\n Depth Insights: Media for Depth Psychology including podcasts and the semi-annual scholarly e-Zine, Depth Insights \n The Institute for Cultural Change - the website is down.\n Pacifica Graduate Institute\n Sonoma State University M.A. program in Depth Psychology\n Institute of Transpersonal Psychology\n Integral Science\n Depth Psychology Explained\n What is depth psychology?\n Center for Depth Psychology. Newport Beach, CA. USA\n What is Jungian Psychotherapy?\n\nPsychodynamic psychotherapy\nAnalytical psychology",
"Sophie or Sofie Lazarsfeld (née Munk, May 26, 1881 – September 24, 1976) was an Austrian-American therapist and writer, a student of Alfred Adler.\n\nLife\nSophie Munk was born in Troppau on May 26, 1881.\n\nShe married Robert Lazarsfeld, a lawyer: the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld was their son. Friedrich Adler lived with the family for some time: on the morning that Adler assassinated Austria's prime minister, he sent them a postcard saying he was in good spirits after leaving the house. In the later judgement of Paul Lazarsfeld, \"My mother was responsible for destroying three men, my father, Friedrich Adler, and myself. I always say this.\"\n\nApparently introduced to the ideas of Alfred Adler (no relation to Friedrich) by her son, Lazarsfeld joined the Vienna Individual Psychology Society after the First World War, and underwent training with Alfred Adler in the 1920s. She coined the phrase \"the courage to be imperfect\", first using it at the 1925 Second International Congress of Individual Psychology, and expanding on the idea in later writing.\n \nHow Women Experience Men (1931) drew on the work of marriage clinics set up by Alfred Adler.\n\nShe escaped Austria for Paris in 1938, and then the United States in 1941, where she settled and built a psychological practice in New York City. She became Honorary President of the American Society of Adlerian Psychology, and contributed several articles to its journal, The American journal of individual psychology.\n\nShe died in 1976 in New York City.\n\nWork\n Vom häuslichen Frieden, 1926. With a foreword by Alfred Adler.\n Richtige Lebensführung, 1926\n Das lügenhafte Kind, 1927\n Die Ehe von heute und morgen (The marriage of today and tomorrow), 1927\n Erziehung zur Ehe (Training for marriage), 1928.\n (ed.) Technik der Erziehung; ein Leitfaden für Eltern und Lehrer, 1929\n Wie die frau den mann erlebt; fremde bekenntnisse und eigene betrachtungen (How women experience men), 1931. Translated by Karsten and E. Pelham Stapelfeldt as The Rhythm of Life: A Guide to Sexual Harmony for Women, London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1934. Also published in translation as Woman's experience of the male, London: Encyclopaedia Press, 1938, with an introduction by Norman Haire.\n Sexuelle Erziehung (Sexual education), 1931\n 'Did Oedipus Have an Oedipus Complex?', American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 14 (1944): 226-29; The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 101, no. 1 (1945)\n 'War and Peace Between the Sexes', Individual Psychology Bulletin Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (1947), pp. 74–9\n 'The Use of Fiction in Psychotherapy: A Contribution to Bibliotherapy', American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 3, No. 1 (January 1949), pp. 26–33\n 'Pitfalls in Psychotherapy', The American Journal of Individual Psychology, 10 (1952), pp. 20–26.\n 'The courage for imperfection', Journal of Individual Psychology, 22 (1966), pp. 163–65.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1881 births\n1976 deaths\nWriters from Opava\nPeople from Austrian Silesia\nAustrian Jews\nJewish emigrants from Austria to the United States after the Anschluss\nAustrian women psychologists\nAdlerian psychology\n20th-century psychologists\nLazarsfeld family"
] |
[
"Pendulum (drum and bass band)",
"2009-11: Immersion"
] | C_9e66b2f0c3fa48179767100bf7ceeb74_1 | Where did Pendulum originate? | 1 | Where did Pendulum originate? | Pendulum (drum and bass band) | Pendulum once again toured Europe in 2009. During this tour they announced that they were working on their third studio album, Immersion. It was announced in December 2009 that Pendulum would be touring for their new album in May 2010. The release date of the album was announced to be sometime "in May" during the live preview party at Matter, and was then announced to be released on 24 May. Pendulum previewed their album Immersion at the Ear Storm night at London's Matter nightclub on Friday 22 January. "Salt in the Wounds", a track from their new album, was Zane Lowe's Hottest Record in the World on BBC Radio 1 on 25 January 2010. On Zane Lowe's show, it was also announced that he wanted to join the band and the first single from the new album would be called "Watercolour". This single also received its first play on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on 8 March 2010, and was his Single of the Week for that week. In December 2010, "Watercolour" was found to be featured in the soundtrack of the 2010 hit game "Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit". On 1 April, the music video for "Salt in the Wounds" was released. The video is unique in that it is, according to the band's website, "...the world's first 360deg interactive music video." "Watercolour" claimed the No.4 spot in the UK Singles Chart, making it their biggest hit to date. On 21 May 2010, the band headlined the annual Radio 1's Big Weekend festival which was held at the Vaynol Estate, Bangor, Gwynedd. The second single from the album, "Witchcraft", was released on 18 July and charted at No.29 in the UK Singles chart, making it their third highest charted single in the UK. The third single from Immersion was "The Island", and just missed the UK Top 40 at No. 41. Rob Swire had stated that if it had achieved greater success than "Witchcraft", he would have released a song entitled "Ransom", which was taken off Immersion before the album's release. Swire revealed the original files for "Ransom" were corrupted, and that he has no plans to recreate them, therefore it will not be released. However, on 6 April 2011, Pendulum released "Ransom" as a single via their website with all proceeds going to the Help for Japan fund after the tsunami. "Crush" was released as the fourth single in January 2011. In January 2011, Pendulum released a Deluxe Edition of Immersion via iTunes which contained the album's original 15 tracks and a collection of remixes of "Watercolour", "Witchcraft" and "The Island" by other artists including deadmau5, Tiesto and Chuckie. Both the UK and US store were also given the music videos of those three tracks in the release. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | false | [
"A ballistic pendulum is a device for measuring a bullet's momentum, from which it is possible to calculate the velocity and kinetic energy. Ballistic pendulums have been largely rendered obsolete by modern chronographs, which allow direct measurement of the projectile velocity.\n\nAlthough the ballistic pendulum is considered obsolete, it remained in use for a significant length of time and led to great advances in the science of ballistics. The ballistic pendulum is still found in physics classrooms today, because of its simplicity and usefulness in demonstrating properties of momentum and energy. Unlike other methods of measuring the speed of a bullet, the basic calculations for a ballistic pendulum do not require any measurement of time, but rely only on measures of mass and distance.\n\nIn addition its primary uses of measuring the velocity of a projectile or the recoil of a gun, the ballistic pendulum can be used to measure any transfer of momentum. For example, a ballistic pendulum was used by physicist C. V. Boys to measure the elasticity of golf balls, and by physicist Peter Guthrie Tait to measure the effect that spin had on the distance a golf ball traveled.\n\nHistory\n \nThe ballistic pendulum was invented in 1742 by English mathematician Benjamin Robins (1707–1751), and published in his book New Principles of Gunnery, which revolutionized the science of ballistics, as it provided the first way to accurately measure the velocity of a bullet.\n\nRobins used the ballistic pendulum to measure projectile velocity in two ways. The first was to attach the gun to the pendulum, and measure the recoil. Since the momentum of the gun is equal to the momentum of the ejecta, and since the projectile was (in those experiments) the large majority of the mass of the ejecta, the velocity of the bullet could be approximated. The second, and more accurate method, was to directly measure the bullet momentum by firing it into the pendulum. Robins experimented with musket balls of around one ounce in mass (28 g), while other contemporaries used his methods with cannon shot of one to three pounds (0.5 to 1.4 kg).\n\nRobins' original work used a heavy iron pendulum, faced with wood, to catch the bullet. Modern reproductions, used as demonstrations in physics classes, generally use a heavy weight suspended by a very fine, lightweight arm, and ignore the mass of the pendulum's arm. Robins' heavy iron pendulum did not allow this, and Robins' mathematical approach was slightly more complex. He used the period of oscillation and mass of the pendulum (both measured with the bullet included) to calculate the rotational inertia of the pendulum, which was then used in the calculations. Robins also used a length of ribbon, loosely gripped in a clamp, to measure the travel of the pendulum. The pendulum would draw out a length of ribbon equal to the chord of pendulum's travel.\n\nThe first system to supplant ballistic pendulums with direct measures of projectile speed was invented in 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars and used a rapidly rotating shaft of known speed with two paper disks on it; the bullet was fired through the disks, parallel to the shaft, and the angular difference in the points of impact provided an elapsed time over the distance between the disks. A direct electromechanical clockwork measure appeared in 1848, with a spring-driven clock started and stopped by electromagnets, whose current was interrupted by the bullet passing through two meshes of fine wires, again providing the time to traverse the given distance.\n\nMathematical derivations\nMost physics textbooks provide a simplified method of calculation of the bullet's velocity that uses the mass of the bullet and pendulum and the height of the pendulum's travel to calculate the amount of energy and momentum in the pendulum and bullet system. Robins' calculations were significantly more involved, and used a measure of the period of oscillation to determine the rotational inertia of the system.\n\nSimple derivation\nWe begin with the motion of the bullet-pendulum system from the instant the pendulum is struck by the bullet.\n\nGiven , the acceleration due to gravity, and , the final height of the pendulum, it is possible to calculate the initial velocity of the bullet-pendulum system using conservation of mechanical energy (kinetic energy + potential energy). Let this initial velocity be denoted by . Suppose the masses of the bullet and pendulum are and respectively.\n\nThe initial kinetic energy of the system \n\nTaking the initial height of the pendulum as the potential energy reference , the final potential energy when the bullet-pendulum system comes to a stop is given by \n\nSo, by the conservation of mechanical energy, we have:\n\nSolve for velocity to obtain: \n\nWe can now use momentum conservation for the bullet-pendulum system to get the speed of the bullet, , before it struck the pendulum. Equating the momentum of the bullet before it is fired to that of the bullet-pendulum system as soon as the bullet strikes the pendulum (and using from above), we get:\n\nSolving for :\n\nRobins' formula\nRobins' original book had some omitted assumptions in the formula; for example, it did not include a correction to account for a bullet impact that did not match the center of mass of the pendulum. An updated formula, with this omission corrected, was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society the following year. Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, unaware of this correction, independently corrected this omission in his annotated German translation of the book. The corrected formula, appearing in a 1786 edition of the book, was:\n\nwhere:\n is the velocity of the ball in units per second\n is the mass of the ball\n is the mass of the pendulum\n is the distance from pivot to the center of gravity\n is the distance from pivot to the point of the ball's impact\n is the chord, as measured by the ribbon described in Robins' apparatus\n is the radius, or distance from the pivot the attachment of the ribbon\n is the number of oscillations made by the pendulum in one minute\n\nRobins used feet for length and ounces for mass, though other units, such as inches or pounds, may be substituted as long as consistency is maintained.\n\nPoisson's formula\nA rotational inertia based formula similar to Robins' was derived by French mathematician Siméon Denis Poisson and published in The Mécanique Physique, for measuring the bullet velocity by using the recoil of the gun:\n\nwhere:\n is the mass of the bullet\n is the velocity of the bullet\n is the distance from pivot to the ribbon\n is the distance from bore axis to pivot point\n is the combined mass of gun and pendulum\n is the chord measured by the ribbon\n is the radius from pivot to the center of mass of gun and pendulum (measured by oscillation, as per Robins)\n is gravitational acceleration\n is the distance from the center of mass of the pendulum to the pivot\n\n can be calculated with the equation:\n\nWhere is half the period of oscillation.\n\nAckley's ballistic pendulum\nP.O. Ackley described how to construct and use a ballistic pendulum in 1962. Ackley's pendulum used a parallelogram linkage, with a standardized size that allowed a simplified means of calculating the velocity.\n\nAckley's pendulum used pendulum arms of exactly 66.25 inches (168.3 cm) in length, from bearing surface to bearing surface, and used turnbuckles located in the middle of the arms to provide a means of setting the arm length precisely. Ackley recommends masses for the body of the pendulum for various calibers as well; 50 pounds (22.7 kg) for rimfire up through the .22 Hornet, 90 pounds (40.9 kg) for .222 Remington through .35 Whelen, and 150 pounds (68.2 kg) for magnum rifle calibers. The pendulum is made of heavy metal pipe, welded shut at one end, and packed with paper and sand to stop the bullet. The open end of the pendulum was covered in a sheet of rubber, to allow the bullet to enter and prevent material from leaking out.\n\nTo use the pendulum, it is set up with a device to measure the horizontal distance of the pendulum swing, such as a light rod that would be pushed backwards by the rear of the pendulum as it moved. The shooter is seated at least 15 feet (5 m) back from the pendulum (reducing the effects of muzzle blast on the pendulum) and a bullet is fired into the pendulum. To calculate the velocity of the bullet given the horizontal swing, the following formula is used:\n\nwhere:\n is the velocity of the bullet, in feet per second\n is the mass of the pendulum, in grains\n is the mass of the bullet, in grains\n is the horizontal travel of the pendulum, in inches\n\nFor more accurate calculations, a number of changes are made, both to the construction and the use of the pendulum. The construction changes involve the addition of a small box on top of the pendulum. Before weighing the pendulum, the box is filled with a number of bullets of the type being measured. For each shot made, a bullet can be removed from the box, thus keeping the mass of the pendulum constant. The measurement change involves measuring the period of the pendulum. The pendulum is swung, and the number of complete oscillations is measured over a long period of time, five to ten minutes. The time is divided by the number of oscillations to obtain the period. Once this is done, the formula generates a more precise constant to replace the value 0.2018 in the above equation. Just like above, the velocity of the bullet is calculated using the formula:\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography\n Benjamin Robins, James Wilson, Charles Hutton (1805). New Principles of Gunnery. F. Wingrave.\n \"Ballistic pendulum\". Encyclopædia Britannica\n\nExternal links\nBallistic pendulum calculator\nBallistic Pendulum demonstrated by Walter Lewin\n\nPendulums\nBallistics",
"Psyclone is a ride at Canada's Wonderland. On May 5, 2002, this Mondial ride was opened to the public at the park. The 1 minute and 54 second ride features 40 seats facing outwards which rotate from a central pendulum as the ride reaches its maximum arc angle of 120 degrees. Even though the ride height is , when the ride reaches the top of its swing, the height becomes high.\n\nRide experience\nThe rider's experience depends on where they are seated on the ride. Before the ride begins, the floor under the riders' feet descends lower (almost like going deeper in the ground) due to how the pendulum swings. If the floor did not move, serious injury to riders' legs and bodies would occur. Due to the way in which the seats rotate, all riders face different angles of the ride. Depending on where the rider is seated, they may experience some air-time as the swing reaches its maximum angle. When the ride cycle ends, the pendulum returns to the 'loading position' and the floor rises to the riders' feet, allowing riders to exit and enter the ride.\n\nStructure\nPsyclone is made primarily out of 7 major parts: the 4 supports around the ride which support the motor that allows the pendulum to swing, the motor itself (the blue part on top of the ride) which supports the pendulum, the pendulum itself which supports the seats for the ride, and the seats themselves.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n Official Psyclone page\n\nPendulum rides\nCanada's Wonderland\nAmusement rides manufactured by Mondial\nAmusement rides introduced in 2002\nCedar Fair attractions\n2002 establishments in Canada",
"A pendulum is a body suspended from a fixed support so that it swings freely back and forth under the influence of gravity.\n\nPendulum may also refer to:\n\nDevices\n Pendulum (mathematics), the mathematical principles of a pendulum\n Pendulum clock, a kind of clock that uses a pendulum to keep time\n Pendulum car, an experimental tilting train\n Foucault pendulum, a pendulum that demonstrates the Earth's rotation\n Spherical pendulum\n Spring pendulum\n Conical pendulum\n Centrifugal pendulum absorber, torsional vibration reduction by using a pendulum principle\n For other types and uses of pendulums, see: :Category:Pendulums\n Mackerras Pendulum, a model devised by Malcolm Mackerras to predict election outcomes\n Pendulum (torture device), a device allegedly used by the Spanish Inquisition\n Pendulum Instruments, a Swedish manufacturer of scientific instruments\n\nMusic\n Pendulum (Australian band), an Australian electronic rock group formed in 2002\n Pendulum (ambient band), an Australian house music group formed in 1994\n\nAlbums\n Pendulum (Broadcast EP), and its title track\n Pendulum (Creedence Clearwater Revival album)\n Pendulum (Dave Liebman album), and its title track\n Pendulum (Eberhard Weber album), and its title track\n Pendulum (Tara Simmons EP), and its title track\n The Pendulum, a comic book miniseries based on Insane Clown Posse's Dark Carnival universe, and associated songs and album\n\nSongs\n \"Pendulum\" (song), by FKA Twigs\n \"Pendulum\", by Katy Perry from the album Witness\n \"Pendulums\", by Sarah Harmer from the album All of Our Names\n\n \"Penduli Pendulum\", by Bobbie Gentry from The Delta Sweete\n \"The Pendulum Song\", song written by Al Hoffman and John Murray\n Pendulum Music, a composition by Steve Reich involving microphones swinging above speakers like pendulums\n\nBooks and periodicals \nPendulum, by John Christopher, 1968 \nThe Pendulum, by Annie S. Swan, 1972 \nPendulum, by A. E. Van Vogt, 1978\nPendulum, by Adam Hamdy, 2017\nThe Pendulum, a student newspaper at Elon University\nThe Pendulum, a publication devoted to radiesthesia\n\nFilm\nPendulum (film), a 1969 film starring George Peppard\nPendulum, a 2001 film starring Rachel Hunter and James Russo\n\nOther\n Pendulum, a trade name for the preemergent herbicide pendimethalin\n Pendulum, several types of Digimon virtual pets\n\nSee also"
] |
|
[
"Pendulum (drum and bass band)",
"2009-11: Immersion",
"Where did Pendulum originate?",
"I don't know."
] | C_9e66b2f0c3fa48179767100bf7ceeb74_1 | What record company where they signed with? | 2 | What record company where Pendulum signed with? | Pendulum (drum and bass band) | Pendulum once again toured Europe in 2009. During this tour they announced that they were working on their third studio album, Immersion. It was announced in December 2009 that Pendulum would be touring for their new album in May 2010. The release date of the album was announced to be sometime "in May" during the live preview party at Matter, and was then announced to be released on 24 May. Pendulum previewed their album Immersion at the Ear Storm night at London's Matter nightclub on Friday 22 January. "Salt in the Wounds", a track from their new album, was Zane Lowe's Hottest Record in the World on BBC Radio 1 on 25 January 2010. On Zane Lowe's show, it was also announced that he wanted to join the band and the first single from the new album would be called "Watercolour". This single also received its first play on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on 8 March 2010, and was his Single of the Week for that week. In December 2010, "Watercolour" was found to be featured in the soundtrack of the 2010 hit game "Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit". On 1 April, the music video for "Salt in the Wounds" was released. The video is unique in that it is, according to the band's website, "...the world's first 360deg interactive music video." "Watercolour" claimed the No.4 spot in the UK Singles Chart, making it their biggest hit to date. On 21 May 2010, the band headlined the annual Radio 1's Big Weekend festival which was held at the Vaynol Estate, Bangor, Gwynedd. The second single from the album, "Witchcraft", was released on 18 July and charted at No.29 in the UK Singles chart, making it their third highest charted single in the UK. The third single from Immersion was "The Island", and just missed the UK Top 40 at No. 41. Rob Swire had stated that if it had achieved greater success than "Witchcraft", he would have released a song entitled "Ransom", which was taken off Immersion before the album's release. Swire revealed the original files for "Ransom" were corrupted, and that he has no plans to recreate them, therefore it will not be released. However, on 6 April 2011, Pendulum released "Ransom" as a single via their website with all proceeds going to the Help for Japan fund after the tsunami. "Crush" was released as the fourth single in January 2011. In January 2011, Pendulum released a Deluxe Edition of Immersion via iTunes which contained the album's original 15 tracks and a collection of remixes of "Watercolour", "Witchcraft" and "The Island" by other artists including deadmau5, Tiesto and Chuckie. Both the UK and US store were also given the music videos of those three tracks in the release. CANNOTANSWER | " "Watercolour | false | [
"Switchflicker Records is an independent British record label based in Manchester, England. The company was established in 2000 by Jayne Compton.\n\nPerformers signed to the label include Divine David, Chloe Poems and formerly The Ting Tings, who launched their career at the label.\n\nIn 2008, members of The Ting Tings wrote critical comments on their blog about what they believe to be inflated prices charged by the label for their single, \"That's Not My Name\", asserting that the company was \"cashing in\" on the band's success at the expense of their fans. The label responded in a published statement, noting that they were doing nothing wrong as they owned the stock and were selling remaining copies in line with the record's value at the time: \n\nFollowing this dispute, The Ting Tings signed with Columbia Records, having received assurances from Columbia that they would retain sufficient artistic control over their music.\n\nReferences\n\nBritish record labels",
"Sista Bussen is a Swedish record company founded in 1978 in Stockholm with a Gothenburg branch. They produced and published music, mainly progg and punk. In 1981 the Gothenburg section seceded into their own company called Last Buzz. Sista Bussen were mainly a DIY record company and the artists had to do much of the work themselves.\n\nAmong the artists signed to the company are Sky High, Liket lever with Freddie Wadling, Dom Dummaste, Köttgrottorna, Gudibrallan, Stefan Sundström, Slobobans Undergång and Leather Nun.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Sista Bussen \n\nSwedish record labels",
"Takeover Entertainment was a British entertainment company. The organization operates an independent record label, talent agency, a music production company, as well as its own music publishing house. The company was founded in 2006 and is run by Kwasi Danquah III (known by his pseudonym Tinchy Stryder), Archie Lamb and Jack Foster. It specializes in producing R&B, hip hop and electronic music. It was dissolved in October 2013\n \nThe first person to be signed to Takeover Entertainment was English rapper and entrepreneur Tinchy Stryder. Success followed by Stryder becoming the biggest selling UK male artist of 2009 with his second studio album, Catch 22, which spawned hits, including \"Take Me Back\", and #1's \"Never Leave You\", and the N-Dubz collaboration \"Number 1\".\n\nHistory\nThe company was formed on Thursday 9 February 2006 by Archie Lamb and Jack Foster. Then part-time promoters, the duo put on nightclubs in the United Kingdom that featured artists including Roll Deep and Lethal Bizzle. Upon meeting Danquah in 2006 they branched out into management, and signed him to a record deal. The Star in the Hood clothing company was founded in the same year.\n\nIn 2008 Takeover Entertainment, signed a joint venture with EMI Music Publishing to create the global music publishing company Takeover/Cloud 9, and enabled Takeover Entertainment to sign artists and songwriters and develop the signed artists and songwriters in partnership with EMI.\n\nIn 2010 Shawn \"Jay-Z\" Carter and Roc Nation signed a joint venture deal with Takeover Entertainment to create a European record label and entertainment company. The new company was named Takeover Roc Nation. Takeover Roc Nation is currently based in the United Kingdom, and distributes its record releases through Sony Music and partners with Live Nation for all other aspects of the business.\n\nPeople\n\nConcerts and tours\nRollercoaster Tour, November 2011 (United Kingdom)\nThe Rockstar Tour, December 2011 (United Kingdom)\nBad Intentions Tour, 2012\n\nDiscography\n\n2011 Studio album single(s)\n\n2012 Studio album single(s)\n\nUpcoming studio album(s)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Contact page — Takeover Entertainment Limited — Contact page \n Tinchy Stryder: Rapping with the Lib Dems collected news and commentary at The Guardian\n\n \n2006 establishments in the United Kingdom\nBritish independent record labels\nElectronic dance music record labels\nHip hop record labels\nMusic production companies\nMusic publishing companies of the United Kingdom\nPublishing companies established in 2006\nSoul music record labels\nSynth-pop record labels\nTalent agencies\nTakeover Group"
] |
|
[
"Pendulum (drum and bass band)",
"2009-11: Immersion",
"Where did Pendulum originate?",
"I don't know.",
"What record company where they signed with?",
"\" \"Watercolour"
] | C_9e66b2f0c3fa48179767100bf7ceeb74_1 | Was this the only record company that they had signed with during their carreer? | 3 | Was Watercolour the only record company that Pendulum had signed with during their career? | Pendulum (drum and bass band) | Pendulum once again toured Europe in 2009. During this tour they announced that they were working on their third studio album, Immersion. It was announced in December 2009 that Pendulum would be touring for their new album in May 2010. The release date of the album was announced to be sometime "in May" during the live preview party at Matter, and was then announced to be released on 24 May. Pendulum previewed their album Immersion at the Ear Storm night at London's Matter nightclub on Friday 22 January. "Salt in the Wounds", a track from their new album, was Zane Lowe's Hottest Record in the World on BBC Radio 1 on 25 January 2010. On Zane Lowe's show, it was also announced that he wanted to join the band and the first single from the new album would be called "Watercolour". This single also received its first play on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on 8 March 2010, and was his Single of the Week for that week. In December 2010, "Watercolour" was found to be featured in the soundtrack of the 2010 hit game "Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit". On 1 April, the music video for "Salt in the Wounds" was released. The video is unique in that it is, according to the band's website, "...the world's first 360deg interactive music video." "Watercolour" claimed the No.4 spot in the UK Singles Chart, making it their biggest hit to date. On 21 May 2010, the band headlined the annual Radio 1's Big Weekend festival which was held at the Vaynol Estate, Bangor, Gwynedd. The second single from the album, "Witchcraft", was released on 18 July and charted at No.29 in the UK Singles chart, making it their third highest charted single in the UK. The third single from Immersion was "The Island", and just missed the UK Top 40 at No. 41. Rob Swire had stated that if it had achieved greater success than "Witchcraft", he would have released a song entitled "Ransom", which was taken off Immersion before the album's release. Swire revealed the original files for "Ransom" were corrupted, and that he has no plans to recreate them, therefore it will not be released. However, on 6 April 2011, Pendulum released "Ransom" as a single via their website with all proceeds going to the Help for Japan fund after the tsunami. "Crush" was released as the fourth single in January 2011. In January 2011, Pendulum released a Deluxe Edition of Immersion via iTunes which contained the album's original 15 tracks and a collection of remixes of "Watercolour", "Witchcraft" and "The Island" by other artists including deadmau5, Tiesto and Chuckie. Both the UK and US store were also given the music videos of those three tracks in the release. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | false | [
"Switchflicker Records is an independent British record label based in Manchester, England. The company was established in 2000 by Jayne Compton.\n\nPerformers signed to the label include Divine David, Chloe Poems and formerly The Ting Tings, who launched their career at the label.\n\nIn 2008, members of The Ting Tings wrote critical comments on their blog about what they believe to be inflated prices charged by the label for their single, \"That's Not My Name\", asserting that the company was \"cashing in\" on the band's success at the expense of their fans. The label responded in a published statement, noting that they were doing nothing wrong as they owned the stock and were selling remaining copies in line with the record's value at the time: \n\nFollowing this dispute, The Ting Tings signed with Columbia Records, having received assurances from Columbia that they would retain sufficient artistic control over their music.\n\nReferences\n\nBritish record labels",
"The Junction is an indie rock band formed in 2000 from Brampton, Ontario, Canada.\nThey signed to Universal Music in 2006 but later split from the label and went on to release recordings on their own independent label.\n\nHistory\nThe Junction formed in Brampton in 2000. Jackson and Taylor were classmates for years when they finally discovered that both of them played instruments during the ninth grade. Jameson later saw the band play at a Battle of the Bands after Jackson had transferred to Mayfield Secondary School. Amidst having several members come and go, the band released three EPs before signing with Universal Music. The first two EPs, White and Orange and Three Singles were recorded by Greg Dawson. The third, And with This Comes Tomorrow, was recorded by Brian Moncarz.\n\nAfter attracting attention from industry, The Junction signed a three-record deal with Universal Records, subsequently recording their first full-length album during 2005 and 2006. The band has openly admitted that they took far too long to record and release their first record. The Junction was released in February 2007 with little support from the label, which purportedly saw the record as “challenging”. Over the summer of 2007 the band was dropped by their booking agents, at which point they left their management company. It was at this time they were able to get out of their deal with Universal and continue independently with Matthew Jameson taking on the role of manager.\n\nThe band continued to tour Canada with bands such as Moneen, Bedouin Soundclash, and The Reason whilst writing songs and continuing to source out the possibilities of making another record. They were told about producer Gus Van Go by Indica Records and made contact with him. With Indica stepping out of the situation due to budget constraints, the band continued to keep in contact with Gus and worked to gather the funds needed to record in Brooklyn with Gus and his partner Werner F.\nTheir second full-length record, Another Link In The Chain, was the product of this collaboration. The record was released in Canada on July 28, 2009. \nThe band released their third LP, Grievances, in 2012.\n\nIn celebration of their 15th anniversary, The Junction announced that they were \"entering the studio to record [their] follow up to ‘Grievances’ with Jose Contreras\", and that it would be their \"first release via Culvert Music\".\n\nBand Name\nThe band name was originally 'The Funky Junction', which was derived from Jamiroquai’s Funktion when Jackson played bass. Jackson later began playing guitar and “funky” was dropped from the name.\n\nPopular culture\nThe song 'My Love Was There' was featured in the television series Degrassi: The Next Generation, Chuck’s Day Off, and was also featured in Hockey Night in Canada. It peaked at No. 34 of the Neilsen BDS Canadian rock radio charts.\n\nThe band performed at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.\n\nThe band has performed on MTV Canada twice.\n\nMembers\n\nCurrent \nBrent Jackson: Vocals, Guitar\nMichael \"Tip\" Taylor: Drums\nMatthew Jameson: Bass\n\"Hong Kong\" Marcus Wong: Guitar, BG Vocals\n\nFormer members\nJoel James: Keyboards, vocals\nRyan Masters: Guitar, vocals\nJames Young: Trumpet\n\nDiscography\n\nAlbums\n The Junction (2007)\n Another Link in the Chain (2009)\n Grievances (2012)\n\nEPs\n White and Orange (2000)\n Three Singles (2002)\n And With This Comes Tomorrow (2004)\n\nSingles\n \"Components of Four\"\n \"Frequencies\"\n \"My Love Was There\"\n \"No Road\"\n \"Level With Me\"\n\nSee also\n\nMusic of Canada\nCanadian rock\nList of Canadian musicians\nList of bands from Canada\n:Category:Canadian musical groups\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOfficial website\nThe Junction at Maplemusic.com\nInterview with For The Sound\nThe Junction Likes Their Music Raw And Inspirational – An interview with Jackson. July 29, 2007.\n\nMusical groups established in 2000\nCanadian indie rock groups\nMusical groups from Brampton\n2000 establishments in Ontario",
"Codiscos (which is short for Compañía Colombiana de Discos, meaning \"Colombian Record Company\") is a record label headquartered in Medellín, Colombia. It was founded in 1950 by Alfredo Díez Montoya with the name Zeida Ltd, which is today the name of its popular label dedicated to tropical music. Along with Discos Fuentes, it is one of the oldest and largest record labels of Colombia.\n\nHistory\nIn 1958, it became an operational recording studio, with the aim of not only distributing, but also recording and encouraging the talents of Colombian authors, composers, arrangers and performers. Currently the company has three studios.\n\nCodiscos was in licensing agreements with U.S. Sonotone Records and Balboa Records that have since been discontinued.\n\nOn 1 August 2005, it opened a branch, called \"Codiscos Corp.\" in Miami, Florida.\n\nArtists\nCodiscos was the label of Juanes when he was part of the group Ekhymosis, when they signed their first record deal.\n\nCodiscos has been the record label for the following artists, among others:\n\nSee also\n Polen Records\n\nReferences\n\nColombian music\nColombian record labels\nRecord labels established in 1950"
] |
|
[
"Pendulum (drum and bass band)",
"2009-11: Immersion",
"Where did Pendulum originate?",
"I don't know.",
"What record company where they signed with?",
"\" \"Watercolour",
"Was this the only record company that they had signed with during their carreer?",
"I don't know."
] | C_9e66b2f0c3fa48179767100bf7ceeb74_1 | Who were the original members? | 4 | Who were the original members of Pendulum? | Pendulum (drum and bass band) | Pendulum once again toured Europe in 2009. During this tour they announced that they were working on their third studio album, Immersion. It was announced in December 2009 that Pendulum would be touring for their new album in May 2010. The release date of the album was announced to be sometime "in May" during the live preview party at Matter, and was then announced to be released on 24 May. Pendulum previewed their album Immersion at the Ear Storm night at London's Matter nightclub on Friday 22 January. "Salt in the Wounds", a track from their new album, was Zane Lowe's Hottest Record in the World on BBC Radio 1 on 25 January 2010. On Zane Lowe's show, it was also announced that he wanted to join the band and the first single from the new album would be called "Watercolour". This single also received its first play on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on 8 March 2010, and was his Single of the Week for that week. In December 2010, "Watercolour" was found to be featured in the soundtrack of the 2010 hit game "Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit". On 1 April, the music video for "Salt in the Wounds" was released. The video is unique in that it is, according to the band's website, "...the world's first 360deg interactive music video." "Watercolour" claimed the No.4 spot in the UK Singles Chart, making it their biggest hit to date. On 21 May 2010, the band headlined the annual Radio 1's Big Weekend festival which was held at the Vaynol Estate, Bangor, Gwynedd. The second single from the album, "Witchcraft", was released on 18 July and charted at No.29 in the UK Singles chart, making it their third highest charted single in the UK. The third single from Immersion was "The Island", and just missed the UK Top 40 at No. 41. Rob Swire had stated that if it had achieved greater success than "Witchcraft", he would have released a song entitled "Ransom", which was taken off Immersion before the album's release. Swire revealed the original files for "Ransom" were corrupted, and that he has no plans to recreate them, therefore it will not be released. However, on 6 April 2011, Pendulum released "Ransom" as a single via their website with all proceeds going to the Help for Japan fund after the tsunami. "Crush" was released as the fourth single in January 2011. In January 2011, Pendulum released a Deluxe Edition of Immersion via iTunes which contained the album's original 15 tracks and a collection of remixes of "Watercolour", "Witchcraft" and "The Island" by other artists including deadmau5, Tiesto and Chuckie. Both the UK and US store were also given the music videos of those three tracks in the release. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | false | [
"The Guess Who are a Canadian rock band, originating as Chad Allan and the Reflections in 1962, and adopting the name The Guess Who in 1965. They were most successful from 1968 to 1975, under the leadership of singer/keyboardist Burton Cummings. During that period they released eleven studio albums, all of which reached the charts in Canada and the United States; their 1970 album American Woman reached no. 1 in Canada and no. 9 in the United States, and five other albums reached the top ten in Canada. They also achieved five number one singles in Canada and two in the United States.\n\nThe band experienced many lineup changes. During the 1968-1975 classic era, Cummings and drummer Garry Peterson were the only consistent members; they were joined by five guitarists and two bassists during those years. Cummings ended the band in 1975 and embarked on a solo career. In the following decades, Cummings and original guitarist Randy Bachman led several one-time reunion shows or short commemorative tours with various former members.\n\nSimultaneously, original bassist Jim Kale led semi-continuous lineups on nostalgia tours with a frequently changing cast of lesser-known sidemen. On some occasions Kale departed temporarily and various entities named The Guess Who performed with no original members. Peterson appeared in both sequences of reunion tours. Kale retired in 2016, and Peterson (the final remaining original member) continues to lead a lineup of The Guess Who to the present day.\n\nThis list article does not include musicians who filled in temporarily for official members.\n\nTimelines\n\nEarly and classic era timeline\n\nTimeline of reunions and nostalgia tours\n\nLineups\n\nPre-Guess Who\n\nThe Guess Who (classic era)\n\nBachman/Cummings-led reunions\n\nKale-led and other reunions\n\nReferences\n\nThe Guess Who members",
"The 2013 Big East Conference men's soccer season is the inaugural season for the newly formed offshoot of the original Big East Conference. The \"new\" Big East consists of the seven members of the original Big East that did not sponsor Division I FBS football (the so-called \"Catholic 7\"), plus invited founding members Butler, Creighton, and Xavier. The FBS schools sold the \"Big East\" name to the \"Catholic 7\" and are operating as the American Athletic Conference under the original Big East charter. Including the history of the original Big East, this will be the 18th season of men's soccer under the \"Big East\" name.\n\nThe defending champions are the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, who moved to the Atlantic Coast Conference.\n\nChanges from 2012 \n\n Butler, Creighton and Xavier were invited by the \"Catholic 7\" to become founding members of the new Big East. \n The FBS schools from the original Big East, along with several new members, are operating as the American Athletic Conference.\n\nSeason outlook\n\nTeams\n\nStadia and locations\n\nStandings\n\nTournament\n\nResults\n\nStatistics\n\nReferences \n\n \n2013 NCAA Division I men's soccer season",
"Shameless Self-Promotion Is the Sloppy Meateaters' first studio album. The album contained the two original members of the band Josh Chambers (Sloppy Josh) and drummer Kevin Highfield (Sloppy Kevin). Although only two members of the band were recorded on the album the cover of the re-released album contained Travis Gerke who joined the band after the original release.\n\nTrack listing \n Another Friend\n Home\n I Sing Like a Girl\n Explore the Obvious\n A Dumb Guy in a Stupid Band\n Mom\n My Secret Killer\n Outta Control\n What Did We Learn Today?\n Nobody Likes Me\n Hang On to Me\n Shonka Tonk\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n on Amazon.com\n\n1999 debut albums\nSloppy Meateaters albums"
] |
|
[
"Stereolab",
"Lyrics and titles"
] | C_c332cd3357ba46e388acc757c1c5ab18_0 | what was special about the lyrics? | 1 | what was special about the Stereolab lyrics? | Stereolab | Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as noted by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon.com interview. Stewart Mason commented in an AllMusic review that the lyrics from the 1997 song "Miss Modular" "sound influenced by the Situationist theory of the 'spectacle'." Critics have noted Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". "Ping Pong", a 1994 single included on the album Mars Audiac Quintet, was noted for its alleged Marxist lyrics. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Simon Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively). Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis. Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde political groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", "Brakhage", the title of the first song on the 1997 album Dots and Loops, is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched on Bach, and the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", named after experimental composer John Cage. CANNOTANSWER | Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. | Stereolab are an Anglo-French avant-pop band formed in London in 1990. Led by the songwriting team of Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier, the group's music combines influences from krautrock, lounge and 1960s pop music, often incorporating a repetitive motorik beat with heavy use of vintage electronic keyboards and female vocals sung in English and French. Their lyrics have political and philosophical themes influenced by the Surrealist and Situationist movements. On stage, they play in a more feedback-driven and guitar-oriented style. The band also draw from funk, jazz and Brazilian music, and were one of the first artists to be dubbed "post-rock". They are regarded among the most innovative and influential groups of the 1990s.
Stereolab were formed by Gane (guitar and keyboards) and Sadier (vocals, keyboards and guitar) after the break-up of McCarthy. The two were romantically involved for fourteen years and are the group's only consistent members. Other longtime members include 1992 addition Mary Hansen (backing vocals, keyboards and guitar), who died in 2002, and 1993 addition Andy Ramsay (drums). The High Llamas' leader Sean O'Hagan (guitar and keyboards) was a member from 1993 to 1994 and continued appearing on later records for occasional guest appearances.
Although Stereolab found success in the underground music scene and were influential enough to spark a renewed interest in older analogue instruments, they have never had a significant commercial impact. The band were released from their recording contract with Elektra Records due to poor record sales, and their self-owned label Duophonic signed a distribution deal with Too Pure and later Warp Records. After a ten-year hiatus, the band reunited for live performances in 2019.
History
1990–1993: Formation
In 1985, Tim Gane formed McCarthy, a band from Essex, England, known for their left-wing politics. Gane met Lætitia Sadier, born in France, at a 1988 McCarthy concert in Paris and the two quickly fell in love. The musically-inclined Sadier was disillusioned with the rock scene in France and soon moved to London to be with Gane and pursue her career. In 1990, after three albums, McCarthy broke up and Gane immediately formed Stereolab with Sadier (who had also contributed vocals to McCarthy's final album), ex-Chills bassist Martin Kean and Gina Morris on backing vocals. Stereolab's name was taken from a division of Vanguard Records demonstrating hi-fi effects.
Gane and Sadier, along with future band manager Martin Pike, set up a record label called Duophonic Super 45s which, along with later offshoot Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, would become commonly known as "Duophonic". Gane said that their "original plan" was to distribute multiple 7 and 10-inch records "–to just do one a month and keep doing them in small editions". The 10 inch vinyl EP Super 45, released in May 1991, was the first release for both Stereolab and the label, and was sold through mail order and through the Rough Trade Shop in London. Super 45s band-designed album art and packaging was the first of many customised and limited-edition Duophonic records. In a 1996 interview in The Wire, Gane calls the "do-it-yourself" aesthetic behind Duophonic "empowering", and said that by releasing one's own music "you learn; it creates more music, more ideas".
Stereolab released the EP, Super-Electric in September 1991, and a single, titled Stunning Debut Album, followed in November 1991 (which was neither debut nor album). The early material was rock and guitar-oriented; of Super-Electric, Jason Ankeny wrote in AllMusic that "Droning guitars, skeletal rhythms, and pop hooks—not vintage synths and pointillist melodies—were their calling cards ..." Under the independent label Too Pure, the group's first full-length album, Peng! was released in May 1992. A compilation titled, Switched On, was released in October 1992 and would be part of a series of compilations that anthologise the band's more obscure material.
Around this time, the line-up consisted of Gane and Sadier plus vocalist and guitarist Mary Hansen, drummer Andy Ramsay, bassist Duncan Brown, and keyboardist Katharine Gifford. Hansen, born in Australia, had been in touch with Gane since his McCarthy days. After joining, she and Sadier developed a style of vocal counterpoint that distinguished Stereolab's sound. Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas joined as a quick replacement for their touring keyboardist, but was invited for their next record and "was allowed to make suggestions".
1993–2001: Critical recognition
Stereolab introduced easy-listening elements into their sound with the EP Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, released in March 1993. The work raised the band's profile and landed them a major-label American record deal with Elektra Records. Their first album under Elektra, Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (August 1993), was an underground success in both the US and the UK. Mark Jenkins commented in Washington Post that with the album, Stereolab "continues the glorious drones of [their] indie work, giving celestial sweep to [their] garage-rock organ pumping and rhythm-guitar strumming". In the UK, the album was released on Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, which is responsible for domestic releases of Stereolab's major albums.
In January 1994, Stereolab achieved their first chart entry when the 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline, entered at number 75 on the UK Singles Chart. (Over the next three years, four more releases by the band would appear on this chart, ending with the EP Miss Modular in 1997.) Their third album, Mars Audiac Quintet, was released in August 1994. The album contains the single "Ping Pong", which gained press coverage for its explicitly Marxist lyrics. The band focused more on pop and less on rock, resulting in what AllMusic described as "what may be the group's most accessible, tightly-written album". It was the last album to feature O'Hagan as a full-time member. He would continue to make guest appearances on later releases. The group issued an EP titled Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center in April 1995. The EP was their musical contribution to an interactive art exhibit put on in collaboration with New York City artist Charles Long. Their second compilation of rarities, titled Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2), was released in July 1995.
The band's fourth album, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (March 1996), was a critical success and was played heavily on college radio. A record that "captivated alternative rock", it represented the group's "high-water mark" said music journalists Tom Moon and Joshua Klein, respectively. The album incorporated their early krautrock sound with funk, hip-hop influences and experimental instrumental arrangements. John McEntire of Tortoise also assisted with production and played on the album. Katharine Gifford was replaced by Morgane Lhote before recording, and bassist Duncan Brown by Richard Harrison after. Lhote was required to both learn the keyboards and 30 of the group's songs before joining.
Released in September 1997, Dots and Loops was their first album to enter the Billboard 200 charts, peaking at number 111. The album leaned towards jazz with bossa nova and 60's pop influences. Barney Hoskyns wrote in Rolling Stone that with it the group moved "ever further away from the one-chord Velvets drone-mesh of its early days" toward easy-listening and Europop. A review in German newspaper Die Zeit stated that in Dots and Loops, Stereolab transformed the harder Velvet Underground-like riffs of previous releases into "softer sounds and noisy playfulness". Contributors to the album included John McEntire and Jan St. Werner of German electropop duo Mouse on Mars. Stereolab toured for seven months and took a break when Gane and Sadier had a child. The group's third compilation of rarities, Aluminum Tunes, was issued in October 1998.
Their sixth album, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, was released in September 1999. It was co-produced by McEntire and American producer Jim O'Rourke, and was recorded with their new bassist, Simon Johns. The album received mixed reviews for its lighter sound, and peaked at number 154 on the Billboard 200. An unsigned NME review said that "this record has far more in common with bad jazz and progressive rock than any experimental art-rock tradition." In a 1999 article of Washington Post, Mark Jenkins asked Gane about the album's apparent lack of guitars; Gane responded, "There's a lot less upfront, distorted guitar ... But it's still quite guitar-based music. Every single track has a guitar on it."
Stereolab's seventh album, Sound-Dust (August 2001), rose to number 178 on the Billboard 200. The album also featured producers McEntire and O'Rourke. Sound-Dust was more warmly received than Cobra and Phases Group…. Critic Joshua Klein said that "the emphasis this time sounds less on unfocused experimentation and more on melody ... a breezy and welcome return to form for the British band." Erlewine of Allmusic stated that the album "[finds the group] deliberately recharging their creative juices" but he argued that Sound-Dust was "anchored in overly familiar territory."
2002–2008: Death of Hansen and later releases
In 2002, as they were planning their next album, Stereolab started building a studio north of Bordeaux, France. ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions; a compilation of BBC Radio 1 sessions was released in October. In the same year, Gane and Sadier's romantic relationship ended.
On 9 December 2002, Hansen was killed when hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. She was 36. Writer Pierre Perrone said that her "playful nature and mischievous sense of humour came through in the way she approached the backing vocals she contributed to Stereolab and the distinctive harmonies she created with Sadier." For the next few months, Stereolab lay dormant as the members grieved. They eventually decided to continue. Future album and concert reviews would mention the effects of Hansen's absence.
The EP Instant 0 in the Universe (October 2003) was recorded in France, and was Stereolab's first release following Hansen's death. Music journalist Jim DeRogatis said that the EP marked a return to their earlier, harder sound—"free from the pseudo-funk moves and avant-garde tinkering that had been inspired by Chicago producer Jim O'Rourke".
Stereolab's eighth album, Margerine Eclipse, was released on 27 January 2004 with generally positive reviews, and peaked at number 174 on the US Billboard 200. The track "Feel and Triple" was written in tribute to Hansen; Sadier said, "I was reflecting on my years with her ... reflecting on how we sometimes found it hard to express the love we had for one another." Sadier continued, "Our dedication to her on the album says, 'We will love you till the end', meaning of our lives. I'm not religious, but I feel Mary's energy is still around somewhere. It didn't just disappear." The Observers Molloy Woodcraft gave the album four out of five stars, and commented that Sadier's vocal performance as "life- and love-affirming", and the record as a whole as "Complex and catchy, bold and beatific." Kelefa Sanneh commented in Rolling Stone that Margerine Eclipse was "full of familiar noises and aimless melodies". Margerine Eclipse was Stereolab's last record to be released on American label Elektra Records, which shut down that same year. Future material would be released on Too Pure, the same label which had released some of the band's earliest material.
The group released six limited-edition singles in 2005 and 2006, which were anthologised in the 2006 compilation Fab Four Suture, and contained material which Mark Jenkins thought continued the brisker sound of the band's post-Hansen work. By June 2007, Stereolab's line-up comprised Tim Gane, Lætitia Sadier, Andy Ramsay, Simon Johns, Dominic Jeffrey, Joseph Watson, and Joseph Walters. In 2008, the band issued their next album under the label 4AD titled, Chemical Chords, which "[downplays] their arsenal of analog synths in favor of live instrumentation". The release was followed by an autumn tour in Europe, the United States and Canada.
In February 2009, they toured Australia as part of the St Jerome's Laneway Festival.
2009–2019: Hiatus and reunion
In April 2009, Stereolab manager Martin Pike announced a pause in their activities for the time being. He said that it was an opportune time for the members to move on to other projects. Not Music, a collection of unreleased material recorded at the same time as Chemical Chords, was released in 2010. In 2013, Gane and Sadier, who both focused on Cavern of Anti-Matter and solo work respectively, performed at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival held at Pontins in Camber Sands.
In February 2019, the group announced a tour of Europe and the United States to coincide with expanded, remastered reissues of several of the albums released under Warp Records. Stereolab were part of the lineup for 2019's Primavera Sound festival, taking part on the weekend of 30 May in Barcelona, Spain, and the following weekend in Porto, Portugal. It was the group's first live performance since 2009.
Musical style
Stereolab's music combines a droning rock sound with lounge instrumentals, overlaid with sing-song female vocals and pop melodies, and have also made use of unorthodox time signatures. It has been generally described as avant-pop, indie pop, art pop, indie electronic, indie rock, post-rock, experimental rock, and experimental pop. Sadier remarked in 2015 that "[the band's] records were written and recorded very quickly… we would write 35 tracks, sometimes more".
The band have played on vintage electronic keyboards and synthesizers from brands such as Farfisa and Vox and Moog. Gane has praised the instruments for their versatility: "We use the older effects because they're more direct, more extreme, and they're more like plasticine: you can shape them into loads of things." The 1994 album Mars Audiac Quintet prominently features Moog synthesizers.
Lætitia Sadier's English and French vocals was a part of Stereolab's music since the beginning, and she would occasionally sing wordlessly along with the music. In reference to her laid-back delivery, Peter Shapiro wrote facetiously in Wire that Sadier "display[ed] all the emotional histrionics of Nico", while some critics have commented that her vocals were unintelligible.Shea (2002), pp.53,54 Sadier would often trade vocals with Mary Hansen back-and-forth in a sing-song manner that has been described as "eerie" and "hypnotic", as well as "sweet [and] slightly alien". After Hansen's death in 2002, critic Jim Harrington commented that her absence is noticeable on live performances of Stereolab's older tracks, and that their newer songs could have benefited from Hansen's backing vocals.
In interviews, Gane and Sadier have discussed their musical philosophy. Gane said that "to be unique was more important than to be good." On the subject of being too obscure, he said in a 1996 interview that "maybe the area where we're on dodgy ground, is this idea that you need great knowledge [of] esoteric music to understand what we're doing." Sadier responded to Gane, saying that she "think[s] we have achieved a music that will make sense to a lot of people whether they know about Steve Reich or not." The duo were up-front about their desire to grow their sound: for Gane, "otherwise it just sounds like what other people are doing", and for Sadier, "you trust that there is more and that it can be done more interesting."
Influences
Their records have been heavily influenced by the "motorik" technique of 1970s krautrock groups such as Neu! and Faust. Tim Gane has supported the comparison: "Neu! did minimalism and drones, but in a very pop way." Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that their music also had "echoes of bubblegum, of exotica, of Beach Boys and bossa nova", with their earlier work "bearing strong Velvet Underground overtones". Funk, jazz, and Brazilian music were additional inspirations for the band. Stephan Davet of French newspaper Le Monde said that Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996) had musical influences such as Burt Bacharach, and Françoise Hardy. The sounds influenced by minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich can be found on the 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night. Stereolab's style also incorporates easy-listening music of the 1950s and '60s. Joshua Klein in Washington Post said that, "Years before everyone else caught on, Stereolab [were] referencing the 1970s German bands Can and Neu!, the Mexican lounge music master Esquivel and the decidedly unhip Burt Bacharach." Regarding their later work such as Instant 0 in the Universe (2003) and Margerine Eclipse (2004), critics have compared the releases to the band's earlier guitar-driven style.
Live performances
Stereolab toured regularly to support their album releases. In a 1996 Washington Post gig review, Mark Jenkins wrote that Stereolab started out favouring an "easy-listening syncopation", but eventually reverted to a "messier, more urgent sound" characteristic of their earlier performances. In another review Jenkins said that the band's live songs "frequently veer[ed] into more cacophonous, guitar-dominated territory", in contrast to their albums such as Cobra and Phases Group… In the Minneapolis Star Tribune Jon Bream compared the band's live sound to feedback-driven rock bands like the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. Jim Harrington of The Oakland Tribune argued that "Sadier often sounded like a third percussion instrument more than a lead vocalist", further stating in regard to her switching between singing in English and French that "a Stereolab show is one of the few concerts where it's hard to find even the biggest fans mouthing along with the lyrics." Regarding being onstage, Gane has said that "I don't like to be the center of attention ... I just get into the music and am not really aware of the people there. That's my way of getting through it." Remarking of the band's 2019 reunion tour, he added that "[Stereolab] never were really a festival band… We’re not like, 'Hey, how you all doing?' and all that stuff.”
Lyrics and titles
Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that the group "[uses] lyrics to convey ideas while using them for the pleasurable way the words sound." Lætitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, was influenced by both the Situationist philosophy Society of the Spectacle by Marxist theorist Guy Debord, and her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist, as well as other Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as stated by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon interview.
Critics have seen Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". The 1994 single "Ping Pong" has been put forward as evidence in regard to these alleged views. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively).
Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis.
Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group… contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", The title of the song "Brakhage" from Dots and Loops (1997), is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched-On Bach, and the 1993 song "Jenny Ondioline", a portmanteau of inventor Georges Jenny and his instrument the Ondioline.
Legacy
Stereolab have been called one of the most "influential" and "fiercely independent and original groups of the Nineties" by writers Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Pierre Perrone respectively; as well as one of "the decade's most innovative British bands." by Mark Jenkins. Simon Reynolds commented in Rolling Stone that the group's earlier records form "an endlessly seductive body of work that sounds always the same, always different." In a review for the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", Jason Ankeny said that "No other artist of its generation fused the high-minded daring of the avant-garde and the lowbrow infectiousness of pop with as much invention, skill, and appeal." In The Wire, Peter Shapiro compared the band to Britpop bands Oasis and Blur, and defended their music against the charge that it is "nothing but the sum total of its arcane reference points." They were one of the first groups to be termed post-rock—in a 1996 article, journalist Angela Lewis applied the "new term" to Stereolab and three other bands who have connections to the group. Stylistically, music journalist J. D. Considine credits the band for anticipating and driving the late 1990s revival of vintage analogue instruments among indie rock bands. Stephen Christian, a creative director of Warp Records, said that the group "exists in the gap between the experimentation of the underground and the appeal of the wider world of pop music".
The group have also received negative press. Barney Hoskyns questioned the longevity of their music in a 1996 Mojo review, saying that their records "sound more like arid experiments than music born of emotional need." In Guardian, Dave Simpson stated: "With their borrowings from early, obscure Kraftwerk and hip obtuse sources, [Stereolab] sound like a band of rock critics rather than musicians." Lætitia Sadier's vocals were cited by author Stuart Shea as often being "indecipherable".
A variety of artists, musical and otherwise, have collaborated with Stereolab. In 1995 the group teamed up with sculptor Charles Long for an interactive art show in New York City, for which Long provided the exhibits and Stereolab the music. They have released tracks by and toured with post-rock band Tortoise, while John McEntire of Tortoise has in turn worked on several Stereolab albums. In the 1990s, the group collaborated with the industrial band Nurse With Wound and released two albums together, Crumb Duck (1993) and Simple Headphone Mind (1998), and Stereolab also released "Calimero" (1998) with French avant-garde singer and poet Brigitte Fontaine. The band worked with Herbie Mann on the song "One Note Samba/Surfboard" for the 1998 AIDS-Benefit album, Red Hot + Rio, produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Stereolab alumni have also founded bands of their own. Guitarist Tim Gane founded the side project Cavern of Anti-Matter and also formed Turn on alongside band member Sean O'Hagan, who formed his own band the High Llamas. Katharine Gifford formed Snowpony with former My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe. Sadier has released three albums with her four-piece side-project Monade, whose sound Mark Jenkins called a "little more Parisian" than Stereolab's. Backing vocalist Mary Hansen formed a band named Schema with members of Hovercraft and released their eponymous EP in 2000.
As of August 1999, US album sales stood at 300,000 copies sold. Despite receiving critical acclaim and a sizeable fanbase, commercial success eluded the group. Early in their career, their 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline entered the UK Singles Chart, but financial issues prevented the band from printing enough records to satisfy demand. According to Sadier, however, the band "[avoided] going overground" like PJ Harvey, Pulp and the Cranberries, all of whom quickly rose from obscurity to fame, adding: "This kind of notoriety is not a particularly good thing, [and] you don't enjoy it anymore." When Elektra Records was closed down by Warner Bros. Records in 2004, Stereolab was dropped along with many other artists, reportedly because of poor sales. Tim Gane said in retrospect that the group "signed to Elektra because we thought we would be on there for an album or two and then we'd get ejected. We were surprised when we got to our first album!" Since then, Stereolab's self-owned label Duophonic has inked a worldwide distribution deal with independent label Too Pure. Through Duophonic, the band both licenses their music and releases it directly (depending on geographic market). Gane said, "... we license our recordings and just give them to people, then we don't have to ask for permission if we want to use it. We just want to be in control of our own music."
MembersCurrent membersTim Gane - guitar, keyboards
Lætitia Sadier - lead vocals, keyboards, guitar, percussion, trombone
Andy Ramsay - drums
Joseph Watson - keyboards, vibraphone, backing vocals
Xavier Muñoz Guimera - bass guitar, backing vocals Former membersJoe Dilworth - drums
Martin Kean - bass guitar
Gina Morris - backing vocals
Mick Conroy - keyboards
Mary Hansen - vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion
Sean O'Hagan - keyboards, guitar
Duncan Brown - bass guitar
Katharine Gifford - keyboards
Morgane Lhote - keyboards
David Pajo - bass guitar
Richard Harrison - bass guitar
Simon Johns - bass guitar
Dominic Jeffery - keyboards
Joseph Walters - french horn, guitar, keyboards
Julien Gasc - keyboards, backing vocals TimelineDiscography
Stereolab released many non-LP tracks that they later anthologised as compilation albums.Studio albums Peng! (1992)
Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993)
Mars Audiac Quintet (1994)
Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996)
Dots and Loops (1997)
Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night (1999)
Sound-Dust (2001)
Margerine Eclipse (2004)
Chemical Chords (2008)
Not Music (2010)Compilation albums'''
Switched On (1992)
Refried Ectoplasm: Switched On, Vol. 2 (1995)
Aluminum Tunes: Switched On, Vol. 3 (1998)
ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions (2002)
Oscillons from the Anti-Sun (2005)
Fab Four Suture (2006)
Serene Velocity: A Stereolab Anthology (2006)
Electrically Possessed: Switched On, Vol. 4'' (2021)
References
Book sources
Chart data
External links
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups disestablished in 2009
Musical groups reestablished in 2019
English indie rock groups
English post-rock groups
Flying Nun Records artists
Drag City (record label) artists
4AD artists
British indie pop groups
English experimental rock groups
Art pop musicians
Experimental pop musicians
Avant-pop musicians
Slumberland Records artists | true | [
"Now That's What I Call Christmas! 4 is a 2010 double album from the Now That's What I Call Music! series in the United States. It was released on October 12, 2010, and peaked at No. 28 on the Billboard 200. The album has sold 440,000 copies as of January 2013.\n\nTrack list\n\nDisc one\n\nDisc two\n\nSpecial Caroling Edition \nOn September 27, 2011, Now That's What I Call Christmas! 4: Special Caroling Edition was released, with this version coming with printed lyrics to the songs.\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official U.S. Now That's What I Call Music website\n\nChristmas compilation albums\n2010 compilation albums\n2010 Christmas albums\nChristmas 04\nPop Christmas albums",
"\"No Matter What\" is a song recorded by British singer-songwriter Calum Scott for the special edition of his debut studio album, Only Human. It was released on 19 October 2018 as the album's fifth overall single and the first single from the special edition.\n\nBackground\nScott describes \"No Matter What\" as his \"most personal song\" and the song he is \"most proud of\". The song tells the story of Scott telling his parents he was gay and their reactions of loving him \"no matter what\". Scott said \"It was a song that I always had to write, and a song I never thought I'd be able to share. This song has so much bones behind it and has such a wider discussion, not only about sexuality but about acceptance.\" adding \"This hopefully will be a movement. I want to help people, I want to inspire people, I want to make people more compassionate.\"\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was released on 8 November 2018 on Scott's YouTube channel via Vevo. It was directed by Ozzie Pullin.\n\nCritical reception\nKatrina Rees from CelebMix called the song \"a stunning piano ballad\" with lyrics that are \"raw and extremely personal\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n2018 songs\n2018 singles\nCalum Scott songs\nCapitol Records singles\nLGBT-related songs\nSongs written by Toby Gad\nSongs written by Calum Scott"
] |
[
"Stereolab",
"Lyrics and titles",
"what was special about the lyrics?",
"Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged."
] | C_c332cd3357ba46e388acc757c1c5ab18_0 | how so? | 2 | How is Stereolab's music politically and philosophically charged? | Stereolab | Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as noted by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon.com interview. Stewart Mason commented in an AllMusic review that the lyrics from the 1997 song "Miss Modular" "sound influenced by the Situationist theory of the 'spectacle'." Critics have noted Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". "Ping Pong", a 1994 single included on the album Mars Audiac Quintet, was noted for its alleged Marxist lyrics. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Simon Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively). Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis. Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde political groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", "Brakhage", the title of the first song on the 1997 album Dots and Loops, is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched on Bach, and the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", named after experimental composer John Cage. CANNOTANSWER | Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War. | Stereolab are an Anglo-French avant-pop band formed in London in 1990. Led by the songwriting team of Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier, the group's music combines influences from krautrock, lounge and 1960s pop music, often incorporating a repetitive motorik beat with heavy use of vintage electronic keyboards and female vocals sung in English and French. Their lyrics have political and philosophical themes influenced by the Surrealist and Situationist movements. On stage, they play in a more feedback-driven and guitar-oriented style. The band also draw from funk, jazz and Brazilian music, and were one of the first artists to be dubbed "post-rock". They are regarded among the most innovative and influential groups of the 1990s.
Stereolab were formed by Gane (guitar and keyboards) and Sadier (vocals, keyboards and guitar) after the break-up of McCarthy. The two were romantically involved for fourteen years and are the group's only consistent members. Other longtime members include 1992 addition Mary Hansen (backing vocals, keyboards and guitar), who died in 2002, and 1993 addition Andy Ramsay (drums). The High Llamas' leader Sean O'Hagan (guitar and keyboards) was a member from 1993 to 1994 and continued appearing on later records for occasional guest appearances.
Although Stereolab found success in the underground music scene and were influential enough to spark a renewed interest in older analogue instruments, they have never had a significant commercial impact. The band were released from their recording contract with Elektra Records due to poor record sales, and their self-owned label Duophonic signed a distribution deal with Too Pure and later Warp Records. After a ten-year hiatus, the band reunited for live performances in 2019.
History
1990–1993: Formation
In 1985, Tim Gane formed McCarthy, a band from Essex, England, known for their left-wing politics. Gane met Lætitia Sadier, born in France, at a 1988 McCarthy concert in Paris and the two quickly fell in love. The musically-inclined Sadier was disillusioned with the rock scene in France and soon moved to London to be with Gane and pursue her career. In 1990, after three albums, McCarthy broke up and Gane immediately formed Stereolab with Sadier (who had also contributed vocals to McCarthy's final album), ex-Chills bassist Martin Kean and Gina Morris on backing vocals. Stereolab's name was taken from a division of Vanguard Records demonstrating hi-fi effects.
Gane and Sadier, along with future band manager Martin Pike, set up a record label called Duophonic Super 45s which, along with later offshoot Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, would become commonly known as "Duophonic". Gane said that their "original plan" was to distribute multiple 7 and 10-inch records "–to just do one a month and keep doing them in small editions". The 10 inch vinyl EP Super 45, released in May 1991, was the first release for both Stereolab and the label, and was sold through mail order and through the Rough Trade Shop in London. Super 45s band-designed album art and packaging was the first of many customised and limited-edition Duophonic records. In a 1996 interview in The Wire, Gane calls the "do-it-yourself" aesthetic behind Duophonic "empowering", and said that by releasing one's own music "you learn; it creates more music, more ideas".
Stereolab released the EP, Super-Electric in September 1991, and a single, titled Stunning Debut Album, followed in November 1991 (which was neither debut nor album). The early material was rock and guitar-oriented; of Super-Electric, Jason Ankeny wrote in AllMusic that "Droning guitars, skeletal rhythms, and pop hooks—not vintage synths and pointillist melodies—were their calling cards ..." Under the independent label Too Pure, the group's first full-length album, Peng! was released in May 1992. A compilation titled, Switched On, was released in October 1992 and would be part of a series of compilations that anthologise the band's more obscure material.
Around this time, the line-up consisted of Gane and Sadier plus vocalist and guitarist Mary Hansen, drummer Andy Ramsay, bassist Duncan Brown, and keyboardist Katharine Gifford. Hansen, born in Australia, had been in touch with Gane since his McCarthy days. After joining, she and Sadier developed a style of vocal counterpoint that distinguished Stereolab's sound. Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas joined as a quick replacement for their touring keyboardist, but was invited for their next record and "was allowed to make suggestions".
1993–2001: Critical recognition
Stereolab introduced easy-listening elements into their sound with the EP Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, released in March 1993. The work raised the band's profile and landed them a major-label American record deal with Elektra Records. Their first album under Elektra, Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (August 1993), was an underground success in both the US and the UK. Mark Jenkins commented in Washington Post that with the album, Stereolab "continues the glorious drones of [their] indie work, giving celestial sweep to [their] garage-rock organ pumping and rhythm-guitar strumming". In the UK, the album was released on Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, which is responsible for domestic releases of Stereolab's major albums.
In January 1994, Stereolab achieved their first chart entry when the 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline, entered at number 75 on the UK Singles Chart. (Over the next three years, four more releases by the band would appear on this chart, ending with the EP Miss Modular in 1997.) Their third album, Mars Audiac Quintet, was released in August 1994. The album contains the single "Ping Pong", which gained press coverage for its explicitly Marxist lyrics. The band focused more on pop and less on rock, resulting in what AllMusic described as "what may be the group's most accessible, tightly-written album". It was the last album to feature O'Hagan as a full-time member. He would continue to make guest appearances on later releases. The group issued an EP titled Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center in April 1995. The EP was their musical contribution to an interactive art exhibit put on in collaboration with New York City artist Charles Long. Their second compilation of rarities, titled Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2), was released in July 1995.
The band's fourth album, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (March 1996), was a critical success and was played heavily on college radio. A record that "captivated alternative rock", it represented the group's "high-water mark" said music journalists Tom Moon and Joshua Klein, respectively. The album incorporated their early krautrock sound with funk, hip-hop influences and experimental instrumental arrangements. John McEntire of Tortoise also assisted with production and played on the album. Katharine Gifford was replaced by Morgane Lhote before recording, and bassist Duncan Brown by Richard Harrison after. Lhote was required to both learn the keyboards and 30 of the group's songs before joining.
Released in September 1997, Dots and Loops was their first album to enter the Billboard 200 charts, peaking at number 111. The album leaned towards jazz with bossa nova and 60's pop influences. Barney Hoskyns wrote in Rolling Stone that with it the group moved "ever further away from the one-chord Velvets drone-mesh of its early days" toward easy-listening and Europop. A review in German newspaper Die Zeit stated that in Dots and Loops, Stereolab transformed the harder Velvet Underground-like riffs of previous releases into "softer sounds and noisy playfulness". Contributors to the album included John McEntire and Jan St. Werner of German electropop duo Mouse on Mars. Stereolab toured for seven months and took a break when Gane and Sadier had a child. The group's third compilation of rarities, Aluminum Tunes, was issued in October 1998.
Their sixth album, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, was released in September 1999. It was co-produced by McEntire and American producer Jim O'Rourke, and was recorded with their new bassist, Simon Johns. The album received mixed reviews for its lighter sound, and peaked at number 154 on the Billboard 200. An unsigned NME review said that "this record has far more in common with bad jazz and progressive rock than any experimental art-rock tradition." In a 1999 article of Washington Post, Mark Jenkins asked Gane about the album's apparent lack of guitars; Gane responded, "There's a lot less upfront, distorted guitar ... But it's still quite guitar-based music. Every single track has a guitar on it."
Stereolab's seventh album, Sound-Dust (August 2001), rose to number 178 on the Billboard 200. The album also featured producers McEntire and O'Rourke. Sound-Dust was more warmly received than Cobra and Phases Group…. Critic Joshua Klein said that "the emphasis this time sounds less on unfocused experimentation and more on melody ... a breezy and welcome return to form for the British band." Erlewine of Allmusic stated that the album "[finds the group] deliberately recharging their creative juices" but he argued that Sound-Dust was "anchored in overly familiar territory."
2002–2008: Death of Hansen and later releases
In 2002, as they were planning their next album, Stereolab started building a studio north of Bordeaux, France. ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions; a compilation of BBC Radio 1 sessions was released in October. In the same year, Gane and Sadier's romantic relationship ended.
On 9 December 2002, Hansen was killed when hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. She was 36. Writer Pierre Perrone said that her "playful nature and mischievous sense of humour came through in the way she approached the backing vocals she contributed to Stereolab and the distinctive harmonies she created with Sadier." For the next few months, Stereolab lay dormant as the members grieved. They eventually decided to continue. Future album and concert reviews would mention the effects of Hansen's absence.
The EP Instant 0 in the Universe (October 2003) was recorded in France, and was Stereolab's first release following Hansen's death. Music journalist Jim DeRogatis said that the EP marked a return to their earlier, harder sound—"free from the pseudo-funk moves and avant-garde tinkering that had been inspired by Chicago producer Jim O'Rourke".
Stereolab's eighth album, Margerine Eclipse, was released on 27 January 2004 with generally positive reviews, and peaked at number 174 on the US Billboard 200. The track "Feel and Triple" was written in tribute to Hansen; Sadier said, "I was reflecting on my years with her ... reflecting on how we sometimes found it hard to express the love we had for one another." Sadier continued, "Our dedication to her on the album says, 'We will love you till the end', meaning of our lives. I'm not religious, but I feel Mary's energy is still around somewhere. It didn't just disappear." The Observers Molloy Woodcraft gave the album four out of five stars, and commented that Sadier's vocal performance as "life- and love-affirming", and the record as a whole as "Complex and catchy, bold and beatific." Kelefa Sanneh commented in Rolling Stone that Margerine Eclipse was "full of familiar noises and aimless melodies". Margerine Eclipse was Stereolab's last record to be released on American label Elektra Records, which shut down that same year. Future material would be released on Too Pure, the same label which had released some of the band's earliest material.
The group released six limited-edition singles in 2005 and 2006, which were anthologised in the 2006 compilation Fab Four Suture, and contained material which Mark Jenkins thought continued the brisker sound of the band's post-Hansen work. By June 2007, Stereolab's line-up comprised Tim Gane, Lætitia Sadier, Andy Ramsay, Simon Johns, Dominic Jeffrey, Joseph Watson, and Joseph Walters. In 2008, the band issued their next album under the label 4AD titled, Chemical Chords, which "[downplays] their arsenal of analog synths in favor of live instrumentation". The release was followed by an autumn tour in Europe, the United States and Canada.
In February 2009, they toured Australia as part of the St Jerome's Laneway Festival.
2009–2019: Hiatus and reunion
In April 2009, Stereolab manager Martin Pike announced a pause in their activities for the time being. He said that it was an opportune time for the members to move on to other projects. Not Music, a collection of unreleased material recorded at the same time as Chemical Chords, was released in 2010. In 2013, Gane and Sadier, who both focused on Cavern of Anti-Matter and solo work respectively, performed at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival held at Pontins in Camber Sands.
In February 2019, the group announced a tour of Europe and the United States to coincide with expanded, remastered reissues of several of the albums released under Warp Records. Stereolab were part of the lineup for 2019's Primavera Sound festival, taking part on the weekend of 30 May in Barcelona, Spain, and the following weekend in Porto, Portugal. It was the group's first live performance since 2009.
Musical style
Stereolab's music combines a droning rock sound with lounge instrumentals, overlaid with sing-song female vocals and pop melodies, and have also made use of unorthodox time signatures. It has been generally described as avant-pop, indie pop, art pop, indie electronic, indie rock, post-rock, experimental rock, and experimental pop. Sadier remarked in 2015 that "[the band's] records were written and recorded very quickly… we would write 35 tracks, sometimes more".
The band have played on vintage electronic keyboards and synthesizers from brands such as Farfisa and Vox and Moog. Gane has praised the instruments for their versatility: "We use the older effects because they're more direct, more extreme, and they're more like plasticine: you can shape them into loads of things." The 1994 album Mars Audiac Quintet prominently features Moog synthesizers.
Lætitia Sadier's English and French vocals was a part of Stereolab's music since the beginning, and she would occasionally sing wordlessly along with the music. In reference to her laid-back delivery, Peter Shapiro wrote facetiously in Wire that Sadier "display[ed] all the emotional histrionics of Nico", while some critics have commented that her vocals were unintelligible.Shea (2002), pp.53,54 Sadier would often trade vocals with Mary Hansen back-and-forth in a sing-song manner that has been described as "eerie" and "hypnotic", as well as "sweet [and] slightly alien". After Hansen's death in 2002, critic Jim Harrington commented that her absence is noticeable on live performances of Stereolab's older tracks, and that their newer songs could have benefited from Hansen's backing vocals.
In interviews, Gane and Sadier have discussed their musical philosophy. Gane said that "to be unique was more important than to be good." On the subject of being too obscure, he said in a 1996 interview that "maybe the area where we're on dodgy ground, is this idea that you need great knowledge [of] esoteric music to understand what we're doing." Sadier responded to Gane, saying that she "think[s] we have achieved a music that will make sense to a lot of people whether they know about Steve Reich or not." The duo were up-front about their desire to grow their sound: for Gane, "otherwise it just sounds like what other people are doing", and for Sadier, "you trust that there is more and that it can be done more interesting."
Influences
Their records have been heavily influenced by the "motorik" technique of 1970s krautrock groups such as Neu! and Faust. Tim Gane has supported the comparison: "Neu! did minimalism and drones, but in a very pop way." Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that their music also had "echoes of bubblegum, of exotica, of Beach Boys and bossa nova", with their earlier work "bearing strong Velvet Underground overtones". Funk, jazz, and Brazilian music were additional inspirations for the band. Stephan Davet of French newspaper Le Monde said that Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996) had musical influences such as Burt Bacharach, and Françoise Hardy. The sounds influenced by minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich can be found on the 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night. Stereolab's style also incorporates easy-listening music of the 1950s and '60s. Joshua Klein in Washington Post said that, "Years before everyone else caught on, Stereolab [were] referencing the 1970s German bands Can and Neu!, the Mexican lounge music master Esquivel and the decidedly unhip Burt Bacharach." Regarding their later work such as Instant 0 in the Universe (2003) and Margerine Eclipse (2004), critics have compared the releases to the band's earlier guitar-driven style.
Live performances
Stereolab toured regularly to support their album releases. In a 1996 Washington Post gig review, Mark Jenkins wrote that Stereolab started out favouring an "easy-listening syncopation", but eventually reverted to a "messier, more urgent sound" characteristic of their earlier performances. In another review Jenkins said that the band's live songs "frequently veer[ed] into more cacophonous, guitar-dominated territory", in contrast to their albums such as Cobra and Phases Group… In the Minneapolis Star Tribune Jon Bream compared the band's live sound to feedback-driven rock bands like the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. Jim Harrington of The Oakland Tribune argued that "Sadier often sounded like a third percussion instrument more than a lead vocalist", further stating in regard to her switching between singing in English and French that "a Stereolab show is one of the few concerts where it's hard to find even the biggest fans mouthing along with the lyrics." Regarding being onstage, Gane has said that "I don't like to be the center of attention ... I just get into the music and am not really aware of the people there. That's my way of getting through it." Remarking of the band's 2019 reunion tour, he added that "[Stereolab] never were really a festival band… We’re not like, 'Hey, how you all doing?' and all that stuff.”
Lyrics and titles
Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that the group "[uses] lyrics to convey ideas while using them for the pleasurable way the words sound." Lætitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, was influenced by both the Situationist philosophy Society of the Spectacle by Marxist theorist Guy Debord, and her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist, as well as other Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as stated by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon interview.
Critics have seen Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". The 1994 single "Ping Pong" has been put forward as evidence in regard to these alleged views. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively).
Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis.
Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group… contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", The title of the song "Brakhage" from Dots and Loops (1997), is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched-On Bach, and the 1993 song "Jenny Ondioline", a portmanteau of inventor Georges Jenny and his instrument the Ondioline.
Legacy
Stereolab have been called one of the most "influential" and "fiercely independent and original groups of the Nineties" by writers Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Pierre Perrone respectively; as well as one of "the decade's most innovative British bands." by Mark Jenkins. Simon Reynolds commented in Rolling Stone that the group's earlier records form "an endlessly seductive body of work that sounds always the same, always different." In a review for the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", Jason Ankeny said that "No other artist of its generation fused the high-minded daring of the avant-garde and the lowbrow infectiousness of pop with as much invention, skill, and appeal." In The Wire, Peter Shapiro compared the band to Britpop bands Oasis and Blur, and defended their music against the charge that it is "nothing but the sum total of its arcane reference points." They were one of the first groups to be termed post-rock—in a 1996 article, journalist Angela Lewis applied the "new term" to Stereolab and three other bands who have connections to the group. Stylistically, music journalist J. D. Considine credits the band for anticipating and driving the late 1990s revival of vintage analogue instruments among indie rock bands. Stephen Christian, a creative director of Warp Records, said that the group "exists in the gap between the experimentation of the underground and the appeal of the wider world of pop music".
The group have also received negative press. Barney Hoskyns questioned the longevity of their music in a 1996 Mojo review, saying that their records "sound more like arid experiments than music born of emotional need." In Guardian, Dave Simpson stated: "With their borrowings from early, obscure Kraftwerk and hip obtuse sources, [Stereolab] sound like a band of rock critics rather than musicians." Lætitia Sadier's vocals were cited by author Stuart Shea as often being "indecipherable".
A variety of artists, musical and otherwise, have collaborated with Stereolab. In 1995 the group teamed up with sculptor Charles Long for an interactive art show in New York City, for which Long provided the exhibits and Stereolab the music. They have released tracks by and toured with post-rock band Tortoise, while John McEntire of Tortoise has in turn worked on several Stereolab albums. In the 1990s, the group collaborated with the industrial band Nurse With Wound and released two albums together, Crumb Duck (1993) and Simple Headphone Mind (1998), and Stereolab also released "Calimero" (1998) with French avant-garde singer and poet Brigitte Fontaine. The band worked with Herbie Mann on the song "One Note Samba/Surfboard" for the 1998 AIDS-Benefit album, Red Hot + Rio, produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Stereolab alumni have also founded bands of their own. Guitarist Tim Gane founded the side project Cavern of Anti-Matter and also formed Turn on alongside band member Sean O'Hagan, who formed his own band the High Llamas. Katharine Gifford formed Snowpony with former My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe. Sadier has released three albums with her four-piece side-project Monade, whose sound Mark Jenkins called a "little more Parisian" than Stereolab's. Backing vocalist Mary Hansen formed a band named Schema with members of Hovercraft and released their eponymous EP in 2000.
As of August 1999, US album sales stood at 300,000 copies sold. Despite receiving critical acclaim and a sizeable fanbase, commercial success eluded the group. Early in their career, their 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline entered the UK Singles Chart, but financial issues prevented the band from printing enough records to satisfy demand. According to Sadier, however, the band "[avoided] going overground" like PJ Harvey, Pulp and the Cranberries, all of whom quickly rose from obscurity to fame, adding: "This kind of notoriety is not a particularly good thing, [and] you don't enjoy it anymore." When Elektra Records was closed down by Warner Bros. Records in 2004, Stereolab was dropped along with many other artists, reportedly because of poor sales. Tim Gane said in retrospect that the group "signed to Elektra because we thought we would be on there for an album or two and then we'd get ejected. We were surprised when we got to our first album!" Since then, Stereolab's self-owned label Duophonic has inked a worldwide distribution deal with independent label Too Pure. Through Duophonic, the band both licenses their music and releases it directly (depending on geographic market). Gane said, "... we license our recordings and just give them to people, then we don't have to ask for permission if we want to use it. We just want to be in control of our own music."
MembersCurrent membersTim Gane - guitar, keyboards
Lætitia Sadier - lead vocals, keyboards, guitar, percussion, trombone
Andy Ramsay - drums
Joseph Watson - keyboards, vibraphone, backing vocals
Xavier Muñoz Guimera - bass guitar, backing vocals Former membersJoe Dilworth - drums
Martin Kean - bass guitar
Gina Morris - backing vocals
Mick Conroy - keyboards
Mary Hansen - vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion
Sean O'Hagan - keyboards, guitar
Duncan Brown - bass guitar
Katharine Gifford - keyboards
Morgane Lhote - keyboards
David Pajo - bass guitar
Richard Harrison - bass guitar
Simon Johns - bass guitar
Dominic Jeffery - keyboards
Joseph Walters - french horn, guitar, keyboards
Julien Gasc - keyboards, backing vocals TimelineDiscography
Stereolab released many non-LP tracks that they later anthologised as compilation albums.Studio albums Peng! (1992)
Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993)
Mars Audiac Quintet (1994)
Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996)
Dots and Loops (1997)
Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night (1999)
Sound-Dust (2001)
Margerine Eclipse (2004)
Chemical Chords (2008)
Not Music (2010)Compilation albums'''
Switched On (1992)
Refried Ectoplasm: Switched On, Vol. 2 (1995)
Aluminum Tunes: Switched On, Vol. 3 (1998)
ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions (2002)
Oscillons from the Anti-Sun (2005)
Fab Four Suture (2006)
Serene Velocity: A Stereolab Anthology (2006)
Electrically Possessed: Switched On, Vol. 4'' (2021)
References
Book sources
Chart data
External links
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups disestablished in 2009
Musical groups reestablished in 2019
English indie rock groups
English post-rock groups
Flying Nun Records artists
Drag City (record label) artists
4AD artists
British indie pop groups
English experimental rock groups
Art pop musicians
Experimental pop musicians
Avant-pop musicians
Slumberland Records artists | false | [
"Adele Faber (born January 12, 1928) is an American author. She writes books about parenting and families and is an expert on communication between adults and children. She currently resides in Long Island, New York and is the parent of three children.\n\nBiography \nFaber graduated from the Queens College with a B.A. in theater and drama and earned her master's degree in education from New York University. She also taught in the New York City High schools for eight years. Having studied with the late child psychologist, Dr. Haim Ginott, Faber is also a former member of the faculty of The New School for Social Research in New York and The Family Life Institute of Long Island University.\n\nBibliography \nBooks that Adele Faber has authored/co-authored, many of them intended for parents struggling to take care of their children, include:\n How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk\n Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too\n How To Talk So Kids Can Learn\n How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk \n Liberated Parents, Liberated Children: Your Guide to a Happier Family \n How To Be The Parent You Always Wanted To Be \n Hercules: The Man, The Myth, The Hero \n In common cause \n Between Brothers and Sisters \n How to Talk So Kids Will Listen Book Summary \n Bobby and the Brockles Go to School \n Bobby and the Brockles \n How To Stop Your Children Fighting\n\nSee also \n\n Haim Ginott\n Elaine Mazlish\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n LONG ISLAND Q&A: ADELE FABER AND ELAINE MAZLISH;2 Writers Guide Parents in Communicating With Children\n Adele Faber as featured on Harper Collins Publishers\n\nLiving people\n1928 births\nWriters from New York City\nQueens College, City University of New York alumni\nNew York University alumni",
"How Dare You may refer to:\n How Dare You! (TV series), a UK children's TV series from 1984 to 1987\n How Dare You (speech), by Greta Thunberg at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit\n\nMusic\n How Dare You! (album), by 10cc\nHow Dare You? (Electric Six album), 2017\n \"How Dare You!\", a song by 10cc, a B-side of \"I'm Mandy Fly Me\"\n \"How Dare You\", So Cool (Sistar album)\n \"How Dare You\", a song by Whodini from Back in Black\n \"How Dare You\", a song by Lupe Fiasco from Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1"
] |
[
"Stereolab",
"Lyrics and titles",
"what was special about the lyrics?",
"Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged.",
"how so?",
"Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War."
] | C_c332cd3357ba46e388acc757c1c5ab18_0 | were there other influences in her lyrics? | 3 | Besides her anger towards the Iraq War, what were some of Laetitia Sadier's other influences in her lyrics? | Stereolab | Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as noted by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon.com interview. Stewart Mason commented in an AllMusic review that the lyrics from the 1997 song "Miss Modular" "sound influenced by the Situationist theory of the 'spectacle'." Critics have noted Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". "Ping Pong", a 1994 single included on the album Mars Audiac Quintet, was noted for its alleged Marxist lyrics. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Simon Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively). Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis. Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde political groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", "Brakhage", the title of the first song on the 1997 album Dots and Loops, is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched on Bach, and the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", named after experimental composer John Cage. CANNOTANSWER | The Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, | Stereolab are an Anglo-French avant-pop band formed in London in 1990. Led by the songwriting team of Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier, the group's music combines influences from krautrock, lounge and 1960s pop music, often incorporating a repetitive motorik beat with heavy use of vintage electronic keyboards and female vocals sung in English and French. Their lyrics have political and philosophical themes influenced by the Surrealist and Situationist movements. On stage, they play in a more feedback-driven and guitar-oriented style. The band also draw from funk, jazz and Brazilian music, and were one of the first artists to be dubbed "post-rock". They are regarded among the most innovative and influential groups of the 1990s.
Stereolab were formed by Gane (guitar and keyboards) and Sadier (vocals, keyboards and guitar) after the break-up of McCarthy. The two were romantically involved for fourteen years and are the group's only consistent members. Other longtime members include 1992 addition Mary Hansen (backing vocals, keyboards and guitar), who died in 2002, and 1993 addition Andy Ramsay (drums). The High Llamas' leader Sean O'Hagan (guitar and keyboards) was a member from 1993 to 1994 and continued appearing on later records for occasional guest appearances.
Although Stereolab found success in the underground music scene and were influential enough to spark a renewed interest in older analogue instruments, they have never had a significant commercial impact. The band were released from their recording contract with Elektra Records due to poor record sales, and their self-owned label Duophonic signed a distribution deal with Too Pure and later Warp Records. After a ten-year hiatus, the band reunited for live performances in 2019.
History
1990–1993: Formation
In 1985, Tim Gane formed McCarthy, a band from Essex, England, known for their left-wing politics. Gane met Lætitia Sadier, born in France, at a 1988 McCarthy concert in Paris and the two quickly fell in love. The musically-inclined Sadier was disillusioned with the rock scene in France and soon moved to London to be with Gane and pursue her career. In 1990, after three albums, McCarthy broke up and Gane immediately formed Stereolab with Sadier (who had also contributed vocals to McCarthy's final album), ex-Chills bassist Martin Kean and Gina Morris on backing vocals. Stereolab's name was taken from a division of Vanguard Records demonstrating hi-fi effects.
Gane and Sadier, along with future band manager Martin Pike, set up a record label called Duophonic Super 45s which, along with later offshoot Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, would become commonly known as "Duophonic". Gane said that their "original plan" was to distribute multiple 7 and 10-inch records "–to just do one a month and keep doing them in small editions". The 10 inch vinyl EP Super 45, released in May 1991, was the first release for both Stereolab and the label, and was sold through mail order and through the Rough Trade Shop in London. Super 45s band-designed album art and packaging was the first of many customised and limited-edition Duophonic records. In a 1996 interview in The Wire, Gane calls the "do-it-yourself" aesthetic behind Duophonic "empowering", and said that by releasing one's own music "you learn; it creates more music, more ideas".
Stereolab released the EP, Super-Electric in September 1991, and a single, titled Stunning Debut Album, followed in November 1991 (which was neither debut nor album). The early material was rock and guitar-oriented; of Super-Electric, Jason Ankeny wrote in AllMusic that "Droning guitars, skeletal rhythms, and pop hooks—not vintage synths and pointillist melodies—were their calling cards ..." Under the independent label Too Pure, the group's first full-length album, Peng! was released in May 1992. A compilation titled, Switched On, was released in October 1992 and would be part of a series of compilations that anthologise the band's more obscure material.
Around this time, the line-up consisted of Gane and Sadier plus vocalist and guitarist Mary Hansen, drummer Andy Ramsay, bassist Duncan Brown, and keyboardist Katharine Gifford. Hansen, born in Australia, had been in touch with Gane since his McCarthy days. After joining, she and Sadier developed a style of vocal counterpoint that distinguished Stereolab's sound. Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas joined as a quick replacement for their touring keyboardist, but was invited for their next record and "was allowed to make suggestions".
1993–2001: Critical recognition
Stereolab introduced easy-listening elements into their sound with the EP Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, released in March 1993. The work raised the band's profile and landed them a major-label American record deal with Elektra Records. Their first album under Elektra, Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (August 1993), was an underground success in both the US and the UK. Mark Jenkins commented in Washington Post that with the album, Stereolab "continues the glorious drones of [their] indie work, giving celestial sweep to [their] garage-rock organ pumping and rhythm-guitar strumming". In the UK, the album was released on Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, which is responsible for domestic releases of Stereolab's major albums.
In January 1994, Stereolab achieved their first chart entry when the 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline, entered at number 75 on the UK Singles Chart. (Over the next three years, four more releases by the band would appear on this chart, ending with the EP Miss Modular in 1997.) Their third album, Mars Audiac Quintet, was released in August 1994. The album contains the single "Ping Pong", which gained press coverage for its explicitly Marxist lyrics. The band focused more on pop and less on rock, resulting in what AllMusic described as "what may be the group's most accessible, tightly-written album". It was the last album to feature O'Hagan as a full-time member. He would continue to make guest appearances on later releases. The group issued an EP titled Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center in April 1995. The EP was their musical contribution to an interactive art exhibit put on in collaboration with New York City artist Charles Long. Their second compilation of rarities, titled Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2), was released in July 1995.
The band's fourth album, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (March 1996), was a critical success and was played heavily on college radio. A record that "captivated alternative rock", it represented the group's "high-water mark" said music journalists Tom Moon and Joshua Klein, respectively. The album incorporated their early krautrock sound with funk, hip-hop influences and experimental instrumental arrangements. John McEntire of Tortoise also assisted with production and played on the album. Katharine Gifford was replaced by Morgane Lhote before recording, and bassist Duncan Brown by Richard Harrison after. Lhote was required to both learn the keyboards and 30 of the group's songs before joining.
Released in September 1997, Dots and Loops was their first album to enter the Billboard 200 charts, peaking at number 111. The album leaned towards jazz with bossa nova and 60's pop influences. Barney Hoskyns wrote in Rolling Stone that with it the group moved "ever further away from the one-chord Velvets drone-mesh of its early days" toward easy-listening and Europop. A review in German newspaper Die Zeit stated that in Dots and Loops, Stereolab transformed the harder Velvet Underground-like riffs of previous releases into "softer sounds and noisy playfulness". Contributors to the album included John McEntire and Jan St. Werner of German electropop duo Mouse on Mars. Stereolab toured for seven months and took a break when Gane and Sadier had a child. The group's third compilation of rarities, Aluminum Tunes, was issued in October 1998.
Their sixth album, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, was released in September 1999. It was co-produced by McEntire and American producer Jim O'Rourke, and was recorded with their new bassist, Simon Johns. The album received mixed reviews for its lighter sound, and peaked at number 154 on the Billboard 200. An unsigned NME review said that "this record has far more in common with bad jazz and progressive rock than any experimental art-rock tradition." In a 1999 article of Washington Post, Mark Jenkins asked Gane about the album's apparent lack of guitars; Gane responded, "There's a lot less upfront, distorted guitar ... But it's still quite guitar-based music. Every single track has a guitar on it."
Stereolab's seventh album, Sound-Dust (August 2001), rose to number 178 on the Billboard 200. The album also featured producers McEntire and O'Rourke. Sound-Dust was more warmly received than Cobra and Phases Group…. Critic Joshua Klein said that "the emphasis this time sounds less on unfocused experimentation and more on melody ... a breezy and welcome return to form for the British band." Erlewine of Allmusic stated that the album "[finds the group] deliberately recharging their creative juices" but he argued that Sound-Dust was "anchored in overly familiar territory."
2002–2008: Death of Hansen and later releases
In 2002, as they were planning their next album, Stereolab started building a studio north of Bordeaux, France. ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions; a compilation of BBC Radio 1 sessions was released in October. In the same year, Gane and Sadier's romantic relationship ended.
On 9 December 2002, Hansen was killed when hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. She was 36. Writer Pierre Perrone said that her "playful nature and mischievous sense of humour came through in the way she approached the backing vocals she contributed to Stereolab and the distinctive harmonies she created with Sadier." For the next few months, Stereolab lay dormant as the members grieved. They eventually decided to continue. Future album and concert reviews would mention the effects of Hansen's absence.
The EP Instant 0 in the Universe (October 2003) was recorded in France, and was Stereolab's first release following Hansen's death. Music journalist Jim DeRogatis said that the EP marked a return to their earlier, harder sound—"free from the pseudo-funk moves and avant-garde tinkering that had been inspired by Chicago producer Jim O'Rourke".
Stereolab's eighth album, Margerine Eclipse, was released on 27 January 2004 with generally positive reviews, and peaked at number 174 on the US Billboard 200. The track "Feel and Triple" was written in tribute to Hansen; Sadier said, "I was reflecting on my years with her ... reflecting on how we sometimes found it hard to express the love we had for one another." Sadier continued, "Our dedication to her on the album says, 'We will love you till the end', meaning of our lives. I'm not religious, but I feel Mary's energy is still around somewhere. It didn't just disappear." The Observers Molloy Woodcraft gave the album four out of five stars, and commented that Sadier's vocal performance as "life- and love-affirming", and the record as a whole as "Complex and catchy, bold and beatific." Kelefa Sanneh commented in Rolling Stone that Margerine Eclipse was "full of familiar noises and aimless melodies". Margerine Eclipse was Stereolab's last record to be released on American label Elektra Records, which shut down that same year. Future material would be released on Too Pure, the same label which had released some of the band's earliest material.
The group released six limited-edition singles in 2005 and 2006, which were anthologised in the 2006 compilation Fab Four Suture, and contained material which Mark Jenkins thought continued the brisker sound of the band's post-Hansen work. By June 2007, Stereolab's line-up comprised Tim Gane, Lætitia Sadier, Andy Ramsay, Simon Johns, Dominic Jeffrey, Joseph Watson, and Joseph Walters. In 2008, the band issued their next album under the label 4AD titled, Chemical Chords, which "[downplays] their arsenal of analog synths in favor of live instrumentation". The release was followed by an autumn tour in Europe, the United States and Canada.
In February 2009, they toured Australia as part of the St Jerome's Laneway Festival.
2009–2019: Hiatus and reunion
In April 2009, Stereolab manager Martin Pike announced a pause in their activities for the time being. He said that it was an opportune time for the members to move on to other projects. Not Music, a collection of unreleased material recorded at the same time as Chemical Chords, was released in 2010. In 2013, Gane and Sadier, who both focused on Cavern of Anti-Matter and solo work respectively, performed at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival held at Pontins in Camber Sands.
In February 2019, the group announced a tour of Europe and the United States to coincide with expanded, remastered reissues of several of the albums released under Warp Records. Stereolab were part of the lineup for 2019's Primavera Sound festival, taking part on the weekend of 30 May in Barcelona, Spain, and the following weekend in Porto, Portugal. It was the group's first live performance since 2009.
Musical style
Stereolab's music combines a droning rock sound with lounge instrumentals, overlaid with sing-song female vocals and pop melodies, and have also made use of unorthodox time signatures. It has been generally described as avant-pop, indie pop, art pop, indie electronic, indie rock, post-rock, experimental rock, and experimental pop. Sadier remarked in 2015 that "[the band's] records were written and recorded very quickly… we would write 35 tracks, sometimes more".
The band have played on vintage electronic keyboards and synthesizers from brands such as Farfisa and Vox and Moog. Gane has praised the instruments for their versatility: "We use the older effects because they're more direct, more extreme, and they're more like plasticine: you can shape them into loads of things." The 1994 album Mars Audiac Quintet prominently features Moog synthesizers.
Lætitia Sadier's English and French vocals was a part of Stereolab's music since the beginning, and she would occasionally sing wordlessly along with the music. In reference to her laid-back delivery, Peter Shapiro wrote facetiously in Wire that Sadier "display[ed] all the emotional histrionics of Nico", while some critics have commented that her vocals were unintelligible.Shea (2002), pp.53,54 Sadier would often trade vocals with Mary Hansen back-and-forth in a sing-song manner that has been described as "eerie" and "hypnotic", as well as "sweet [and] slightly alien". After Hansen's death in 2002, critic Jim Harrington commented that her absence is noticeable on live performances of Stereolab's older tracks, and that their newer songs could have benefited from Hansen's backing vocals.
In interviews, Gane and Sadier have discussed their musical philosophy. Gane said that "to be unique was more important than to be good." On the subject of being too obscure, he said in a 1996 interview that "maybe the area where we're on dodgy ground, is this idea that you need great knowledge [of] esoteric music to understand what we're doing." Sadier responded to Gane, saying that she "think[s] we have achieved a music that will make sense to a lot of people whether they know about Steve Reich or not." The duo were up-front about their desire to grow their sound: for Gane, "otherwise it just sounds like what other people are doing", and for Sadier, "you trust that there is more and that it can be done more interesting."
Influences
Their records have been heavily influenced by the "motorik" technique of 1970s krautrock groups such as Neu! and Faust. Tim Gane has supported the comparison: "Neu! did minimalism and drones, but in a very pop way." Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that their music also had "echoes of bubblegum, of exotica, of Beach Boys and bossa nova", with their earlier work "bearing strong Velvet Underground overtones". Funk, jazz, and Brazilian music were additional inspirations for the band. Stephan Davet of French newspaper Le Monde said that Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996) had musical influences such as Burt Bacharach, and Françoise Hardy. The sounds influenced by minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich can be found on the 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night. Stereolab's style also incorporates easy-listening music of the 1950s and '60s. Joshua Klein in Washington Post said that, "Years before everyone else caught on, Stereolab [were] referencing the 1970s German bands Can and Neu!, the Mexican lounge music master Esquivel and the decidedly unhip Burt Bacharach." Regarding their later work such as Instant 0 in the Universe (2003) and Margerine Eclipse (2004), critics have compared the releases to the band's earlier guitar-driven style.
Live performances
Stereolab toured regularly to support their album releases. In a 1996 Washington Post gig review, Mark Jenkins wrote that Stereolab started out favouring an "easy-listening syncopation", but eventually reverted to a "messier, more urgent sound" characteristic of their earlier performances. In another review Jenkins said that the band's live songs "frequently veer[ed] into more cacophonous, guitar-dominated territory", in contrast to their albums such as Cobra and Phases Group… In the Minneapolis Star Tribune Jon Bream compared the band's live sound to feedback-driven rock bands like the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. Jim Harrington of The Oakland Tribune argued that "Sadier often sounded like a third percussion instrument more than a lead vocalist", further stating in regard to her switching between singing in English and French that "a Stereolab show is one of the few concerts where it's hard to find even the biggest fans mouthing along with the lyrics." Regarding being onstage, Gane has said that "I don't like to be the center of attention ... I just get into the music and am not really aware of the people there. That's my way of getting through it." Remarking of the band's 2019 reunion tour, he added that "[Stereolab] never were really a festival band… We’re not like, 'Hey, how you all doing?' and all that stuff.”
Lyrics and titles
Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that the group "[uses] lyrics to convey ideas while using them for the pleasurable way the words sound." Lætitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, was influenced by both the Situationist philosophy Society of the Spectacle by Marxist theorist Guy Debord, and her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist, as well as other Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as stated by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon interview.
Critics have seen Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". The 1994 single "Ping Pong" has been put forward as evidence in regard to these alleged views. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively).
Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis.
Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group… contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", The title of the song "Brakhage" from Dots and Loops (1997), is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched-On Bach, and the 1993 song "Jenny Ondioline", a portmanteau of inventor Georges Jenny and his instrument the Ondioline.
Legacy
Stereolab have been called one of the most "influential" and "fiercely independent and original groups of the Nineties" by writers Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Pierre Perrone respectively; as well as one of "the decade's most innovative British bands." by Mark Jenkins. Simon Reynolds commented in Rolling Stone that the group's earlier records form "an endlessly seductive body of work that sounds always the same, always different." In a review for the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", Jason Ankeny said that "No other artist of its generation fused the high-minded daring of the avant-garde and the lowbrow infectiousness of pop with as much invention, skill, and appeal." In The Wire, Peter Shapiro compared the band to Britpop bands Oasis and Blur, and defended their music against the charge that it is "nothing but the sum total of its arcane reference points." They were one of the first groups to be termed post-rock—in a 1996 article, journalist Angela Lewis applied the "new term" to Stereolab and three other bands who have connections to the group. Stylistically, music journalist J. D. Considine credits the band for anticipating and driving the late 1990s revival of vintage analogue instruments among indie rock bands. Stephen Christian, a creative director of Warp Records, said that the group "exists in the gap between the experimentation of the underground and the appeal of the wider world of pop music".
The group have also received negative press. Barney Hoskyns questioned the longevity of their music in a 1996 Mojo review, saying that their records "sound more like arid experiments than music born of emotional need." In Guardian, Dave Simpson stated: "With their borrowings from early, obscure Kraftwerk and hip obtuse sources, [Stereolab] sound like a band of rock critics rather than musicians." Lætitia Sadier's vocals were cited by author Stuart Shea as often being "indecipherable".
A variety of artists, musical and otherwise, have collaborated with Stereolab. In 1995 the group teamed up with sculptor Charles Long for an interactive art show in New York City, for which Long provided the exhibits and Stereolab the music. They have released tracks by and toured with post-rock band Tortoise, while John McEntire of Tortoise has in turn worked on several Stereolab albums. In the 1990s, the group collaborated with the industrial band Nurse With Wound and released two albums together, Crumb Duck (1993) and Simple Headphone Mind (1998), and Stereolab also released "Calimero" (1998) with French avant-garde singer and poet Brigitte Fontaine. The band worked with Herbie Mann on the song "One Note Samba/Surfboard" for the 1998 AIDS-Benefit album, Red Hot + Rio, produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Stereolab alumni have also founded bands of their own. Guitarist Tim Gane founded the side project Cavern of Anti-Matter and also formed Turn on alongside band member Sean O'Hagan, who formed his own band the High Llamas. Katharine Gifford formed Snowpony with former My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe. Sadier has released three albums with her four-piece side-project Monade, whose sound Mark Jenkins called a "little more Parisian" than Stereolab's. Backing vocalist Mary Hansen formed a band named Schema with members of Hovercraft and released their eponymous EP in 2000.
As of August 1999, US album sales stood at 300,000 copies sold. Despite receiving critical acclaim and a sizeable fanbase, commercial success eluded the group. Early in their career, their 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline entered the UK Singles Chart, but financial issues prevented the band from printing enough records to satisfy demand. According to Sadier, however, the band "[avoided] going overground" like PJ Harvey, Pulp and the Cranberries, all of whom quickly rose from obscurity to fame, adding: "This kind of notoriety is not a particularly good thing, [and] you don't enjoy it anymore." When Elektra Records was closed down by Warner Bros. Records in 2004, Stereolab was dropped along with many other artists, reportedly because of poor sales. Tim Gane said in retrospect that the group "signed to Elektra because we thought we would be on there for an album or two and then we'd get ejected. We were surprised when we got to our first album!" Since then, Stereolab's self-owned label Duophonic has inked a worldwide distribution deal with independent label Too Pure. Through Duophonic, the band both licenses their music and releases it directly (depending on geographic market). Gane said, "... we license our recordings and just give them to people, then we don't have to ask for permission if we want to use it. We just want to be in control of our own music."
MembersCurrent membersTim Gane - guitar, keyboards
Lætitia Sadier - lead vocals, keyboards, guitar, percussion, trombone
Andy Ramsay - drums
Joseph Watson - keyboards, vibraphone, backing vocals
Xavier Muñoz Guimera - bass guitar, backing vocals Former membersJoe Dilworth - drums
Martin Kean - bass guitar
Gina Morris - backing vocals
Mick Conroy - keyboards
Mary Hansen - vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion
Sean O'Hagan - keyboards, guitar
Duncan Brown - bass guitar
Katharine Gifford - keyboards
Morgane Lhote - keyboards
David Pajo - bass guitar
Richard Harrison - bass guitar
Simon Johns - bass guitar
Dominic Jeffery - keyboards
Joseph Walters - french horn, guitar, keyboards
Julien Gasc - keyboards, backing vocals TimelineDiscography
Stereolab released many non-LP tracks that they later anthologised as compilation albums.Studio albums Peng! (1992)
Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993)
Mars Audiac Quintet (1994)
Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996)
Dots and Loops (1997)
Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night (1999)
Sound-Dust (2001)
Margerine Eclipse (2004)
Chemical Chords (2008)
Not Music (2010)Compilation albums'''
Switched On (1992)
Refried Ectoplasm: Switched On, Vol. 2 (1995)
Aluminum Tunes: Switched On, Vol. 3 (1998)
ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions (2002)
Oscillons from the Anti-Sun (2005)
Fab Four Suture (2006)
Serene Velocity: A Stereolab Anthology (2006)
Electrically Possessed: Switched On, Vol. 4'' (2021)
References
Book sources
Chart data
External links
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups disestablished in 2009
Musical groups reestablished in 2019
English indie rock groups
English post-rock groups
Flying Nun Records artists
Drag City (record label) artists
4AD artists
British indie pop groups
English experimental rock groups
Art pop musicians
Experimental pop musicians
Avant-pop musicians
Slumberland Records artists | false | [
"More Sokol Pie (English: A Falcon is Drinking) is a traditional folk song from the region of Macedonia, particularly popular in Bulgaria and North Macedonia. There are several versions of this song. Probably the earliest record of an early version of this song was in 1837, by Serbian author Petar Petrović Samopodlužanin. The song was recorded by Podlužanin from a Bulgarian immigrant in Serbia and in the text there are Serbian language influences made either by the person recording or by the person relating the lyrics. Many other versions of this song with motif of falcon drinking water from Vardar were published at the beginning of the 20th century in then Southern Serbia. Numerous performers of this song include Toše Proeski, Hanka Paldum, Kostadin Gugov, Aleksandar Sarievski, Nikola Badev, Volodya Stoyanov and \"Episode\" group.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nLyrics in Macedonian with transcription\n Text in Bulgarian\nMore Sokol Pie performed by Aleksandar Sarievski\n\nMacedonian folk songs\nBulgarian folk songs\n1837 songs",
"Könsrock (Swedish for Genitalia rock) is a Swedish music genre characterized by off-color humor, dealing with subjects such as handicapped people, disorders and diseases, homosexuality, and nazism, often with strong elements of toilet humor. Toilet references is widely regarded as the best.\n\nHistory\n\nKönsrock was created in the late 1970s, with origins in punk rock. Two important earlier influences were Johnny Bode, who released three records in the '60s and '70s with songs containing explicit sexual lyrics, and Eddie Meduza, also known for songs with off-color and often sexual lyrics. As they don't work in a punk rock style, neither of them are considered to be part of the könsrock genre proper.\n\nOnkel Kånkel and his Kånkelbär\n\nOnkel Kånkel and his Kånkelbär are often considered to have created the könsrock genre.\n\nTunnan och Moroten\n\nIn 1994 Tunnan och Moroten (The Trashcan and The Carrot) began making music together. Early songs were released as Amiga modules, but since the late 1990s, they have incorporated guitar and drums. In the late 1990s, songs in MP3 format began circulating on the internet, and Bajs i bastun was released in 1998, becoming one of their most famous songs. There are now eight albums. On the later releases, synth, bass, electric guitar, and drums are used, together with influences from chip music.\n\nCharacteristics\nKönsrock is commonly produced using the same line-up as punk rock, often including post-punk influences with drum machines, keyboards, and other electronic devices.\nSome bands use heavily distorted instrument similar to extreme punk, and some use a more experimental sound deliberately made to sound unpleasant. The lyrics are usually offensive and deal with topics such as paedophilia, obscenity, feces, drugs, violence, and handicapped people. Könsrock has been popular in schools in Sweden and has on some occasions caused public outrage.\n\nReferences\n\nFootnotes and sources\nsome newspaper articles about Onkel Kånkel and könsrock (in Swedish)\na reportage about könsrock in swedish radio (in Swedish)\n\nPunk rock genres\nSwedish styles of music"
] |
[
"Stereolab",
"Lyrics and titles",
"what was special about the lyrics?",
"Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged.",
"how so?",
"Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War.",
"were there other influences in her lyrics?",
"The Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences,"
] | C_c332cd3357ba46e388acc757c1c5ab18_0 | any other influences? | 4 | Other than the Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were there any other influences on Laetitia Sadier? | Stereolab | Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as noted by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon.com interview. Stewart Mason commented in an AllMusic review that the lyrics from the 1997 song "Miss Modular" "sound influenced by the Situationist theory of the 'spectacle'." Critics have noted Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". "Ping Pong", a 1994 single included on the album Mars Audiac Quintet, was noted for its alleged Marxist lyrics. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Simon Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively). Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis. Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde political groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", "Brakhage", the title of the first song on the 1997 album Dots and Loops, is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched on Bach, and the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", named after experimental composer John Cage. CANNOTANSWER | Critics have noted Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. | Stereolab are an Anglo-French avant-pop band formed in London in 1990. Led by the songwriting team of Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier, the group's music combines influences from krautrock, lounge and 1960s pop music, often incorporating a repetitive motorik beat with heavy use of vintage electronic keyboards and female vocals sung in English and French. Their lyrics have political and philosophical themes influenced by the Surrealist and Situationist movements. On stage, they play in a more feedback-driven and guitar-oriented style. The band also draw from funk, jazz and Brazilian music, and were one of the first artists to be dubbed "post-rock". They are regarded among the most innovative and influential groups of the 1990s.
Stereolab were formed by Gane (guitar and keyboards) and Sadier (vocals, keyboards and guitar) after the break-up of McCarthy. The two were romantically involved for fourteen years and are the group's only consistent members. Other longtime members include 1992 addition Mary Hansen (backing vocals, keyboards and guitar), who died in 2002, and 1993 addition Andy Ramsay (drums). The High Llamas' leader Sean O'Hagan (guitar and keyboards) was a member from 1993 to 1994 and continued appearing on later records for occasional guest appearances.
Although Stereolab found success in the underground music scene and were influential enough to spark a renewed interest in older analogue instruments, they have never had a significant commercial impact. The band were released from their recording contract with Elektra Records due to poor record sales, and their self-owned label Duophonic signed a distribution deal with Too Pure and later Warp Records. After a ten-year hiatus, the band reunited for live performances in 2019.
History
1990–1993: Formation
In 1985, Tim Gane formed McCarthy, a band from Essex, England, known for their left-wing politics. Gane met Lætitia Sadier, born in France, at a 1988 McCarthy concert in Paris and the two quickly fell in love. The musically-inclined Sadier was disillusioned with the rock scene in France and soon moved to London to be with Gane and pursue her career. In 1990, after three albums, McCarthy broke up and Gane immediately formed Stereolab with Sadier (who had also contributed vocals to McCarthy's final album), ex-Chills bassist Martin Kean and Gina Morris on backing vocals. Stereolab's name was taken from a division of Vanguard Records demonstrating hi-fi effects.
Gane and Sadier, along with future band manager Martin Pike, set up a record label called Duophonic Super 45s which, along with later offshoot Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, would become commonly known as "Duophonic". Gane said that their "original plan" was to distribute multiple 7 and 10-inch records "–to just do one a month and keep doing them in small editions". The 10 inch vinyl EP Super 45, released in May 1991, was the first release for both Stereolab and the label, and was sold through mail order and through the Rough Trade Shop in London. Super 45s band-designed album art and packaging was the first of many customised and limited-edition Duophonic records. In a 1996 interview in The Wire, Gane calls the "do-it-yourself" aesthetic behind Duophonic "empowering", and said that by releasing one's own music "you learn; it creates more music, more ideas".
Stereolab released the EP, Super-Electric in September 1991, and a single, titled Stunning Debut Album, followed in November 1991 (which was neither debut nor album). The early material was rock and guitar-oriented; of Super-Electric, Jason Ankeny wrote in AllMusic that "Droning guitars, skeletal rhythms, and pop hooks—not vintage synths and pointillist melodies—were their calling cards ..." Under the independent label Too Pure, the group's first full-length album, Peng! was released in May 1992. A compilation titled, Switched On, was released in October 1992 and would be part of a series of compilations that anthologise the band's more obscure material.
Around this time, the line-up consisted of Gane and Sadier plus vocalist and guitarist Mary Hansen, drummer Andy Ramsay, bassist Duncan Brown, and keyboardist Katharine Gifford. Hansen, born in Australia, had been in touch with Gane since his McCarthy days. After joining, she and Sadier developed a style of vocal counterpoint that distinguished Stereolab's sound. Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas joined as a quick replacement for their touring keyboardist, but was invited for their next record and "was allowed to make suggestions".
1993–2001: Critical recognition
Stereolab introduced easy-listening elements into their sound with the EP Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, released in March 1993. The work raised the band's profile and landed them a major-label American record deal with Elektra Records. Their first album under Elektra, Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (August 1993), was an underground success in both the US and the UK. Mark Jenkins commented in Washington Post that with the album, Stereolab "continues the glorious drones of [their] indie work, giving celestial sweep to [their] garage-rock organ pumping and rhythm-guitar strumming". In the UK, the album was released on Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, which is responsible for domestic releases of Stereolab's major albums.
In January 1994, Stereolab achieved their first chart entry when the 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline, entered at number 75 on the UK Singles Chart. (Over the next three years, four more releases by the band would appear on this chart, ending with the EP Miss Modular in 1997.) Their third album, Mars Audiac Quintet, was released in August 1994. The album contains the single "Ping Pong", which gained press coverage for its explicitly Marxist lyrics. The band focused more on pop and less on rock, resulting in what AllMusic described as "what may be the group's most accessible, tightly-written album". It was the last album to feature O'Hagan as a full-time member. He would continue to make guest appearances on later releases. The group issued an EP titled Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center in April 1995. The EP was their musical contribution to an interactive art exhibit put on in collaboration with New York City artist Charles Long. Their second compilation of rarities, titled Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2), was released in July 1995.
The band's fourth album, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (March 1996), was a critical success and was played heavily on college radio. A record that "captivated alternative rock", it represented the group's "high-water mark" said music journalists Tom Moon and Joshua Klein, respectively. The album incorporated their early krautrock sound with funk, hip-hop influences and experimental instrumental arrangements. John McEntire of Tortoise also assisted with production and played on the album. Katharine Gifford was replaced by Morgane Lhote before recording, and bassist Duncan Brown by Richard Harrison after. Lhote was required to both learn the keyboards and 30 of the group's songs before joining.
Released in September 1997, Dots and Loops was their first album to enter the Billboard 200 charts, peaking at number 111. The album leaned towards jazz with bossa nova and 60's pop influences. Barney Hoskyns wrote in Rolling Stone that with it the group moved "ever further away from the one-chord Velvets drone-mesh of its early days" toward easy-listening and Europop. A review in German newspaper Die Zeit stated that in Dots and Loops, Stereolab transformed the harder Velvet Underground-like riffs of previous releases into "softer sounds and noisy playfulness". Contributors to the album included John McEntire and Jan St. Werner of German electropop duo Mouse on Mars. Stereolab toured for seven months and took a break when Gane and Sadier had a child. The group's third compilation of rarities, Aluminum Tunes, was issued in October 1998.
Their sixth album, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, was released in September 1999. It was co-produced by McEntire and American producer Jim O'Rourke, and was recorded with their new bassist, Simon Johns. The album received mixed reviews for its lighter sound, and peaked at number 154 on the Billboard 200. An unsigned NME review said that "this record has far more in common with bad jazz and progressive rock than any experimental art-rock tradition." In a 1999 article of Washington Post, Mark Jenkins asked Gane about the album's apparent lack of guitars; Gane responded, "There's a lot less upfront, distorted guitar ... But it's still quite guitar-based music. Every single track has a guitar on it."
Stereolab's seventh album, Sound-Dust (August 2001), rose to number 178 on the Billboard 200. The album also featured producers McEntire and O'Rourke. Sound-Dust was more warmly received than Cobra and Phases Group…. Critic Joshua Klein said that "the emphasis this time sounds less on unfocused experimentation and more on melody ... a breezy and welcome return to form for the British band." Erlewine of Allmusic stated that the album "[finds the group] deliberately recharging their creative juices" but he argued that Sound-Dust was "anchored in overly familiar territory."
2002–2008: Death of Hansen and later releases
In 2002, as they were planning their next album, Stereolab started building a studio north of Bordeaux, France. ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions; a compilation of BBC Radio 1 sessions was released in October. In the same year, Gane and Sadier's romantic relationship ended.
On 9 December 2002, Hansen was killed when hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. She was 36. Writer Pierre Perrone said that her "playful nature and mischievous sense of humour came through in the way she approached the backing vocals she contributed to Stereolab and the distinctive harmonies she created with Sadier." For the next few months, Stereolab lay dormant as the members grieved. They eventually decided to continue. Future album and concert reviews would mention the effects of Hansen's absence.
The EP Instant 0 in the Universe (October 2003) was recorded in France, and was Stereolab's first release following Hansen's death. Music journalist Jim DeRogatis said that the EP marked a return to their earlier, harder sound—"free from the pseudo-funk moves and avant-garde tinkering that had been inspired by Chicago producer Jim O'Rourke".
Stereolab's eighth album, Margerine Eclipse, was released on 27 January 2004 with generally positive reviews, and peaked at number 174 on the US Billboard 200. The track "Feel and Triple" was written in tribute to Hansen; Sadier said, "I was reflecting on my years with her ... reflecting on how we sometimes found it hard to express the love we had for one another." Sadier continued, "Our dedication to her on the album says, 'We will love you till the end', meaning of our lives. I'm not religious, but I feel Mary's energy is still around somewhere. It didn't just disappear." The Observers Molloy Woodcraft gave the album four out of five stars, and commented that Sadier's vocal performance as "life- and love-affirming", and the record as a whole as "Complex and catchy, bold and beatific." Kelefa Sanneh commented in Rolling Stone that Margerine Eclipse was "full of familiar noises and aimless melodies". Margerine Eclipse was Stereolab's last record to be released on American label Elektra Records, which shut down that same year. Future material would be released on Too Pure, the same label which had released some of the band's earliest material.
The group released six limited-edition singles in 2005 and 2006, which were anthologised in the 2006 compilation Fab Four Suture, and contained material which Mark Jenkins thought continued the brisker sound of the band's post-Hansen work. By June 2007, Stereolab's line-up comprised Tim Gane, Lætitia Sadier, Andy Ramsay, Simon Johns, Dominic Jeffrey, Joseph Watson, and Joseph Walters. In 2008, the band issued their next album under the label 4AD titled, Chemical Chords, which "[downplays] their arsenal of analog synths in favor of live instrumentation". The release was followed by an autumn tour in Europe, the United States and Canada.
In February 2009, they toured Australia as part of the St Jerome's Laneway Festival.
2009–2019: Hiatus and reunion
In April 2009, Stereolab manager Martin Pike announced a pause in their activities for the time being. He said that it was an opportune time for the members to move on to other projects. Not Music, a collection of unreleased material recorded at the same time as Chemical Chords, was released in 2010. In 2013, Gane and Sadier, who both focused on Cavern of Anti-Matter and solo work respectively, performed at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival held at Pontins in Camber Sands.
In February 2019, the group announced a tour of Europe and the United States to coincide with expanded, remastered reissues of several of the albums released under Warp Records. Stereolab were part of the lineup for 2019's Primavera Sound festival, taking part on the weekend of 30 May in Barcelona, Spain, and the following weekend in Porto, Portugal. It was the group's first live performance since 2009.
Musical style
Stereolab's music combines a droning rock sound with lounge instrumentals, overlaid with sing-song female vocals and pop melodies, and have also made use of unorthodox time signatures. It has been generally described as avant-pop, indie pop, art pop, indie electronic, indie rock, post-rock, experimental rock, and experimental pop. Sadier remarked in 2015 that "[the band's] records were written and recorded very quickly… we would write 35 tracks, sometimes more".
The band have played on vintage electronic keyboards and synthesizers from brands such as Farfisa and Vox and Moog. Gane has praised the instruments for their versatility: "We use the older effects because they're more direct, more extreme, and they're more like plasticine: you can shape them into loads of things." The 1994 album Mars Audiac Quintet prominently features Moog synthesizers.
Lætitia Sadier's English and French vocals was a part of Stereolab's music since the beginning, and she would occasionally sing wordlessly along with the music. In reference to her laid-back delivery, Peter Shapiro wrote facetiously in Wire that Sadier "display[ed] all the emotional histrionics of Nico", while some critics have commented that her vocals were unintelligible.Shea (2002), pp.53,54 Sadier would often trade vocals with Mary Hansen back-and-forth in a sing-song manner that has been described as "eerie" and "hypnotic", as well as "sweet [and] slightly alien". After Hansen's death in 2002, critic Jim Harrington commented that her absence is noticeable on live performances of Stereolab's older tracks, and that their newer songs could have benefited from Hansen's backing vocals.
In interviews, Gane and Sadier have discussed their musical philosophy. Gane said that "to be unique was more important than to be good." On the subject of being too obscure, he said in a 1996 interview that "maybe the area where we're on dodgy ground, is this idea that you need great knowledge [of] esoteric music to understand what we're doing." Sadier responded to Gane, saying that she "think[s] we have achieved a music that will make sense to a lot of people whether they know about Steve Reich or not." The duo were up-front about their desire to grow their sound: for Gane, "otherwise it just sounds like what other people are doing", and for Sadier, "you trust that there is more and that it can be done more interesting."
Influences
Their records have been heavily influenced by the "motorik" technique of 1970s krautrock groups such as Neu! and Faust. Tim Gane has supported the comparison: "Neu! did minimalism and drones, but in a very pop way." Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that their music also had "echoes of bubblegum, of exotica, of Beach Boys and bossa nova", with their earlier work "bearing strong Velvet Underground overtones". Funk, jazz, and Brazilian music were additional inspirations for the band. Stephan Davet of French newspaper Le Monde said that Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996) had musical influences such as Burt Bacharach, and Françoise Hardy. The sounds influenced by minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich can be found on the 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night. Stereolab's style also incorporates easy-listening music of the 1950s and '60s. Joshua Klein in Washington Post said that, "Years before everyone else caught on, Stereolab [were] referencing the 1970s German bands Can and Neu!, the Mexican lounge music master Esquivel and the decidedly unhip Burt Bacharach." Regarding their later work such as Instant 0 in the Universe (2003) and Margerine Eclipse (2004), critics have compared the releases to the band's earlier guitar-driven style.
Live performances
Stereolab toured regularly to support their album releases. In a 1996 Washington Post gig review, Mark Jenkins wrote that Stereolab started out favouring an "easy-listening syncopation", but eventually reverted to a "messier, more urgent sound" characteristic of their earlier performances. In another review Jenkins said that the band's live songs "frequently veer[ed] into more cacophonous, guitar-dominated territory", in contrast to their albums such as Cobra and Phases Group… In the Minneapolis Star Tribune Jon Bream compared the band's live sound to feedback-driven rock bands like the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. Jim Harrington of The Oakland Tribune argued that "Sadier often sounded like a third percussion instrument more than a lead vocalist", further stating in regard to her switching between singing in English and French that "a Stereolab show is one of the few concerts where it's hard to find even the biggest fans mouthing along with the lyrics." Regarding being onstage, Gane has said that "I don't like to be the center of attention ... I just get into the music and am not really aware of the people there. That's my way of getting through it." Remarking of the band's 2019 reunion tour, he added that "[Stereolab] never were really a festival band… We’re not like, 'Hey, how you all doing?' and all that stuff.”
Lyrics and titles
Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that the group "[uses] lyrics to convey ideas while using them for the pleasurable way the words sound." Lætitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, was influenced by both the Situationist philosophy Society of the Spectacle by Marxist theorist Guy Debord, and her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist, as well as other Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as stated by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon interview.
Critics have seen Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". The 1994 single "Ping Pong" has been put forward as evidence in regard to these alleged views. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively).
Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis.
Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group… contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", The title of the song "Brakhage" from Dots and Loops (1997), is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched-On Bach, and the 1993 song "Jenny Ondioline", a portmanteau of inventor Georges Jenny and his instrument the Ondioline.
Legacy
Stereolab have been called one of the most "influential" and "fiercely independent and original groups of the Nineties" by writers Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Pierre Perrone respectively; as well as one of "the decade's most innovative British bands." by Mark Jenkins. Simon Reynolds commented in Rolling Stone that the group's earlier records form "an endlessly seductive body of work that sounds always the same, always different." In a review for the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", Jason Ankeny said that "No other artist of its generation fused the high-minded daring of the avant-garde and the lowbrow infectiousness of pop with as much invention, skill, and appeal." In The Wire, Peter Shapiro compared the band to Britpop bands Oasis and Blur, and defended their music against the charge that it is "nothing but the sum total of its arcane reference points." They were one of the first groups to be termed post-rock—in a 1996 article, journalist Angela Lewis applied the "new term" to Stereolab and three other bands who have connections to the group. Stylistically, music journalist J. D. Considine credits the band for anticipating and driving the late 1990s revival of vintage analogue instruments among indie rock bands. Stephen Christian, a creative director of Warp Records, said that the group "exists in the gap between the experimentation of the underground and the appeal of the wider world of pop music".
The group have also received negative press. Barney Hoskyns questioned the longevity of their music in a 1996 Mojo review, saying that their records "sound more like arid experiments than music born of emotional need." In Guardian, Dave Simpson stated: "With their borrowings from early, obscure Kraftwerk and hip obtuse sources, [Stereolab] sound like a band of rock critics rather than musicians." Lætitia Sadier's vocals were cited by author Stuart Shea as often being "indecipherable".
A variety of artists, musical and otherwise, have collaborated with Stereolab. In 1995 the group teamed up with sculptor Charles Long for an interactive art show in New York City, for which Long provided the exhibits and Stereolab the music. They have released tracks by and toured with post-rock band Tortoise, while John McEntire of Tortoise has in turn worked on several Stereolab albums. In the 1990s, the group collaborated with the industrial band Nurse With Wound and released two albums together, Crumb Duck (1993) and Simple Headphone Mind (1998), and Stereolab also released "Calimero" (1998) with French avant-garde singer and poet Brigitte Fontaine. The band worked with Herbie Mann on the song "One Note Samba/Surfboard" for the 1998 AIDS-Benefit album, Red Hot + Rio, produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Stereolab alumni have also founded bands of their own. Guitarist Tim Gane founded the side project Cavern of Anti-Matter and also formed Turn on alongside band member Sean O'Hagan, who formed his own band the High Llamas. Katharine Gifford formed Snowpony with former My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe. Sadier has released three albums with her four-piece side-project Monade, whose sound Mark Jenkins called a "little more Parisian" than Stereolab's. Backing vocalist Mary Hansen formed a band named Schema with members of Hovercraft and released their eponymous EP in 2000.
As of August 1999, US album sales stood at 300,000 copies sold. Despite receiving critical acclaim and a sizeable fanbase, commercial success eluded the group. Early in their career, their 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline entered the UK Singles Chart, but financial issues prevented the band from printing enough records to satisfy demand. According to Sadier, however, the band "[avoided] going overground" like PJ Harvey, Pulp and the Cranberries, all of whom quickly rose from obscurity to fame, adding: "This kind of notoriety is not a particularly good thing, [and] you don't enjoy it anymore." When Elektra Records was closed down by Warner Bros. Records in 2004, Stereolab was dropped along with many other artists, reportedly because of poor sales. Tim Gane said in retrospect that the group "signed to Elektra because we thought we would be on there for an album or two and then we'd get ejected. We were surprised when we got to our first album!" Since then, Stereolab's self-owned label Duophonic has inked a worldwide distribution deal with independent label Too Pure. Through Duophonic, the band both licenses their music and releases it directly (depending on geographic market). Gane said, "... we license our recordings and just give them to people, then we don't have to ask for permission if we want to use it. We just want to be in control of our own music."
MembersCurrent membersTim Gane - guitar, keyboards
Lætitia Sadier - lead vocals, keyboards, guitar, percussion, trombone
Andy Ramsay - drums
Joseph Watson - keyboards, vibraphone, backing vocals
Xavier Muñoz Guimera - bass guitar, backing vocals Former membersJoe Dilworth - drums
Martin Kean - bass guitar
Gina Morris - backing vocals
Mick Conroy - keyboards
Mary Hansen - vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion
Sean O'Hagan - keyboards, guitar
Duncan Brown - bass guitar
Katharine Gifford - keyboards
Morgane Lhote - keyboards
David Pajo - bass guitar
Richard Harrison - bass guitar
Simon Johns - bass guitar
Dominic Jeffery - keyboards
Joseph Walters - french horn, guitar, keyboards
Julien Gasc - keyboards, backing vocals TimelineDiscography
Stereolab released many non-LP tracks that they later anthologised as compilation albums.Studio albums Peng! (1992)
Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993)
Mars Audiac Quintet (1994)
Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996)
Dots and Loops (1997)
Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night (1999)
Sound-Dust (2001)
Margerine Eclipse (2004)
Chemical Chords (2008)
Not Music (2010)Compilation albums'''
Switched On (1992)
Refried Ectoplasm: Switched On, Vol. 2 (1995)
Aluminum Tunes: Switched On, Vol. 3 (1998)
ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions (2002)
Oscillons from the Anti-Sun (2005)
Fab Four Suture (2006)
Serene Velocity: A Stereolab Anthology (2006)
Electrically Possessed: Switched On, Vol. 4'' (2021)
References
Book sources
Chart data
External links
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups disestablished in 2009
Musical groups reestablished in 2019
English indie rock groups
English post-rock groups
Flying Nun Records artists
Drag City (record label) artists
4AD artists
British indie pop groups
English experimental rock groups
Art pop musicians
Experimental pop musicians
Avant-pop musicians
Slumberland Records artists | false | [
"The Gurus were an American psychedelic rock band from the 1960s. They were among the first to incorporate Middle Eastern influences, maybe more than any other band of that era. The band broke up without making a large impact on the music scene of the time, although they did release two singles on United Artists Records in 1966 and 1967. Their album, The Gurus Are Hear, failed to be released in 1967, which was noted as the reason for the band splitting up.\n\nThe album was finally released in 2003.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican psychedelic rock music groups",
"An operational context (OLC) for an operation is the external environment that influences its operation. For a mobile application, the OLC is defined by the combined hardware/firmware/software configurarions of several appliances or devices, as well as the bearer of the mobiles of these units and other work position environment this person as the key stakeholder makes use of in timely, spatial and modal coincidence. \n\nThis concept differs from the operating context and does not address the operating system of computers.\n\nExample \n\nThe classic example is defined by the electronic leash configuration, where one mobile appliance is wirelessly tethered to another such appliance. The function of this electronic leash is to set an aural alarm with any of these two in case of unintentional leaving one of these two behind.\n\nImplementing the example \n\nSeveral suppliers offer the electronic leash solution. A new aspect has been launched with Bluetooth low energy for better economised battery life cycle. Special trimming serves for two years operation from a button cell.\n\nReferences\n\nSee also\n Context\n Operating context, the external environment that influences an operation;\n Unilateration\n\nWireless networking"
] |
[
"Stereolab",
"Lyrics and titles",
"what was special about the lyrics?",
"Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged.",
"how so?",
"Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War.",
"were there other influences in her lyrics?",
"The Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences,",
"any other influences?",
"Critics have noted Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist."
] | C_c332cd3357ba46e388acc757c1c5ab18_0 | what influenced the title? | 5 | What influenced the title of Stereolab? | Stereolab | Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Laetitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, said that her inspiration was most recently her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist and Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as noted by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon.com interview. Stewart Mason commented in an AllMusic review that the lyrics from the 1997 song "Miss Modular" "sound influenced by the Situationist theory of the 'spectacle'." Critics have noted Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". "Ping Pong", a 1994 single included on the album Mars Audiac Quintet, was noted for its alleged Marxist lyrics. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Simon Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively). Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis. Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde political groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", "Brakhage", the title of the first song on the 1997 album Dots and Loops, is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched on Bach, and the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", named after experimental composer John Cage. CANNOTANSWER | the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", | Stereolab are an Anglo-French avant-pop band formed in London in 1990. Led by the songwriting team of Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier, the group's music combines influences from krautrock, lounge and 1960s pop music, often incorporating a repetitive motorik beat with heavy use of vintage electronic keyboards and female vocals sung in English and French. Their lyrics have political and philosophical themes influenced by the Surrealist and Situationist movements. On stage, they play in a more feedback-driven and guitar-oriented style. The band also draw from funk, jazz and Brazilian music, and were one of the first artists to be dubbed "post-rock". They are regarded among the most innovative and influential groups of the 1990s.
Stereolab were formed by Gane (guitar and keyboards) and Sadier (vocals, keyboards and guitar) after the break-up of McCarthy. The two were romantically involved for fourteen years and are the group's only consistent members. Other longtime members include 1992 addition Mary Hansen (backing vocals, keyboards and guitar), who died in 2002, and 1993 addition Andy Ramsay (drums). The High Llamas' leader Sean O'Hagan (guitar and keyboards) was a member from 1993 to 1994 and continued appearing on later records for occasional guest appearances.
Although Stereolab found success in the underground music scene and were influential enough to spark a renewed interest in older analogue instruments, they have never had a significant commercial impact. The band were released from their recording contract with Elektra Records due to poor record sales, and their self-owned label Duophonic signed a distribution deal with Too Pure and later Warp Records. After a ten-year hiatus, the band reunited for live performances in 2019.
History
1990–1993: Formation
In 1985, Tim Gane formed McCarthy, a band from Essex, England, known for their left-wing politics. Gane met Lætitia Sadier, born in France, at a 1988 McCarthy concert in Paris and the two quickly fell in love. The musically-inclined Sadier was disillusioned with the rock scene in France and soon moved to London to be with Gane and pursue her career. In 1990, after three albums, McCarthy broke up and Gane immediately formed Stereolab with Sadier (who had also contributed vocals to McCarthy's final album), ex-Chills bassist Martin Kean and Gina Morris on backing vocals. Stereolab's name was taken from a division of Vanguard Records demonstrating hi-fi effects.
Gane and Sadier, along with future band manager Martin Pike, set up a record label called Duophonic Super 45s which, along with later offshoot Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, would become commonly known as "Duophonic". Gane said that their "original plan" was to distribute multiple 7 and 10-inch records "–to just do one a month and keep doing them in small editions". The 10 inch vinyl EP Super 45, released in May 1991, was the first release for both Stereolab and the label, and was sold through mail order and through the Rough Trade Shop in London. Super 45s band-designed album art and packaging was the first of many customised and limited-edition Duophonic records. In a 1996 interview in The Wire, Gane calls the "do-it-yourself" aesthetic behind Duophonic "empowering", and said that by releasing one's own music "you learn; it creates more music, more ideas".
Stereolab released the EP, Super-Electric in September 1991, and a single, titled Stunning Debut Album, followed in November 1991 (which was neither debut nor album). The early material was rock and guitar-oriented; of Super-Electric, Jason Ankeny wrote in AllMusic that "Droning guitars, skeletal rhythms, and pop hooks—not vintage synths and pointillist melodies—were their calling cards ..." Under the independent label Too Pure, the group's first full-length album, Peng! was released in May 1992. A compilation titled, Switched On, was released in October 1992 and would be part of a series of compilations that anthologise the band's more obscure material.
Around this time, the line-up consisted of Gane and Sadier plus vocalist and guitarist Mary Hansen, drummer Andy Ramsay, bassist Duncan Brown, and keyboardist Katharine Gifford. Hansen, born in Australia, had been in touch with Gane since his McCarthy days. After joining, she and Sadier developed a style of vocal counterpoint that distinguished Stereolab's sound. Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas joined as a quick replacement for their touring keyboardist, but was invited for their next record and "was allowed to make suggestions".
1993–2001: Critical recognition
Stereolab introduced easy-listening elements into their sound with the EP Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, released in March 1993. The work raised the band's profile and landed them a major-label American record deal with Elektra Records. Their first album under Elektra, Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (August 1993), was an underground success in both the US and the UK. Mark Jenkins commented in Washington Post that with the album, Stereolab "continues the glorious drones of [their] indie work, giving celestial sweep to [their] garage-rock organ pumping and rhythm-guitar strumming". In the UK, the album was released on Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks, which is responsible for domestic releases of Stereolab's major albums.
In January 1994, Stereolab achieved their first chart entry when the 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline, entered at number 75 on the UK Singles Chart. (Over the next three years, four more releases by the band would appear on this chart, ending with the EP Miss Modular in 1997.) Their third album, Mars Audiac Quintet, was released in August 1994. The album contains the single "Ping Pong", which gained press coverage for its explicitly Marxist lyrics. The band focused more on pop and less on rock, resulting in what AllMusic described as "what may be the group's most accessible, tightly-written album". It was the last album to feature O'Hagan as a full-time member. He would continue to make guest appearances on later releases. The group issued an EP titled Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center in April 1995. The EP was their musical contribution to an interactive art exhibit put on in collaboration with New York City artist Charles Long. Their second compilation of rarities, titled Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2), was released in July 1995.
The band's fourth album, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (March 1996), was a critical success and was played heavily on college radio. A record that "captivated alternative rock", it represented the group's "high-water mark" said music journalists Tom Moon and Joshua Klein, respectively. The album incorporated their early krautrock sound with funk, hip-hop influences and experimental instrumental arrangements. John McEntire of Tortoise also assisted with production and played on the album. Katharine Gifford was replaced by Morgane Lhote before recording, and bassist Duncan Brown by Richard Harrison after. Lhote was required to both learn the keyboards and 30 of the group's songs before joining.
Released in September 1997, Dots and Loops was their first album to enter the Billboard 200 charts, peaking at number 111. The album leaned towards jazz with bossa nova and 60's pop influences. Barney Hoskyns wrote in Rolling Stone that with it the group moved "ever further away from the one-chord Velvets drone-mesh of its early days" toward easy-listening and Europop. A review in German newspaper Die Zeit stated that in Dots and Loops, Stereolab transformed the harder Velvet Underground-like riffs of previous releases into "softer sounds and noisy playfulness". Contributors to the album included John McEntire and Jan St. Werner of German electropop duo Mouse on Mars. Stereolab toured for seven months and took a break when Gane and Sadier had a child. The group's third compilation of rarities, Aluminum Tunes, was issued in October 1998.
Their sixth album, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, was released in September 1999. It was co-produced by McEntire and American producer Jim O'Rourke, and was recorded with their new bassist, Simon Johns. The album received mixed reviews for its lighter sound, and peaked at number 154 on the Billboard 200. An unsigned NME review said that "this record has far more in common with bad jazz and progressive rock than any experimental art-rock tradition." In a 1999 article of Washington Post, Mark Jenkins asked Gane about the album's apparent lack of guitars; Gane responded, "There's a lot less upfront, distorted guitar ... But it's still quite guitar-based music. Every single track has a guitar on it."
Stereolab's seventh album, Sound-Dust (August 2001), rose to number 178 on the Billboard 200. The album also featured producers McEntire and O'Rourke. Sound-Dust was more warmly received than Cobra and Phases Group…. Critic Joshua Klein said that "the emphasis this time sounds less on unfocused experimentation and more on melody ... a breezy and welcome return to form for the British band." Erlewine of Allmusic stated that the album "[finds the group] deliberately recharging their creative juices" but he argued that Sound-Dust was "anchored in overly familiar territory."
2002–2008: Death of Hansen and later releases
In 2002, as they were planning their next album, Stereolab started building a studio north of Bordeaux, France. ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions; a compilation of BBC Radio 1 sessions was released in October. In the same year, Gane and Sadier's romantic relationship ended.
On 9 December 2002, Hansen was killed when hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. She was 36. Writer Pierre Perrone said that her "playful nature and mischievous sense of humour came through in the way she approached the backing vocals she contributed to Stereolab and the distinctive harmonies she created with Sadier." For the next few months, Stereolab lay dormant as the members grieved. They eventually decided to continue. Future album and concert reviews would mention the effects of Hansen's absence.
The EP Instant 0 in the Universe (October 2003) was recorded in France, and was Stereolab's first release following Hansen's death. Music journalist Jim DeRogatis said that the EP marked a return to their earlier, harder sound—"free from the pseudo-funk moves and avant-garde tinkering that had been inspired by Chicago producer Jim O'Rourke".
Stereolab's eighth album, Margerine Eclipse, was released on 27 January 2004 with generally positive reviews, and peaked at number 174 on the US Billboard 200. The track "Feel and Triple" was written in tribute to Hansen; Sadier said, "I was reflecting on my years with her ... reflecting on how we sometimes found it hard to express the love we had for one another." Sadier continued, "Our dedication to her on the album says, 'We will love you till the end', meaning of our lives. I'm not religious, but I feel Mary's energy is still around somewhere. It didn't just disappear." The Observers Molloy Woodcraft gave the album four out of five stars, and commented that Sadier's vocal performance as "life- and love-affirming", and the record as a whole as "Complex and catchy, bold and beatific." Kelefa Sanneh commented in Rolling Stone that Margerine Eclipse was "full of familiar noises and aimless melodies". Margerine Eclipse was Stereolab's last record to be released on American label Elektra Records, which shut down that same year. Future material would be released on Too Pure, the same label which had released some of the band's earliest material.
The group released six limited-edition singles in 2005 and 2006, which were anthologised in the 2006 compilation Fab Four Suture, and contained material which Mark Jenkins thought continued the brisker sound of the band's post-Hansen work. By June 2007, Stereolab's line-up comprised Tim Gane, Lætitia Sadier, Andy Ramsay, Simon Johns, Dominic Jeffrey, Joseph Watson, and Joseph Walters. In 2008, the band issued their next album under the label 4AD titled, Chemical Chords, which "[downplays] their arsenal of analog synths in favor of live instrumentation". The release was followed by an autumn tour in Europe, the United States and Canada.
In February 2009, they toured Australia as part of the St Jerome's Laneway Festival.
2009–2019: Hiatus and reunion
In April 2009, Stereolab manager Martin Pike announced a pause in their activities for the time being. He said that it was an opportune time for the members to move on to other projects. Not Music, a collection of unreleased material recorded at the same time as Chemical Chords, was released in 2010. In 2013, Gane and Sadier, who both focused on Cavern of Anti-Matter and solo work respectively, performed at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival held at Pontins in Camber Sands.
In February 2019, the group announced a tour of Europe and the United States to coincide with expanded, remastered reissues of several of the albums released under Warp Records. Stereolab were part of the lineup for 2019's Primavera Sound festival, taking part on the weekend of 30 May in Barcelona, Spain, and the following weekend in Porto, Portugal. It was the group's first live performance since 2009.
Musical style
Stereolab's music combines a droning rock sound with lounge instrumentals, overlaid with sing-song female vocals and pop melodies, and have also made use of unorthodox time signatures. It has been generally described as avant-pop, indie pop, art pop, indie electronic, indie rock, post-rock, experimental rock, and experimental pop. Sadier remarked in 2015 that "[the band's] records were written and recorded very quickly… we would write 35 tracks, sometimes more".
The band have played on vintage electronic keyboards and synthesizers from brands such as Farfisa and Vox and Moog. Gane has praised the instruments for their versatility: "We use the older effects because they're more direct, more extreme, and they're more like plasticine: you can shape them into loads of things." The 1994 album Mars Audiac Quintet prominently features Moog synthesizers.
Lætitia Sadier's English and French vocals was a part of Stereolab's music since the beginning, and she would occasionally sing wordlessly along with the music. In reference to her laid-back delivery, Peter Shapiro wrote facetiously in Wire that Sadier "display[ed] all the emotional histrionics of Nico", while some critics have commented that her vocals were unintelligible.Shea (2002), pp.53,54 Sadier would often trade vocals with Mary Hansen back-and-forth in a sing-song manner that has been described as "eerie" and "hypnotic", as well as "sweet [and] slightly alien". After Hansen's death in 2002, critic Jim Harrington commented that her absence is noticeable on live performances of Stereolab's older tracks, and that their newer songs could have benefited from Hansen's backing vocals.
In interviews, Gane and Sadier have discussed their musical philosophy. Gane said that "to be unique was more important than to be good." On the subject of being too obscure, he said in a 1996 interview that "maybe the area where we're on dodgy ground, is this idea that you need great knowledge [of] esoteric music to understand what we're doing." Sadier responded to Gane, saying that she "think[s] we have achieved a music that will make sense to a lot of people whether they know about Steve Reich or not." The duo were up-front about their desire to grow their sound: for Gane, "otherwise it just sounds like what other people are doing", and for Sadier, "you trust that there is more and that it can be done more interesting."
Influences
Their records have been heavily influenced by the "motorik" technique of 1970s krautrock groups such as Neu! and Faust. Tim Gane has supported the comparison: "Neu! did minimalism and drones, but in a very pop way." Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that their music also had "echoes of bubblegum, of exotica, of Beach Boys and bossa nova", with their earlier work "bearing strong Velvet Underground overtones". Funk, jazz, and Brazilian music were additional inspirations for the band. Stephan Davet of French newspaper Le Monde said that Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996) had musical influences such as Burt Bacharach, and Françoise Hardy. The sounds influenced by minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich can be found on the 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night. Stereolab's style also incorporates easy-listening music of the 1950s and '60s. Joshua Klein in Washington Post said that, "Years before everyone else caught on, Stereolab [were] referencing the 1970s German bands Can and Neu!, the Mexican lounge music master Esquivel and the decidedly unhip Burt Bacharach." Regarding their later work such as Instant 0 in the Universe (2003) and Margerine Eclipse (2004), critics have compared the releases to the band's earlier guitar-driven style.
Live performances
Stereolab toured regularly to support their album releases. In a 1996 Washington Post gig review, Mark Jenkins wrote that Stereolab started out favouring an "easy-listening syncopation", but eventually reverted to a "messier, more urgent sound" characteristic of their earlier performances. In another review Jenkins said that the band's live songs "frequently veer[ed] into more cacophonous, guitar-dominated territory", in contrast to their albums such as Cobra and Phases Group… In the Minneapolis Star Tribune Jon Bream compared the band's live sound to feedback-driven rock bands like the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. Jim Harrington of The Oakland Tribune argued that "Sadier often sounded like a third percussion instrument more than a lead vocalist", further stating in regard to her switching between singing in English and French that "a Stereolab show is one of the few concerts where it's hard to find even the biggest fans mouthing along with the lyrics." Regarding being onstage, Gane has said that "I don't like to be the center of attention ... I just get into the music and am not really aware of the people there. That's my way of getting through it." Remarking of the band's 2019 reunion tour, he added that "[Stereolab] never were really a festival band… We’re not like, 'Hey, how you all doing?' and all that stuff.”
Lyrics and titles
Stereolab's music is politically and philosophically charged. Dave Heaton of PopMatters said that the group "[uses] lyrics to convey ideas while using them for the pleasurable way the words sound." Lætitia Sadier, who writes the group's lyrics, was influenced by both the Situationist philosophy Society of the Spectacle by Marxist theorist Guy Debord, and her anger towards the Iraq War. The Surrealist, as well as other Situationist cultural and political movements were also influences, as stated by Sadier and Gane in a 1999 Salon interview.
Critics have seen Marxist allusions in the band's lyrics, and have gone so far as to call the band members themselves Marxist. Music journalist Simon Reynolds commented that Sadier's lyrics tend to lean towards Marxist social commentary rather than "affairs of the heart". The 1994 single "Ping Pong" has been put forward as evidence in regard to these alleged views. In the song, Sadier sings "about capitalism's cruel cycles of slump and recovery" with lyrics that constitute "a plainspoken explanation of one of the central tenets of Marxian economic analysis" (said critics Reynolds and Stewart Mason, respectively).
Band members have resisted attempts to link the group and its music to Marxism. In a 1999 interview, Gane stated that "none of us are Marxists ... I've never even read Marx." Gane said that although Sadier's lyrics touch on political topics, they do not cross the line into "sloganeering". Sadier also said that she had read very little Marx. In contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis, a radical political philosopher but strong critic of Marxism, has been cited as a marking influence in Sadier's thinking. The name of her side project, Monade, and its debut album title, Socialisme ou Barbarie, are also references to the work of Castoriadis.
Stereolab's album and song titles occasionally reference avant-garde groups and artists. Gane said that the title of their 1999 album Cobra and Phases Group… contains the names of two Surrealist organisations, "CoBrA" and "Phases Group", The title of the song "Brakhage" from Dots and Loops (1997), is a nod to experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Other examples are the 1992 compilation Switched On, named after Wendy Carlos' 1968 album Switched-On Bach, and the 1993 song "Jenny Ondioline", a portmanteau of inventor Georges Jenny and his instrument the Ondioline.
Legacy
Stereolab have been called one of the most "influential" and "fiercely independent and original groups of the Nineties" by writers Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Pierre Perrone respectively; as well as one of "the decade's most innovative British bands." by Mark Jenkins. Simon Reynolds commented in Rolling Stone that the group's earlier records form "an endlessly seductive body of work that sounds always the same, always different." In a review for the 1992 single "John Cage Bubblegum", Jason Ankeny said that "No other artist of its generation fused the high-minded daring of the avant-garde and the lowbrow infectiousness of pop with as much invention, skill, and appeal." In The Wire, Peter Shapiro compared the band to Britpop bands Oasis and Blur, and defended their music against the charge that it is "nothing but the sum total of its arcane reference points." They were one of the first groups to be termed post-rock—in a 1996 article, journalist Angela Lewis applied the "new term" to Stereolab and three other bands who have connections to the group. Stylistically, music journalist J. D. Considine credits the band for anticipating and driving the late 1990s revival of vintage analogue instruments among indie rock bands. Stephen Christian, a creative director of Warp Records, said that the group "exists in the gap between the experimentation of the underground and the appeal of the wider world of pop music".
The group have also received negative press. Barney Hoskyns questioned the longevity of their music in a 1996 Mojo review, saying that their records "sound more like arid experiments than music born of emotional need." In Guardian, Dave Simpson stated: "With their borrowings from early, obscure Kraftwerk and hip obtuse sources, [Stereolab] sound like a band of rock critics rather than musicians." Lætitia Sadier's vocals were cited by author Stuart Shea as often being "indecipherable".
A variety of artists, musical and otherwise, have collaborated with Stereolab. In 1995 the group teamed up with sculptor Charles Long for an interactive art show in New York City, for which Long provided the exhibits and Stereolab the music. They have released tracks by and toured with post-rock band Tortoise, while John McEntire of Tortoise has in turn worked on several Stereolab albums. In the 1990s, the group collaborated with the industrial band Nurse With Wound and released two albums together, Crumb Duck (1993) and Simple Headphone Mind (1998), and Stereolab also released "Calimero" (1998) with French avant-garde singer and poet Brigitte Fontaine. The band worked with Herbie Mann on the song "One Note Samba/Surfboard" for the 1998 AIDS-Benefit album, Red Hot + Rio, produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Stereolab alumni have also founded bands of their own. Guitarist Tim Gane founded the side project Cavern of Anti-Matter and also formed Turn on alongside band member Sean O'Hagan, who formed his own band the High Llamas. Katharine Gifford formed Snowpony with former My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe. Sadier has released three albums with her four-piece side-project Monade, whose sound Mark Jenkins called a "little more Parisian" than Stereolab's. Backing vocalist Mary Hansen formed a band named Schema with members of Hovercraft and released their eponymous EP in 2000.
As of August 1999, US album sales stood at 300,000 copies sold. Despite receiving critical acclaim and a sizeable fanbase, commercial success eluded the group. Early in their career, their 1993 EP Jenny Ondioline entered the UK Singles Chart, but financial issues prevented the band from printing enough records to satisfy demand. According to Sadier, however, the band "[avoided] going overground" like PJ Harvey, Pulp and the Cranberries, all of whom quickly rose from obscurity to fame, adding: "This kind of notoriety is not a particularly good thing, [and] you don't enjoy it anymore." When Elektra Records was closed down by Warner Bros. Records in 2004, Stereolab was dropped along with many other artists, reportedly because of poor sales. Tim Gane said in retrospect that the group "signed to Elektra because we thought we would be on there for an album or two and then we'd get ejected. We were surprised when we got to our first album!" Since then, Stereolab's self-owned label Duophonic has inked a worldwide distribution deal with independent label Too Pure. Through Duophonic, the band both licenses their music and releases it directly (depending on geographic market). Gane said, "... we license our recordings and just give them to people, then we don't have to ask for permission if we want to use it. We just want to be in control of our own music."
MembersCurrent membersTim Gane - guitar, keyboards
Lætitia Sadier - lead vocals, keyboards, guitar, percussion, trombone
Andy Ramsay - drums
Joseph Watson - keyboards, vibraphone, backing vocals
Xavier Muñoz Guimera - bass guitar, backing vocals Former membersJoe Dilworth - drums
Martin Kean - bass guitar
Gina Morris - backing vocals
Mick Conroy - keyboards
Mary Hansen - vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion
Sean O'Hagan - keyboards, guitar
Duncan Brown - bass guitar
Katharine Gifford - keyboards
Morgane Lhote - keyboards
David Pajo - bass guitar
Richard Harrison - bass guitar
Simon Johns - bass guitar
Dominic Jeffery - keyboards
Joseph Walters - french horn, guitar, keyboards
Julien Gasc - keyboards, backing vocals TimelineDiscography
Stereolab released many non-LP tracks that they later anthologised as compilation albums.Studio albums Peng! (1992)
Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993)
Mars Audiac Quintet (1994)
Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996)
Dots and Loops (1997)
Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night (1999)
Sound-Dust (2001)
Margerine Eclipse (2004)
Chemical Chords (2008)
Not Music (2010)Compilation albums'''
Switched On (1992)
Refried Ectoplasm: Switched On, Vol. 2 (1995)
Aluminum Tunes: Switched On, Vol. 3 (1998)
ABC Music: The Radio 1 Sessions (2002)
Oscillons from the Anti-Sun (2005)
Fab Four Suture (2006)
Serene Velocity: A Stereolab Anthology (2006)
Electrically Possessed: Switched On, Vol. 4'' (2021)
References
Book sources
Chart data
External links
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups disestablished in 2009
Musical groups reestablished in 2019
English indie rock groups
English post-rock groups
Flying Nun Records artists
Drag City (record label) artists
4AD artists
British indie pop groups
English experimental rock groups
Art pop musicians
Experimental pop musicians
Avant-pop musicians
Slumberland Records artists | false | [
"Casual Viewin' is a 2000 album by Canadian alternative rock band 54-40. The title refers to a lyric from the Genesis song \"Broadway Melody of 1974\", which reads: \"Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand.\" 54-40 commented in interviews at the time of the album's release that they were influenced by McLuhan's work when making the album, and that they adopted the Genesis lyric as a result.\n\nTrack listing\n \"Casual Viewin'\" – 4:43\n \"Unbend\" – 3:49\n \"Blue Sky\" – 4:05\n \"Sunday Girl\" – 4:39\n \"Roll Up Rule\" – 4:23\n \"She's a Jones\" – 4:24\n \"It's Alright\" – 3:45\n \"Watching You\" – 4:44\n \"Say My Name\" – 4:40\n \"Speak What You Feel\" – 5:10\n \"Someone's Mind\" – 3:28\n \"You the One\" – 4:22\n \"Big You Up\" – 3:57\n \"Castles\" – 3:54\n\nAdditional Personnel\n\nProduction\n Howard Redekopp - Engineer\n\n2000 albums\n54-40 albums",
"War in My Mind is the ninth solo studio album by American singer-songwriter Beth Hart, released on September 27, 2019. The album was produced by Rob Cavallo. Hart will tour the UK and Ireland in support of the album in 2020.\n\nBackground\nIn the album announcement, Hart commented: \"More than any record I've ever made, I'm more open to being myself on these songs [...] On this record, something told me, 'Just let it be what it is.' I think I'm starting to make a little headway, getting closer to the truth. And I might not know what the truth is... but I'm OK with that.\"\n\nCritical reception\n\nWriting for American Songwriter, Hal Horowitz called it \"arguably [Hart's] most intimate and intense set yet\", further commenting that \"Her dynamic, classically influenced piano propels most songs including the ballads, such as the title track, that dominate this set. [...] There's no denying the truth, integrity and gritty realism that infuses everything Beth Hart touches.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2019 albums\nBeth Hart albums"
] |
[
"Suzanne Lenglen",
"Professional career"
] | C_41fb23025a874c888de27a229c0a75c0_1 | How did her professional career begin? | 1 | How did Suzanne Lenglen's professional career begin? | Suzanne Lenglen | The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States in a series of matches against Mary K. Browne. Browne, winner of the US Championships from 1912 to 1914, was 35 and considered to be past her prime, although she had reached the French final earlier that year (losing to Lenglen 6-1, 6-0). For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players). In their first match in New York City, Lenglen put on a performance that New York Times writer Allison Danzig lauded as "one of the most masterly exhibitions of court generalship that has been seen in this country." When the tour ended in February 1927, Lenglen had defeated Browne, 38 matches to 0. She was exhausted from the lengthy tour, and a physician advised Lenglen that she needed a lengthy period away from the game to recover. Instead, Lenglen chose to retire from competitive tennis to run a Paris tennis school, which she set up with the help and money of her lover Jean Tillier. The school, located next to the courts of Roland Garros, slowly expanded and was recognised as a federal training centre by the French tennis federation in 1936. During this period, Lenglen also wrote several books on tennis. Lenglen was criticised widely for her decision to turn professional, and the All England Club at Wimbledon even revoked her honorary membership. Lenglen, however, described her decision as "an escape from bondage and slavery" and said in the tour programme, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis and have paid thousands of francs in entrance fees to be allowed to do so.... I have worked as hard at my career as any man or woman has worked at any career. And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 - not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study - tennis.... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy - should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune - for whom?" As for the amateur tennis system, Lenglen said, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport? Does it make tennis more popular - or does it tend to suppress and hinder an enormous amount of tennis talent lying dormant in the bodies of young men and women whose names are not in the social register?" CANNOTANSWER | The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States | Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen (; 24 May 18994 July 1938) was a French tennis player. She was ranked as the inaugural world No. 1 from 1921 to 1926, winning 8 Grand Slam titles in singles and 21 in total. She also was a four-time World Hard Court Champion in singles, and ten times in total. Lenglen won six Wimbledon singles titles, including five in a row from 1919 to 1923, and was the champion in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at the first two open French Championships in 1925 and 1926. In doubles, she was undefeated with her usual partner Elizabeth Ryan, highlighted by another six titles at Wimbledon. Lenglen was the first leading amateur to turn professional, and was ranked as the greatest women's tennis player from the amateur era in the 100 Greatest of All Time series.
Coached by her father Charles throughout her career, Lenglen began playing tennis at age 11, becoming the youngest major champion in history with her 1914 World Hard Court Championship title at age 15. This success along with her balletic playing style and brash personality helped make Lenglen a national heroine in a country coping with the aftermath of World War I. After the war delayed her career four years, Lenglen was largely unchallenged. She won her Wimbledon debut in 1919 in the second-longest final in history, the only one of her major singles finals she did not win by a lopsided scoreline. Her only post-war loss came in a retirement against Molla Mallory, her only amateur match in the United States. Afterwards, she began a 179-match win streak, during which she defeated Helen Wills in the high-profile Match of the Century in 1926. Following a misunderstanding at Wimbledon later that year, Lenglen abruptly retired from amateur tennis, signing to headline a professional tour in the United States beginning that same year.
Referred to by the French press as La Divine (The Goddess), Lenglen revolutionised the sport by integrating the aggressive style of men's tennis into the women's game and breaking the convention of women competing in clothing unsuitable for tennis. She incorporated fashion into her matches, highlighted by her signature bandeau headwear. Lenglen is recognised as the first female athlete to become a global sport celebrity and her popularity led Wimbledon to move to its larger modern-day venue. Her professional tours laid the foundation for the series of men's professional tours that continued until the Open Era, and led to the first major men's professional tournament the following year. Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978, and the second show court at the site of the French Open is named in her honour.
Early life and background
Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen was born in Paris on 24 May 1899 to Charles and Anaïs Lenglen. She had a younger brother who did not live past the age of three. Lenglen's father was a pharmacist who became wealthy by inheriting a horse-drawn omnibus company from his father. Several years after Suzanne was born, her father sold the omnibus business, after which he relocated the family to Marest-sur-Matz near Compiègne in northern France in 1904. They spent their winters in Nice on the French Riviera in a villa across the street from the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. By the time Lenglen was eight, she excelled at a variety of sports including swimming and cycling. In particular, she enjoyed diabolo, a game involving balancing a spinning top on a string with two attached sticks. During the winter, Lenglen performed diabolo routines in front of large crowds on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Her father credited her confidence to play tennis in large stadiums to her experience as a diabolo performer.
Lenglen's father attended tennis tournaments on the Riviera circuit, where the world's best players competed in the first half of the year. Having played the sport recreationally, he bought Lenglen a racket from a toy store in June 1910 shortly after she had turned 11 years old, and set up a makeshift court on the lawn of their house. She quickly showed enough skill to convince her father to get her a proper racket from a tennis manufacturer within a month. He developed training exercises and played against his daughter. Three months later, Lenglen travelled to Paris to play on a proper clay court owned by her father's friend, Dr. Cizelly. At Cizelly's recommendation, she entered a local high-level tournament in Chantilly. In the singles handicap event, Lenglen won four rounds and finished in second place.
Lenglen's success at the Chantilly tournament prompted her father to train her more seriously. He studied the leading male and female players and decided to teach Lenglen the tactics from the men's game, which was more aggressive than the women's style of slowly constructing points from the baseline. When the family returned to Nice towards the end of autumn, her father arranged for her to play twice a week at the Nice Lawn Tennis Club even though children had never been allowed on the courts, and had her practice with leading male players at the club. Lenglen began training with Joseph Negro, the club's teaching professional. Negro had a wide variety of shots in his repertoire and trained Lenglen to play the same way. As Lenglen's primary coach, her father employed harsh and rigorous methods, saying, "I was a hard taskmaster, and although my advice was always well intentioned, my criticisms were at times severe, and occasionally intemperate." Lenglen's parents watched her matches and discussed her minute errors between themselves throughout, only showing restraint in their criticisms when she was sick. As a result, Lenglen became comfortable with appearing ill, which made it difficult for others to tell if she was sick.
Amateur career
1912–13: Maiden titles
Lenglen entered her first non-handicap singles event in July 1912 at the Compiègne Championships near her hometown, her only regular event of the year. She won her debut match in the quarterfinals before losing her semifinal to Jeanne Matthey. She also played in the singles and mixed doubles handicap events, winning both of them. When Lenglen returned to Nice in 1913, she entered a handicap doubles event in Monte Carlo with Elizabeth Ryan, an American who had moved to England a year earlier. Although they lost the final in three sets, Ryan became Lenglen's most frequent doubles partner and the pair never lost another match. Lenglen's success at handicap events led her to enter more regular events in the rest of 1913. She debuted at the South of France Championships at the Nice Club in March, winning only one match. Nonetheless, when Lenglen returned to Compiègne, she won her first two regular singles titles, both within a few weeks of her 14th birthday. After losing to Matthey again at both of her events in July, the latter of which by default, Lenglen rebounded to win titles in her last two singles events of the year.
1914: World Hard Court champion
Back on the Riviera in 1914, Lenglen focused on regular events. Her victory in singles against high-ranking British player Ruth Winch was regarded as a huge surprise by the tennis community. However, Lenglen still struggled at larger tournaments early in the year, losing to Ryan in the quarterfinals at Monte Carlo and six-time Wimbledon champion Dorothea Lambert Chambers in the semifinals at the South of France Championships. In May, Lenglen was invited to enter the French Championships, which was restricted to French players. The format gave the defending champion a bye until the final match, known as the challenge round. In that match, they faced the winner of the All Comers' competition, a standard tournament bracket for the remaining players. Lenglen won the All Comers' singles draw of six players to make it to the challenge round against Marguerite Broquedis. Despite winning the first set, she lost the match. This was the last time in Lenglen's career she lost a completed singles match, and the only time she lost a singles final other than by default. Although she also lost the doubles challenge round at the tournament to Blanche and Suzanne Amblard, Lenglen won the mixed doubles title with Max Decugis as her partner.
Lenglen's performance at the French Championships set the stage for her debut at the World Hard Court Championships, one of the major tournaments recognised by the International Lawn Tennis Federation at the time. She won the singles final against Germaine Golding for her first major title. The only set she lost during the event was to Suzanne Amblard in the semifinals. Her volleying ability was instrumental in defeating Amblard, while her ability to outlast Golding in long rallies gave her the advantage in the final. Lenglen also won the doubles title with Ryan over the Amblard sisters without dropping a game in the final. She finished runner-up in mixed doubles to Ryan and Decugis. Following the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen could have debuted at Wimbledon; however, her father decided against it. He did not like her chances of defeating Lambert Chambers on grass, a surface on which she had never competed, given that she already lost to her earlier in the year on clay.
World War I hiatus
After World War I began in August 1914, tournaments ceased, interfering with Lenglen's father's plan for her to enter Wimbledon in 1915. During the war, Lenglen's family lived at their home in Nice, an area less affected by the war than northern France. Although there were no tournaments, Lenglen had plenty of opportunity to train in Nice. Soldiers came to the Riviera to temporarily avoid the war, including leading tennis players such as two-time United States national champions R. Norris Williams and Clarence Griffin. These players competed in charity exhibitions primarily in Cannes to raise money for the French Red Cross. Lenglen participated and had the opportunity to play singles matches against male players.
1919: Classic Wimbledon final
Many tournaments resumed in 1919, following the end of World War I. Lenglen won nine singles titles in ten events, all four of her doubles events, and eight mixed doubles titles in ten events. She won the South of France Championships in March without dropping a game in any of her four matches. Although the French Championships and World Hard Court Championships did not return until the following year, Lenglen was able to debut at Wimbledon in July. She won the six-round All Comers' bracket, only losing six games in the first four rounds. Her biggest challenge in the All Comers' competition was her doubles partner Ryan, who saved match points and levelled the second set of their semifinal at five games, only losing after an hour-long rain delay. Although the 20-year-old Lenglen was considered a favourite against the 40-year-old Lambert Chambers in the challenge round, Lambert Chambers was able to trouble Lenglen with well-placed drop shots. Lenglen won the first set 10–8 after both players saved two set points. After saving two match points, Lenglen won the third set 9–7 for her first Wimbledon title. The match set the record for most games in a Wimbledon women's singles final with 44, only since surpassed by the 1970 final between Margaret Court and Billie Jean King. Over 8,000 people attended the match, well above the seating capacity of 3500 on Centre Court. Lenglen defeated Lambert Chambers and Ethel Larcombe again in the doubles final with Ryan. She already lost to Ryan and Randolph Lycett in the her mixed doubles quarterfinal, her only loss of the year in any discipline aside from defaults.
1920: Olympic champion
Lenglen began 1920 with five singles titles on the Riviera, three of which she won in lopsided finals against Ryan. However, Ryan was able to defeat Lenglen in mixed doubles at Cannes in windy conditions, Lenglen's only mixed doubles loss of the year. Although the World Hard Court Championships returned in May, Lenglen withdrew due to illness. She recovered in time for the French Championships two weeks later and won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles to complete a triple crown. Lenglen easily made it to the challenge round in singles, where she defeated Broquedis in a rematch of the 1914 final. She won the doubles event with Élisabeth d'Ayen and defended her mixed doubles title with Decugis, only needing to play the challenge round.
Lenglen's next event was Wimbledon. Lambert Chambers won the All Comers' final to set up a rematch of the previous year's final. Although the match was expected to be close again and began 2–2, Lenglen won ten of the last eleven games for her second consecutive Wimbledon singles title. She won the triple crown, taking the doubles with Ryan and the mixed doubles with Australian Gerald Patterson. The doubles final was also a rematch of the previous year's final against Lambert Chambers and Larcombe, while the mixed doubles victory came against defending champions Ryan and Lycett. Lenglen's decision to partner with Patterson led to the Fédération Française de Lawn Tennis (FFLT) threatening to not pay her expenses for the Wimbledon trip unless she partnered with a compatriot. Lenglen and her father replied by paying for the trip themselves. After Wimbledon, Lenglen won both of her events in Belgium in the lead-up to the Olympic Games in Antwerp. At the Olympics, Lenglen won two gold medals and one bronze medal for France. She won the singles title over British player Dorothy Holman, losing only four games in the entire event. She won mixed doubles with Decugis, overcoming an opening set loss in their quarterfinal. Lenglen partnered with d'Ayen again in the doubles event, losing their semifinal to Kathleen McKane and Winifred McNair in a tight match that ended 8–6 in the decisive third set. This match was Lenglen's only loss in doubles all year. Their opponents in the bronze medal match defaulted.
1921: Only singles defeat post-World War I
Lenglen again dominated the tournaments on the Riviera in 1921, winning eight titles in singles, six in doubles, and seven in mixed doubles. Her only loss came in mixed doubles. She won all of her matches against Ryan, four in singles and five in mixed doubles. All of Lenglen's doubles titles on the Riviera were with Ryan.
Lenglen defended her triple crown at the French Championships. Later that month, she returned to the World Hard Court Championships, where five-time United States national singles champion Molla Mallory was making her debut. The United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) sent Mallory and Bill Tilden to the tournament with the hope of drawing Lenglen over to compete in the United States. Although Lenglen defeated Mallory in the final in straight sets, she trailed 2–3 in the second set before winning the last four games. Lenglen won the triple crown at the tournament, partnering with Golding in doubles and Jacques Brugnon in mixed doubles. She then won her third consecutive Wimbledon titles in both singles and doubles, defeating her doubles partner Ryan in a lopsided singles final. She withdrew from the mixed doubles event after her partner suffered an ankle injury.
Lenglen planned to compete at the U.S. National Championships in August to prove she deserved to be called a world champion. Due to illness delaying her trip, however, she did not make it to New York until three days before her opening match and was still sick when she arrived. After Lenglen's opening round opponent defaulted, the tournament rescheduled her second round match against Mallory for that night to appease the large crowd that showed up to see Lenglen play. With over 8,000 people in attendance, Mallory took a 2–0 lead in the first set before Lenglen began coughing in the third game. After losing the first set, Lenglen retired from the match two points into the second set for her only singles loss after World War I. She only played two more matches in the United States, both small exhibitions, before leaving in late September.
1922: Start of 179-match win streak
During the 1922 season, Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline other than by default. She did not return to competitive tennis until March, six months after her loss to Mallory. Lenglen's first tournament back was the South of France Championships, where she won the doubles and mixed doubles titles. She did not play the singles event and did not play singles again until a month later at the Beausoleil Championships in Monte Carlo, where she won the title without dropping a game. This tournament began a 179-match win streak that Lenglen continued through the end of her amateur career.
In the middle of the year, Lenglen won triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships, the French Championships, and Wimbledon. At the first, she saved two set points in her semifinal against McKane before winning the set 10–8. After only needing to play three challenge round matches at the French, Lenglen agreed to forgo the challenge round system at Wimbledon and be included in the main draw at the request of the tournament organisers. In the singles final, she faced Mallory in a rematch of their U.S. National Championship meeting. Like in the United States, Mallory won the first two games of the final. However, Lenglen rebounded and won the next twelve games for the title. The final remains the shortest in Wimbledon history, only lasting 26 minutes.
1923: Career-best 45 titles
Lenglen entered more events and won more titles in 1923 than any other year. She won all 16 of the singles events she entered, as well as 13 of 14 doubles events, and 16 of 18 mixed doubles events. Unlike previous years, she did not default a match in any discipline. At the beginning of the season, Mallory travelled to France to make her debut on the French Riviera circuit. Lenglen and Mallory had their last encounter at the South of France Championships, which Mallory entered after not performing well at her other two events on the Riviera. Lenglen defeated her without losing a game. At the same tournament, Lenglen's twelve-month win streak across all disciplines came to an end with a mixed doubles loss to Ryan and Lycett.
At what was to be the last edition of the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen faced McKane in the final in each event, all three of which were held in the same afternoon. She defeated McKane in singles and mixed doubles, the latter of which was with Henri Cochet as her partner for the second consecutive year. With Ryan absent, however, Lenglen partnered with Golding and lost to the British team of McKane and Geraldine Beamish. At the French Championships, Lenglen defended her triple crown without losing a set in spite of the challenge round format being abandoned. She partnered with Brugnon in mixed doubles for the third straight year, while pairing up with Julie Vlasto for the first time in doubles. She faced the most adversity in the singles final when the crowd uncharacteristically booed her for trailing 0–4 to Golding in the second set. At Wimbledon, Lenglen won the singles and doubles titles with ease, never dropping more than three games in a set. In mixed doubles, however, she was defeated by Ryan and Lycett for the second time in the year. In September, Lenglen travelled outside of France and won titles in Belgium, Spain, and Portugal.
1924: No major titles
Although Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline in 1924 except by default, she did not win a major tournament for the first time since 1913 aside from her hiatus due to World War I. Minor illnesses limited her to three singles events on the Riviera. Lenglen played doubles more regularly, winning eight titles in both doubles and mixed doubles. In April, Lenglen travelled to Spain to compete at the Barcelona International. Although she won all three events, she contracted jaundice soon after, preventing her from playing the French Championships. Although she had not fully recovered by Wimbledon, she entered the tournament and won her first three singles matches without dropping a game. In the next round, however, Ryan proved to be a more difficult opponent and took the second set from Lenglen 8–6, only the third set of singles Lenglen had lost since World War I. Although Lenglen narrowly won the match, she then withdrew from the tournament following the advice of her doctor. She did not play another event the rest of the year, and in particular missed the Olympic Games in Paris, where Helen Wills won the women's singles event.
1925: Open French champion
Lenglen returned to tennis at the Beau Site New Year Meeting in Cannes the first week of the year, winning in doubles with Ryan in her only event. She only played singles at two tournaments on the Riviera, including the South of France Championships. Her only loss during this part of the season was to Ryan and Umberto de Morpurgo at the Côte d'Azur Championships in Cannes. In May, Lenglen entered the French Championships, the inaugural edition open to international players. The tournament was played at St. Cloud at the site of the defunct World Hard Court Championships. Lenglen won the triple crown and was not challenged in singles or mixed doubles. She won the singles final over McKane, losing only three games. She won the mixed doubles final with Brugnon against her doubles partner Julie Vlasto and Cochet. Although Lenglen and Vlasto lost the second set of the doubles final 9–11 to McKane and Evelyn Colyer, they won the other two sets with ease for the title.
Lenglen followed up her performance at the French Championships with another triple crown at Wimbledon. She played five singles matches and did not lose a game in the second set of any of them. The five games she dropped in total remain a record for fewest games lost in a singles title run in Wimbledon history. Her opponents included Ryan in her opening match, the defending champion McKane in the semifinals, and Joan Fry in the final. In mixed doubles, she partnered with Jean Borotra to defeat Ryan and de Morpurgo in the final. In doubles, Lenglen and Ryan played their last tournament together and won the title without dropping a set. During the last part of the year, Lenglen led France to a 7–4 victory in a tie against Australia, and defeated Australasian champion Daphne Akhurst in the final of the concurrent Deauville tournament. Later in the year, Lenglen won the doubles and mixed doubles events at the Cromer Covered Courts, the only time she played in England other than Wimbledon and her only indoor wood tournament.
1926: Match of the Century
The 1926 season unexpectedly was Lenglen's last as an amateur. At the beginning of the season, three-time reigning U.S. national champion Helen Wills travelled to the French Riviera with the hope of playing a match against Lenglen. With Wills's level of stardom approaching that of Lenglen's, there was an immense amount of hype for a match between them to take place. They only entered the same singles draw once, at the Carlton Club in Cannes. When Lenglen and Wills both made the final with little opposition, the club doubled the number of seats around their main court and all 3,000 seats plus standing room sold out. Spectators unable to get into the venue attempted to watch the match by climbing trees and ladders or by purchasing unofficial tickets for the windows and roofs of villas across the street. In what was called the Match of the Century, Lenglen defeated Wills in straight sets. The first match point became chaotic when a winner from Wills was called out by a spectator, leading both the players and spectators to believe the match was over. Photographers captured the unique situation of Lenglen and Wills shaking hands at the net as if the match had ended, a moment followed by the crowd flooding the court to congratulate Lenglen. After clarification the shot was in, Wills broke Lenglen to level the set. Despite Lenglen winning, her reputation of being unbeatable was damaged by Wills's competitive performance.
While Wills remained in France, Lenglen avoided a rematch on the Riviera. After Wills's season was marred by an appendectomy during the French Championships, she withdrew from both Grand Slam tournaments in Europe and another match between her and Lenglen never took place. In Wills's absence, Lenglen defended all three of her titles at the French Championships with ease, defeating Mary Browne in the singles final. She again won the doubles with Vlasto and the mixed doubles with Brugnon.
Wimbledon misunderstanding
Although Lenglen was a heavy favourite at Wimbledon with Wills not participating, she began the tournament facing two issues. She was concerned with her family's finances as her father's health was worsening, and she was not content with the FFLT wanting her to enter the doubles event with a French partner instead of her usual partner Ryan. Although Lenglen agreed to play with Vlasto as the FFLT wanted, she was unsettled by being drawn against Ryan in her opening doubles match.
Lenglen's situation did not improve once the tournament began. She opened the singles event with an uncharacteristic win against Browne in which she lost five games, the same number she had lost in the entire 1925 singles event. Her next singles match was then moved up before her doubles match to accommodate the royal family, who planned to be in attendance. Wanting to play doubles first, Lenglen asked for the match to be rescheduled. Although the request was never received, she arrived at the grounds late. After Wimbledon officials confronted her in anger over keeping Queen Mary waiting, she refused to play. The club ultimately adhered to Lenglen's wishes and rescheduled both matches with the doubles first. Nonetheless, Lenglen and Vlasto were defeated by Ryan and Browne in three sets while the crowd who typically supported Lenglen turned against her. Although she defeated Evelyn Dewhurst in the rescheduled singles match, she then withdrew from both singles and mixed doubles, ending her last amateur tournament.
Professional career
United States tour (1926–27)
A month after her withdrawal from Wimbledon, Lenglen signed a $50,000 contract (equivalent to about $ in 2020) with American sports promoter C. C. Pyle to headline a four-month professional tour in the United States beginning in October 1926. She had begun discussing a professional contract with Pyle's associate William Pickens when he visited her on the Riviera in April. Lenglen had previously turned down an offer of 200,000 francs (equivalent to about $ in 2020) to turn professional in the United States following her last victory over Molla Mallory in 1923, declining in large part to keep her amateur status. She became less concerned with that, however, after the crowd turned against her at Wimbledon. She was more interested in keeping her social status, and was convinced by Pyle that turning professional would not hurt her stardom or damage her reputation. With Lenglen on the tour, Pyle attempted to recruit other top players, including Wills, McKane, and leading Americans Bill Tilden and Bill Johnston. Although they all declined, Pyle was able to sign Mary Browne as well as men's players Vincent Richards, Paul Féret, Howard Kinsey, and Harvey Snodgrass. Richards was regarded as the biggest star among the male players, having won gold medals in singles and doubles at the 1924 Olympics. Once the tour began, Lenglen and all of the other players lost their amateur status.
Although professional tennis tournaments already existed, the tour was the first travelling professional exhibition series in tennis history. It featured 40 stops, starting on 9 October 1926 and ending on 14 February 1927, and included several stops in Canada as well as one in Cuba. Lenglen dominated Browne on the tour, winning all 33 of the best-of-three-set matches played to completion. Browne did not win a set until the second set at the 33rd stop. The only other set she won was the only set they played at the 36th stop, where Lenglen had decided to play just a one-set match while ill to avoid disappointing the fans. Browne also nearly won a set at the 23rd stop, losing 9–11, at which point Lenglen decided not to continue.
The tour was a financial success. Lenglen earned the most money, receiving half of the revenue from ticket sales and $100,000 in total, more than the $70,000 that Babe Ruth earned in 1927 as the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball. The average attendance was just over 4,000 at the 34 venues where it was recorded. The most well-attended venues were opening night at Madison Square Garden in New York City with an attendance of 13,000 and the Public Auditorium in Cleveland with an attendance of 10,000. Opening night in particular brought in $34,000 from tickets sold at $1.50 to $5.50 (equivalent to $ to $ in 2020).
British tour (1927)
A few months after the end of the United States tour, Lenglen signed with British promoter Charles Cochran to headline a shorter professional tour in the United Kingdom. Cochran recruited Dora Köring, the 1912 Olympic silver medalist in singles, and Dewhurst to play against Lenglen. Karel Koželuh and Kinsey were the male players on the tour. There were seven tour stops, all in July 1927. Lenglen won all seven of her singles matches, never losing more than five games in any of them. The last three stops were played on the grounds of association football clubs: Queen's Park in Glasgow, Blackpool, and Manchester United. These were the best attended events on the tour and the final match at Old Trafford had an attendance of over 15,000, the highest between either professional tour.
Aftermath
Lenglen was widely criticised for her decision to turn professional. Once the tour began, the FFLT expelled her and Féret while the All England Lawn Tennis Club revoked her membership. Lenglen in turn criticised amateur tennis for her nearing poverty. In the program for the United States professional tour, she stated, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis... And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 – not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study – tennis... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy – should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune – for whom?" She criticised the barriers that typically prevented ordinary people from becoming tennis players, stating, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport?" Lenglen did not participate in any other professional tours after 1927. She never formally applied to be reinstated as an amateur with the FFLT either. She had asked about the possibility in 1932 after Féret was reinstated, but was told to wait another three years and decided against it.
Rivalries
Lenglen vs. Mallory
Molla Mallory was the only player to defeat Lenglen in singles after World War I. Fifteen years older than Lenglen and originally from Norway, Mallory won a bronze medal at the 1912 Olympic Games before emigrating to the United States in 1914. While World War I halted tennis in Europe, Mallory established herself as the top-ranked American player, winning the first four U.S. National Championships she entered from 1915 through 1918. Whereas Lenglen regularly came to the net and had an all-court game built around control rather than power, the much older Mallory played almost exclusively from the baseline. The strengths of Mallory's game were that she took the ball early and had one of the most powerful forehands in women's tennis at the time. Mallory had a similar personality to Lenglen off the court. While they each hated losing, both of them smoked regularly and loved to dance. Lenglen faced Mallory just four times in singles, compiling a 3–1 record. She also won both of their doubles and mixed doubles encounters.
Their first two meetings were highlighted by Lenglen's health issues. In the final of the 1921 World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen nearly retired while struggling with blisters on her foot and trailing in the second set. Nonetheless, Lenglen proceeded to win by following her plan to play defensively and wait for Mallory to make unforced errors on attempted winners. In their second meeting at the 1921 U.S. National Championships, Mallory was able to take advantage of Lenglen's poor health, executing her usual strategy of going for winners to win the match. Although they had entered the doubles event as partners, Lenglen's health prevented them from playing any matches together at the tournament. Lenglen was able to easily win their last two meetings in 1922 and 1923 by playing more aggressively and employing Mallory's strategy of hitting well-placed winners from the baseline.
The press built up the rivalry between Lenglen and Mallory. After Lenglen's retirement against Mallory at the U.S. National Championships, the vast majority of American newspapers criticised Lenglen for not finishing the match and accused her of retiring because she did not think she could win. They coined a phrase "cough and quit" that became popular at the time for describing someone who needed an excuse to avoid losing. After Lenglen's victory over Mallory at Wimbledon, the American press returned to supporting Lenglen. Both Lenglen and Mallory believed the newspapers exaggerated the personal nature of their rivalry. Mallory in particular said, "The newspapers are the dirtiest, filthiest things that ever happened. I don't want my name in the newspapers. I have a better chance on the courts than in the newspapers of my own country."
Lenglen and Ryan
Lenglen's usual doubles partner Elizabeth Ryan was also her most frequent opponent in singles. Born in the United States, Ryan travelled to England in 1912 to visit her sister before deciding to stay there permanently. Although she lost all four of her appearances in major finals, Ryan won 26 major titles between doubles and mixed doubles. The biggest strength of her game was volleying. Tennis writer Ted Tinling said, "volleying as a fundamental, aggressive technique was first injected into the women's game by Ryan." Lenglen and Ryan first partnered together at a handicap event in Monte Carlo in 1913 when they were 13 and 20 years old respectively. After losing the final at that tournament, the two of them never lost a regular doubles match, only once dropping a set in 1923 to Dorothea Lambert Chambers and Kathleen McKane, again at Monte Carlo. Ryan was Lenglen's doubles partner for 40 of her 74 doubles titles, including all six at Wimbledon and two of three at the World Hard Court Championships.
Ryan defeated Lenglen in their first singles meeting in straight sets at Monte Carlo in 1914 and also won a set in their second meeting two months later. Following their first encounter, Lenglen won all 17 of their remaining matches, including five at Wimbledon and two major finals. The only time Ryan won a set against Lenglen after World War I was in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 1924, where Lenglen withdrew due to illness in the following round. When the FFLT asked Lenglen to take a French partner in doubles at Wimbledon in 1926, Ryan partnered with Mary Browne to defeat Lenglen and her new partner Julie Vlasto, coming from three match points down in the second set. Ryan also won their only other doubles meeting in 1914. In mixed doubles, Lenglen compiled a 23–9 record against Ryan. Half of her career mixed doubles losses were to Ryan. After losing their first six encounters, she recovered to win the next thirteen. Lenglen won her first mixed doubles match against Ryan at the 1920 Beaulieu tournament, starting a win streak that ended with a loss to Ryan and Lycett at the 1923 South of France Championships.
Overlap with Wills
Helen Wills was the closest to becoming Lenglen's counterpart. Wills finished her career with 19 Grand Slam singles titles, a record that stood until 1970. She succeeded Lenglen as world No. 1 in 1927 and kept that ranking for the next six years and nine of the next twelve overall until 1938. Late in Lenglen's amateur career, Wills had built up a similar level of stardom to Lenglen by winning the 1924 Olympic gold medal in singles in Lenglen's absence while still only 18 years old. Although their careers overlapped when Wills visited Europe in 1924 and 1926, Lenglen only faced Wills once in her career. Lenglen withdrew from Wimbledon and the Olympics due to jaundice in 1924, while Wills withdrew from the French Championships and Wimbledon in 1926 due to appendicitis, preventing a longer rivalry between tennis's two biggest female stars of the 1920s from emerging.
Playing style
Elizabeth Ryan described Lenglen's all-court style of play as, "[Lenglen] owned every kind of shot, plus a genius for knowing how and when to use them. She never gave an opponent the same kind of shot twice in a row. She’d make you run miles... her game was all placement and deception and steadiness. I had the best drop shot anybody ever had, but she could not only get up to it but was so fast that often she could score a placement off it." Her rivals Molla Mallory and Helen Wills both noted that Lenglen excelled at extending rallies and could take control of points with defensive shots. Although Lenglen built her game around control rather than power, she had the ability to hit powerful shots. In particular, Mallory praised the power behind her defensive shots, saying, "She is just the steadiest player that ever was. She just sent back at me whatever I sent at her and waited for me to make a fault. And her returns often enough were harder than the shots I sent up to her." British journalist A. E. Crawley regarded her as having the best movement of her time, saying, "I have never seen on a lawn tennis court either man or woman move with such mechanical and artistic perfection and prose. Whether [Lenglen's] objective is the ball or merely changing sides, she reminded you of the movement of fire over prairie grass." He believed she was a powerful server and an aggressive volleyer, commenting, "She serves with all the male athlete's power. She smashes with the same loose and rapid action, the release of a spring of steel. Her volley is not a timid push, but an arrow from the bow. And an arrow from the bow is Suzanne herself."
Adopting a style of play drawn from men's players led Lenglen to become one of the leading volleyers in women's tennis at a time when the women's game was centred around playing from the baseline, even for the top players. Lenglen aimed to come to the net to finish points quickly whenever possible. Kathleen McKane specifically noted that "Suzanne volleyed like a man" when describing her influence on women's tennis. While Lenglen did not model the majority of her game after any specific player, she modelled her forehand after that of Anthony Wilding. Like Wilding, she aimed to hit forehands flat and with little to no topspin. She used a continental grip and strived to hit balls early on the rise. Lenglen wrote in her book Lawn Tennis for Girls, "A favorite shot of mine is the backhand down the line". Lenglen was regarded as having a graceful style of play. Her movement was thought to resemble that of a dancer, a style that may have arisen from a course on classic Greek dance she had taken as a child. René Lacoste, a leading French men's tennis player from her era, said, "[Lenglen] played with marvelous ease the simplest strokes in the world. It was only after several games that I understood what harmony was concealed by her simplicity, what wonderful mental and physical balance was hidden by the facility of her play."
Lenglen developed a reputation for drinking cognac to help her play at pivotal points of her biggest matches. Most notably, she did so during the second and third sets of her victory against Lambert Chambers in the 1919 Wimbledon final, and at the start and during the more competitive second set of her victory over Helen Wills in the Match of the Century. She only travelled to the U.S. National Championships in 1921 after the USLTA agreed to supply her with alcohol during her stay even though consumption was illegal under the laws of Prohibition at the time. Nonetheless, they did not provide Lenglen with alcohol during her retirement loss to Mallory.
Legacy
Achievements
Lenglen was ranked as the 24th greatest player of all-time in the 100 Greatest of All Time series. She was the ninth-highest ranked woman overall, and the highest-ranked woman to play exclusively in the amateur era. After formal annual women's tennis rankings began to be published by tennis journalist and player A. Wallis Myers in 1921, Lenglen was No. 1 in the world in each of the first six editions of the rankings through her retirement from amateur tennis in 1926. She won a total of 250 titles consisting of 83 in singles, 74 in doubles, and 93 in mixed doubles. Nine of her singles titles were won without losing a game. Lenglen compiled win percentages of 97.9% in singles and 96.9% across all disciplines. After World War I, she won 287 of 288 singles matches, starting with a 108-match win streak and ending with a 179-match win streak, the latter of which was longer than Helen Wills' longest win streak of 161 matches. Lenglen ended her career on a 250-match win streak on clay.
Lenglen's eight Grand Slam women's singles titles are tied for the tenth-most all-time, and tied for fourth in the amateur era behind only Maureen Connolly's nine, Court's thirteen, and Wills's nineteen. Aside from the 1919 Wimbledon Championships, Lenglen did not lose more than three games in a set in any of her other Grand Slam or World Hard Court Championship singles finals. Lenglen's six Wimbledon titles are tied for the sixth-most in history. Her former record of five consecutive Wimbledon titles has only since been matched by Martina Navratilova, who won her sixth in a row in 1987. Lenglen's title at the 1914 World Hard Court Championships made her the youngest major champion in tennis history at 15 years and 16 days old, nearly a year ahead of the next two youngest, Martina Hingis and Lottie Dod.
Lenglen won a total of 17 titles at Wimbledon, 19 at the French Championships, and 10 at the World Hard Court Championships across all disciplines. Lenglen completed three Wimbledon triple crowns – winning the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles events at a tournament in the same year – in 1920, 1922, and 1925. She also won two triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships in 1921 and 1922, and six at the French Championships, the first four of which came consecutively from 1920 through 1923 when the tournament was invitation-only to French nationals and the last two of which came in 1925 and 1926 when the tournament was open to internationals.
Mythical persona
Following World War I, Lenglen became a symbol of national pride in France in a country looking to recover from the war. The French press referred to Lenglen as notre Suzanne (our Suzanne) to characterise her status as a national heroine; and more eminently as La Divine (The Goddess) to assert her unassailability. The press wrote about Lenglen as if she was infallible at tennis, often attributing any performance that was relatively poor by her standards to various excuses such as the fault of her doubles partner or to having concern over the health of her father. Journalists who criticised Lenglen were condemned and refuted by the rest of the press. At the Olympics, she introduced herself to journalists as "The Great Lenglen", a title that was well received. Before matches, Lenglen would predict to the press that she was going to win, a practice that Americans treated as improper. She explained, "When I am asked a question I endeavour to give a frank answer. If I know I am going to win, what harm is there in saying so?"
Lenglen was the first female athlete to be acknowledged as a celebrity outside of her sport. She was acquainted with members of royal families such as King Gustav V of Sweden, and actresses such as Mary Pickford. She was well known by the general public, and her matches were well-attended by people not otherwise interested in tennis. Many of her biggest matches were sold out, including the 1919 Wimbledon final against Lambert Chambers, where the attendance more than doubled the seating capacity of Centre Court, and her first match against Mallory, where tickets were sold at a cost of up to 500 francs (about $ in 2020) and an estimated 5,000 people could not gain entry to see the match after it had sold out. The popularity of Lenglen's matches at Wimbledon was a large factor in the club moving the tournament from Worple Road to its modern site at Church Road. A new Centre Court opened in 1922 with a seating capacity of nearly 10,000, nearly three times larger than that at the old venue. At the Match of the Century against Wills, seated tickets that were sold out at 300 francs, then equivalent to about $11 in the United States (or $ in 2020), were re-sold by scalpers at up to 1200 francs, which was then about $44 (or $ in 2020). This cost far exceeded that for the men's singles final at the U.S. National Championships at the time, which were sold at as low as $2 per seat (about $ in 2020).
Lenglen's mythical reputation began at a young age. She was known for a story about her father training her to improve her shot precision as a child by placing a handkerchief at different locations on the court and instructing her to hit it as a target. She was said to be able to hit the handkerchief with ease regardless of the type of incoming shot. Each time she did, he would fold it in half before replacing it with a coin. It was said that Lenglen could hit the coin up to five times in a row.
Professional tennis
Lenglen was the first leading tennis player to leave amateur tennis to play professionally, thereby launching playing tennis as a professional career. The exhibition tour she headlined in the United States from 1926 to 1927 in which a few players travelled together to compete against each other across a series of venues was the first of its kind. It established a format that was repeated over twenty times for the next four decades until the start of the Open Era. With Pyle only interested in tennis because of Lenglen, Vincent Richards, the leading male player on Lenglen's United States tour, organised the next such tour featuring himself competing against Karel Koželuh in 1928. He also began organising the first major professional tournaments to feature players who had been top amateurs, beginning with the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships first held later in 1927.
As the top women's players nearly all kept their amateur status, women were largely left out of both the travelling exhibition tours and the growing professional tournaments after Lenglen's playing career ended. The next significant exhibition tour to feature women's tennis players did not occur until 1941 when Alice Marble became one of the headliners on a tour that also featured leading male players Don Budge and Bill Tilden. Fellow top-ranked players Pauline Betz and Althea Gibson followed Marble by turning professional in 1947 and 1958 respectively. Betz played on two tours, one in 1947 and another from 1950 to 1951. Gibson played in a series of warmup matches for the Harlem Globetrotters, an exhibition basketball team in the United States.
Fashion
Lenglen redefined traditional women's tennis attire early in her career. By the 1919 Wimbledon final, she avoided donning a corset in favour of a short-sleeved and calf-length pleated skirt to go along with a distinctive circular-brimmed bonnet, a stark contrast with her much older opponent Dorothea Lambert Chambers who wore long sleeves and a plain skirt below the calf.
The following year, Lenglen ended the norm of women competing in clothes not suited for playing tennis. She had Jean Patou design her outfits that were not only intended to be stylish, but allowed her to perform her signature leaping ballet motion in points and did not restrict her movement on the court. This type of attire was among the earliest women's sportswear. Unusual for the time, her skirt was both sleeveless and only extended to her knees. Lenglen replaced the bonnet with a bandeau, which became known as the "Lenglen bandeau" and was her signature piece of attire throughout the rest of her career. On the court, she routinely wore makeup and popularised having tanned skin instead of a pale complexion that other players had preferred before her time. Later in her career, she moved away from just wearing white in favour of brighter-coloured outfits. Overall, she pioneered the idea of players using the tennis court to showcase fashion instead of just competing. Off the court, Lenglen frequently wore an oversized and expensive fur coat.
Honours
Lenglen is honoured in a variety of ways at the French Open. At Stade Roland Garros, the second show court that was built in 1994 with a capacity of about 10,000 was named Court Suzanne Lenglen in 1997. Outside the court, there is a bronze relief statue of Lenglen that was erected in 1994. The FFLT had originally planned to erect a statue of Lenglen immediately after her death, but this plan never materialised due to the start of World War II later that year. Additionally, one of the main entrances to the ground is Porte Suzanne Lenglen, which leads to Allée Suzanne Lenglen. Moreover, the women's singles championship trophy was named the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen in 1987. In spite of her success at the French Championships, Lenglen never competed at Stade Roland Garros as it did not become the site for the tournament until 1928 after her retirement from amateur tennis.
Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978. Following her death, she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Another road, the Avenue Suzanne Lenglen, is named in her honour outside of the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. She has been honoured in a Google Doodle twice, once on her 117th birthday on 24 May 2016, and again on International Women's Day on 8 March 2017.
Personal life
Lenglen was in a long-term relationship with Baldwin Baldwin from 1927 to 1932. Baldwin was the grandson and heir to Lucky Baldwin, a prominent businessman and real estate investor active in California. Lenglen met Baldwin during her professional tour in the United States. Although they intended to get married, those plans never materialised largely because Baldwin was already married and his wife would not agree to a divorce while Lenglen and Baldwin were together. During this time, her father died of poor health in 1929.
Lenglen was the author of several books on tennis, the first two of which she wrote during her amateur career. Her first book, Lawn Tennis for Girls, covered techniques and advice on tactics for beginner tennis players. She also wrote Lawn Tennis: The Game of Nations and a romantic novel, The Love Game: Being the Life Story of Marcelle Penrose. Lenglen finished her last book Tennis by Simple Exercises with Margaret Morris in 1937. The book featured a section by Lenglen on what was needed to become an all-around tennis player and a section by Morris, a choreographer and dancer, on exercises designed for tennis players. She played a role as an actress in the 1935 British musical comedy film Things Are Looking Up, in which she contests a tennis match against the lead character portrayed by Cicely Courtneidge.
Following her playing career, Lenglen returned to tennis as a coach in 1933, serving as the director of a school on the grounds of Stade Roland Garros. She opened her own tennis school for girls in 1936 at the Tennis Mirabeau in Paris with the support of the FFLT. She began instructing adults the following year as well. A year later in May 1938, Lenglen became the inaugural director of the French National Tennis School in Paris. Shortly after this appointment, however, Lenglen became severely fatigued while teaching at the school and needed to receive a blood transfusion. She previously had other health issues following her retirement, most notably suffering from appendicitis and having her appendix removed in October 1934. Lenglen died on 4 July 1938 at the age of 39, three weeks after she became ill, and was reported to have died from pernicious anemia. Her specific cause of death was unclear due to anemia being curable and reports of her having other illnesses, including leukemia. Lenglen was buried at the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen just outside Paris.
Career statistics
Performance timelines
Results from the French Championships before 1924 do not count towards the statistical totals because the tournament was not yet open to international players.
Singles
Doubles
Mixed doubles
Source: Little
Major finals
Grand Slam singles: 8 (8 titles)
World Championship singles: 4 (4 titles)
Source: Little
Olympic medal matches
Singles: 1 (1 gold medal)
Source: Little
See also
List of Grand Slam women's singles champions
List of Grand Slam women's doubles champions
List of Grand Slam mixed doubles champions
List of Grand Slam related tennis records
Notes
References
Books
External links
1899 births
1938 deaths
Deaths from pernicious anemia
Deaths from leukemia
Deaths from cancer in France
French female tennis players
French Championships (tennis) champions
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in mixed doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's singles
International Tennis Hall of Fame inductees
Medalists at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Olympic bronze medalists for France
Olympic gold medalists for France
Olympic medalists in tennis
Olympic tennis players of France
Tennis players from Paris
Professional tennis players before the Open Era
Tennis players at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Wimbledon champions (pre-Open Era)
World No. 1 tennis players
20th-century French women | false | [
"Keely Froling (born 31 January 1996) is an Australian professional basketball player for the Launceston Tornadoes in the NBL1.\n\nCareer\n\nCollege\nFroling played college basketball for two years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas for the SMU Mustangs. Froling decided to return home after her Sophomore season, to complete her studies and pursue her career in Australia.\n\nWNBL\nBorn and raised in Townsville, Froling would begin her WNBL career in her home town, signed as a development player alongside her twin sister, with the Townsville Fire for the 2011–12 WNBL season. Froling remained a member of the Fire's roster through to 2014. She then departed to begin her college career in the United States. Froling cut her college career short and has returned to Australia, after she was signed by the Canberra Capitals for 2016–17.\n\nNational Team\nFroling first played for Australia at the 2011 FIBA Oceania Under-16 Championship for Women where she took home Gold. She would then go on to participate in the world championship in Amsterdam, Netherlands where Australia placed 5th.\n\nPersonal life\nFroling has a twin sister, Alicia who is also a professional basketball player. She played alongside her in Townsville, SMU and the U17 National team. Their younger brothers, Harry and Sam, have also represented Australia internationally.\n\nReferences\n\n1996 births\nLiving people\nAustralian expatriate basketball people in the United States\nAustralian women's basketball players\nCanberra Capitals players\nForwards (basketball)\nSportspeople from Townsville\nTownsville Fire players\nUniversiade medalists in basketball\nUniversiade gold medalists for Australia\nMedalists at the 2017 Summer Universiade\nMedalists at the 2019 Summer Universiade",
"Taylor Jae Ortlepp (born 22 June 1997) is an Australian professional basketball player.\n\nCareer\n\nWNBL\nOrtlepp began her WNBL career at a young age, with the Adelaide Lightning in 2015. She would then depart to pursue her college career in the United States.\n\nIn 2020, Ortlepp returned to the Adelaide Lightning for her second season.\n\nCollege\nOrtlepp will begin her college career at the Boston College with the Eagles.\n\nNational team\nOrtlepp first represented Australia in 2013, at the FIBA Oceania Under-16 Championship in Melbourne. She would then go on to represent Australia, at the 2014 FIBA Under-17 World Championship in the Czech Republic. Where Australia finished in fifth place, with a 6–1 record.\n\nReferences\n\n1997 births\nLiving people\nGuards (basketball)\nAustralian women's basketball players"
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"Suzanne Lenglen",
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"How did her professional career begin?",
"The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States"
] | C_41fb23025a874c888de27a229c0a75c0_1 | What was her first professional tournament? | 2 | What was Suzanne Lenglen's first professional tournament? | Suzanne Lenglen | The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States in a series of matches against Mary K. Browne. Browne, winner of the US Championships from 1912 to 1914, was 35 and considered to be past her prime, although she had reached the French final earlier that year (losing to Lenglen 6-1, 6-0). For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players). In their first match in New York City, Lenglen put on a performance that New York Times writer Allison Danzig lauded as "one of the most masterly exhibitions of court generalship that has been seen in this country." When the tour ended in February 1927, Lenglen had defeated Browne, 38 matches to 0. She was exhausted from the lengthy tour, and a physician advised Lenglen that she needed a lengthy period away from the game to recover. Instead, Lenglen chose to retire from competitive tennis to run a Paris tennis school, which she set up with the help and money of her lover Jean Tillier. The school, located next to the courts of Roland Garros, slowly expanded and was recognised as a federal training centre by the French tennis federation in 1936. During this period, Lenglen also wrote several books on tennis. Lenglen was criticised widely for her decision to turn professional, and the All England Club at Wimbledon even revoked her honorary membership. Lenglen, however, described her decision as "an escape from bondage and slavery" and said in the tour programme, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis and have paid thousands of francs in entrance fees to be allowed to do so.... I have worked as hard at my career as any man or woman has worked at any career. And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 - not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study - tennis.... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy - should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune - for whom?" As for the amateur tennis system, Lenglen said, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport? Does it make tennis more popular - or does it tend to suppress and hinder an enormous amount of tennis talent lying dormant in the bodies of young men and women whose names are not in the social register?" CANNOTANSWER | For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players). | Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen (; 24 May 18994 July 1938) was a French tennis player. She was ranked as the inaugural world No. 1 from 1921 to 1926, winning 8 Grand Slam titles in singles and 21 in total. She also was a four-time World Hard Court Champion in singles, and ten times in total. Lenglen won six Wimbledon singles titles, including five in a row from 1919 to 1923, and was the champion in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at the first two open French Championships in 1925 and 1926. In doubles, she was undefeated with her usual partner Elizabeth Ryan, highlighted by another six titles at Wimbledon. Lenglen was the first leading amateur to turn professional, and was ranked as the greatest women's tennis player from the amateur era in the 100 Greatest of All Time series.
Coached by her father Charles throughout her career, Lenglen began playing tennis at age 11, becoming the youngest major champion in history with her 1914 World Hard Court Championship title at age 15. This success along with her balletic playing style and brash personality helped make Lenglen a national heroine in a country coping with the aftermath of World War I. After the war delayed her career four years, Lenglen was largely unchallenged. She won her Wimbledon debut in 1919 in the second-longest final in history, the only one of her major singles finals she did not win by a lopsided scoreline. Her only post-war loss came in a retirement against Molla Mallory, her only amateur match in the United States. Afterwards, she began a 179-match win streak, during which she defeated Helen Wills in the high-profile Match of the Century in 1926. Following a misunderstanding at Wimbledon later that year, Lenglen abruptly retired from amateur tennis, signing to headline a professional tour in the United States beginning that same year.
Referred to by the French press as La Divine (The Goddess), Lenglen revolutionised the sport by integrating the aggressive style of men's tennis into the women's game and breaking the convention of women competing in clothing unsuitable for tennis. She incorporated fashion into her matches, highlighted by her signature bandeau headwear. Lenglen is recognised as the first female athlete to become a global sport celebrity and her popularity led Wimbledon to move to its larger modern-day venue. Her professional tours laid the foundation for the series of men's professional tours that continued until the Open Era, and led to the first major men's professional tournament the following year. Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978, and the second show court at the site of the French Open is named in her honour.
Early life and background
Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen was born in Paris on 24 May 1899 to Charles and Anaïs Lenglen. She had a younger brother who did not live past the age of three. Lenglen's father was a pharmacist who became wealthy by inheriting a horse-drawn omnibus company from his father. Several years after Suzanne was born, her father sold the omnibus business, after which he relocated the family to Marest-sur-Matz near Compiègne in northern France in 1904. They spent their winters in Nice on the French Riviera in a villa across the street from the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. By the time Lenglen was eight, she excelled at a variety of sports including swimming and cycling. In particular, she enjoyed diabolo, a game involving balancing a spinning top on a string with two attached sticks. During the winter, Lenglen performed diabolo routines in front of large crowds on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Her father credited her confidence to play tennis in large stadiums to her experience as a diabolo performer.
Lenglen's father attended tennis tournaments on the Riviera circuit, where the world's best players competed in the first half of the year. Having played the sport recreationally, he bought Lenglen a racket from a toy store in June 1910 shortly after she had turned 11 years old, and set up a makeshift court on the lawn of their house. She quickly showed enough skill to convince her father to get her a proper racket from a tennis manufacturer within a month. He developed training exercises and played against his daughter. Three months later, Lenglen travelled to Paris to play on a proper clay court owned by her father's friend, Dr. Cizelly. At Cizelly's recommendation, she entered a local high-level tournament in Chantilly. In the singles handicap event, Lenglen won four rounds and finished in second place.
Lenglen's success at the Chantilly tournament prompted her father to train her more seriously. He studied the leading male and female players and decided to teach Lenglen the tactics from the men's game, which was more aggressive than the women's style of slowly constructing points from the baseline. When the family returned to Nice towards the end of autumn, her father arranged for her to play twice a week at the Nice Lawn Tennis Club even though children had never been allowed on the courts, and had her practice with leading male players at the club. Lenglen began training with Joseph Negro, the club's teaching professional. Negro had a wide variety of shots in his repertoire and trained Lenglen to play the same way. As Lenglen's primary coach, her father employed harsh and rigorous methods, saying, "I was a hard taskmaster, and although my advice was always well intentioned, my criticisms were at times severe, and occasionally intemperate." Lenglen's parents watched her matches and discussed her minute errors between themselves throughout, only showing restraint in their criticisms when she was sick. As a result, Lenglen became comfortable with appearing ill, which made it difficult for others to tell if she was sick.
Amateur career
1912–13: Maiden titles
Lenglen entered her first non-handicap singles event in July 1912 at the Compiègne Championships near her hometown, her only regular event of the year. She won her debut match in the quarterfinals before losing her semifinal to Jeanne Matthey. She also played in the singles and mixed doubles handicap events, winning both of them. When Lenglen returned to Nice in 1913, she entered a handicap doubles event in Monte Carlo with Elizabeth Ryan, an American who had moved to England a year earlier. Although they lost the final in three sets, Ryan became Lenglen's most frequent doubles partner and the pair never lost another match. Lenglen's success at handicap events led her to enter more regular events in the rest of 1913. She debuted at the South of France Championships at the Nice Club in March, winning only one match. Nonetheless, when Lenglen returned to Compiègne, she won her first two regular singles titles, both within a few weeks of her 14th birthday. After losing to Matthey again at both of her events in July, the latter of which by default, Lenglen rebounded to win titles in her last two singles events of the year.
1914: World Hard Court champion
Back on the Riviera in 1914, Lenglen focused on regular events. Her victory in singles against high-ranking British player Ruth Winch was regarded as a huge surprise by the tennis community. However, Lenglen still struggled at larger tournaments early in the year, losing to Ryan in the quarterfinals at Monte Carlo and six-time Wimbledon champion Dorothea Lambert Chambers in the semifinals at the South of France Championships. In May, Lenglen was invited to enter the French Championships, which was restricted to French players. The format gave the defending champion a bye until the final match, known as the challenge round. In that match, they faced the winner of the All Comers' competition, a standard tournament bracket for the remaining players. Lenglen won the All Comers' singles draw of six players to make it to the challenge round against Marguerite Broquedis. Despite winning the first set, she lost the match. This was the last time in Lenglen's career she lost a completed singles match, and the only time she lost a singles final other than by default. Although she also lost the doubles challenge round at the tournament to Blanche and Suzanne Amblard, Lenglen won the mixed doubles title with Max Decugis as her partner.
Lenglen's performance at the French Championships set the stage for her debut at the World Hard Court Championships, one of the major tournaments recognised by the International Lawn Tennis Federation at the time. She won the singles final against Germaine Golding for her first major title. The only set she lost during the event was to Suzanne Amblard in the semifinals. Her volleying ability was instrumental in defeating Amblard, while her ability to outlast Golding in long rallies gave her the advantage in the final. Lenglen also won the doubles title with Ryan over the Amblard sisters without dropping a game in the final. She finished runner-up in mixed doubles to Ryan and Decugis. Following the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen could have debuted at Wimbledon; however, her father decided against it. He did not like her chances of defeating Lambert Chambers on grass, a surface on which she had never competed, given that she already lost to her earlier in the year on clay.
World War I hiatus
After World War I began in August 1914, tournaments ceased, interfering with Lenglen's father's plan for her to enter Wimbledon in 1915. During the war, Lenglen's family lived at their home in Nice, an area less affected by the war than northern France. Although there were no tournaments, Lenglen had plenty of opportunity to train in Nice. Soldiers came to the Riviera to temporarily avoid the war, including leading tennis players such as two-time United States national champions R. Norris Williams and Clarence Griffin. These players competed in charity exhibitions primarily in Cannes to raise money for the French Red Cross. Lenglen participated and had the opportunity to play singles matches against male players.
1919: Classic Wimbledon final
Many tournaments resumed in 1919, following the end of World War I. Lenglen won nine singles titles in ten events, all four of her doubles events, and eight mixed doubles titles in ten events. She won the South of France Championships in March without dropping a game in any of her four matches. Although the French Championships and World Hard Court Championships did not return until the following year, Lenglen was able to debut at Wimbledon in July. She won the six-round All Comers' bracket, only losing six games in the first four rounds. Her biggest challenge in the All Comers' competition was her doubles partner Ryan, who saved match points and levelled the second set of their semifinal at five games, only losing after an hour-long rain delay. Although the 20-year-old Lenglen was considered a favourite against the 40-year-old Lambert Chambers in the challenge round, Lambert Chambers was able to trouble Lenglen with well-placed drop shots. Lenglen won the first set 10–8 after both players saved two set points. After saving two match points, Lenglen won the third set 9–7 for her first Wimbledon title. The match set the record for most games in a Wimbledon women's singles final with 44, only since surpassed by the 1970 final between Margaret Court and Billie Jean King. Over 8,000 people attended the match, well above the seating capacity of 3500 on Centre Court. Lenglen defeated Lambert Chambers and Ethel Larcombe again in the doubles final with Ryan. She already lost to Ryan and Randolph Lycett in the her mixed doubles quarterfinal, her only loss of the year in any discipline aside from defaults.
1920: Olympic champion
Lenglen began 1920 with five singles titles on the Riviera, three of which she won in lopsided finals against Ryan. However, Ryan was able to defeat Lenglen in mixed doubles at Cannes in windy conditions, Lenglen's only mixed doubles loss of the year. Although the World Hard Court Championships returned in May, Lenglen withdrew due to illness. She recovered in time for the French Championships two weeks later and won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles to complete a triple crown. Lenglen easily made it to the challenge round in singles, where she defeated Broquedis in a rematch of the 1914 final. She won the doubles event with Élisabeth d'Ayen and defended her mixed doubles title with Decugis, only needing to play the challenge round.
Lenglen's next event was Wimbledon. Lambert Chambers won the All Comers' final to set up a rematch of the previous year's final. Although the match was expected to be close again and began 2–2, Lenglen won ten of the last eleven games for her second consecutive Wimbledon singles title. She won the triple crown, taking the doubles with Ryan and the mixed doubles with Australian Gerald Patterson. The doubles final was also a rematch of the previous year's final against Lambert Chambers and Larcombe, while the mixed doubles victory came against defending champions Ryan and Lycett. Lenglen's decision to partner with Patterson led to the Fédération Française de Lawn Tennis (FFLT) threatening to not pay her expenses for the Wimbledon trip unless she partnered with a compatriot. Lenglen and her father replied by paying for the trip themselves. After Wimbledon, Lenglen won both of her events in Belgium in the lead-up to the Olympic Games in Antwerp. At the Olympics, Lenglen won two gold medals and one bronze medal for France. She won the singles title over British player Dorothy Holman, losing only four games in the entire event. She won mixed doubles with Decugis, overcoming an opening set loss in their quarterfinal. Lenglen partnered with d'Ayen again in the doubles event, losing their semifinal to Kathleen McKane and Winifred McNair in a tight match that ended 8–6 in the decisive third set. This match was Lenglen's only loss in doubles all year. Their opponents in the bronze medal match defaulted.
1921: Only singles defeat post-World War I
Lenglen again dominated the tournaments on the Riviera in 1921, winning eight titles in singles, six in doubles, and seven in mixed doubles. Her only loss came in mixed doubles. She won all of her matches against Ryan, four in singles and five in mixed doubles. All of Lenglen's doubles titles on the Riviera were with Ryan.
Lenglen defended her triple crown at the French Championships. Later that month, she returned to the World Hard Court Championships, where five-time United States national singles champion Molla Mallory was making her debut. The United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) sent Mallory and Bill Tilden to the tournament with the hope of drawing Lenglen over to compete in the United States. Although Lenglen defeated Mallory in the final in straight sets, she trailed 2–3 in the second set before winning the last four games. Lenglen won the triple crown at the tournament, partnering with Golding in doubles and Jacques Brugnon in mixed doubles. She then won her third consecutive Wimbledon titles in both singles and doubles, defeating her doubles partner Ryan in a lopsided singles final. She withdrew from the mixed doubles event after her partner suffered an ankle injury.
Lenglen planned to compete at the U.S. National Championships in August to prove she deserved to be called a world champion. Due to illness delaying her trip, however, she did not make it to New York until three days before her opening match and was still sick when she arrived. After Lenglen's opening round opponent defaulted, the tournament rescheduled her second round match against Mallory for that night to appease the large crowd that showed up to see Lenglen play. With over 8,000 people in attendance, Mallory took a 2–0 lead in the first set before Lenglen began coughing in the third game. After losing the first set, Lenglen retired from the match two points into the second set for her only singles loss after World War I. She only played two more matches in the United States, both small exhibitions, before leaving in late September.
1922: Start of 179-match win streak
During the 1922 season, Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline other than by default. She did not return to competitive tennis until March, six months after her loss to Mallory. Lenglen's first tournament back was the South of France Championships, where she won the doubles and mixed doubles titles. She did not play the singles event and did not play singles again until a month later at the Beausoleil Championships in Monte Carlo, where she won the title without dropping a game. This tournament began a 179-match win streak that Lenglen continued through the end of her amateur career.
In the middle of the year, Lenglen won triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships, the French Championships, and Wimbledon. At the first, she saved two set points in her semifinal against McKane before winning the set 10–8. After only needing to play three challenge round matches at the French, Lenglen agreed to forgo the challenge round system at Wimbledon and be included in the main draw at the request of the tournament organisers. In the singles final, she faced Mallory in a rematch of their U.S. National Championship meeting. Like in the United States, Mallory won the first two games of the final. However, Lenglen rebounded and won the next twelve games for the title. The final remains the shortest in Wimbledon history, only lasting 26 minutes.
1923: Career-best 45 titles
Lenglen entered more events and won more titles in 1923 than any other year. She won all 16 of the singles events she entered, as well as 13 of 14 doubles events, and 16 of 18 mixed doubles events. Unlike previous years, she did not default a match in any discipline. At the beginning of the season, Mallory travelled to France to make her debut on the French Riviera circuit. Lenglen and Mallory had their last encounter at the South of France Championships, which Mallory entered after not performing well at her other two events on the Riviera. Lenglen defeated her without losing a game. At the same tournament, Lenglen's twelve-month win streak across all disciplines came to an end with a mixed doubles loss to Ryan and Lycett.
At what was to be the last edition of the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen faced McKane in the final in each event, all three of which were held in the same afternoon. She defeated McKane in singles and mixed doubles, the latter of which was with Henri Cochet as her partner for the second consecutive year. With Ryan absent, however, Lenglen partnered with Golding and lost to the British team of McKane and Geraldine Beamish. At the French Championships, Lenglen defended her triple crown without losing a set in spite of the challenge round format being abandoned. She partnered with Brugnon in mixed doubles for the third straight year, while pairing up with Julie Vlasto for the first time in doubles. She faced the most adversity in the singles final when the crowd uncharacteristically booed her for trailing 0–4 to Golding in the second set. At Wimbledon, Lenglen won the singles and doubles titles with ease, never dropping more than three games in a set. In mixed doubles, however, she was defeated by Ryan and Lycett for the second time in the year. In September, Lenglen travelled outside of France and won titles in Belgium, Spain, and Portugal.
1924: No major titles
Although Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline in 1924 except by default, she did not win a major tournament for the first time since 1913 aside from her hiatus due to World War I. Minor illnesses limited her to three singles events on the Riviera. Lenglen played doubles more regularly, winning eight titles in both doubles and mixed doubles. In April, Lenglen travelled to Spain to compete at the Barcelona International. Although she won all three events, she contracted jaundice soon after, preventing her from playing the French Championships. Although she had not fully recovered by Wimbledon, she entered the tournament and won her first three singles matches without dropping a game. In the next round, however, Ryan proved to be a more difficult opponent and took the second set from Lenglen 8–6, only the third set of singles Lenglen had lost since World War I. Although Lenglen narrowly won the match, she then withdrew from the tournament following the advice of her doctor. She did not play another event the rest of the year, and in particular missed the Olympic Games in Paris, where Helen Wills won the women's singles event.
1925: Open French champion
Lenglen returned to tennis at the Beau Site New Year Meeting in Cannes the first week of the year, winning in doubles with Ryan in her only event. She only played singles at two tournaments on the Riviera, including the South of France Championships. Her only loss during this part of the season was to Ryan and Umberto de Morpurgo at the Côte d'Azur Championships in Cannes. In May, Lenglen entered the French Championships, the inaugural edition open to international players. The tournament was played at St. Cloud at the site of the defunct World Hard Court Championships. Lenglen won the triple crown and was not challenged in singles or mixed doubles. She won the singles final over McKane, losing only three games. She won the mixed doubles final with Brugnon against her doubles partner Julie Vlasto and Cochet. Although Lenglen and Vlasto lost the second set of the doubles final 9–11 to McKane and Evelyn Colyer, they won the other two sets with ease for the title.
Lenglen followed up her performance at the French Championships with another triple crown at Wimbledon. She played five singles matches and did not lose a game in the second set of any of them. The five games she dropped in total remain a record for fewest games lost in a singles title run in Wimbledon history. Her opponents included Ryan in her opening match, the defending champion McKane in the semifinals, and Joan Fry in the final. In mixed doubles, she partnered with Jean Borotra to defeat Ryan and de Morpurgo in the final. In doubles, Lenglen and Ryan played their last tournament together and won the title without dropping a set. During the last part of the year, Lenglen led France to a 7–4 victory in a tie against Australia, and defeated Australasian champion Daphne Akhurst in the final of the concurrent Deauville tournament. Later in the year, Lenglen won the doubles and mixed doubles events at the Cromer Covered Courts, the only time she played in England other than Wimbledon and her only indoor wood tournament.
1926: Match of the Century
The 1926 season unexpectedly was Lenglen's last as an amateur. At the beginning of the season, three-time reigning U.S. national champion Helen Wills travelled to the French Riviera with the hope of playing a match against Lenglen. With Wills's level of stardom approaching that of Lenglen's, there was an immense amount of hype for a match between them to take place. They only entered the same singles draw once, at the Carlton Club in Cannes. When Lenglen and Wills both made the final with little opposition, the club doubled the number of seats around their main court and all 3,000 seats plus standing room sold out. Spectators unable to get into the venue attempted to watch the match by climbing trees and ladders or by purchasing unofficial tickets for the windows and roofs of villas across the street. In what was called the Match of the Century, Lenglen defeated Wills in straight sets. The first match point became chaotic when a winner from Wills was called out by a spectator, leading both the players and spectators to believe the match was over. Photographers captured the unique situation of Lenglen and Wills shaking hands at the net as if the match had ended, a moment followed by the crowd flooding the court to congratulate Lenglen. After clarification the shot was in, Wills broke Lenglen to level the set. Despite Lenglen winning, her reputation of being unbeatable was damaged by Wills's competitive performance.
While Wills remained in France, Lenglen avoided a rematch on the Riviera. After Wills's season was marred by an appendectomy during the French Championships, she withdrew from both Grand Slam tournaments in Europe and another match between her and Lenglen never took place. In Wills's absence, Lenglen defended all three of her titles at the French Championships with ease, defeating Mary Browne in the singles final. She again won the doubles with Vlasto and the mixed doubles with Brugnon.
Wimbledon misunderstanding
Although Lenglen was a heavy favourite at Wimbledon with Wills not participating, she began the tournament facing two issues. She was concerned with her family's finances as her father's health was worsening, and she was not content with the FFLT wanting her to enter the doubles event with a French partner instead of her usual partner Ryan. Although Lenglen agreed to play with Vlasto as the FFLT wanted, she was unsettled by being drawn against Ryan in her opening doubles match.
Lenglen's situation did not improve once the tournament began. She opened the singles event with an uncharacteristic win against Browne in which she lost five games, the same number she had lost in the entire 1925 singles event. Her next singles match was then moved up before her doubles match to accommodate the royal family, who planned to be in attendance. Wanting to play doubles first, Lenglen asked for the match to be rescheduled. Although the request was never received, she arrived at the grounds late. After Wimbledon officials confronted her in anger over keeping Queen Mary waiting, she refused to play. The club ultimately adhered to Lenglen's wishes and rescheduled both matches with the doubles first. Nonetheless, Lenglen and Vlasto were defeated by Ryan and Browne in three sets while the crowd who typically supported Lenglen turned against her. Although she defeated Evelyn Dewhurst in the rescheduled singles match, she then withdrew from both singles and mixed doubles, ending her last amateur tournament.
Professional career
United States tour (1926–27)
A month after her withdrawal from Wimbledon, Lenglen signed a $50,000 contract (equivalent to about $ in 2020) with American sports promoter C. C. Pyle to headline a four-month professional tour in the United States beginning in October 1926. She had begun discussing a professional contract with Pyle's associate William Pickens when he visited her on the Riviera in April. Lenglen had previously turned down an offer of 200,000 francs (equivalent to about $ in 2020) to turn professional in the United States following her last victory over Molla Mallory in 1923, declining in large part to keep her amateur status. She became less concerned with that, however, after the crowd turned against her at Wimbledon. She was more interested in keeping her social status, and was convinced by Pyle that turning professional would not hurt her stardom or damage her reputation. With Lenglen on the tour, Pyle attempted to recruit other top players, including Wills, McKane, and leading Americans Bill Tilden and Bill Johnston. Although they all declined, Pyle was able to sign Mary Browne as well as men's players Vincent Richards, Paul Féret, Howard Kinsey, and Harvey Snodgrass. Richards was regarded as the biggest star among the male players, having won gold medals in singles and doubles at the 1924 Olympics. Once the tour began, Lenglen and all of the other players lost their amateur status.
Although professional tennis tournaments already existed, the tour was the first travelling professional exhibition series in tennis history. It featured 40 stops, starting on 9 October 1926 and ending on 14 February 1927, and included several stops in Canada as well as one in Cuba. Lenglen dominated Browne on the tour, winning all 33 of the best-of-three-set matches played to completion. Browne did not win a set until the second set at the 33rd stop. The only other set she won was the only set they played at the 36th stop, where Lenglen had decided to play just a one-set match while ill to avoid disappointing the fans. Browne also nearly won a set at the 23rd stop, losing 9–11, at which point Lenglen decided not to continue.
The tour was a financial success. Lenglen earned the most money, receiving half of the revenue from ticket sales and $100,000 in total, more than the $70,000 that Babe Ruth earned in 1927 as the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball. The average attendance was just over 4,000 at the 34 venues where it was recorded. The most well-attended venues were opening night at Madison Square Garden in New York City with an attendance of 13,000 and the Public Auditorium in Cleveland with an attendance of 10,000. Opening night in particular brought in $34,000 from tickets sold at $1.50 to $5.50 (equivalent to $ to $ in 2020).
British tour (1927)
A few months after the end of the United States tour, Lenglen signed with British promoter Charles Cochran to headline a shorter professional tour in the United Kingdom. Cochran recruited Dora Köring, the 1912 Olympic silver medalist in singles, and Dewhurst to play against Lenglen. Karel Koželuh and Kinsey were the male players on the tour. There were seven tour stops, all in July 1927. Lenglen won all seven of her singles matches, never losing more than five games in any of them. The last three stops were played on the grounds of association football clubs: Queen's Park in Glasgow, Blackpool, and Manchester United. These were the best attended events on the tour and the final match at Old Trafford had an attendance of over 15,000, the highest between either professional tour.
Aftermath
Lenglen was widely criticised for her decision to turn professional. Once the tour began, the FFLT expelled her and Féret while the All England Lawn Tennis Club revoked her membership. Lenglen in turn criticised amateur tennis for her nearing poverty. In the program for the United States professional tour, she stated, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis... And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 – not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study – tennis... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy – should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune – for whom?" She criticised the barriers that typically prevented ordinary people from becoming tennis players, stating, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport?" Lenglen did not participate in any other professional tours after 1927. She never formally applied to be reinstated as an amateur with the FFLT either. She had asked about the possibility in 1932 after Féret was reinstated, but was told to wait another three years and decided against it.
Rivalries
Lenglen vs. Mallory
Molla Mallory was the only player to defeat Lenglen in singles after World War I. Fifteen years older than Lenglen and originally from Norway, Mallory won a bronze medal at the 1912 Olympic Games before emigrating to the United States in 1914. While World War I halted tennis in Europe, Mallory established herself as the top-ranked American player, winning the first four U.S. National Championships she entered from 1915 through 1918. Whereas Lenglen regularly came to the net and had an all-court game built around control rather than power, the much older Mallory played almost exclusively from the baseline. The strengths of Mallory's game were that she took the ball early and had one of the most powerful forehands in women's tennis at the time. Mallory had a similar personality to Lenglen off the court. While they each hated losing, both of them smoked regularly and loved to dance. Lenglen faced Mallory just four times in singles, compiling a 3–1 record. She also won both of their doubles and mixed doubles encounters.
Their first two meetings were highlighted by Lenglen's health issues. In the final of the 1921 World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen nearly retired while struggling with blisters on her foot and trailing in the second set. Nonetheless, Lenglen proceeded to win by following her plan to play defensively and wait for Mallory to make unforced errors on attempted winners. In their second meeting at the 1921 U.S. National Championships, Mallory was able to take advantage of Lenglen's poor health, executing her usual strategy of going for winners to win the match. Although they had entered the doubles event as partners, Lenglen's health prevented them from playing any matches together at the tournament. Lenglen was able to easily win their last two meetings in 1922 and 1923 by playing more aggressively and employing Mallory's strategy of hitting well-placed winners from the baseline.
The press built up the rivalry between Lenglen and Mallory. After Lenglen's retirement against Mallory at the U.S. National Championships, the vast majority of American newspapers criticised Lenglen for not finishing the match and accused her of retiring because she did not think she could win. They coined a phrase "cough and quit" that became popular at the time for describing someone who needed an excuse to avoid losing. After Lenglen's victory over Mallory at Wimbledon, the American press returned to supporting Lenglen. Both Lenglen and Mallory believed the newspapers exaggerated the personal nature of their rivalry. Mallory in particular said, "The newspapers are the dirtiest, filthiest things that ever happened. I don't want my name in the newspapers. I have a better chance on the courts than in the newspapers of my own country."
Lenglen and Ryan
Lenglen's usual doubles partner Elizabeth Ryan was also her most frequent opponent in singles. Born in the United States, Ryan travelled to England in 1912 to visit her sister before deciding to stay there permanently. Although she lost all four of her appearances in major finals, Ryan won 26 major titles between doubles and mixed doubles. The biggest strength of her game was volleying. Tennis writer Ted Tinling said, "volleying as a fundamental, aggressive technique was first injected into the women's game by Ryan." Lenglen and Ryan first partnered together at a handicap event in Monte Carlo in 1913 when they were 13 and 20 years old respectively. After losing the final at that tournament, the two of them never lost a regular doubles match, only once dropping a set in 1923 to Dorothea Lambert Chambers and Kathleen McKane, again at Monte Carlo. Ryan was Lenglen's doubles partner for 40 of her 74 doubles titles, including all six at Wimbledon and two of three at the World Hard Court Championships.
Ryan defeated Lenglen in their first singles meeting in straight sets at Monte Carlo in 1914 and also won a set in their second meeting two months later. Following their first encounter, Lenglen won all 17 of their remaining matches, including five at Wimbledon and two major finals. The only time Ryan won a set against Lenglen after World War I was in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 1924, where Lenglen withdrew due to illness in the following round. When the FFLT asked Lenglen to take a French partner in doubles at Wimbledon in 1926, Ryan partnered with Mary Browne to defeat Lenglen and her new partner Julie Vlasto, coming from three match points down in the second set. Ryan also won their only other doubles meeting in 1914. In mixed doubles, Lenglen compiled a 23–9 record against Ryan. Half of her career mixed doubles losses were to Ryan. After losing their first six encounters, she recovered to win the next thirteen. Lenglen won her first mixed doubles match against Ryan at the 1920 Beaulieu tournament, starting a win streak that ended with a loss to Ryan and Lycett at the 1923 South of France Championships.
Overlap with Wills
Helen Wills was the closest to becoming Lenglen's counterpart. Wills finished her career with 19 Grand Slam singles titles, a record that stood until 1970. She succeeded Lenglen as world No. 1 in 1927 and kept that ranking for the next six years and nine of the next twelve overall until 1938. Late in Lenglen's amateur career, Wills had built up a similar level of stardom to Lenglen by winning the 1924 Olympic gold medal in singles in Lenglen's absence while still only 18 years old. Although their careers overlapped when Wills visited Europe in 1924 and 1926, Lenglen only faced Wills once in her career. Lenglen withdrew from Wimbledon and the Olympics due to jaundice in 1924, while Wills withdrew from the French Championships and Wimbledon in 1926 due to appendicitis, preventing a longer rivalry between tennis's two biggest female stars of the 1920s from emerging.
Playing style
Elizabeth Ryan described Lenglen's all-court style of play as, "[Lenglen] owned every kind of shot, plus a genius for knowing how and when to use them. She never gave an opponent the same kind of shot twice in a row. She’d make you run miles... her game was all placement and deception and steadiness. I had the best drop shot anybody ever had, but she could not only get up to it but was so fast that often she could score a placement off it." Her rivals Molla Mallory and Helen Wills both noted that Lenglen excelled at extending rallies and could take control of points with defensive shots. Although Lenglen built her game around control rather than power, she had the ability to hit powerful shots. In particular, Mallory praised the power behind her defensive shots, saying, "She is just the steadiest player that ever was. She just sent back at me whatever I sent at her and waited for me to make a fault. And her returns often enough were harder than the shots I sent up to her." British journalist A. E. Crawley regarded her as having the best movement of her time, saying, "I have never seen on a lawn tennis court either man or woman move with such mechanical and artistic perfection and prose. Whether [Lenglen's] objective is the ball or merely changing sides, she reminded you of the movement of fire over prairie grass." He believed she was a powerful server and an aggressive volleyer, commenting, "She serves with all the male athlete's power. She smashes with the same loose and rapid action, the release of a spring of steel. Her volley is not a timid push, but an arrow from the bow. And an arrow from the bow is Suzanne herself."
Adopting a style of play drawn from men's players led Lenglen to become one of the leading volleyers in women's tennis at a time when the women's game was centred around playing from the baseline, even for the top players. Lenglen aimed to come to the net to finish points quickly whenever possible. Kathleen McKane specifically noted that "Suzanne volleyed like a man" when describing her influence on women's tennis. While Lenglen did not model the majority of her game after any specific player, she modelled her forehand after that of Anthony Wilding. Like Wilding, she aimed to hit forehands flat and with little to no topspin. She used a continental grip and strived to hit balls early on the rise. Lenglen wrote in her book Lawn Tennis for Girls, "A favorite shot of mine is the backhand down the line". Lenglen was regarded as having a graceful style of play. Her movement was thought to resemble that of a dancer, a style that may have arisen from a course on classic Greek dance she had taken as a child. René Lacoste, a leading French men's tennis player from her era, said, "[Lenglen] played with marvelous ease the simplest strokes in the world. It was only after several games that I understood what harmony was concealed by her simplicity, what wonderful mental and physical balance was hidden by the facility of her play."
Lenglen developed a reputation for drinking cognac to help her play at pivotal points of her biggest matches. Most notably, she did so during the second and third sets of her victory against Lambert Chambers in the 1919 Wimbledon final, and at the start and during the more competitive second set of her victory over Helen Wills in the Match of the Century. She only travelled to the U.S. National Championships in 1921 after the USLTA agreed to supply her with alcohol during her stay even though consumption was illegal under the laws of Prohibition at the time. Nonetheless, they did not provide Lenglen with alcohol during her retirement loss to Mallory.
Legacy
Achievements
Lenglen was ranked as the 24th greatest player of all-time in the 100 Greatest of All Time series. She was the ninth-highest ranked woman overall, and the highest-ranked woman to play exclusively in the amateur era. After formal annual women's tennis rankings began to be published by tennis journalist and player A. Wallis Myers in 1921, Lenglen was No. 1 in the world in each of the first six editions of the rankings through her retirement from amateur tennis in 1926. She won a total of 250 titles consisting of 83 in singles, 74 in doubles, and 93 in mixed doubles. Nine of her singles titles were won without losing a game. Lenglen compiled win percentages of 97.9% in singles and 96.9% across all disciplines. After World War I, she won 287 of 288 singles matches, starting with a 108-match win streak and ending with a 179-match win streak, the latter of which was longer than Helen Wills' longest win streak of 161 matches. Lenglen ended her career on a 250-match win streak on clay.
Lenglen's eight Grand Slam women's singles titles are tied for the tenth-most all-time, and tied for fourth in the amateur era behind only Maureen Connolly's nine, Court's thirteen, and Wills's nineteen. Aside from the 1919 Wimbledon Championships, Lenglen did not lose more than three games in a set in any of her other Grand Slam or World Hard Court Championship singles finals. Lenglen's six Wimbledon titles are tied for the sixth-most in history. Her former record of five consecutive Wimbledon titles has only since been matched by Martina Navratilova, who won her sixth in a row in 1987. Lenglen's title at the 1914 World Hard Court Championships made her the youngest major champion in tennis history at 15 years and 16 days old, nearly a year ahead of the next two youngest, Martina Hingis and Lottie Dod.
Lenglen won a total of 17 titles at Wimbledon, 19 at the French Championships, and 10 at the World Hard Court Championships across all disciplines. Lenglen completed three Wimbledon triple crowns – winning the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles events at a tournament in the same year – in 1920, 1922, and 1925. She also won two triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships in 1921 and 1922, and six at the French Championships, the first four of which came consecutively from 1920 through 1923 when the tournament was invitation-only to French nationals and the last two of which came in 1925 and 1926 when the tournament was open to internationals.
Mythical persona
Following World War I, Lenglen became a symbol of national pride in France in a country looking to recover from the war. The French press referred to Lenglen as notre Suzanne (our Suzanne) to characterise her status as a national heroine; and more eminently as La Divine (The Goddess) to assert her unassailability. The press wrote about Lenglen as if she was infallible at tennis, often attributing any performance that was relatively poor by her standards to various excuses such as the fault of her doubles partner or to having concern over the health of her father. Journalists who criticised Lenglen were condemned and refuted by the rest of the press. At the Olympics, she introduced herself to journalists as "The Great Lenglen", a title that was well received. Before matches, Lenglen would predict to the press that she was going to win, a practice that Americans treated as improper. She explained, "When I am asked a question I endeavour to give a frank answer. If I know I am going to win, what harm is there in saying so?"
Lenglen was the first female athlete to be acknowledged as a celebrity outside of her sport. She was acquainted with members of royal families such as King Gustav V of Sweden, and actresses such as Mary Pickford. She was well known by the general public, and her matches were well-attended by people not otherwise interested in tennis. Many of her biggest matches were sold out, including the 1919 Wimbledon final against Lambert Chambers, where the attendance more than doubled the seating capacity of Centre Court, and her first match against Mallory, where tickets were sold at a cost of up to 500 francs (about $ in 2020) and an estimated 5,000 people could not gain entry to see the match after it had sold out. The popularity of Lenglen's matches at Wimbledon was a large factor in the club moving the tournament from Worple Road to its modern site at Church Road. A new Centre Court opened in 1922 with a seating capacity of nearly 10,000, nearly three times larger than that at the old venue. At the Match of the Century against Wills, seated tickets that were sold out at 300 francs, then equivalent to about $11 in the United States (or $ in 2020), were re-sold by scalpers at up to 1200 francs, which was then about $44 (or $ in 2020). This cost far exceeded that for the men's singles final at the U.S. National Championships at the time, which were sold at as low as $2 per seat (about $ in 2020).
Lenglen's mythical reputation began at a young age. She was known for a story about her father training her to improve her shot precision as a child by placing a handkerchief at different locations on the court and instructing her to hit it as a target. She was said to be able to hit the handkerchief with ease regardless of the type of incoming shot. Each time she did, he would fold it in half before replacing it with a coin. It was said that Lenglen could hit the coin up to five times in a row.
Professional tennis
Lenglen was the first leading tennis player to leave amateur tennis to play professionally, thereby launching playing tennis as a professional career. The exhibition tour she headlined in the United States from 1926 to 1927 in which a few players travelled together to compete against each other across a series of venues was the first of its kind. It established a format that was repeated over twenty times for the next four decades until the start of the Open Era. With Pyle only interested in tennis because of Lenglen, Vincent Richards, the leading male player on Lenglen's United States tour, organised the next such tour featuring himself competing against Karel Koželuh in 1928. He also began organising the first major professional tournaments to feature players who had been top amateurs, beginning with the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships first held later in 1927.
As the top women's players nearly all kept their amateur status, women were largely left out of both the travelling exhibition tours and the growing professional tournaments after Lenglen's playing career ended. The next significant exhibition tour to feature women's tennis players did not occur until 1941 when Alice Marble became one of the headliners on a tour that also featured leading male players Don Budge and Bill Tilden. Fellow top-ranked players Pauline Betz and Althea Gibson followed Marble by turning professional in 1947 and 1958 respectively. Betz played on two tours, one in 1947 and another from 1950 to 1951. Gibson played in a series of warmup matches for the Harlem Globetrotters, an exhibition basketball team in the United States.
Fashion
Lenglen redefined traditional women's tennis attire early in her career. By the 1919 Wimbledon final, she avoided donning a corset in favour of a short-sleeved and calf-length pleated skirt to go along with a distinctive circular-brimmed bonnet, a stark contrast with her much older opponent Dorothea Lambert Chambers who wore long sleeves and a plain skirt below the calf.
The following year, Lenglen ended the norm of women competing in clothes not suited for playing tennis. She had Jean Patou design her outfits that were not only intended to be stylish, but allowed her to perform her signature leaping ballet motion in points and did not restrict her movement on the court. This type of attire was among the earliest women's sportswear. Unusual for the time, her skirt was both sleeveless and only extended to her knees. Lenglen replaced the bonnet with a bandeau, which became known as the "Lenglen bandeau" and was her signature piece of attire throughout the rest of her career. On the court, she routinely wore makeup and popularised having tanned skin instead of a pale complexion that other players had preferred before her time. Later in her career, she moved away from just wearing white in favour of brighter-coloured outfits. Overall, she pioneered the idea of players using the tennis court to showcase fashion instead of just competing. Off the court, Lenglen frequently wore an oversized and expensive fur coat.
Honours
Lenglen is honoured in a variety of ways at the French Open. At Stade Roland Garros, the second show court that was built in 1994 with a capacity of about 10,000 was named Court Suzanne Lenglen in 1997. Outside the court, there is a bronze relief statue of Lenglen that was erected in 1994. The FFLT had originally planned to erect a statue of Lenglen immediately after her death, but this plan never materialised due to the start of World War II later that year. Additionally, one of the main entrances to the ground is Porte Suzanne Lenglen, which leads to Allée Suzanne Lenglen. Moreover, the women's singles championship trophy was named the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen in 1987. In spite of her success at the French Championships, Lenglen never competed at Stade Roland Garros as it did not become the site for the tournament until 1928 after her retirement from amateur tennis.
Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978. Following her death, she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Another road, the Avenue Suzanne Lenglen, is named in her honour outside of the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. She has been honoured in a Google Doodle twice, once on her 117th birthday on 24 May 2016, and again on International Women's Day on 8 March 2017.
Personal life
Lenglen was in a long-term relationship with Baldwin Baldwin from 1927 to 1932. Baldwin was the grandson and heir to Lucky Baldwin, a prominent businessman and real estate investor active in California. Lenglen met Baldwin during her professional tour in the United States. Although they intended to get married, those plans never materialised largely because Baldwin was already married and his wife would not agree to a divorce while Lenglen and Baldwin were together. During this time, her father died of poor health in 1929.
Lenglen was the author of several books on tennis, the first two of which she wrote during her amateur career. Her first book, Lawn Tennis for Girls, covered techniques and advice on tactics for beginner tennis players. She also wrote Lawn Tennis: The Game of Nations and a romantic novel, The Love Game: Being the Life Story of Marcelle Penrose. Lenglen finished her last book Tennis by Simple Exercises with Margaret Morris in 1937. The book featured a section by Lenglen on what was needed to become an all-around tennis player and a section by Morris, a choreographer and dancer, on exercises designed for tennis players. She played a role as an actress in the 1935 British musical comedy film Things Are Looking Up, in which she contests a tennis match against the lead character portrayed by Cicely Courtneidge.
Following her playing career, Lenglen returned to tennis as a coach in 1933, serving as the director of a school on the grounds of Stade Roland Garros. She opened her own tennis school for girls in 1936 at the Tennis Mirabeau in Paris with the support of the FFLT. She began instructing adults the following year as well. A year later in May 1938, Lenglen became the inaugural director of the French National Tennis School in Paris. Shortly after this appointment, however, Lenglen became severely fatigued while teaching at the school and needed to receive a blood transfusion. She previously had other health issues following her retirement, most notably suffering from appendicitis and having her appendix removed in October 1934. Lenglen died on 4 July 1938 at the age of 39, three weeks after she became ill, and was reported to have died from pernicious anemia. Her specific cause of death was unclear due to anemia being curable and reports of her having other illnesses, including leukemia. Lenglen was buried at the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen just outside Paris.
Career statistics
Performance timelines
Results from the French Championships before 1924 do not count towards the statistical totals because the tournament was not yet open to international players.
Singles
Doubles
Mixed doubles
Source: Little
Major finals
Grand Slam singles: 8 (8 titles)
World Championship singles: 4 (4 titles)
Source: Little
Olympic medal matches
Singles: 1 (1 gold medal)
Source: Little
See also
List of Grand Slam women's singles champions
List of Grand Slam women's doubles champions
List of Grand Slam mixed doubles champions
List of Grand Slam related tennis records
Notes
References
Books
External links
1899 births
1938 deaths
Deaths from pernicious anemia
Deaths from leukemia
Deaths from cancer in France
French female tennis players
French Championships (tennis) champions
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in mixed doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's singles
International Tennis Hall of Fame inductees
Medalists at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Olympic bronze medalists for France
Olympic gold medalists for France
Olympic medalists in tennis
Olympic tennis players of France
Tennis players from Paris
Professional tennis players before the Open Era
Tennis players at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Wimbledon champions (pre-Open Era)
World No. 1 tennis players
20th-century French women | false | [
"The 1994 Virginia Slims of Philadelphia was a women's tennis tournament played on indoor carpet courts at the Philadelphia Civic Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States that was part of the Tier I category of the 1994 WTA Tour. It was the 12th edition of the tournament and was held from November 7 through November 13, 1994. Sixth-seeded Anke Huber won the singles title and earned $150,000 first-prize money.\n\nThe tournament was highlighted by the presence of Jennifer Capriati, who returned to professional tennis after a 14-month hiatus. Her last match was at the first round of the 1993 US Open, where she lost to Leila Meskhi. Capriati will eventually lost in the first round against tournament winner Anke Huber, in what would end up being her only match in the entire 1994 season.\n\nFinals\n\nSingles\n\n Anke Huber defeated Mary Pierce 6–0, 6–7(4–7), 7–5\n It was Huber's 3rd singles title of the year and the 6th of her career.\n\nDoubles\n\n Gigi Fernández / Natasha Zvereva defeated Gabriela Sabatini / Brenda Schultz 4–6, 6–4, 6–2\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n ITF tournament edition details\n Tournament draws\n\nVirginia Slims of Philadelphia\nAdvanta Championships of Philadelphia\nVirginia Slims of Philadelphia\nVirginia Slims of Philadelphia\nVirginia Slims of Philadelphia",
"The 1970 Rothmans Canadian Open was a tennis tournament played on outdoor clay courts at the Toronto Cricket Skating and Curling Club in Toronto in Canada that was part of the 1970 Pepsi-Cola Grand Prix. The men's tournament was held from August 12 through August 18, 1970, while the women's tournament was played from August 19 through August 25, 1970.\n\nFinals\n\nMen's Singles\n Rod Laver defeated Roger Taylor 6–0, 4–6, 6–3\n It was Laver's 6th professional title of the year and the 17th of his career.\n\nWomen's Singles\n Margaret Court defeated Rosemary Casals 6–8, 6–4, 6–4\n It was Court's 27th professional title of the year and the 77th of her career.\n\nMen's Doubles\n William Bowrey / Marty Riessen defeated Cliff Drysdale / Fred Stolle 6–3, 6–2\n It was Bowrey's 2nd title of the year and the 4th of his career. It was Riessen's 3rd title of the year and the 8th of his professional career.\n\nWomen's Doubles\n Rosemary Casals / Margaret Court defeated Evonne Goolagong / Pat Walkden 6–0, 6–1\n It was Casals' 6th title of the year and the 13th of her career. It was Court's 28th professional title of the year and the 78th of her career.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tournament profile\n Women's Tennis Association (WTA) tournament profile\n\nRothmans Canadian Open\nCanadian Open (tennis)\nRothmans Canadian Open\nRothmans Canadian Open\nCanadian Open"
] |
[
"Suzanne Lenglen",
"Professional career",
"How did her professional career begin?",
"The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States",
"What was her first professional tournament?",
"For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players)."
] | C_41fb23025a874c888de27a229c0a75c0_1 | Did she win her first tournament? | 3 | Did Suzanne Lenglen win her first tournament? | Suzanne Lenglen | The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States in a series of matches against Mary K. Browne. Browne, winner of the US Championships from 1912 to 1914, was 35 and considered to be past her prime, although she had reached the French final earlier that year (losing to Lenglen 6-1, 6-0). For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players). In their first match in New York City, Lenglen put on a performance that New York Times writer Allison Danzig lauded as "one of the most masterly exhibitions of court generalship that has been seen in this country." When the tour ended in February 1927, Lenglen had defeated Browne, 38 matches to 0. She was exhausted from the lengthy tour, and a physician advised Lenglen that she needed a lengthy period away from the game to recover. Instead, Lenglen chose to retire from competitive tennis to run a Paris tennis school, which she set up with the help and money of her lover Jean Tillier. The school, located next to the courts of Roland Garros, slowly expanded and was recognised as a federal training centre by the French tennis federation in 1936. During this period, Lenglen also wrote several books on tennis. Lenglen was criticised widely for her decision to turn professional, and the All England Club at Wimbledon even revoked her honorary membership. Lenglen, however, described her decision as "an escape from bondage and slavery" and said in the tour programme, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis and have paid thousands of francs in entrance fees to be allowed to do so.... I have worked as hard at my career as any man or woman has worked at any career. And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 - not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study - tennis.... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy - should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune - for whom?" As for the amateur tennis system, Lenglen said, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport? Does it make tennis more popular - or does it tend to suppress and hinder an enormous amount of tennis talent lying dormant in the bodies of young men and women whose names are not in the social register?" CANNOTANSWER | In their first match in New York City, Lenglen put on a performance that New York Times writer Allison Danzig lauded as "one of the most masterly exhibitions | Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen (; 24 May 18994 July 1938) was a French tennis player. She was ranked as the inaugural world No. 1 from 1921 to 1926, winning 8 Grand Slam titles in singles and 21 in total. She also was a four-time World Hard Court Champion in singles, and ten times in total. Lenglen won six Wimbledon singles titles, including five in a row from 1919 to 1923, and was the champion in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at the first two open French Championships in 1925 and 1926. In doubles, she was undefeated with her usual partner Elizabeth Ryan, highlighted by another six titles at Wimbledon. Lenglen was the first leading amateur to turn professional, and was ranked as the greatest women's tennis player from the amateur era in the 100 Greatest of All Time series.
Coached by her father Charles throughout her career, Lenglen began playing tennis at age 11, becoming the youngest major champion in history with her 1914 World Hard Court Championship title at age 15. This success along with her balletic playing style and brash personality helped make Lenglen a national heroine in a country coping with the aftermath of World War I. After the war delayed her career four years, Lenglen was largely unchallenged. She won her Wimbledon debut in 1919 in the second-longest final in history, the only one of her major singles finals she did not win by a lopsided scoreline. Her only post-war loss came in a retirement against Molla Mallory, her only amateur match in the United States. Afterwards, she began a 179-match win streak, during which she defeated Helen Wills in the high-profile Match of the Century in 1926. Following a misunderstanding at Wimbledon later that year, Lenglen abruptly retired from amateur tennis, signing to headline a professional tour in the United States beginning that same year.
Referred to by the French press as La Divine (The Goddess), Lenglen revolutionised the sport by integrating the aggressive style of men's tennis into the women's game and breaking the convention of women competing in clothing unsuitable for tennis. She incorporated fashion into her matches, highlighted by her signature bandeau headwear. Lenglen is recognised as the first female athlete to become a global sport celebrity and her popularity led Wimbledon to move to its larger modern-day venue. Her professional tours laid the foundation for the series of men's professional tours that continued until the Open Era, and led to the first major men's professional tournament the following year. Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978, and the second show court at the site of the French Open is named in her honour.
Early life and background
Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen was born in Paris on 24 May 1899 to Charles and Anaïs Lenglen. She had a younger brother who did not live past the age of three. Lenglen's father was a pharmacist who became wealthy by inheriting a horse-drawn omnibus company from his father. Several years after Suzanne was born, her father sold the omnibus business, after which he relocated the family to Marest-sur-Matz near Compiègne in northern France in 1904. They spent their winters in Nice on the French Riviera in a villa across the street from the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. By the time Lenglen was eight, she excelled at a variety of sports including swimming and cycling. In particular, she enjoyed diabolo, a game involving balancing a spinning top on a string with two attached sticks. During the winter, Lenglen performed diabolo routines in front of large crowds on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Her father credited her confidence to play tennis in large stadiums to her experience as a diabolo performer.
Lenglen's father attended tennis tournaments on the Riviera circuit, where the world's best players competed in the first half of the year. Having played the sport recreationally, he bought Lenglen a racket from a toy store in June 1910 shortly after she had turned 11 years old, and set up a makeshift court on the lawn of their house. She quickly showed enough skill to convince her father to get her a proper racket from a tennis manufacturer within a month. He developed training exercises and played against his daughter. Three months later, Lenglen travelled to Paris to play on a proper clay court owned by her father's friend, Dr. Cizelly. At Cizelly's recommendation, she entered a local high-level tournament in Chantilly. In the singles handicap event, Lenglen won four rounds and finished in second place.
Lenglen's success at the Chantilly tournament prompted her father to train her more seriously. He studied the leading male and female players and decided to teach Lenglen the tactics from the men's game, which was more aggressive than the women's style of slowly constructing points from the baseline. When the family returned to Nice towards the end of autumn, her father arranged for her to play twice a week at the Nice Lawn Tennis Club even though children had never been allowed on the courts, and had her practice with leading male players at the club. Lenglen began training with Joseph Negro, the club's teaching professional. Negro had a wide variety of shots in his repertoire and trained Lenglen to play the same way. As Lenglen's primary coach, her father employed harsh and rigorous methods, saying, "I was a hard taskmaster, and although my advice was always well intentioned, my criticisms were at times severe, and occasionally intemperate." Lenglen's parents watched her matches and discussed her minute errors between themselves throughout, only showing restraint in their criticisms when she was sick. As a result, Lenglen became comfortable with appearing ill, which made it difficult for others to tell if she was sick.
Amateur career
1912–13: Maiden titles
Lenglen entered her first non-handicap singles event in July 1912 at the Compiègne Championships near her hometown, her only regular event of the year. She won her debut match in the quarterfinals before losing her semifinal to Jeanne Matthey. She also played in the singles and mixed doubles handicap events, winning both of them. When Lenglen returned to Nice in 1913, she entered a handicap doubles event in Monte Carlo with Elizabeth Ryan, an American who had moved to England a year earlier. Although they lost the final in three sets, Ryan became Lenglen's most frequent doubles partner and the pair never lost another match. Lenglen's success at handicap events led her to enter more regular events in the rest of 1913. She debuted at the South of France Championships at the Nice Club in March, winning only one match. Nonetheless, when Lenglen returned to Compiègne, she won her first two regular singles titles, both within a few weeks of her 14th birthday. After losing to Matthey again at both of her events in July, the latter of which by default, Lenglen rebounded to win titles in her last two singles events of the year.
1914: World Hard Court champion
Back on the Riviera in 1914, Lenglen focused on regular events. Her victory in singles against high-ranking British player Ruth Winch was regarded as a huge surprise by the tennis community. However, Lenglen still struggled at larger tournaments early in the year, losing to Ryan in the quarterfinals at Monte Carlo and six-time Wimbledon champion Dorothea Lambert Chambers in the semifinals at the South of France Championships. In May, Lenglen was invited to enter the French Championships, which was restricted to French players. The format gave the defending champion a bye until the final match, known as the challenge round. In that match, they faced the winner of the All Comers' competition, a standard tournament bracket for the remaining players. Lenglen won the All Comers' singles draw of six players to make it to the challenge round against Marguerite Broquedis. Despite winning the first set, she lost the match. This was the last time in Lenglen's career she lost a completed singles match, and the only time she lost a singles final other than by default. Although she also lost the doubles challenge round at the tournament to Blanche and Suzanne Amblard, Lenglen won the mixed doubles title with Max Decugis as her partner.
Lenglen's performance at the French Championships set the stage for her debut at the World Hard Court Championships, one of the major tournaments recognised by the International Lawn Tennis Federation at the time. She won the singles final against Germaine Golding for her first major title. The only set she lost during the event was to Suzanne Amblard in the semifinals. Her volleying ability was instrumental in defeating Amblard, while her ability to outlast Golding in long rallies gave her the advantage in the final. Lenglen also won the doubles title with Ryan over the Amblard sisters without dropping a game in the final. She finished runner-up in mixed doubles to Ryan and Decugis. Following the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen could have debuted at Wimbledon; however, her father decided against it. He did not like her chances of defeating Lambert Chambers on grass, a surface on which she had never competed, given that she already lost to her earlier in the year on clay.
World War I hiatus
After World War I began in August 1914, tournaments ceased, interfering with Lenglen's father's plan for her to enter Wimbledon in 1915. During the war, Lenglen's family lived at their home in Nice, an area less affected by the war than northern France. Although there were no tournaments, Lenglen had plenty of opportunity to train in Nice. Soldiers came to the Riviera to temporarily avoid the war, including leading tennis players such as two-time United States national champions R. Norris Williams and Clarence Griffin. These players competed in charity exhibitions primarily in Cannes to raise money for the French Red Cross. Lenglen participated and had the opportunity to play singles matches against male players.
1919: Classic Wimbledon final
Many tournaments resumed in 1919, following the end of World War I. Lenglen won nine singles titles in ten events, all four of her doubles events, and eight mixed doubles titles in ten events. She won the South of France Championships in March without dropping a game in any of her four matches. Although the French Championships and World Hard Court Championships did not return until the following year, Lenglen was able to debut at Wimbledon in July. She won the six-round All Comers' bracket, only losing six games in the first four rounds. Her biggest challenge in the All Comers' competition was her doubles partner Ryan, who saved match points and levelled the second set of their semifinal at five games, only losing after an hour-long rain delay. Although the 20-year-old Lenglen was considered a favourite against the 40-year-old Lambert Chambers in the challenge round, Lambert Chambers was able to trouble Lenglen with well-placed drop shots. Lenglen won the first set 10–8 after both players saved two set points. After saving two match points, Lenglen won the third set 9–7 for her first Wimbledon title. The match set the record for most games in a Wimbledon women's singles final with 44, only since surpassed by the 1970 final between Margaret Court and Billie Jean King. Over 8,000 people attended the match, well above the seating capacity of 3500 on Centre Court. Lenglen defeated Lambert Chambers and Ethel Larcombe again in the doubles final with Ryan. She already lost to Ryan and Randolph Lycett in the her mixed doubles quarterfinal, her only loss of the year in any discipline aside from defaults.
1920: Olympic champion
Lenglen began 1920 with five singles titles on the Riviera, three of which she won in lopsided finals against Ryan. However, Ryan was able to defeat Lenglen in mixed doubles at Cannes in windy conditions, Lenglen's only mixed doubles loss of the year. Although the World Hard Court Championships returned in May, Lenglen withdrew due to illness. She recovered in time for the French Championships two weeks later and won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles to complete a triple crown. Lenglen easily made it to the challenge round in singles, where she defeated Broquedis in a rematch of the 1914 final. She won the doubles event with Élisabeth d'Ayen and defended her mixed doubles title with Decugis, only needing to play the challenge round.
Lenglen's next event was Wimbledon. Lambert Chambers won the All Comers' final to set up a rematch of the previous year's final. Although the match was expected to be close again and began 2–2, Lenglen won ten of the last eleven games for her second consecutive Wimbledon singles title. She won the triple crown, taking the doubles with Ryan and the mixed doubles with Australian Gerald Patterson. The doubles final was also a rematch of the previous year's final against Lambert Chambers and Larcombe, while the mixed doubles victory came against defending champions Ryan and Lycett. Lenglen's decision to partner with Patterson led to the Fédération Française de Lawn Tennis (FFLT) threatening to not pay her expenses for the Wimbledon trip unless she partnered with a compatriot. Lenglen and her father replied by paying for the trip themselves. After Wimbledon, Lenglen won both of her events in Belgium in the lead-up to the Olympic Games in Antwerp. At the Olympics, Lenglen won two gold medals and one bronze medal for France. She won the singles title over British player Dorothy Holman, losing only four games in the entire event. She won mixed doubles with Decugis, overcoming an opening set loss in their quarterfinal. Lenglen partnered with d'Ayen again in the doubles event, losing their semifinal to Kathleen McKane and Winifred McNair in a tight match that ended 8–6 in the decisive third set. This match was Lenglen's only loss in doubles all year. Their opponents in the bronze medal match defaulted.
1921: Only singles defeat post-World War I
Lenglen again dominated the tournaments on the Riviera in 1921, winning eight titles in singles, six in doubles, and seven in mixed doubles. Her only loss came in mixed doubles. She won all of her matches against Ryan, four in singles and five in mixed doubles. All of Lenglen's doubles titles on the Riviera were with Ryan.
Lenglen defended her triple crown at the French Championships. Later that month, she returned to the World Hard Court Championships, where five-time United States national singles champion Molla Mallory was making her debut. The United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) sent Mallory and Bill Tilden to the tournament with the hope of drawing Lenglen over to compete in the United States. Although Lenglen defeated Mallory in the final in straight sets, she trailed 2–3 in the second set before winning the last four games. Lenglen won the triple crown at the tournament, partnering with Golding in doubles and Jacques Brugnon in mixed doubles. She then won her third consecutive Wimbledon titles in both singles and doubles, defeating her doubles partner Ryan in a lopsided singles final. She withdrew from the mixed doubles event after her partner suffered an ankle injury.
Lenglen planned to compete at the U.S. National Championships in August to prove she deserved to be called a world champion. Due to illness delaying her trip, however, she did not make it to New York until three days before her opening match and was still sick when she arrived. After Lenglen's opening round opponent defaulted, the tournament rescheduled her second round match against Mallory for that night to appease the large crowd that showed up to see Lenglen play. With over 8,000 people in attendance, Mallory took a 2–0 lead in the first set before Lenglen began coughing in the third game. After losing the first set, Lenglen retired from the match two points into the second set for her only singles loss after World War I. She only played two more matches in the United States, both small exhibitions, before leaving in late September.
1922: Start of 179-match win streak
During the 1922 season, Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline other than by default. She did not return to competitive tennis until March, six months after her loss to Mallory. Lenglen's first tournament back was the South of France Championships, where she won the doubles and mixed doubles titles. She did not play the singles event and did not play singles again until a month later at the Beausoleil Championships in Monte Carlo, where she won the title without dropping a game. This tournament began a 179-match win streak that Lenglen continued through the end of her amateur career.
In the middle of the year, Lenglen won triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships, the French Championships, and Wimbledon. At the first, she saved two set points in her semifinal against McKane before winning the set 10–8. After only needing to play three challenge round matches at the French, Lenglen agreed to forgo the challenge round system at Wimbledon and be included in the main draw at the request of the tournament organisers. In the singles final, she faced Mallory in a rematch of their U.S. National Championship meeting. Like in the United States, Mallory won the first two games of the final. However, Lenglen rebounded and won the next twelve games for the title. The final remains the shortest in Wimbledon history, only lasting 26 minutes.
1923: Career-best 45 titles
Lenglen entered more events and won more titles in 1923 than any other year. She won all 16 of the singles events she entered, as well as 13 of 14 doubles events, and 16 of 18 mixed doubles events. Unlike previous years, she did not default a match in any discipline. At the beginning of the season, Mallory travelled to France to make her debut on the French Riviera circuit. Lenglen and Mallory had their last encounter at the South of France Championships, which Mallory entered after not performing well at her other two events on the Riviera. Lenglen defeated her without losing a game. At the same tournament, Lenglen's twelve-month win streak across all disciplines came to an end with a mixed doubles loss to Ryan and Lycett.
At what was to be the last edition of the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen faced McKane in the final in each event, all three of which were held in the same afternoon. She defeated McKane in singles and mixed doubles, the latter of which was with Henri Cochet as her partner for the second consecutive year. With Ryan absent, however, Lenglen partnered with Golding and lost to the British team of McKane and Geraldine Beamish. At the French Championships, Lenglen defended her triple crown without losing a set in spite of the challenge round format being abandoned. She partnered with Brugnon in mixed doubles for the third straight year, while pairing up with Julie Vlasto for the first time in doubles. She faced the most adversity in the singles final when the crowd uncharacteristically booed her for trailing 0–4 to Golding in the second set. At Wimbledon, Lenglen won the singles and doubles titles with ease, never dropping more than three games in a set. In mixed doubles, however, she was defeated by Ryan and Lycett for the second time in the year. In September, Lenglen travelled outside of France and won titles in Belgium, Spain, and Portugal.
1924: No major titles
Although Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline in 1924 except by default, she did not win a major tournament for the first time since 1913 aside from her hiatus due to World War I. Minor illnesses limited her to three singles events on the Riviera. Lenglen played doubles more regularly, winning eight titles in both doubles and mixed doubles. In April, Lenglen travelled to Spain to compete at the Barcelona International. Although she won all three events, she contracted jaundice soon after, preventing her from playing the French Championships. Although she had not fully recovered by Wimbledon, she entered the tournament and won her first three singles matches without dropping a game. In the next round, however, Ryan proved to be a more difficult opponent and took the second set from Lenglen 8–6, only the third set of singles Lenglen had lost since World War I. Although Lenglen narrowly won the match, she then withdrew from the tournament following the advice of her doctor. She did not play another event the rest of the year, and in particular missed the Olympic Games in Paris, where Helen Wills won the women's singles event.
1925: Open French champion
Lenglen returned to tennis at the Beau Site New Year Meeting in Cannes the first week of the year, winning in doubles with Ryan in her only event. She only played singles at two tournaments on the Riviera, including the South of France Championships. Her only loss during this part of the season was to Ryan and Umberto de Morpurgo at the Côte d'Azur Championships in Cannes. In May, Lenglen entered the French Championships, the inaugural edition open to international players. The tournament was played at St. Cloud at the site of the defunct World Hard Court Championships. Lenglen won the triple crown and was not challenged in singles or mixed doubles. She won the singles final over McKane, losing only three games. She won the mixed doubles final with Brugnon against her doubles partner Julie Vlasto and Cochet. Although Lenglen and Vlasto lost the second set of the doubles final 9–11 to McKane and Evelyn Colyer, they won the other two sets with ease for the title.
Lenglen followed up her performance at the French Championships with another triple crown at Wimbledon. She played five singles matches and did not lose a game in the second set of any of them. The five games she dropped in total remain a record for fewest games lost in a singles title run in Wimbledon history. Her opponents included Ryan in her opening match, the defending champion McKane in the semifinals, and Joan Fry in the final. In mixed doubles, she partnered with Jean Borotra to defeat Ryan and de Morpurgo in the final. In doubles, Lenglen and Ryan played their last tournament together and won the title without dropping a set. During the last part of the year, Lenglen led France to a 7–4 victory in a tie against Australia, and defeated Australasian champion Daphne Akhurst in the final of the concurrent Deauville tournament. Later in the year, Lenglen won the doubles and mixed doubles events at the Cromer Covered Courts, the only time she played in England other than Wimbledon and her only indoor wood tournament.
1926: Match of the Century
The 1926 season unexpectedly was Lenglen's last as an amateur. At the beginning of the season, three-time reigning U.S. national champion Helen Wills travelled to the French Riviera with the hope of playing a match against Lenglen. With Wills's level of stardom approaching that of Lenglen's, there was an immense amount of hype for a match between them to take place. They only entered the same singles draw once, at the Carlton Club in Cannes. When Lenglen and Wills both made the final with little opposition, the club doubled the number of seats around their main court and all 3,000 seats plus standing room sold out. Spectators unable to get into the venue attempted to watch the match by climbing trees and ladders or by purchasing unofficial tickets for the windows and roofs of villas across the street. In what was called the Match of the Century, Lenglen defeated Wills in straight sets. The first match point became chaotic when a winner from Wills was called out by a spectator, leading both the players and spectators to believe the match was over. Photographers captured the unique situation of Lenglen and Wills shaking hands at the net as if the match had ended, a moment followed by the crowd flooding the court to congratulate Lenglen. After clarification the shot was in, Wills broke Lenglen to level the set. Despite Lenglen winning, her reputation of being unbeatable was damaged by Wills's competitive performance.
While Wills remained in France, Lenglen avoided a rematch on the Riviera. After Wills's season was marred by an appendectomy during the French Championships, she withdrew from both Grand Slam tournaments in Europe and another match between her and Lenglen never took place. In Wills's absence, Lenglen defended all three of her titles at the French Championships with ease, defeating Mary Browne in the singles final. She again won the doubles with Vlasto and the mixed doubles with Brugnon.
Wimbledon misunderstanding
Although Lenglen was a heavy favourite at Wimbledon with Wills not participating, she began the tournament facing two issues. She was concerned with her family's finances as her father's health was worsening, and she was not content with the FFLT wanting her to enter the doubles event with a French partner instead of her usual partner Ryan. Although Lenglen agreed to play with Vlasto as the FFLT wanted, she was unsettled by being drawn against Ryan in her opening doubles match.
Lenglen's situation did not improve once the tournament began. She opened the singles event with an uncharacteristic win against Browne in which she lost five games, the same number she had lost in the entire 1925 singles event. Her next singles match was then moved up before her doubles match to accommodate the royal family, who planned to be in attendance. Wanting to play doubles first, Lenglen asked for the match to be rescheduled. Although the request was never received, she arrived at the grounds late. After Wimbledon officials confronted her in anger over keeping Queen Mary waiting, she refused to play. The club ultimately adhered to Lenglen's wishes and rescheduled both matches with the doubles first. Nonetheless, Lenglen and Vlasto were defeated by Ryan and Browne in three sets while the crowd who typically supported Lenglen turned against her. Although she defeated Evelyn Dewhurst in the rescheduled singles match, she then withdrew from both singles and mixed doubles, ending her last amateur tournament.
Professional career
United States tour (1926–27)
A month after her withdrawal from Wimbledon, Lenglen signed a $50,000 contract (equivalent to about $ in 2020) with American sports promoter C. C. Pyle to headline a four-month professional tour in the United States beginning in October 1926. She had begun discussing a professional contract with Pyle's associate William Pickens when he visited her on the Riviera in April. Lenglen had previously turned down an offer of 200,000 francs (equivalent to about $ in 2020) to turn professional in the United States following her last victory over Molla Mallory in 1923, declining in large part to keep her amateur status. She became less concerned with that, however, after the crowd turned against her at Wimbledon. She was more interested in keeping her social status, and was convinced by Pyle that turning professional would not hurt her stardom or damage her reputation. With Lenglen on the tour, Pyle attempted to recruit other top players, including Wills, McKane, and leading Americans Bill Tilden and Bill Johnston. Although they all declined, Pyle was able to sign Mary Browne as well as men's players Vincent Richards, Paul Féret, Howard Kinsey, and Harvey Snodgrass. Richards was regarded as the biggest star among the male players, having won gold medals in singles and doubles at the 1924 Olympics. Once the tour began, Lenglen and all of the other players lost their amateur status.
Although professional tennis tournaments already existed, the tour was the first travelling professional exhibition series in tennis history. It featured 40 stops, starting on 9 October 1926 and ending on 14 February 1927, and included several stops in Canada as well as one in Cuba. Lenglen dominated Browne on the tour, winning all 33 of the best-of-three-set matches played to completion. Browne did not win a set until the second set at the 33rd stop. The only other set she won was the only set they played at the 36th stop, where Lenglen had decided to play just a one-set match while ill to avoid disappointing the fans. Browne also nearly won a set at the 23rd stop, losing 9–11, at which point Lenglen decided not to continue.
The tour was a financial success. Lenglen earned the most money, receiving half of the revenue from ticket sales and $100,000 in total, more than the $70,000 that Babe Ruth earned in 1927 as the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball. The average attendance was just over 4,000 at the 34 venues where it was recorded. The most well-attended venues were opening night at Madison Square Garden in New York City with an attendance of 13,000 and the Public Auditorium in Cleveland with an attendance of 10,000. Opening night in particular brought in $34,000 from tickets sold at $1.50 to $5.50 (equivalent to $ to $ in 2020).
British tour (1927)
A few months after the end of the United States tour, Lenglen signed with British promoter Charles Cochran to headline a shorter professional tour in the United Kingdom. Cochran recruited Dora Köring, the 1912 Olympic silver medalist in singles, and Dewhurst to play against Lenglen. Karel Koželuh and Kinsey were the male players on the tour. There were seven tour stops, all in July 1927. Lenglen won all seven of her singles matches, never losing more than five games in any of them. The last three stops were played on the grounds of association football clubs: Queen's Park in Glasgow, Blackpool, and Manchester United. These were the best attended events on the tour and the final match at Old Trafford had an attendance of over 15,000, the highest between either professional tour.
Aftermath
Lenglen was widely criticised for her decision to turn professional. Once the tour began, the FFLT expelled her and Féret while the All England Lawn Tennis Club revoked her membership. Lenglen in turn criticised amateur tennis for her nearing poverty. In the program for the United States professional tour, she stated, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis... And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 – not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study – tennis... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy – should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune – for whom?" She criticised the barriers that typically prevented ordinary people from becoming tennis players, stating, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport?" Lenglen did not participate in any other professional tours after 1927. She never formally applied to be reinstated as an amateur with the FFLT either. She had asked about the possibility in 1932 after Féret was reinstated, but was told to wait another three years and decided against it.
Rivalries
Lenglen vs. Mallory
Molla Mallory was the only player to defeat Lenglen in singles after World War I. Fifteen years older than Lenglen and originally from Norway, Mallory won a bronze medal at the 1912 Olympic Games before emigrating to the United States in 1914. While World War I halted tennis in Europe, Mallory established herself as the top-ranked American player, winning the first four U.S. National Championships she entered from 1915 through 1918. Whereas Lenglen regularly came to the net and had an all-court game built around control rather than power, the much older Mallory played almost exclusively from the baseline. The strengths of Mallory's game were that she took the ball early and had one of the most powerful forehands in women's tennis at the time. Mallory had a similar personality to Lenglen off the court. While they each hated losing, both of them smoked regularly and loved to dance. Lenglen faced Mallory just four times in singles, compiling a 3–1 record. She also won both of their doubles and mixed doubles encounters.
Their first two meetings were highlighted by Lenglen's health issues. In the final of the 1921 World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen nearly retired while struggling with blisters on her foot and trailing in the second set. Nonetheless, Lenglen proceeded to win by following her plan to play defensively and wait for Mallory to make unforced errors on attempted winners. In their second meeting at the 1921 U.S. National Championships, Mallory was able to take advantage of Lenglen's poor health, executing her usual strategy of going for winners to win the match. Although they had entered the doubles event as partners, Lenglen's health prevented them from playing any matches together at the tournament. Lenglen was able to easily win their last two meetings in 1922 and 1923 by playing more aggressively and employing Mallory's strategy of hitting well-placed winners from the baseline.
The press built up the rivalry between Lenglen and Mallory. After Lenglen's retirement against Mallory at the U.S. National Championships, the vast majority of American newspapers criticised Lenglen for not finishing the match and accused her of retiring because she did not think she could win. They coined a phrase "cough and quit" that became popular at the time for describing someone who needed an excuse to avoid losing. After Lenglen's victory over Mallory at Wimbledon, the American press returned to supporting Lenglen. Both Lenglen and Mallory believed the newspapers exaggerated the personal nature of their rivalry. Mallory in particular said, "The newspapers are the dirtiest, filthiest things that ever happened. I don't want my name in the newspapers. I have a better chance on the courts than in the newspapers of my own country."
Lenglen and Ryan
Lenglen's usual doubles partner Elizabeth Ryan was also her most frequent opponent in singles. Born in the United States, Ryan travelled to England in 1912 to visit her sister before deciding to stay there permanently. Although she lost all four of her appearances in major finals, Ryan won 26 major titles between doubles and mixed doubles. The biggest strength of her game was volleying. Tennis writer Ted Tinling said, "volleying as a fundamental, aggressive technique was first injected into the women's game by Ryan." Lenglen and Ryan first partnered together at a handicap event in Monte Carlo in 1913 when they were 13 and 20 years old respectively. After losing the final at that tournament, the two of them never lost a regular doubles match, only once dropping a set in 1923 to Dorothea Lambert Chambers and Kathleen McKane, again at Monte Carlo. Ryan was Lenglen's doubles partner for 40 of her 74 doubles titles, including all six at Wimbledon and two of three at the World Hard Court Championships.
Ryan defeated Lenglen in their first singles meeting in straight sets at Monte Carlo in 1914 and also won a set in their second meeting two months later. Following their first encounter, Lenglen won all 17 of their remaining matches, including five at Wimbledon and two major finals. The only time Ryan won a set against Lenglen after World War I was in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 1924, where Lenglen withdrew due to illness in the following round. When the FFLT asked Lenglen to take a French partner in doubles at Wimbledon in 1926, Ryan partnered with Mary Browne to defeat Lenglen and her new partner Julie Vlasto, coming from three match points down in the second set. Ryan also won their only other doubles meeting in 1914. In mixed doubles, Lenglen compiled a 23–9 record against Ryan. Half of her career mixed doubles losses were to Ryan. After losing their first six encounters, she recovered to win the next thirteen. Lenglen won her first mixed doubles match against Ryan at the 1920 Beaulieu tournament, starting a win streak that ended with a loss to Ryan and Lycett at the 1923 South of France Championships.
Overlap with Wills
Helen Wills was the closest to becoming Lenglen's counterpart. Wills finished her career with 19 Grand Slam singles titles, a record that stood until 1970. She succeeded Lenglen as world No. 1 in 1927 and kept that ranking for the next six years and nine of the next twelve overall until 1938. Late in Lenglen's amateur career, Wills had built up a similar level of stardom to Lenglen by winning the 1924 Olympic gold medal in singles in Lenglen's absence while still only 18 years old. Although their careers overlapped when Wills visited Europe in 1924 and 1926, Lenglen only faced Wills once in her career. Lenglen withdrew from Wimbledon and the Olympics due to jaundice in 1924, while Wills withdrew from the French Championships and Wimbledon in 1926 due to appendicitis, preventing a longer rivalry between tennis's two biggest female stars of the 1920s from emerging.
Playing style
Elizabeth Ryan described Lenglen's all-court style of play as, "[Lenglen] owned every kind of shot, plus a genius for knowing how and when to use them. She never gave an opponent the same kind of shot twice in a row. She’d make you run miles... her game was all placement and deception and steadiness. I had the best drop shot anybody ever had, but she could not only get up to it but was so fast that often she could score a placement off it." Her rivals Molla Mallory and Helen Wills both noted that Lenglen excelled at extending rallies and could take control of points with defensive shots. Although Lenglen built her game around control rather than power, she had the ability to hit powerful shots. In particular, Mallory praised the power behind her defensive shots, saying, "She is just the steadiest player that ever was. She just sent back at me whatever I sent at her and waited for me to make a fault. And her returns often enough were harder than the shots I sent up to her." British journalist A. E. Crawley regarded her as having the best movement of her time, saying, "I have never seen on a lawn tennis court either man or woman move with such mechanical and artistic perfection and prose. Whether [Lenglen's] objective is the ball or merely changing sides, she reminded you of the movement of fire over prairie grass." He believed she was a powerful server and an aggressive volleyer, commenting, "She serves with all the male athlete's power. She smashes with the same loose and rapid action, the release of a spring of steel. Her volley is not a timid push, but an arrow from the bow. And an arrow from the bow is Suzanne herself."
Adopting a style of play drawn from men's players led Lenglen to become one of the leading volleyers in women's tennis at a time when the women's game was centred around playing from the baseline, even for the top players. Lenglen aimed to come to the net to finish points quickly whenever possible. Kathleen McKane specifically noted that "Suzanne volleyed like a man" when describing her influence on women's tennis. While Lenglen did not model the majority of her game after any specific player, she modelled her forehand after that of Anthony Wilding. Like Wilding, she aimed to hit forehands flat and with little to no topspin. She used a continental grip and strived to hit balls early on the rise. Lenglen wrote in her book Lawn Tennis for Girls, "A favorite shot of mine is the backhand down the line". Lenglen was regarded as having a graceful style of play. Her movement was thought to resemble that of a dancer, a style that may have arisen from a course on classic Greek dance she had taken as a child. René Lacoste, a leading French men's tennis player from her era, said, "[Lenglen] played with marvelous ease the simplest strokes in the world. It was only after several games that I understood what harmony was concealed by her simplicity, what wonderful mental and physical balance was hidden by the facility of her play."
Lenglen developed a reputation for drinking cognac to help her play at pivotal points of her biggest matches. Most notably, she did so during the second and third sets of her victory against Lambert Chambers in the 1919 Wimbledon final, and at the start and during the more competitive second set of her victory over Helen Wills in the Match of the Century. She only travelled to the U.S. National Championships in 1921 after the USLTA agreed to supply her with alcohol during her stay even though consumption was illegal under the laws of Prohibition at the time. Nonetheless, they did not provide Lenglen with alcohol during her retirement loss to Mallory.
Legacy
Achievements
Lenglen was ranked as the 24th greatest player of all-time in the 100 Greatest of All Time series. She was the ninth-highest ranked woman overall, and the highest-ranked woman to play exclusively in the amateur era. After formal annual women's tennis rankings began to be published by tennis journalist and player A. Wallis Myers in 1921, Lenglen was No. 1 in the world in each of the first six editions of the rankings through her retirement from amateur tennis in 1926. She won a total of 250 titles consisting of 83 in singles, 74 in doubles, and 93 in mixed doubles. Nine of her singles titles were won without losing a game. Lenglen compiled win percentages of 97.9% in singles and 96.9% across all disciplines. After World War I, she won 287 of 288 singles matches, starting with a 108-match win streak and ending with a 179-match win streak, the latter of which was longer than Helen Wills' longest win streak of 161 matches. Lenglen ended her career on a 250-match win streak on clay.
Lenglen's eight Grand Slam women's singles titles are tied for the tenth-most all-time, and tied for fourth in the amateur era behind only Maureen Connolly's nine, Court's thirteen, and Wills's nineteen. Aside from the 1919 Wimbledon Championships, Lenglen did not lose more than three games in a set in any of her other Grand Slam or World Hard Court Championship singles finals. Lenglen's six Wimbledon titles are tied for the sixth-most in history. Her former record of five consecutive Wimbledon titles has only since been matched by Martina Navratilova, who won her sixth in a row in 1987. Lenglen's title at the 1914 World Hard Court Championships made her the youngest major champion in tennis history at 15 years and 16 days old, nearly a year ahead of the next two youngest, Martina Hingis and Lottie Dod.
Lenglen won a total of 17 titles at Wimbledon, 19 at the French Championships, and 10 at the World Hard Court Championships across all disciplines. Lenglen completed three Wimbledon triple crowns – winning the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles events at a tournament in the same year – in 1920, 1922, and 1925. She also won two triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships in 1921 and 1922, and six at the French Championships, the first four of which came consecutively from 1920 through 1923 when the tournament was invitation-only to French nationals and the last two of which came in 1925 and 1926 when the tournament was open to internationals.
Mythical persona
Following World War I, Lenglen became a symbol of national pride in France in a country looking to recover from the war. The French press referred to Lenglen as notre Suzanne (our Suzanne) to characterise her status as a national heroine; and more eminently as La Divine (The Goddess) to assert her unassailability. The press wrote about Lenglen as if she was infallible at tennis, often attributing any performance that was relatively poor by her standards to various excuses such as the fault of her doubles partner or to having concern over the health of her father. Journalists who criticised Lenglen were condemned and refuted by the rest of the press. At the Olympics, she introduced herself to journalists as "The Great Lenglen", a title that was well received. Before matches, Lenglen would predict to the press that she was going to win, a practice that Americans treated as improper. She explained, "When I am asked a question I endeavour to give a frank answer. If I know I am going to win, what harm is there in saying so?"
Lenglen was the first female athlete to be acknowledged as a celebrity outside of her sport. She was acquainted with members of royal families such as King Gustav V of Sweden, and actresses such as Mary Pickford. She was well known by the general public, and her matches were well-attended by people not otherwise interested in tennis. Many of her biggest matches were sold out, including the 1919 Wimbledon final against Lambert Chambers, where the attendance more than doubled the seating capacity of Centre Court, and her first match against Mallory, where tickets were sold at a cost of up to 500 francs (about $ in 2020) and an estimated 5,000 people could not gain entry to see the match after it had sold out. The popularity of Lenglen's matches at Wimbledon was a large factor in the club moving the tournament from Worple Road to its modern site at Church Road. A new Centre Court opened in 1922 with a seating capacity of nearly 10,000, nearly three times larger than that at the old venue. At the Match of the Century against Wills, seated tickets that were sold out at 300 francs, then equivalent to about $11 in the United States (or $ in 2020), were re-sold by scalpers at up to 1200 francs, which was then about $44 (or $ in 2020). This cost far exceeded that for the men's singles final at the U.S. National Championships at the time, which were sold at as low as $2 per seat (about $ in 2020).
Lenglen's mythical reputation began at a young age. She was known for a story about her father training her to improve her shot precision as a child by placing a handkerchief at different locations on the court and instructing her to hit it as a target. She was said to be able to hit the handkerchief with ease regardless of the type of incoming shot. Each time she did, he would fold it in half before replacing it with a coin. It was said that Lenglen could hit the coin up to five times in a row.
Professional tennis
Lenglen was the first leading tennis player to leave amateur tennis to play professionally, thereby launching playing tennis as a professional career. The exhibition tour she headlined in the United States from 1926 to 1927 in which a few players travelled together to compete against each other across a series of venues was the first of its kind. It established a format that was repeated over twenty times for the next four decades until the start of the Open Era. With Pyle only interested in tennis because of Lenglen, Vincent Richards, the leading male player on Lenglen's United States tour, organised the next such tour featuring himself competing against Karel Koželuh in 1928. He also began organising the first major professional tournaments to feature players who had been top amateurs, beginning with the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships first held later in 1927.
As the top women's players nearly all kept their amateur status, women were largely left out of both the travelling exhibition tours and the growing professional tournaments after Lenglen's playing career ended. The next significant exhibition tour to feature women's tennis players did not occur until 1941 when Alice Marble became one of the headliners on a tour that also featured leading male players Don Budge and Bill Tilden. Fellow top-ranked players Pauline Betz and Althea Gibson followed Marble by turning professional in 1947 and 1958 respectively. Betz played on two tours, one in 1947 and another from 1950 to 1951. Gibson played in a series of warmup matches for the Harlem Globetrotters, an exhibition basketball team in the United States.
Fashion
Lenglen redefined traditional women's tennis attire early in her career. By the 1919 Wimbledon final, she avoided donning a corset in favour of a short-sleeved and calf-length pleated skirt to go along with a distinctive circular-brimmed bonnet, a stark contrast with her much older opponent Dorothea Lambert Chambers who wore long sleeves and a plain skirt below the calf.
The following year, Lenglen ended the norm of women competing in clothes not suited for playing tennis. She had Jean Patou design her outfits that were not only intended to be stylish, but allowed her to perform her signature leaping ballet motion in points and did not restrict her movement on the court. This type of attire was among the earliest women's sportswear. Unusual for the time, her skirt was both sleeveless and only extended to her knees. Lenglen replaced the bonnet with a bandeau, which became known as the "Lenglen bandeau" and was her signature piece of attire throughout the rest of her career. On the court, she routinely wore makeup and popularised having tanned skin instead of a pale complexion that other players had preferred before her time. Later in her career, she moved away from just wearing white in favour of brighter-coloured outfits. Overall, she pioneered the idea of players using the tennis court to showcase fashion instead of just competing. Off the court, Lenglen frequently wore an oversized and expensive fur coat.
Honours
Lenglen is honoured in a variety of ways at the French Open. At Stade Roland Garros, the second show court that was built in 1994 with a capacity of about 10,000 was named Court Suzanne Lenglen in 1997. Outside the court, there is a bronze relief statue of Lenglen that was erected in 1994. The FFLT had originally planned to erect a statue of Lenglen immediately after her death, but this plan never materialised due to the start of World War II later that year. Additionally, one of the main entrances to the ground is Porte Suzanne Lenglen, which leads to Allée Suzanne Lenglen. Moreover, the women's singles championship trophy was named the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen in 1987. In spite of her success at the French Championships, Lenglen never competed at Stade Roland Garros as it did not become the site for the tournament until 1928 after her retirement from amateur tennis.
Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978. Following her death, she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Another road, the Avenue Suzanne Lenglen, is named in her honour outside of the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. She has been honoured in a Google Doodle twice, once on her 117th birthday on 24 May 2016, and again on International Women's Day on 8 March 2017.
Personal life
Lenglen was in a long-term relationship with Baldwin Baldwin from 1927 to 1932. Baldwin was the grandson and heir to Lucky Baldwin, a prominent businessman and real estate investor active in California. Lenglen met Baldwin during her professional tour in the United States. Although they intended to get married, those plans never materialised largely because Baldwin was already married and his wife would not agree to a divorce while Lenglen and Baldwin were together. During this time, her father died of poor health in 1929.
Lenglen was the author of several books on tennis, the first two of which she wrote during her amateur career. Her first book, Lawn Tennis for Girls, covered techniques and advice on tactics for beginner tennis players. She also wrote Lawn Tennis: The Game of Nations and a romantic novel, The Love Game: Being the Life Story of Marcelle Penrose. Lenglen finished her last book Tennis by Simple Exercises with Margaret Morris in 1937. The book featured a section by Lenglen on what was needed to become an all-around tennis player and a section by Morris, a choreographer and dancer, on exercises designed for tennis players. She played a role as an actress in the 1935 British musical comedy film Things Are Looking Up, in which she contests a tennis match against the lead character portrayed by Cicely Courtneidge.
Following her playing career, Lenglen returned to tennis as a coach in 1933, serving as the director of a school on the grounds of Stade Roland Garros. She opened her own tennis school for girls in 1936 at the Tennis Mirabeau in Paris with the support of the FFLT. She began instructing adults the following year as well. A year later in May 1938, Lenglen became the inaugural director of the French National Tennis School in Paris. Shortly after this appointment, however, Lenglen became severely fatigued while teaching at the school and needed to receive a blood transfusion. She previously had other health issues following her retirement, most notably suffering from appendicitis and having her appendix removed in October 1934. Lenglen died on 4 July 1938 at the age of 39, three weeks after she became ill, and was reported to have died from pernicious anemia. Her specific cause of death was unclear due to anemia being curable and reports of her having other illnesses, including leukemia. Lenglen was buried at the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen just outside Paris.
Career statistics
Performance timelines
Results from the French Championships before 1924 do not count towards the statistical totals because the tournament was not yet open to international players.
Singles
Doubles
Mixed doubles
Source: Little
Major finals
Grand Slam singles: 8 (8 titles)
World Championship singles: 4 (4 titles)
Source: Little
Olympic medal matches
Singles: 1 (1 gold medal)
Source: Little
See also
List of Grand Slam women's singles champions
List of Grand Slam women's doubles champions
List of Grand Slam mixed doubles champions
List of Grand Slam related tennis records
Notes
References
Books
External links
1899 births
1938 deaths
Deaths from pernicious anemia
Deaths from leukemia
Deaths from cancer in France
French female tennis players
French Championships (tennis) champions
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in mixed doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's singles
International Tennis Hall of Fame inductees
Medalists at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Olympic bronze medalists for France
Olympic gold medalists for France
Olympic medalists in tennis
Olympic tennis players of France
Tennis players from Paris
Professional tennis players before the Open Era
Tennis players at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Wimbledon champions (pre-Open Era)
World No. 1 tennis players
20th-century French women | false | [
"Sofya Andreyevna Zhuk (; born 1 December 1999) is an inactive Russian tennis player.\nShe won the 2015 Wimbledon girls' singles title.\n\nCareer\n\nEarly career\nZhuk trained at the Justine Henin Academy in Belgium and her coach was Olivier Jeunehomme. Her best win to date on the professional tour has been at a $60K tournament in Turkey, where she beat home favourite İpek Soylu in the final.\n\nWhen she won her first tournament at Shymkent, she became only the 17th 14 year old in ITF history to win an open tournament at that age, joining a group which includes former world number ones Justine Henin and Dinara Safina.\n\nIn 2015, Zhuk competed as an unseeded 15-year-old at Wimbledon, where she won the junior girls' title against fellow Russian and No. 12 ranked junior Anna Blinkova in straight sets, 7–5, 6–4. Zhuk did not drop a set in the whole Wimbledon tournament. Zhuk became only the second Russian girl to win the Junior Wimbledon title, following the 2002 final when Vera Dushevina defeated compatriot Maria Sharapova.\n\nShe made her WTA Tour singles debut at the 2016 Miami Open, where she received a wildcard into the main draw. She lost in straight sets to Zhang Shuai in the first round.\n\n2018\nZhuk reached the second round of qualifying at the Australian Open, losing to Magdalena Frech of Poland, before heading to Newport Beach in California for their inaugural WTA 125K series tournament. She reached her first 125K final in this event where, after taking the first set, she eventually fell to Danielle Collins, six years her senior, in three sets.\n\nCollins was her nemesis again when they played at Indian Wells, after both had defeated seeded players. Zhuk recorded her very first WTA Tour win when she defeated Alizé Cornet in the first round, and followed that by beating 18th seed Magdalena Rybarikova in the second round. Zhuk's second to last service game in that match took well over 20 minutes, with 12 deuces and 30 points. Rybarikova saved eleven match points during the game, before finally winning on only her second break point. Zhuk promptly broke back, and then served out to win 6–3, 2–6, 7–5. Collins, though having beaten 15th seed Madison Keys in the second round, always had the advantage in their third round clash, winning 6–4, 6–4. Zhuk nevertheless reached her career-high ranking of 123 after this defeat. She then went to the Premier Mandatory tournament in Miami, where she lost in the first round of qualifying.\n\nIn the European Grand Slam tournaments, she lost in the first qualifying round of the French Open to Valentini Grammatikopoulou, and in the final qualifying round for Wimbledon to Vitalia Diatchenko, having had her revenge on Grammatikopoulou in the first round.\n\nPerformance timeline\n\nSingles\n\nWTA Challenger finals\n\nSingles: 1 (1 runner-up)\n\nITF Circuit finals\n\nSingles: 9 (6 titles, 3 runner-ups)\n\nJunior Grand Slam finals\n\nGirls' singles: 1 (1 title)\n\nAwards\n2015\n The Russian Cup in the nomination Junior of the Year\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n \n \n\n1999 births\nLiving people\nTennis players from Moscow\nRussian female tennis players\nWimbledon junior champions\nGrand Slam (tennis) champions in girls' singles\nRussian expatriates in Belgium",
"Seong Eun-jeong (born 31 October 1999) is a South Korean professional golfer. Before turning professional, she won the 2016 U.S. Women's Amateur. Her win granted her exemptions into several majors on the LPGA Tour from 2016 to 2017. At the 2017 ANA Inspiration, she became the first amateur golfer to score a hole in one at the event. As a professional golfer, Seong won her first professional golf tournament at the Danielle Downey Credit Union Classic during the 2018 Symetra Tour.\n\nCareer\nAs an amateur golfer, Seong participated at events held by the United States Golf Association. She competed at the 2013 U.S. Women's Amateur but did not make the cut. The following year, Seong was runner up at the 2014 U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links. Her first amateur wins came at the U.S. Girls' Junior in 2015 and 2016. After winning her second Junior championship, Seong won the 2016 U.S. Women's Amateur. Her 2016 wins made Seong the first golfer to win both the Junior and Amateur championships within the same year. After she won the U.S. Amateur, Seong received an exemption to the 2017 U.S. Women's Open and potential invitations to the 2016 Evian Championship, 2017 ANA Inspiration and 2017 Women's British Open.\n\nAt major championships, Seong did not make the cut at the 2016 Evian Championship. The following year, she was the first ever amateur golfer to score a hole in one at the 2017 ANA Inspiration. Her ace was the latest at the tournament since 2012. Despite her hole in one, Seong did not make the cut at the ANA Inspiration in 2017. At subsequent 2017 major championships, Seong missed the cup at the U.S Women's Open and Women's British Open. Outside of the LPGA, Seong began playing on the Symetra Tour in May 2018. A few months later, she won the Danielle Downey Credit Union Classic and obtained her first win as a professional golfer during the 2018 Symetra Tour season.\n\nAmateur wins\n2014 Song Am Cup, Daebo Group Cup Maekyung Amateur\n2015 U.S. Girls' Junior\n2016 U.S. Girls' Junior, U.S. Women's Amateur\n\nSource:\n\nSymetra Tour wins\n2018 Danielle Downey Credit Union Classic\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nSouth Korean female golfers\nWinners of ladies' major amateur golf championships\n1999 births\nLiving people"
] |
[
"Suzanne Lenglen",
"Professional career",
"How did her professional career begin?",
"The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States",
"What was her first professional tournament?",
"For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players).",
"Did she win her first tournament?",
"In their first match in New York City, Lenglen put on a performance that New York Times writer Allison Danzig lauded as \"one of the most masterly exhibitions"
] | C_41fb23025a874c888de27a229c0a75c0_1 | Is there any other important information? | 4 | Besides Suzanne Lenglen being the first major female tennis star to turn professional, is there any other important information? | Suzanne Lenglen | The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States in a series of matches against Mary K. Browne. Browne, winner of the US Championships from 1912 to 1914, was 35 and considered to be past her prime, although she had reached the French final earlier that year (losing to Lenglen 6-1, 6-0). For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players). In their first match in New York City, Lenglen put on a performance that New York Times writer Allison Danzig lauded as "one of the most masterly exhibitions of court generalship that has been seen in this country." When the tour ended in February 1927, Lenglen had defeated Browne, 38 matches to 0. She was exhausted from the lengthy tour, and a physician advised Lenglen that she needed a lengthy period away from the game to recover. Instead, Lenglen chose to retire from competitive tennis to run a Paris tennis school, which she set up with the help and money of her lover Jean Tillier. The school, located next to the courts of Roland Garros, slowly expanded and was recognised as a federal training centre by the French tennis federation in 1936. During this period, Lenglen also wrote several books on tennis. Lenglen was criticised widely for her decision to turn professional, and the All England Club at Wimbledon even revoked her honorary membership. Lenglen, however, described her decision as "an escape from bondage and slavery" and said in the tour programme, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis and have paid thousands of francs in entrance fees to be allowed to do so.... I have worked as hard at my career as any man or woman has worked at any career. And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 - not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study - tennis.... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy - should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune - for whom?" As for the amateur tennis system, Lenglen said, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport? Does it make tennis more popular - or does it tend to suppress and hinder an enormous amount of tennis talent lying dormant in the bodies of young men and women whose names are not in the social register?" CANNOTANSWER | " When the tour ended in February 1927, Lenglen had defeated Browne, 38 matches to 0. | Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen (; 24 May 18994 July 1938) was a French tennis player. She was ranked as the inaugural world No. 1 from 1921 to 1926, winning 8 Grand Slam titles in singles and 21 in total. She also was a four-time World Hard Court Champion in singles, and ten times in total. Lenglen won six Wimbledon singles titles, including five in a row from 1919 to 1923, and was the champion in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at the first two open French Championships in 1925 and 1926. In doubles, she was undefeated with her usual partner Elizabeth Ryan, highlighted by another six titles at Wimbledon. Lenglen was the first leading amateur to turn professional, and was ranked as the greatest women's tennis player from the amateur era in the 100 Greatest of All Time series.
Coached by her father Charles throughout her career, Lenglen began playing tennis at age 11, becoming the youngest major champion in history with her 1914 World Hard Court Championship title at age 15. This success along with her balletic playing style and brash personality helped make Lenglen a national heroine in a country coping with the aftermath of World War I. After the war delayed her career four years, Lenglen was largely unchallenged. She won her Wimbledon debut in 1919 in the second-longest final in history, the only one of her major singles finals she did not win by a lopsided scoreline. Her only post-war loss came in a retirement against Molla Mallory, her only amateur match in the United States. Afterwards, she began a 179-match win streak, during which she defeated Helen Wills in the high-profile Match of the Century in 1926. Following a misunderstanding at Wimbledon later that year, Lenglen abruptly retired from amateur tennis, signing to headline a professional tour in the United States beginning that same year.
Referred to by the French press as La Divine (The Goddess), Lenglen revolutionised the sport by integrating the aggressive style of men's tennis into the women's game and breaking the convention of women competing in clothing unsuitable for tennis. She incorporated fashion into her matches, highlighted by her signature bandeau headwear. Lenglen is recognised as the first female athlete to become a global sport celebrity and her popularity led Wimbledon to move to its larger modern-day venue. Her professional tours laid the foundation for the series of men's professional tours that continued until the Open Era, and led to the first major men's professional tournament the following year. Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978, and the second show court at the site of the French Open is named in her honour.
Early life and background
Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen was born in Paris on 24 May 1899 to Charles and Anaïs Lenglen. She had a younger brother who did not live past the age of three. Lenglen's father was a pharmacist who became wealthy by inheriting a horse-drawn omnibus company from his father. Several years after Suzanne was born, her father sold the omnibus business, after which he relocated the family to Marest-sur-Matz near Compiègne in northern France in 1904. They spent their winters in Nice on the French Riviera in a villa across the street from the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. By the time Lenglen was eight, she excelled at a variety of sports including swimming and cycling. In particular, she enjoyed diabolo, a game involving balancing a spinning top on a string with two attached sticks. During the winter, Lenglen performed diabolo routines in front of large crowds on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Her father credited her confidence to play tennis in large stadiums to her experience as a diabolo performer.
Lenglen's father attended tennis tournaments on the Riviera circuit, where the world's best players competed in the first half of the year. Having played the sport recreationally, he bought Lenglen a racket from a toy store in June 1910 shortly after she had turned 11 years old, and set up a makeshift court on the lawn of their house. She quickly showed enough skill to convince her father to get her a proper racket from a tennis manufacturer within a month. He developed training exercises and played against his daughter. Three months later, Lenglen travelled to Paris to play on a proper clay court owned by her father's friend, Dr. Cizelly. At Cizelly's recommendation, she entered a local high-level tournament in Chantilly. In the singles handicap event, Lenglen won four rounds and finished in second place.
Lenglen's success at the Chantilly tournament prompted her father to train her more seriously. He studied the leading male and female players and decided to teach Lenglen the tactics from the men's game, which was more aggressive than the women's style of slowly constructing points from the baseline. When the family returned to Nice towards the end of autumn, her father arranged for her to play twice a week at the Nice Lawn Tennis Club even though children had never been allowed on the courts, and had her practice with leading male players at the club. Lenglen began training with Joseph Negro, the club's teaching professional. Negro had a wide variety of shots in his repertoire and trained Lenglen to play the same way. As Lenglen's primary coach, her father employed harsh and rigorous methods, saying, "I was a hard taskmaster, and although my advice was always well intentioned, my criticisms were at times severe, and occasionally intemperate." Lenglen's parents watched her matches and discussed her minute errors between themselves throughout, only showing restraint in their criticisms when she was sick. As a result, Lenglen became comfortable with appearing ill, which made it difficult for others to tell if she was sick.
Amateur career
1912–13: Maiden titles
Lenglen entered her first non-handicap singles event in July 1912 at the Compiègne Championships near her hometown, her only regular event of the year. She won her debut match in the quarterfinals before losing her semifinal to Jeanne Matthey. She also played in the singles and mixed doubles handicap events, winning both of them. When Lenglen returned to Nice in 1913, she entered a handicap doubles event in Monte Carlo with Elizabeth Ryan, an American who had moved to England a year earlier. Although they lost the final in three sets, Ryan became Lenglen's most frequent doubles partner and the pair never lost another match. Lenglen's success at handicap events led her to enter more regular events in the rest of 1913. She debuted at the South of France Championships at the Nice Club in March, winning only one match. Nonetheless, when Lenglen returned to Compiègne, she won her first two regular singles titles, both within a few weeks of her 14th birthday. After losing to Matthey again at both of her events in July, the latter of which by default, Lenglen rebounded to win titles in her last two singles events of the year.
1914: World Hard Court champion
Back on the Riviera in 1914, Lenglen focused on regular events. Her victory in singles against high-ranking British player Ruth Winch was regarded as a huge surprise by the tennis community. However, Lenglen still struggled at larger tournaments early in the year, losing to Ryan in the quarterfinals at Monte Carlo and six-time Wimbledon champion Dorothea Lambert Chambers in the semifinals at the South of France Championships. In May, Lenglen was invited to enter the French Championships, which was restricted to French players. The format gave the defending champion a bye until the final match, known as the challenge round. In that match, they faced the winner of the All Comers' competition, a standard tournament bracket for the remaining players. Lenglen won the All Comers' singles draw of six players to make it to the challenge round against Marguerite Broquedis. Despite winning the first set, she lost the match. This was the last time in Lenglen's career she lost a completed singles match, and the only time she lost a singles final other than by default. Although she also lost the doubles challenge round at the tournament to Blanche and Suzanne Amblard, Lenglen won the mixed doubles title with Max Decugis as her partner.
Lenglen's performance at the French Championships set the stage for her debut at the World Hard Court Championships, one of the major tournaments recognised by the International Lawn Tennis Federation at the time. She won the singles final against Germaine Golding for her first major title. The only set she lost during the event was to Suzanne Amblard in the semifinals. Her volleying ability was instrumental in defeating Amblard, while her ability to outlast Golding in long rallies gave her the advantage in the final. Lenglen also won the doubles title with Ryan over the Amblard sisters without dropping a game in the final. She finished runner-up in mixed doubles to Ryan and Decugis. Following the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen could have debuted at Wimbledon; however, her father decided against it. He did not like her chances of defeating Lambert Chambers on grass, a surface on which she had never competed, given that she already lost to her earlier in the year on clay.
World War I hiatus
After World War I began in August 1914, tournaments ceased, interfering with Lenglen's father's plan for her to enter Wimbledon in 1915. During the war, Lenglen's family lived at their home in Nice, an area less affected by the war than northern France. Although there were no tournaments, Lenglen had plenty of opportunity to train in Nice. Soldiers came to the Riviera to temporarily avoid the war, including leading tennis players such as two-time United States national champions R. Norris Williams and Clarence Griffin. These players competed in charity exhibitions primarily in Cannes to raise money for the French Red Cross. Lenglen participated and had the opportunity to play singles matches against male players.
1919: Classic Wimbledon final
Many tournaments resumed in 1919, following the end of World War I. Lenglen won nine singles titles in ten events, all four of her doubles events, and eight mixed doubles titles in ten events. She won the South of France Championships in March without dropping a game in any of her four matches. Although the French Championships and World Hard Court Championships did not return until the following year, Lenglen was able to debut at Wimbledon in July. She won the six-round All Comers' bracket, only losing six games in the first four rounds. Her biggest challenge in the All Comers' competition was her doubles partner Ryan, who saved match points and levelled the second set of their semifinal at five games, only losing after an hour-long rain delay. Although the 20-year-old Lenglen was considered a favourite against the 40-year-old Lambert Chambers in the challenge round, Lambert Chambers was able to trouble Lenglen with well-placed drop shots. Lenglen won the first set 10–8 after both players saved two set points. After saving two match points, Lenglen won the third set 9–7 for her first Wimbledon title. The match set the record for most games in a Wimbledon women's singles final with 44, only since surpassed by the 1970 final between Margaret Court and Billie Jean King. Over 8,000 people attended the match, well above the seating capacity of 3500 on Centre Court. Lenglen defeated Lambert Chambers and Ethel Larcombe again in the doubles final with Ryan. She already lost to Ryan and Randolph Lycett in the her mixed doubles quarterfinal, her only loss of the year in any discipline aside from defaults.
1920: Olympic champion
Lenglen began 1920 with five singles titles on the Riviera, three of which she won in lopsided finals against Ryan. However, Ryan was able to defeat Lenglen in mixed doubles at Cannes in windy conditions, Lenglen's only mixed doubles loss of the year. Although the World Hard Court Championships returned in May, Lenglen withdrew due to illness. She recovered in time for the French Championships two weeks later and won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles to complete a triple crown. Lenglen easily made it to the challenge round in singles, where she defeated Broquedis in a rematch of the 1914 final. She won the doubles event with Élisabeth d'Ayen and defended her mixed doubles title with Decugis, only needing to play the challenge round.
Lenglen's next event was Wimbledon. Lambert Chambers won the All Comers' final to set up a rematch of the previous year's final. Although the match was expected to be close again and began 2–2, Lenglen won ten of the last eleven games for her second consecutive Wimbledon singles title. She won the triple crown, taking the doubles with Ryan and the mixed doubles with Australian Gerald Patterson. The doubles final was also a rematch of the previous year's final against Lambert Chambers and Larcombe, while the mixed doubles victory came against defending champions Ryan and Lycett. Lenglen's decision to partner with Patterson led to the Fédération Française de Lawn Tennis (FFLT) threatening to not pay her expenses for the Wimbledon trip unless she partnered with a compatriot. Lenglen and her father replied by paying for the trip themselves. After Wimbledon, Lenglen won both of her events in Belgium in the lead-up to the Olympic Games in Antwerp. At the Olympics, Lenglen won two gold medals and one bronze medal for France. She won the singles title over British player Dorothy Holman, losing only four games in the entire event. She won mixed doubles with Decugis, overcoming an opening set loss in their quarterfinal. Lenglen partnered with d'Ayen again in the doubles event, losing their semifinal to Kathleen McKane and Winifred McNair in a tight match that ended 8–6 in the decisive third set. This match was Lenglen's only loss in doubles all year. Their opponents in the bronze medal match defaulted.
1921: Only singles defeat post-World War I
Lenglen again dominated the tournaments on the Riviera in 1921, winning eight titles in singles, six in doubles, and seven in mixed doubles. Her only loss came in mixed doubles. She won all of her matches against Ryan, four in singles and five in mixed doubles. All of Lenglen's doubles titles on the Riviera were with Ryan.
Lenglen defended her triple crown at the French Championships. Later that month, she returned to the World Hard Court Championships, where five-time United States national singles champion Molla Mallory was making her debut. The United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) sent Mallory and Bill Tilden to the tournament with the hope of drawing Lenglen over to compete in the United States. Although Lenglen defeated Mallory in the final in straight sets, she trailed 2–3 in the second set before winning the last four games. Lenglen won the triple crown at the tournament, partnering with Golding in doubles and Jacques Brugnon in mixed doubles. She then won her third consecutive Wimbledon titles in both singles and doubles, defeating her doubles partner Ryan in a lopsided singles final. She withdrew from the mixed doubles event after her partner suffered an ankle injury.
Lenglen planned to compete at the U.S. National Championships in August to prove she deserved to be called a world champion. Due to illness delaying her trip, however, she did not make it to New York until three days before her opening match and was still sick when she arrived. After Lenglen's opening round opponent defaulted, the tournament rescheduled her second round match against Mallory for that night to appease the large crowd that showed up to see Lenglen play. With over 8,000 people in attendance, Mallory took a 2–0 lead in the first set before Lenglen began coughing in the third game. After losing the first set, Lenglen retired from the match two points into the second set for her only singles loss after World War I. She only played two more matches in the United States, both small exhibitions, before leaving in late September.
1922: Start of 179-match win streak
During the 1922 season, Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline other than by default. She did not return to competitive tennis until March, six months after her loss to Mallory. Lenglen's first tournament back was the South of France Championships, where she won the doubles and mixed doubles titles. She did not play the singles event and did not play singles again until a month later at the Beausoleil Championships in Monte Carlo, where she won the title without dropping a game. This tournament began a 179-match win streak that Lenglen continued through the end of her amateur career.
In the middle of the year, Lenglen won triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships, the French Championships, and Wimbledon. At the first, she saved two set points in her semifinal against McKane before winning the set 10–8. After only needing to play three challenge round matches at the French, Lenglen agreed to forgo the challenge round system at Wimbledon and be included in the main draw at the request of the tournament organisers. In the singles final, she faced Mallory in a rematch of their U.S. National Championship meeting. Like in the United States, Mallory won the first two games of the final. However, Lenglen rebounded and won the next twelve games for the title. The final remains the shortest in Wimbledon history, only lasting 26 minutes.
1923: Career-best 45 titles
Lenglen entered more events and won more titles in 1923 than any other year. She won all 16 of the singles events she entered, as well as 13 of 14 doubles events, and 16 of 18 mixed doubles events. Unlike previous years, she did not default a match in any discipline. At the beginning of the season, Mallory travelled to France to make her debut on the French Riviera circuit. Lenglen and Mallory had their last encounter at the South of France Championships, which Mallory entered after not performing well at her other two events on the Riviera. Lenglen defeated her without losing a game. At the same tournament, Lenglen's twelve-month win streak across all disciplines came to an end with a mixed doubles loss to Ryan and Lycett.
At what was to be the last edition of the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen faced McKane in the final in each event, all three of which were held in the same afternoon. She defeated McKane in singles and mixed doubles, the latter of which was with Henri Cochet as her partner for the second consecutive year. With Ryan absent, however, Lenglen partnered with Golding and lost to the British team of McKane and Geraldine Beamish. At the French Championships, Lenglen defended her triple crown without losing a set in spite of the challenge round format being abandoned. She partnered with Brugnon in mixed doubles for the third straight year, while pairing up with Julie Vlasto for the first time in doubles. She faced the most adversity in the singles final when the crowd uncharacteristically booed her for trailing 0–4 to Golding in the second set. At Wimbledon, Lenglen won the singles and doubles titles with ease, never dropping more than three games in a set. In mixed doubles, however, she was defeated by Ryan and Lycett for the second time in the year. In September, Lenglen travelled outside of France and won titles in Belgium, Spain, and Portugal.
1924: No major titles
Although Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline in 1924 except by default, she did not win a major tournament for the first time since 1913 aside from her hiatus due to World War I. Minor illnesses limited her to three singles events on the Riviera. Lenglen played doubles more regularly, winning eight titles in both doubles and mixed doubles. In April, Lenglen travelled to Spain to compete at the Barcelona International. Although she won all three events, she contracted jaundice soon after, preventing her from playing the French Championships. Although she had not fully recovered by Wimbledon, she entered the tournament and won her first three singles matches without dropping a game. In the next round, however, Ryan proved to be a more difficult opponent and took the second set from Lenglen 8–6, only the third set of singles Lenglen had lost since World War I. Although Lenglen narrowly won the match, she then withdrew from the tournament following the advice of her doctor. She did not play another event the rest of the year, and in particular missed the Olympic Games in Paris, where Helen Wills won the women's singles event.
1925: Open French champion
Lenglen returned to tennis at the Beau Site New Year Meeting in Cannes the first week of the year, winning in doubles with Ryan in her only event. She only played singles at two tournaments on the Riviera, including the South of France Championships. Her only loss during this part of the season was to Ryan and Umberto de Morpurgo at the Côte d'Azur Championships in Cannes. In May, Lenglen entered the French Championships, the inaugural edition open to international players. The tournament was played at St. Cloud at the site of the defunct World Hard Court Championships. Lenglen won the triple crown and was not challenged in singles or mixed doubles. She won the singles final over McKane, losing only three games. She won the mixed doubles final with Brugnon against her doubles partner Julie Vlasto and Cochet. Although Lenglen and Vlasto lost the second set of the doubles final 9–11 to McKane and Evelyn Colyer, they won the other two sets with ease for the title.
Lenglen followed up her performance at the French Championships with another triple crown at Wimbledon. She played five singles matches and did not lose a game in the second set of any of them. The five games she dropped in total remain a record for fewest games lost in a singles title run in Wimbledon history. Her opponents included Ryan in her opening match, the defending champion McKane in the semifinals, and Joan Fry in the final. In mixed doubles, she partnered with Jean Borotra to defeat Ryan and de Morpurgo in the final. In doubles, Lenglen and Ryan played their last tournament together and won the title without dropping a set. During the last part of the year, Lenglen led France to a 7–4 victory in a tie against Australia, and defeated Australasian champion Daphne Akhurst in the final of the concurrent Deauville tournament. Later in the year, Lenglen won the doubles and mixed doubles events at the Cromer Covered Courts, the only time she played in England other than Wimbledon and her only indoor wood tournament.
1926: Match of the Century
The 1926 season unexpectedly was Lenglen's last as an amateur. At the beginning of the season, three-time reigning U.S. national champion Helen Wills travelled to the French Riviera with the hope of playing a match against Lenglen. With Wills's level of stardom approaching that of Lenglen's, there was an immense amount of hype for a match between them to take place. They only entered the same singles draw once, at the Carlton Club in Cannes. When Lenglen and Wills both made the final with little opposition, the club doubled the number of seats around their main court and all 3,000 seats plus standing room sold out. Spectators unable to get into the venue attempted to watch the match by climbing trees and ladders or by purchasing unofficial tickets for the windows and roofs of villas across the street. In what was called the Match of the Century, Lenglen defeated Wills in straight sets. The first match point became chaotic when a winner from Wills was called out by a spectator, leading both the players and spectators to believe the match was over. Photographers captured the unique situation of Lenglen and Wills shaking hands at the net as if the match had ended, a moment followed by the crowd flooding the court to congratulate Lenglen. After clarification the shot was in, Wills broke Lenglen to level the set. Despite Lenglen winning, her reputation of being unbeatable was damaged by Wills's competitive performance.
While Wills remained in France, Lenglen avoided a rematch on the Riviera. After Wills's season was marred by an appendectomy during the French Championships, she withdrew from both Grand Slam tournaments in Europe and another match between her and Lenglen never took place. In Wills's absence, Lenglen defended all three of her titles at the French Championships with ease, defeating Mary Browne in the singles final. She again won the doubles with Vlasto and the mixed doubles with Brugnon.
Wimbledon misunderstanding
Although Lenglen was a heavy favourite at Wimbledon with Wills not participating, she began the tournament facing two issues. She was concerned with her family's finances as her father's health was worsening, and she was not content with the FFLT wanting her to enter the doubles event with a French partner instead of her usual partner Ryan. Although Lenglen agreed to play with Vlasto as the FFLT wanted, she was unsettled by being drawn against Ryan in her opening doubles match.
Lenglen's situation did not improve once the tournament began. She opened the singles event with an uncharacteristic win against Browne in which she lost five games, the same number she had lost in the entire 1925 singles event. Her next singles match was then moved up before her doubles match to accommodate the royal family, who planned to be in attendance. Wanting to play doubles first, Lenglen asked for the match to be rescheduled. Although the request was never received, she arrived at the grounds late. After Wimbledon officials confronted her in anger over keeping Queen Mary waiting, she refused to play. The club ultimately adhered to Lenglen's wishes and rescheduled both matches with the doubles first. Nonetheless, Lenglen and Vlasto were defeated by Ryan and Browne in three sets while the crowd who typically supported Lenglen turned against her. Although she defeated Evelyn Dewhurst in the rescheduled singles match, she then withdrew from both singles and mixed doubles, ending her last amateur tournament.
Professional career
United States tour (1926–27)
A month after her withdrawal from Wimbledon, Lenglen signed a $50,000 contract (equivalent to about $ in 2020) with American sports promoter C. C. Pyle to headline a four-month professional tour in the United States beginning in October 1926. She had begun discussing a professional contract with Pyle's associate William Pickens when he visited her on the Riviera in April. Lenglen had previously turned down an offer of 200,000 francs (equivalent to about $ in 2020) to turn professional in the United States following her last victory over Molla Mallory in 1923, declining in large part to keep her amateur status. She became less concerned with that, however, after the crowd turned against her at Wimbledon. She was more interested in keeping her social status, and was convinced by Pyle that turning professional would not hurt her stardom or damage her reputation. With Lenglen on the tour, Pyle attempted to recruit other top players, including Wills, McKane, and leading Americans Bill Tilden and Bill Johnston. Although they all declined, Pyle was able to sign Mary Browne as well as men's players Vincent Richards, Paul Féret, Howard Kinsey, and Harvey Snodgrass. Richards was regarded as the biggest star among the male players, having won gold medals in singles and doubles at the 1924 Olympics. Once the tour began, Lenglen and all of the other players lost their amateur status.
Although professional tennis tournaments already existed, the tour was the first travelling professional exhibition series in tennis history. It featured 40 stops, starting on 9 October 1926 and ending on 14 February 1927, and included several stops in Canada as well as one in Cuba. Lenglen dominated Browne on the tour, winning all 33 of the best-of-three-set matches played to completion. Browne did not win a set until the second set at the 33rd stop. The only other set she won was the only set they played at the 36th stop, where Lenglen had decided to play just a one-set match while ill to avoid disappointing the fans. Browne also nearly won a set at the 23rd stop, losing 9–11, at which point Lenglen decided not to continue.
The tour was a financial success. Lenglen earned the most money, receiving half of the revenue from ticket sales and $100,000 in total, more than the $70,000 that Babe Ruth earned in 1927 as the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball. The average attendance was just over 4,000 at the 34 venues where it was recorded. The most well-attended venues were opening night at Madison Square Garden in New York City with an attendance of 13,000 and the Public Auditorium in Cleveland with an attendance of 10,000. Opening night in particular brought in $34,000 from tickets sold at $1.50 to $5.50 (equivalent to $ to $ in 2020).
British tour (1927)
A few months after the end of the United States tour, Lenglen signed with British promoter Charles Cochran to headline a shorter professional tour in the United Kingdom. Cochran recruited Dora Köring, the 1912 Olympic silver medalist in singles, and Dewhurst to play against Lenglen. Karel Koželuh and Kinsey were the male players on the tour. There were seven tour stops, all in July 1927. Lenglen won all seven of her singles matches, never losing more than five games in any of them. The last three stops were played on the grounds of association football clubs: Queen's Park in Glasgow, Blackpool, and Manchester United. These were the best attended events on the tour and the final match at Old Trafford had an attendance of over 15,000, the highest between either professional tour.
Aftermath
Lenglen was widely criticised for her decision to turn professional. Once the tour began, the FFLT expelled her and Féret while the All England Lawn Tennis Club revoked her membership. Lenglen in turn criticised amateur tennis for her nearing poverty. In the program for the United States professional tour, she stated, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis... And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 – not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study – tennis... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy – should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune – for whom?" She criticised the barriers that typically prevented ordinary people from becoming tennis players, stating, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport?" Lenglen did not participate in any other professional tours after 1927. She never formally applied to be reinstated as an amateur with the FFLT either. She had asked about the possibility in 1932 after Féret was reinstated, but was told to wait another three years and decided against it.
Rivalries
Lenglen vs. Mallory
Molla Mallory was the only player to defeat Lenglen in singles after World War I. Fifteen years older than Lenglen and originally from Norway, Mallory won a bronze medal at the 1912 Olympic Games before emigrating to the United States in 1914. While World War I halted tennis in Europe, Mallory established herself as the top-ranked American player, winning the first four U.S. National Championships she entered from 1915 through 1918. Whereas Lenglen regularly came to the net and had an all-court game built around control rather than power, the much older Mallory played almost exclusively from the baseline. The strengths of Mallory's game were that she took the ball early and had one of the most powerful forehands in women's tennis at the time. Mallory had a similar personality to Lenglen off the court. While they each hated losing, both of them smoked regularly and loved to dance. Lenglen faced Mallory just four times in singles, compiling a 3–1 record. She also won both of their doubles and mixed doubles encounters.
Their first two meetings were highlighted by Lenglen's health issues. In the final of the 1921 World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen nearly retired while struggling with blisters on her foot and trailing in the second set. Nonetheless, Lenglen proceeded to win by following her plan to play defensively and wait for Mallory to make unforced errors on attempted winners. In their second meeting at the 1921 U.S. National Championships, Mallory was able to take advantage of Lenglen's poor health, executing her usual strategy of going for winners to win the match. Although they had entered the doubles event as partners, Lenglen's health prevented them from playing any matches together at the tournament. Lenglen was able to easily win their last two meetings in 1922 and 1923 by playing more aggressively and employing Mallory's strategy of hitting well-placed winners from the baseline.
The press built up the rivalry between Lenglen and Mallory. After Lenglen's retirement against Mallory at the U.S. National Championships, the vast majority of American newspapers criticised Lenglen for not finishing the match and accused her of retiring because she did not think she could win. They coined a phrase "cough and quit" that became popular at the time for describing someone who needed an excuse to avoid losing. After Lenglen's victory over Mallory at Wimbledon, the American press returned to supporting Lenglen. Both Lenglen and Mallory believed the newspapers exaggerated the personal nature of their rivalry. Mallory in particular said, "The newspapers are the dirtiest, filthiest things that ever happened. I don't want my name in the newspapers. I have a better chance on the courts than in the newspapers of my own country."
Lenglen and Ryan
Lenglen's usual doubles partner Elizabeth Ryan was also her most frequent opponent in singles. Born in the United States, Ryan travelled to England in 1912 to visit her sister before deciding to stay there permanently. Although she lost all four of her appearances in major finals, Ryan won 26 major titles between doubles and mixed doubles. The biggest strength of her game was volleying. Tennis writer Ted Tinling said, "volleying as a fundamental, aggressive technique was first injected into the women's game by Ryan." Lenglen and Ryan first partnered together at a handicap event in Monte Carlo in 1913 when they were 13 and 20 years old respectively. After losing the final at that tournament, the two of them never lost a regular doubles match, only once dropping a set in 1923 to Dorothea Lambert Chambers and Kathleen McKane, again at Monte Carlo. Ryan was Lenglen's doubles partner for 40 of her 74 doubles titles, including all six at Wimbledon and two of three at the World Hard Court Championships.
Ryan defeated Lenglen in their first singles meeting in straight sets at Monte Carlo in 1914 and also won a set in their second meeting two months later. Following their first encounter, Lenglen won all 17 of their remaining matches, including five at Wimbledon and two major finals. The only time Ryan won a set against Lenglen after World War I was in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 1924, where Lenglen withdrew due to illness in the following round. When the FFLT asked Lenglen to take a French partner in doubles at Wimbledon in 1926, Ryan partnered with Mary Browne to defeat Lenglen and her new partner Julie Vlasto, coming from three match points down in the second set. Ryan also won their only other doubles meeting in 1914. In mixed doubles, Lenglen compiled a 23–9 record against Ryan. Half of her career mixed doubles losses were to Ryan. After losing their first six encounters, she recovered to win the next thirteen. Lenglen won her first mixed doubles match against Ryan at the 1920 Beaulieu tournament, starting a win streak that ended with a loss to Ryan and Lycett at the 1923 South of France Championships.
Overlap with Wills
Helen Wills was the closest to becoming Lenglen's counterpart. Wills finished her career with 19 Grand Slam singles titles, a record that stood until 1970. She succeeded Lenglen as world No. 1 in 1927 and kept that ranking for the next six years and nine of the next twelve overall until 1938. Late in Lenglen's amateur career, Wills had built up a similar level of stardom to Lenglen by winning the 1924 Olympic gold medal in singles in Lenglen's absence while still only 18 years old. Although their careers overlapped when Wills visited Europe in 1924 and 1926, Lenglen only faced Wills once in her career. Lenglen withdrew from Wimbledon and the Olympics due to jaundice in 1924, while Wills withdrew from the French Championships and Wimbledon in 1926 due to appendicitis, preventing a longer rivalry between tennis's two biggest female stars of the 1920s from emerging.
Playing style
Elizabeth Ryan described Lenglen's all-court style of play as, "[Lenglen] owned every kind of shot, plus a genius for knowing how and when to use them. She never gave an opponent the same kind of shot twice in a row. She’d make you run miles... her game was all placement and deception and steadiness. I had the best drop shot anybody ever had, but she could not only get up to it but was so fast that often she could score a placement off it." Her rivals Molla Mallory and Helen Wills both noted that Lenglen excelled at extending rallies and could take control of points with defensive shots. Although Lenglen built her game around control rather than power, she had the ability to hit powerful shots. In particular, Mallory praised the power behind her defensive shots, saying, "She is just the steadiest player that ever was. She just sent back at me whatever I sent at her and waited for me to make a fault. And her returns often enough were harder than the shots I sent up to her." British journalist A. E. Crawley regarded her as having the best movement of her time, saying, "I have never seen on a lawn tennis court either man or woman move with such mechanical and artistic perfection and prose. Whether [Lenglen's] objective is the ball or merely changing sides, she reminded you of the movement of fire over prairie grass." He believed she was a powerful server and an aggressive volleyer, commenting, "She serves with all the male athlete's power. She smashes with the same loose and rapid action, the release of a spring of steel. Her volley is not a timid push, but an arrow from the bow. And an arrow from the bow is Suzanne herself."
Adopting a style of play drawn from men's players led Lenglen to become one of the leading volleyers in women's tennis at a time when the women's game was centred around playing from the baseline, even for the top players. Lenglen aimed to come to the net to finish points quickly whenever possible. Kathleen McKane specifically noted that "Suzanne volleyed like a man" when describing her influence on women's tennis. While Lenglen did not model the majority of her game after any specific player, she modelled her forehand after that of Anthony Wilding. Like Wilding, she aimed to hit forehands flat and with little to no topspin. She used a continental grip and strived to hit balls early on the rise. Lenglen wrote in her book Lawn Tennis for Girls, "A favorite shot of mine is the backhand down the line". Lenglen was regarded as having a graceful style of play. Her movement was thought to resemble that of a dancer, a style that may have arisen from a course on classic Greek dance she had taken as a child. René Lacoste, a leading French men's tennis player from her era, said, "[Lenglen] played with marvelous ease the simplest strokes in the world. It was only after several games that I understood what harmony was concealed by her simplicity, what wonderful mental and physical balance was hidden by the facility of her play."
Lenglen developed a reputation for drinking cognac to help her play at pivotal points of her biggest matches. Most notably, she did so during the second and third sets of her victory against Lambert Chambers in the 1919 Wimbledon final, and at the start and during the more competitive second set of her victory over Helen Wills in the Match of the Century. She only travelled to the U.S. National Championships in 1921 after the USLTA agreed to supply her with alcohol during her stay even though consumption was illegal under the laws of Prohibition at the time. Nonetheless, they did not provide Lenglen with alcohol during her retirement loss to Mallory.
Legacy
Achievements
Lenglen was ranked as the 24th greatest player of all-time in the 100 Greatest of All Time series. She was the ninth-highest ranked woman overall, and the highest-ranked woman to play exclusively in the amateur era. After formal annual women's tennis rankings began to be published by tennis journalist and player A. Wallis Myers in 1921, Lenglen was No. 1 in the world in each of the first six editions of the rankings through her retirement from amateur tennis in 1926. She won a total of 250 titles consisting of 83 in singles, 74 in doubles, and 93 in mixed doubles. Nine of her singles titles were won without losing a game. Lenglen compiled win percentages of 97.9% in singles and 96.9% across all disciplines. After World War I, she won 287 of 288 singles matches, starting with a 108-match win streak and ending with a 179-match win streak, the latter of which was longer than Helen Wills' longest win streak of 161 matches. Lenglen ended her career on a 250-match win streak on clay.
Lenglen's eight Grand Slam women's singles titles are tied for the tenth-most all-time, and tied for fourth in the amateur era behind only Maureen Connolly's nine, Court's thirteen, and Wills's nineteen. Aside from the 1919 Wimbledon Championships, Lenglen did not lose more than three games in a set in any of her other Grand Slam or World Hard Court Championship singles finals. Lenglen's six Wimbledon titles are tied for the sixth-most in history. Her former record of five consecutive Wimbledon titles has only since been matched by Martina Navratilova, who won her sixth in a row in 1987. Lenglen's title at the 1914 World Hard Court Championships made her the youngest major champion in tennis history at 15 years and 16 days old, nearly a year ahead of the next two youngest, Martina Hingis and Lottie Dod.
Lenglen won a total of 17 titles at Wimbledon, 19 at the French Championships, and 10 at the World Hard Court Championships across all disciplines. Lenglen completed three Wimbledon triple crowns – winning the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles events at a tournament in the same year – in 1920, 1922, and 1925. She also won two triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships in 1921 and 1922, and six at the French Championships, the first four of which came consecutively from 1920 through 1923 when the tournament was invitation-only to French nationals and the last two of which came in 1925 and 1926 when the tournament was open to internationals.
Mythical persona
Following World War I, Lenglen became a symbol of national pride in France in a country looking to recover from the war. The French press referred to Lenglen as notre Suzanne (our Suzanne) to characterise her status as a national heroine; and more eminently as La Divine (The Goddess) to assert her unassailability. The press wrote about Lenglen as if she was infallible at tennis, often attributing any performance that was relatively poor by her standards to various excuses such as the fault of her doubles partner or to having concern over the health of her father. Journalists who criticised Lenglen were condemned and refuted by the rest of the press. At the Olympics, she introduced herself to journalists as "The Great Lenglen", a title that was well received. Before matches, Lenglen would predict to the press that she was going to win, a practice that Americans treated as improper. She explained, "When I am asked a question I endeavour to give a frank answer. If I know I am going to win, what harm is there in saying so?"
Lenglen was the first female athlete to be acknowledged as a celebrity outside of her sport. She was acquainted with members of royal families such as King Gustav V of Sweden, and actresses such as Mary Pickford. She was well known by the general public, and her matches were well-attended by people not otherwise interested in tennis. Many of her biggest matches were sold out, including the 1919 Wimbledon final against Lambert Chambers, where the attendance more than doubled the seating capacity of Centre Court, and her first match against Mallory, where tickets were sold at a cost of up to 500 francs (about $ in 2020) and an estimated 5,000 people could not gain entry to see the match after it had sold out. The popularity of Lenglen's matches at Wimbledon was a large factor in the club moving the tournament from Worple Road to its modern site at Church Road. A new Centre Court opened in 1922 with a seating capacity of nearly 10,000, nearly three times larger than that at the old venue. At the Match of the Century against Wills, seated tickets that were sold out at 300 francs, then equivalent to about $11 in the United States (or $ in 2020), were re-sold by scalpers at up to 1200 francs, which was then about $44 (or $ in 2020). This cost far exceeded that for the men's singles final at the U.S. National Championships at the time, which were sold at as low as $2 per seat (about $ in 2020).
Lenglen's mythical reputation began at a young age. She was known for a story about her father training her to improve her shot precision as a child by placing a handkerchief at different locations on the court and instructing her to hit it as a target. She was said to be able to hit the handkerchief with ease regardless of the type of incoming shot. Each time she did, he would fold it in half before replacing it with a coin. It was said that Lenglen could hit the coin up to five times in a row.
Professional tennis
Lenglen was the first leading tennis player to leave amateur tennis to play professionally, thereby launching playing tennis as a professional career. The exhibition tour she headlined in the United States from 1926 to 1927 in which a few players travelled together to compete against each other across a series of venues was the first of its kind. It established a format that was repeated over twenty times for the next four decades until the start of the Open Era. With Pyle only interested in tennis because of Lenglen, Vincent Richards, the leading male player on Lenglen's United States tour, organised the next such tour featuring himself competing against Karel Koželuh in 1928. He also began organising the first major professional tournaments to feature players who had been top amateurs, beginning with the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships first held later in 1927.
As the top women's players nearly all kept their amateur status, women were largely left out of both the travelling exhibition tours and the growing professional tournaments after Lenglen's playing career ended. The next significant exhibition tour to feature women's tennis players did not occur until 1941 when Alice Marble became one of the headliners on a tour that also featured leading male players Don Budge and Bill Tilden. Fellow top-ranked players Pauline Betz and Althea Gibson followed Marble by turning professional in 1947 and 1958 respectively. Betz played on two tours, one in 1947 and another from 1950 to 1951. Gibson played in a series of warmup matches for the Harlem Globetrotters, an exhibition basketball team in the United States.
Fashion
Lenglen redefined traditional women's tennis attire early in her career. By the 1919 Wimbledon final, she avoided donning a corset in favour of a short-sleeved and calf-length pleated skirt to go along with a distinctive circular-brimmed bonnet, a stark contrast with her much older opponent Dorothea Lambert Chambers who wore long sleeves and a plain skirt below the calf.
The following year, Lenglen ended the norm of women competing in clothes not suited for playing tennis. She had Jean Patou design her outfits that were not only intended to be stylish, but allowed her to perform her signature leaping ballet motion in points and did not restrict her movement on the court. This type of attire was among the earliest women's sportswear. Unusual for the time, her skirt was both sleeveless and only extended to her knees. Lenglen replaced the bonnet with a bandeau, which became known as the "Lenglen bandeau" and was her signature piece of attire throughout the rest of her career. On the court, she routinely wore makeup and popularised having tanned skin instead of a pale complexion that other players had preferred before her time. Later in her career, she moved away from just wearing white in favour of brighter-coloured outfits. Overall, she pioneered the idea of players using the tennis court to showcase fashion instead of just competing. Off the court, Lenglen frequently wore an oversized and expensive fur coat.
Honours
Lenglen is honoured in a variety of ways at the French Open. At Stade Roland Garros, the second show court that was built in 1994 with a capacity of about 10,000 was named Court Suzanne Lenglen in 1997. Outside the court, there is a bronze relief statue of Lenglen that was erected in 1994. The FFLT had originally planned to erect a statue of Lenglen immediately after her death, but this plan never materialised due to the start of World War II later that year. Additionally, one of the main entrances to the ground is Porte Suzanne Lenglen, which leads to Allée Suzanne Lenglen. Moreover, the women's singles championship trophy was named the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen in 1987. In spite of her success at the French Championships, Lenglen never competed at Stade Roland Garros as it did not become the site for the tournament until 1928 after her retirement from amateur tennis.
Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978. Following her death, she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Another road, the Avenue Suzanne Lenglen, is named in her honour outside of the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. She has been honoured in a Google Doodle twice, once on her 117th birthday on 24 May 2016, and again on International Women's Day on 8 March 2017.
Personal life
Lenglen was in a long-term relationship with Baldwin Baldwin from 1927 to 1932. Baldwin was the grandson and heir to Lucky Baldwin, a prominent businessman and real estate investor active in California. Lenglen met Baldwin during her professional tour in the United States. Although they intended to get married, those plans never materialised largely because Baldwin was already married and his wife would not agree to a divorce while Lenglen and Baldwin were together. During this time, her father died of poor health in 1929.
Lenglen was the author of several books on tennis, the first two of which she wrote during her amateur career. Her first book, Lawn Tennis for Girls, covered techniques and advice on tactics for beginner tennis players. She also wrote Lawn Tennis: The Game of Nations and a romantic novel, The Love Game: Being the Life Story of Marcelle Penrose. Lenglen finished her last book Tennis by Simple Exercises with Margaret Morris in 1937. The book featured a section by Lenglen on what was needed to become an all-around tennis player and a section by Morris, a choreographer and dancer, on exercises designed for tennis players. She played a role as an actress in the 1935 British musical comedy film Things Are Looking Up, in which she contests a tennis match against the lead character portrayed by Cicely Courtneidge.
Following her playing career, Lenglen returned to tennis as a coach in 1933, serving as the director of a school on the grounds of Stade Roland Garros. She opened her own tennis school for girls in 1936 at the Tennis Mirabeau in Paris with the support of the FFLT. She began instructing adults the following year as well. A year later in May 1938, Lenglen became the inaugural director of the French National Tennis School in Paris. Shortly after this appointment, however, Lenglen became severely fatigued while teaching at the school and needed to receive a blood transfusion. She previously had other health issues following her retirement, most notably suffering from appendicitis and having her appendix removed in October 1934. Lenglen died on 4 July 1938 at the age of 39, three weeks after she became ill, and was reported to have died from pernicious anemia. Her specific cause of death was unclear due to anemia being curable and reports of her having other illnesses, including leukemia. Lenglen was buried at the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen just outside Paris.
Career statistics
Performance timelines
Results from the French Championships before 1924 do not count towards the statistical totals because the tournament was not yet open to international players.
Singles
Doubles
Mixed doubles
Source: Little
Major finals
Grand Slam singles: 8 (8 titles)
World Championship singles: 4 (4 titles)
Source: Little
Olympic medal matches
Singles: 1 (1 gold medal)
Source: Little
See also
List of Grand Slam women's singles champions
List of Grand Slam women's doubles champions
List of Grand Slam mixed doubles champions
List of Grand Slam related tennis records
Notes
References
Books
External links
1899 births
1938 deaths
Deaths from pernicious anemia
Deaths from leukemia
Deaths from cancer in France
French female tennis players
French Championships (tennis) champions
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in mixed doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's singles
International Tennis Hall of Fame inductees
Medalists at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Olympic bronze medalists for France
Olympic gold medalists for France
Olympic medalists in tennis
Olympic tennis players of France
Tennis players from Paris
Professional tennis players before the Open Era
Tennis players at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Wimbledon champions (pre-Open Era)
World No. 1 tennis players
20th-century French women | false | [
"Source data is raw data (sometimes called atomic data) that has not been processed for meaningful use to become Information.\n\nExamples\n Data entered at a till in a store\n A list of information about customers used in a mail merge in Word Processing\n Handwritten notes or printed documents, before they are typed in, such as an order form or CV\n Research data such as air temperature measurements\n\nRisks\nOften when data is captured in one electronic system and then transferred to another, there is a loss of audit trail or the inherent data cannot be absolutely verified. There are systems that provide for absolute data export but then the system imported into has to allow for all available data fields to be imported. Similarly, there are transaction logs in many modern database systems. The acceptance of these transaction records into any new system could be very important for any verification of such imported data.\n\nIn research, gaining access to source data may be cumbersome. Particularly where sensitive personal data is involved, security and redaction (obscuring information) may be an issue.\n\nSee also\n Computer Assisted Auditing Techniques\n Cooked data\n Electronic Media\n Information\n Information technology audit process\n Primary data and Secondary data\n\nReferences\n\nDigital media\nComputer data",
"Background noise or ambient noise is any sound other than the sound being monitored (primary sound). Background noise is a form of noise pollution or interference. Background noise is an important concept in setting noise levels.\n\nBackground noises include environmental noises such as water waves, traffic noise, alarms, extraneous speech, bioacoustic noise from animals, and electrical noise from devices such as refrigerators, air conditioning, power supplies, and motors.\n\nThe prevention or reduction of background noise is important in the field of active noise control. It is an important consideration with the use of ultrasound (e.g. for medical diagnosis or imaging), sonar, and sound reproduction.\n\nOther uses\nIn astronomy, background noise or cosmic background radiation is electromagnetic radiation from the sky with no discernible source.\n\nIn information architecture, irrelevant, duplicate or incorrect information may be called background noise.\n\nIn physics and telecommunication, background signal noise can be detrimental or in some cases beneficial. The study of avoiding, reducing or using signal noise is information theory.\n\nIn telephony, artificial comfort noise is used as a substitute for natural background noise, to fill in artificial silence created by discontinuous transmission systems using voice activity detection.\nBackground noise can also affect concentration.\n\nSee also\n4'33\"\nAmbient noise level\nElectronic noise\nThe Hum\nColors of noise\nSound masking\n\nExternal links\nHow low noise levels are achieved in concert halls\nBackground noise in acoustics (demo)\n\nAcoustics\nNoise pollution\nSound"
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"Suzanne Lenglen",
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"How did her professional career begin?",
"The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States",
"What was her first professional tournament?",
"For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players).",
"Did she win her first tournament?",
"In their first match in New York City, Lenglen put on a performance that New York Times writer Allison Danzig lauded as \"one of the most masterly exhibitions",
"Is there any other important information?",
"\" When the tour ended in February 1927, Lenglen had defeated Browne, 38 matches to 0."
] | C_41fb23025a874c888de27a229c0a75c0_1 | Did she ever play against men? | 5 | Did Suzanne Lenglen ever play against men? | Suzanne Lenglen | The first major female tennis star to turn professional, Lenglen was paid US$50,000 by American entrepreneur Charles C. Pyle to tour the United States in a series of matches against Mary K. Browne. Browne, winner of the US Championships from 1912 to 1914, was 35 and considered to be past her prime, although she had reached the French final earlier that year (losing to Lenglen 6-1, 6-0). For the first time in tennis history, the women's match was the headline event of the tour (which also featured male players). In their first match in New York City, Lenglen put on a performance that New York Times writer Allison Danzig lauded as "one of the most masterly exhibitions of court generalship that has been seen in this country." When the tour ended in February 1927, Lenglen had defeated Browne, 38 matches to 0. She was exhausted from the lengthy tour, and a physician advised Lenglen that she needed a lengthy period away from the game to recover. Instead, Lenglen chose to retire from competitive tennis to run a Paris tennis school, which she set up with the help and money of her lover Jean Tillier. The school, located next to the courts of Roland Garros, slowly expanded and was recognised as a federal training centre by the French tennis federation in 1936. During this period, Lenglen also wrote several books on tennis. Lenglen was criticised widely for her decision to turn professional, and the All England Club at Wimbledon even revoked her honorary membership. Lenglen, however, described her decision as "an escape from bondage and slavery" and said in the tour programme, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis and have paid thousands of francs in entrance fees to be allowed to do so.... I have worked as hard at my career as any man or woman has worked at any career. And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 - not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study - tennis.... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy - should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune - for whom?" As for the amateur tennis system, Lenglen said, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport? Does it make tennis more popular - or does it tend to suppress and hinder an enormous amount of tennis talent lying dormant in the bodies of young men and women whose names are not in the social register?" CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen (; 24 May 18994 July 1938) was a French tennis player. She was ranked as the inaugural world No. 1 from 1921 to 1926, winning 8 Grand Slam titles in singles and 21 in total. She also was a four-time World Hard Court Champion in singles, and ten times in total. Lenglen won six Wimbledon singles titles, including five in a row from 1919 to 1923, and was the champion in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at the first two open French Championships in 1925 and 1926. In doubles, she was undefeated with her usual partner Elizabeth Ryan, highlighted by another six titles at Wimbledon. Lenglen was the first leading amateur to turn professional, and was ranked as the greatest women's tennis player from the amateur era in the 100 Greatest of All Time series.
Coached by her father Charles throughout her career, Lenglen began playing tennis at age 11, becoming the youngest major champion in history with her 1914 World Hard Court Championship title at age 15. This success along with her balletic playing style and brash personality helped make Lenglen a national heroine in a country coping with the aftermath of World War I. After the war delayed her career four years, Lenglen was largely unchallenged. She won her Wimbledon debut in 1919 in the second-longest final in history, the only one of her major singles finals she did not win by a lopsided scoreline. Her only post-war loss came in a retirement against Molla Mallory, her only amateur match in the United States. Afterwards, she began a 179-match win streak, during which she defeated Helen Wills in the high-profile Match of the Century in 1926. Following a misunderstanding at Wimbledon later that year, Lenglen abruptly retired from amateur tennis, signing to headline a professional tour in the United States beginning that same year.
Referred to by the French press as La Divine (The Goddess), Lenglen revolutionised the sport by integrating the aggressive style of men's tennis into the women's game and breaking the convention of women competing in clothing unsuitable for tennis. She incorporated fashion into her matches, highlighted by her signature bandeau headwear. Lenglen is recognised as the first female athlete to become a global sport celebrity and her popularity led Wimbledon to move to its larger modern-day venue. Her professional tours laid the foundation for the series of men's professional tours that continued until the Open Era, and led to the first major men's professional tournament the following year. Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978, and the second show court at the site of the French Open is named in her honour.
Early life and background
Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen was born in Paris on 24 May 1899 to Charles and Anaïs Lenglen. She had a younger brother who did not live past the age of three. Lenglen's father was a pharmacist who became wealthy by inheriting a horse-drawn omnibus company from his father. Several years after Suzanne was born, her father sold the omnibus business, after which he relocated the family to Marest-sur-Matz near Compiègne in northern France in 1904. They spent their winters in Nice on the French Riviera in a villa across the street from the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. By the time Lenglen was eight, she excelled at a variety of sports including swimming and cycling. In particular, she enjoyed diabolo, a game involving balancing a spinning top on a string with two attached sticks. During the winter, Lenglen performed diabolo routines in front of large crowds on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Her father credited her confidence to play tennis in large stadiums to her experience as a diabolo performer.
Lenglen's father attended tennis tournaments on the Riviera circuit, where the world's best players competed in the first half of the year. Having played the sport recreationally, he bought Lenglen a racket from a toy store in June 1910 shortly after she had turned 11 years old, and set up a makeshift court on the lawn of their house. She quickly showed enough skill to convince her father to get her a proper racket from a tennis manufacturer within a month. He developed training exercises and played against his daughter. Three months later, Lenglen travelled to Paris to play on a proper clay court owned by her father's friend, Dr. Cizelly. At Cizelly's recommendation, she entered a local high-level tournament in Chantilly. In the singles handicap event, Lenglen won four rounds and finished in second place.
Lenglen's success at the Chantilly tournament prompted her father to train her more seriously. He studied the leading male and female players and decided to teach Lenglen the tactics from the men's game, which was more aggressive than the women's style of slowly constructing points from the baseline. When the family returned to Nice towards the end of autumn, her father arranged for her to play twice a week at the Nice Lawn Tennis Club even though children had never been allowed on the courts, and had her practice with leading male players at the club. Lenglen began training with Joseph Negro, the club's teaching professional. Negro had a wide variety of shots in his repertoire and trained Lenglen to play the same way. As Lenglen's primary coach, her father employed harsh and rigorous methods, saying, "I was a hard taskmaster, and although my advice was always well intentioned, my criticisms were at times severe, and occasionally intemperate." Lenglen's parents watched her matches and discussed her minute errors between themselves throughout, only showing restraint in their criticisms when she was sick. As a result, Lenglen became comfortable with appearing ill, which made it difficult for others to tell if she was sick.
Amateur career
1912–13: Maiden titles
Lenglen entered her first non-handicap singles event in July 1912 at the Compiègne Championships near her hometown, her only regular event of the year. She won her debut match in the quarterfinals before losing her semifinal to Jeanne Matthey. She also played in the singles and mixed doubles handicap events, winning both of them. When Lenglen returned to Nice in 1913, she entered a handicap doubles event in Monte Carlo with Elizabeth Ryan, an American who had moved to England a year earlier. Although they lost the final in three sets, Ryan became Lenglen's most frequent doubles partner and the pair never lost another match. Lenglen's success at handicap events led her to enter more regular events in the rest of 1913. She debuted at the South of France Championships at the Nice Club in March, winning only one match. Nonetheless, when Lenglen returned to Compiègne, she won her first two regular singles titles, both within a few weeks of her 14th birthday. After losing to Matthey again at both of her events in July, the latter of which by default, Lenglen rebounded to win titles in her last two singles events of the year.
1914: World Hard Court champion
Back on the Riviera in 1914, Lenglen focused on regular events. Her victory in singles against high-ranking British player Ruth Winch was regarded as a huge surprise by the tennis community. However, Lenglen still struggled at larger tournaments early in the year, losing to Ryan in the quarterfinals at Monte Carlo and six-time Wimbledon champion Dorothea Lambert Chambers in the semifinals at the South of France Championships. In May, Lenglen was invited to enter the French Championships, which was restricted to French players. The format gave the defending champion a bye until the final match, known as the challenge round. In that match, they faced the winner of the All Comers' competition, a standard tournament bracket for the remaining players. Lenglen won the All Comers' singles draw of six players to make it to the challenge round against Marguerite Broquedis. Despite winning the first set, she lost the match. This was the last time in Lenglen's career she lost a completed singles match, and the only time she lost a singles final other than by default. Although she also lost the doubles challenge round at the tournament to Blanche and Suzanne Amblard, Lenglen won the mixed doubles title with Max Decugis as her partner.
Lenglen's performance at the French Championships set the stage for her debut at the World Hard Court Championships, one of the major tournaments recognised by the International Lawn Tennis Federation at the time. She won the singles final against Germaine Golding for her first major title. The only set she lost during the event was to Suzanne Amblard in the semifinals. Her volleying ability was instrumental in defeating Amblard, while her ability to outlast Golding in long rallies gave her the advantage in the final. Lenglen also won the doubles title with Ryan over the Amblard sisters without dropping a game in the final. She finished runner-up in mixed doubles to Ryan and Decugis. Following the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen could have debuted at Wimbledon; however, her father decided against it. He did not like her chances of defeating Lambert Chambers on grass, a surface on which she had never competed, given that she already lost to her earlier in the year on clay.
World War I hiatus
After World War I began in August 1914, tournaments ceased, interfering with Lenglen's father's plan for her to enter Wimbledon in 1915. During the war, Lenglen's family lived at their home in Nice, an area less affected by the war than northern France. Although there were no tournaments, Lenglen had plenty of opportunity to train in Nice. Soldiers came to the Riviera to temporarily avoid the war, including leading tennis players such as two-time United States national champions R. Norris Williams and Clarence Griffin. These players competed in charity exhibitions primarily in Cannes to raise money for the French Red Cross. Lenglen participated and had the opportunity to play singles matches against male players.
1919: Classic Wimbledon final
Many tournaments resumed in 1919, following the end of World War I. Lenglen won nine singles titles in ten events, all four of her doubles events, and eight mixed doubles titles in ten events. She won the South of France Championships in March without dropping a game in any of her four matches. Although the French Championships and World Hard Court Championships did not return until the following year, Lenglen was able to debut at Wimbledon in July. She won the six-round All Comers' bracket, only losing six games in the first four rounds. Her biggest challenge in the All Comers' competition was her doubles partner Ryan, who saved match points and levelled the second set of their semifinal at five games, only losing after an hour-long rain delay. Although the 20-year-old Lenglen was considered a favourite against the 40-year-old Lambert Chambers in the challenge round, Lambert Chambers was able to trouble Lenglen with well-placed drop shots. Lenglen won the first set 10–8 after both players saved two set points. After saving two match points, Lenglen won the third set 9–7 for her first Wimbledon title. The match set the record for most games in a Wimbledon women's singles final with 44, only since surpassed by the 1970 final between Margaret Court and Billie Jean King. Over 8,000 people attended the match, well above the seating capacity of 3500 on Centre Court. Lenglen defeated Lambert Chambers and Ethel Larcombe again in the doubles final with Ryan. She already lost to Ryan and Randolph Lycett in the her mixed doubles quarterfinal, her only loss of the year in any discipline aside from defaults.
1920: Olympic champion
Lenglen began 1920 with five singles titles on the Riviera, three of which she won in lopsided finals against Ryan. However, Ryan was able to defeat Lenglen in mixed doubles at Cannes in windy conditions, Lenglen's only mixed doubles loss of the year. Although the World Hard Court Championships returned in May, Lenglen withdrew due to illness. She recovered in time for the French Championships two weeks later and won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles to complete a triple crown. Lenglen easily made it to the challenge round in singles, where she defeated Broquedis in a rematch of the 1914 final. She won the doubles event with Élisabeth d'Ayen and defended her mixed doubles title with Decugis, only needing to play the challenge round.
Lenglen's next event was Wimbledon. Lambert Chambers won the All Comers' final to set up a rematch of the previous year's final. Although the match was expected to be close again and began 2–2, Lenglen won ten of the last eleven games for her second consecutive Wimbledon singles title. She won the triple crown, taking the doubles with Ryan and the mixed doubles with Australian Gerald Patterson. The doubles final was also a rematch of the previous year's final against Lambert Chambers and Larcombe, while the mixed doubles victory came against defending champions Ryan and Lycett. Lenglen's decision to partner with Patterson led to the Fédération Française de Lawn Tennis (FFLT) threatening to not pay her expenses for the Wimbledon trip unless she partnered with a compatriot. Lenglen and her father replied by paying for the trip themselves. After Wimbledon, Lenglen won both of her events in Belgium in the lead-up to the Olympic Games in Antwerp. At the Olympics, Lenglen won two gold medals and one bronze medal for France. She won the singles title over British player Dorothy Holman, losing only four games in the entire event. She won mixed doubles with Decugis, overcoming an opening set loss in their quarterfinal. Lenglen partnered with d'Ayen again in the doubles event, losing their semifinal to Kathleen McKane and Winifred McNair in a tight match that ended 8–6 in the decisive third set. This match was Lenglen's only loss in doubles all year. Their opponents in the bronze medal match defaulted.
1921: Only singles defeat post-World War I
Lenglen again dominated the tournaments on the Riviera in 1921, winning eight titles in singles, six in doubles, and seven in mixed doubles. Her only loss came in mixed doubles. She won all of her matches against Ryan, four in singles and five in mixed doubles. All of Lenglen's doubles titles on the Riviera were with Ryan.
Lenglen defended her triple crown at the French Championships. Later that month, she returned to the World Hard Court Championships, where five-time United States national singles champion Molla Mallory was making her debut. The United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) sent Mallory and Bill Tilden to the tournament with the hope of drawing Lenglen over to compete in the United States. Although Lenglen defeated Mallory in the final in straight sets, she trailed 2–3 in the second set before winning the last four games. Lenglen won the triple crown at the tournament, partnering with Golding in doubles and Jacques Brugnon in mixed doubles. She then won her third consecutive Wimbledon titles in both singles and doubles, defeating her doubles partner Ryan in a lopsided singles final. She withdrew from the mixed doubles event after her partner suffered an ankle injury.
Lenglen planned to compete at the U.S. National Championships in August to prove she deserved to be called a world champion. Due to illness delaying her trip, however, she did not make it to New York until three days before her opening match and was still sick when she arrived. After Lenglen's opening round opponent defaulted, the tournament rescheduled her second round match against Mallory for that night to appease the large crowd that showed up to see Lenglen play. With over 8,000 people in attendance, Mallory took a 2–0 lead in the first set before Lenglen began coughing in the third game. After losing the first set, Lenglen retired from the match two points into the second set for her only singles loss after World War I. She only played two more matches in the United States, both small exhibitions, before leaving in late September.
1922: Start of 179-match win streak
During the 1922 season, Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline other than by default. She did not return to competitive tennis until March, six months after her loss to Mallory. Lenglen's first tournament back was the South of France Championships, where she won the doubles and mixed doubles titles. She did not play the singles event and did not play singles again until a month later at the Beausoleil Championships in Monte Carlo, where she won the title without dropping a game. This tournament began a 179-match win streak that Lenglen continued through the end of her amateur career.
In the middle of the year, Lenglen won triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships, the French Championships, and Wimbledon. At the first, she saved two set points in her semifinal against McKane before winning the set 10–8. After only needing to play three challenge round matches at the French, Lenglen agreed to forgo the challenge round system at Wimbledon and be included in the main draw at the request of the tournament organisers. In the singles final, she faced Mallory in a rematch of their U.S. National Championship meeting. Like in the United States, Mallory won the first two games of the final. However, Lenglen rebounded and won the next twelve games for the title. The final remains the shortest in Wimbledon history, only lasting 26 minutes.
1923: Career-best 45 titles
Lenglen entered more events and won more titles in 1923 than any other year. She won all 16 of the singles events she entered, as well as 13 of 14 doubles events, and 16 of 18 mixed doubles events. Unlike previous years, she did not default a match in any discipline. At the beginning of the season, Mallory travelled to France to make her debut on the French Riviera circuit. Lenglen and Mallory had their last encounter at the South of France Championships, which Mallory entered after not performing well at her other two events on the Riviera. Lenglen defeated her without losing a game. At the same tournament, Lenglen's twelve-month win streak across all disciplines came to an end with a mixed doubles loss to Ryan and Lycett.
At what was to be the last edition of the World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen faced McKane in the final in each event, all three of which were held in the same afternoon. She defeated McKane in singles and mixed doubles, the latter of which was with Henri Cochet as her partner for the second consecutive year. With Ryan absent, however, Lenglen partnered with Golding and lost to the British team of McKane and Geraldine Beamish. At the French Championships, Lenglen defended her triple crown without losing a set in spite of the challenge round format being abandoned. She partnered with Brugnon in mixed doubles for the third straight year, while pairing up with Julie Vlasto for the first time in doubles. She faced the most adversity in the singles final when the crowd uncharacteristically booed her for trailing 0–4 to Golding in the second set. At Wimbledon, Lenglen won the singles and doubles titles with ease, never dropping more than three games in a set. In mixed doubles, however, she was defeated by Ryan and Lycett for the second time in the year. In September, Lenglen travelled outside of France and won titles in Belgium, Spain, and Portugal.
1924: No major titles
Although Lenglen did not lose a match in any discipline in 1924 except by default, she did not win a major tournament for the first time since 1913 aside from her hiatus due to World War I. Minor illnesses limited her to three singles events on the Riviera. Lenglen played doubles more regularly, winning eight titles in both doubles and mixed doubles. In April, Lenglen travelled to Spain to compete at the Barcelona International. Although she won all three events, she contracted jaundice soon after, preventing her from playing the French Championships. Although she had not fully recovered by Wimbledon, she entered the tournament and won her first three singles matches without dropping a game. In the next round, however, Ryan proved to be a more difficult opponent and took the second set from Lenglen 8–6, only the third set of singles Lenglen had lost since World War I. Although Lenglen narrowly won the match, she then withdrew from the tournament following the advice of her doctor. She did not play another event the rest of the year, and in particular missed the Olympic Games in Paris, where Helen Wills won the women's singles event.
1925: Open French champion
Lenglen returned to tennis at the Beau Site New Year Meeting in Cannes the first week of the year, winning in doubles with Ryan in her only event. She only played singles at two tournaments on the Riviera, including the South of France Championships. Her only loss during this part of the season was to Ryan and Umberto de Morpurgo at the Côte d'Azur Championships in Cannes. In May, Lenglen entered the French Championships, the inaugural edition open to international players. The tournament was played at St. Cloud at the site of the defunct World Hard Court Championships. Lenglen won the triple crown and was not challenged in singles or mixed doubles. She won the singles final over McKane, losing only three games. She won the mixed doubles final with Brugnon against her doubles partner Julie Vlasto and Cochet. Although Lenglen and Vlasto lost the second set of the doubles final 9–11 to McKane and Evelyn Colyer, they won the other two sets with ease for the title.
Lenglen followed up her performance at the French Championships with another triple crown at Wimbledon. She played five singles matches and did not lose a game in the second set of any of them. The five games she dropped in total remain a record for fewest games lost in a singles title run in Wimbledon history. Her opponents included Ryan in her opening match, the defending champion McKane in the semifinals, and Joan Fry in the final. In mixed doubles, she partnered with Jean Borotra to defeat Ryan and de Morpurgo in the final. In doubles, Lenglen and Ryan played their last tournament together and won the title without dropping a set. During the last part of the year, Lenglen led France to a 7–4 victory in a tie against Australia, and defeated Australasian champion Daphne Akhurst in the final of the concurrent Deauville tournament. Later in the year, Lenglen won the doubles and mixed doubles events at the Cromer Covered Courts, the only time she played in England other than Wimbledon and her only indoor wood tournament.
1926: Match of the Century
The 1926 season unexpectedly was Lenglen's last as an amateur. At the beginning of the season, three-time reigning U.S. national champion Helen Wills travelled to the French Riviera with the hope of playing a match against Lenglen. With Wills's level of stardom approaching that of Lenglen's, there was an immense amount of hype for a match between them to take place. They only entered the same singles draw once, at the Carlton Club in Cannes. When Lenglen and Wills both made the final with little opposition, the club doubled the number of seats around their main court and all 3,000 seats plus standing room sold out. Spectators unable to get into the venue attempted to watch the match by climbing trees and ladders or by purchasing unofficial tickets for the windows and roofs of villas across the street. In what was called the Match of the Century, Lenglen defeated Wills in straight sets. The first match point became chaotic when a winner from Wills was called out by a spectator, leading both the players and spectators to believe the match was over. Photographers captured the unique situation of Lenglen and Wills shaking hands at the net as if the match had ended, a moment followed by the crowd flooding the court to congratulate Lenglen. After clarification the shot was in, Wills broke Lenglen to level the set. Despite Lenglen winning, her reputation of being unbeatable was damaged by Wills's competitive performance.
While Wills remained in France, Lenglen avoided a rematch on the Riviera. After Wills's season was marred by an appendectomy during the French Championships, she withdrew from both Grand Slam tournaments in Europe and another match between her and Lenglen never took place. In Wills's absence, Lenglen defended all three of her titles at the French Championships with ease, defeating Mary Browne in the singles final. She again won the doubles with Vlasto and the mixed doubles with Brugnon.
Wimbledon misunderstanding
Although Lenglen was a heavy favourite at Wimbledon with Wills not participating, she began the tournament facing two issues. She was concerned with her family's finances as her father's health was worsening, and she was not content with the FFLT wanting her to enter the doubles event with a French partner instead of her usual partner Ryan. Although Lenglen agreed to play with Vlasto as the FFLT wanted, she was unsettled by being drawn against Ryan in her opening doubles match.
Lenglen's situation did not improve once the tournament began. She opened the singles event with an uncharacteristic win against Browne in which she lost five games, the same number she had lost in the entire 1925 singles event. Her next singles match was then moved up before her doubles match to accommodate the royal family, who planned to be in attendance. Wanting to play doubles first, Lenglen asked for the match to be rescheduled. Although the request was never received, she arrived at the grounds late. After Wimbledon officials confronted her in anger over keeping Queen Mary waiting, she refused to play. The club ultimately adhered to Lenglen's wishes and rescheduled both matches with the doubles first. Nonetheless, Lenglen and Vlasto were defeated by Ryan and Browne in three sets while the crowd who typically supported Lenglen turned against her. Although she defeated Evelyn Dewhurst in the rescheduled singles match, she then withdrew from both singles and mixed doubles, ending her last amateur tournament.
Professional career
United States tour (1926–27)
A month after her withdrawal from Wimbledon, Lenglen signed a $50,000 contract (equivalent to about $ in 2020) with American sports promoter C. C. Pyle to headline a four-month professional tour in the United States beginning in October 1926. She had begun discussing a professional contract with Pyle's associate William Pickens when he visited her on the Riviera in April. Lenglen had previously turned down an offer of 200,000 francs (equivalent to about $ in 2020) to turn professional in the United States following her last victory over Molla Mallory in 1923, declining in large part to keep her amateur status. She became less concerned with that, however, after the crowd turned against her at Wimbledon. She was more interested in keeping her social status, and was convinced by Pyle that turning professional would not hurt her stardom or damage her reputation. With Lenglen on the tour, Pyle attempted to recruit other top players, including Wills, McKane, and leading Americans Bill Tilden and Bill Johnston. Although they all declined, Pyle was able to sign Mary Browne as well as men's players Vincent Richards, Paul Féret, Howard Kinsey, and Harvey Snodgrass. Richards was regarded as the biggest star among the male players, having won gold medals in singles and doubles at the 1924 Olympics. Once the tour began, Lenglen and all of the other players lost their amateur status.
Although professional tennis tournaments already existed, the tour was the first travelling professional exhibition series in tennis history. It featured 40 stops, starting on 9 October 1926 and ending on 14 February 1927, and included several stops in Canada as well as one in Cuba. Lenglen dominated Browne on the tour, winning all 33 of the best-of-three-set matches played to completion. Browne did not win a set until the second set at the 33rd stop. The only other set she won was the only set they played at the 36th stop, where Lenglen had decided to play just a one-set match while ill to avoid disappointing the fans. Browne also nearly won a set at the 23rd stop, losing 9–11, at which point Lenglen decided not to continue.
The tour was a financial success. Lenglen earned the most money, receiving half of the revenue from ticket sales and $100,000 in total, more than the $70,000 that Babe Ruth earned in 1927 as the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball. The average attendance was just over 4,000 at the 34 venues where it was recorded. The most well-attended venues were opening night at Madison Square Garden in New York City with an attendance of 13,000 and the Public Auditorium in Cleveland with an attendance of 10,000. Opening night in particular brought in $34,000 from tickets sold at $1.50 to $5.50 (equivalent to $ to $ in 2020).
British tour (1927)
A few months after the end of the United States tour, Lenglen signed with British promoter Charles Cochran to headline a shorter professional tour in the United Kingdom. Cochran recruited Dora Köring, the 1912 Olympic silver medalist in singles, and Dewhurst to play against Lenglen. Karel Koželuh and Kinsey were the male players on the tour. There were seven tour stops, all in July 1927. Lenglen won all seven of her singles matches, never losing more than five games in any of them. The last three stops were played on the grounds of association football clubs: Queen's Park in Glasgow, Blackpool, and Manchester United. These were the best attended events on the tour and the final match at Old Trafford had an attendance of over 15,000, the highest between either professional tour.
Aftermath
Lenglen was widely criticised for her decision to turn professional. Once the tour began, the FFLT expelled her and Féret while the All England Lawn Tennis Club revoked her membership. Lenglen in turn criticised amateur tennis for her nearing poverty. In the program for the United States professional tour, she stated, "In the twelve years I have been champion I have earned literally millions of francs for tennis... And in my whole lifetime I have not earned $5,000 – not one cent of that by my specialty, my life study – tennis... I am twenty-seven and not wealthy – should I embark on any other career and leave the one for which I have what people call genius? Or should I smile at the prospect of actual poverty and continue to earn a fortune – for whom?" She criticised the barriers that typically prevented ordinary people from becoming tennis players, stating, "Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport?" Lenglen did not participate in any other professional tours after 1927. She never formally applied to be reinstated as an amateur with the FFLT either. She had asked about the possibility in 1932 after Féret was reinstated, but was told to wait another three years and decided against it.
Rivalries
Lenglen vs. Mallory
Molla Mallory was the only player to defeat Lenglen in singles after World War I. Fifteen years older than Lenglen and originally from Norway, Mallory won a bronze medal at the 1912 Olympic Games before emigrating to the United States in 1914. While World War I halted tennis in Europe, Mallory established herself as the top-ranked American player, winning the first four U.S. National Championships she entered from 1915 through 1918. Whereas Lenglen regularly came to the net and had an all-court game built around control rather than power, the much older Mallory played almost exclusively from the baseline. The strengths of Mallory's game were that she took the ball early and had one of the most powerful forehands in women's tennis at the time. Mallory had a similar personality to Lenglen off the court. While they each hated losing, both of them smoked regularly and loved to dance. Lenglen faced Mallory just four times in singles, compiling a 3–1 record. She also won both of their doubles and mixed doubles encounters.
Their first two meetings were highlighted by Lenglen's health issues. In the final of the 1921 World Hard Court Championships, Lenglen nearly retired while struggling with blisters on her foot and trailing in the second set. Nonetheless, Lenglen proceeded to win by following her plan to play defensively and wait for Mallory to make unforced errors on attempted winners. In their second meeting at the 1921 U.S. National Championships, Mallory was able to take advantage of Lenglen's poor health, executing her usual strategy of going for winners to win the match. Although they had entered the doubles event as partners, Lenglen's health prevented them from playing any matches together at the tournament. Lenglen was able to easily win their last two meetings in 1922 and 1923 by playing more aggressively and employing Mallory's strategy of hitting well-placed winners from the baseline.
The press built up the rivalry between Lenglen and Mallory. After Lenglen's retirement against Mallory at the U.S. National Championships, the vast majority of American newspapers criticised Lenglen for not finishing the match and accused her of retiring because she did not think she could win. They coined a phrase "cough and quit" that became popular at the time for describing someone who needed an excuse to avoid losing. After Lenglen's victory over Mallory at Wimbledon, the American press returned to supporting Lenglen. Both Lenglen and Mallory believed the newspapers exaggerated the personal nature of their rivalry. Mallory in particular said, "The newspapers are the dirtiest, filthiest things that ever happened. I don't want my name in the newspapers. I have a better chance on the courts than in the newspapers of my own country."
Lenglen and Ryan
Lenglen's usual doubles partner Elizabeth Ryan was also her most frequent opponent in singles. Born in the United States, Ryan travelled to England in 1912 to visit her sister before deciding to stay there permanently. Although she lost all four of her appearances in major finals, Ryan won 26 major titles between doubles and mixed doubles. The biggest strength of her game was volleying. Tennis writer Ted Tinling said, "volleying as a fundamental, aggressive technique was first injected into the women's game by Ryan." Lenglen and Ryan first partnered together at a handicap event in Monte Carlo in 1913 when they were 13 and 20 years old respectively. After losing the final at that tournament, the two of them never lost a regular doubles match, only once dropping a set in 1923 to Dorothea Lambert Chambers and Kathleen McKane, again at Monte Carlo. Ryan was Lenglen's doubles partner for 40 of her 74 doubles titles, including all six at Wimbledon and two of three at the World Hard Court Championships.
Ryan defeated Lenglen in their first singles meeting in straight sets at Monte Carlo in 1914 and also won a set in their second meeting two months later. Following their first encounter, Lenglen won all 17 of their remaining matches, including five at Wimbledon and two major finals. The only time Ryan won a set against Lenglen after World War I was in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 1924, where Lenglen withdrew due to illness in the following round. When the FFLT asked Lenglen to take a French partner in doubles at Wimbledon in 1926, Ryan partnered with Mary Browne to defeat Lenglen and her new partner Julie Vlasto, coming from three match points down in the second set. Ryan also won their only other doubles meeting in 1914. In mixed doubles, Lenglen compiled a 23–9 record against Ryan. Half of her career mixed doubles losses were to Ryan. After losing their first six encounters, she recovered to win the next thirteen. Lenglen won her first mixed doubles match against Ryan at the 1920 Beaulieu tournament, starting a win streak that ended with a loss to Ryan and Lycett at the 1923 South of France Championships.
Overlap with Wills
Helen Wills was the closest to becoming Lenglen's counterpart. Wills finished her career with 19 Grand Slam singles titles, a record that stood until 1970. She succeeded Lenglen as world No. 1 in 1927 and kept that ranking for the next six years and nine of the next twelve overall until 1938. Late in Lenglen's amateur career, Wills had built up a similar level of stardom to Lenglen by winning the 1924 Olympic gold medal in singles in Lenglen's absence while still only 18 years old. Although their careers overlapped when Wills visited Europe in 1924 and 1926, Lenglen only faced Wills once in her career. Lenglen withdrew from Wimbledon and the Olympics due to jaundice in 1924, while Wills withdrew from the French Championships and Wimbledon in 1926 due to appendicitis, preventing a longer rivalry between tennis's two biggest female stars of the 1920s from emerging.
Playing style
Elizabeth Ryan described Lenglen's all-court style of play as, "[Lenglen] owned every kind of shot, plus a genius for knowing how and when to use them. She never gave an opponent the same kind of shot twice in a row. She’d make you run miles... her game was all placement and deception and steadiness. I had the best drop shot anybody ever had, but she could not only get up to it but was so fast that often she could score a placement off it." Her rivals Molla Mallory and Helen Wills both noted that Lenglen excelled at extending rallies and could take control of points with defensive shots. Although Lenglen built her game around control rather than power, she had the ability to hit powerful shots. In particular, Mallory praised the power behind her defensive shots, saying, "She is just the steadiest player that ever was. She just sent back at me whatever I sent at her and waited for me to make a fault. And her returns often enough were harder than the shots I sent up to her." British journalist A. E. Crawley regarded her as having the best movement of her time, saying, "I have never seen on a lawn tennis court either man or woman move with such mechanical and artistic perfection and prose. Whether [Lenglen's] objective is the ball or merely changing sides, she reminded you of the movement of fire over prairie grass." He believed she was a powerful server and an aggressive volleyer, commenting, "She serves with all the male athlete's power. She smashes with the same loose and rapid action, the release of a spring of steel. Her volley is not a timid push, but an arrow from the bow. And an arrow from the bow is Suzanne herself."
Adopting a style of play drawn from men's players led Lenglen to become one of the leading volleyers in women's tennis at a time when the women's game was centred around playing from the baseline, even for the top players. Lenglen aimed to come to the net to finish points quickly whenever possible. Kathleen McKane specifically noted that "Suzanne volleyed like a man" when describing her influence on women's tennis. While Lenglen did not model the majority of her game after any specific player, she modelled her forehand after that of Anthony Wilding. Like Wilding, she aimed to hit forehands flat and with little to no topspin. She used a continental grip and strived to hit balls early on the rise. Lenglen wrote in her book Lawn Tennis for Girls, "A favorite shot of mine is the backhand down the line". Lenglen was regarded as having a graceful style of play. Her movement was thought to resemble that of a dancer, a style that may have arisen from a course on classic Greek dance she had taken as a child. René Lacoste, a leading French men's tennis player from her era, said, "[Lenglen] played with marvelous ease the simplest strokes in the world. It was only after several games that I understood what harmony was concealed by her simplicity, what wonderful mental and physical balance was hidden by the facility of her play."
Lenglen developed a reputation for drinking cognac to help her play at pivotal points of her biggest matches. Most notably, she did so during the second and third sets of her victory against Lambert Chambers in the 1919 Wimbledon final, and at the start and during the more competitive second set of her victory over Helen Wills in the Match of the Century. She only travelled to the U.S. National Championships in 1921 after the USLTA agreed to supply her with alcohol during her stay even though consumption was illegal under the laws of Prohibition at the time. Nonetheless, they did not provide Lenglen with alcohol during her retirement loss to Mallory.
Legacy
Achievements
Lenglen was ranked as the 24th greatest player of all-time in the 100 Greatest of All Time series. She was the ninth-highest ranked woman overall, and the highest-ranked woman to play exclusively in the amateur era. After formal annual women's tennis rankings began to be published by tennis journalist and player A. Wallis Myers in 1921, Lenglen was No. 1 in the world in each of the first six editions of the rankings through her retirement from amateur tennis in 1926. She won a total of 250 titles consisting of 83 in singles, 74 in doubles, and 93 in mixed doubles. Nine of her singles titles were won without losing a game. Lenglen compiled win percentages of 97.9% in singles and 96.9% across all disciplines. After World War I, she won 287 of 288 singles matches, starting with a 108-match win streak and ending with a 179-match win streak, the latter of which was longer than Helen Wills' longest win streak of 161 matches. Lenglen ended her career on a 250-match win streak on clay.
Lenglen's eight Grand Slam women's singles titles are tied for the tenth-most all-time, and tied for fourth in the amateur era behind only Maureen Connolly's nine, Court's thirteen, and Wills's nineteen. Aside from the 1919 Wimbledon Championships, Lenglen did not lose more than three games in a set in any of her other Grand Slam or World Hard Court Championship singles finals. Lenglen's six Wimbledon titles are tied for the sixth-most in history. Her former record of five consecutive Wimbledon titles has only since been matched by Martina Navratilova, who won her sixth in a row in 1987. Lenglen's title at the 1914 World Hard Court Championships made her the youngest major champion in tennis history at 15 years and 16 days old, nearly a year ahead of the next two youngest, Martina Hingis and Lottie Dod.
Lenglen won a total of 17 titles at Wimbledon, 19 at the French Championships, and 10 at the World Hard Court Championships across all disciplines. Lenglen completed three Wimbledon triple crowns – winning the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles events at a tournament in the same year – in 1920, 1922, and 1925. She also won two triple crowns at the World Hard Court Championships in 1921 and 1922, and six at the French Championships, the first four of which came consecutively from 1920 through 1923 when the tournament was invitation-only to French nationals and the last two of which came in 1925 and 1926 when the tournament was open to internationals.
Mythical persona
Following World War I, Lenglen became a symbol of national pride in France in a country looking to recover from the war. The French press referred to Lenglen as notre Suzanne (our Suzanne) to characterise her status as a national heroine; and more eminently as La Divine (The Goddess) to assert her unassailability. The press wrote about Lenglen as if she was infallible at tennis, often attributing any performance that was relatively poor by her standards to various excuses such as the fault of her doubles partner or to having concern over the health of her father. Journalists who criticised Lenglen were condemned and refuted by the rest of the press. At the Olympics, she introduced herself to journalists as "The Great Lenglen", a title that was well received. Before matches, Lenglen would predict to the press that she was going to win, a practice that Americans treated as improper. She explained, "When I am asked a question I endeavour to give a frank answer. If I know I am going to win, what harm is there in saying so?"
Lenglen was the first female athlete to be acknowledged as a celebrity outside of her sport. She was acquainted with members of royal families such as King Gustav V of Sweden, and actresses such as Mary Pickford. She was well known by the general public, and her matches were well-attended by people not otherwise interested in tennis. Many of her biggest matches were sold out, including the 1919 Wimbledon final against Lambert Chambers, where the attendance more than doubled the seating capacity of Centre Court, and her first match against Mallory, where tickets were sold at a cost of up to 500 francs (about $ in 2020) and an estimated 5,000 people could not gain entry to see the match after it had sold out. The popularity of Lenglen's matches at Wimbledon was a large factor in the club moving the tournament from Worple Road to its modern site at Church Road. A new Centre Court opened in 1922 with a seating capacity of nearly 10,000, nearly three times larger than that at the old venue. At the Match of the Century against Wills, seated tickets that were sold out at 300 francs, then equivalent to about $11 in the United States (or $ in 2020), were re-sold by scalpers at up to 1200 francs, which was then about $44 (or $ in 2020). This cost far exceeded that for the men's singles final at the U.S. National Championships at the time, which were sold at as low as $2 per seat (about $ in 2020).
Lenglen's mythical reputation began at a young age. She was known for a story about her father training her to improve her shot precision as a child by placing a handkerchief at different locations on the court and instructing her to hit it as a target. She was said to be able to hit the handkerchief with ease regardless of the type of incoming shot. Each time she did, he would fold it in half before replacing it with a coin. It was said that Lenglen could hit the coin up to five times in a row.
Professional tennis
Lenglen was the first leading tennis player to leave amateur tennis to play professionally, thereby launching playing tennis as a professional career. The exhibition tour she headlined in the United States from 1926 to 1927 in which a few players travelled together to compete against each other across a series of venues was the first of its kind. It established a format that was repeated over twenty times for the next four decades until the start of the Open Era. With Pyle only interested in tennis because of Lenglen, Vincent Richards, the leading male player on Lenglen's United States tour, organised the next such tour featuring himself competing against Karel Koželuh in 1928. He also began organising the first major professional tournaments to feature players who had been top amateurs, beginning with the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships first held later in 1927.
As the top women's players nearly all kept their amateur status, women were largely left out of both the travelling exhibition tours and the growing professional tournaments after Lenglen's playing career ended. The next significant exhibition tour to feature women's tennis players did not occur until 1941 when Alice Marble became one of the headliners on a tour that also featured leading male players Don Budge and Bill Tilden. Fellow top-ranked players Pauline Betz and Althea Gibson followed Marble by turning professional in 1947 and 1958 respectively. Betz played on two tours, one in 1947 and another from 1950 to 1951. Gibson played in a series of warmup matches for the Harlem Globetrotters, an exhibition basketball team in the United States.
Fashion
Lenglen redefined traditional women's tennis attire early in her career. By the 1919 Wimbledon final, she avoided donning a corset in favour of a short-sleeved and calf-length pleated skirt to go along with a distinctive circular-brimmed bonnet, a stark contrast with her much older opponent Dorothea Lambert Chambers who wore long sleeves and a plain skirt below the calf.
The following year, Lenglen ended the norm of women competing in clothes not suited for playing tennis. She had Jean Patou design her outfits that were not only intended to be stylish, but allowed her to perform her signature leaping ballet motion in points and did not restrict her movement on the court. This type of attire was among the earliest women's sportswear. Unusual for the time, her skirt was both sleeveless and only extended to her knees. Lenglen replaced the bonnet with a bandeau, which became known as the "Lenglen bandeau" and was her signature piece of attire throughout the rest of her career. On the court, she routinely wore makeup and popularised having tanned skin instead of a pale complexion that other players had preferred before her time. Later in her career, she moved away from just wearing white in favour of brighter-coloured outfits. Overall, she pioneered the idea of players using the tennis court to showcase fashion instead of just competing. Off the court, Lenglen frequently wore an oversized and expensive fur coat.
Honours
Lenglen is honoured in a variety of ways at the French Open. At Stade Roland Garros, the second show court that was built in 1994 with a capacity of about 10,000 was named Court Suzanne Lenglen in 1997. Outside the court, there is a bronze relief statue of Lenglen that was erected in 1994. The FFLT had originally planned to erect a statue of Lenglen immediately after her death, but this plan never materialised due to the start of World War II later that year. Additionally, one of the main entrances to the ground is Porte Suzanne Lenglen, which leads to Allée Suzanne Lenglen. Moreover, the women's singles championship trophy was named the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen in 1987. In spite of her success at the French Championships, Lenglen never competed at Stade Roland Garros as it did not become the site for the tournament until 1928 after her retirement from amateur tennis.
Lenglen was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978. Following her death, she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Another road, the Avenue Suzanne Lenglen, is named in her honour outside of the Nice Lawn Tennis Club. She has been honoured in a Google Doodle twice, once on her 117th birthday on 24 May 2016, and again on International Women's Day on 8 March 2017.
Personal life
Lenglen was in a long-term relationship with Baldwin Baldwin from 1927 to 1932. Baldwin was the grandson and heir to Lucky Baldwin, a prominent businessman and real estate investor active in California. Lenglen met Baldwin during her professional tour in the United States. Although they intended to get married, those plans never materialised largely because Baldwin was already married and his wife would not agree to a divorce while Lenglen and Baldwin were together. During this time, her father died of poor health in 1929.
Lenglen was the author of several books on tennis, the first two of which she wrote during her amateur career. Her first book, Lawn Tennis for Girls, covered techniques and advice on tactics for beginner tennis players. She also wrote Lawn Tennis: The Game of Nations and a romantic novel, The Love Game: Being the Life Story of Marcelle Penrose. Lenglen finished her last book Tennis by Simple Exercises with Margaret Morris in 1937. The book featured a section by Lenglen on what was needed to become an all-around tennis player and a section by Morris, a choreographer and dancer, on exercises designed for tennis players. She played a role as an actress in the 1935 British musical comedy film Things Are Looking Up, in which she contests a tennis match against the lead character portrayed by Cicely Courtneidge.
Following her playing career, Lenglen returned to tennis as a coach in 1933, serving as the director of a school on the grounds of Stade Roland Garros. She opened her own tennis school for girls in 1936 at the Tennis Mirabeau in Paris with the support of the FFLT. She began instructing adults the following year as well. A year later in May 1938, Lenglen became the inaugural director of the French National Tennis School in Paris. Shortly after this appointment, however, Lenglen became severely fatigued while teaching at the school and needed to receive a blood transfusion. She previously had other health issues following her retirement, most notably suffering from appendicitis and having her appendix removed in October 1934. Lenglen died on 4 July 1938 at the age of 39, three weeks after she became ill, and was reported to have died from pernicious anemia. Her specific cause of death was unclear due to anemia being curable and reports of her having other illnesses, including leukemia. Lenglen was buried at the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen just outside Paris.
Career statistics
Performance timelines
Results from the French Championships before 1924 do not count towards the statistical totals because the tournament was not yet open to international players.
Singles
Doubles
Mixed doubles
Source: Little
Major finals
Grand Slam singles: 8 (8 titles)
World Championship singles: 4 (4 titles)
Source: Little
Olympic medal matches
Singles: 1 (1 gold medal)
Source: Little
See also
List of Grand Slam women's singles champions
List of Grand Slam women's doubles champions
List of Grand Slam mixed doubles champions
List of Grand Slam related tennis records
Notes
References
Books
External links
1899 births
1938 deaths
Deaths from pernicious anemia
Deaths from leukemia
Deaths from cancer in France
French female tennis players
French Championships (tennis) champions
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in mixed doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's doubles
Grand Slam (tennis) champions in women's singles
International Tennis Hall of Fame inductees
Medalists at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Olympic bronze medalists for France
Olympic gold medalists for France
Olympic medalists in tennis
Olympic tennis players of France
Tennis players from Paris
Professional tennis players before the Open Era
Tennis players at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Wimbledon champions (pre-Open Era)
World No. 1 tennis players
20th-century French women | false | [
"Vivianne Miedema is a Dutch professional footballer who has played as a forward for the Netherlands women's national football team since 2013. She is the all-time top scorer for her country, for both women and men. On 26 September 2013, Miedema made her debut for the Dutch senior team aged seventeen. She was an 84th-minute substitute for Lieke Martens in a 4–0 win over Albania in the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup qualification – UEFA Group 5. One month later in her second cap she scored her first goals, a hat-trick, in her country's 7–0 win over Portugal, after only having come onto the pitch as a substitute in the 75th minute.\n\nMiedema helped the Dutch qualify for their first-ever FIFA World Cup finals, scoring all three of her side's goals in the two-leg final of the UEFA qualification play-offs against Italy in November 2014. She finished as the top scorer in the qualification campaign with 16 goals. At the finals in Canada, she played all four matches, three group stage games and the round of 16 match, a defeat against Japan. She did not score in Canada. At the 2017 UEFA Women's European Championship, held in the Netherlands, Miedema scored four times, including in the semi-final win over England and in the final against Denmark. Her goals helped secure the first ever title for the Dutch women.\n\nIn the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup qualification – UEFA play-offs Miedema scored twice against Switzerland, taking her country to the World Cup finals in France, where she scored three times. On 15 June 2019, Miedema became the all-time top scorer of the Netherlands women's national football team after scoring her 60th goal in a 3–1 Group E win against Cameroon. She passed the record held by Manon Melis and extended her lead over the men's team's leading scorer, Robin van Persie, who scored 50 goals before retiring. In the quarter-final against Italy she scored the first goal of the match, helping the Dutch progress. In the final against the United States the Netherlands did not score and lost 2–0. At the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo Miedema broke the record of most goals scored in a single Olympic tournament: 10. In 106 appearances for the senior national team as of February 2022, Miedema has scored 85 goals. None of her goals have come from penalty kicks. She has scored five hat-tricks; against Portugal (2013 and 2014), Greece (2013), Russia (2017), and Zambia (2021), when she scored four goals. Her most productive year was 2017 with 20 goals from 21 games.\n\nInternational goals\n\"Score\" represents the score in the match after Miedema's goal. \"Score\" and \"Result\" list the Netherlands' goal tally first. Cap represents the player's appearance in an international level match at senior level.\n\nStatistics\n\nSee also\n List of top international women's football goal scorers by country\n List of women's footballers with 100 or more international goals\n\nReferences\n\nMiedema\nMiedema goals\nMiedema goals\nMiedema",
"The 2020 Eurohockey Indoor Championship II was the 7th edition of the tournament. It took take place from 17 to 19 January 2020 in Lucerne, Switzerland.\n\nQualified Teams\n\nSweden finished 3rd in the previous tournament, but did not take part in 2020. Instead Turkey, which as 7th placed team in 2018 were originally relegated, took part.\n\nFormat\nThe eight teams are split into two groups of four teams. The bottom two teams from pool A and B, play in a new group, pool C, against the teams they did not play against in the group stage. The top two teams from pool A and B, will also play in a new group, pool D, where they play the teams they did not play against in the group stage to determine the winner. All points from pools A and B will be taken over in pools C and D. The top two teams will be promoted to the 2022 Men's EuroHockey Indoor Nations Championship. The last two teams will be relegated to the 2022 Eurohockey Indoor Championship III.\n\nResults\n''All times are local (UTC+1).\n\nPreliminary round\n\nPool A\n\nPool B\n\nFifth to eighth place classification\n\nPool C\nThe points obtained in the preliminary round against the other team are taken over.\n\nPool D\nThe points obtained in the preliminary round against the other team are taken over.\n\nFinal standings\n\nReferences\n\nMen's EuroHockey Indoor Championship II\nInternational indoor hockey competitions hosted by Switzerland\nEuroHockey Indoor Nations Championship Men\nIndoor Men\nEuroHockey Indoor Nations Championship Men\nEvents in Lucerne"
] |
[
"John Ruskin",
"Modern Painters I (1843)"
] | C_586bfbeaa57b4e3ab23a77a6d7b375c8_0 | What was Modern Painters I? | 1 | What was John Ruskin's Modern Painters I? | John Ruskin | Much of the period, from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin spent abroad with his parents, principally in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by critic, Rev John Eagles, in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903. Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and, from 1839, Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842. What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous but authoritative title, "A Graduate of Oxford," was Ruskin's response to Turner's critics. An electronic edition is available online. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters--and in particular Turner--were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa, unlike Turner, favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studio--to render what he has seen and understood imaginatively on canvas, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity. Although critics were slow to react and reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, notably Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his metier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued the nearly 20,000 sketches Turner gave to the British nation. CANNOTANSWER | What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous but authoritative title, "A Graduate of Oxford, | John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.
Early life (1819–1846)
Genealogy
Ruskin was the only child of first cousins. His father, John James Ruskin (1785–1864), was a sherry and wine importer, founding partner and de facto business manager of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq (see Allied Domecq). John James was born and brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a mother from Glenluce and a father originally from Hertfordshire. His wife, Margaret Cock (1781–1871), was the daughter of a publican in Croydon. She had joined the Ruskin household when she became companion to John James's mother, Catherine.
John James had hoped to practise law, and was articled as a clerk in London. His father, John Thomas Ruskin, described as a grocer (but apparently an ambitious wholesale merchant), was an incompetent businessman. To save the family from bankruptcy, John James, whose prudence and success were in stark contrast to his father, took on all debts, settling the last of them in 1832. John James and Margaret were engaged in 1809, but opposition to the union from John Thomas, and the problem of his debts, delayed the couple's wedding. They finally married, without celebration, in 1818. John James died on 3 March 1864 and is buried in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, Shirley, Croydon.
Childhood and education
Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London (demolished 1969), south of St Pancras railway station. His childhood was shaped by the contrasting influences of his father and mother, both of whom were fiercely ambitious for him. John James Ruskin helped to develop his son's Romanticism. They shared a passion for the works of Byron, Shakespeare and especially Walter Scott. They visited Scott's home, Abbotsford, in 1838, but Ruskin was disappointed by its appearance. Margaret Ruskin, an evangelical Christian, more cautious and restrained than her husband, taught young John to read the Bible from beginning to end, and then to start all over again, committing large portions to memory. Its language, imagery and parables had a profound and lasting effect on his writing. He later wrote:
Ruskin's childhood was spent from 1823 at 28 Herne Hill (demolished ), near the village of Camberwell in South London. He had few friends of his own age, but it was not the friendless and toyless experience he later said it was in his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89). He was educated at home by his parents and private tutors, including Congregationalist preacher Edward Andrews, whose daughters, Mrs Eliza Orme and Emily Augusta Patmore were later credited with introducing Ruskin to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
From 1834 to 1835 he attended the school in Peckham run by the progressive evangelical Thomas Dale (1797–1870). Ruskin heard Dale lecture in 1836 at King's College, London, where Dale was the first Professor of English Literature. Ruskin went on to enroll and complete his studies at King's College, where he prepared for Oxford under Dale's tutelage.
Travel
Ruskin was greatly influenced by the extensive and privileged travels he enjoyed in his childhood. It helped to establish his taste and augmented his education. He sometimes accompanied his father on visits to business clients at their country houses, which exposed him to English landscapes, architecture and paintings. Family tours took them to the Lake District (his first long poem, Iteriad, was an account of his tour in 1830) and to relatives in Perth, Scotland. As early as 1825, the family visited France and Belgium. Their continental tours became increasingly ambitious in scope: in 1833 they visited Strasbourg, Schaffhausen, Milan, Genoa and Turin, places to which Ruskin frequently returned. He developed a lifelong love of the Alps, and in 1835 visited Venice for the first time, that 'Paradise of cities' that provided the subject and symbolism of much of his later work.
These tours gave Ruskin the opportunity to observe and record his impressions of nature. He composed elegant, though mainly conventional poetry, some of which was published in Friendship's Offering. His early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of visually sophisticated and technically accomplished drawings of maps, landscapes and buildings, remarkable for a boy of his age. He was profoundly affected by Samuel Rogers's poem Italy (1830), a copy of which was given to him as a 13th birthday present; in particular, he deeply admired the accompanying illustrations by J. M. W. Turner. Much of Ruskin's own art in the 1830s was in imitation of Turner, and of Samuel Prout, whose Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany (1833) he also admired. His artistic skills were refined under the tutelage of Charles Runciman, Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding.
First publications
Ruskin's journeys also provided inspiration for writing. His first publication was the poem "On Skiddaw and Derwent Water" (originally entitled "Lines written at the Lakes in Cumberland: Derwentwater" and published in the Spiritual Times) (August 1829). In 1834, three short articles for Loudon's Magazine of Natural History were published. They show early signs of his skill as a close "scientific" observer of nature, especially its geology.
From September 1837 to December 1838, Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture was serialised in Loudon's Architectural Magazine, under the pen name "Kata Phusin" (Greek for "According to Nature"). It was a study of cottages, villas, and other dwellings centred on a Wordsworthian argument that buildings should be sympathetic to their immediate environment and use local materials. It anticipated key themes in his later writings. In 1839, Ruskin's "Remarks on the Present State of Meteorological Science" was published in Transactions of the Meteorological Society.
Oxford
In Michaelmas 1836, Ruskin matriculated at the University of Oxford, taking up residence at Christ Church in January of the following year. Enrolled as a gentleman-commoner, he enjoyed equal status with his aristocratic peers. Ruskin was generally uninspired by Oxford and suffered bouts of illness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of his time there was in the few, close friendships he made. His tutor, the Rev Walter Lucas Brown, always encouraged him, as did a young senior tutor, Henry Liddell (later the father of Alice Liddell) and a private tutor, the Rev Osborne Gordon. He became close to the geologist and natural theologian, William Buckland. Among his fellow-undergraduates, Ruskin's most important friends were Charles Thomas Newton and Henry Acland.
His most noteworthy success came in 1839 when, at the third attempt, he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry (Arthur Hugh Clough came second). He met William Wordsworth, who was receiving an honorary degree, at the ceremony.
Ruskin's health was poor and he never became independent from his family during his time at Oxford. His mother took lodgings on High Street, where his father joined them at weekends. He was devastated to hear that his first love, Adèle Domecq, the second daughter of his father's business partner, had become engaged to a French nobleman. In April 1840, whilst revising for his examinations, he began to cough blood, which led to fears of consumption and a long break from Oxford travelling with his parents.
Before he returned to Oxford, Ruskin responded to a challenge that had been put to him by Effie Gray, whom he later married: the twelve-year-old Effie had asked him to write a fairy story. During a six-week break at Leamington Spa to undergo Dr Jephson's (1798–1878) celebrated salt-water cure, Ruskin wrote his only work of fiction, the fable The King of the Golden River (not published until December 1850 (but imprinted 1851), with illustrations by Richard Doyle). A work of Christian sacrificial morality and charity, it is set in the Alpine landscape Ruskin loved and knew so well. It remains the most translated of all his works. Back at Oxford, in 1842 Ruskin sat for a pass degree, and was awarded an uncommon honorary double fourth-class degree in recognition of his achievements.
Modern Painters I (1843)
For much of the period from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin was abroad with his parents, mainly in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, later married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by the critic Rev John Eagles in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner, who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903.
Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842.
What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous authority of "A Graduate of Oxford", was Ruskin's answer to Turner's critics. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters—and in particular Turner—were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that, unlike Turner, Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studioto render imaginatively on canvas what he has seen and understood, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity.
Although critics were slow to react and the reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, including Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his métier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued nearly 20,000 sketches that Turner gave to the British nation.
1845 tour and Modern Painters II (1846)
Ruskin toured the continent with his parents again during 1844, visiting Chamonix and Paris, studying the geology of the Alps and the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Perugino among others at the Louvre. In 1845, at the age of 26, he undertook to travel without his parents for the first time. It provided him with an opportunity to study medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and especially Italy. In Lucca he saw the Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia, which Ruskin considered the exemplar of Christian sculpture (he later associated it with the then object of his love, Rose La Touche). He drew inspiration from what he saw at the Campo Santo in Pisa, and in Florence. In Venice, he was particularly impressed by the works of Fra Angelico and Giotto in St Mark's Cathedral, and Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco, but he was alarmed by the combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city: "Venice is lost to me", he wrote. It finally convinced him that architectural restoration was destruction, and that the only true and faithful action was preservation and conservation.
Drawing on his travels, he wrote the second volume of Modern Painters (published April 1846). The volume concentrated on Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists rather than on Turner. It was a more theoretical work than its predecessor. Ruskin explicitly linked the aesthetic and the divine, arguing that truth, beauty and religion are inextricably bound together: "the Beautiful as a gift of God". In defining categories of beauty and imagination, Ruskin argued that all great artists must perceive beauty and, with their imagination, communicate it creatively by means of symbolic representation. Generally, critics gave this second volume a warmer reception, although many found the attack on the aesthetic orthodoxy associated with Joshua Reynolds difficult to accept. In the summer, Ruskin was abroad again with his father, who still hoped his son might become a poet, even poet laureate, just one among many factors increasing the tension between them.
Middle life (1847–1869)
Marriage to Effie Gray
During 1847, Ruskin became closer to Euphemia "Effie" Gray, the daughter of family friends. It was for her that Ruskin had written The King of the Golden River. The couple were engaged in October. They married on 10 April 1848 at her home, Bowerswell, in Perth, once the residence of the Ruskin family. It was the site of the suicide of John Thomas Ruskin (Ruskin's grandfather). Owing to this association and other complications, Ruskin's parents did not attend. The European Revolutions of 1848 meant that the newlyweds' earliest travels together were restricted, but they were able to visit Normandy, where Ruskin admired the Gothic architecture.
Their early life together was spent at 31 Park Street, Mayfair, secured for them by Ruskin's father (later addresses included nearby 6 Charles Street, and 30 Herne Hill). Effie was too unwell to undertake the European tour of 1849, so Ruskin visited the Alps with his parents, gathering material for the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters. He was struck by the contrast between the Alpine beauty and the poverty of Alpine peasants, stirring his increasingly sensitive social conscience.
The marriage was unhappy, with Ruskin reportedly being cruel to Effie and distrustful of her. The marriage was never consummated and was annulled six years later in 1854.
Architecture
Ruskin's developing interest in architecture, and particularly in the Gothic, led to the first work to bear his name, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). It contained 14 plates etched by the author. The title refers to seven moral categories that Ruskin considered vital to and inseparable from all architecture: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience. All would provide recurring themes in his future work. Seven Lamps promoted the virtues of a secular and Protestant form of Gothic. It was a challenge to the Catholic influence of architect A. W. N. Pugin.
The Stones of Venice
In November 1849, John and Effie Ruskin visited Venice, staying at the Hotel Danieli. Their different personalities are revealed by their contrasting priorities. For Effie, Venice provided an opportunity to socialise, while Ruskin was engaged in solitary studies. In particular, he made a point of drawing the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, because he feared that they would be destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops. One of these troops, Lieutenant Charles Paulizza, became friendly with Effie, apparently with Ruskin's consent. Her brother, among others, later claimed that Ruskin was deliberately encouraging the friendship to compromise her, as an excuse to separate.
Meanwhile, Ruskin was making the extensive sketches and notes that he used for his three-volume work The Stones of Venice (1851–53). Developing from a technical history of Venetian architecture from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history, Stones represented Ruskin's opinion of contemporary England. It served as a warning about the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued that Venice had degenerated slowly. Its cultural achievements had been compromised, and its society corrupted, by the decline of true Christian faith. Instead of revering the divine, Renaissance artists honoured themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness.
The chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" appeared in the second volume of Stones. Praising Gothic ornament, Ruskin argued that it was an expression of the artisan's joy in free, creative work. The worker must be allowed to think and to express his own personality and ideas, ideally using his own hands, rather than machinery.
This was both an aesthetic attack on, and a social critique of, the division of labour in particular, and industrial capitalism in general. This chapter had a profound effect, and was reprinted both by the Christian socialist founders of the Working Men's College and later by the Arts and Crafts pioneer and socialist William Morris.
Pre-Raphaelites
John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelite commitment to 'naturalism' – "paint[ing] from nature only", depicting nature in fine detail, had been influenced by Ruskin.
Ruskin became acquainted with Millais after the artists made an approach to Ruskin through their mutual friend Coventry Patmore. Initially, Ruskin had not been impressed by Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50), a painting that was considered blasphemous at the time, but Ruskin wrote letters defending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to The Times during May 1851. Providing Millais with artistic patronage and encouragement, in the summer of 1853 the artist (and his brother) travelled to Scotland with Ruskin and Effie where, at Glenfinlas, he painted the closely observed landscape background of gneiss rock to which, as had always been intended, he later added Ruskin's portrait.
Millais had painted a picture of Effie for The Order of Release, 1746, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. Suffering increasingly from physical illness and acute mental anxiety, Effie was arguing fiercely with her husband and his intense and overly protective parents, and sought solace with her own parents in Scotland. The Ruskin marriage was already undermined as she and Millais fell in love, and Effie left Ruskin, causing a public scandal.
During April 1854, Effie filed her suit of nullity, on grounds of "non-consummation" owing to his "incurable impotency", a charge Ruskin later disputed. Ruskin wrote, "I can prove my virility at once." The annulment was granted in July. Ruskin did not even mention it in his diary. Effie married Millais the following year. The complex reasons for the non-consummation and ultimate failure of the Ruskin marriage are a matter of enduring speculation and debate.
Ruskin continued to support Hunt and Rossetti. He also provided an annuity of £150 in 1855–57 to Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's wife, to encourage her art (and paid for the services of Henry Acland for her medical care). Other artists influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites also received both critical and financial assistance from Ruskin, including John Brett, John William Inchbold, and Edward Burne-Jones, who became a good friend (he called him "Brother Ned"). His father's disapproval of such friends was a further cause of tension between them.
During this period Ruskin wrote regular reviews of the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy with the title Academy Notes (1855–59, 1875). They were highly influential, capable of making or breaking reputations. The satirical magazine Punch published the lines (24 May 1856), "I paints and paints,/hears no complaints/And sells before I'm dry,/Till savage Ruskin/He sticks his tusk in/Then nobody will buy."
Ruskin was an art-philanthropist: in March 1861 he gave 48 Turner drawings to the Ashmolean in Oxford, and a further 25 to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in May. Ruskin's own work was very distinctive, and he occasionally exhibited his watercolours: in the United States in 1857–58 and 1879, for example; and in England, at the Fine Art Society in 1878, and at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour (of which he was an honorary member) in 1879. He created many careful studies of natural forms, based on his detailed botanical, geological and architectural observations. Examples of his work include a painted, floral pilaster decoration in the central room of Wallington Hall in Northumberland, home of his friend Pauline Trevelyan. The stained glass window in the Little Church of St Francis Funtley, Fareham, Hampshire is reputed to have been designed by him. Originally placed in the St. Peter's Church Duntisbourne Abbots near Cirencester, the window depicts the Ascension and the Nativity.
Ruskin's theories also inspired some architects to adapt the Gothic style. Such buildings created what has been called a distinctive "Ruskinian Gothic". Through his friendship with Henry Acland, Ruskin supported attempts to establish what became the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (designed by Benjamin Woodward)—which is the closest thing to a model of this style, but still failed to satisfy Ruskin completely. The many twists and turns in the Museum's development, not least its increasing cost, and the University authorities' less than enthusiastic attitude towards it, proved increasingly frustrating for Ruskin.
Ruskin and education
The Museum was part of a wider plan to improve science provision at Oxford, something the University initially resisted. Ruskin's first formal teaching role came about in the mid-1850s, when he taught drawing classes (assisted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) at the Working Men's College, established by the Christian socialists, Frederick James Furnivall and Frederick Denison Maurice. Although Ruskin did not share the founders' politics, he strongly supported the idea that through education workers could achieve a crucially important sense of (self-)fulfilment. One result of this involvement was Ruskin's Elements of Drawing (1857). He had taught several women drawing, by means of correspondence, and his book represented both a response and a challenge to contemporary drawing manuals. The WMC was also a useful recruiting ground for assistants, on some of whom Ruskin would later come to rely, such as his future publisher, George Allen.
From 1859 until 1868, Ruskin was involved with the progressive school for girls at Winnington Hall in Cheshire. A frequent visitor, letter-writer, and donor of pictures and geological specimens to the school, Ruskin approved of the mixture of sports, handicrafts, music and dancing encouraged by its principal, Miss Bell. The association led to Ruskin's sub-Socratic work, The Ethics of the Dust (1866), an imagined conversation with Winnington's girls in which he cast himself as the "Old Lecturer". On the surface a discourse on crystallography, it is a metaphorical exploration of social and political ideals. In the 1880s, Ruskin became involved with another educational institution, Whitelands College, a training college for teachers, where he instituted a May Queen festival that endures today. (It was also replicated in the 19th century at the Cork High School for Girls.) Ruskin also bestowed books and gemstones upon Somerville College, one of Oxford's first two women's colleges, which he visited regularly, and was similarly generous to other educational institutions for women.
Modern Painters III and IV
Both volumes III and IV of Modern Painters were published in 1856. In MP III Ruskin argued that all great art is "the expression of the spirits of great men". Only the morally and spiritually healthy are capable of admiring the noble and the beautiful, and transforming them into great art by imaginatively penetrating their essence. MP IV presents the geology of the Alps in terms of landscape painting, and their moral and spiritual influence on those living nearby. The contrasting final chapters, "The Mountain Glory" and "The Mountain Gloom" provide an early example of Ruskin's social analysis, highlighting the poverty of the peasants living in the lower Alps.
Public lecturer
In addition to leading more formal teaching classes, from the 1850s Ruskin became an increasingly popular public lecturer. His first public lectures were given in Edinburgh, in November 1853, on architecture and painting. His lectures at the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester in 1857, were collected as The Political Economy of Art and later under Keats's phrase, A Joy For Ever. In these lectures, Ruskin spoke about how to acquire art, and how to use it, arguing that England had forgotten that true wealth is virtue, and that art is an index of a nation's well-being. Individuals have a responsibility to consume wisely, stimulating beneficent demand. The increasingly critical tone and political nature of Ruskin's interventions outraged his father and the "Manchester School" of economists, as represented by a hostile review in the Manchester Examiner and Times. As the Ruskin scholar Helen Gill Viljoen noted, Ruskin was increasingly critical of his father, especially in letters written by Ruskin directly to him, many of them still unpublished.
Ruskin gave the inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art in 1858, an institution from which the modern-day Anglia Ruskin University has grown. In The Two Paths (1859), five lectures given in London, Manchester, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells, Ruskin argued that a 'vital law' underpins art and architecture, drawing on the labour theory of value. (For other addresses and letters, Cook and Wedderburn, vol. 16, pp. 427–87.) The year 1859 also marked his last tour of Europe with his ageing parents, during which they visited Germany and Switzerland.
Turner Bequest
Ruskin had been in Venice when he heard about Turner's death in 1851. Being named an executor to Turner's will was an honour that Ruskin respectfully declined, but later took up. Ruskin's book in celebration of the sea, The Harbours of England, revolving around Turner's drawings, was published in 1856. In January 1857, Ruskin's Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1856 was published. He persuaded the National Gallery to allow him to work on the Turner Bequest of nearly 20,000 individual artworks left to the nation by the artist. This involved Ruskin in an enormous amount of work, completed in May 1858, and involved cataloguing, framing and conserving. Four hundred watercolours were displayed in cabinets of Ruskin's own design. Recent scholarship has argued that Ruskin did not, as previously thought, collude in the destruction of Turner's erotic drawings, but his work on the Bequest did modify his attitude towards Turner. (See below, Controversies: Turner's Erotic Drawings.)
Religious "unconversion"
In 1858, Ruskin was again travelling in Europe. The tour took him from Switzerland to Turin, where he saw Paolo Veronese's Presentation of the Queen of Sheba. He would later claim (in April 1877) that the discovery of this painting, contrasting starkly with a particularly dull sermon, led to his "unconversion" from Evangelical Christianity. He had, however, doubted his Evangelical Christian faith for some time, shaken by Biblical and geological scholarship that had undermined the literal truth and absolute authority of the Bible: "those dreadful hammers!" he wrote to Henry Acland, "I hear the chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses." This "loss of faith" precipitated a considerable personal crisis. His confidence undermined, he believed that much of his writing to date had been founded on a bed of lies and half-truths. He later returned to Christianity.
Social critic and reformer: Unto This Last
Although in 1877 Ruskin said that in 1860, "I gave up my art work and wrote Unto This Last ... the central work of my life" the break was not so dramatic or final. Following his crisis of faith, and influenced in part by his friend Thomas Carlyle (whom he had first met in 1850), Ruskin shifted his emphasis in the late 1850s from art towards social issues. Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on and write about a wide range of subjects including art and, among many other matters, geology (in June 1863 he lectured on the Alps), art practice and judgement (The Cestus of Aglaia), botany and mythology (Proserpina and The Queen of the Air). He continued to draw and paint in watercolours, and to travel extensively across Europe with servants and friends. In 1868, his tour took him to Abbeville, and in the following year he was in Verona (studying tombs for the Arundel Society) and Venice (where he was joined by William Holman Hunt). Yet increasingly Ruskin concentrated his energies on fiercely attacking industrial capitalism, and the utilitarian theories of political economy underpinning it. He repudiated his sometimes grandiloquent style, writing now in plainer, simpler language, to communicate his message straightforwardly.
Ruskin's social view broadened from concerns about the dignity of labour to consider issues of citizenship and notions of the ideal community. Just as he had questioned aesthetic orthodoxy in his earliest writings, he now dissected the orthodox political economy espoused by John Stuart Mill, based on theories of laissez-faire and competition drawn from the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In his four essays Unto This Last, Ruskin rejected the division of labour as dehumanising (separating the labourer from the product of his work), and argued that the false "science" of political economy failed to consider the social affections that bind communities together. He articulated an extended metaphor of household and family, drawing on Plato and Xenophon to demonstrate the communal and sometimes sacrificial nature of true economics. For Ruskin, all economies and societies are ideally founded on a politics of social justice. His ideas influenced the concept of the "social economy", characterised by networks of charitable, co-operative and other non-governmental organisations.
The essays were originally published in consecutive monthly instalments of the new Cornhill Magazine between August and November 1860 (and published in a single volume in 1862). However, the Cornhills editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to abandon the series by the outcry of the magazine's largely conservative readership and the fears of a nervous publisher (Smith, Elder & Co.). The reaction of the national press was hostile, and Ruskin was, he claimed, "reprobated in a violent manner". Ruskin's father also strongly disapproved. Others were enthusiastic, including Ruskin's friend Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "I have read your paper with exhilaration... such a thing flung suddenly into half a million dull British heads... will do a great deal of good."
Ruskin's political ideas, and Unto This Last in particular, later proved highly influential. The essays were praised and paraphrased in Gujarati by Mohandas Gandhi, a wide range of autodidacts cited their positive impact, the economist John A. Hobson and many of the founders of the British Labour party credited them as an influence.
Ruskin believed in a hierarchical social structure. He wrote "I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school." He believed in man's duty to God, and while he sought to improve the conditions of the poor, he opposed attempts to level social differences and sought to resolve social inequalities by abandoning capitalism in favour of a co-operative structure of society based on obedience and benevolent philanthropy, rooted in the agricultural economy.
Ruskin's explorations of nature and aesthetics in the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters focused on Giorgione, Veronese, Titian and Turner. Ruskin asserted that the components of the greatest artworks are held together, like human communities, in a quasi-organic unity. Competitive struggle is destructive. Uniting Modern Painters V and Unto This Last is Ruskin's "Law of Help":
Ruskin's next work on political economy, redefining some of the basic terms of the discipline, also ended prematurely, when Fraser's Magazine, under the editorship of James Anthony Froude, cut short his Essays on Political Economy (1862–63) (later collected as Munera Pulveris (1872)). Ruskin further explored political themes in Time and Tide (1867), his letters to Thomas Dixon, a cork-cutter in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear who had a well-established interest in literary and artistic matters. In these letters, Ruskin promoted honesty in work and exchange, just relations in employment and the need for co-operation.
Ruskin's sense of politics was not confined to theory. On his father's death in 1864, he inherited a considerable fortune of between £120,000 and £157,000 (the exact figure is disputed). This considerable fortune, inherited from the father he described on his tombstone as "an entirely honest merchant", gave him the means to engage in personal philanthropy and practical schemes of social amelioration. One of his first actions was to support the housing work of Octavia Hill (originally one of his art pupils): he bought property in Marylebone to aid her philanthropic housing scheme. But Ruskin's endeavours extended to the establishment of a shop selling pure tea in any quantity desired at 29 Paddington Street, Paddington (giving employment to two former Ruskin family servants) and crossing-sweepings to keep the area around the British Museum clean and tidy. Modest as these practical schemes were, they represented a symbolic challenge to the existing state of society. Yet his greatest practical experiments would come in his later years.
Lectures in the 1860s
Ruskin lectured widely in the 1860s, giving the Rede lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1867, for example. He spoke at the British Institution on 'Modern Art', the Working Men's Institute, Camberwell on "Work" and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich on 'War.'Ruskin's widely admired lecture, Traffic, on the relation between taste and morality, was delivered in April 1864 at Bradford Town Hall, to which he had been invited because of a local debate about the style of a new Exchange building. "I do not care about this Exchange", Ruskin told his audience, "because you don't!" These last three lectures were published in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866).
The lectures that comprised Sesame and Lilies (published 1865), delivered in December 1864 at the town halls at Rusholme and Manchester, are essentially concerned with education and ideal conduct. "Of Kings' Treasuries" (in support of a library fund) explored issues of reading practice, literature (books of the hour vs. books of all time), cultural value and public education. "Of Queens' Gardens" (supporting a school fund) focused on the role of women, asserting their rights and duties in education, according them responsibility for the household and, by extension, for providing the human compassion that must balance a social order dominated by men. This book proved to be one of Ruskin's most popular, and was regularly awarded as a Sunday School prize. Its reception over time, however, has been more mixed, and twentieth-century feminists have taken aim at "Of Queens' Gardens" in particular, as an attempt to "subvert the new heresy" of women's rights by confining women to the domestic sphere. Although indeed subscribing to the Victorian belief in "separate spheres" for men and women, Ruskin was however unusual in arguing for parity of esteem, a case based on his philosophy that a nation's political economy should be modelled on that of the ideal household.
Later life (1869–1900)
Oxford's first Slade Professor of Fine Art
Ruskin was unanimously appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University in August 1869, though largely through the offices of his friend, Henry Acland. He delivered his inaugural lecture on his 51st birthday in 1870, at the Sheldonian Theatre to a larger-than-expected audience. It was here that he said, "The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues." It has been claimed that Cecil Rhodes cherished a long-hand copy of the lecture, believing that it supported his own view of the British Empire.
In 1871, John Ruskin founded his own art school at Oxford, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. It was originally accommodated within the Ashmolean Museum but now occupies premises on High Street. Ruskin endowed the drawing mastership with £5000 of his own money. He also established a large collection of drawings, watercolours and other materials (over 800 frames) that he used to illustrate his lectures. The School challenged the orthodox, mechanical methodology of the government art schools (the "South Kensington System").
Ruskin's lectures were often so popular that they had to be given twice—once for the students, and again for the public. Most of them were eventually published (see Select Bibliography below). He lectured on a wide range of subjects at Oxford, his interpretation of "Art" encompassing almost every conceivable area of study, including wood and metal engraving (Ariadne Florentina), the relation of science to art (The Eagle's Nest) and sculpture (Aratra Pentelici). His lectures ranged through myth, ornithology, geology, nature-study and literature. "The teaching of Art...", Ruskin wrote, "is the teaching of all things." Ruskin was never careful about offending his employer. When he criticised Michelangelo in a lecture in June 1871 it was seen as an attack on the large collection of that artist's work in the Ashmolean Museum.
Most controversial, from the point of view of the University authorities, spectators and the national press, was the digging scheme on Ferry Hinksey Road at North Hinksey, near Oxford, instigated by Ruskin in 1874, and continuing into 1875, which involved undergraduates in a road-mending scheme. The scheme was motivated in part by a desire to teach the virtues of wholesome manual labour. Some of the diggers, who included Oscar Wilde, Alfred Milner and Ruskin's future secretary and biographer W. G. Collingwood, were profoundly influenced by the experience: notably Arnold Toynbee, Leonard Montefiore and Alexander Robertson MacEwen. It helped to foster a public service ethic that was later given expression in the university settlements, and was keenly celebrated by the founders of Ruskin Hall, Oxford.
In 1879, Ruskin resigned from Oxford, but resumed his Professorship in 1883, only to resign again in 1884. He gave his reason as opposition to vivisection, but he had increasingly been in conflict with the University authorities, who refused to expand his Drawing School. He was also suffering from increasingly poor health.
Fors Clavigera and the Whistler libel case
In January 1871, the month before Ruskin started to lecture the wealthy undergraduates at Oxford University, he began his series of 96 (monthly) "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–84). (The letters were published irregularly after the 87th instalment in March 1878.) These letters were personal, dealt with every subject in his oeuvre, and were written in a variety of styles, reflecting his mood and circumstances. From 1873, Ruskin had full control over all his publications, having established George Allen as his sole publisher (see Allen & Unwin).
In the July 1877 letter of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin launched a scathing attack on paintings by James McNeill Whistler exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. He found particular fault with Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, and accused Whistler of asking two hundred guineas for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler filed a libel suit against Ruskin, but Ruskin was ill when the case went to trial in November 1887, so the artist Edward Burne-Jones and Attorney General Sir John Holker represented him. The trial took place on 25 and 26 November, and many major figures of the art world at the time appeared at the trial. Artist Albert Moore appeared as a witness for Whistler, and artist William Powell Frith appeared for Ruskin. Frith said "the nocturne in black in gold is not in my opinion worth two hundred guineas". Frederic Leighton also agreed to give evidence for Whistler, but in the end could not attend as he had to go to Windsor to be knighted. Edward Burne-Jones, representing Ruskin, also asserted that Nocturne in Black and Gold was not a serious work of art. When asked to give reasons, Burne-Jones said he had never seen one painting of night that was successful, but also acknowledged that he saw marks of great labour and artistic skill in the painting. In the end, Whistler won the case, but the jury awarded damages of only a derisory farthing (the smallest coin of the realm) to the artist. Court costs were split between the two parties. Ruskin's were paid by public subscription organised by the Fine Art Society, but Whistler was bankrupt within six months, and was forced to sell his studio. The episode tarnished Ruskin's reputation, and may have accelerated his mental decline. It did nothing to mitigate Ruskin's exaggerated sense of failure in persuading his readers to share in his own keenly felt priorities.
Guild of St George
Ruskin founded his utopian society, the Guild of St George, in 1871 (although originally it was called St George's Fund, and then St George's Company, before becoming the Guild in 1878). Its aims and objectives were articulated in Fors Clavigera. A communitarian protest against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, it had a hierarchical structure, with Ruskin as its Master, and dedicated members called "Companions". Ruskin wished to show that contemporary life could still be enjoyed in the countryside, with land being farmed by traditional means, in harmony with the environment, and with the minimum of mechanical assistance. He also sought to educate and enrich the lives of industrial workers by inspiring them with beautiful objects. As such, with a tithe (or personal donation) of £7,000, Ruskin acquired land and a collection of art treasures.
Ruskin purchased land initially in Totley, near Sheffield, but the agricultural scheme established there by local communists met with only modest success after many difficulties. Donations of land from wealthy and dedicated Companions eventually placed land and property in the Guild's care: in the Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, called Ruskin Land today; Barmouth, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales; Cloughton, in North Yorkshire; Westmill in Hertfordshire; and Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire.
In principle, Ruskin worked out a scheme for different grades of "Companion", wrote codes of practice, described styles of dress and even designed the Guild's own coins. Ruskin wished to see St George's Schools established, and published various volumes to aid its teaching (his Bibliotheca Pastorum or Shepherd's Library), but the schools themselves were never established. (In the 1880s, in a venture loosely related to the Bibliotheca, he supported Francesca Alexander's publication of some of her tales of peasant life.) In reality, the Guild, which still exists today as a charitable education trust, has only ever operated on a small scale.
Ruskin also wished to see traditional rural handicrafts revived. St. George's Mill was established at Laxey, Isle of Man, producing cloth goods. The Guild also encouraged independent but allied efforts in spinning and weaving at Langdale, in other parts of the Lake District and elsewhere, producing linen and other goods exhibited by the Home Arts and Industries Association and similar organisations.
The Guild's most conspicuous and enduring achievement was the creation of a remarkable collection of art, minerals, books, medieval manuscripts, architectural casts, coins and other precious and beautiful objects. Housed in a cottage museum high on a hill in the Sheffield district of Walkley, it opened in 1875, and was curated by Henry and Emily Swan. Ruskin had written in Modern Painters III (1856) that, "the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way." Through the Museum, Ruskin aimed to bring to the eyes of the working man many of the sights and experiences otherwise reserved for those who could afford to travel across Europe. The original Museum has been digitally recreated online. In 1890, the Museum relocated to Meersbrook Park. The collection is now on display at Sheffield's Millennium Gallery.
Rose La Touche
Ruskin had been introduced to the wealthy Irish La Touche family by Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford. Maria La Touche, a minor Irish poet and novelist, asked Ruskin to teach her daughters drawing and painting in 1858. Rose La Touche was ten. His first meeting came at a time when Ruskin's own religious faith was under strain. This always caused difficulties for the staunchly Protestant La Touche family who at various times prevented the two from meeting. A chance meeting at the Royal Academy in 1869 was one of the few occasions they came into personal contact. After a long illness, she died on 25 May 1875, at the age of 27. These events plunged Ruskin into despair and led to increasingly severe bouts of mental illness involving a number of breakdowns and delirious visions. The first of these had occurred in 1871 at Matlock, Derbyshire, a town and a county that he knew from his boyhood travels, whose flora, fauna, and minerals helped to form and reinforce his appreciation and understanding of nature.
Ruskin turned to spiritualism. He attended seances at Broadlands. Ruskin's increasing need to believe in a meaningful universe and a life after death, both for himself and his loved ones, helped to revive his Christian faith in the 1870s.
Travel guides
Ruskin continued to travel, studying the landscapes, buildings and art of Europe. In May 1870 and June 1872 he admired Carpaccio's St Ursula in Venice, a vision of which, associated with Rose La Touche would haunt him, described in the pages of Fors. In 1874, on his tour of Italy, Ruskin visited Sicily, the furthest he ever travelled.
Ruskin embraced the emerging literary forms, the travel guide (and gallery guide), writing new works, and adapting old ones "to give", he said, "what guidance I may to travellers..." The Stones of Venice was revised, edited and issued in a new "Travellers' Edition" in 1879. Ruskin directed his readers, the would-be traveller, to look with his cultural gaze at the landscapes, buildings and art of France and Italy: Mornings in Florence (1875–77), The Bible of Amiens (1880–85) (a close study of its sculpture and a wider history), St Mark's Rest (1877–84) and A Guide to the Principal Pictures in ... Venice (1877).
Final writings
In the 1880s, Ruskin returned to some literature and themes that had been among his favourites since childhood. He wrote about Scott, Byron and Wordsworth in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880) in which, as Seth Reno argues, he describes the devastating effects on the landscape caused by industrialization, a vision Reno sees as a realization of the Anthropocene. He returned to meteorological observations in his lectures, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century (1884), describing the apparent effects of industrialisation on weather patterns. Ruskin's Storm-Cloud has been seen as foreshadowing environmentalism and related concerns in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ruskin's prophetic writings were also tied to his emotions, and his more general (ethical) dissatisfaction with the modern world with which he now felt almost completely out of sympathy.
His last great work was his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89) (meaning, 'Of Past Things'), a highly personalised, selective, eloquent but incomplete account of aspects of his life, the preface of which was written in his childhood nursery at Herne Hill.
The period from the late 1880s was one of steady and inexorable decline. Gradually it became too difficult for him to travel to Europe. He suffered a complete mental collapse on his final tour, which included Beauvais, Sallanches and Venice, in 1888. The emergence and dominance of the Aesthetic movement and Impressionism distanced Ruskin from the modern art world, his ideas on the social utility of art contrasting with the doctrine of "l'art pour l'art" or "art for art's sake" that was beginning to dominate. His later writings were increasingly seen as irrelevant, especially as he seemed to be more interested in book illustrators such as Kate Greenaway than in modern art. He also attacked aspects of Darwinian theory with increasing violence, although he knew and respected Darwin personally.
Brantwood and final years
In August 1871, Ruskin purchased, from W. J. Linton, the then somewhat dilapidated Brantwood house, on the shores of Coniston Water, in the English Lake District, paying £1500 for it. Brantwood was Ruskin's main home from 1872 until his death. His estate provided a site for more of his practical schemes and experiments: he had an ice house built, and the gardens comprehensively rearranged. He oversaw the construction of a larger harbour (from where he rowed his boat, the Jumping Jenny), and he altered the house (adding a dining room, a turret to his bedroom to give him a panoramic view of the lake, and he later extended the property to accommodate his relatives). He built a reservoir, and redirected the waterfall down the hills, adding a slate seat that faced the tumbling stream and craggy rocks rather than the lake, so that he could closely observe the fauna and flora of the hillside.
Although Ruskin's 80th birthday was widely celebrated in 1899 (various Ruskin societies presenting him with an elaborately illuminated congratulatory address), Ruskin was scarcely aware of it. He died at Brantwood from influenza on 20 January 1900 at the age of 80. He was buried five days later in the churchyard at Coniston, according to his wishes. As he had grown weaker, suffering prolonged bouts of mental illness, he had been looked after by his second cousin, Joan(na) Severn (formerly "companion" to Ruskin's mother) and she and her family inherited his estate. Joanna's Care was the eloquent final chapter of Ruskin's memoir, which he dedicated to her as a fitting tribute.
Joan Severn, together with Ruskin's secretary, W. G. Collingwood, and his eminent American friend Charles Eliot Norton, were executors to his will. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn edited the monumental 39-volume Library Edition of Ruskin's Works, the last volume of which, an index, attempts to demonstrate the complex interconnectedness of Ruskin's thought. They all acted together to guard, and even control, Ruskin's public and personal reputation.
The centenary of Ruskin's birth was keenly celebrated in 1919, but his reputation was already in decline and sank further in the fifty years that followed. The contents of Ruskin's home were dispersed in a series of sales at auction, and Brantwood itself was bought in 1932 by the educationist and Ruskin enthusiast, collector and memorialist, John Howard Whitehouse.
Brantwood was opened in 1934 as a memorial to Ruskin and remains open to the public today. The Guild of St George continues to thrive as an educational charity, and has an international membership. The Ruskin Society organises events throughout the year.
A series of public celebrations of Ruskin's multiple legacies took place in 2000, on the centenary of his death, and events are planned throughout 2019, to mark the bicentenary of his birth.
Note on Ruskin's personal appearance
In middle age, and at his prime as a lecturer, Ruskin was described as slim, perhaps a little short, with an aquiline nose and brilliant, piercing blue eyes. Often sporting a double-breasted waistcoat, a high collar and, when necessary, a frock coat, he also wore his trademark blue neckcloth. From 1878 he cultivated an increasingly long beard, and took on the appearance of an "Old Testament" prophet.
Ruskin in the eyes of a student
The following description of Ruskin as a lecturer was written by an eyewitness, who was a student at the time (1884):
An incident where the Arts and Crafts master William Morris had aroused the anger of Dr Bright, Master of University College, Oxford, served to demonstrate Ruskin's charisma:
Legacy
International
Ruskin's influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as "one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him, rendering his ideas into Russian. Proust not only admired Ruskin but helped translate his works into French. Gandhi wrote of the "magic spell" cast on him by Unto This Last and paraphrased the work in Gujarati, calling it Sarvodaya, "The Advancement of All". In Japan, Ryuzo Mikimoto actively collaborated in Ruskin's translation. He commissioned sculptures and sundry commemorative items, and incorporated Ruskinian rose motifs in the jewellery produced by his cultured pearl empire. He established the Ruskin Society of Tokyo and his children built a dedicated library to house his Ruskin collection.
A number of utopian socialist Ruskin Colonies attempted to put his political ideals into practice. These communities included Ruskin, Florida, Ruskin, British Columbia and the Ruskin Commonwealth Association, a colony in Dickson County, Tennessee in existence from 1894 to 1899.
Ruskin's work has been translated into numerous languages including, in addition to those already mentioned (Russian, French, Japanese): German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Welsh, several Indian languages like Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ), Esperanto and Gikuyu.
Art, architecture and literature
Theorists and practitioners in a broad range of disciplines acknowledged their debt to Ruskin. Architects including Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius incorporated his ideas in their work. Writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound felt Ruskin's influence. The American poet Marianne Moore was an enthusiastic Ruskin reader. Art historians and critics, among them Herbert Read, Roger Fry and Wilhelm Worringer, knew Ruskin's work well. Admirers ranged from the British-born American watercolourist and engraver John William Hill to the sculptor-designer, printmaker and utopianist Eric Gill. Aside from E. T. Cook, Ruskin's editor and biographer, other leading British journalists influenced by Ruskin include J. A. Spender, and the war correspondent H. W. Nevinson.
Craft and conservation
William Morris and C. R. Ashbee (of the Guild of Handicraft) were keen disciples, and through them Ruskin's legacy can be traced in the arts and crafts movement. Ruskin's ideas on the preservation of open spaces and the conservation of historic buildings and places inspired his friends Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley to help found the National Trust.
Society, education and sport
Pioneers of town planning such as Thomas Coglan Horsfall and Patrick Geddes called Ruskin an inspiration and invoked his ideas in justification of their own social interventions; likewise the founders of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.
Edward Carpenter's community in Millthorpe, Derbyshire was partly inspired by Ruskin, and John Kenworthy's colony at Purleigh, Essex, which was briefly a refuge for the Doukhobors, combined Ruskin's ideas and Tolstoy's.
The most prolific collector of Ruskiniana was John Howard Whitehouse, who saved Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and opened it as a permanent Ruskin memorial. Inspired by Ruskin's educational ideals, Whitehouse established Bembridge School, on the Isle of Wight, and ran it along Ruskinian lines. Educationists from William Jolly to Michael Ernest Sadler wrote about and appreciated Ruskin's ideas. Ruskin College, an educational establishment in Oxford originally intended for working men, was named after him by its American founders, Walter Vrooman and Charles A. Beard.
Ruskin's innovative publishing experiment, conducted by his one-time Working Men's College pupil George Allen, whose business was eventually merged to become Allen & Unwin, anticipated the establishment of the Net Book Agreement.
Ruskin's Drawing Collection, a collection of 1470 works of art he gathered as learning aids for the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (which he founded at Oxford), is at the Ashmolean Museum. The Museum has promoted Ruskin's art teaching, utilising the collection for in-person and online drawing courses.
Pierre de Coubertin, the innovator of the modern Olympic Games, cited Ruskin's principles of beautification, asserting that the games should be "Ruskinised" to create an aesthetic identity that transcended mere championship competitions.
Politics and critique of political economy
Ruskin was an inspiration for many Christian socialists, and his ideas informed the work of economists such as William Smart and J. A. Hobson, and the positivist Frederic Harrison. Ruskin was discussed in university extension classes, and in reading circles and societies formed in his name. He helped to inspire the settlement movement in Britain and the United States. Resident workers at Toynbee Hall such as the future civil servants Hubert Llewellyn Smith and William Beveridge (author of the Report ... on Social Insurance and Allied Services), and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged their debt to Ruskin as they helped to found the British welfare state. More of the British Labour Party's earliest MPs acknowledged Ruskin's influence than mentioned Karl Marx or the Bible. More recently, Ruskin's works have also influenced Phillip Blond and the Red Tory movement.
Ruskin in the 21st century
In 2019, Ruskin200 was inaugurated as a year-long celebration marking the bicentenary of Ruskin's birth.
Admirers and scholars of Ruskin can visit the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and the Ruskin Museum, both in Coniston in the English Lake District. All three mount regular exhibitions open to the public all the year round. Barony House in Edinburgh is home to a descendant of John Ruskin. She has designed and hand painted various friezes in honour of her ancestor and it is open to the public. Ruskin's Guild of St George continues his work today, in education, the arts, crafts, and the rural economy.
Many streets, buildings, organisations and institutions bear his name: The Priory Ruskin Academy in Grantham, Lincolnshire; John Ruskin College, South Croydon; and Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford and Cambridge, which traces its origins to the Cambridge School of Art, at the foundation of which Ruskin spoke in 1858. Also, the Ruskin Literary and Debating Society, (founded in 1900 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), the oldest surviving club of its type, and still promoting the development of literary knowledge and public speaking today; and the Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles, which still exists. In addition, there is the Ruskin Pottery, Ruskin House, Croydon and Ruskin Hall at the University of Pittsburgh.
Ruskin, Florida, United States—site of one of the short-lived American Ruskin Colleges—is named after John Ruskin. There is a mural of Ruskin titled "Head, Heart and Hands" on a building across from the Ruskin Post Office.
Since 2000, scholarly research has focused on aspects of Ruskin's legacy, including his impact on the sciences; John Lubbock and Oliver Lodge admired him. Two major academic projects have looked at Ruskin and cultural tourism (investigating, for example, Ruskin's links with Thomas Cook); the other focuses on Ruskin and the theatre. The sociologist and media theorist David Gauntlett argues that Ruskin's notions of craft can be felt today in online communities such as YouTube and throughout Web 2.0. Similarly, architectural theorist Lars Spuybroek has argued that Ruskin's understanding of the Gothic as a combination of two types of variation, rough savageness and smooth changefulness, opens up a new way of thinking leading to digital and so-called parametric design.
Notable Ruskin enthusiasts include the writers Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson, and the politicians Patrick Cormack, Frank Judd, Frank Field and Tony Benn. In 2006, Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, Raficq Abdulla, Jonathon Porritt and Nicholas Wright were among those to contribute to the symposium, There is no wealth but life: Ruskin in the 21st Century. Jonathan Glancey at The Guardian and Andrew Hill at the Financial Times have both written about Ruskin, as has the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. In 2015, inspired by Ruskin's philosophy of education, Marc Turtletaub founded Meristem in Fair Oaks, California. The centre educates adolescents with developmental differences using Ruskin's "land and craft" ideals, transitioning them so they will succeed as adults in an evolving post-industrial society.
Theory and criticism
Ruskin wrote over 250 works, initially art criticism and history, but expanding to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, mythology, travel, political economy and social reform. After his death Ruskin's works were collected in the 39-volume "Library Edition", completed in 1912 by his friends Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. The range and quantity of Ruskin's writing, and its complex, allusive and associative method of expression, cause certain difficulties. In 1898, John A. Hobson observed that in attempting to summarise Ruskin's thought, and by extracting passages from across his work, "the spell of his eloquence is broken". Clive Wilmer has written, further, that, "The anthologising of short purple passages, removed from their intended contexts [... is] something which Ruskin himself detested and which has bedevilled his reputation from the start." Nevertheless, some aspects of Ruskin's theory and criticism require further consideration.
Art and design criticism
Ruskin's early work defended the reputation of J. M. W. Turner. He believed that all great art should communicate an understanding and appreciation of nature. Accordingly, inherited artistic conventions should be rejected. Only by means of direct observation can an artist, through form and colour, represent nature in art. He advised artists in Modern Painters I to: "go to Nature in all singleness of heart... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing." By the 1850s. Ruskin was celebrating the Pre-Raphaelites, whose members, he said, had formed "a new and noble school" of art that would provide a basis for a thoroughgoing reform of the art world. For Ruskin, art should communicate truth above all things. However, this could not be revealed by mere display of skill, and must be an expression of the artist's whole moral outlook. Ruskin rejected the work of Whistler because he considered it to epitomise a reductive mechanisation of art.
Ruskin's strong rejection of Classical tradition in The Stones of Venice typifies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in his thought: "Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified." Rejection of mechanisation and standardisation informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised the Gothic for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he perceived between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural environment, and between worker and God. Attempts in the 19th century to reproduce Gothic forms (such as pointed arches), attempts he had helped inspire, were not enough to make these buildings expressions of what Ruskin saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organicism.
For Ruskin, the Gothic style in architecture embodied the same moral truths he sought to promote in the visual arts. It expressed the 'meaning' of architecture—as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration—all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure." Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous and repressive standardisation. Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with the demoralising consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as The Crystal Palace, which he criticised. Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works over the course of his career, his much-anthologised essay "The Nature of Gothic" from the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) is widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative discussions of his central argument.
Ruskin's theories indirectly encouraged a revival of Gothic styles, but Ruskin himself was often dissatisfied with the results. He objected that forms of mass-produced faux Gothic did not exemplify his principles, but showed disregard for the true meaning of the style. Even the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration, met with his disapproval. The O'Shea brothers, freehand stone carvers chosen to revive the creative "freedom of thought" of Gothic craftsmen, disappointed him by their lack of reverence for the task.
Ruskin's distaste for oppressive standardisation led to later works in which he attacked laissez-faire capitalism, which he thought was at its root. His ideas provided inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement, the founders of the National Trust, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Ruskin's views on art, wrote Kenneth Clark, "cannot be made to form a logical system, and perhaps owe to this fact a part of their value." Ruskin's accounts of art are descriptions of a superior type that conjure images vividly in the mind's eye.
Clark neatly summarises the key features of Ruskin's writing on art and architecture:
Art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole man. Whether in making or perceiving a work of art, we bring to bear on it feeling, intellect, morals, knowledge, memory, and every other human capacity, all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept as false and dehumanising as economic man.
Even the most superior mind and the most powerful imagination must found itself on facts, which must be recognised for what they are. The imagination will often reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind cannot understand; but this recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions.
These facts must be perceived by the senses, or felt; not learnt.
The greatest artists and schools of art have believed it their duty to impart vital truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about religion and the conduct of life.
Beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function.'
This fulfilment of function depends on all parts of an organism cohering and co-operating. This was what he called the 'Law of Help,' one of Ruskin's fundamental beliefs, extending from nature and art to society.
Good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important.
Great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny.
Historic preservation
Ruskin's belief in preservation of ancient buildings had a significant influence on later thinking about the distinction between conservation and restoration. He was a strong proponent of the former, while his contemporary, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, promoted the latter. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, (1849) Ruskin wrote:
This abhorrence of restoration is in marked contrast to Viollet-le-Duc, who wrote that restoration is a "means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time."
For Ruskin, the "age" of a building was crucially significant as an aspect in its preservation: "For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."
Critique of political economy
Ruskin wielded a critique of political economy of orthodox, 19th-century political economy principally on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations (broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in The Stones of Venice, and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such as The Political Economy of Art (A Joy for Ever), but he gave them full expression in the influential and at the time of publication, very controversial essays, Unto This Last.
At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or craftsman, in modern industrial capitalist society. Ruskin believed that the economic theories of Adam Smith, expressed in The Wealth of Nations had led, through the division of labour to the alienation of the worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment. (See The Stones of Venice above.)
Ruskin argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker or product.
In the preface to Unto This Last (1862), Ruskin recommended that the state should underwrite standards of service and production to guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and 'gentleness and justice'; government manufactories and workshops; government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received honourably and not in shame. Many of these ideas were later incorporated into the welfare state.
Controversies
Turner's erotic drawings
Until 2005, biographies of both J. M. W. Turner and Ruskin had claimed that in 1858 Ruskin burned bundles of erotic paintings and drawings by Turner to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. Ruskin's friend Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery, was said to have colluded in the alleged destruction of Turner's works. In 2005, these works, which form part of the Turner Bequest held at Tate Britain, were re-appraised by Turner Curator Ian Warrell, who concluded that Ruskin and Wornum had not destroyed them.
Sexuality
Ruskin's sexuality has been the subject of a great deal of speculation and critical comment. His one marriage, to Effie Gray, was annulled after six years owing to non-consummation. Effie, in a letter to her parents, claimed that Ruskin found her "person" repugnant: He alleged various reasons, hatred of children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason... that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848]. Ruskin told his lawyer during the annulment proceedings: It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it. The cause of Ruskin's "disgust" has led to much conjecture. Mary Lutyens speculated that he rejected Effie because he was horrified by the sight of her pubic hair. Lutyens argued that Ruskin must have known the female form only through Greek statues and paintings of nudes which lacked pubic hair. However, Peter Fuller wrote, "It has been said that he was frightened on the wedding night by the sight of his wife's pubic hair; more probably, he was perturbed by her menstrual blood." Ruskin's biographers Tim Hilton and John Batchelor also took the view that menstruation was the more likely explanation, though Batchelor also suggests that body-odour may have been the problem. There is no evidence to support any of these theories. William Ewart Gladstone said to his daughter Mary, "should you ever hear anyone blame Millais or his wife, or Mr. Ruskin [for the breakdown of the marriage], remember that there is no fault; there was misfortune, even tragedy. All three were perfectly blameless." The fullest story of the Ruskins' marriage to date has been told by the scholar Robert Brownell.
Ruskin's later relationship with Rose La Touche has led to claims that he started a correspondence with her when he met her at the age of nine. In fact, he did not approach her as a suitor until on or near her eighteenth birthday. She asked him to wait for her until she was 21. Receiving no answer, he repeated his proposal.
Ruskin is not known to have had any sexually intimate relationships. During an episode of mental derangement after Rose died, he wrote a letter in which he insisted that Rose's spirit had instructed him to marry a girl who was visiting him at the time. It is also true that in letters from Ruskin to Kate Greenaway he asked her to draw her "girlies" (as he called her child figures) without clothing:
Will you – (it's all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me.
In a letter to his physician John Simon on 15 May 1886, Ruskin wrote:
I like my girls from ten to sixteen—allowing of 17 or 18 as long as they're not in love with anybody but me.—I've got some darlings of 8—12—14—just now, and my Pigwiggina here—12—who fetches my wood and is learning to play my bells.Pigwiggina is a nickname Ruskin used for the girl as she looked after (lambs and) piglets; c.f.
Ruskin's biographers disagree about the allegation of "paedophilia". Tim Hilton, in his two-volume biography, asserts that Ruskin "was a paedophile" but leaves the claim unexplained, while John Batchelor argues that the term is inappropriate because Ruskin's behaviour does not "fit the profile". Others point to a definite pattern of "nympholeptic" behaviour with regard to his interactions with girls at a Winnington school. However, there is no evidence that Ruskin ever engaged in any sexual activity with anyone at all. According to one interpretation, what Ruskin valued most in pre-pubescent girls was their innocence; the fact that they were not (yet) fully developed sexual beings is what attracted him. An exploration of this topic by James L. Spates declares that "whatever idiosyncratic qualities his erotic expressions may have possessed, when it comes to matters of sexual capability and interest, there is every reason to conclude that John Ruskin was physically and emotionally normal."
Common law of business balance
Ruskin was not a fan of buying low and selling high. In the "Veins of Wealth" section of Unto This Last, he wrote: "So far as I know, there is not in history record of anything so disgraceful to the human intellect as the modern idea that the commercial text, 'Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,' represents, or under any circumstances could represent, an available principle of national economy." Perhaps due to such passages, Ruskin is frequently identified as the originator of the "common law of business balance"—a statement about the relationships of price and quality as they pertain to manufactured goods, and often summarised as: "The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot." This is the core of a longer statement usually attributed to Ruskin, although Ruskin's authorship is disputed among Ruskin scholars. Fred Shapiro maintains that the statement does not appear anywhere in Ruskin's works, and George Landow is likewise sceptical of the claim of Ruskin's authorship. In a posting of the Ruskin Library News, a blog associated with the Ruskin Library (a major collection of Ruskiniana located at Lancaster University), an anonymous library staff member briefly mentions the statement and its widespread use, saying that, "This is one of many quotations ascribed to Ruskin, without there being any trace of them in his writings – although someone, somewhere, thought they sounded like Ruskin." In an issue of the journal Heat Transfer Engineering, Kenneth Bell quotes the statement and mentions that it has been attributed to Ruskin. While Bell believes in the veracity of its content, he adds that the statement does not appear in Ruskin's published works.
Early in the 20th century, this statement appeared—without any authorship attribution—in magazine advertisements, in a business catalogue, in student publications, and, occasionally, in editorial columns. Later in the 20th century, however, magazine advertisements, student publications, business books, technical publications, scholarly journals, and business catalogues often included the statement with attribution to Ruskin.
In the 21st century, and based upon the statement's applicability of the issues of quality and price, the statement continues to be used and attributed to Ruskin—despite the questionable nature of the attribution.
For many years, various Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlours prominently displayed a section of the statement in framed signs. ("There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that man's lawful prey.") The signs listed Ruskin as the author of the statement, but the signs gave no information on where or when Ruskin was supposed to have written, spoken, or published the statement. Due to the statement's widespread use as a promotional slogan, and despite questions of Ruskin's authorship, it is likely that many people who are otherwise unfamiliar with Ruskin now associate him with this statement.
Definitions
The OED credits J. Ruskin with the first quotation in 152 separate entries. Some include:
Pathetic fallacy: Ruskin coined this term in Modern Painters III (1856) to describe the ascription of human emotions to inanimate objects and impersonal natural forces, as in "Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy" (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre).
Fors Clavigera: Ruskin gave this title to a series of letters he wrote "to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" (1871–84). The name was intended to signify three great powers that fashion human destiny, as Ruskin explained at length in Letter 2 (February 1871). These were: force, symbolised by the club (clava) of Hercules; Fortitude, symbolised by the key (clavis) of Ulysses; and Fortune, symbolised by the nail (clavus) of Lycurgus. These three powers (the "fors") together represent human talents and abilities to choose the right moment and then to strike with energy. The concept is derived from Shakespeare's phrase "There is a tide in the affairs of men/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" (Brutus in Julius Caesar). Ruskin believed that the letters were inspired by the Third Fors: striking out at the right moment.For a full and concise introduction to the work, see Dinah Birch, "Introduction", in John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. xxxiii–xlix.
Illth: Used by Ruskin as the antithesis of wealth, which he defined as life itself; broadly, where wealth is 'well-being', illth is "ill-being".
Theoria: Ruskin's 'theoretic' faculty – theoretic, as opposed to aesthetic – enables a vision of the beautiful as intimating a reality deeper than the everyday, at least in terms of the kind of transcendence generally seen as immanent in things of this world. For an example of the influence of Ruskin's concept of theoria, see Peter Fuller.
Modern Atheism: Ruskin applied this label to "the unfortunate persistence of the clergy in teaching children what they cannot understand, and in employing young consecrate persons to assert in pulpits what they do not know."
Excrescence: Ruskin defined an "excrescence" as an outgrowth of the main body of a building that does not harmonise well with the main body. He originally used the term to describe certain gothic revival features also for later additions to cathedrals and various other public buildings, especially from the Gothic period.
Fictional portrayals
Ruskin figures as Mr Herbert in The New Republic (1878), a novel by one of his Oxford undergraduates, William Mallock (1849–1923).
The Love of John Ruskin (1912) a silent movie about Ruskin, Effie and Millais.
Edith Wharton's False Dawn novella, the first in the 1924 Old New York series has the protagonist meet John Ruskin.
Ruskin was the inspiration for either the Drawling Master or the Gryphon in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Dante's Inferno (1967) Ken Russell's biopic for television of Rossetti, in which Ruskin is played by Clive Goodwin
The Love School (1975) a BBC TV series about the Pre-Raphaelites, starring David Collings (Ruskin), Anne Kidd (Effie), Peter Egan (Millais).
A novel about the marriage of John Ruskin.
Dear Countess (1983) a radio play by Elizabeth Morgan, with Derek Jacobi (Ruskin), Bridget McCann (Gray), Timothy West (Old Mr Ruskin) Michael Fenner (Millais). The author played Ruskin's mother.
Peter Hoyle's novel, Brantwood: The Story of an Obsession (1986, ) is about two cousins who pursue their interest in Ruskin to his Coniston home.
The Passion of John Ruskin (1994), a film directed by Alex Chapple.
Modern Painters (1995) an opera about Ruskin by David Lang.
Parrots and Owls (1994) a radio play by John Purser about Ruskin's attempt to revive Gothic architecture and his connection to the O'Shea brothers.
The Countess (1995), a play written by Gregory Murphy, dealing with Ruskin's marriage.
A novel in which Ruskin makes his last visit to Amiens cathedral in 1879.
The Order of Release (1998), a radio play by Robin Brooks about Ruskin (Bob Peck), Effie (Sharon Small) and Millais (David Tennant).
Ruskin and the Hinksey diggings form the backdrop to Ann Harries' novel, Manly Pursuits (1999).
A collection of short stories that includes Come, Gentle Nightabout Ruskin and Effie's wedding night.
Mrs Ruskin (2003), a play by Kim Morrissey dealing with Ruskin's marriage.
"Sesame and Roses" (2007), a short story by Grace Andreacchi that explores Ruskin's twin obsessions with Venice and Rose La Touche.
Desperate Romantics (2009), a six-part BBC drama serial about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin is played by Tom Hollander.
Benjamin, Melanie (2010). Alice I Have Been. . A fictionalized account of the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Mr. Turner (2014), a biopic of J. M. W. Turner with Ruskin portrayed as a precocious prig by Joshua McGuire.
Effie Gray (2014), a biopic about the Ruskin-Gray-Millais love triangle, written by Emma Thompson and featuring Greg Wise (Ruskin), Dakota Fanning (Gray) and Tom Sturridge (Millais).
Light, Descending (2014) is a biographical novel about John Ruskin by Octavia Randolph.
Gallery
Paintings
Drawings
Select bibliography
It is the standard scholarly edition of Ruskin's work, the Library Edition, sometimes called simply Cook and Wedderburn. The volume in which the following works can be found is indicated in the form: (Works [followed by the volume number]).
Works by Ruskin
Poems (written 1835–46; collected 1850) (Works 2)
The Poetry of Architecture (serialised The Architectural Magazine 1837–38; authorised book, 1893) (Works 1)
Letters to a College Friend (written 1840–45; published 1894) (Works 1)
The King of the Golden River, or the Black Brothers. A Legend of Stiria (written 1841; published 1850) (Works 1)
Modern Painters (5 vols.) (1843–60) (Works 3–7)
Vol. I (1843) (Parts I and II) Of General Principles and of Truth (Works 3)
Vol. II (1846) (Part III) Of the Imaginative and Theoretic Faculties (Works 4)
Vol. III (1856) (Part IV) Of Many Things (Works 5)
Vol. IV (1856) (Part V) Mountain Beauty (Works 6)
Vol. V (1860) (Part VI) Of Leaf Beauty (Part VII) Of Cloud Beauty (Part VIII) Of Ideas of Relation (1) Of Invention Formal (Part IX) Of Ideas of Relation (2) Of Invention Spiritual (Works 7)
The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) (Works 8)
The Stones of Venice (3 vols) (1851–53)
Vol. I. The Foundations (1851) (Works 9)
Vol. II. The Sea–Stories (1853) (Works 10) – containing the chapter "The Nature of Gothic"
Vol. III. The Fall (1853) (Works 11)
Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851) (Works 12)
Pre-Raphaelitism (1851) (Works 12)
Letters to the Times on the Pre-Raphaelite Artists (1851, 1854) (Works 12)
Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh, 1853) (1854) (Works 12)
Academy Notes (Annual Reviews of the June Royal Academy Exhibitions) (1855–59, 1875) (Works 14)
The Harbours of England (1856) (Works 13)
The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners (1857) (Works 15)
A Joy Forever' and Its Price in the Market: being the substance (with additions) of two lectures on The Political Economy of Art (1857, 1880) (Works 16)
The Two Paths: being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858–9 (1859) (Works 16)
The Elements of Perspective, Arranged for the Use of Schools and Intended to be Read in Connection with the First Three Books of Euclid (1859) (Works 15)
Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (serialised Cornhill Magazine 1860, book 1862) (Works 17)
Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy (serialised Fraser's Magazine 1862–63, book 1872) (Works 17)
The Cestus of Aglaia (serialised Art Journal 1864–64, incorporated (revised) in On the Old Road (1882) (Works 19)
Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in 1864 (1865) (i.e., "Of Queens' Gardens" and "Of Kings' Treasuries" to which was added, in a later edition of 1871, "The Mystery of Life and Its Arts") (Works 18)
The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation (1866) (Works 18)
The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War (1866) (to a later edition was added a fourth lecture (delivered 1869), called "The Future of England") (1866) (Works 18)
Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work (1867) (Works 17)
The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (1869) (Works 19)
Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 (Works 20)
Aratra Pentelici: Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas term, 1870 (1872) (Works 20)
Lectures on Landscape, Delivered at Oxford in [Lent term| Lent Term], 1871 (1898) ("Works" 22)
Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871–84) ("Works" 27–29) (originally collected in 8 vols., vols. 1–7 covering annually 1871–1877, and vol. 8, Letters 85–96, covering 1878–84)
Volume I. Letters 1–36 (1871–73) (Works 27)
Volume II. Letters 37–72 (1874–76) (Works 28)
Volume III. Letters 73–96 (1877–84) (Works 29)
The Eagle's Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural science to Art, Given before the University of Oxford in Lent term, 1872 (1872) (Works 22)
Ariadne Florentina': Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving, with Appendix, Given before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term, 1872 (1876) (Works 22)
Love's Meinie: Lectures on Greek and English Birds (1873–81) (Works 25)
Val d'Arno: Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art, directly antecedent to the Florentine Year of Victories, given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1873 (1874) (Works 23)
The Aesthetic and Mathematic School of Art in Florence: Lectures Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1874 (first published 1906) (Works 23)
Mornings in Florence: Simple Studies of Christian Art, for English Travellers (1875–77) (Works 23)
Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and Life of Stones (1875–83) (Works 26)
Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps, and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew (1875–86) (Works 25)
Bibliotheca Pastorum (i.e., 'Shepherd's Library', consisting ofmultiple volumes) (ed. John Ruskin) (1876–88) (Works 31–32)
Laws of Fésole: A Familiar Treatise on the Elementary Principles and Practice of Drawing and Painting as Determined by the Tuscan Masters (arranged for the use of schools) (1877–78) (Works 15)
St Mark's Rest (1877–84, book 1884) (Works 24)
Fiction, Fair and Foul (serialised Nineteenth Century 1880–81, incorporated in On the Old Road (1885)) (Works 34)
The Bible of Amiens (the first part of Our Fathers Have Told Us) (1880–85) (Works 33)
The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1883, book 1884) (Works 33)
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution, 4 and 11 February 1884 (1884) (Works 34)
The Pleasures of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1884, published 1884–85) (Works 33)
Præterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life (3 vols.) (1885–89) (Works 35)
Dilecta: Correspondence, Diary Notes, and Extracts from Books, Illustrating 'Praeterita''' (1886, 1887, 1900) (Works 35)
Selected diaries and letters
The Diaries of John Ruskin eds. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (Clarendon Press, 1956–59)
The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin ed. Helen Gill Viljoen (Yale University Press, 1971)
A Tour of the Lakes in Cumbria. John Ruskin's Diary for 1830 eds. Van Akin Burd and James S. Dearden (Scolar, 1990)
The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the children at Winnington Hall ed. Van Akin Burd (Harvard University Press, 1969)
The Ruskin Family Letters: The Correspondence of John James Ruskin, his wife, and their son John, 1801–1843 ed. Van Akin Burd (2 vols.) (Cornell University Press, 1973)
The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton ed. John Lewis Bradley and Ian Ousby (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin ed. George Allen Cate (Stanford University Press, 1982)
John Ruskin's Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters ed. Rachel Dickinson (Legenda, 2008)
Selected editions of Ruskin still in print
Praeterita [Ruskin's autobiography] ed. Francis O' Gorman (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Unto this Last: Four essays on the First Principles of Political Economy intro. Andrew Hill (Pallas Athene, 2010)
Unto This Last And Other Writings ed. Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1986)
Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century preface by Clive Wilmer and intro. Peter Brimblecombe (Pallas Athene, 2012)
The Nature of Gothic (Pallas Athene, 2011) [facsimile reprint of Morris's Kelmscott Edition with essays by Robert Hewison and Tony Pinkney]
Selected Writings ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Selected Writings (originally Ruskin Today) ed. Kenneth Clark (Penguin, 1964 and later impressions)
The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from his Writings ed. John D. Rosenberg (George Allen and Unwin, 1963)
Athena: Queen of the Air (Annotated) (originally The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm) ed. Na Ding, foreword by Tim Kavi, brief literary bio by Kelli M. Webert (TiLu Press, 2013 electronic book version, paper forthcoming)Ruskin on Music ed Mary Augusta Wakefield (Creative Media Partners LLC, 2015)
See also
John Henry Devereux
Ruskin, Nebraska
Ruskin's diggers in Ferry Hinksey (1874)
Ruskin's Ride, a bridleway in Oxford
Trenton, Missouri, home of the first Ruskin College in the United States
Charles Augustus Howell
The English House Mount Ruskin
References
Sources
Robert Hewison, "Ruskin, John (1819–1900)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition.
Francis O'Gorman (1999) John Ruskin (Pocket Biographies) (Sutton Publishing)
James S. Dearden (2004), John Ruskin (Shire Publications)
Further reading
General
Barringer, Tim. et al., ed. Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-300-24641-4.
Conner, Patrick. Savage Ruskin. New York: Macmillan Press, 1979.
Cook, E. T. Ruskin, John. Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1901.
Dearden, James S. John Ruskin's Bookplates. The Book Collector (1964) 13 no 3 (autumn): 335-339.
Dearden, J. S. The Production and Distribution of John Ruskin's Poems 1850. The Book Collector (1968)17 no 2 (summer): 151-167.
Dearden, J. S. Wise and Ruskin. The Book Collector (1969) 18.no.1 (spring): 45-56.
Freeman, Kelly; Hughes, Thomas. et al. eds. Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to The Storm-Cloud. The Courtauld, 2021. ISBN 978-1-907485-13-8.
Hanley, K; Hull, C. S. eds. John Ruskin's Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings. Cambridge: Legenda, 2016. ISBN 978-1-906540-85-2.
Hewison, Robert. John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye. Thames and Hudson, 1976.
Hugh, Chriholm. ed. Ruskin, John. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1911.
Jackson, Kevin. The Worlds of John Ruskin. Pallas Athene, 2010.
Quill, Sarah. Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited. Ashgate, 2000.
Quigley Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History Of The World In Our Time. GSG & Associates, 1966.
Rosenberg, J. G. The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius. Columbia University Press, 1961.
Viljoen, Helen Gill. Ruskin's Scottish Heritage: A Prelude. University of Illinois Press, 1956.
Waldstein, C. The Work of John Ruskin: Its Influence Upon Modern Thought and Life, Harper's magazine vol. 78, no. 465 (Feb. 1889), pp. 382–418.
Biographies of Ruskin
W. G. Collingwood (1893) The Life and Work of John Ruskin 1–2. Methuen. (The Life of John Ruskin, sixth edition (1905).) – Note that the title was slightly changed for the 1900 2nd edition and later editions.
E. T. Cook (1911) The Life of John Ruskin 1–2. George Allen. (The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 1 of the second edition (1912); The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 2 of the second edition (1912))
Derrick Leon (1949) Ruskin: The Great Victorian (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Tim Hilton (1985) John Ruskin: The Early Years (Yale University Press)
Tim Hilton (2000) John Ruskin: The Later Years (Yale University Press)
John Batchelor (2000) John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life (Chatto & Windus)
Robert Hewison (2007) John Ruskin'' (Oxford University Press)
External links
Ruskin Today
The Eighth Lamp, Ruskin Studies Today. Ruskin journal
Library collections
UK Museum, Library and Archive collections relating to Ruskin at Cornucopia.org.uk. Retrieved
John Ruskin texts in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature Digital Collection. Retrieved 2010-10-19
Electronic editions
Liverpool Museums audio files on Ruskin
Archival material
Ruskin letter to Brantwood at Mount Holyoke College
Ruskin letter to Simon at Mount Holyoke College
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's online biography and gallery . Retrieved 2010-10-19
Sources for the Study of John Ruskin and the Guild of St George. Produced by Sheffield City Council's Libraries and Archives.
Archival material at
Finding aid to John Ruskin letters at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
John Ruskin Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
1819 births
1900 deaths
19th-century British journalists
19th-century British philosophers
19th-century economists
19th-century English painters
Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford
Alumni of King's College London
Anti-consumerists
Architectural theoreticians
Arts and Crafts movement artists
British anti-capitalists
British male journalists
Burials in Cumbria
Conchologists
English architecture writers
English art critics
English environmentalists
English essayists
English male painters
English people of Scottish descent
English philosophers
English watercolourists
Guild of St George
Male essayists
Painters from London
People associated with Anglia Ruskin University
People associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Romantic critics of political economy
Slade Professors of Fine Art (University of Oxford) | false | [
"Mikhail Roginsky (; 14 August 1931 – 5 July 2004) was a Russian painter. Roginsky was one of the leaders of Soviet Nonconformist Art and the creator of the modern national visual method, with its laconic means and inner expressiveness.\n\nBiography \nIn 1978, Roginsky moved to Paris. One year before his emigration he had gone back to documentary art and did a series of five or six works with cans. \"I felt (he explained) that I had to go back to what I had begun with, to return to myself\". He left Russia shortly after he had finished that series. Roginsky answer to the question whether the West had any influence on him, was brief: \"Sure\". But he could not say exactly what. \"Everything, (he believes) a different life, a different atmosphere, a different reality. I am generally very much influenced by where I live, what I see around me, what kind of art I behold and the type of people I rub shoulders with'\".\n\nHe died on 5 July 2004 in Paris.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nRussia Info-Centre: Photograph and samples of his work\n\n20th-century Russian painters\nRussian male painters\n21st-century Russian painters\n1931 births\n2004 deaths",
"Manohar Kaul (1925–1999) was born in Srinagar, Kashmir. He was one of 20th century's most famous Kashmiri painters. His work is in the National Gallery of Modern Art in India.\n\nWritings\n Kashmir: Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim architecture, Sagar Publications (1971) \n Trends in Indian painting, ancient, medieval, modern, Dhoomimal Ramchand (1961)\n\nExternal links\nEssay on Kaul by the art critic Keshav Malik - includes newspaper reviews\n\nIndian male painters\n1925 births\n1999 deaths\nKashmiri people\nPeople from Srinagar\n20th-century Indian painters\nPainters from Jammu and Kashmir"
] |
[
"John Ruskin",
"Modern Painters I (1843)",
"What was Modern Painters I?",
"What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous but authoritative title, \"A Graduate of Oxford,"
] | C_586bfbeaa57b4e3ab23a77a6d7b375c8_0 | What was the outcome of Modern Painters? | 2 | What was the outcome of John Ruskin's Modern Painters? | John Ruskin | Much of the period, from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin spent abroad with his parents, principally in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by critic, Rev John Eagles, in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903. Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and, from 1839, Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842. What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous but authoritative title, "A Graduate of Oxford," was Ruskin's response to Turner's critics. An electronic edition is available online. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters--and in particular Turner--were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa, unlike Turner, favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studio--to render what he has seen and understood imaginatively on canvas, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity. Although critics were slow to react and reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, notably Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his metier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued the nearly 20,000 sketches Turner gave to the British nation. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.
Early life (1819–1846)
Genealogy
Ruskin was the only child of first cousins. His father, John James Ruskin (1785–1864), was a sherry and wine importer, founding partner and de facto business manager of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq (see Allied Domecq). John James was born and brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a mother from Glenluce and a father originally from Hertfordshire. His wife, Margaret Cock (1781–1871), was the daughter of a publican in Croydon. She had joined the Ruskin household when she became companion to John James's mother, Catherine.
John James had hoped to practise law, and was articled as a clerk in London. His father, John Thomas Ruskin, described as a grocer (but apparently an ambitious wholesale merchant), was an incompetent businessman. To save the family from bankruptcy, John James, whose prudence and success were in stark contrast to his father, took on all debts, settling the last of them in 1832. John James and Margaret were engaged in 1809, but opposition to the union from John Thomas, and the problem of his debts, delayed the couple's wedding. They finally married, without celebration, in 1818. John James died on 3 March 1864 and is buried in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, Shirley, Croydon.
Childhood and education
Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London (demolished 1969), south of St Pancras railway station. His childhood was shaped by the contrasting influences of his father and mother, both of whom were fiercely ambitious for him. John James Ruskin helped to develop his son's Romanticism. They shared a passion for the works of Byron, Shakespeare and especially Walter Scott. They visited Scott's home, Abbotsford, in 1838, but Ruskin was disappointed by its appearance. Margaret Ruskin, an evangelical Christian, more cautious and restrained than her husband, taught young John to read the Bible from beginning to end, and then to start all over again, committing large portions to memory. Its language, imagery and parables had a profound and lasting effect on his writing. He later wrote:
Ruskin's childhood was spent from 1823 at 28 Herne Hill (demolished ), near the village of Camberwell in South London. He had few friends of his own age, but it was not the friendless and toyless experience he later said it was in his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89). He was educated at home by his parents and private tutors, including Congregationalist preacher Edward Andrews, whose daughters, Mrs Eliza Orme and Emily Augusta Patmore were later credited with introducing Ruskin to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
From 1834 to 1835 he attended the school in Peckham run by the progressive evangelical Thomas Dale (1797–1870). Ruskin heard Dale lecture in 1836 at King's College, London, where Dale was the first Professor of English Literature. Ruskin went on to enroll and complete his studies at King's College, where he prepared for Oxford under Dale's tutelage.
Travel
Ruskin was greatly influenced by the extensive and privileged travels he enjoyed in his childhood. It helped to establish his taste and augmented his education. He sometimes accompanied his father on visits to business clients at their country houses, which exposed him to English landscapes, architecture and paintings. Family tours took them to the Lake District (his first long poem, Iteriad, was an account of his tour in 1830) and to relatives in Perth, Scotland. As early as 1825, the family visited France and Belgium. Their continental tours became increasingly ambitious in scope: in 1833 they visited Strasbourg, Schaffhausen, Milan, Genoa and Turin, places to which Ruskin frequently returned. He developed a lifelong love of the Alps, and in 1835 visited Venice for the first time, that 'Paradise of cities' that provided the subject and symbolism of much of his later work.
These tours gave Ruskin the opportunity to observe and record his impressions of nature. He composed elegant, though mainly conventional poetry, some of which was published in Friendship's Offering. His early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of visually sophisticated and technically accomplished drawings of maps, landscapes and buildings, remarkable for a boy of his age. He was profoundly affected by Samuel Rogers's poem Italy (1830), a copy of which was given to him as a 13th birthday present; in particular, he deeply admired the accompanying illustrations by J. M. W. Turner. Much of Ruskin's own art in the 1830s was in imitation of Turner, and of Samuel Prout, whose Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany (1833) he also admired. His artistic skills were refined under the tutelage of Charles Runciman, Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding.
First publications
Ruskin's journeys also provided inspiration for writing. His first publication was the poem "On Skiddaw and Derwent Water" (originally entitled "Lines written at the Lakes in Cumberland: Derwentwater" and published in the Spiritual Times) (August 1829). In 1834, three short articles for Loudon's Magazine of Natural History were published. They show early signs of his skill as a close "scientific" observer of nature, especially its geology.
From September 1837 to December 1838, Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture was serialised in Loudon's Architectural Magazine, under the pen name "Kata Phusin" (Greek for "According to Nature"). It was a study of cottages, villas, and other dwellings centred on a Wordsworthian argument that buildings should be sympathetic to their immediate environment and use local materials. It anticipated key themes in his later writings. In 1839, Ruskin's "Remarks on the Present State of Meteorological Science" was published in Transactions of the Meteorological Society.
Oxford
In Michaelmas 1836, Ruskin matriculated at the University of Oxford, taking up residence at Christ Church in January of the following year. Enrolled as a gentleman-commoner, he enjoyed equal status with his aristocratic peers. Ruskin was generally uninspired by Oxford and suffered bouts of illness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of his time there was in the few, close friendships he made. His tutor, the Rev Walter Lucas Brown, always encouraged him, as did a young senior tutor, Henry Liddell (later the father of Alice Liddell) and a private tutor, the Rev Osborne Gordon. He became close to the geologist and natural theologian, William Buckland. Among his fellow-undergraduates, Ruskin's most important friends were Charles Thomas Newton and Henry Acland.
His most noteworthy success came in 1839 when, at the third attempt, he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry (Arthur Hugh Clough came second). He met William Wordsworth, who was receiving an honorary degree, at the ceremony.
Ruskin's health was poor and he never became independent from his family during his time at Oxford. His mother took lodgings on High Street, where his father joined them at weekends. He was devastated to hear that his first love, Adèle Domecq, the second daughter of his father's business partner, had become engaged to a French nobleman. In April 1840, whilst revising for his examinations, he began to cough blood, which led to fears of consumption and a long break from Oxford travelling with his parents.
Before he returned to Oxford, Ruskin responded to a challenge that had been put to him by Effie Gray, whom he later married: the twelve-year-old Effie had asked him to write a fairy story. During a six-week break at Leamington Spa to undergo Dr Jephson's (1798–1878) celebrated salt-water cure, Ruskin wrote his only work of fiction, the fable The King of the Golden River (not published until December 1850 (but imprinted 1851), with illustrations by Richard Doyle). A work of Christian sacrificial morality and charity, it is set in the Alpine landscape Ruskin loved and knew so well. It remains the most translated of all his works. Back at Oxford, in 1842 Ruskin sat for a pass degree, and was awarded an uncommon honorary double fourth-class degree in recognition of his achievements.
Modern Painters I (1843)
For much of the period from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin was abroad with his parents, mainly in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, later married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by the critic Rev John Eagles in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner, who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903.
Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842.
What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous authority of "A Graduate of Oxford", was Ruskin's answer to Turner's critics. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters—and in particular Turner—were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that, unlike Turner, Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studioto render imaginatively on canvas what he has seen and understood, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity.
Although critics were slow to react and the reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, including Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his métier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued nearly 20,000 sketches that Turner gave to the British nation.
1845 tour and Modern Painters II (1846)
Ruskin toured the continent with his parents again during 1844, visiting Chamonix and Paris, studying the geology of the Alps and the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Perugino among others at the Louvre. In 1845, at the age of 26, he undertook to travel without his parents for the first time. It provided him with an opportunity to study medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and especially Italy. In Lucca he saw the Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia, which Ruskin considered the exemplar of Christian sculpture (he later associated it with the then object of his love, Rose La Touche). He drew inspiration from what he saw at the Campo Santo in Pisa, and in Florence. In Venice, he was particularly impressed by the works of Fra Angelico and Giotto in St Mark's Cathedral, and Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco, but he was alarmed by the combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city: "Venice is lost to me", he wrote. It finally convinced him that architectural restoration was destruction, and that the only true and faithful action was preservation and conservation.
Drawing on his travels, he wrote the second volume of Modern Painters (published April 1846). The volume concentrated on Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists rather than on Turner. It was a more theoretical work than its predecessor. Ruskin explicitly linked the aesthetic and the divine, arguing that truth, beauty and religion are inextricably bound together: "the Beautiful as a gift of God". In defining categories of beauty and imagination, Ruskin argued that all great artists must perceive beauty and, with their imagination, communicate it creatively by means of symbolic representation. Generally, critics gave this second volume a warmer reception, although many found the attack on the aesthetic orthodoxy associated with Joshua Reynolds difficult to accept. In the summer, Ruskin was abroad again with his father, who still hoped his son might become a poet, even poet laureate, just one among many factors increasing the tension between them.
Middle life (1847–1869)
Marriage to Effie Gray
During 1847, Ruskin became closer to Euphemia "Effie" Gray, the daughter of family friends. It was for her that Ruskin had written The King of the Golden River. The couple were engaged in October. They married on 10 April 1848 at her home, Bowerswell, in Perth, once the residence of the Ruskin family. It was the site of the suicide of John Thomas Ruskin (Ruskin's grandfather). Owing to this association and other complications, Ruskin's parents did not attend. The European Revolutions of 1848 meant that the newlyweds' earliest travels together were restricted, but they were able to visit Normandy, where Ruskin admired the Gothic architecture.
Their early life together was spent at 31 Park Street, Mayfair, secured for them by Ruskin's father (later addresses included nearby 6 Charles Street, and 30 Herne Hill). Effie was too unwell to undertake the European tour of 1849, so Ruskin visited the Alps with his parents, gathering material for the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters. He was struck by the contrast between the Alpine beauty and the poverty of Alpine peasants, stirring his increasingly sensitive social conscience.
The marriage was unhappy, with Ruskin reportedly being cruel to Effie and distrustful of her. The marriage was never consummated and was annulled six years later in 1854.
Architecture
Ruskin's developing interest in architecture, and particularly in the Gothic, led to the first work to bear his name, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). It contained 14 plates etched by the author. The title refers to seven moral categories that Ruskin considered vital to and inseparable from all architecture: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience. All would provide recurring themes in his future work. Seven Lamps promoted the virtues of a secular and Protestant form of Gothic. It was a challenge to the Catholic influence of architect A. W. N. Pugin.
The Stones of Venice
In November 1849, John and Effie Ruskin visited Venice, staying at the Hotel Danieli. Their different personalities are revealed by their contrasting priorities. For Effie, Venice provided an opportunity to socialise, while Ruskin was engaged in solitary studies. In particular, he made a point of drawing the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, because he feared that they would be destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops. One of these troops, Lieutenant Charles Paulizza, became friendly with Effie, apparently with Ruskin's consent. Her brother, among others, later claimed that Ruskin was deliberately encouraging the friendship to compromise her, as an excuse to separate.
Meanwhile, Ruskin was making the extensive sketches and notes that he used for his three-volume work The Stones of Venice (1851–53). Developing from a technical history of Venetian architecture from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history, Stones represented Ruskin's opinion of contemporary England. It served as a warning about the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued that Venice had degenerated slowly. Its cultural achievements had been compromised, and its society corrupted, by the decline of true Christian faith. Instead of revering the divine, Renaissance artists honoured themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness.
The chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" appeared in the second volume of Stones. Praising Gothic ornament, Ruskin argued that it was an expression of the artisan's joy in free, creative work. The worker must be allowed to think and to express his own personality and ideas, ideally using his own hands, rather than machinery.
This was both an aesthetic attack on, and a social critique of, the division of labour in particular, and industrial capitalism in general. This chapter had a profound effect, and was reprinted both by the Christian socialist founders of the Working Men's College and later by the Arts and Crafts pioneer and socialist William Morris.
Pre-Raphaelites
John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelite commitment to 'naturalism' – "paint[ing] from nature only", depicting nature in fine detail, had been influenced by Ruskin.
Ruskin became acquainted with Millais after the artists made an approach to Ruskin through their mutual friend Coventry Patmore. Initially, Ruskin had not been impressed by Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50), a painting that was considered blasphemous at the time, but Ruskin wrote letters defending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to The Times during May 1851. Providing Millais with artistic patronage and encouragement, in the summer of 1853 the artist (and his brother) travelled to Scotland with Ruskin and Effie where, at Glenfinlas, he painted the closely observed landscape background of gneiss rock to which, as had always been intended, he later added Ruskin's portrait.
Millais had painted a picture of Effie for The Order of Release, 1746, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. Suffering increasingly from physical illness and acute mental anxiety, Effie was arguing fiercely with her husband and his intense and overly protective parents, and sought solace with her own parents in Scotland. The Ruskin marriage was already undermined as she and Millais fell in love, and Effie left Ruskin, causing a public scandal.
During April 1854, Effie filed her suit of nullity, on grounds of "non-consummation" owing to his "incurable impotency", a charge Ruskin later disputed. Ruskin wrote, "I can prove my virility at once." The annulment was granted in July. Ruskin did not even mention it in his diary. Effie married Millais the following year. The complex reasons for the non-consummation and ultimate failure of the Ruskin marriage are a matter of enduring speculation and debate.
Ruskin continued to support Hunt and Rossetti. He also provided an annuity of £150 in 1855–57 to Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's wife, to encourage her art (and paid for the services of Henry Acland for her medical care). Other artists influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites also received both critical and financial assistance from Ruskin, including John Brett, John William Inchbold, and Edward Burne-Jones, who became a good friend (he called him "Brother Ned"). His father's disapproval of such friends was a further cause of tension between them.
During this period Ruskin wrote regular reviews of the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy with the title Academy Notes (1855–59, 1875). They were highly influential, capable of making or breaking reputations. The satirical magazine Punch published the lines (24 May 1856), "I paints and paints,/hears no complaints/And sells before I'm dry,/Till savage Ruskin/He sticks his tusk in/Then nobody will buy."
Ruskin was an art-philanthropist: in March 1861 he gave 48 Turner drawings to the Ashmolean in Oxford, and a further 25 to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in May. Ruskin's own work was very distinctive, and he occasionally exhibited his watercolours: in the United States in 1857–58 and 1879, for example; and in England, at the Fine Art Society in 1878, and at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour (of which he was an honorary member) in 1879. He created many careful studies of natural forms, based on his detailed botanical, geological and architectural observations. Examples of his work include a painted, floral pilaster decoration in the central room of Wallington Hall in Northumberland, home of his friend Pauline Trevelyan. The stained glass window in the Little Church of St Francis Funtley, Fareham, Hampshire is reputed to have been designed by him. Originally placed in the St. Peter's Church Duntisbourne Abbots near Cirencester, the window depicts the Ascension and the Nativity.
Ruskin's theories also inspired some architects to adapt the Gothic style. Such buildings created what has been called a distinctive "Ruskinian Gothic". Through his friendship with Henry Acland, Ruskin supported attempts to establish what became the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (designed by Benjamin Woodward)—which is the closest thing to a model of this style, but still failed to satisfy Ruskin completely. The many twists and turns in the Museum's development, not least its increasing cost, and the University authorities' less than enthusiastic attitude towards it, proved increasingly frustrating for Ruskin.
Ruskin and education
The Museum was part of a wider plan to improve science provision at Oxford, something the University initially resisted. Ruskin's first formal teaching role came about in the mid-1850s, when he taught drawing classes (assisted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) at the Working Men's College, established by the Christian socialists, Frederick James Furnivall and Frederick Denison Maurice. Although Ruskin did not share the founders' politics, he strongly supported the idea that through education workers could achieve a crucially important sense of (self-)fulfilment. One result of this involvement was Ruskin's Elements of Drawing (1857). He had taught several women drawing, by means of correspondence, and his book represented both a response and a challenge to contemporary drawing manuals. The WMC was also a useful recruiting ground for assistants, on some of whom Ruskin would later come to rely, such as his future publisher, George Allen.
From 1859 until 1868, Ruskin was involved with the progressive school for girls at Winnington Hall in Cheshire. A frequent visitor, letter-writer, and donor of pictures and geological specimens to the school, Ruskin approved of the mixture of sports, handicrafts, music and dancing encouraged by its principal, Miss Bell. The association led to Ruskin's sub-Socratic work, The Ethics of the Dust (1866), an imagined conversation with Winnington's girls in which he cast himself as the "Old Lecturer". On the surface a discourse on crystallography, it is a metaphorical exploration of social and political ideals. In the 1880s, Ruskin became involved with another educational institution, Whitelands College, a training college for teachers, where he instituted a May Queen festival that endures today. (It was also replicated in the 19th century at the Cork High School for Girls.) Ruskin also bestowed books and gemstones upon Somerville College, one of Oxford's first two women's colleges, which he visited regularly, and was similarly generous to other educational institutions for women.
Modern Painters III and IV
Both volumes III and IV of Modern Painters were published in 1856. In MP III Ruskin argued that all great art is "the expression of the spirits of great men". Only the morally and spiritually healthy are capable of admiring the noble and the beautiful, and transforming them into great art by imaginatively penetrating their essence. MP IV presents the geology of the Alps in terms of landscape painting, and their moral and spiritual influence on those living nearby. The contrasting final chapters, "The Mountain Glory" and "The Mountain Gloom" provide an early example of Ruskin's social analysis, highlighting the poverty of the peasants living in the lower Alps.
Public lecturer
In addition to leading more formal teaching classes, from the 1850s Ruskin became an increasingly popular public lecturer. His first public lectures were given in Edinburgh, in November 1853, on architecture and painting. His lectures at the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester in 1857, were collected as The Political Economy of Art and later under Keats's phrase, A Joy For Ever. In these lectures, Ruskin spoke about how to acquire art, and how to use it, arguing that England had forgotten that true wealth is virtue, and that art is an index of a nation's well-being. Individuals have a responsibility to consume wisely, stimulating beneficent demand. The increasingly critical tone and political nature of Ruskin's interventions outraged his father and the "Manchester School" of economists, as represented by a hostile review in the Manchester Examiner and Times. As the Ruskin scholar Helen Gill Viljoen noted, Ruskin was increasingly critical of his father, especially in letters written by Ruskin directly to him, many of them still unpublished.
Ruskin gave the inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art in 1858, an institution from which the modern-day Anglia Ruskin University has grown. In The Two Paths (1859), five lectures given in London, Manchester, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells, Ruskin argued that a 'vital law' underpins art and architecture, drawing on the labour theory of value. (For other addresses and letters, Cook and Wedderburn, vol. 16, pp. 427–87.) The year 1859 also marked his last tour of Europe with his ageing parents, during which they visited Germany and Switzerland.
Turner Bequest
Ruskin had been in Venice when he heard about Turner's death in 1851. Being named an executor to Turner's will was an honour that Ruskin respectfully declined, but later took up. Ruskin's book in celebration of the sea, The Harbours of England, revolving around Turner's drawings, was published in 1856. In January 1857, Ruskin's Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1856 was published. He persuaded the National Gallery to allow him to work on the Turner Bequest of nearly 20,000 individual artworks left to the nation by the artist. This involved Ruskin in an enormous amount of work, completed in May 1858, and involved cataloguing, framing and conserving. Four hundred watercolours were displayed in cabinets of Ruskin's own design. Recent scholarship has argued that Ruskin did not, as previously thought, collude in the destruction of Turner's erotic drawings, but his work on the Bequest did modify his attitude towards Turner. (See below, Controversies: Turner's Erotic Drawings.)
Religious "unconversion"
In 1858, Ruskin was again travelling in Europe. The tour took him from Switzerland to Turin, where he saw Paolo Veronese's Presentation of the Queen of Sheba. He would later claim (in April 1877) that the discovery of this painting, contrasting starkly with a particularly dull sermon, led to his "unconversion" from Evangelical Christianity. He had, however, doubted his Evangelical Christian faith for some time, shaken by Biblical and geological scholarship that had undermined the literal truth and absolute authority of the Bible: "those dreadful hammers!" he wrote to Henry Acland, "I hear the chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses." This "loss of faith" precipitated a considerable personal crisis. His confidence undermined, he believed that much of his writing to date had been founded on a bed of lies and half-truths. He later returned to Christianity.
Social critic and reformer: Unto This Last
Although in 1877 Ruskin said that in 1860, "I gave up my art work and wrote Unto This Last ... the central work of my life" the break was not so dramatic or final. Following his crisis of faith, and influenced in part by his friend Thomas Carlyle (whom he had first met in 1850), Ruskin shifted his emphasis in the late 1850s from art towards social issues. Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on and write about a wide range of subjects including art and, among many other matters, geology (in June 1863 he lectured on the Alps), art practice and judgement (The Cestus of Aglaia), botany and mythology (Proserpina and The Queen of the Air). He continued to draw and paint in watercolours, and to travel extensively across Europe with servants and friends. In 1868, his tour took him to Abbeville, and in the following year he was in Verona (studying tombs for the Arundel Society) and Venice (where he was joined by William Holman Hunt). Yet increasingly Ruskin concentrated his energies on fiercely attacking industrial capitalism, and the utilitarian theories of political economy underpinning it. He repudiated his sometimes grandiloquent style, writing now in plainer, simpler language, to communicate his message straightforwardly.
Ruskin's social view broadened from concerns about the dignity of labour to consider issues of citizenship and notions of the ideal community. Just as he had questioned aesthetic orthodoxy in his earliest writings, he now dissected the orthodox political economy espoused by John Stuart Mill, based on theories of laissez-faire and competition drawn from the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In his four essays Unto This Last, Ruskin rejected the division of labour as dehumanising (separating the labourer from the product of his work), and argued that the false "science" of political economy failed to consider the social affections that bind communities together. He articulated an extended metaphor of household and family, drawing on Plato and Xenophon to demonstrate the communal and sometimes sacrificial nature of true economics. For Ruskin, all economies and societies are ideally founded on a politics of social justice. His ideas influenced the concept of the "social economy", characterised by networks of charitable, co-operative and other non-governmental organisations.
The essays were originally published in consecutive monthly instalments of the new Cornhill Magazine between August and November 1860 (and published in a single volume in 1862). However, the Cornhills editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to abandon the series by the outcry of the magazine's largely conservative readership and the fears of a nervous publisher (Smith, Elder & Co.). The reaction of the national press was hostile, and Ruskin was, he claimed, "reprobated in a violent manner". Ruskin's father also strongly disapproved. Others were enthusiastic, including Ruskin's friend Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "I have read your paper with exhilaration... such a thing flung suddenly into half a million dull British heads... will do a great deal of good."
Ruskin's political ideas, and Unto This Last in particular, later proved highly influential. The essays were praised and paraphrased in Gujarati by Mohandas Gandhi, a wide range of autodidacts cited their positive impact, the economist John A. Hobson and many of the founders of the British Labour party credited them as an influence.
Ruskin believed in a hierarchical social structure. He wrote "I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school." He believed in man's duty to God, and while he sought to improve the conditions of the poor, he opposed attempts to level social differences and sought to resolve social inequalities by abandoning capitalism in favour of a co-operative structure of society based on obedience and benevolent philanthropy, rooted in the agricultural economy.
Ruskin's explorations of nature and aesthetics in the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters focused on Giorgione, Veronese, Titian and Turner. Ruskin asserted that the components of the greatest artworks are held together, like human communities, in a quasi-organic unity. Competitive struggle is destructive. Uniting Modern Painters V and Unto This Last is Ruskin's "Law of Help":
Ruskin's next work on political economy, redefining some of the basic terms of the discipline, also ended prematurely, when Fraser's Magazine, under the editorship of James Anthony Froude, cut short his Essays on Political Economy (1862–63) (later collected as Munera Pulveris (1872)). Ruskin further explored political themes in Time and Tide (1867), his letters to Thomas Dixon, a cork-cutter in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear who had a well-established interest in literary and artistic matters. In these letters, Ruskin promoted honesty in work and exchange, just relations in employment and the need for co-operation.
Ruskin's sense of politics was not confined to theory. On his father's death in 1864, he inherited a considerable fortune of between £120,000 and £157,000 (the exact figure is disputed). This considerable fortune, inherited from the father he described on his tombstone as "an entirely honest merchant", gave him the means to engage in personal philanthropy and practical schemes of social amelioration. One of his first actions was to support the housing work of Octavia Hill (originally one of his art pupils): he bought property in Marylebone to aid her philanthropic housing scheme. But Ruskin's endeavours extended to the establishment of a shop selling pure tea in any quantity desired at 29 Paddington Street, Paddington (giving employment to two former Ruskin family servants) and crossing-sweepings to keep the area around the British Museum clean and tidy. Modest as these practical schemes were, they represented a symbolic challenge to the existing state of society. Yet his greatest practical experiments would come in his later years.
Lectures in the 1860s
Ruskin lectured widely in the 1860s, giving the Rede lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1867, for example. He spoke at the British Institution on 'Modern Art', the Working Men's Institute, Camberwell on "Work" and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich on 'War.'Ruskin's widely admired lecture, Traffic, on the relation between taste and morality, was delivered in April 1864 at Bradford Town Hall, to which he had been invited because of a local debate about the style of a new Exchange building. "I do not care about this Exchange", Ruskin told his audience, "because you don't!" These last three lectures were published in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866).
The lectures that comprised Sesame and Lilies (published 1865), delivered in December 1864 at the town halls at Rusholme and Manchester, are essentially concerned with education and ideal conduct. "Of Kings' Treasuries" (in support of a library fund) explored issues of reading practice, literature (books of the hour vs. books of all time), cultural value and public education. "Of Queens' Gardens" (supporting a school fund) focused on the role of women, asserting their rights and duties in education, according them responsibility for the household and, by extension, for providing the human compassion that must balance a social order dominated by men. This book proved to be one of Ruskin's most popular, and was regularly awarded as a Sunday School prize. Its reception over time, however, has been more mixed, and twentieth-century feminists have taken aim at "Of Queens' Gardens" in particular, as an attempt to "subvert the new heresy" of women's rights by confining women to the domestic sphere. Although indeed subscribing to the Victorian belief in "separate spheres" for men and women, Ruskin was however unusual in arguing for parity of esteem, a case based on his philosophy that a nation's political economy should be modelled on that of the ideal household.
Later life (1869–1900)
Oxford's first Slade Professor of Fine Art
Ruskin was unanimously appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University in August 1869, though largely through the offices of his friend, Henry Acland. He delivered his inaugural lecture on his 51st birthday in 1870, at the Sheldonian Theatre to a larger-than-expected audience. It was here that he said, "The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues." It has been claimed that Cecil Rhodes cherished a long-hand copy of the lecture, believing that it supported his own view of the British Empire.
In 1871, John Ruskin founded his own art school at Oxford, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. It was originally accommodated within the Ashmolean Museum but now occupies premises on High Street. Ruskin endowed the drawing mastership with £5000 of his own money. He also established a large collection of drawings, watercolours and other materials (over 800 frames) that he used to illustrate his lectures. The School challenged the orthodox, mechanical methodology of the government art schools (the "South Kensington System").
Ruskin's lectures were often so popular that they had to be given twice—once for the students, and again for the public. Most of them were eventually published (see Select Bibliography below). He lectured on a wide range of subjects at Oxford, his interpretation of "Art" encompassing almost every conceivable area of study, including wood and metal engraving (Ariadne Florentina), the relation of science to art (The Eagle's Nest) and sculpture (Aratra Pentelici). His lectures ranged through myth, ornithology, geology, nature-study and literature. "The teaching of Art...", Ruskin wrote, "is the teaching of all things." Ruskin was never careful about offending his employer. When he criticised Michelangelo in a lecture in June 1871 it was seen as an attack on the large collection of that artist's work in the Ashmolean Museum.
Most controversial, from the point of view of the University authorities, spectators and the national press, was the digging scheme on Ferry Hinksey Road at North Hinksey, near Oxford, instigated by Ruskin in 1874, and continuing into 1875, which involved undergraduates in a road-mending scheme. The scheme was motivated in part by a desire to teach the virtues of wholesome manual labour. Some of the diggers, who included Oscar Wilde, Alfred Milner and Ruskin's future secretary and biographer W. G. Collingwood, were profoundly influenced by the experience: notably Arnold Toynbee, Leonard Montefiore and Alexander Robertson MacEwen. It helped to foster a public service ethic that was later given expression in the university settlements, and was keenly celebrated by the founders of Ruskin Hall, Oxford.
In 1879, Ruskin resigned from Oxford, but resumed his Professorship in 1883, only to resign again in 1884. He gave his reason as opposition to vivisection, but he had increasingly been in conflict with the University authorities, who refused to expand his Drawing School. He was also suffering from increasingly poor health.
Fors Clavigera and the Whistler libel case
In January 1871, the month before Ruskin started to lecture the wealthy undergraduates at Oxford University, he began his series of 96 (monthly) "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–84). (The letters were published irregularly after the 87th instalment in March 1878.) These letters were personal, dealt with every subject in his oeuvre, and were written in a variety of styles, reflecting his mood and circumstances. From 1873, Ruskin had full control over all his publications, having established George Allen as his sole publisher (see Allen & Unwin).
In the July 1877 letter of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin launched a scathing attack on paintings by James McNeill Whistler exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. He found particular fault with Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, and accused Whistler of asking two hundred guineas for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler filed a libel suit against Ruskin, but Ruskin was ill when the case went to trial in November 1887, so the artist Edward Burne-Jones and Attorney General Sir John Holker represented him. The trial took place on 25 and 26 November, and many major figures of the art world at the time appeared at the trial. Artist Albert Moore appeared as a witness for Whistler, and artist William Powell Frith appeared for Ruskin. Frith said "the nocturne in black in gold is not in my opinion worth two hundred guineas". Frederic Leighton also agreed to give evidence for Whistler, but in the end could not attend as he had to go to Windsor to be knighted. Edward Burne-Jones, representing Ruskin, also asserted that Nocturne in Black and Gold was not a serious work of art. When asked to give reasons, Burne-Jones said he had never seen one painting of night that was successful, but also acknowledged that he saw marks of great labour and artistic skill in the painting. In the end, Whistler won the case, but the jury awarded damages of only a derisory farthing (the smallest coin of the realm) to the artist. Court costs were split between the two parties. Ruskin's were paid by public subscription organised by the Fine Art Society, but Whistler was bankrupt within six months, and was forced to sell his studio. The episode tarnished Ruskin's reputation, and may have accelerated his mental decline. It did nothing to mitigate Ruskin's exaggerated sense of failure in persuading his readers to share in his own keenly felt priorities.
Guild of St George
Ruskin founded his utopian society, the Guild of St George, in 1871 (although originally it was called St George's Fund, and then St George's Company, before becoming the Guild in 1878). Its aims and objectives were articulated in Fors Clavigera. A communitarian protest against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, it had a hierarchical structure, with Ruskin as its Master, and dedicated members called "Companions". Ruskin wished to show that contemporary life could still be enjoyed in the countryside, with land being farmed by traditional means, in harmony with the environment, and with the minimum of mechanical assistance. He also sought to educate and enrich the lives of industrial workers by inspiring them with beautiful objects. As such, with a tithe (or personal donation) of £7,000, Ruskin acquired land and a collection of art treasures.
Ruskin purchased land initially in Totley, near Sheffield, but the agricultural scheme established there by local communists met with only modest success after many difficulties. Donations of land from wealthy and dedicated Companions eventually placed land and property in the Guild's care: in the Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, called Ruskin Land today; Barmouth, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales; Cloughton, in North Yorkshire; Westmill in Hertfordshire; and Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire.
In principle, Ruskin worked out a scheme for different grades of "Companion", wrote codes of practice, described styles of dress and even designed the Guild's own coins. Ruskin wished to see St George's Schools established, and published various volumes to aid its teaching (his Bibliotheca Pastorum or Shepherd's Library), but the schools themselves were never established. (In the 1880s, in a venture loosely related to the Bibliotheca, he supported Francesca Alexander's publication of some of her tales of peasant life.) In reality, the Guild, which still exists today as a charitable education trust, has only ever operated on a small scale.
Ruskin also wished to see traditional rural handicrafts revived. St. George's Mill was established at Laxey, Isle of Man, producing cloth goods. The Guild also encouraged independent but allied efforts in spinning and weaving at Langdale, in other parts of the Lake District and elsewhere, producing linen and other goods exhibited by the Home Arts and Industries Association and similar organisations.
The Guild's most conspicuous and enduring achievement was the creation of a remarkable collection of art, minerals, books, medieval manuscripts, architectural casts, coins and other precious and beautiful objects. Housed in a cottage museum high on a hill in the Sheffield district of Walkley, it opened in 1875, and was curated by Henry and Emily Swan. Ruskin had written in Modern Painters III (1856) that, "the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way." Through the Museum, Ruskin aimed to bring to the eyes of the working man many of the sights and experiences otherwise reserved for those who could afford to travel across Europe. The original Museum has been digitally recreated online. In 1890, the Museum relocated to Meersbrook Park. The collection is now on display at Sheffield's Millennium Gallery.
Rose La Touche
Ruskin had been introduced to the wealthy Irish La Touche family by Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford. Maria La Touche, a minor Irish poet and novelist, asked Ruskin to teach her daughters drawing and painting in 1858. Rose La Touche was ten. His first meeting came at a time when Ruskin's own religious faith was under strain. This always caused difficulties for the staunchly Protestant La Touche family who at various times prevented the two from meeting. A chance meeting at the Royal Academy in 1869 was one of the few occasions they came into personal contact. After a long illness, she died on 25 May 1875, at the age of 27. These events plunged Ruskin into despair and led to increasingly severe bouts of mental illness involving a number of breakdowns and delirious visions. The first of these had occurred in 1871 at Matlock, Derbyshire, a town and a county that he knew from his boyhood travels, whose flora, fauna, and minerals helped to form and reinforce his appreciation and understanding of nature.
Ruskin turned to spiritualism. He attended seances at Broadlands. Ruskin's increasing need to believe in a meaningful universe and a life after death, both for himself and his loved ones, helped to revive his Christian faith in the 1870s.
Travel guides
Ruskin continued to travel, studying the landscapes, buildings and art of Europe. In May 1870 and June 1872 he admired Carpaccio's St Ursula in Venice, a vision of which, associated with Rose La Touche would haunt him, described in the pages of Fors. In 1874, on his tour of Italy, Ruskin visited Sicily, the furthest he ever travelled.
Ruskin embraced the emerging literary forms, the travel guide (and gallery guide), writing new works, and adapting old ones "to give", he said, "what guidance I may to travellers..." The Stones of Venice was revised, edited and issued in a new "Travellers' Edition" in 1879. Ruskin directed his readers, the would-be traveller, to look with his cultural gaze at the landscapes, buildings and art of France and Italy: Mornings in Florence (1875–77), The Bible of Amiens (1880–85) (a close study of its sculpture and a wider history), St Mark's Rest (1877–84) and A Guide to the Principal Pictures in ... Venice (1877).
Final writings
In the 1880s, Ruskin returned to some literature and themes that had been among his favourites since childhood. He wrote about Scott, Byron and Wordsworth in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880) in which, as Seth Reno argues, he describes the devastating effects on the landscape caused by industrialization, a vision Reno sees as a realization of the Anthropocene. He returned to meteorological observations in his lectures, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century (1884), describing the apparent effects of industrialisation on weather patterns. Ruskin's Storm-Cloud has been seen as foreshadowing environmentalism and related concerns in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ruskin's prophetic writings were also tied to his emotions, and his more general (ethical) dissatisfaction with the modern world with which he now felt almost completely out of sympathy.
His last great work was his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89) (meaning, 'Of Past Things'), a highly personalised, selective, eloquent but incomplete account of aspects of his life, the preface of which was written in his childhood nursery at Herne Hill.
The period from the late 1880s was one of steady and inexorable decline. Gradually it became too difficult for him to travel to Europe. He suffered a complete mental collapse on his final tour, which included Beauvais, Sallanches and Venice, in 1888. The emergence and dominance of the Aesthetic movement and Impressionism distanced Ruskin from the modern art world, his ideas on the social utility of art contrasting with the doctrine of "l'art pour l'art" or "art for art's sake" that was beginning to dominate. His later writings were increasingly seen as irrelevant, especially as he seemed to be more interested in book illustrators such as Kate Greenaway than in modern art. He also attacked aspects of Darwinian theory with increasing violence, although he knew and respected Darwin personally.
Brantwood and final years
In August 1871, Ruskin purchased, from W. J. Linton, the then somewhat dilapidated Brantwood house, on the shores of Coniston Water, in the English Lake District, paying £1500 for it. Brantwood was Ruskin's main home from 1872 until his death. His estate provided a site for more of his practical schemes and experiments: he had an ice house built, and the gardens comprehensively rearranged. He oversaw the construction of a larger harbour (from where he rowed his boat, the Jumping Jenny), and he altered the house (adding a dining room, a turret to his bedroom to give him a panoramic view of the lake, and he later extended the property to accommodate his relatives). He built a reservoir, and redirected the waterfall down the hills, adding a slate seat that faced the tumbling stream and craggy rocks rather than the lake, so that he could closely observe the fauna and flora of the hillside.
Although Ruskin's 80th birthday was widely celebrated in 1899 (various Ruskin societies presenting him with an elaborately illuminated congratulatory address), Ruskin was scarcely aware of it. He died at Brantwood from influenza on 20 January 1900 at the age of 80. He was buried five days later in the churchyard at Coniston, according to his wishes. As he had grown weaker, suffering prolonged bouts of mental illness, he had been looked after by his second cousin, Joan(na) Severn (formerly "companion" to Ruskin's mother) and she and her family inherited his estate. Joanna's Care was the eloquent final chapter of Ruskin's memoir, which he dedicated to her as a fitting tribute.
Joan Severn, together with Ruskin's secretary, W. G. Collingwood, and his eminent American friend Charles Eliot Norton, were executors to his will. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn edited the monumental 39-volume Library Edition of Ruskin's Works, the last volume of which, an index, attempts to demonstrate the complex interconnectedness of Ruskin's thought. They all acted together to guard, and even control, Ruskin's public and personal reputation.
The centenary of Ruskin's birth was keenly celebrated in 1919, but his reputation was already in decline and sank further in the fifty years that followed. The contents of Ruskin's home were dispersed in a series of sales at auction, and Brantwood itself was bought in 1932 by the educationist and Ruskin enthusiast, collector and memorialist, John Howard Whitehouse.
Brantwood was opened in 1934 as a memorial to Ruskin and remains open to the public today. The Guild of St George continues to thrive as an educational charity, and has an international membership. The Ruskin Society organises events throughout the year.
A series of public celebrations of Ruskin's multiple legacies took place in 2000, on the centenary of his death, and events are planned throughout 2019, to mark the bicentenary of his birth.
Note on Ruskin's personal appearance
In middle age, and at his prime as a lecturer, Ruskin was described as slim, perhaps a little short, with an aquiline nose and brilliant, piercing blue eyes. Often sporting a double-breasted waistcoat, a high collar and, when necessary, a frock coat, he also wore his trademark blue neckcloth. From 1878 he cultivated an increasingly long beard, and took on the appearance of an "Old Testament" prophet.
Ruskin in the eyes of a student
The following description of Ruskin as a lecturer was written by an eyewitness, who was a student at the time (1884):
An incident where the Arts and Crafts master William Morris had aroused the anger of Dr Bright, Master of University College, Oxford, served to demonstrate Ruskin's charisma:
Legacy
International
Ruskin's influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as "one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him, rendering his ideas into Russian. Proust not only admired Ruskin but helped translate his works into French. Gandhi wrote of the "magic spell" cast on him by Unto This Last and paraphrased the work in Gujarati, calling it Sarvodaya, "The Advancement of All". In Japan, Ryuzo Mikimoto actively collaborated in Ruskin's translation. He commissioned sculptures and sundry commemorative items, and incorporated Ruskinian rose motifs in the jewellery produced by his cultured pearl empire. He established the Ruskin Society of Tokyo and his children built a dedicated library to house his Ruskin collection.
A number of utopian socialist Ruskin Colonies attempted to put his political ideals into practice. These communities included Ruskin, Florida, Ruskin, British Columbia and the Ruskin Commonwealth Association, a colony in Dickson County, Tennessee in existence from 1894 to 1899.
Ruskin's work has been translated into numerous languages including, in addition to those already mentioned (Russian, French, Japanese): German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Welsh, several Indian languages like Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ), Esperanto and Gikuyu.
Art, architecture and literature
Theorists and practitioners in a broad range of disciplines acknowledged their debt to Ruskin. Architects including Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius incorporated his ideas in their work. Writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound felt Ruskin's influence. The American poet Marianne Moore was an enthusiastic Ruskin reader. Art historians and critics, among them Herbert Read, Roger Fry and Wilhelm Worringer, knew Ruskin's work well. Admirers ranged from the British-born American watercolourist and engraver John William Hill to the sculptor-designer, printmaker and utopianist Eric Gill. Aside from E. T. Cook, Ruskin's editor and biographer, other leading British journalists influenced by Ruskin include J. A. Spender, and the war correspondent H. W. Nevinson.
Craft and conservation
William Morris and C. R. Ashbee (of the Guild of Handicraft) were keen disciples, and through them Ruskin's legacy can be traced in the arts and crafts movement. Ruskin's ideas on the preservation of open spaces and the conservation of historic buildings and places inspired his friends Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley to help found the National Trust.
Society, education and sport
Pioneers of town planning such as Thomas Coglan Horsfall and Patrick Geddes called Ruskin an inspiration and invoked his ideas in justification of their own social interventions; likewise the founders of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.
Edward Carpenter's community in Millthorpe, Derbyshire was partly inspired by Ruskin, and John Kenworthy's colony at Purleigh, Essex, which was briefly a refuge for the Doukhobors, combined Ruskin's ideas and Tolstoy's.
The most prolific collector of Ruskiniana was John Howard Whitehouse, who saved Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and opened it as a permanent Ruskin memorial. Inspired by Ruskin's educational ideals, Whitehouse established Bembridge School, on the Isle of Wight, and ran it along Ruskinian lines. Educationists from William Jolly to Michael Ernest Sadler wrote about and appreciated Ruskin's ideas. Ruskin College, an educational establishment in Oxford originally intended for working men, was named after him by its American founders, Walter Vrooman and Charles A. Beard.
Ruskin's innovative publishing experiment, conducted by his one-time Working Men's College pupil George Allen, whose business was eventually merged to become Allen & Unwin, anticipated the establishment of the Net Book Agreement.
Ruskin's Drawing Collection, a collection of 1470 works of art he gathered as learning aids for the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (which he founded at Oxford), is at the Ashmolean Museum. The Museum has promoted Ruskin's art teaching, utilising the collection for in-person and online drawing courses.
Pierre de Coubertin, the innovator of the modern Olympic Games, cited Ruskin's principles of beautification, asserting that the games should be "Ruskinised" to create an aesthetic identity that transcended mere championship competitions.
Politics and critique of political economy
Ruskin was an inspiration for many Christian socialists, and his ideas informed the work of economists such as William Smart and J. A. Hobson, and the positivist Frederic Harrison. Ruskin was discussed in university extension classes, and in reading circles and societies formed in his name. He helped to inspire the settlement movement in Britain and the United States. Resident workers at Toynbee Hall such as the future civil servants Hubert Llewellyn Smith and William Beveridge (author of the Report ... on Social Insurance and Allied Services), and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged their debt to Ruskin as they helped to found the British welfare state. More of the British Labour Party's earliest MPs acknowledged Ruskin's influence than mentioned Karl Marx or the Bible. More recently, Ruskin's works have also influenced Phillip Blond and the Red Tory movement.
Ruskin in the 21st century
In 2019, Ruskin200 was inaugurated as a year-long celebration marking the bicentenary of Ruskin's birth.
Admirers and scholars of Ruskin can visit the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and the Ruskin Museum, both in Coniston in the English Lake District. All three mount regular exhibitions open to the public all the year round. Barony House in Edinburgh is home to a descendant of John Ruskin. She has designed and hand painted various friezes in honour of her ancestor and it is open to the public. Ruskin's Guild of St George continues his work today, in education, the arts, crafts, and the rural economy.
Many streets, buildings, organisations and institutions bear his name: The Priory Ruskin Academy in Grantham, Lincolnshire; John Ruskin College, South Croydon; and Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford and Cambridge, which traces its origins to the Cambridge School of Art, at the foundation of which Ruskin spoke in 1858. Also, the Ruskin Literary and Debating Society, (founded in 1900 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), the oldest surviving club of its type, and still promoting the development of literary knowledge and public speaking today; and the Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles, which still exists. In addition, there is the Ruskin Pottery, Ruskin House, Croydon and Ruskin Hall at the University of Pittsburgh.
Ruskin, Florida, United States—site of one of the short-lived American Ruskin Colleges—is named after John Ruskin. There is a mural of Ruskin titled "Head, Heart and Hands" on a building across from the Ruskin Post Office.
Since 2000, scholarly research has focused on aspects of Ruskin's legacy, including his impact on the sciences; John Lubbock and Oliver Lodge admired him. Two major academic projects have looked at Ruskin and cultural tourism (investigating, for example, Ruskin's links with Thomas Cook); the other focuses on Ruskin and the theatre. The sociologist and media theorist David Gauntlett argues that Ruskin's notions of craft can be felt today in online communities such as YouTube and throughout Web 2.0. Similarly, architectural theorist Lars Spuybroek has argued that Ruskin's understanding of the Gothic as a combination of two types of variation, rough savageness and smooth changefulness, opens up a new way of thinking leading to digital and so-called parametric design.
Notable Ruskin enthusiasts include the writers Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson, and the politicians Patrick Cormack, Frank Judd, Frank Field and Tony Benn. In 2006, Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, Raficq Abdulla, Jonathon Porritt and Nicholas Wright were among those to contribute to the symposium, There is no wealth but life: Ruskin in the 21st Century. Jonathan Glancey at The Guardian and Andrew Hill at the Financial Times have both written about Ruskin, as has the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. In 2015, inspired by Ruskin's philosophy of education, Marc Turtletaub founded Meristem in Fair Oaks, California. The centre educates adolescents with developmental differences using Ruskin's "land and craft" ideals, transitioning them so they will succeed as adults in an evolving post-industrial society.
Theory and criticism
Ruskin wrote over 250 works, initially art criticism and history, but expanding to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, mythology, travel, political economy and social reform. After his death Ruskin's works were collected in the 39-volume "Library Edition", completed in 1912 by his friends Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. The range and quantity of Ruskin's writing, and its complex, allusive and associative method of expression, cause certain difficulties. In 1898, John A. Hobson observed that in attempting to summarise Ruskin's thought, and by extracting passages from across his work, "the spell of his eloquence is broken". Clive Wilmer has written, further, that, "The anthologising of short purple passages, removed from their intended contexts [... is] something which Ruskin himself detested and which has bedevilled his reputation from the start." Nevertheless, some aspects of Ruskin's theory and criticism require further consideration.
Art and design criticism
Ruskin's early work defended the reputation of J. M. W. Turner. He believed that all great art should communicate an understanding and appreciation of nature. Accordingly, inherited artistic conventions should be rejected. Only by means of direct observation can an artist, through form and colour, represent nature in art. He advised artists in Modern Painters I to: "go to Nature in all singleness of heart... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing." By the 1850s. Ruskin was celebrating the Pre-Raphaelites, whose members, he said, had formed "a new and noble school" of art that would provide a basis for a thoroughgoing reform of the art world. For Ruskin, art should communicate truth above all things. However, this could not be revealed by mere display of skill, and must be an expression of the artist's whole moral outlook. Ruskin rejected the work of Whistler because he considered it to epitomise a reductive mechanisation of art.
Ruskin's strong rejection of Classical tradition in The Stones of Venice typifies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in his thought: "Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified." Rejection of mechanisation and standardisation informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised the Gothic for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he perceived between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural environment, and between worker and God. Attempts in the 19th century to reproduce Gothic forms (such as pointed arches), attempts he had helped inspire, were not enough to make these buildings expressions of what Ruskin saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organicism.
For Ruskin, the Gothic style in architecture embodied the same moral truths he sought to promote in the visual arts. It expressed the 'meaning' of architecture—as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration—all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure." Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous and repressive standardisation. Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with the demoralising consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as The Crystal Palace, which he criticised. Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works over the course of his career, his much-anthologised essay "The Nature of Gothic" from the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) is widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative discussions of his central argument.
Ruskin's theories indirectly encouraged a revival of Gothic styles, but Ruskin himself was often dissatisfied with the results. He objected that forms of mass-produced faux Gothic did not exemplify his principles, but showed disregard for the true meaning of the style. Even the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration, met with his disapproval. The O'Shea brothers, freehand stone carvers chosen to revive the creative "freedom of thought" of Gothic craftsmen, disappointed him by their lack of reverence for the task.
Ruskin's distaste for oppressive standardisation led to later works in which he attacked laissez-faire capitalism, which he thought was at its root. His ideas provided inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement, the founders of the National Trust, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Ruskin's views on art, wrote Kenneth Clark, "cannot be made to form a logical system, and perhaps owe to this fact a part of their value." Ruskin's accounts of art are descriptions of a superior type that conjure images vividly in the mind's eye.
Clark neatly summarises the key features of Ruskin's writing on art and architecture:
Art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole man. Whether in making or perceiving a work of art, we bring to bear on it feeling, intellect, morals, knowledge, memory, and every other human capacity, all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept as false and dehumanising as economic man.
Even the most superior mind and the most powerful imagination must found itself on facts, which must be recognised for what they are. The imagination will often reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind cannot understand; but this recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions.
These facts must be perceived by the senses, or felt; not learnt.
The greatest artists and schools of art have believed it their duty to impart vital truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about religion and the conduct of life.
Beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function.'
This fulfilment of function depends on all parts of an organism cohering and co-operating. This was what he called the 'Law of Help,' one of Ruskin's fundamental beliefs, extending from nature and art to society.
Good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important.
Great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny.
Historic preservation
Ruskin's belief in preservation of ancient buildings had a significant influence on later thinking about the distinction between conservation and restoration. He was a strong proponent of the former, while his contemporary, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, promoted the latter. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, (1849) Ruskin wrote:
This abhorrence of restoration is in marked contrast to Viollet-le-Duc, who wrote that restoration is a "means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time."
For Ruskin, the "age" of a building was crucially significant as an aspect in its preservation: "For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."
Critique of political economy
Ruskin wielded a critique of political economy of orthodox, 19th-century political economy principally on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations (broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in The Stones of Venice, and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such as The Political Economy of Art (A Joy for Ever), but he gave them full expression in the influential and at the time of publication, very controversial essays, Unto This Last.
At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or craftsman, in modern industrial capitalist society. Ruskin believed that the economic theories of Adam Smith, expressed in The Wealth of Nations had led, through the division of labour to the alienation of the worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment. (See The Stones of Venice above.)
Ruskin argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker or product.
In the preface to Unto This Last (1862), Ruskin recommended that the state should underwrite standards of service and production to guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and 'gentleness and justice'; government manufactories and workshops; government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received honourably and not in shame. Many of these ideas were later incorporated into the welfare state.
Controversies
Turner's erotic drawings
Until 2005, biographies of both J. M. W. Turner and Ruskin had claimed that in 1858 Ruskin burned bundles of erotic paintings and drawings by Turner to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. Ruskin's friend Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery, was said to have colluded in the alleged destruction of Turner's works. In 2005, these works, which form part of the Turner Bequest held at Tate Britain, were re-appraised by Turner Curator Ian Warrell, who concluded that Ruskin and Wornum had not destroyed them.
Sexuality
Ruskin's sexuality has been the subject of a great deal of speculation and critical comment. His one marriage, to Effie Gray, was annulled after six years owing to non-consummation. Effie, in a letter to her parents, claimed that Ruskin found her "person" repugnant: He alleged various reasons, hatred of children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason... that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848]. Ruskin told his lawyer during the annulment proceedings: It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it. The cause of Ruskin's "disgust" has led to much conjecture. Mary Lutyens speculated that he rejected Effie because he was horrified by the sight of her pubic hair. Lutyens argued that Ruskin must have known the female form only through Greek statues and paintings of nudes which lacked pubic hair. However, Peter Fuller wrote, "It has been said that he was frightened on the wedding night by the sight of his wife's pubic hair; more probably, he was perturbed by her menstrual blood." Ruskin's biographers Tim Hilton and John Batchelor also took the view that menstruation was the more likely explanation, though Batchelor also suggests that body-odour may have been the problem. There is no evidence to support any of these theories. William Ewart Gladstone said to his daughter Mary, "should you ever hear anyone blame Millais or his wife, or Mr. Ruskin [for the breakdown of the marriage], remember that there is no fault; there was misfortune, even tragedy. All three were perfectly blameless." The fullest story of the Ruskins' marriage to date has been told by the scholar Robert Brownell.
Ruskin's later relationship with Rose La Touche has led to claims that he started a correspondence with her when he met her at the age of nine. In fact, he did not approach her as a suitor until on or near her eighteenth birthday. She asked him to wait for her until she was 21. Receiving no answer, he repeated his proposal.
Ruskin is not known to have had any sexually intimate relationships. During an episode of mental derangement after Rose died, he wrote a letter in which he insisted that Rose's spirit had instructed him to marry a girl who was visiting him at the time. It is also true that in letters from Ruskin to Kate Greenaway he asked her to draw her "girlies" (as he called her child figures) without clothing:
Will you – (it's all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me.
In a letter to his physician John Simon on 15 May 1886, Ruskin wrote:
I like my girls from ten to sixteen—allowing of 17 or 18 as long as they're not in love with anybody but me.—I've got some darlings of 8—12—14—just now, and my Pigwiggina here—12—who fetches my wood and is learning to play my bells.Pigwiggina is a nickname Ruskin used for the girl as she looked after (lambs and) piglets; c.f.
Ruskin's biographers disagree about the allegation of "paedophilia". Tim Hilton, in his two-volume biography, asserts that Ruskin "was a paedophile" but leaves the claim unexplained, while John Batchelor argues that the term is inappropriate because Ruskin's behaviour does not "fit the profile". Others point to a definite pattern of "nympholeptic" behaviour with regard to his interactions with girls at a Winnington school. However, there is no evidence that Ruskin ever engaged in any sexual activity with anyone at all. According to one interpretation, what Ruskin valued most in pre-pubescent girls was their innocence; the fact that they were not (yet) fully developed sexual beings is what attracted him. An exploration of this topic by James L. Spates declares that "whatever idiosyncratic qualities his erotic expressions may have possessed, when it comes to matters of sexual capability and interest, there is every reason to conclude that John Ruskin was physically and emotionally normal."
Common law of business balance
Ruskin was not a fan of buying low and selling high. In the "Veins of Wealth" section of Unto This Last, he wrote: "So far as I know, there is not in history record of anything so disgraceful to the human intellect as the modern idea that the commercial text, 'Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,' represents, or under any circumstances could represent, an available principle of national economy." Perhaps due to such passages, Ruskin is frequently identified as the originator of the "common law of business balance"—a statement about the relationships of price and quality as they pertain to manufactured goods, and often summarised as: "The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot." This is the core of a longer statement usually attributed to Ruskin, although Ruskin's authorship is disputed among Ruskin scholars. Fred Shapiro maintains that the statement does not appear anywhere in Ruskin's works, and George Landow is likewise sceptical of the claim of Ruskin's authorship. In a posting of the Ruskin Library News, a blog associated with the Ruskin Library (a major collection of Ruskiniana located at Lancaster University), an anonymous library staff member briefly mentions the statement and its widespread use, saying that, "This is one of many quotations ascribed to Ruskin, without there being any trace of them in his writings – although someone, somewhere, thought they sounded like Ruskin." In an issue of the journal Heat Transfer Engineering, Kenneth Bell quotes the statement and mentions that it has been attributed to Ruskin. While Bell believes in the veracity of its content, he adds that the statement does not appear in Ruskin's published works.
Early in the 20th century, this statement appeared—without any authorship attribution—in magazine advertisements, in a business catalogue, in student publications, and, occasionally, in editorial columns. Later in the 20th century, however, magazine advertisements, student publications, business books, technical publications, scholarly journals, and business catalogues often included the statement with attribution to Ruskin.
In the 21st century, and based upon the statement's applicability of the issues of quality and price, the statement continues to be used and attributed to Ruskin—despite the questionable nature of the attribution.
For many years, various Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlours prominently displayed a section of the statement in framed signs. ("There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that man's lawful prey.") The signs listed Ruskin as the author of the statement, but the signs gave no information on where or when Ruskin was supposed to have written, spoken, or published the statement. Due to the statement's widespread use as a promotional slogan, and despite questions of Ruskin's authorship, it is likely that many people who are otherwise unfamiliar with Ruskin now associate him with this statement.
Definitions
The OED credits J. Ruskin with the first quotation in 152 separate entries. Some include:
Pathetic fallacy: Ruskin coined this term in Modern Painters III (1856) to describe the ascription of human emotions to inanimate objects and impersonal natural forces, as in "Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy" (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre).
Fors Clavigera: Ruskin gave this title to a series of letters he wrote "to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" (1871–84). The name was intended to signify three great powers that fashion human destiny, as Ruskin explained at length in Letter 2 (February 1871). These were: force, symbolised by the club (clava) of Hercules; Fortitude, symbolised by the key (clavis) of Ulysses; and Fortune, symbolised by the nail (clavus) of Lycurgus. These three powers (the "fors") together represent human talents and abilities to choose the right moment and then to strike with energy. The concept is derived from Shakespeare's phrase "There is a tide in the affairs of men/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" (Brutus in Julius Caesar). Ruskin believed that the letters were inspired by the Third Fors: striking out at the right moment.For a full and concise introduction to the work, see Dinah Birch, "Introduction", in John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. xxxiii–xlix.
Illth: Used by Ruskin as the antithesis of wealth, which he defined as life itself; broadly, where wealth is 'well-being', illth is "ill-being".
Theoria: Ruskin's 'theoretic' faculty – theoretic, as opposed to aesthetic – enables a vision of the beautiful as intimating a reality deeper than the everyday, at least in terms of the kind of transcendence generally seen as immanent in things of this world. For an example of the influence of Ruskin's concept of theoria, see Peter Fuller.
Modern Atheism: Ruskin applied this label to "the unfortunate persistence of the clergy in teaching children what they cannot understand, and in employing young consecrate persons to assert in pulpits what they do not know."
Excrescence: Ruskin defined an "excrescence" as an outgrowth of the main body of a building that does not harmonise well with the main body. He originally used the term to describe certain gothic revival features also for later additions to cathedrals and various other public buildings, especially from the Gothic period.
Fictional portrayals
Ruskin figures as Mr Herbert in The New Republic (1878), a novel by one of his Oxford undergraduates, William Mallock (1849–1923).
The Love of John Ruskin (1912) a silent movie about Ruskin, Effie and Millais.
Edith Wharton's False Dawn novella, the first in the 1924 Old New York series has the protagonist meet John Ruskin.
Ruskin was the inspiration for either the Drawling Master or the Gryphon in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Dante's Inferno (1967) Ken Russell's biopic for television of Rossetti, in which Ruskin is played by Clive Goodwin
The Love School (1975) a BBC TV series about the Pre-Raphaelites, starring David Collings (Ruskin), Anne Kidd (Effie), Peter Egan (Millais).
A novel about the marriage of John Ruskin.
Dear Countess (1983) a radio play by Elizabeth Morgan, with Derek Jacobi (Ruskin), Bridget McCann (Gray), Timothy West (Old Mr Ruskin) Michael Fenner (Millais). The author played Ruskin's mother.
Peter Hoyle's novel, Brantwood: The Story of an Obsession (1986, ) is about two cousins who pursue their interest in Ruskin to his Coniston home.
The Passion of John Ruskin (1994), a film directed by Alex Chapple.
Modern Painters (1995) an opera about Ruskin by David Lang.
Parrots and Owls (1994) a radio play by John Purser about Ruskin's attempt to revive Gothic architecture and his connection to the O'Shea brothers.
The Countess (1995), a play written by Gregory Murphy, dealing with Ruskin's marriage.
A novel in which Ruskin makes his last visit to Amiens cathedral in 1879.
The Order of Release (1998), a radio play by Robin Brooks about Ruskin (Bob Peck), Effie (Sharon Small) and Millais (David Tennant).
Ruskin and the Hinksey diggings form the backdrop to Ann Harries' novel, Manly Pursuits (1999).
A collection of short stories that includes Come, Gentle Nightabout Ruskin and Effie's wedding night.
Mrs Ruskin (2003), a play by Kim Morrissey dealing with Ruskin's marriage.
"Sesame and Roses" (2007), a short story by Grace Andreacchi that explores Ruskin's twin obsessions with Venice and Rose La Touche.
Desperate Romantics (2009), a six-part BBC drama serial about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin is played by Tom Hollander.
Benjamin, Melanie (2010). Alice I Have Been. . A fictionalized account of the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Mr. Turner (2014), a biopic of J. M. W. Turner with Ruskin portrayed as a precocious prig by Joshua McGuire.
Effie Gray (2014), a biopic about the Ruskin-Gray-Millais love triangle, written by Emma Thompson and featuring Greg Wise (Ruskin), Dakota Fanning (Gray) and Tom Sturridge (Millais).
Light, Descending (2014) is a biographical novel about John Ruskin by Octavia Randolph.
Gallery
Paintings
Drawings
Select bibliography
It is the standard scholarly edition of Ruskin's work, the Library Edition, sometimes called simply Cook and Wedderburn. The volume in which the following works can be found is indicated in the form: (Works [followed by the volume number]).
Works by Ruskin
Poems (written 1835–46; collected 1850) (Works 2)
The Poetry of Architecture (serialised The Architectural Magazine 1837–38; authorised book, 1893) (Works 1)
Letters to a College Friend (written 1840–45; published 1894) (Works 1)
The King of the Golden River, or the Black Brothers. A Legend of Stiria (written 1841; published 1850) (Works 1)
Modern Painters (5 vols.) (1843–60) (Works 3–7)
Vol. I (1843) (Parts I and II) Of General Principles and of Truth (Works 3)
Vol. II (1846) (Part III) Of the Imaginative and Theoretic Faculties (Works 4)
Vol. III (1856) (Part IV) Of Many Things (Works 5)
Vol. IV (1856) (Part V) Mountain Beauty (Works 6)
Vol. V (1860) (Part VI) Of Leaf Beauty (Part VII) Of Cloud Beauty (Part VIII) Of Ideas of Relation (1) Of Invention Formal (Part IX) Of Ideas of Relation (2) Of Invention Spiritual (Works 7)
The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) (Works 8)
The Stones of Venice (3 vols) (1851–53)
Vol. I. The Foundations (1851) (Works 9)
Vol. II. The Sea–Stories (1853) (Works 10) – containing the chapter "The Nature of Gothic"
Vol. III. The Fall (1853) (Works 11)
Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851) (Works 12)
Pre-Raphaelitism (1851) (Works 12)
Letters to the Times on the Pre-Raphaelite Artists (1851, 1854) (Works 12)
Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh, 1853) (1854) (Works 12)
Academy Notes (Annual Reviews of the June Royal Academy Exhibitions) (1855–59, 1875) (Works 14)
The Harbours of England (1856) (Works 13)
The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners (1857) (Works 15)
A Joy Forever' and Its Price in the Market: being the substance (with additions) of two lectures on The Political Economy of Art (1857, 1880) (Works 16)
The Two Paths: being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858–9 (1859) (Works 16)
The Elements of Perspective, Arranged for the Use of Schools and Intended to be Read in Connection with the First Three Books of Euclid (1859) (Works 15)
Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (serialised Cornhill Magazine 1860, book 1862) (Works 17)
Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy (serialised Fraser's Magazine 1862–63, book 1872) (Works 17)
The Cestus of Aglaia (serialised Art Journal 1864–64, incorporated (revised) in On the Old Road (1882) (Works 19)
Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in 1864 (1865) (i.e., "Of Queens' Gardens" and "Of Kings' Treasuries" to which was added, in a later edition of 1871, "The Mystery of Life and Its Arts") (Works 18)
The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation (1866) (Works 18)
The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War (1866) (to a later edition was added a fourth lecture (delivered 1869), called "The Future of England") (1866) (Works 18)
Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work (1867) (Works 17)
The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (1869) (Works 19)
Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 (Works 20)
Aratra Pentelici: Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas term, 1870 (1872) (Works 20)
Lectures on Landscape, Delivered at Oxford in [Lent term| Lent Term], 1871 (1898) ("Works" 22)
Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871–84) ("Works" 27–29) (originally collected in 8 vols., vols. 1–7 covering annually 1871–1877, and vol. 8, Letters 85–96, covering 1878–84)
Volume I. Letters 1–36 (1871–73) (Works 27)
Volume II. Letters 37–72 (1874–76) (Works 28)
Volume III. Letters 73–96 (1877–84) (Works 29)
The Eagle's Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural science to Art, Given before the University of Oxford in Lent term, 1872 (1872) (Works 22)
Ariadne Florentina': Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving, with Appendix, Given before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term, 1872 (1876) (Works 22)
Love's Meinie: Lectures on Greek and English Birds (1873–81) (Works 25)
Val d'Arno: Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art, directly antecedent to the Florentine Year of Victories, given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1873 (1874) (Works 23)
The Aesthetic and Mathematic School of Art in Florence: Lectures Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1874 (first published 1906) (Works 23)
Mornings in Florence: Simple Studies of Christian Art, for English Travellers (1875–77) (Works 23)
Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and Life of Stones (1875–83) (Works 26)
Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps, and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew (1875–86) (Works 25)
Bibliotheca Pastorum (i.e., 'Shepherd's Library', consisting ofmultiple volumes) (ed. John Ruskin) (1876–88) (Works 31–32)
Laws of Fésole: A Familiar Treatise on the Elementary Principles and Practice of Drawing and Painting as Determined by the Tuscan Masters (arranged for the use of schools) (1877–78) (Works 15)
St Mark's Rest (1877–84, book 1884) (Works 24)
Fiction, Fair and Foul (serialised Nineteenth Century 1880–81, incorporated in On the Old Road (1885)) (Works 34)
The Bible of Amiens (the first part of Our Fathers Have Told Us) (1880–85) (Works 33)
The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1883, book 1884) (Works 33)
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution, 4 and 11 February 1884 (1884) (Works 34)
The Pleasures of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1884, published 1884–85) (Works 33)
Præterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life (3 vols.) (1885–89) (Works 35)
Dilecta: Correspondence, Diary Notes, and Extracts from Books, Illustrating 'Praeterita''' (1886, 1887, 1900) (Works 35)
Selected diaries and letters
The Diaries of John Ruskin eds. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (Clarendon Press, 1956–59)
The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin ed. Helen Gill Viljoen (Yale University Press, 1971)
A Tour of the Lakes in Cumbria. John Ruskin's Diary for 1830 eds. Van Akin Burd and James S. Dearden (Scolar, 1990)
The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the children at Winnington Hall ed. Van Akin Burd (Harvard University Press, 1969)
The Ruskin Family Letters: The Correspondence of John James Ruskin, his wife, and their son John, 1801–1843 ed. Van Akin Burd (2 vols.) (Cornell University Press, 1973)
The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton ed. John Lewis Bradley and Ian Ousby (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin ed. George Allen Cate (Stanford University Press, 1982)
John Ruskin's Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters ed. Rachel Dickinson (Legenda, 2008)
Selected editions of Ruskin still in print
Praeterita [Ruskin's autobiography] ed. Francis O' Gorman (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Unto this Last: Four essays on the First Principles of Political Economy intro. Andrew Hill (Pallas Athene, 2010)
Unto This Last And Other Writings ed. Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1986)
Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century preface by Clive Wilmer and intro. Peter Brimblecombe (Pallas Athene, 2012)
The Nature of Gothic (Pallas Athene, 2011) [facsimile reprint of Morris's Kelmscott Edition with essays by Robert Hewison and Tony Pinkney]
Selected Writings ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Selected Writings (originally Ruskin Today) ed. Kenneth Clark (Penguin, 1964 and later impressions)
The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from his Writings ed. John D. Rosenberg (George Allen and Unwin, 1963)
Athena: Queen of the Air (Annotated) (originally The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm) ed. Na Ding, foreword by Tim Kavi, brief literary bio by Kelli M. Webert (TiLu Press, 2013 electronic book version, paper forthcoming)Ruskin on Music ed Mary Augusta Wakefield (Creative Media Partners LLC, 2015)
See also
John Henry Devereux
Ruskin, Nebraska
Ruskin's diggers in Ferry Hinksey (1874)
Ruskin's Ride, a bridleway in Oxford
Trenton, Missouri, home of the first Ruskin College in the United States
Charles Augustus Howell
The English House Mount Ruskin
References
Sources
Robert Hewison, "Ruskin, John (1819–1900)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition.
Francis O'Gorman (1999) John Ruskin (Pocket Biographies) (Sutton Publishing)
James S. Dearden (2004), John Ruskin (Shire Publications)
Further reading
General
Barringer, Tim. et al., ed. Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-300-24641-4.
Conner, Patrick. Savage Ruskin. New York: Macmillan Press, 1979.
Cook, E. T. Ruskin, John. Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1901.
Dearden, James S. John Ruskin's Bookplates. The Book Collector (1964) 13 no 3 (autumn): 335-339.
Dearden, J. S. The Production and Distribution of John Ruskin's Poems 1850. The Book Collector (1968)17 no 2 (summer): 151-167.
Dearden, J. S. Wise and Ruskin. The Book Collector (1969) 18.no.1 (spring): 45-56.
Freeman, Kelly; Hughes, Thomas. et al. eds. Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to The Storm-Cloud. The Courtauld, 2021. ISBN 978-1-907485-13-8.
Hanley, K; Hull, C. S. eds. John Ruskin's Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings. Cambridge: Legenda, 2016. ISBN 978-1-906540-85-2.
Hewison, Robert. John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye. Thames and Hudson, 1976.
Hugh, Chriholm. ed. Ruskin, John. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1911.
Jackson, Kevin. The Worlds of John Ruskin. Pallas Athene, 2010.
Quill, Sarah. Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited. Ashgate, 2000.
Quigley Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History Of The World In Our Time. GSG & Associates, 1966.
Rosenberg, J. G. The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius. Columbia University Press, 1961.
Viljoen, Helen Gill. Ruskin's Scottish Heritage: A Prelude. University of Illinois Press, 1956.
Waldstein, C. The Work of John Ruskin: Its Influence Upon Modern Thought and Life, Harper's magazine vol. 78, no. 465 (Feb. 1889), pp. 382–418.
Biographies of Ruskin
W. G. Collingwood (1893) The Life and Work of John Ruskin 1–2. Methuen. (The Life of John Ruskin, sixth edition (1905).) – Note that the title was slightly changed for the 1900 2nd edition and later editions.
E. T. Cook (1911) The Life of John Ruskin 1–2. George Allen. (The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 1 of the second edition (1912); The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 2 of the second edition (1912))
Derrick Leon (1949) Ruskin: The Great Victorian (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Tim Hilton (1985) John Ruskin: The Early Years (Yale University Press)
Tim Hilton (2000) John Ruskin: The Later Years (Yale University Press)
John Batchelor (2000) John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life (Chatto & Windus)
Robert Hewison (2007) John Ruskin'' (Oxford University Press)
External links
Ruskin Today
The Eighth Lamp, Ruskin Studies Today. Ruskin journal
Library collections
UK Museum, Library and Archive collections relating to Ruskin at Cornucopia.org.uk. Retrieved
John Ruskin texts in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature Digital Collection. Retrieved 2010-10-19
Electronic editions
Liverpool Museums audio files on Ruskin
Archival material
Ruskin letter to Brantwood at Mount Holyoke College
Ruskin letter to Simon at Mount Holyoke College
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's online biography and gallery . Retrieved 2010-10-19
Sources for the Study of John Ruskin and the Guild of St George. Produced by Sheffield City Council's Libraries and Archives.
Archival material at
Finding aid to John Ruskin letters at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
John Ruskin Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
1819 births
1900 deaths
19th-century British journalists
19th-century British philosophers
19th-century economists
19th-century English painters
Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford
Alumni of King's College London
Anti-consumerists
Architectural theoreticians
Arts and Crafts movement artists
British anti-capitalists
British male journalists
Burials in Cumbria
Conchologists
English architecture writers
English art critics
English environmentalists
English essayists
English male painters
English people of Scottish descent
English philosophers
English watercolourists
Guild of St George
Male essayists
Painters from London
People associated with Anglia Ruskin University
People associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Romantic critics of political economy
Slade Professors of Fine Art (University of Oxford) | false | [
"Mikhail Roginsky (; 14 August 1931 – 5 July 2004) was a Russian painter. Roginsky was one of the leaders of Soviet Nonconformist Art and the creator of the modern national visual method, with its laconic means and inner expressiveness.\n\nBiography \nIn 1978, Roginsky moved to Paris. One year before his emigration he had gone back to documentary art and did a series of five or six works with cans. \"I felt (he explained) that I had to go back to what I had begun with, to return to myself\". He left Russia shortly after he had finished that series. Roginsky answer to the question whether the West had any influence on him, was brief: \"Sure\". But he could not say exactly what. \"Everything, (he believes) a different life, a different atmosphere, a different reality. I am generally very much influenced by where I live, what I see around me, what kind of art I behold and the type of people I rub shoulders with'\".\n\nHe died on 5 July 2004 in Paris.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nRussia Info-Centre: Photograph and samples of his work\n\n20th-century Russian painters\nRussian male painters\n21st-century Russian painters\n1931 births\n2004 deaths",
"Jovan Zonjić (1907–1961) was one of Serbia's most important painters in the transition from academic to modern painting.\n\nZonjić came from the village of Kralj near Andrijevica. From Andrijevica, his father Radisav Zonjić moved to Podgorica, then to Cetinje, where he ran cafės, and in Cetinje married a Herzegovinian from Berovo, Milica Popović. \n\nZonjić graduated from Royal Art School in Belgrade in 1931 and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he lived intermittently until 1939. With Zonjić's painting \"Fethiye\", which he exhibited in 1934 at the VII Autumn Exhibition in Belgrade, he received the \"Belgraders to Belgrade Artists\" Award. That award enabled him to return to Paris and resume his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts which he had previously interrupted due to financial difficulties. It was in Paris that he improved, in the midst of some fiercest competition at the time.\n\nAt the Exhibition of Yugoslav Artists in Paris in March 1939, the only painting purchased by the Musée National d'Art Moderne was Zonjić's \"Black Woman\" (nine of Zonjić's paintings were exhibited). Occupying Paris, the Nazis, as spoils of war, took from that museum what they considered significant. Among the looted paintings was his painting, \"Black Woman\". The original painting is now lost, but a reproduction of that painting was found by Branka Bogavac, former director of the Cultural Center of Yugoslavia in Paris. It was stored on one of the underground floors of the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.\n\nOne critic wrote that Zonjić was not a favourite among Belgrade painters, because he endangered their position in the painting establishment since they could not challenge his painting abilities they resorted instead to spreading stories and rumours about him.\n\nIn 2007, an exhibition of Zonjić's paintings from the collection of the Cetinje Museums was organized in Berane and Andrijevica.\n\nReferences \n\n1907 births\n1961 deaths\n20th-century Serbian painters\n20th-century male artists\nPeople from Andrijevica\nPeople from Podgorica\nPeople from Cetinje\nAlumni of the École des Beaux-Arts\nModern painters\nSerbian male painters"
] |
[
"John Ruskin",
"Modern Painters I (1843)",
"What was Modern Painters I?",
"What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous but authoritative title, \"A Graduate of Oxford,",
"What was the outcome of Modern Painters?",
"I don't know."
] | C_586bfbeaa57b4e3ab23a77a6d7b375c8_0 | Was there a second volume? | 3 | Was there a second volume of Modern Painters by John Ruskin? | John Ruskin | Much of the period, from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin spent abroad with his parents, principally in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by critic, Rev John Eagles, in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903. Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and, from 1839, Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842. What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous but authoritative title, "A Graduate of Oxford," was Ruskin's response to Turner's critics. An electronic edition is available online. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters--and in particular Turner--were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa, unlike Turner, favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studio--to render what he has seen and understood imaginatively on canvas, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity. Although critics were slow to react and reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, notably Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his metier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued the nearly 20,000 sketches Turner gave to the British nation. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.
Early life (1819–1846)
Genealogy
Ruskin was the only child of first cousins. His father, John James Ruskin (1785–1864), was a sherry and wine importer, founding partner and de facto business manager of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq (see Allied Domecq). John James was born and brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a mother from Glenluce and a father originally from Hertfordshire. His wife, Margaret Cock (1781–1871), was the daughter of a publican in Croydon. She had joined the Ruskin household when she became companion to John James's mother, Catherine.
John James had hoped to practise law, and was articled as a clerk in London. His father, John Thomas Ruskin, described as a grocer (but apparently an ambitious wholesale merchant), was an incompetent businessman. To save the family from bankruptcy, John James, whose prudence and success were in stark contrast to his father, took on all debts, settling the last of them in 1832. John James and Margaret were engaged in 1809, but opposition to the union from John Thomas, and the problem of his debts, delayed the couple's wedding. They finally married, without celebration, in 1818. John James died on 3 March 1864 and is buried in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, Shirley, Croydon.
Childhood and education
Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London (demolished 1969), south of St Pancras railway station. His childhood was shaped by the contrasting influences of his father and mother, both of whom were fiercely ambitious for him. John James Ruskin helped to develop his son's Romanticism. They shared a passion for the works of Byron, Shakespeare and especially Walter Scott. They visited Scott's home, Abbotsford, in 1838, but Ruskin was disappointed by its appearance. Margaret Ruskin, an evangelical Christian, more cautious and restrained than her husband, taught young John to read the Bible from beginning to end, and then to start all over again, committing large portions to memory. Its language, imagery and parables had a profound and lasting effect on his writing. He later wrote:
Ruskin's childhood was spent from 1823 at 28 Herne Hill (demolished ), near the village of Camberwell in South London. He had few friends of his own age, but it was not the friendless and toyless experience he later said it was in his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89). He was educated at home by his parents and private tutors, including Congregationalist preacher Edward Andrews, whose daughters, Mrs Eliza Orme and Emily Augusta Patmore were later credited with introducing Ruskin to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
From 1834 to 1835 he attended the school in Peckham run by the progressive evangelical Thomas Dale (1797–1870). Ruskin heard Dale lecture in 1836 at King's College, London, where Dale was the first Professor of English Literature. Ruskin went on to enroll and complete his studies at King's College, where he prepared for Oxford under Dale's tutelage.
Travel
Ruskin was greatly influenced by the extensive and privileged travels he enjoyed in his childhood. It helped to establish his taste and augmented his education. He sometimes accompanied his father on visits to business clients at their country houses, which exposed him to English landscapes, architecture and paintings. Family tours took them to the Lake District (his first long poem, Iteriad, was an account of his tour in 1830) and to relatives in Perth, Scotland. As early as 1825, the family visited France and Belgium. Their continental tours became increasingly ambitious in scope: in 1833 they visited Strasbourg, Schaffhausen, Milan, Genoa and Turin, places to which Ruskin frequently returned. He developed a lifelong love of the Alps, and in 1835 visited Venice for the first time, that 'Paradise of cities' that provided the subject and symbolism of much of his later work.
These tours gave Ruskin the opportunity to observe and record his impressions of nature. He composed elegant, though mainly conventional poetry, some of which was published in Friendship's Offering. His early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of visually sophisticated and technically accomplished drawings of maps, landscapes and buildings, remarkable for a boy of his age. He was profoundly affected by Samuel Rogers's poem Italy (1830), a copy of which was given to him as a 13th birthday present; in particular, he deeply admired the accompanying illustrations by J. M. W. Turner. Much of Ruskin's own art in the 1830s was in imitation of Turner, and of Samuel Prout, whose Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany (1833) he also admired. His artistic skills were refined under the tutelage of Charles Runciman, Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding.
First publications
Ruskin's journeys also provided inspiration for writing. His first publication was the poem "On Skiddaw and Derwent Water" (originally entitled "Lines written at the Lakes in Cumberland: Derwentwater" and published in the Spiritual Times) (August 1829). In 1834, three short articles for Loudon's Magazine of Natural History were published. They show early signs of his skill as a close "scientific" observer of nature, especially its geology.
From September 1837 to December 1838, Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture was serialised in Loudon's Architectural Magazine, under the pen name "Kata Phusin" (Greek for "According to Nature"). It was a study of cottages, villas, and other dwellings centred on a Wordsworthian argument that buildings should be sympathetic to their immediate environment and use local materials. It anticipated key themes in his later writings. In 1839, Ruskin's "Remarks on the Present State of Meteorological Science" was published in Transactions of the Meteorological Society.
Oxford
In Michaelmas 1836, Ruskin matriculated at the University of Oxford, taking up residence at Christ Church in January of the following year. Enrolled as a gentleman-commoner, he enjoyed equal status with his aristocratic peers. Ruskin was generally uninspired by Oxford and suffered bouts of illness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of his time there was in the few, close friendships he made. His tutor, the Rev Walter Lucas Brown, always encouraged him, as did a young senior tutor, Henry Liddell (later the father of Alice Liddell) and a private tutor, the Rev Osborne Gordon. He became close to the geologist and natural theologian, William Buckland. Among his fellow-undergraduates, Ruskin's most important friends were Charles Thomas Newton and Henry Acland.
His most noteworthy success came in 1839 when, at the third attempt, he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry (Arthur Hugh Clough came second). He met William Wordsworth, who was receiving an honorary degree, at the ceremony.
Ruskin's health was poor and he never became independent from his family during his time at Oxford. His mother took lodgings on High Street, where his father joined them at weekends. He was devastated to hear that his first love, Adèle Domecq, the second daughter of his father's business partner, had become engaged to a French nobleman. In April 1840, whilst revising for his examinations, he began to cough blood, which led to fears of consumption and a long break from Oxford travelling with his parents.
Before he returned to Oxford, Ruskin responded to a challenge that had been put to him by Effie Gray, whom he later married: the twelve-year-old Effie had asked him to write a fairy story. During a six-week break at Leamington Spa to undergo Dr Jephson's (1798–1878) celebrated salt-water cure, Ruskin wrote his only work of fiction, the fable The King of the Golden River (not published until December 1850 (but imprinted 1851), with illustrations by Richard Doyle). A work of Christian sacrificial morality and charity, it is set in the Alpine landscape Ruskin loved and knew so well. It remains the most translated of all his works. Back at Oxford, in 1842 Ruskin sat for a pass degree, and was awarded an uncommon honorary double fourth-class degree in recognition of his achievements.
Modern Painters I (1843)
For much of the period from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin was abroad with his parents, mainly in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, later married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by the critic Rev John Eagles in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner, who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903.
Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842.
What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous authority of "A Graduate of Oxford", was Ruskin's answer to Turner's critics. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters—and in particular Turner—were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that, unlike Turner, Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studioto render imaginatively on canvas what he has seen and understood, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity.
Although critics were slow to react and the reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, including Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his métier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued nearly 20,000 sketches that Turner gave to the British nation.
1845 tour and Modern Painters II (1846)
Ruskin toured the continent with his parents again during 1844, visiting Chamonix and Paris, studying the geology of the Alps and the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Perugino among others at the Louvre. In 1845, at the age of 26, he undertook to travel without his parents for the first time. It provided him with an opportunity to study medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and especially Italy. In Lucca he saw the Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia, which Ruskin considered the exemplar of Christian sculpture (he later associated it with the then object of his love, Rose La Touche). He drew inspiration from what he saw at the Campo Santo in Pisa, and in Florence. In Venice, he was particularly impressed by the works of Fra Angelico and Giotto in St Mark's Cathedral, and Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco, but he was alarmed by the combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city: "Venice is lost to me", he wrote. It finally convinced him that architectural restoration was destruction, and that the only true and faithful action was preservation and conservation.
Drawing on his travels, he wrote the second volume of Modern Painters (published April 1846). The volume concentrated on Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists rather than on Turner. It was a more theoretical work than its predecessor. Ruskin explicitly linked the aesthetic and the divine, arguing that truth, beauty and religion are inextricably bound together: "the Beautiful as a gift of God". In defining categories of beauty and imagination, Ruskin argued that all great artists must perceive beauty and, with their imagination, communicate it creatively by means of symbolic representation. Generally, critics gave this second volume a warmer reception, although many found the attack on the aesthetic orthodoxy associated with Joshua Reynolds difficult to accept. In the summer, Ruskin was abroad again with his father, who still hoped his son might become a poet, even poet laureate, just one among many factors increasing the tension between them.
Middle life (1847–1869)
Marriage to Effie Gray
During 1847, Ruskin became closer to Euphemia "Effie" Gray, the daughter of family friends. It was for her that Ruskin had written The King of the Golden River. The couple were engaged in October. They married on 10 April 1848 at her home, Bowerswell, in Perth, once the residence of the Ruskin family. It was the site of the suicide of John Thomas Ruskin (Ruskin's grandfather). Owing to this association and other complications, Ruskin's parents did not attend. The European Revolutions of 1848 meant that the newlyweds' earliest travels together were restricted, but they were able to visit Normandy, where Ruskin admired the Gothic architecture.
Their early life together was spent at 31 Park Street, Mayfair, secured for them by Ruskin's father (later addresses included nearby 6 Charles Street, and 30 Herne Hill). Effie was too unwell to undertake the European tour of 1849, so Ruskin visited the Alps with his parents, gathering material for the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters. He was struck by the contrast between the Alpine beauty and the poverty of Alpine peasants, stirring his increasingly sensitive social conscience.
The marriage was unhappy, with Ruskin reportedly being cruel to Effie and distrustful of her. The marriage was never consummated and was annulled six years later in 1854.
Architecture
Ruskin's developing interest in architecture, and particularly in the Gothic, led to the first work to bear his name, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). It contained 14 plates etched by the author. The title refers to seven moral categories that Ruskin considered vital to and inseparable from all architecture: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience. All would provide recurring themes in his future work. Seven Lamps promoted the virtues of a secular and Protestant form of Gothic. It was a challenge to the Catholic influence of architect A. W. N. Pugin.
The Stones of Venice
In November 1849, John and Effie Ruskin visited Venice, staying at the Hotel Danieli. Their different personalities are revealed by their contrasting priorities. For Effie, Venice provided an opportunity to socialise, while Ruskin was engaged in solitary studies. In particular, he made a point of drawing the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, because he feared that they would be destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops. One of these troops, Lieutenant Charles Paulizza, became friendly with Effie, apparently with Ruskin's consent. Her brother, among others, later claimed that Ruskin was deliberately encouraging the friendship to compromise her, as an excuse to separate.
Meanwhile, Ruskin was making the extensive sketches and notes that he used for his three-volume work The Stones of Venice (1851–53). Developing from a technical history of Venetian architecture from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history, Stones represented Ruskin's opinion of contemporary England. It served as a warning about the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued that Venice had degenerated slowly. Its cultural achievements had been compromised, and its society corrupted, by the decline of true Christian faith. Instead of revering the divine, Renaissance artists honoured themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness.
The chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" appeared in the second volume of Stones. Praising Gothic ornament, Ruskin argued that it was an expression of the artisan's joy in free, creative work. The worker must be allowed to think and to express his own personality and ideas, ideally using his own hands, rather than machinery.
This was both an aesthetic attack on, and a social critique of, the division of labour in particular, and industrial capitalism in general. This chapter had a profound effect, and was reprinted both by the Christian socialist founders of the Working Men's College and later by the Arts and Crafts pioneer and socialist William Morris.
Pre-Raphaelites
John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelite commitment to 'naturalism' – "paint[ing] from nature only", depicting nature in fine detail, had been influenced by Ruskin.
Ruskin became acquainted with Millais after the artists made an approach to Ruskin through their mutual friend Coventry Patmore. Initially, Ruskin had not been impressed by Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50), a painting that was considered blasphemous at the time, but Ruskin wrote letters defending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to The Times during May 1851. Providing Millais with artistic patronage and encouragement, in the summer of 1853 the artist (and his brother) travelled to Scotland with Ruskin and Effie where, at Glenfinlas, he painted the closely observed landscape background of gneiss rock to which, as had always been intended, he later added Ruskin's portrait.
Millais had painted a picture of Effie for The Order of Release, 1746, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. Suffering increasingly from physical illness and acute mental anxiety, Effie was arguing fiercely with her husband and his intense and overly protective parents, and sought solace with her own parents in Scotland. The Ruskin marriage was already undermined as she and Millais fell in love, and Effie left Ruskin, causing a public scandal.
During April 1854, Effie filed her suit of nullity, on grounds of "non-consummation" owing to his "incurable impotency", a charge Ruskin later disputed. Ruskin wrote, "I can prove my virility at once." The annulment was granted in July. Ruskin did not even mention it in his diary. Effie married Millais the following year. The complex reasons for the non-consummation and ultimate failure of the Ruskin marriage are a matter of enduring speculation and debate.
Ruskin continued to support Hunt and Rossetti. He also provided an annuity of £150 in 1855–57 to Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's wife, to encourage her art (and paid for the services of Henry Acland for her medical care). Other artists influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites also received both critical and financial assistance from Ruskin, including John Brett, John William Inchbold, and Edward Burne-Jones, who became a good friend (he called him "Brother Ned"). His father's disapproval of such friends was a further cause of tension between them.
During this period Ruskin wrote regular reviews of the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy with the title Academy Notes (1855–59, 1875). They were highly influential, capable of making or breaking reputations. The satirical magazine Punch published the lines (24 May 1856), "I paints and paints,/hears no complaints/And sells before I'm dry,/Till savage Ruskin/He sticks his tusk in/Then nobody will buy."
Ruskin was an art-philanthropist: in March 1861 he gave 48 Turner drawings to the Ashmolean in Oxford, and a further 25 to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in May. Ruskin's own work was very distinctive, and he occasionally exhibited his watercolours: in the United States in 1857–58 and 1879, for example; and in England, at the Fine Art Society in 1878, and at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour (of which he was an honorary member) in 1879. He created many careful studies of natural forms, based on his detailed botanical, geological and architectural observations. Examples of his work include a painted, floral pilaster decoration in the central room of Wallington Hall in Northumberland, home of his friend Pauline Trevelyan. The stained glass window in the Little Church of St Francis Funtley, Fareham, Hampshire is reputed to have been designed by him. Originally placed in the St. Peter's Church Duntisbourne Abbots near Cirencester, the window depicts the Ascension and the Nativity.
Ruskin's theories also inspired some architects to adapt the Gothic style. Such buildings created what has been called a distinctive "Ruskinian Gothic". Through his friendship with Henry Acland, Ruskin supported attempts to establish what became the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (designed by Benjamin Woodward)—which is the closest thing to a model of this style, but still failed to satisfy Ruskin completely. The many twists and turns in the Museum's development, not least its increasing cost, and the University authorities' less than enthusiastic attitude towards it, proved increasingly frustrating for Ruskin.
Ruskin and education
The Museum was part of a wider plan to improve science provision at Oxford, something the University initially resisted. Ruskin's first formal teaching role came about in the mid-1850s, when he taught drawing classes (assisted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) at the Working Men's College, established by the Christian socialists, Frederick James Furnivall and Frederick Denison Maurice. Although Ruskin did not share the founders' politics, he strongly supported the idea that through education workers could achieve a crucially important sense of (self-)fulfilment. One result of this involvement was Ruskin's Elements of Drawing (1857). He had taught several women drawing, by means of correspondence, and his book represented both a response and a challenge to contemporary drawing manuals. The WMC was also a useful recruiting ground for assistants, on some of whom Ruskin would later come to rely, such as his future publisher, George Allen.
From 1859 until 1868, Ruskin was involved with the progressive school for girls at Winnington Hall in Cheshire. A frequent visitor, letter-writer, and donor of pictures and geological specimens to the school, Ruskin approved of the mixture of sports, handicrafts, music and dancing encouraged by its principal, Miss Bell. The association led to Ruskin's sub-Socratic work, The Ethics of the Dust (1866), an imagined conversation with Winnington's girls in which he cast himself as the "Old Lecturer". On the surface a discourse on crystallography, it is a metaphorical exploration of social and political ideals. In the 1880s, Ruskin became involved with another educational institution, Whitelands College, a training college for teachers, where he instituted a May Queen festival that endures today. (It was also replicated in the 19th century at the Cork High School for Girls.) Ruskin also bestowed books and gemstones upon Somerville College, one of Oxford's first two women's colleges, which he visited regularly, and was similarly generous to other educational institutions for women.
Modern Painters III and IV
Both volumes III and IV of Modern Painters were published in 1856. In MP III Ruskin argued that all great art is "the expression of the spirits of great men". Only the morally and spiritually healthy are capable of admiring the noble and the beautiful, and transforming them into great art by imaginatively penetrating their essence. MP IV presents the geology of the Alps in terms of landscape painting, and their moral and spiritual influence on those living nearby. The contrasting final chapters, "The Mountain Glory" and "The Mountain Gloom" provide an early example of Ruskin's social analysis, highlighting the poverty of the peasants living in the lower Alps.
Public lecturer
In addition to leading more formal teaching classes, from the 1850s Ruskin became an increasingly popular public lecturer. His first public lectures were given in Edinburgh, in November 1853, on architecture and painting. His lectures at the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester in 1857, were collected as The Political Economy of Art and later under Keats's phrase, A Joy For Ever. In these lectures, Ruskin spoke about how to acquire art, and how to use it, arguing that England had forgotten that true wealth is virtue, and that art is an index of a nation's well-being. Individuals have a responsibility to consume wisely, stimulating beneficent demand. The increasingly critical tone and political nature of Ruskin's interventions outraged his father and the "Manchester School" of economists, as represented by a hostile review in the Manchester Examiner and Times. As the Ruskin scholar Helen Gill Viljoen noted, Ruskin was increasingly critical of his father, especially in letters written by Ruskin directly to him, many of them still unpublished.
Ruskin gave the inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art in 1858, an institution from which the modern-day Anglia Ruskin University has grown. In The Two Paths (1859), five lectures given in London, Manchester, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells, Ruskin argued that a 'vital law' underpins art and architecture, drawing on the labour theory of value. (For other addresses and letters, Cook and Wedderburn, vol. 16, pp. 427–87.) The year 1859 also marked his last tour of Europe with his ageing parents, during which they visited Germany and Switzerland.
Turner Bequest
Ruskin had been in Venice when he heard about Turner's death in 1851. Being named an executor to Turner's will was an honour that Ruskin respectfully declined, but later took up. Ruskin's book in celebration of the sea, The Harbours of England, revolving around Turner's drawings, was published in 1856. In January 1857, Ruskin's Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1856 was published. He persuaded the National Gallery to allow him to work on the Turner Bequest of nearly 20,000 individual artworks left to the nation by the artist. This involved Ruskin in an enormous amount of work, completed in May 1858, and involved cataloguing, framing and conserving. Four hundred watercolours were displayed in cabinets of Ruskin's own design. Recent scholarship has argued that Ruskin did not, as previously thought, collude in the destruction of Turner's erotic drawings, but his work on the Bequest did modify his attitude towards Turner. (See below, Controversies: Turner's Erotic Drawings.)
Religious "unconversion"
In 1858, Ruskin was again travelling in Europe. The tour took him from Switzerland to Turin, where he saw Paolo Veronese's Presentation of the Queen of Sheba. He would later claim (in April 1877) that the discovery of this painting, contrasting starkly with a particularly dull sermon, led to his "unconversion" from Evangelical Christianity. He had, however, doubted his Evangelical Christian faith for some time, shaken by Biblical and geological scholarship that had undermined the literal truth and absolute authority of the Bible: "those dreadful hammers!" he wrote to Henry Acland, "I hear the chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses." This "loss of faith" precipitated a considerable personal crisis. His confidence undermined, he believed that much of his writing to date had been founded on a bed of lies and half-truths. He later returned to Christianity.
Social critic and reformer: Unto This Last
Although in 1877 Ruskin said that in 1860, "I gave up my art work and wrote Unto This Last ... the central work of my life" the break was not so dramatic or final. Following his crisis of faith, and influenced in part by his friend Thomas Carlyle (whom he had first met in 1850), Ruskin shifted his emphasis in the late 1850s from art towards social issues. Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on and write about a wide range of subjects including art and, among many other matters, geology (in June 1863 he lectured on the Alps), art practice and judgement (The Cestus of Aglaia), botany and mythology (Proserpina and The Queen of the Air). He continued to draw and paint in watercolours, and to travel extensively across Europe with servants and friends. In 1868, his tour took him to Abbeville, and in the following year he was in Verona (studying tombs for the Arundel Society) and Venice (where he was joined by William Holman Hunt). Yet increasingly Ruskin concentrated his energies on fiercely attacking industrial capitalism, and the utilitarian theories of political economy underpinning it. He repudiated his sometimes grandiloquent style, writing now in plainer, simpler language, to communicate his message straightforwardly.
Ruskin's social view broadened from concerns about the dignity of labour to consider issues of citizenship and notions of the ideal community. Just as he had questioned aesthetic orthodoxy in his earliest writings, he now dissected the orthodox political economy espoused by John Stuart Mill, based on theories of laissez-faire and competition drawn from the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In his four essays Unto This Last, Ruskin rejected the division of labour as dehumanising (separating the labourer from the product of his work), and argued that the false "science" of political economy failed to consider the social affections that bind communities together. He articulated an extended metaphor of household and family, drawing on Plato and Xenophon to demonstrate the communal and sometimes sacrificial nature of true economics. For Ruskin, all economies and societies are ideally founded on a politics of social justice. His ideas influenced the concept of the "social economy", characterised by networks of charitable, co-operative and other non-governmental organisations.
The essays were originally published in consecutive monthly instalments of the new Cornhill Magazine between August and November 1860 (and published in a single volume in 1862). However, the Cornhills editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to abandon the series by the outcry of the magazine's largely conservative readership and the fears of a nervous publisher (Smith, Elder & Co.). The reaction of the national press was hostile, and Ruskin was, he claimed, "reprobated in a violent manner". Ruskin's father also strongly disapproved. Others were enthusiastic, including Ruskin's friend Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "I have read your paper with exhilaration... such a thing flung suddenly into half a million dull British heads... will do a great deal of good."
Ruskin's political ideas, and Unto This Last in particular, later proved highly influential. The essays were praised and paraphrased in Gujarati by Mohandas Gandhi, a wide range of autodidacts cited their positive impact, the economist John A. Hobson and many of the founders of the British Labour party credited them as an influence.
Ruskin believed in a hierarchical social structure. He wrote "I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school." He believed in man's duty to God, and while he sought to improve the conditions of the poor, he opposed attempts to level social differences and sought to resolve social inequalities by abandoning capitalism in favour of a co-operative structure of society based on obedience and benevolent philanthropy, rooted in the agricultural economy.
Ruskin's explorations of nature and aesthetics in the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters focused on Giorgione, Veronese, Titian and Turner. Ruskin asserted that the components of the greatest artworks are held together, like human communities, in a quasi-organic unity. Competitive struggle is destructive. Uniting Modern Painters V and Unto This Last is Ruskin's "Law of Help":
Ruskin's next work on political economy, redefining some of the basic terms of the discipline, also ended prematurely, when Fraser's Magazine, under the editorship of James Anthony Froude, cut short his Essays on Political Economy (1862–63) (later collected as Munera Pulveris (1872)). Ruskin further explored political themes in Time and Tide (1867), his letters to Thomas Dixon, a cork-cutter in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear who had a well-established interest in literary and artistic matters. In these letters, Ruskin promoted honesty in work and exchange, just relations in employment and the need for co-operation.
Ruskin's sense of politics was not confined to theory. On his father's death in 1864, he inherited a considerable fortune of between £120,000 and £157,000 (the exact figure is disputed). This considerable fortune, inherited from the father he described on his tombstone as "an entirely honest merchant", gave him the means to engage in personal philanthropy and practical schemes of social amelioration. One of his first actions was to support the housing work of Octavia Hill (originally one of his art pupils): he bought property in Marylebone to aid her philanthropic housing scheme. But Ruskin's endeavours extended to the establishment of a shop selling pure tea in any quantity desired at 29 Paddington Street, Paddington (giving employment to two former Ruskin family servants) and crossing-sweepings to keep the area around the British Museum clean and tidy. Modest as these practical schemes were, they represented a symbolic challenge to the existing state of society. Yet his greatest practical experiments would come in his later years.
Lectures in the 1860s
Ruskin lectured widely in the 1860s, giving the Rede lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1867, for example. He spoke at the British Institution on 'Modern Art', the Working Men's Institute, Camberwell on "Work" and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich on 'War.'Ruskin's widely admired lecture, Traffic, on the relation between taste and morality, was delivered in April 1864 at Bradford Town Hall, to which he had been invited because of a local debate about the style of a new Exchange building. "I do not care about this Exchange", Ruskin told his audience, "because you don't!" These last three lectures were published in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866).
The lectures that comprised Sesame and Lilies (published 1865), delivered in December 1864 at the town halls at Rusholme and Manchester, are essentially concerned with education and ideal conduct. "Of Kings' Treasuries" (in support of a library fund) explored issues of reading practice, literature (books of the hour vs. books of all time), cultural value and public education. "Of Queens' Gardens" (supporting a school fund) focused on the role of women, asserting their rights and duties in education, according them responsibility for the household and, by extension, for providing the human compassion that must balance a social order dominated by men. This book proved to be one of Ruskin's most popular, and was regularly awarded as a Sunday School prize. Its reception over time, however, has been more mixed, and twentieth-century feminists have taken aim at "Of Queens' Gardens" in particular, as an attempt to "subvert the new heresy" of women's rights by confining women to the domestic sphere. Although indeed subscribing to the Victorian belief in "separate spheres" for men and women, Ruskin was however unusual in arguing for parity of esteem, a case based on his philosophy that a nation's political economy should be modelled on that of the ideal household.
Later life (1869–1900)
Oxford's first Slade Professor of Fine Art
Ruskin was unanimously appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University in August 1869, though largely through the offices of his friend, Henry Acland. He delivered his inaugural lecture on his 51st birthday in 1870, at the Sheldonian Theatre to a larger-than-expected audience. It was here that he said, "The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues." It has been claimed that Cecil Rhodes cherished a long-hand copy of the lecture, believing that it supported his own view of the British Empire.
In 1871, John Ruskin founded his own art school at Oxford, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. It was originally accommodated within the Ashmolean Museum but now occupies premises on High Street. Ruskin endowed the drawing mastership with £5000 of his own money. He also established a large collection of drawings, watercolours and other materials (over 800 frames) that he used to illustrate his lectures. The School challenged the orthodox, mechanical methodology of the government art schools (the "South Kensington System").
Ruskin's lectures were often so popular that they had to be given twice—once for the students, and again for the public. Most of them were eventually published (see Select Bibliography below). He lectured on a wide range of subjects at Oxford, his interpretation of "Art" encompassing almost every conceivable area of study, including wood and metal engraving (Ariadne Florentina), the relation of science to art (The Eagle's Nest) and sculpture (Aratra Pentelici). His lectures ranged through myth, ornithology, geology, nature-study and literature. "The teaching of Art...", Ruskin wrote, "is the teaching of all things." Ruskin was never careful about offending his employer. When he criticised Michelangelo in a lecture in June 1871 it was seen as an attack on the large collection of that artist's work in the Ashmolean Museum.
Most controversial, from the point of view of the University authorities, spectators and the national press, was the digging scheme on Ferry Hinksey Road at North Hinksey, near Oxford, instigated by Ruskin in 1874, and continuing into 1875, which involved undergraduates in a road-mending scheme. The scheme was motivated in part by a desire to teach the virtues of wholesome manual labour. Some of the diggers, who included Oscar Wilde, Alfred Milner and Ruskin's future secretary and biographer W. G. Collingwood, were profoundly influenced by the experience: notably Arnold Toynbee, Leonard Montefiore and Alexander Robertson MacEwen. It helped to foster a public service ethic that was later given expression in the university settlements, and was keenly celebrated by the founders of Ruskin Hall, Oxford.
In 1879, Ruskin resigned from Oxford, but resumed his Professorship in 1883, only to resign again in 1884. He gave his reason as opposition to vivisection, but he had increasingly been in conflict with the University authorities, who refused to expand his Drawing School. He was also suffering from increasingly poor health.
Fors Clavigera and the Whistler libel case
In January 1871, the month before Ruskin started to lecture the wealthy undergraduates at Oxford University, he began his series of 96 (monthly) "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–84). (The letters were published irregularly after the 87th instalment in March 1878.) These letters were personal, dealt with every subject in his oeuvre, and were written in a variety of styles, reflecting his mood and circumstances. From 1873, Ruskin had full control over all his publications, having established George Allen as his sole publisher (see Allen & Unwin).
In the July 1877 letter of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin launched a scathing attack on paintings by James McNeill Whistler exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. He found particular fault with Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, and accused Whistler of asking two hundred guineas for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler filed a libel suit against Ruskin, but Ruskin was ill when the case went to trial in November 1887, so the artist Edward Burne-Jones and Attorney General Sir John Holker represented him. The trial took place on 25 and 26 November, and many major figures of the art world at the time appeared at the trial. Artist Albert Moore appeared as a witness for Whistler, and artist William Powell Frith appeared for Ruskin. Frith said "the nocturne in black in gold is not in my opinion worth two hundred guineas". Frederic Leighton also agreed to give evidence for Whistler, but in the end could not attend as he had to go to Windsor to be knighted. Edward Burne-Jones, representing Ruskin, also asserted that Nocturne in Black and Gold was not a serious work of art. When asked to give reasons, Burne-Jones said he had never seen one painting of night that was successful, but also acknowledged that he saw marks of great labour and artistic skill in the painting. In the end, Whistler won the case, but the jury awarded damages of only a derisory farthing (the smallest coin of the realm) to the artist. Court costs were split between the two parties. Ruskin's were paid by public subscription organised by the Fine Art Society, but Whistler was bankrupt within six months, and was forced to sell his studio. The episode tarnished Ruskin's reputation, and may have accelerated his mental decline. It did nothing to mitigate Ruskin's exaggerated sense of failure in persuading his readers to share in his own keenly felt priorities.
Guild of St George
Ruskin founded his utopian society, the Guild of St George, in 1871 (although originally it was called St George's Fund, and then St George's Company, before becoming the Guild in 1878). Its aims and objectives were articulated in Fors Clavigera. A communitarian protest against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, it had a hierarchical structure, with Ruskin as its Master, and dedicated members called "Companions". Ruskin wished to show that contemporary life could still be enjoyed in the countryside, with land being farmed by traditional means, in harmony with the environment, and with the minimum of mechanical assistance. He also sought to educate and enrich the lives of industrial workers by inspiring them with beautiful objects. As such, with a tithe (or personal donation) of £7,000, Ruskin acquired land and a collection of art treasures.
Ruskin purchased land initially in Totley, near Sheffield, but the agricultural scheme established there by local communists met with only modest success after many difficulties. Donations of land from wealthy and dedicated Companions eventually placed land and property in the Guild's care: in the Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, called Ruskin Land today; Barmouth, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales; Cloughton, in North Yorkshire; Westmill in Hertfordshire; and Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire.
In principle, Ruskin worked out a scheme for different grades of "Companion", wrote codes of practice, described styles of dress and even designed the Guild's own coins. Ruskin wished to see St George's Schools established, and published various volumes to aid its teaching (his Bibliotheca Pastorum or Shepherd's Library), but the schools themselves were never established. (In the 1880s, in a venture loosely related to the Bibliotheca, he supported Francesca Alexander's publication of some of her tales of peasant life.) In reality, the Guild, which still exists today as a charitable education trust, has only ever operated on a small scale.
Ruskin also wished to see traditional rural handicrafts revived. St. George's Mill was established at Laxey, Isle of Man, producing cloth goods. The Guild also encouraged independent but allied efforts in spinning and weaving at Langdale, in other parts of the Lake District and elsewhere, producing linen and other goods exhibited by the Home Arts and Industries Association and similar organisations.
The Guild's most conspicuous and enduring achievement was the creation of a remarkable collection of art, minerals, books, medieval manuscripts, architectural casts, coins and other precious and beautiful objects. Housed in a cottage museum high on a hill in the Sheffield district of Walkley, it opened in 1875, and was curated by Henry and Emily Swan. Ruskin had written in Modern Painters III (1856) that, "the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way." Through the Museum, Ruskin aimed to bring to the eyes of the working man many of the sights and experiences otherwise reserved for those who could afford to travel across Europe. The original Museum has been digitally recreated online. In 1890, the Museum relocated to Meersbrook Park. The collection is now on display at Sheffield's Millennium Gallery.
Rose La Touche
Ruskin had been introduced to the wealthy Irish La Touche family by Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford. Maria La Touche, a minor Irish poet and novelist, asked Ruskin to teach her daughters drawing and painting in 1858. Rose La Touche was ten. His first meeting came at a time when Ruskin's own religious faith was under strain. This always caused difficulties for the staunchly Protestant La Touche family who at various times prevented the two from meeting. A chance meeting at the Royal Academy in 1869 was one of the few occasions they came into personal contact. After a long illness, she died on 25 May 1875, at the age of 27. These events plunged Ruskin into despair and led to increasingly severe bouts of mental illness involving a number of breakdowns and delirious visions. The first of these had occurred in 1871 at Matlock, Derbyshire, a town and a county that he knew from his boyhood travels, whose flora, fauna, and minerals helped to form and reinforce his appreciation and understanding of nature.
Ruskin turned to spiritualism. He attended seances at Broadlands. Ruskin's increasing need to believe in a meaningful universe and a life after death, both for himself and his loved ones, helped to revive his Christian faith in the 1870s.
Travel guides
Ruskin continued to travel, studying the landscapes, buildings and art of Europe. In May 1870 and June 1872 he admired Carpaccio's St Ursula in Venice, a vision of which, associated with Rose La Touche would haunt him, described in the pages of Fors. In 1874, on his tour of Italy, Ruskin visited Sicily, the furthest he ever travelled.
Ruskin embraced the emerging literary forms, the travel guide (and gallery guide), writing new works, and adapting old ones "to give", he said, "what guidance I may to travellers..." The Stones of Venice was revised, edited and issued in a new "Travellers' Edition" in 1879. Ruskin directed his readers, the would-be traveller, to look with his cultural gaze at the landscapes, buildings and art of France and Italy: Mornings in Florence (1875–77), The Bible of Amiens (1880–85) (a close study of its sculpture and a wider history), St Mark's Rest (1877–84) and A Guide to the Principal Pictures in ... Venice (1877).
Final writings
In the 1880s, Ruskin returned to some literature and themes that had been among his favourites since childhood. He wrote about Scott, Byron and Wordsworth in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880) in which, as Seth Reno argues, he describes the devastating effects on the landscape caused by industrialization, a vision Reno sees as a realization of the Anthropocene. He returned to meteorological observations in his lectures, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century (1884), describing the apparent effects of industrialisation on weather patterns. Ruskin's Storm-Cloud has been seen as foreshadowing environmentalism and related concerns in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ruskin's prophetic writings were also tied to his emotions, and his more general (ethical) dissatisfaction with the modern world with which he now felt almost completely out of sympathy.
His last great work was his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89) (meaning, 'Of Past Things'), a highly personalised, selective, eloquent but incomplete account of aspects of his life, the preface of which was written in his childhood nursery at Herne Hill.
The period from the late 1880s was one of steady and inexorable decline. Gradually it became too difficult for him to travel to Europe. He suffered a complete mental collapse on his final tour, which included Beauvais, Sallanches and Venice, in 1888. The emergence and dominance of the Aesthetic movement and Impressionism distanced Ruskin from the modern art world, his ideas on the social utility of art contrasting with the doctrine of "l'art pour l'art" or "art for art's sake" that was beginning to dominate. His later writings were increasingly seen as irrelevant, especially as he seemed to be more interested in book illustrators such as Kate Greenaway than in modern art. He also attacked aspects of Darwinian theory with increasing violence, although he knew and respected Darwin personally.
Brantwood and final years
In August 1871, Ruskin purchased, from W. J. Linton, the then somewhat dilapidated Brantwood house, on the shores of Coniston Water, in the English Lake District, paying £1500 for it. Brantwood was Ruskin's main home from 1872 until his death. His estate provided a site for more of his practical schemes and experiments: he had an ice house built, and the gardens comprehensively rearranged. He oversaw the construction of a larger harbour (from where he rowed his boat, the Jumping Jenny), and he altered the house (adding a dining room, a turret to his bedroom to give him a panoramic view of the lake, and he later extended the property to accommodate his relatives). He built a reservoir, and redirected the waterfall down the hills, adding a slate seat that faced the tumbling stream and craggy rocks rather than the lake, so that he could closely observe the fauna and flora of the hillside.
Although Ruskin's 80th birthday was widely celebrated in 1899 (various Ruskin societies presenting him with an elaborately illuminated congratulatory address), Ruskin was scarcely aware of it. He died at Brantwood from influenza on 20 January 1900 at the age of 80. He was buried five days later in the churchyard at Coniston, according to his wishes. As he had grown weaker, suffering prolonged bouts of mental illness, he had been looked after by his second cousin, Joan(na) Severn (formerly "companion" to Ruskin's mother) and she and her family inherited his estate. Joanna's Care was the eloquent final chapter of Ruskin's memoir, which he dedicated to her as a fitting tribute.
Joan Severn, together with Ruskin's secretary, W. G. Collingwood, and his eminent American friend Charles Eliot Norton, were executors to his will. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn edited the monumental 39-volume Library Edition of Ruskin's Works, the last volume of which, an index, attempts to demonstrate the complex interconnectedness of Ruskin's thought. They all acted together to guard, and even control, Ruskin's public and personal reputation.
The centenary of Ruskin's birth was keenly celebrated in 1919, but his reputation was already in decline and sank further in the fifty years that followed. The contents of Ruskin's home were dispersed in a series of sales at auction, and Brantwood itself was bought in 1932 by the educationist and Ruskin enthusiast, collector and memorialist, John Howard Whitehouse.
Brantwood was opened in 1934 as a memorial to Ruskin and remains open to the public today. The Guild of St George continues to thrive as an educational charity, and has an international membership. The Ruskin Society organises events throughout the year.
A series of public celebrations of Ruskin's multiple legacies took place in 2000, on the centenary of his death, and events are planned throughout 2019, to mark the bicentenary of his birth.
Note on Ruskin's personal appearance
In middle age, and at his prime as a lecturer, Ruskin was described as slim, perhaps a little short, with an aquiline nose and brilliant, piercing blue eyes. Often sporting a double-breasted waistcoat, a high collar and, when necessary, a frock coat, he also wore his trademark blue neckcloth. From 1878 he cultivated an increasingly long beard, and took on the appearance of an "Old Testament" prophet.
Ruskin in the eyes of a student
The following description of Ruskin as a lecturer was written by an eyewitness, who was a student at the time (1884):
An incident where the Arts and Crafts master William Morris had aroused the anger of Dr Bright, Master of University College, Oxford, served to demonstrate Ruskin's charisma:
Legacy
International
Ruskin's influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as "one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him, rendering his ideas into Russian. Proust not only admired Ruskin but helped translate his works into French. Gandhi wrote of the "magic spell" cast on him by Unto This Last and paraphrased the work in Gujarati, calling it Sarvodaya, "The Advancement of All". In Japan, Ryuzo Mikimoto actively collaborated in Ruskin's translation. He commissioned sculptures and sundry commemorative items, and incorporated Ruskinian rose motifs in the jewellery produced by his cultured pearl empire. He established the Ruskin Society of Tokyo and his children built a dedicated library to house his Ruskin collection.
A number of utopian socialist Ruskin Colonies attempted to put his political ideals into practice. These communities included Ruskin, Florida, Ruskin, British Columbia and the Ruskin Commonwealth Association, a colony in Dickson County, Tennessee in existence from 1894 to 1899.
Ruskin's work has been translated into numerous languages including, in addition to those already mentioned (Russian, French, Japanese): German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Welsh, several Indian languages like Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ), Esperanto and Gikuyu.
Art, architecture and literature
Theorists and practitioners in a broad range of disciplines acknowledged their debt to Ruskin. Architects including Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius incorporated his ideas in their work. Writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound felt Ruskin's influence. The American poet Marianne Moore was an enthusiastic Ruskin reader. Art historians and critics, among them Herbert Read, Roger Fry and Wilhelm Worringer, knew Ruskin's work well. Admirers ranged from the British-born American watercolourist and engraver John William Hill to the sculptor-designer, printmaker and utopianist Eric Gill. Aside from E. T. Cook, Ruskin's editor and biographer, other leading British journalists influenced by Ruskin include J. A. Spender, and the war correspondent H. W. Nevinson.
Craft and conservation
William Morris and C. R. Ashbee (of the Guild of Handicraft) were keen disciples, and through them Ruskin's legacy can be traced in the arts and crafts movement. Ruskin's ideas on the preservation of open spaces and the conservation of historic buildings and places inspired his friends Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley to help found the National Trust.
Society, education and sport
Pioneers of town planning such as Thomas Coglan Horsfall and Patrick Geddes called Ruskin an inspiration and invoked his ideas in justification of their own social interventions; likewise the founders of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.
Edward Carpenter's community in Millthorpe, Derbyshire was partly inspired by Ruskin, and John Kenworthy's colony at Purleigh, Essex, which was briefly a refuge for the Doukhobors, combined Ruskin's ideas and Tolstoy's.
The most prolific collector of Ruskiniana was John Howard Whitehouse, who saved Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and opened it as a permanent Ruskin memorial. Inspired by Ruskin's educational ideals, Whitehouse established Bembridge School, on the Isle of Wight, and ran it along Ruskinian lines. Educationists from William Jolly to Michael Ernest Sadler wrote about and appreciated Ruskin's ideas. Ruskin College, an educational establishment in Oxford originally intended for working men, was named after him by its American founders, Walter Vrooman and Charles A. Beard.
Ruskin's innovative publishing experiment, conducted by his one-time Working Men's College pupil George Allen, whose business was eventually merged to become Allen & Unwin, anticipated the establishment of the Net Book Agreement.
Ruskin's Drawing Collection, a collection of 1470 works of art he gathered as learning aids for the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (which he founded at Oxford), is at the Ashmolean Museum. The Museum has promoted Ruskin's art teaching, utilising the collection for in-person and online drawing courses.
Pierre de Coubertin, the innovator of the modern Olympic Games, cited Ruskin's principles of beautification, asserting that the games should be "Ruskinised" to create an aesthetic identity that transcended mere championship competitions.
Politics and critique of political economy
Ruskin was an inspiration for many Christian socialists, and his ideas informed the work of economists such as William Smart and J. A. Hobson, and the positivist Frederic Harrison. Ruskin was discussed in university extension classes, and in reading circles and societies formed in his name. He helped to inspire the settlement movement in Britain and the United States. Resident workers at Toynbee Hall such as the future civil servants Hubert Llewellyn Smith and William Beveridge (author of the Report ... on Social Insurance and Allied Services), and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged their debt to Ruskin as they helped to found the British welfare state. More of the British Labour Party's earliest MPs acknowledged Ruskin's influence than mentioned Karl Marx or the Bible. More recently, Ruskin's works have also influenced Phillip Blond and the Red Tory movement.
Ruskin in the 21st century
In 2019, Ruskin200 was inaugurated as a year-long celebration marking the bicentenary of Ruskin's birth.
Admirers and scholars of Ruskin can visit the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and the Ruskin Museum, both in Coniston in the English Lake District. All three mount regular exhibitions open to the public all the year round. Barony House in Edinburgh is home to a descendant of John Ruskin. She has designed and hand painted various friezes in honour of her ancestor and it is open to the public. Ruskin's Guild of St George continues his work today, in education, the arts, crafts, and the rural economy.
Many streets, buildings, organisations and institutions bear his name: The Priory Ruskin Academy in Grantham, Lincolnshire; John Ruskin College, South Croydon; and Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford and Cambridge, which traces its origins to the Cambridge School of Art, at the foundation of which Ruskin spoke in 1858. Also, the Ruskin Literary and Debating Society, (founded in 1900 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), the oldest surviving club of its type, and still promoting the development of literary knowledge and public speaking today; and the Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles, which still exists. In addition, there is the Ruskin Pottery, Ruskin House, Croydon and Ruskin Hall at the University of Pittsburgh.
Ruskin, Florida, United States—site of one of the short-lived American Ruskin Colleges—is named after John Ruskin. There is a mural of Ruskin titled "Head, Heart and Hands" on a building across from the Ruskin Post Office.
Since 2000, scholarly research has focused on aspects of Ruskin's legacy, including his impact on the sciences; John Lubbock and Oliver Lodge admired him. Two major academic projects have looked at Ruskin and cultural tourism (investigating, for example, Ruskin's links with Thomas Cook); the other focuses on Ruskin and the theatre. The sociologist and media theorist David Gauntlett argues that Ruskin's notions of craft can be felt today in online communities such as YouTube and throughout Web 2.0. Similarly, architectural theorist Lars Spuybroek has argued that Ruskin's understanding of the Gothic as a combination of two types of variation, rough savageness and smooth changefulness, opens up a new way of thinking leading to digital and so-called parametric design.
Notable Ruskin enthusiasts include the writers Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson, and the politicians Patrick Cormack, Frank Judd, Frank Field and Tony Benn. In 2006, Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, Raficq Abdulla, Jonathon Porritt and Nicholas Wright were among those to contribute to the symposium, There is no wealth but life: Ruskin in the 21st Century. Jonathan Glancey at The Guardian and Andrew Hill at the Financial Times have both written about Ruskin, as has the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. In 2015, inspired by Ruskin's philosophy of education, Marc Turtletaub founded Meristem in Fair Oaks, California. The centre educates adolescents with developmental differences using Ruskin's "land and craft" ideals, transitioning them so they will succeed as adults in an evolving post-industrial society.
Theory and criticism
Ruskin wrote over 250 works, initially art criticism and history, but expanding to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, mythology, travel, political economy and social reform. After his death Ruskin's works were collected in the 39-volume "Library Edition", completed in 1912 by his friends Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. The range and quantity of Ruskin's writing, and its complex, allusive and associative method of expression, cause certain difficulties. In 1898, John A. Hobson observed that in attempting to summarise Ruskin's thought, and by extracting passages from across his work, "the spell of his eloquence is broken". Clive Wilmer has written, further, that, "The anthologising of short purple passages, removed from their intended contexts [... is] something which Ruskin himself detested and which has bedevilled his reputation from the start." Nevertheless, some aspects of Ruskin's theory and criticism require further consideration.
Art and design criticism
Ruskin's early work defended the reputation of J. M. W. Turner. He believed that all great art should communicate an understanding and appreciation of nature. Accordingly, inherited artistic conventions should be rejected. Only by means of direct observation can an artist, through form and colour, represent nature in art. He advised artists in Modern Painters I to: "go to Nature in all singleness of heart... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing." By the 1850s. Ruskin was celebrating the Pre-Raphaelites, whose members, he said, had formed "a new and noble school" of art that would provide a basis for a thoroughgoing reform of the art world. For Ruskin, art should communicate truth above all things. However, this could not be revealed by mere display of skill, and must be an expression of the artist's whole moral outlook. Ruskin rejected the work of Whistler because he considered it to epitomise a reductive mechanisation of art.
Ruskin's strong rejection of Classical tradition in The Stones of Venice typifies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in his thought: "Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified." Rejection of mechanisation and standardisation informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised the Gothic for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he perceived between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural environment, and between worker and God. Attempts in the 19th century to reproduce Gothic forms (such as pointed arches), attempts he had helped inspire, were not enough to make these buildings expressions of what Ruskin saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organicism.
For Ruskin, the Gothic style in architecture embodied the same moral truths he sought to promote in the visual arts. It expressed the 'meaning' of architecture—as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration—all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure." Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous and repressive standardisation. Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with the demoralising consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as The Crystal Palace, which he criticised. Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works over the course of his career, his much-anthologised essay "The Nature of Gothic" from the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) is widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative discussions of his central argument.
Ruskin's theories indirectly encouraged a revival of Gothic styles, but Ruskin himself was often dissatisfied with the results. He objected that forms of mass-produced faux Gothic did not exemplify his principles, but showed disregard for the true meaning of the style. Even the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration, met with his disapproval. The O'Shea brothers, freehand stone carvers chosen to revive the creative "freedom of thought" of Gothic craftsmen, disappointed him by their lack of reverence for the task.
Ruskin's distaste for oppressive standardisation led to later works in which he attacked laissez-faire capitalism, which he thought was at its root. His ideas provided inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement, the founders of the National Trust, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Ruskin's views on art, wrote Kenneth Clark, "cannot be made to form a logical system, and perhaps owe to this fact a part of their value." Ruskin's accounts of art are descriptions of a superior type that conjure images vividly in the mind's eye.
Clark neatly summarises the key features of Ruskin's writing on art and architecture:
Art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole man. Whether in making or perceiving a work of art, we bring to bear on it feeling, intellect, morals, knowledge, memory, and every other human capacity, all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept as false and dehumanising as economic man.
Even the most superior mind and the most powerful imagination must found itself on facts, which must be recognised for what they are. The imagination will often reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind cannot understand; but this recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions.
These facts must be perceived by the senses, or felt; not learnt.
The greatest artists and schools of art have believed it their duty to impart vital truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about religion and the conduct of life.
Beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function.'
This fulfilment of function depends on all parts of an organism cohering and co-operating. This was what he called the 'Law of Help,' one of Ruskin's fundamental beliefs, extending from nature and art to society.
Good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important.
Great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny.
Historic preservation
Ruskin's belief in preservation of ancient buildings had a significant influence on later thinking about the distinction between conservation and restoration. He was a strong proponent of the former, while his contemporary, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, promoted the latter. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, (1849) Ruskin wrote:
This abhorrence of restoration is in marked contrast to Viollet-le-Duc, who wrote that restoration is a "means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time."
For Ruskin, the "age" of a building was crucially significant as an aspect in its preservation: "For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."
Critique of political economy
Ruskin wielded a critique of political economy of orthodox, 19th-century political economy principally on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations (broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in The Stones of Venice, and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such as The Political Economy of Art (A Joy for Ever), but he gave them full expression in the influential and at the time of publication, very controversial essays, Unto This Last.
At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or craftsman, in modern industrial capitalist society. Ruskin believed that the economic theories of Adam Smith, expressed in The Wealth of Nations had led, through the division of labour to the alienation of the worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment. (See The Stones of Venice above.)
Ruskin argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker or product.
In the preface to Unto This Last (1862), Ruskin recommended that the state should underwrite standards of service and production to guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and 'gentleness and justice'; government manufactories and workshops; government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received honourably and not in shame. Many of these ideas were later incorporated into the welfare state.
Controversies
Turner's erotic drawings
Until 2005, biographies of both J. M. W. Turner and Ruskin had claimed that in 1858 Ruskin burned bundles of erotic paintings and drawings by Turner to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. Ruskin's friend Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery, was said to have colluded in the alleged destruction of Turner's works. In 2005, these works, which form part of the Turner Bequest held at Tate Britain, were re-appraised by Turner Curator Ian Warrell, who concluded that Ruskin and Wornum had not destroyed them.
Sexuality
Ruskin's sexuality has been the subject of a great deal of speculation and critical comment. His one marriage, to Effie Gray, was annulled after six years owing to non-consummation. Effie, in a letter to her parents, claimed that Ruskin found her "person" repugnant: He alleged various reasons, hatred of children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason... that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848]. Ruskin told his lawyer during the annulment proceedings: It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it. The cause of Ruskin's "disgust" has led to much conjecture. Mary Lutyens speculated that he rejected Effie because he was horrified by the sight of her pubic hair. Lutyens argued that Ruskin must have known the female form only through Greek statues and paintings of nudes which lacked pubic hair. However, Peter Fuller wrote, "It has been said that he was frightened on the wedding night by the sight of his wife's pubic hair; more probably, he was perturbed by her menstrual blood." Ruskin's biographers Tim Hilton and John Batchelor also took the view that menstruation was the more likely explanation, though Batchelor also suggests that body-odour may have been the problem. There is no evidence to support any of these theories. William Ewart Gladstone said to his daughter Mary, "should you ever hear anyone blame Millais or his wife, or Mr. Ruskin [for the breakdown of the marriage], remember that there is no fault; there was misfortune, even tragedy. All three were perfectly blameless." The fullest story of the Ruskins' marriage to date has been told by the scholar Robert Brownell.
Ruskin's later relationship with Rose La Touche has led to claims that he started a correspondence with her when he met her at the age of nine. In fact, he did not approach her as a suitor until on or near her eighteenth birthday. She asked him to wait for her until she was 21. Receiving no answer, he repeated his proposal.
Ruskin is not known to have had any sexually intimate relationships. During an episode of mental derangement after Rose died, he wrote a letter in which he insisted that Rose's spirit had instructed him to marry a girl who was visiting him at the time. It is also true that in letters from Ruskin to Kate Greenaway he asked her to draw her "girlies" (as he called her child figures) without clothing:
Will you – (it's all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me.
In a letter to his physician John Simon on 15 May 1886, Ruskin wrote:
I like my girls from ten to sixteen—allowing of 17 or 18 as long as they're not in love with anybody but me.—I've got some darlings of 8—12—14—just now, and my Pigwiggina here—12—who fetches my wood and is learning to play my bells.Pigwiggina is a nickname Ruskin used for the girl as she looked after (lambs and) piglets; c.f.
Ruskin's biographers disagree about the allegation of "paedophilia". Tim Hilton, in his two-volume biography, asserts that Ruskin "was a paedophile" but leaves the claim unexplained, while John Batchelor argues that the term is inappropriate because Ruskin's behaviour does not "fit the profile". Others point to a definite pattern of "nympholeptic" behaviour with regard to his interactions with girls at a Winnington school. However, there is no evidence that Ruskin ever engaged in any sexual activity with anyone at all. According to one interpretation, what Ruskin valued most in pre-pubescent girls was their innocence; the fact that they were not (yet) fully developed sexual beings is what attracted him. An exploration of this topic by James L. Spates declares that "whatever idiosyncratic qualities his erotic expressions may have possessed, when it comes to matters of sexual capability and interest, there is every reason to conclude that John Ruskin was physically and emotionally normal."
Common law of business balance
Ruskin was not a fan of buying low and selling high. In the "Veins of Wealth" section of Unto This Last, he wrote: "So far as I know, there is not in history record of anything so disgraceful to the human intellect as the modern idea that the commercial text, 'Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,' represents, or under any circumstances could represent, an available principle of national economy." Perhaps due to such passages, Ruskin is frequently identified as the originator of the "common law of business balance"—a statement about the relationships of price and quality as they pertain to manufactured goods, and often summarised as: "The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot." This is the core of a longer statement usually attributed to Ruskin, although Ruskin's authorship is disputed among Ruskin scholars. Fred Shapiro maintains that the statement does not appear anywhere in Ruskin's works, and George Landow is likewise sceptical of the claim of Ruskin's authorship. In a posting of the Ruskin Library News, a blog associated with the Ruskin Library (a major collection of Ruskiniana located at Lancaster University), an anonymous library staff member briefly mentions the statement and its widespread use, saying that, "This is one of many quotations ascribed to Ruskin, without there being any trace of them in his writings – although someone, somewhere, thought they sounded like Ruskin." In an issue of the journal Heat Transfer Engineering, Kenneth Bell quotes the statement and mentions that it has been attributed to Ruskin. While Bell believes in the veracity of its content, he adds that the statement does not appear in Ruskin's published works.
Early in the 20th century, this statement appeared—without any authorship attribution—in magazine advertisements, in a business catalogue, in student publications, and, occasionally, in editorial columns. Later in the 20th century, however, magazine advertisements, student publications, business books, technical publications, scholarly journals, and business catalogues often included the statement with attribution to Ruskin.
In the 21st century, and based upon the statement's applicability of the issues of quality and price, the statement continues to be used and attributed to Ruskin—despite the questionable nature of the attribution.
For many years, various Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlours prominently displayed a section of the statement in framed signs. ("There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that man's lawful prey.") The signs listed Ruskin as the author of the statement, but the signs gave no information on where or when Ruskin was supposed to have written, spoken, or published the statement. Due to the statement's widespread use as a promotional slogan, and despite questions of Ruskin's authorship, it is likely that many people who are otherwise unfamiliar with Ruskin now associate him with this statement.
Definitions
The OED credits J. Ruskin with the first quotation in 152 separate entries. Some include:
Pathetic fallacy: Ruskin coined this term in Modern Painters III (1856) to describe the ascription of human emotions to inanimate objects and impersonal natural forces, as in "Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy" (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre).
Fors Clavigera: Ruskin gave this title to a series of letters he wrote "to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" (1871–84). The name was intended to signify three great powers that fashion human destiny, as Ruskin explained at length in Letter 2 (February 1871). These were: force, symbolised by the club (clava) of Hercules; Fortitude, symbolised by the key (clavis) of Ulysses; and Fortune, symbolised by the nail (clavus) of Lycurgus. These three powers (the "fors") together represent human talents and abilities to choose the right moment and then to strike with energy. The concept is derived from Shakespeare's phrase "There is a tide in the affairs of men/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" (Brutus in Julius Caesar). Ruskin believed that the letters were inspired by the Third Fors: striking out at the right moment.For a full and concise introduction to the work, see Dinah Birch, "Introduction", in John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. xxxiii–xlix.
Illth: Used by Ruskin as the antithesis of wealth, which he defined as life itself; broadly, where wealth is 'well-being', illth is "ill-being".
Theoria: Ruskin's 'theoretic' faculty – theoretic, as opposed to aesthetic – enables a vision of the beautiful as intimating a reality deeper than the everyday, at least in terms of the kind of transcendence generally seen as immanent in things of this world. For an example of the influence of Ruskin's concept of theoria, see Peter Fuller.
Modern Atheism: Ruskin applied this label to "the unfortunate persistence of the clergy in teaching children what they cannot understand, and in employing young consecrate persons to assert in pulpits what they do not know."
Excrescence: Ruskin defined an "excrescence" as an outgrowth of the main body of a building that does not harmonise well with the main body. He originally used the term to describe certain gothic revival features also for later additions to cathedrals and various other public buildings, especially from the Gothic period.
Fictional portrayals
Ruskin figures as Mr Herbert in The New Republic (1878), a novel by one of his Oxford undergraduates, William Mallock (1849–1923).
The Love of John Ruskin (1912) a silent movie about Ruskin, Effie and Millais.
Edith Wharton's False Dawn novella, the first in the 1924 Old New York series has the protagonist meet John Ruskin.
Ruskin was the inspiration for either the Drawling Master or the Gryphon in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Dante's Inferno (1967) Ken Russell's biopic for television of Rossetti, in which Ruskin is played by Clive Goodwin
The Love School (1975) a BBC TV series about the Pre-Raphaelites, starring David Collings (Ruskin), Anne Kidd (Effie), Peter Egan (Millais).
A novel about the marriage of John Ruskin.
Dear Countess (1983) a radio play by Elizabeth Morgan, with Derek Jacobi (Ruskin), Bridget McCann (Gray), Timothy West (Old Mr Ruskin) Michael Fenner (Millais). The author played Ruskin's mother.
Peter Hoyle's novel, Brantwood: The Story of an Obsession (1986, ) is about two cousins who pursue their interest in Ruskin to his Coniston home.
The Passion of John Ruskin (1994), a film directed by Alex Chapple.
Modern Painters (1995) an opera about Ruskin by David Lang.
Parrots and Owls (1994) a radio play by John Purser about Ruskin's attempt to revive Gothic architecture and his connection to the O'Shea brothers.
The Countess (1995), a play written by Gregory Murphy, dealing with Ruskin's marriage.
A novel in which Ruskin makes his last visit to Amiens cathedral in 1879.
The Order of Release (1998), a radio play by Robin Brooks about Ruskin (Bob Peck), Effie (Sharon Small) and Millais (David Tennant).
Ruskin and the Hinksey diggings form the backdrop to Ann Harries' novel, Manly Pursuits (1999).
A collection of short stories that includes Come, Gentle Nightabout Ruskin and Effie's wedding night.
Mrs Ruskin (2003), a play by Kim Morrissey dealing with Ruskin's marriage.
"Sesame and Roses" (2007), a short story by Grace Andreacchi that explores Ruskin's twin obsessions with Venice and Rose La Touche.
Desperate Romantics (2009), a six-part BBC drama serial about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin is played by Tom Hollander.
Benjamin, Melanie (2010). Alice I Have Been. . A fictionalized account of the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Mr. Turner (2014), a biopic of J. M. W. Turner with Ruskin portrayed as a precocious prig by Joshua McGuire.
Effie Gray (2014), a biopic about the Ruskin-Gray-Millais love triangle, written by Emma Thompson and featuring Greg Wise (Ruskin), Dakota Fanning (Gray) and Tom Sturridge (Millais).
Light, Descending (2014) is a biographical novel about John Ruskin by Octavia Randolph.
Gallery
Paintings
Drawings
Select bibliography
It is the standard scholarly edition of Ruskin's work, the Library Edition, sometimes called simply Cook and Wedderburn. The volume in which the following works can be found is indicated in the form: (Works [followed by the volume number]).
Works by Ruskin
Poems (written 1835–46; collected 1850) (Works 2)
The Poetry of Architecture (serialised The Architectural Magazine 1837–38; authorised book, 1893) (Works 1)
Letters to a College Friend (written 1840–45; published 1894) (Works 1)
The King of the Golden River, or the Black Brothers. A Legend of Stiria (written 1841; published 1850) (Works 1)
Modern Painters (5 vols.) (1843–60) (Works 3–7)
Vol. I (1843) (Parts I and II) Of General Principles and of Truth (Works 3)
Vol. II (1846) (Part III) Of the Imaginative and Theoretic Faculties (Works 4)
Vol. III (1856) (Part IV) Of Many Things (Works 5)
Vol. IV (1856) (Part V) Mountain Beauty (Works 6)
Vol. V (1860) (Part VI) Of Leaf Beauty (Part VII) Of Cloud Beauty (Part VIII) Of Ideas of Relation (1) Of Invention Formal (Part IX) Of Ideas of Relation (2) Of Invention Spiritual (Works 7)
The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) (Works 8)
The Stones of Venice (3 vols) (1851–53)
Vol. I. The Foundations (1851) (Works 9)
Vol. II. The Sea–Stories (1853) (Works 10) – containing the chapter "The Nature of Gothic"
Vol. III. The Fall (1853) (Works 11)
Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851) (Works 12)
Pre-Raphaelitism (1851) (Works 12)
Letters to the Times on the Pre-Raphaelite Artists (1851, 1854) (Works 12)
Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh, 1853) (1854) (Works 12)
Academy Notes (Annual Reviews of the June Royal Academy Exhibitions) (1855–59, 1875) (Works 14)
The Harbours of England (1856) (Works 13)
The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners (1857) (Works 15)
A Joy Forever' and Its Price in the Market: being the substance (with additions) of two lectures on The Political Economy of Art (1857, 1880) (Works 16)
The Two Paths: being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858–9 (1859) (Works 16)
The Elements of Perspective, Arranged for the Use of Schools and Intended to be Read in Connection with the First Three Books of Euclid (1859) (Works 15)
Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (serialised Cornhill Magazine 1860, book 1862) (Works 17)
Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy (serialised Fraser's Magazine 1862–63, book 1872) (Works 17)
The Cestus of Aglaia (serialised Art Journal 1864–64, incorporated (revised) in On the Old Road (1882) (Works 19)
Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in 1864 (1865) (i.e., "Of Queens' Gardens" and "Of Kings' Treasuries" to which was added, in a later edition of 1871, "The Mystery of Life and Its Arts") (Works 18)
The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation (1866) (Works 18)
The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War (1866) (to a later edition was added a fourth lecture (delivered 1869), called "The Future of England") (1866) (Works 18)
Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work (1867) (Works 17)
The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (1869) (Works 19)
Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 (Works 20)
Aratra Pentelici: Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas term, 1870 (1872) (Works 20)
Lectures on Landscape, Delivered at Oxford in [Lent term| Lent Term], 1871 (1898) ("Works" 22)
Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871–84) ("Works" 27–29) (originally collected in 8 vols., vols. 1–7 covering annually 1871–1877, and vol. 8, Letters 85–96, covering 1878–84)
Volume I. Letters 1–36 (1871–73) (Works 27)
Volume II. Letters 37–72 (1874–76) (Works 28)
Volume III. Letters 73–96 (1877–84) (Works 29)
The Eagle's Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural science to Art, Given before the University of Oxford in Lent term, 1872 (1872) (Works 22)
Ariadne Florentina': Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving, with Appendix, Given before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term, 1872 (1876) (Works 22)
Love's Meinie: Lectures on Greek and English Birds (1873–81) (Works 25)
Val d'Arno: Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art, directly antecedent to the Florentine Year of Victories, given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1873 (1874) (Works 23)
The Aesthetic and Mathematic School of Art in Florence: Lectures Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1874 (first published 1906) (Works 23)
Mornings in Florence: Simple Studies of Christian Art, for English Travellers (1875–77) (Works 23)
Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and Life of Stones (1875–83) (Works 26)
Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps, and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew (1875–86) (Works 25)
Bibliotheca Pastorum (i.e., 'Shepherd's Library', consisting ofmultiple volumes) (ed. John Ruskin) (1876–88) (Works 31–32)
Laws of Fésole: A Familiar Treatise on the Elementary Principles and Practice of Drawing and Painting as Determined by the Tuscan Masters (arranged for the use of schools) (1877–78) (Works 15)
St Mark's Rest (1877–84, book 1884) (Works 24)
Fiction, Fair and Foul (serialised Nineteenth Century 1880–81, incorporated in On the Old Road (1885)) (Works 34)
The Bible of Amiens (the first part of Our Fathers Have Told Us) (1880–85) (Works 33)
The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1883, book 1884) (Works 33)
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution, 4 and 11 February 1884 (1884) (Works 34)
The Pleasures of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1884, published 1884–85) (Works 33)
Præterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life (3 vols.) (1885–89) (Works 35)
Dilecta: Correspondence, Diary Notes, and Extracts from Books, Illustrating 'Praeterita''' (1886, 1887, 1900) (Works 35)
Selected diaries and letters
The Diaries of John Ruskin eds. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (Clarendon Press, 1956–59)
The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin ed. Helen Gill Viljoen (Yale University Press, 1971)
A Tour of the Lakes in Cumbria. John Ruskin's Diary for 1830 eds. Van Akin Burd and James S. Dearden (Scolar, 1990)
The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the children at Winnington Hall ed. Van Akin Burd (Harvard University Press, 1969)
The Ruskin Family Letters: The Correspondence of John James Ruskin, his wife, and their son John, 1801–1843 ed. Van Akin Burd (2 vols.) (Cornell University Press, 1973)
The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton ed. John Lewis Bradley and Ian Ousby (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin ed. George Allen Cate (Stanford University Press, 1982)
John Ruskin's Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters ed. Rachel Dickinson (Legenda, 2008)
Selected editions of Ruskin still in print
Praeterita [Ruskin's autobiography] ed. Francis O' Gorman (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Unto this Last: Four essays on the First Principles of Political Economy intro. Andrew Hill (Pallas Athene, 2010)
Unto This Last And Other Writings ed. Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1986)
Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century preface by Clive Wilmer and intro. Peter Brimblecombe (Pallas Athene, 2012)
The Nature of Gothic (Pallas Athene, 2011) [facsimile reprint of Morris's Kelmscott Edition with essays by Robert Hewison and Tony Pinkney]
Selected Writings ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Selected Writings (originally Ruskin Today) ed. Kenneth Clark (Penguin, 1964 and later impressions)
The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from his Writings ed. John D. Rosenberg (George Allen and Unwin, 1963)
Athena: Queen of the Air (Annotated) (originally The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm) ed. Na Ding, foreword by Tim Kavi, brief literary bio by Kelli M. Webert (TiLu Press, 2013 electronic book version, paper forthcoming)Ruskin on Music ed Mary Augusta Wakefield (Creative Media Partners LLC, 2015)
See also
John Henry Devereux
Ruskin, Nebraska
Ruskin's diggers in Ferry Hinksey (1874)
Ruskin's Ride, a bridleway in Oxford
Trenton, Missouri, home of the first Ruskin College in the United States
Charles Augustus Howell
The English House Mount Ruskin
References
Sources
Robert Hewison, "Ruskin, John (1819–1900)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition.
Francis O'Gorman (1999) John Ruskin (Pocket Biographies) (Sutton Publishing)
James S. Dearden (2004), John Ruskin (Shire Publications)
Further reading
General
Barringer, Tim. et al., ed. Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-300-24641-4.
Conner, Patrick. Savage Ruskin. New York: Macmillan Press, 1979.
Cook, E. T. Ruskin, John. Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1901.
Dearden, James S. John Ruskin's Bookplates. The Book Collector (1964) 13 no 3 (autumn): 335-339.
Dearden, J. S. The Production and Distribution of John Ruskin's Poems 1850. The Book Collector (1968)17 no 2 (summer): 151-167.
Dearden, J. S. Wise and Ruskin. The Book Collector (1969) 18.no.1 (spring): 45-56.
Freeman, Kelly; Hughes, Thomas. et al. eds. Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to The Storm-Cloud. The Courtauld, 2021. ISBN 978-1-907485-13-8.
Hanley, K; Hull, C. S. eds. John Ruskin's Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings. Cambridge: Legenda, 2016. ISBN 978-1-906540-85-2.
Hewison, Robert. John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye. Thames and Hudson, 1976.
Hugh, Chriholm. ed. Ruskin, John. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1911.
Jackson, Kevin. The Worlds of John Ruskin. Pallas Athene, 2010.
Quill, Sarah. Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited. Ashgate, 2000.
Quigley Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History Of The World In Our Time. GSG & Associates, 1966.
Rosenberg, J. G. The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius. Columbia University Press, 1961.
Viljoen, Helen Gill. Ruskin's Scottish Heritage: A Prelude. University of Illinois Press, 1956.
Waldstein, C. The Work of John Ruskin: Its Influence Upon Modern Thought and Life, Harper's magazine vol. 78, no. 465 (Feb. 1889), pp. 382–418.
Biographies of Ruskin
W. G. Collingwood (1893) The Life and Work of John Ruskin 1–2. Methuen. (The Life of John Ruskin, sixth edition (1905).) – Note that the title was slightly changed for the 1900 2nd edition and later editions.
E. T. Cook (1911) The Life of John Ruskin 1–2. George Allen. (The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 1 of the second edition (1912); The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 2 of the second edition (1912))
Derrick Leon (1949) Ruskin: The Great Victorian (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Tim Hilton (1985) John Ruskin: The Early Years (Yale University Press)
Tim Hilton (2000) John Ruskin: The Later Years (Yale University Press)
John Batchelor (2000) John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life (Chatto & Windus)
Robert Hewison (2007) John Ruskin'' (Oxford University Press)
External links
Ruskin Today
The Eighth Lamp, Ruskin Studies Today. Ruskin journal
Library collections
UK Museum, Library and Archive collections relating to Ruskin at Cornucopia.org.uk. Retrieved
John Ruskin texts in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature Digital Collection. Retrieved 2010-10-19
Electronic editions
Liverpool Museums audio files on Ruskin
Archival material
Ruskin letter to Brantwood at Mount Holyoke College
Ruskin letter to Simon at Mount Holyoke College
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's online biography and gallery . Retrieved 2010-10-19
Sources for the Study of John Ruskin and the Guild of St George. Produced by Sheffield City Council's Libraries and Archives.
Archival material at
Finding aid to John Ruskin letters at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
John Ruskin Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
1819 births
1900 deaths
19th-century British journalists
19th-century British philosophers
19th-century economists
19th-century English painters
Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford
Alumni of King's College London
Anti-consumerists
Architectural theoreticians
Arts and Crafts movement artists
British anti-capitalists
British male journalists
Burials in Cumbria
Conchologists
English architecture writers
English art critics
English environmentalists
English essayists
English male painters
English people of Scottish descent
English philosophers
English watercolourists
Guild of St George
Male essayists
Painters from London
People associated with Anglia Ruskin University
People associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Romantic critics of political economy
Slade Professors of Fine Art (University of Oxford) | false | [
"Zeferino González (28 January 1831 – 29 November 1894) was a Spanish Dominican theologian, and philosopher, Archbishop of Seville and Cardinal.\n\nLife\nOn 28 November 1844, in the College of Ocania, González entered the Dominican Order, and a year later took his solemn vows. He was sent to Manila in 1848 to complete his studies, and in January 1853, he was made a lector of philosophy. The following year he was ordained priest. After teaching philosophy and theology for many years in the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, he returned to Spain in 1867, where, the year following, he was elected rector of Ocania College, discharging the duties of this office for three years.\n\nIn 1874 he was named Bishop of Málaga, but, before taking charge of this diocese, he was consecrated Bishop of Córdoba in October 1875. Eight years later he was removed to the archiepiscopal See of Seville, and in November 1884, he was created cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, with Santa Maria sopra Minerva as his titular church.\n\nIn May, 1885, Cardinal González was appointed to the primacy of Spain, was made Patriarch of the West Indies, vicar-general of the army, and major-chaplain to the royal chapel. After many years of service González, in December 1889, resigned all his offices and dignities, except that of the cardinalate, and retired from active life. The remaining five years of his life were spent in study and prayer.\n\nHe was honoured with medals of Isabella the Catholic and Charles III, he was appointed chancellor of Castile, was chosen as royal adviser, made a member of the Royal Academy of Languages, of History, of Moral and Political Sciences, and of the Roman Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.\n\nWorks\nBesides those below, among his several works are: \"La Biblia y la ciencia\"; \"La infalibilidad pontificia\" (pamphlet); \"Discurso de recepción en la Academia Española\" (pamphlet); \"Discurso de recepción en la Academia de Ciencias políticas y morales\" (pamphlet).\n\nEstudios religiosos, políticos, científicos y sociales - volume 1, Madrid 1873\n Contains the three essays:\n La filosofía de la historia\n La inmortalidad del alma y sus destinos segun una teoría krauso-espiritista\n El positivismo materialista\nEstudios religiosos, políticos, científicos y sociales - volume 2, Madrid 1873\n Contains the five essays:\n La Economia política y el cristianismo\n Los temblores de tierra\n Sobre una Biblioteca de teólogos españoles\n La definición de la infalibilidad pontificia\n Sermon de Santo Tomás de Aquino\nFilosofía elemental - volume 1, second edition, Madrid 1876\nFilosofía elemental - volume 2, second edition, Madrid 1876\nHistoria de la filosofía - volume 1, second edition, Madrid 1886\nHistoria de la filosofía - volume 2, second edition, Madrid 1886\nHistoria de la filosofía - volume 3, second edition, Madrid 1886\nHistoria de la filosofía - volume 4, second edition, Madrid 1886\nEstudios sobre la filosofía de Santo Tomás - volume 1, second edition, Madrid 1886\nEstudios sobre la filosofía de Santo Tomás - volume 2, second edition, Madrid 1886\nEstudios sobre la filosofía de Santo Tomás - volume 3, second edition, Madrid 1887\nPhilosophia elementaria - volume 1: Logicam, psychologiam, idealogiam complectens, seventh edition, Madrid 1894\nPhilosophia elementaria - volume 2: Metaphysicam generalem atque specialem complectens, seventh edition, Madrid 1894\nPhilosophia elementaria - volume 3: Ethicam et historiam philosophiae complectens, seventh edition, Madrid 1894\n\nReferences\n\nActa Cap. Ord. Praed. (Rome, 1885);\nHugo von Hurter, Nomenclator literarius, III (Innsbruck, 1895), 1499;\nVigil, La orden de praedicatores (Madrid, 1884), 297.\n\nExternal links\n \nCatholic Encyclopedia article\nBiography\n\n1831 births\n1894 deaths\nPeople from Asturias\nCardinals created by Pope Leo XIII\nDominican cardinals",
"Billy Joel's Greatest Hits is a collection released in two sets, 12 years apart. The first set, consisting of two discs, titled Volume I and Volume II, was released in 1985. The second, single disc titled Volume III was released in 1997. Also 4-disc Compete Hits Collection was also released in 1997.\n\n Greatest Hits – Volume I & Volume II (1985)\n Greatest Hits Volume III (Billy Joel album) (1997)\n The Complete Hits Collection: 1973–1997 (1997)\n\nSee also\n Billy Joel discography\n\nBilly Joel compilation albums"
] |
[
"John Ruskin",
"Modern Painters I (1843)",
"What was Modern Painters I?",
"What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous but authoritative title, \"A Graduate of Oxford,",
"What was the outcome of Modern Painters?",
"I don't know.",
"Was there a second volume?",
"I don't know."
] | C_586bfbeaa57b4e3ab23a77a6d7b375c8_0 | What was it about? | 4 | What was Modern Painters I by John Ruskin about? | John Ruskin | Much of the period, from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin spent abroad with his parents, principally in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by critic, Rev John Eagles, in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903. Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and, from 1839, Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842. What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous but authoritative title, "A Graduate of Oxford," was Ruskin's response to Turner's critics. An electronic edition is available online. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters--and in particular Turner--were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa, unlike Turner, favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studio--to render what he has seen and understood imaginatively on canvas, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity. Although critics were slow to react and reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, notably Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his metier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued the nearly 20,000 sketches Turner gave to the British nation. CANNOTANSWER | online. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters-- | John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.
Early life (1819–1846)
Genealogy
Ruskin was the only child of first cousins. His father, John James Ruskin (1785–1864), was a sherry and wine importer, founding partner and de facto business manager of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq (see Allied Domecq). John James was born and brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a mother from Glenluce and a father originally from Hertfordshire. His wife, Margaret Cock (1781–1871), was the daughter of a publican in Croydon. She had joined the Ruskin household when she became companion to John James's mother, Catherine.
John James had hoped to practise law, and was articled as a clerk in London. His father, John Thomas Ruskin, described as a grocer (but apparently an ambitious wholesale merchant), was an incompetent businessman. To save the family from bankruptcy, John James, whose prudence and success were in stark contrast to his father, took on all debts, settling the last of them in 1832. John James and Margaret were engaged in 1809, but opposition to the union from John Thomas, and the problem of his debts, delayed the couple's wedding. They finally married, without celebration, in 1818. John James died on 3 March 1864 and is buried in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, Shirley, Croydon.
Childhood and education
Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London (demolished 1969), south of St Pancras railway station. His childhood was shaped by the contrasting influences of his father and mother, both of whom were fiercely ambitious for him. John James Ruskin helped to develop his son's Romanticism. They shared a passion for the works of Byron, Shakespeare and especially Walter Scott. They visited Scott's home, Abbotsford, in 1838, but Ruskin was disappointed by its appearance. Margaret Ruskin, an evangelical Christian, more cautious and restrained than her husband, taught young John to read the Bible from beginning to end, and then to start all over again, committing large portions to memory. Its language, imagery and parables had a profound and lasting effect on his writing. He later wrote:
Ruskin's childhood was spent from 1823 at 28 Herne Hill (demolished ), near the village of Camberwell in South London. He had few friends of his own age, but it was not the friendless and toyless experience he later said it was in his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89). He was educated at home by his parents and private tutors, including Congregationalist preacher Edward Andrews, whose daughters, Mrs Eliza Orme and Emily Augusta Patmore were later credited with introducing Ruskin to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
From 1834 to 1835 he attended the school in Peckham run by the progressive evangelical Thomas Dale (1797–1870). Ruskin heard Dale lecture in 1836 at King's College, London, where Dale was the first Professor of English Literature. Ruskin went on to enroll and complete his studies at King's College, where he prepared for Oxford under Dale's tutelage.
Travel
Ruskin was greatly influenced by the extensive and privileged travels he enjoyed in his childhood. It helped to establish his taste and augmented his education. He sometimes accompanied his father on visits to business clients at their country houses, which exposed him to English landscapes, architecture and paintings. Family tours took them to the Lake District (his first long poem, Iteriad, was an account of his tour in 1830) and to relatives in Perth, Scotland. As early as 1825, the family visited France and Belgium. Their continental tours became increasingly ambitious in scope: in 1833 they visited Strasbourg, Schaffhausen, Milan, Genoa and Turin, places to which Ruskin frequently returned. He developed a lifelong love of the Alps, and in 1835 visited Venice for the first time, that 'Paradise of cities' that provided the subject and symbolism of much of his later work.
These tours gave Ruskin the opportunity to observe and record his impressions of nature. He composed elegant, though mainly conventional poetry, some of which was published in Friendship's Offering. His early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of visually sophisticated and technically accomplished drawings of maps, landscapes and buildings, remarkable for a boy of his age. He was profoundly affected by Samuel Rogers's poem Italy (1830), a copy of which was given to him as a 13th birthday present; in particular, he deeply admired the accompanying illustrations by J. M. W. Turner. Much of Ruskin's own art in the 1830s was in imitation of Turner, and of Samuel Prout, whose Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany (1833) he also admired. His artistic skills were refined under the tutelage of Charles Runciman, Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding.
First publications
Ruskin's journeys also provided inspiration for writing. His first publication was the poem "On Skiddaw and Derwent Water" (originally entitled "Lines written at the Lakes in Cumberland: Derwentwater" and published in the Spiritual Times) (August 1829). In 1834, three short articles for Loudon's Magazine of Natural History were published. They show early signs of his skill as a close "scientific" observer of nature, especially its geology.
From September 1837 to December 1838, Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture was serialised in Loudon's Architectural Magazine, under the pen name "Kata Phusin" (Greek for "According to Nature"). It was a study of cottages, villas, and other dwellings centred on a Wordsworthian argument that buildings should be sympathetic to their immediate environment and use local materials. It anticipated key themes in his later writings. In 1839, Ruskin's "Remarks on the Present State of Meteorological Science" was published in Transactions of the Meteorological Society.
Oxford
In Michaelmas 1836, Ruskin matriculated at the University of Oxford, taking up residence at Christ Church in January of the following year. Enrolled as a gentleman-commoner, he enjoyed equal status with his aristocratic peers. Ruskin was generally uninspired by Oxford and suffered bouts of illness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of his time there was in the few, close friendships he made. His tutor, the Rev Walter Lucas Brown, always encouraged him, as did a young senior tutor, Henry Liddell (later the father of Alice Liddell) and a private tutor, the Rev Osborne Gordon. He became close to the geologist and natural theologian, William Buckland. Among his fellow-undergraduates, Ruskin's most important friends were Charles Thomas Newton and Henry Acland.
His most noteworthy success came in 1839 when, at the third attempt, he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry (Arthur Hugh Clough came second). He met William Wordsworth, who was receiving an honorary degree, at the ceremony.
Ruskin's health was poor and he never became independent from his family during his time at Oxford. His mother took lodgings on High Street, where his father joined them at weekends. He was devastated to hear that his first love, Adèle Domecq, the second daughter of his father's business partner, had become engaged to a French nobleman. In April 1840, whilst revising for his examinations, he began to cough blood, which led to fears of consumption and a long break from Oxford travelling with his parents.
Before he returned to Oxford, Ruskin responded to a challenge that had been put to him by Effie Gray, whom he later married: the twelve-year-old Effie had asked him to write a fairy story. During a six-week break at Leamington Spa to undergo Dr Jephson's (1798–1878) celebrated salt-water cure, Ruskin wrote his only work of fiction, the fable The King of the Golden River (not published until December 1850 (but imprinted 1851), with illustrations by Richard Doyle). A work of Christian sacrificial morality and charity, it is set in the Alpine landscape Ruskin loved and knew so well. It remains the most translated of all his works. Back at Oxford, in 1842 Ruskin sat for a pass degree, and was awarded an uncommon honorary double fourth-class degree in recognition of his achievements.
Modern Painters I (1843)
For much of the period from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin was abroad with his parents, mainly in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, later married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by the critic Rev John Eagles in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner, who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903.
Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842.
What became the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous authority of "A Graduate of Oxford", was Ruskin's answer to Turner's critics. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters—and in particular Turner—were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that, unlike Turner, Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studioto render imaginatively on canvas what he has seen and understood, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity.
Although critics were slow to react and the reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, including Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his métier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued nearly 20,000 sketches that Turner gave to the British nation.
1845 tour and Modern Painters II (1846)
Ruskin toured the continent with his parents again during 1844, visiting Chamonix and Paris, studying the geology of the Alps and the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Perugino among others at the Louvre. In 1845, at the age of 26, he undertook to travel without his parents for the first time. It provided him with an opportunity to study medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and especially Italy. In Lucca he saw the Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia, which Ruskin considered the exemplar of Christian sculpture (he later associated it with the then object of his love, Rose La Touche). He drew inspiration from what he saw at the Campo Santo in Pisa, and in Florence. In Venice, he was particularly impressed by the works of Fra Angelico and Giotto in St Mark's Cathedral, and Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco, but he was alarmed by the combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city: "Venice is lost to me", he wrote. It finally convinced him that architectural restoration was destruction, and that the only true and faithful action was preservation and conservation.
Drawing on his travels, he wrote the second volume of Modern Painters (published April 1846). The volume concentrated on Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists rather than on Turner. It was a more theoretical work than its predecessor. Ruskin explicitly linked the aesthetic and the divine, arguing that truth, beauty and religion are inextricably bound together: "the Beautiful as a gift of God". In defining categories of beauty and imagination, Ruskin argued that all great artists must perceive beauty and, with their imagination, communicate it creatively by means of symbolic representation. Generally, critics gave this second volume a warmer reception, although many found the attack on the aesthetic orthodoxy associated with Joshua Reynolds difficult to accept. In the summer, Ruskin was abroad again with his father, who still hoped his son might become a poet, even poet laureate, just one among many factors increasing the tension between them.
Middle life (1847–1869)
Marriage to Effie Gray
During 1847, Ruskin became closer to Euphemia "Effie" Gray, the daughter of family friends. It was for her that Ruskin had written The King of the Golden River. The couple were engaged in October. They married on 10 April 1848 at her home, Bowerswell, in Perth, once the residence of the Ruskin family. It was the site of the suicide of John Thomas Ruskin (Ruskin's grandfather). Owing to this association and other complications, Ruskin's parents did not attend. The European Revolutions of 1848 meant that the newlyweds' earliest travels together were restricted, but they were able to visit Normandy, where Ruskin admired the Gothic architecture.
Their early life together was spent at 31 Park Street, Mayfair, secured for them by Ruskin's father (later addresses included nearby 6 Charles Street, and 30 Herne Hill). Effie was too unwell to undertake the European tour of 1849, so Ruskin visited the Alps with his parents, gathering material for the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters. He was struck by the contrast between the Alpine beauty and the poverty of Alpine peasants, stirring his increasingly sensitive social conscience.
The marriage was unhappy, with Ruskin reportedly being cruel to Effie and distrustful of her. The marriage was never consummated and was annulled six years later in 1854.
Architecture
Ruskin's developing interest in architecture, and particularly in the Gothic, led to the first work to bear his name, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). It contained 14 plates etched by the author. The title refers to seven moral categories that Ruskin considered vital to and inseparable from all architecture: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience. All would provide recurring themes in his future work. Seven Lamps promoted the virtues of a secular and Protestant form of Gothic. It was a challenge to the Catholic influence of architect A. W. N. Pugin.
The Stones of Venice
In November 1849, John and Effie Ruskin visited Venice, staying at the Hotel Danieli. Their different personalities are revealed by their contrasting priorities. For Effie, Venice provided an opportunity to socialise, while Ruskin was engaged in solitary studies. In particular, he made a point of drawing the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, because he feared that they would be destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops. One of these troops, Lieutenant Charles Paulizza, became friendly with Effie, apparently with Ruskin's consent. Her brother, among others, later claimed that Ruskin was deliberately encouraging the friendship to compromise her, as an excuse to separate.
Meanwhile, Ruskin was making the extensive sketches and notes that he used for his three-volume work The Stones of Venice (1851–53). Developing from a technical history of Venetian architecture from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history, Stones represented Ruskin's opinion of contemporary England. It served as a warning about the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued that Venice had degenerated slowly. Its cultural achievements had been compromised, and its society corrupted, by the decline of true Christian faith. Instead of revering the divine, Renaissance artists honoured themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness.
The chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" appeared in the second volume of Stones. Praising Gothic ornament, Ruskin argued that it was an expression of the artisan's joy in free, creative work. The worker must be allowed to think and to express his own personality and ideas, ideally using his own hands, rather than machinery.
This was both an aesthetic attack on, and a social critique of, the division of labour in particular, and industrial capitalism in general. This chapter had a profound effect, and was reprinted both by the Christian socialist founders of the Working Men's College and later by the Arts and Crafts pioneer and socialist William Morris.
Pre-Raphaelites
John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelite commitment to 'naturalism' – "paint[ing] from nature only", depicting nature in fine detail, had been influenced by Ruskin.
Ruskin became acquainted with Millais after the artists made an approach to Ruskin through their mutual friend Coventry Patmore. Initially, Ruskin had not been impressed by Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50), a painting that was considered blasphemous at the time, but Ruskin wrote letters defending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to The Times during May 1851. Providing Millais with artistic patronage and encouragement, in the summer of 1853 the artist (and his brother) travelled to Scotland with Ruskin and Effie where, at Glenfinlas, he painted the closely observed landscape background of gneiss rock to which, as had always been intended, he later added Ruskin's portrait.
Millais had painted a picture of Effie for The Order of Release, 1746, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. Suffering increasingly from physical illness and acute mental anxiety, Effie was arguing fiercely with her husband and his intense and overly protective parents, and sought solace with her own parents in Scotland. The Ruskin marriage was already undermined as she and Millais fell in love, and Effie left Ruskin, causing a public scandal.
During April 1854, Effie filed her suit of nullity, on grounds of "non-consummation" owing to his "incurable impotency", a charge Ruskin later disputed. Ruskin wrote, "I can prove my virility at once." The annulment was granted in July. Ruskin did not even mention it in his diary. Effie married Millais the following year. The complex reasons for the non-consummation and ultimate failure of the Ruskin marriage are a matter of enduring speculation and debate.
Ruskin continued to support Hunt and Rossetti. He also provided an annuity of £150 in 1855–57 to Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's wife, to encourage her art (and paid for the services of Henry Acland for her medical care). Other artists influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites also received both critical and financial assistance from Ruskin, including John Brett, John William Inchbold, and Edward Burne-Jones, who became a good friend (he called him "Brother Ned"). His father's disapproval of such friends was a further cause of tension between them.
During this period Ruskin wrote regular reviews of the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy with the title Academy Notes (1855–59, 1875). They were highly influential, capable of making or breaking reputations. The satirical magazine Punch published the lines (24 May 1856), "I paints and paints,/hears no complaints/And sells before I'm dry,/Till savage Ruskin/He sticks his tusk in/Then nobody will buy."
Ruskin was an art-philanthropist: in March 1861 he gave 48 Turner drawings to the Ashmolean in Oxford, and a further 25 to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in May. Ruskin's own work was very distinctive, and he occasionally exhibited his watercolours: in the United States in 1857–58 and 1879, for example; and in England, at the Fine Art Society in 1878, and at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour (of which he was an honorary member) in 1879. He created many careful studies of natural forms, based on his detailed botanical, geological and architectural observations. Examples of his work include a painted, floral pilaster decoration in the central room of Wallington Hall in Northumberland, home of his friend Pauline Trevelyan. The stained glass window in the Little Church of St Francis Funtley, Fareham, Hampshire is reputed to have been designed by him. Originally placed in the St. Peter's Church Duntisbourne Abbots near Cirencester, the window depicts the Ascension and the Nativity.
Ruskin's theories also inspired some architects to adapt the Gothic style. Such buildings created what has been called a distinctive "Ruskinian Gothic". Through his friendship with Henry Acland, Ruskin supported attempts to establish what became the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (designed by Benjamin Woodward)—which is the closest thing to a model of this style, but still failed to satisfy Ruskin completely. The many twists and turns in the Museum's development, not least its increasing cost, and the University authorities' less than enthusiastic attitude towards it, proved increasingly frustrating for Ruskin.
Ruskin and education
The Museum was part of a wider plan to improve science provision at Oxford, something the University initially resisted. Ruskin's first formal teaching role came about in the mid-1850s, when he taught drawing classes (assisted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) at the Working Men's College, established by the Christian socialists, Frederick James Furnivall and Frederick Denison Maurice. Although Ruskin did not share the founders' politics, he strongly supported the idea that through education workers could achieve a crucially important sense of (self-)fulfilment. One result of this involvement was Ruskin's Elements of Drawing (1857). He had taught several women drawing, by means of correspondence, and his book represented both a response and a challenge to contemporary drawing manuals. The WMC was also a useful recruiting ground for assistants, on some of whom Ruskin would later come to rely, such as his future publisher, George Allen.
From 1859 until 1868, Ruskin was involved with the progressive school for girls at Winnington Hall in Cheshire. A frequent visitor, letter-writer, and donor of pictures and geological specimens to the school, Ruskin approved of the mixture of sports, handicrafts, music and dancing encouraged by its principal, Miss Bell. The association led to Ruskin's sub-Socratic work, The Ethics of the Dust (1866), an imagined conversation with Winnington's girls in which he cast himself as the "Old Lecturer". On the surface a discourse on crystallography, it is a metaphorical exploration of social and political ideals. In the 1880s, Ruskin became involved with another educational institution, Whitelands College, a training college for teachers, where he instituted a May Queen festival that endures today. (It was also replicated in the 19th century at the Cork High School for Girls.) Ruskin also bestowed books and gemstones upon Somerville College, one of Oxford's first two women's colleges, which he visited regularly, and was similarly generous to other educational institutions for women.
Modern Painters III and IV
Both volumes III and IV of Modern Painters were published in 1856. In MP III Ruskin argued that all great art is "the expression of the spirits of great men". Only the morally and spiritually healthy are capable of admiring the noble and the beautiful, and transforming them into great art by imaginatively penetrating their essence. MP IV presents the geology of the Alps in terms of landscape painting, and their moral and spiritual influence on those living nearby. The contrasting final chapters, "The Mountain Glory" and "The Mountain Gloom" provide an early example of Ruskin's social analysis, highlighting the poverty of the peasants living in the lower Alps.
Public lecturer
In addition to leading more formal teaching classes, from the 1850s Ruskin became an increasingly popular public lecturer. His first public lectures were given in Edinburgh, in November 1853, on architecture and painting. His lectures at the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester in 1857, were collected as The Political Economy of Art and later under Keats's phrase, A Joy For Ever. In these lectures, Ruskin spoke about how to acquire art, and how to use it, arguing that England had forgotten that true wealth is virtue, and that art is an index of a nation's well-being. Individuals have a responsibility to consume wisely, stimulating beneficent demand. The increasingly critical tone and political nature of Ruskin's interventions outraged his father and the "Manchester School" of economists, as represented by a hostile review in the Manchester Examiner and Times. As the Ruskin scholar Helen Gill Viljoen noted, Ruskin was increasingly critical of his father, especially in letters written by Ruskin directly to him, many of them still unpublished.
Ruskin gave the inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art in 1858, an institution from which the modern-day Anglia Ruskin University has grown. In The Two Paths (1859), five lectures given in London, Manchester, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells, Ruskin argued that a 'vital law' underpins art and architecture, drawing on the labour theory of value. (For other addresses and letters, Cook and Wedderburn, vol. 16, pp. 427–87.) The year 1859 also marked his last tour of Europe with his ageing parents, during which they visited Germany and Switzerland.
Turner Bequest
Ruskin had been in Venice when he heard about Turner's death in 1851. Being named an executor to Turner's will was an honour that Ruskin respectfully declined, but later took up. Ruskin's book in celebration of the sea, The Harbours of England, revolving around Turner's drawings, was published in 1856. In January 1857, Ruskin's Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1856 was published. He persuaded the National Gallery to allow him to work on the Turner Bequest of nearly 20,000 individual artworks left to the nation by the artist. This involved Ruskin in an enormous amount of work, completed in May 1858, and involved cataloguing, framing and conserving. Four hundred watercolours were displayed in cabinets of Ruskin's own design. Recent scholarship has argued that Ruskin did not, as previously thought, collude in the destruction of Turner's erotic drawings, but his work on the Bequest did modify his attitude towards Turner. (See below, Controversies: Turner's Erotic Drawings.)
Religious "unconversion"
In 1858, Ruskin was again travelling in Europe. The tour took him from Switzerland to Turin, where he saw Paolo Veronese's Presentation of the Queen of Sheba. He would later claim (in April 1877) that the discovery of this painting, contrasting starkly with a particularly dull sermon, led to his "unconversion" from Evangelical Christianity. He had, however, doubted his Evangelical Christian faith for some time, shaken by Biblical and geological scholarship that had undermined the literal truth and absolute authority of the Bible: "those dreadful hammers!" he wrote to Henry Acland, "I hear the chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses." This "loss of faith" precipitated a considerable personal crisis. His confidence undermined, he believed that much of his writing to date had been founded on a bed of lies and half-truths. He later returned to Christianity.
Social critic and reformer: Unto This Last
Although in 1877 Ruskin said that in 1860, "I gave up my art work and wrote Unto This Last ... the central work of my life" the break was not so dramatic or final. Following his crisis of faith, and influenced in part by his friend Thomas Carlyle (whom he had first met in 1850), Ruskin shifted his emphasis in the late 1850s from art towards social issues. Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on and write about a wide range of subjects including art and, among many other matters, geology (in June 1863 he lectured on the Alps), art practice and judgement (The Cestus of Aglaia), botany and mythology (Proserpina and The Queen of the Air). He continued to draw and paint in watercolours, and to travel extensively across Europe with servants and friends. In 1868, his tour took him to Abbeville, and in the following year he was in Verona (studying tombs for the Arundel Society) and Venice (where he was joined by William Holman Hunt). Yet increasingly Ruskin concentrated his energies on fiercely attacking industrial capitalism, and the utilitarian theories of political economy underpinning it. He repudiated his sometimes grandiloquent style, writing now in plainer, simpler language, to communicate his message straightforwardly.
Ruskin's social view broadened from concerns about the dignity of labour to consider issues of citizenship and notions of the ideal community. Just as he had questioned aesthetic orthodoxy in his earliest writings, he now dissected the orthodox political economy espoused by John Stuart Mill, based on theories of laissez-faire and competition drawn from the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In his four essays Unto This Last, Ruskin rejected the division of labour as dehumanising (separating the labourer from the product of his work), and argued that the false "science" of political economy failed to consider the social affections that bind communities together. He articulated an extended metaphor of household and family, drawing on Plato and Xenophon to demonstrate the communal and sometimes sacrificial nature of true economics. For Ruskin, all economies and societies are ideally founded on a politics of social justice. His ideas influenced the concept of the "social economy", characterised by networks of charitable, co-operative and other non-governmental organisations.
The essays were originally published in consecutive monthly instalments of the new Cornhill Magazine between August and November 1860 (and published in a single volume in 1862). However, the Cornhills editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to abandon the series by the outcry of the magazine's largely conservative readership and the fears of a nervous publisher (Smith, Elder & Co.). The reaction of the national press was hostile, and Ruskin was, he claimed, "reprobated in a violent manner". Ruskin's father also strongly disapproved. Others were enthusiastic, including Ruskin's friend Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "I have read your paper with exhilaration... such a thing flung suddenly into half a million dull British heads... will do a great deal of good."
Ruskin's political ideas, and Unto This Last in particular, later proved highly influential. The essays were praised and paraphrased in Gujarati by Mohandas Gandhi, a wide range of autodidacts cited their positive impact, the economist John A. Hobson and many of the founders of the British Labour party credited them as an influence.
Ruskin believed in a hierarchical social structure. He wrote "I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school." He believed in man's duty to God, and while he sought to improve the conditions of the poor, he opposed attempts to level social differences and sought to resolve social inequalities by abandoning capitalism in favour of a co-operative structure of society based on obedience and benevolent philanthropy, rooted in the agricultural economy.
Ruskin's explorations of nature and aesthetics in the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters focused on Giorgione, Veronese, Titian and Turner. Ruskin asserted that the components of the greatest artworks are held together, like human communities, in a quasi-organic unity. Competitive struggle is destructive. Uniting Modern Painters V and Unto This Last is Ruskin's "Law of Help":
Ruskin's next work on political economy, redefining some of the basic terms of the discipline, also ended prematurely, when Fraser's Magazine, under the editorship of James Anthony Froude, cut short his Essays on Political Economy (1862–63) (later collected as Munera Pulveris (1872)). Ruskin further explored political themes in Time and Tide (1867), his letters to Thomas Dixon, a cork-cutter in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear who had a well-established interest in literary and artistic matters. In these letters, Ruskin promoted honesty in work and exchange, just relations in employment and the need for co-operation.
Ruskin's sense of politics was not confined to theory. On his father's death in 1864, he inherited a considerable fortune of between £120,000 and £157,000 (the exact figure is disputed). This considerable fortune, inherited from the father he described on his tombstone as "an entirely honest merchant", gave him the means to engage in personal philanthropy and practical schemes of social amelioration. One of his first actions was to support the housing work of Octavia Hill (originally one of his art pupils): he bought property in Marylebone to aid her philanthropic housing scheme. But Ruskin's endeavours extended to the establishment of a shop selling pure tea in any quantity desired at 29 Paddington Street, Paddington (giving employment to two former Ruskin family servants) and crossing-sweepings to keep the area around the British Museum clean and tidy. Modest as these practical schemes were, they represented a symbolic challenge to the existing state of society. Yet his greatest practical experiments would come in his later years.
Lectures in the 1860s
Ruskin lectured widely in the 1860s, giving the Rede lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1867, for example. He spoke at the British Institution on 'Modern Art', the Working Men's Institute, Camberwell on "Work" and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich on 'War.'Ruskin's widely admired lecture, Traffic, on the relation between taste and morality, was delivered in April 1864 at Bradford Town Hall, to which he had been invited because of a local debate about the style of a new Exchange building. "I do not care about this Exchange", Ruskin told his audience, "because you don't!" These last three lectures were published in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866).
The lectures that comprised Sesame and Lilies (published 1865), delivered in December 1864 at the town halls at Rusholme and Manchester, are essentially concerned with education and ideal conduct. "Of Kings' Treasuries" (in support of a library fund) explored issues of reading practice, literature (books of the hour vs. books of all time), cultural value and public education. "Of Queens' Gardens" (supporting a school fund) focused on the role of women, asserting their rights and duties in education, according them responsibility for the household and, by extension, for providing the human compassion that must balance a social order dominated by men. This book proved to be one of Ruskin's most popular, and was regularly awarded as a Sunday School prize. Its reception over time, however, has been more mixed, and twentieth-century feminists have taken aim at "Of Queens' Gardens" in particular, as an attempt to "subvert the new heresy" of women's rights by confining women to the domestic sphere. Although indeed subscribing to the Victorian belief in "separate spheres" for men and women, Ruskin was however unusual in arguing for parity of esteem, a case based on his philosophy that a nation's political economy should be modelled on that of the ideal household.
Later life (1869–1900)
Oxford's first Slade Professor of Fine Art
Ruskin was unanimously appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University in August 1869, though largely through the offices of his friend, Henry Acland. He delivered his inaugural lecture on his 51st birthday in 1870, at the Sheldonian Theatre to a larger-than-expected audience. It was here that he said, "The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues." It has been claimed that Cecil Rhodes cherished a long-hand copy of the lecture, believing that it supported his own view of the British Empire.
In 1871, John Ruskin founded his own art school at Oxford, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. It was originally accommodated within the Ashmolean Museum but now occupies premises on High Street. Ruskin endowed the drawing mastership with £5000 of his own money. He also established a large collection of drawings, watercolours and other materials (over 800 frames) that he used to illustrate his lectures. The School challenged the orthodox, mechanical methodology of the government art schools (the "South Kensington System").
Ruskin's lectures were often so popular that they had to be given twice—once for the students, and again for the public. Most of them were eventually published (see Select Bibliography below). He lectured on a wide range of subjects at Oxford, his interpretation of "Art" encompassing almost every conceivable area of study, including wood and metal engraving (Ariadne Florentina), the relation of science to art (The Eagle's Nest) and sculpture (Aratra Pentelici). His lectures ranged through myth, ornithology, geology, nature-study and literature. "The teaching of Art...", Ruskin wrote, "is the teaching of all things." Ruskin was never careful about offending his employer. When he criticised Michelangelo in a lecture in June 1871 it was seen as an attack on the large collection of that artist's work in the Ashmolean Museum.
Most controversial, from the point of view of the University authorities, spectators and the national press, was the digging scheme on Ferry Hinksey Road at North Hinksey, near Oxford, instigated by Ruskin in 1874, and continuing into 1875, which involved undergraduates in a road-mending scheme. The scheme was motivated in part by a desire to teach the virtues of wholesome manual labour. Some of the diggers, who included Oscar Wilde, Alfred Milner and Ruskin's future secretary and biographer W. G. Collingwood, were profoundly influenced by the experience: notably Arnold Toynbee, Leonard Montefiore and Alexander Robertson MacEwen. It helped to foster a public service ethic that was later given expression in the university settlements, and was keenly celebrated by the founders of Ruskin Hall, Oxford.
In 1879, Ruskin resigned from Oxford, but resumed his Professorship in 1883, only to resign again in 1884. He gave his reason as opposition to vivisection, but he had increasingly been in conflict with the University authorities, who refused to expand his Drawing School. He was also suffering from increasingly poor health.
Fors Clavigera and the Whistler libel case
In January 1871, the month before Ruskin started to lecture the wealthy undergraduates at Oxford University, he began his series of 96 (monthly) "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–84). (The letters were published irregularly after the 87th instalment in March 1878.) These letters were personal, dealt with every subject in his oeuvre, and were written in a variety of styles, reflecting his mood and circumstances. From 1873, Ruskin had full control over all his publications, having established George Allen as his sole publisher (see Allen & Unwin).
In the July 1877 letter of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin launched a scathing attack on paintings by James McNeill Whistler exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. He found particular fault with Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, and accused Whistler of asking two hundred guineas for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler filed a libel suit against Ruskin, but Ruskin was ill when the case went to trial in November 1887, so the artist Edward Burne-Jones and Attorney General Sir John Holker represented him. The trial took place on 25 and 26 November, and many major figures of the art world at the time appeared at the trial. Artist Albert Moore appeared as a witness for Whistler, and artist William Powell Frith appeared for Ruskin. Frith said "the nocturne in black in gold is not in my opinion worth two hundred guineas". Frederic Leighton also agreed to give evidence for Whistler, but in the end could not attend as he had to go to Windsor to be knighted. Edward Burne-Jones, representing Ruskin, also asserted that Nocturne in Black and Gold was not a serious work of art. When asked to give reasons, Burne-Jones said he had never seen one painting of night that was successful, but also acknowledged that he saw marks of great labour and artistic skill in the painting. In the end, Whistler won the case, but the jury awarded damages of only a derisory farthing (the smallest coin of the realm) to the artist. Court costs were split between the two parties. Ruskin's were paid by public subscription organised by the Fine Art Society, but Whistler was bankrupt within six months, and was forced to sell his studio. The episode tarnished Ruskin's reputation, and may have accelerated his mental decline. It did nothing to mitigate Ruskin's exaggerated sense of failure in persuading his readers to share in his own keenly felt priorities.
Guild of St George
Ruskin founded his utopian society, the Guild of St George, in 1871 (although originally it was called St George's Fund, and then St George's Company, before becoming the Guild in 1878). Its aims and objectives were articulated in Fors Clavigera. A communitarian protest against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, it had a hierarchical structure, with Ruskin as its Master, and dedicated members called "Companions". Ruskin wished to show that contemporary life could still be enjoyed in the countryside, with land being farmed by traditional means, in harmony with the environment, and with the minimum of mechanical assistance. He also sought to educate and enrich the lives of industrial workers by inspiring them with beautiful objects. As such, with a tithe (or personal donation) of £7,000, Ruskin acquired land and a collection of art treasures.
Ruskin purchased land initially in Totley, near Sheffield, but the agricultural scheme established there by local communists met with only modest success after many difficulties. Donations of land from wealthy and dedicated Companions eventually placed land and property in the Guild's care: in the Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, called Ruskin Land today; Barmouth, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales; Cloughton, in North Yorkshire; Westmill in Hertfordshire; and Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire.
In principle, Ruskin worked out a scheme for different grades of "Companion", wrote codes of practice, described styles of dress and even designed the Guild's own coins. Ruskin wished to see St George's Schools established, and published various volumes to aid its teaching (his Bibliotheca Pastorum or Shepherd's Library), but the schools themselves were never established. (In the 1880s, in a venture loosely related to the Bibliotheca, he supported Francesca Alexander's publication of some of her tales of peasant life.) In reality, the Guild, which still exists today as a charitable education trust, has only ever operated on a small scale.
Ruskin also wished to see traditional rural handicrafts revived. St. George's Mill was established at Laxey, Isle of Man, producing cloth goods. The Guild also encouraged independent but allied efforts in spinning and weaving at Langdale, in other parts of the Lake District and elsewhere, producing linen and other goods exhibited by the Home Arts and Industries Association and similar organisations.
The Guild's most conspicuous and enduring achievement was the creation of a remarkable collection of art, minerals, books, medieval manuscripts, architectural casts, coins and other precious and beautiful objects. Housed in a cottage museum high on a hill in the Sheffield district of Walkley, it opened in 1875, and was curated by Henry and Emily Swan. Ruskin had written in Modern Painters III (1856) that, "the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way." Through the Museum, Ruskin aimed to bring to the eyes of the working man many of the sights and experiences otherwise reserved for those who could afford to travel across Europe. The original Museum has been digitally recreated online. In 1890, the Museum relocated to Meersbrook Park. The collection is now on display at Sheffield's Millennium Gallery.
Rose La Touche
Ruskin had been introduced to the wealthy Irish La Touche family by Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford. Maria La Touche, a minor Irish poet and novelist, asked Ruskin to teach her daughters drawing and painting in 1858. Rose La Touche was ten. His first meeting came at a time when Ruskin's own religious faith was under strain. This always caused difficulties for the staunchly Protestant La Touche family who at various times prevented the two from meeting. A chance meeting at the Royal Academy in 1869 was one of the few occasions they came into personal contact. After a long illness, she died on 25 May 1875, at the age of 27. These events plunged Ruskin into despair and led to increasingly severe bouts of mental illness involving a number of breakdowns and delirious visions. The first of these had occurred in 1871 at Matlock, Derbyshire, a town and a county that he knew from his boyhood travels, whose flora, fauna, and minerals helped to form and reinforce his appreciation and understanding of nature.
Ruskin turned to spiritualism. He attended seances at Broadlands. Ruskin's increasing need to believe in a meaningful universe and a life after death, both for himself and his loved ones, helped to revive his Christian faith in the 1870s.
Travel guides
Ruskin continued to travel, studying the landscapes, buildings and art of Europe. In May 1870 and June 1872 he admired Carpaccio's St Ursula in Venice, a vision of which, associated with Rose La Touche would haunt him, described in the pages of Fors. In 1874, on his tour of Italy, Ruskin visited Sicily, the furthest he ever travelled.
Ruskin embraced the emerging literary forms, the travel guide (and gallery guide), writing new works, and adapting old ones "to give", he said, "what guidance I may to travellers..." The Stones of Venice was revised, edited and issued in a new "Travellers' Edition" in 1879. Ruskin directed his readers, the would-be traveller, to look with his cultural gaze at the landscapes, buildings and art of France and Italy: Mornings in Florence (1875–77), The Bible of Amiens (1880–85) (a close study of its sculpture and a wider history), St Mark's Rest (1877–84) and A Guide to the Principal Pictures in ... Venice (1877).
Final writings
In the 1880s, Ruskin returned to some literature and themes that had been among his favourites since childhood. He wrote about Scott, Byron and Wordsworth in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880) in which, as Seth Reno argues, he describes the devastating effects on the landscape caused by industrialization, a vision Reno sees as a realization of the Anthropocene. He returned to meteorological observations in his lectures, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century (1884), describing the apparent effects of industrialisation on weather patterns. Ruskin's Storm-Cloud has been seen as foreshadowing environmentalism and related concerns in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ruskin's prophetic writings were also tied to his emotions, and his more general (ethical) dissatisfaction with the modern world with which he now felt almost completely out of sympathy.
His last great work was his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89) (meaning, 'Of Past Things'), a highly personalised, selective, eloquent but incomplete account of aspects of his life, the preface of which was written in his childhood nursery at Herne Hill.
The period from the late 1880s was one of steady and inexorable decline. Gradually it became too difficult for him to travel to Europe. He suffered a complete mental collapse on his final tour, which included Beauvais, Sallanches and Venice, in 1888. The emergence and dominance of the Aesthetic movement and Impressionism distanced Ruskin from the modern art world, his ideas on the social utility of art contrasting with the doctrine of "l'art pour l'art" or "art for art's sake" that was beginning to dominate. His later writings were increasingly seen as irrelevant, especially as he seemed to be more interested in book illustrators such as Kate Greenaway than in modern art. He also attacked aspects of Darwinian theory with increasing violence, although he knew and respected Darwin personally.
Brantwood and final years
In August 1871, Ruskin purchased, from W. J. Linton, the then somewhat dilapidated Brantwood house, on the shores of Coniston Water, in the English Lake District, paying £1500 for it. Brantwood was Ruskin's main home from 1872 until his death. His estate provided a site for more of his practical schemes and experiments: he had an ice house built, and the gardens comprehensively rearranged. He oversaw the construction of a larger harbour (from where he rowed his boat, the Jumping Jenny), and he altered the house (adding a dining room, a turret to his bedroom to give him a panoramic view of the lake, and he later extended the property to accommodate his relatives). He built a reservoir, and redirected the waterfall down the hills, adding a slate seat that faced the tumbling stream and craggy rocks rather than the lake, so that he could closely observe the fauna and flora of the hillside.
Although Ruskin's 80th birthday was widely celebrated in 1899 (various Ruskin societies presenting him with an elaborately illuminated congratulatory address), Ruskin was scarcely aware of it. He died at Brantwood from influenza on 20 January 1900 at the age of 80. He was buried five days later in the churchyard at Coniston, according to his wishes. As he had grown weaker, suffering prolonged bouts of mental illness, he had been looked after by his second cousin, Joan(na) Severn (formerly "companion" to Ruskin's mother) and she and her family inherited his estate. Joanna's Care was the eloquent final chapter of Ruskin's memoir, which he dedicated to her as a fitting tribute.
Joan Severn, together with Ruskin's secretary, W. G. Collingwood, and his eminent American friend Charles Eliot Norton, were executors to his will. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn edited the monumental 39-volume Library Edition of Ruskin's Works, the last volume of which, an index, attempts to demonstrate the complex interconnectedness of Ruskin's thought. They all acted together to guard, and even control, Ruskin's public and personal reputation.
The centenary of Ruskin's birth was keenly celebrated in 1919, but his reputation was already in decline and sank further in the fifty years that followed. The contents of Ruskin's home were dispersed in a series of sales at auction, and Brantwood itself was bought in 1932 by the educationist and Ruskin enthusiast, collector and memorialist, John Howard Whitehouse.
Brantwood was opened in 1934 as a memorial to Ruskin and remains open to the public today. The Guild of St George continues to thrive as an educational charity, and has an international membership. The Ruskin Society organises events throughout the year.
A series of public celebrations of Ruskin's multiple legacies took place in 2000, on the centenary of his death, and events are planned throughout 2019, to mark the bicentenary of his birth.
Note on Ruskin's personal appearance
In middle age, and at his prime as a lecturer, Ruskin was described as slim, perhaps a little short, with an aquiline nose and brilliant, piercing blue eyes. Often sporting a double-breasted waistcoat, a high collar and, when necessary, a frock coat, he also wore his trademark blue neckcloth. From 1878 he cultivated an increasingly long beard, and took on the appearance of an "Old Testament" prophet.
Ruskin in the eyes of a student
The following description of Ruskin as a lecturer was written by an eyewitness, who was a student at the time (1884):
An incident where the Arts and Crafts master William Morris had aroused the anger of Dr Bright, Master of University College, Oxford, served to demonstrate Ruskin's charisma:
Legacy
International
Ruskin's influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as "one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him, rendering his ideas into Russian. Proust not only admired Ruskin but helped translate his works into French. Gandhi wrote of the "magic spell" cast on him by Unto This Last and paraphrased the work in Gujarati, calling it Sarvodaya, "The Advancement of All". In Japan, Ryuzo Mikimoto actively collaborated in Ruskin's translation. He commissioned sculptures and sundry commemorative items, and incorporated Ruskinian rose motifs in the jewellery produced by his cultured pearl empire. He established the Ruskin Society of Tokyo and his children built a dedicated library to house his Ruskin collection.
A number of utopian socialist Ruskin Colonies attempted to put his political ideals into practice. These communities included Ruskin, Florida, Ruskin, British Columbia and the Ruskin Commonwealth Association, a colony in Dickson County, Tennessee in existence from 1894 to 1899.
Ruskin's work has been translated into numerous languages including, in addition to those already mentioned (Russian, French, Japanese): German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Welsh, several Indian languages like Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ), Esperanto and Gikuyu.
Art, architecture and literature
Theorists and practitioners in a broad range of disciplines acknowledged their debt to Ruskin. Architects including Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius incorporated his ideas in their work. Writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound felt Ruskin's influence. The American poet Marianne Moore was an enthusiastic Ruskin reader. Art historians and critics, among them Herbert Read, Roger Fry and Wilhelm Worringer, knew Ruskin's work well. Admirers ranged from the British-born American watercolourist and engraver John William Hill to the sculptor-designer, printmaker and utopianist Eric Gill. Aside from E. T. Cook, Ruskin's editor and biographer, other leading British journalists influenced by Ruskin include J. A. Spender, and the war correspondent H. W. Nevinson.
Craft and conservation
William Morris and C. R. Ashbee (of the Guild of Handicraft) were keen disciples, and through them Ruskin's legacy can be traced in the arts and crafts movement. Ruskin's ideas on the preservation of open spaces and the conservation of historic buildings and places inspired his friends Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley to help found the National Trust.
Society, education and sport
Pioneers of town planning such as Thomas Coglan Horsfall and Patrick Geddes called Ruskin an inspiration and invoked his ideas in justification of their own social interventions; likewise the founders of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.
Edward Carpenter's community in Millthorpe, Derbyshire was partly inspired by Ruskin, and John Kenworthy's colony at Purleigh, Essex, which was briefly a refuge for the Doukhobors, combined Ruskin's ideas and Tolstoy's.
The most prolific collector of Ruskiniana was John Howard Whitehouse, who saved Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and opened it as a permanent Ruskin memorial. Inspired by Ruskin's educational ideals, Whitehouse established Bembridge School, on the Isle of Wight, and ran it along Ruskinian lines. Educationists from William Jolly to Michael Ernest Sadler wrote about and appreciated Ruskin's ideas. Ruskin College, an educational establishment in Oxford originally intended for working men, was named after him by its American founders, Walter Vrooman and Charles A. Beard.
Ruskin's innovative publishing experiment, conducted by his one-time Working Men's College pupil George Allen, whose business was eventually merged to become Allen & Unwin, anticipated the establishment of the Net Book Agreement.
Ruskin's Drawing Collection, a collection of 1470 works of art he gathered as learning aids for the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (which he founded at Oxford), is at the Ashmolean Museum. The Museum has promoted Ruskin's art teaching, utilising the collection for in-person and online drawing courses.
Pierre de Coubertin, the innovator of the modern Olympic Games, cited Ruskin's principles of beautification, asserting that the games should be "Ruskinised" to create an aesthetic identity that transcended mere championship competitions.
Politics and critique of political economy
Ruskin was an inspiration for many Christian socialists, and his ideas informed the work of economists such as William Smart and J. A. Hobson, and the positivist Frederic Harrison. Ruskin was discussed in university extension classes, and in reading circles and societies formed in his name. He helped to inspire the settlement movement in Britain and the United States. Resident workers at Toynbee Hall such as the future civil servants Hubert Llewellyn Smith and William Beveridge (author of the Report ... on Social Insurance and Allied Services), and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged their debt to Ruskin as they helped to found the British welfare state. More of the British Labour Party's earliest MPs acknowledged Ruskin's influence than mentioned Karl Marx or the Bible. More recently, Ruskin's works have also influenced Phillip Blond and the Red Tory movement.
Ruskin in the 21st century
In 2019, Ruskin200 was inaugurated as a year-long celebration marking the bicentenary of Ruskin's birth.
Admirers and scholars of Ruskin can visit the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and the Ruskin Museum, both in Coniston in the English Lake District. All three mount regular exhibitions open to the public all the year round. Barony House in Edinburgh is home to a descendant of John Ruskin. She has designed and hand painted various friezes in honour of her ancestor and it is open to the public. Ruskin's Guild of St George continues his work today, in education, the arts, crafts, and the rural economy.
Many streets, buildings, organisations and institutions bear his name: The Priory Ruskin Academy in Grantham, Lincolnshire; John Ruskin College, South Croydon; and Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford and Cambridge, which traces its origins to the Cambridge School of Art, at the foundation of which Ruskin spoke in 1858. Also, the Ruskin Literary and Debating Society, (founded in 1900 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), the oldest surviving club of its type, and still promoting the development of literary knowledge and public speaking today; and the Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles, which still exists. In addition, there is the Ruskin Pottery, Ruskin House, Croydon and Ruskin Hall at the University of Pittsburgh.
Ruskin, Florida, United States—site of one of the short-lived American Ruskin Colleges—is named after John Ruskin. There is a mural of Ruskin titled "Head, Heart and Hands" on a building across from the Ruskin Post Office.
Since 2000, scholarly research has focused on aspects of Ruskin's legacy, including his impact on the sciences; John Lubbock and Oliver Lodge admired him. Two major academic projects have looked at Ruskin and cultural tourism (investigating, for example, Ruskin's links with Thomas Cook); the other focuses on Ruskin and the theatre. The sociologist and media theorist David Gauntlett argues that Ruskin's notions of craft can be felt today in online communities such as YouTube and throughout Web 2.0. Similarly, architectural theorist Lars Spuybroek has argued that Ruskin's understanding of the Gothic as a combination of two types of variation, rough savageness and smooth changefulness, opens up a new way of thinking leading to digital and so-called parametric design.
Notable Ruskin enthusiasts include the writers Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson, and the politicians Patrick Cormack, Frank Judd, Frank Field and Tony Benn. In 2006, Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, Raficq Abdulla, Jonathon Porritt and Nicholas Wright were among those to contribute to the symposium, There is no wealth but life: Ruskin in the 21st Century. Jonathan Glancey at The Guardian and Andrew Hill at the Financial Times have both written about Ruskin, as has the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. In 2015, inspired by Ruskin's philosophy of education, Marc Turtletaub founded Meristem in Fair Oaks, California. The centre educates adolescents with developmental differences using Ruskin's "land and craft" ideals, transitioning them so they will succeed as adults in an evolving post-industrial society.
Theory and criticism
Ruskin wrote over 250 works, initially art criticism and history, but expanding to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, mythology, travel, political economy and social reform. After his death Ruskin's works were collected in the 39-volume "Library Edition", completed in 1912 by his friends Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. The range and quantity of Ruskin's writing, and its complex, allusive and associative method of expression, cause certain difficulties. In 1898, John A. Hobson observed that in attempting to summarise Ruskin's thought, and by extracting passages from across his work, "the spell of his eloquence is broken". Clive Wilmer has written, further, that, "The anthologising of short purple passages, removed from their intended contexts [... is] something which Ruskin himself detested and which has bedevilled his reputation from the start." Nevertheless, some aspects of Ruskin's theory and criticism require further consideration.
Art and design criticism
Ruskin's early work defended the reputation of J. M. W. Turner. He believed that all great art should communicate an understanding and appreciation of nature. Accordingly, inherited artistic conventions should be rejected. Only by means of direct observation can an artist, through form and colour, represent nature in art. He advised artists in Modern Painters I to: "go to Nature in all singleness of heart... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing." By the 1850s. Ruskin was celebrating the Pre-Raphaelites, whose members, he said, had formed "a new and noble school" of art that would provide a basis for a thoroughgoing reform of the art world. For Ruskin, art should communicate truth above all things. However, this could not be revealed by mere display of skill, and must be an expression of the artist's whole moral outlook. Ruskin rejected the work of Whistler because he considered it to epitomise a reductive mechanisation of art.
Ruskin's strong rejection of Classical tradition in The Stones of Venice typifies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in his thought: "Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified." Rejection of mechanisation and standardisation informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised the Gothic for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he perceived between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural environment, and between worker and God. Attempts in the 19th century to reproduce Gothic forms (such as pointed arches), attempts he had helped inspire, were not enough to make these buildings expressions of what Ruskin saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organicism.
For Ruskin, the Gothic style in architecture embodied the same moral truths he sought to promote in the visual arts. It expressed the 'meaning' of architecture—as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration—all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure." Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous and repressive standardisation. Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with the demoralising consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as The Crystal Palace, which he criticised. Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works over the course of his career, his much-anthologised essay "The Nature of Gothic" from the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) is widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative discussions of his central argument.
Ruskin's theories indirectly encouraged a revival of Gothic styles, but Ruskin himself was often dissatisfied with the results. He objected that forms of mass-produced faux Gothic did not exemplify his principles, but showed disregard for the true meaning of the style. Even the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration, met with his disapproval. The O'Shea brothers, freehand stone carvers chosen to revive the creative "freedom of thought" of Gothic craftsmen, disappointed him by their lack of reverence for the task.
Ruskin's distaste for oppressive standardisation led to later works in which he attacked laissez-faire capitalism, which he thought was at its root. His ideas provided inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement, the founders of the National Trust, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Ruskin's views on art, wrote Kenneth Clark, "cannot be made to form a logical system, and perhaps owe to this fact a part of their value." Ruskin's accounts of art are descriptions of a superior type that conjure images vividly in the mind's eye.
Clark neatly summarises the key features of Ruskin's writing on art and architecture:
Art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole man. Whether in making or perceiving a work of art, we bring to bear on it feeling, intellect, morals, knowledge, memory, and every other human capacity, all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept as false and dehumanising as economic man.
Even the most superior mind and the most powerful imagination must found itself on facts, which must be recognised for what they are. The imagination will often reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind cannot understand; but this recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions.
These facts must be perceived by the senses, or felt; not learnt.
The greatest artists and schools of art have believed it their duty to impart vital truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about religion and the conduct of life.
Beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function.'
This fulfilment of function depends on all parts of an organism cohering and co-operating. This was what he called the 'Law of Help,' one of Ruskin's fundamental beliefs, extending from nature and art to society.
Good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important.
Great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny.
Historic preservation
Ruskin's belief in preservation of ancient buildings had a significant influence on later thinking about the distinction between conservation and restoration. He was a strong proponent of the former, while his contemporary, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, promoted the latter. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, (1849) Ruskin wrote:
This abhorrence of restoration is in marked contrast to Viollet-le-Duc, who wrote that restoration is a "means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time."
For Ruskin, the "age" of a building was crucially significant as an aspect in its preservation: "For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."
Critique of political economy
Ruskin wielded a critique of political economy of orthodox, 19th-century political economy principally on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations (broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in The Stones of Venice, and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such as The Political Economy of Art (A Joy for Ever), but he gave them full expression in the influential and at the time of publication, very controversial essays, Unto This Last.
At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or craftsman, in modern industrial capitalist society. Ruskin believed that the economic theories of Adam Smith, expressed in The Wealth of Nations had led, through the division of labour to the alienation of the worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment. (See The Stones of Venice above.)
Ruskin argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker or product.
In the preface to Unto This Last (1862), Ruskin recommended that the state should underwrite standards of service and production to guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and 'gentleness and justice'; government manufactories and workshops; government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received honourably and not in shame. Many of these ideas were later incorporated into the welfare state.
Controversies
Turner's erotic drawings
Until 2005, biographies of both J. M. W. Turner and Ruskin had claimed that in 1858 Ruskin burned bundles of erotic paintings and drawings by Turner to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. Ruskin's friend Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery, was said to have colluded in the alleged destruction of Turner's works. In 2005, these works, which form part of the Turner Bequest held at Tate Britain, were re-appraised by Turner Curator Ian Warrell, who concluded that Ruskin and Wornum had not destroyed them.
Sexuality
Ruskin's sexuality has been the subject of a great deal of speculation and critical comment. His one marriage, to Effie Gray, was annulled after six years owing to non-consummation. Effie, in a letter to her parents, claimed that Ruskin found her "person" repugnant: He alleged various reasons, hatred of children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason... that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848]. Ruskin told his lawyer during the annulment proceedings: It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it. The cause of Ruskin's "disgust" has led to much conjecture. Mary Lutyens speculated that he rejected Effie because he was horrified by the sight of her pubic hair. Lutyens argued that Ruskin must have known the female form only through Greek statues and paintings of nudes which lacked pubic hair. However, Peter Fuller wrote, "It has been said that he was frightened on the wedding night by the sight of his wife's pubic hair; more probably, he was perturbed by her menstrual blood." Ruskin's biographers Tim Hilton and John Batchelor also took the view that menstruation was the more likely explanation, though Batchelor also suggests that body-odour may have been the problem. There is no evidence to support any of these theories. William Ewart Gladstone said to his daughter Mary, "should you ever hear anyone blame Millais or his wife, or Mr. Ruskin [for the breakdown of the marriage], remember that there is no fault; there was misfortune, even tragedy. All three were perfectly blameless." The fullest story of the Ruskins' marriage to date has been told by the scholar Robert Brownell.
Ruskin's later relationship with Rose La Touche has led to claims that he started a correspondence with her when he met her at the age of nine. In fact, he did not approach her as a suitor until on or near her eighteenth birthday. She asked him to wait for her until she was 21. Receiving no answer, he repeated his proposal.
Ruskin is not known to have had any sexually intimate relationships. During an episode of mental derangement after Rose died, he wrote a letter in which he insisted that Rose's spirit had instructed him to marry a girl who was visiting him at the time. It is also true that in letters from Ruskin to Kate Greenaway he asked her to draw her "girlies" (as he called her child figures) without clothing:
Will you – (it's all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me.
In a letter to his physician John Simon on 15 May 1886, Ruskin wrote:
I like my girls from ten to sixteen—allowing of 17 or 18 as long as they're not in love with anybody but me.—I've got some darlings of 8—12—14—just now, and my Pigwiggina here—12—who fetches my wood and is learning to play my bells.Pigwiggina is a nickname Ruskin used for the girl as she looked after (lambs and) piglets; c.f.
Ruskin's biographers disagree about the allegation of "paedophilia". Tim Hilton, in his two-volume biography, asserts that Ruskin "was a paedophile" but leaves the claim unexplained, while John Batchelor argues that the term is inappropriate because Ruskin's behaviour does not "fit the profile". Others point to a definite pattern of "nympholeptic" behaviour with regard to his interactions with girls at a Winnington school. However, there is no evidence that Ruskin ever engaged in any sexual activity with anyone at all. According to one interpretation, what Ruskin valued most in pre-pubescent girls was their innocence; the fact that they were not (yet) fully developed sexual beings is what attracted him. An exploration of this topic by James L. Spates declares that "whatever idiosyncratic qualities his erotic expressions may have possessed, when it comes to matters of sexual capability and interest, there is every reason to conclude that John Ruskin was physically and emotionally normal."
Common law of business balance
Ruskin was not a fan of buying low and selling high. In the "Veins of Wealth" section of Unto This Last, he wrote: "So far as I know, there is not in history record of anything so disgraceful to the human intellect as the modern idea that the commercial text, 'Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,' represents, or under any circumstances could represent, an available principle of national economy." Perhaps due to such passages, Ruskin is frequently identified as the originator of the "common law of business balance"—a statement about the relationships of price and quality as they pertain to manufactured goods, and often summarised as: "The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot." This is the core of a longer statement usually attributed to Ruskin, although Ruskin's authorship is disputed among Ruskin scholars. Fred Shapiro maintains that the statement does not appear anywhere in Ruskin's works, and George Landow is likewise sceptical of the claim of Ruskin's authorship. In a posting of the Ruskin Library News, a blog associated with the Ruskin Library (a major collection of Ruskiniana located at Lancaster University), an anonymous library staff member briefly mentions the statement and its widespread use, saying that, "This is one of many quotations ascribed to Ruskin, without there being any trace of them in his writings – although someone, somewhere, thought they sounded like Ruskin." In an issue of the journal Heat Transfer Engineering, Kenneth Bell quotes the statement and mentions that it has been attributed to Ruskin. While Bell believes in the veracity of its content, he adds that the statement does not appear in Ruskin's published works.
Early in the 20th century, this statement appeared—without any authorship attribution—in magazine advertisements, in a business catalogue, in student publications, and, occasionally, in editorial columns. Later in the 20th century, however, magazine advertisements, student publications, business books, technical publications, scholarly journals, and business catalogues often included the statement with attribution to Ruskin.
In the 21st century, and based upon the statement's applicability of the issues of quality and price, the statement continues to be used and attributed to Ruskin—despite the questionable nature of the attribution.
For many years, various Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlours prominently displayed a section of the statement in framed signs. ("There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that man's lawful prey.") The signs listed Ruskin as the author of the statement, but the signs gave no information on where or when Ruskin was supposed to have written, spoken, or published the statement. Due to the statement's widespread use as a promotional slogan, and despite questions of Ruskin's authorship, it is likely that many people who are otherwise unfamiliar with Ruskin now associate him with this statement.
Definitions
The OED credits J. Ruskin with the first quotation in 152 separate entries. Some include:
Pathetic fallacy: Ruskin coined this term in Modern Painters III (1856) to describe the ascription of human emotions to inanimate objects and impersonal natural forces, as in "Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy" (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre).
Fors Clavigera: Ruskin gave this title to a series of letters he wrote "to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" (1871–84). The name was intended to signify three great powers that fashion human destiny, as Ruskin explained at length in Letter 2 (February 1871). These were: force, symbolised by the club (clava) of Hercules; Fortitude, symbolised by the key (clavis) of Ulysses; and Fortune, symbolised by the nail (clavus) of Lycurgus. These three powers (the "fors") together represent human talents and abilities to choose the right moment and then to strike with energy. The concept is derived from Shakespeare's phrase "There is a tide in the affairs of men/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" (Brutus in Julius Caesar). Ruskin believed that the letters were inspired by the Third Fors: striking out at the right moment.For a full and concise introduction to the work, see Dinah Birch, "Introduction", in John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. xxxiii–xlix.
Illth: Used by Ruskin as the antithesis of wealth, which he defined as life itself; broadly, where wealth is 'well-being', illth is "ill-being".
Theoria: Ruskin's 'theoretic' faculty – theoretic, as opposed to aesthetic – enables a vision of the beautiful as intimating a reality deeper than the everyday, at least in terms of the kind of transcendence generally seen as immanent in things of this world. For an example of the influence of Ruskin's concept of theoria, see Peter Fuller.
Modern Atheism: Ruskin applied this label to "the unfortunate persistence of the clergy in teaching children what they cannot understand, and in employing young consecrate persons to assert in pulpits what they do not know."
Excrescence: Ruskin defined an "excrescence" as an outgrowth of the main body of a building that does not harmonise well with the main body. He originally used the term to describe certain gothic revival features also for later additions to cathedrals and various other public buildings, especially from the Gothic period.
Fictional portrayals
Ruskin figures as Mr Herbert in The New Republic (1878), a novel by one of his Oxford undergraduates, William Mallock (1849–1923).
The Love of John Ruskin (1912) a silent movie about Ruskin, Effie and Millais.
Edith Wharton's False Dawn novella, the first in the 1924 Old New York series has the protagonist meet John Ruskin.
Ruskin was the inspiration for either the Drawling Master or the Gryphon in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Dante's Inferno (1967) Ken Russell's biopic for television of Rossetti, in which Ruskin is played by Clive Goodwin
The Love School (1975) a BBC TV series about the Pre-Raphaelites, starring David Collings (Ruskin), Anne Kidd (Effie), Peter Egan (Millais).
A novel about the marriage of John Ruskin.
Dear Countess (1983) a radio play by Elizabeth Morgan, with Derek Jacobi (Ruskin), Bridget McCann (Gray), Timothy West (Old Mr Ruskin) Michael Fenner (Millais). The author played Ruskin's mother.
Peter Hoyle's novel, Brantwood: The Story of an Obsession (1986, ) is about two cousins who pursue their interest in Ruskin to his Coniston home.
The Passion of John Ruskin (1994), a film directed by Alex Chapple.
Modern Painters (1995) an opera about Ruskin by David Lang.
Parrots and Owls (1994) a radio play by John Purser about Ruskin's attempt to revive Gothic architecture and his connection to the O'Shea brothers.
The Countess (1995), a play written by Gregory Murphy, dealing with Ruskin's marriage.
A novel in which Ruskin makes his last visit to Amiens cathedral in 1879.
The Order of Release (1998), a radio play by Robin Brooks about Ruskin (Bob Peck), Effie (Sharon Small) and Millais (David Tennant).
Ruskin and the Hinksey diggings form the backdrop to Ann Harries' novel, Manly Pursuits (1999).
A collection of short stories that includes Come, Gentle Nightabout Ruskin and Effie's wedding night.
Mrs Ruskin (2003), a play by Kim Morrissey dealing with Ruskin's marriage.
"Sesame and Roses" (2007), a short story by Grace Andreacchi that explores Ruskin's twin obsessions with Venice and Rose La Touche.
Desperate Romantics (2009), a six-part BBC drama serial about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin is played by Tom Hollander.
Benjamin, Melanie (2010). Alice I Have Been. . A fictionalized account of the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Mr. Turner (2014), a biopic of J. M. W. Turner with Ruskin portrayed as a precocious prig by Joshua McGuire.
Effie Gray (2014), a biopic about the Ruskin-Gray-Millais love triangle, written by Emma Thompson and featuring Greg Wise (Ruskin), Dakota Fanning (Gray) and Tom Sturridge (Millais).
Light, Descending (2014) is a biographical novel about John Ruskin by Octavia Randolph.
Gallery
Paintings
Drawings
Select bibliography
It is the standard scholarly edition of Ruskin's work, the Library Edition, sometimes called simply Cook and Wedderburn. The volume in which the following works can be found is indicated in the form: (Works [followed by the volume number]).
Works by Ruskin
Poems (written 1835–46; collected 1850) (Works 2)
The Poetry of Architecture (serialised The Architectural Magazine 1837–38; authorised book, 1893) (Works 1)
Letters to a College Friend (written 1840–45; published 1894) (Works 1)
The King of the Golden River, or the Black Brothers. A Legend of Stiria (written 1841; published 1850) (Works 1)
Modern Painters (5 vols.) (1843–60) (Works 3–7)
Vol. I (1843) (Parts I and II) Of General Principles and of Truth (Works 3)
Vol. II (1846) (Part III) Of the Imaginative and Theoretic Faculties (Works 4)
Vol. III (1856) (Part IV) Of Many Things (Works 5)
Vol. IV (1856) (Part V) Mountain Beauty (Works 6)
Vol. V (1860) (Part VI) Of Leaf Beauty (Part VII) Of Cloud Beauty (Part VIII) Of Ideas of Relation (1) Of Invention Formal (Part IX) Of Ideas of Relation (2) Of Invention Spiritual (Works 7)
The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) (Works 8)
The Stones of Venice (3 vols) (1851–53)
Vol. I. The Foundations (1851) (Works 9)
Vol. II. The Sea–Stories (1853) (Works 10) – containing the chapter "The Nature of Gothic"
Vol. III. The Fall (1853) (Works 11)
Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851) (Works 12)
Pre-Raphaelitism (1851) (Works 12)
Letters to the Times on the Pre-Raphaelite Artists (1851, 1854) (Works 12)
Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh, 1853) (1854) (Works 12)
Academy Notes (Annual Reviews of the June Royal Academy Exhibitions) (1855–59, 1875) (Works 14)
The Harbours of England (1856) (Works 13)
The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners (1857) (Works 15)
A Joy Forever' and Its Price in the Market: being the substance (with additions) of two lectures on The Political Economy of Art (1857, 1880) (Works 16)
The Two Paths: being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858–9 (1859) (Works 16)
The Elements of Perspective, Arranged for the Use of Schools and Intended to be Read in Connection with the First Three Books of Euclid (1859) (Works 15)
Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (serialised Cornhill Magazine 1860, book 1862) (Works 17)
Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy (serialised Fraser's Magazine 1862–63, book 1872) (Works 17)
The Cestus of Aglaia (serialised Art Journal 1864–64, incorporated (revised) in On the Old Road (1882) (Works 19)
Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in 1864 (1865) (i.e., "Of Queens' Gardens" and "Of Kings' Treasuries" to which was added, in a later edition of 1871, "The Mystery of Life and Its Arts") (Works 18)
The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation (1866) (Works 18)
The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War (1866) (to a later edition was added a fourth lecture (delivered 1869), called "The Future of England") (1866) (Works 18)
Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work (1867) (Works 17)
The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (1869) (Works 19)
Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 (Works 20)
Aratra Pentelici: Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas term, 1870 (1872) (Works 20)
Lectures on Landscape, Delivered at Oxford in [Lent term| Lent Term], 1871 (1898) ("Works" 22)
Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871–84) ("Works" 27–29) (originally collected in 8 vols., vols. 1–7 covering annually 1871–1877, and vol. 8, Letters 85–96, covering 1878–84)
Volume I. Letters 1–36 (1871–73) (Works 27)
Volume II. Letters 37–72 (1874–76) (Works 28)
Volume III. Letters 73–96 (1877–84) (Works 29)
The Eagle's Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural science to Art, Given before the University of Oxford in Lent term, 1872 (1872) (Works 22)
Ariadne Florentina': Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving, with Appendix, Given before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term, 1872 (1876) (Works 22)
Love's Meinie: Lectures on Greek and English Birds (1873–81) (Works 25)
Val d'Arno: Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art, directly antecedent to the Florentine Year of Victories, given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1873 (1874) (Works 23)
The Aesthetic and Mathematic School of Art in Florence: Lectures Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1874 (first published 1906) (Works 23)
Mornings in Florence: Simple Studies of Christian Art, for English Travellers (1875–77) (Works 23)
Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and Life of Stones (1875–83) (Works 26)
Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps, and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew (1875–86) (Works 25)
Bibliotheca Pastorum (i.e., 'Shepherd's Library', consisting ofmultiple volumes) (ed. John Ruskin) (1876–88) (Works 31–32)
Laws of Fésole: A Familiar Treatise on the Elementary Principles and Practice of Drawing and Painting as Determined by the Tuscan Masters (arranged for the use of schools) (1877–78) (Works 15)
St Mark's Rest (1877–84, book 1884) (Works 24)
Fiction, Fair and Foul (serialised Nineteenth Century 1880–81, incorporated in On the Old Road (1885)) (Works 34)
The Bible of Amiens (the first part of Our Fathers Have Told Us) (1880–85) (Works 33)
The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1883, book 1884) (Works 33)
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution, 4 and 11 February 1884 (1884) (Works 34)
The Pleasures of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1884, published 1884–85) (Works 33)
Præterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life (3 vols.) (1885–89) (Works 35)
Dilecta: Correspondence, Diary Notes, and Extracts from Books, Illustrating 'Praeterita''' (1886, 1887, 1900) (Works 35)
Selected diaries and letters
The Diaries of John Ruskin eds. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (Clarendon Press, 1956–59)
The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin ed. Helen Gill Viljoen (Yale University Press, 1971)
A Tour of the Lakes in Cumbria. John Ruskin's Diary for 1830 eds. Van Akin Burd and James S. Dearden (Scolar, 1990)
The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the children at Winnington Hall ed. Van Akin Burd (Harvard University Press, 1969)
The Ruskin Family Letters: The Correspondence of John James Ruskin, his wife, and their son John, 1801–1843 ed. Van Akin Burd (2 vols.) (Cornell University Press, 1973)
The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton ed. John Lewis Bradley and Ian Ousby (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin ed. George Allen Cate (Stanford University Press, 1982)
John Ruskin's Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters ed. Rachel Dickinson (Legenda, 2008)
Selected editions of Ruskin still in print
Praeterita [Ruskin's autobiography] ed. Francis O' Gorman (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Unto this Last: Four essays on the First Principles of Political Economy intro. Andrew Hill (Pallas Athene, 2010)
Unto This Last And Other Writings ed. Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1986)
Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century preface by Clive Wilmer and intro. Peter Brimblecombe (Pallas Athene, 2012)
The Nature of Gothic (Pallas Athene, 2011) [facsimile reprint of Morris's Kelmscott Edition with essays by Robert Hewison and Tony Pinkney]
Selected Writings ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Selected Writings (originally Ruskin Today) ed. Kenneth Clark (Penguin, 1964 and later impressions)
The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from his Writings ed. John D. Rosenberg (George Allen and Unwin, 1963)
Athena: Queen of the Air (Annotated) (originally The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm) ed. Na Ding, foreword by Tim Kavi, brief literary bio by Kelli M. Webert (TiLu Press, 2013 electronic book version, paper forthcoming)Ruskin on Music ed Mary Augusta Wakefield (Creative Media Partners LLC, 2015)
See also
John Henry Devereux
Ruskin, Nebraska
Ruskin's diggers in Ferry Hinksey (1874)
Ruskin's Ride, a bridleway in Oxford
Trenton, Missouri, home of the first Ruskin College in the United States
Charles Augustus Howell
The English House Mount Ruskin
References
Sources
Robert Hewison, "Ruskin, John (1819–1900)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition.
Francis O'Gorman (1999) John Ruskin (Pocket Biographies) (Sutton Publishing)
James S. Dearden (2004), John Ruskin (Shire Publications)
Further reading
General
Barringer, Tim. et al., ed. Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-300-24641-4.
Conner, Patrick. Savage Ruskin. New York: Macmillan Press, 1979.
Cook, E. T. Ruskin, John. Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1901.
Dearden, James S. John Ruskin's Bookplates. The Book Collector (1964) 13 no 3 (autumn): 335-339.
Dearden, J. S. The Production and Distribution of John Ruskin's Poems 1850. The Book Collector (1968)17 no 2 (summer): 151-167.
Dearden, J. S. Wise and Ruskin. The Book Collector (1969) 18.no.1 (spring): 45-56.
Freeman, Kelly; Hughes, Thomas. et al. eds. Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to The Storm-Cloud. The Courtauld, 2021. ISBN 978-1-907485-13-8.
Hanley, K; Hull, C. S. eds. John Ruskin's Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings. Cambridge: Legenda, 2016. ISBN 978-1-906540-85-2.
Hewison, Robert. John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye. Thames and Hudson, 1976.
Hugh, Chriholm. ed. Ruskin, John. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1911.
Jackson, Kevin. The Worlds of John Ruskin. Pallas Athene, 2010.
Quill, Sarah. Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited. Ashgate, 2000.
Quigley Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History Of The World In Our Time. GSG & Associates, 1966.
Rosenberg, J. G. The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius. Columbia University Press, 1961.
Viljoen, Helen Gill. Ruskin's Scottish Heritage: A Prelude. University of Illinois Press, 1956.
Waldstein, C. The Work of John Ruskin: Its Influence Upon Modern Thought and Life, Harper's magazine vol. 78, no. 465 (Feb. 1889), pp. 382–418.
Biographies of Ruskin
W. G. Collingwood (1893) The Life and Work of John Ruskin 1–2. Methuen. (The Life of John Ruskin, sixth edition (1905).) – Note that the title was slightly changed for the 1900 2nd edition and later editions.
E. T. Cook (1911) The Life of John Ruskin 1–2. George Allen. (The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 1 of the second edition (1912); The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 2 of the second edition (1912))
Derrick Leon (1949) Ruskin: The Great Victorian (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Tim Hilton (1985) John Ruskin: The Early Years (Yale University Press)
Tim Hilton (2000) John Ruskin: The Later Years (Yale University Press)
John Batchelor (2000) John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life (Chatto & Windus)
Robert Hewison (2007) John Ruskin'' (Oxford University Press)
External links
Ruskin Today
The Eighth Lamp, Ruskin Studies Today. Ruskin journal
Library collections
UK Museum, Library and Archive collections relating to Ruskin at Cornucopia.org.uk. Retrieved
John Ruskin texts in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature Digital Collection. Retrieved 2010-10-19
Electronic editions
Liverpool Museums audio files on Ruskin
Archival material
Ruskin letter to Brantwood at Mount Holyoke College
Ruskin letter to Simon at Mount Holyoke College
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's online biography and gallery . Retrieved 2010-10-19
Sources for the Study of John Ruskin and the Guild of St George. Produced by Sheffield City Council's Libraries and Archives.
Archival material at
Finding aid to John Ruskin letters at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
John Ruskin Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
1819 births
1900 deaths
19th-century British journalists
19th-century British philosophers
19th-century economists
19th-century English painters
Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford
Alumni of King's College London
Anti-consumerists
Architectural theoreticians
Arts and Crafts movement artists
British anti-capitalists
British male journalists
Burials in Cumbria
Conchologists
English architecture writers
English art critics
English environmentalists
English essayists
English male painters
English people of Scottish descent
English philosophers
English watercolourists
Guild of St George
Male essayists
Painters from London
People associated with Anglia Ruskin University
People associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Romantic critics of political economy
Slade Professors of Fine Art (University of Oxford) | false | [
"\"What About Us\" is a single released by British-Irish girl group the Saturdays. Their first international single, it is the lead single from their first American-only release EP, Chasing the Saturdays (2013). It also acts as the second single from their fourth studio album Living for the Weekend (2013). The single was first released in the United States and Canada on 18 December 2012 via digital download, before being released in the United Kingdom on 16 March 2013 via CD single and digital download. The single was written by Camille Purcell, Ollie Jacobs, Philip Jacobs. There are two different versions of the track which have been recorded and released: a solo version, which was released exclusively in the US and Canada, and a version featuring Jamaican rapper Sean Paul, which was released internationally. Music critics gave the song positive feedback, but questioned the heavily auto-tuned chorus and the move away from the group's traditional sound.\n\nA music video was released for the song was published and released via the Saturdays' Vevo account on 11 January 2013. The video was filmed in Los Angeles, where the band were filming their US reality series, Chasing the Saturdays, which is broadcast through E!. An acoustic version of \"Somebody Else's Life\", which can be heard on the opening titles of the show, was released as a B-side. The Saturdays went on to a promotional tour in order to get the song \"out there\" in the United States, and appeared on a number of different chat shows including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Jeff Probst Show, Fashion Police, Chelsea Lately and The Today Show in New York City. They later went on to a promotional tour in the UK, visiting radio stations around the country.\n\n\"What About Us\" gained commercial success, debuted at number one on the UK Singles Chart to become the Saturdays' twelfth UK top 10 single and first ever number-one. In Ireland, the song debuted at number six on the Irish Singles Chart, gaining the group their fifth top 10 single there. With first-week sales of 114,000 copies and 40,000 copies more sold than their closest competitor to number one, \"What About Us\" was the fastest-selling single of 2013 in the UK until it was overtaken by Naughty Boy's \"La La La\" two months later. In December 2013, it was announced as the eleventh fastest-selling single of the year overall. As of August 2014, the song has sold over 400,000 copies in the UK. On 23 December 2013, Mollie King posted a photo on Instagram of her holding a 500,000 sales plaque from their record label, with the message that \"What About Us\" had sold over 500,000 copies in UK and USA, with 120,000 copies in the US alone even without charting on the Billboard Hot 100.\n\nBackground \n\nIn 2012, it was announced that the Saturdays had received an offer to star in their own reality television programme, Chasing the Saturdays, broadcast through E! Network. While filming their show, the band began visiting the recording studio, where they began work with Rodney \"Darkchild\" Jerkins.\n\nThe Saturdays felt comfortable with their US labels, and thanked them for not only giving them a chance in North America, but for making them feel at ease and welcome which took a lot of \"weight of our shoulders\". The band said they have always respected the labels due to the massive success they've had with artists. The band had been working with Demi Lovato in the recording studio.\n\nComposition\n\n\"What About Us\" was written and produced by Ollie Jacobs and acts as the Saturdays first single to be released in North America where it could appear on the Billboard Hot 100 and Canadian Hot 100. In America its release coincided with their TV show, Chasing the Saturdays. The track is the band's fourteenth single to be released in the United Kingdom and Ireland and the track is a dance-pop song. Before the release of the song, Mollie King said that the band were excited to share the track as they had the song \"for months\" She said: \"I can't wait for everyone to hear it and to get to perform it. I'm just so excited about this one, I think it's going down really well.\" The band said they didn't want to change their type of music just for the American public and would stick to their roots and the genre they enjoyed to perform. King spoke: \"We've always made a point that we don't want to change to go to America. We wanted to go over as we are and if they like us, they like us and if they don't, they don't!\" King said that the track is reggae pop music, a little different from what band usually record, but the track is still really \"dancey\" and \"upbeat\", as well a good song to dance to on either stage or at a club. When Una Healy was asked what the song was about she said that she \"did not know\" what the song was exactly about. \"To be honest I was trying to figure out the other day what exactly it's about. I could bullshit away telling you, but I really don't know. But I think it's all about someone driving you crazy.\" She said she \"thinks\" that 'What About Us' part means \"me and you getting together\". She did point out that she did know that the song was about \"making you happy\" and that the track was good for the summer and will get you on the dancefloor. The band teased saying that \"What About Us\" is a pop track, and that is a good indication of what the expect from the album, and that they've paired up with Diane Warren to record a few ballads and not just pop tracks. \"What About Us\" is the only collaboration on the album.\n\nRelease\n\"What About Us\" was confirmed as the Saturdays' first single to be released in North America, and would be released on 18 December 2012 to coincide with their American reality show, Chasing the Saturdays. It was also revealed that the track would be released as the lead single from the band's North America released only Extended play, Chasing the Saturdays, which was named after the show. Some critics said that releasing \"What About Us\" from an EP for the US market was a \"wise decision\". One critic said: For, throwing out a traditional release on the back of a show that isn't (yet) a hit would ultimately be setting them up for failure. What's more, the EP allows their \"storyline\" for the next season of the show (should there be one) to revolve around recording an album. In the United Kingdom, it was revealed that \"What About Us\" would be the follow-up single from \"30 Days\" in the UK and Ireland, and therefore would not be the lead single from the band's fourth studio album. The band announced that before the release of the album, there would be another single release from the album. The follow-up single was revealed to be titled \"Gentleman\".\n\nJust like all the band's previous singles, the record was accepted by all A-Lists at radio stations. The UK and Ireland version of the track features a guest rap from Sean Paul. Whereas the North American version does not feature vocals from Sean Paul and only vocals from the band. The original version of the track last 3 minutes and 24 seconds, whereas the version which features Sean Paul lasts 3 minutes and 40 seconds. The single was released with B-side, an Acoustic version of a brand new track, \"Somebody Else's Life\", which is the opening theme to Chasing the Saturdays. \"What About Us\" was released as a digital download EP, and this featured the single version which features Sean Paul, the solo version and the B-side track. Upon the release in North America, there was a digital remixes EP which featured remixes of \"What About Us\" by a number of DJs including: Seamus Haji, Guy Scheiman, the Buzz Junkies and 2nd Adventure and this was also made available to purchase on 18 December 2012. While in the UK, the CD single was made available to be from stores from 18 March 2013. On the CD single featured \"What About Us\", the B-side \"Somebody Else's Life\".\n\nThe band decided to release \"What About Us\" differently between the United Kingdom and the United States, \"What About Us\" was released onto the charts without any airplay and without a music video accompanying the release, something the band experienced in the UK, with \"Notorious\". Whereas in the UK, \"What About Us\" was released with airplay and the music video being released before the release of the single. During this time, Frankie Sandford became ambassadors for mental health after Sandford battled depression. The band said they choose \"What About Us\" to be the lead single in the US and follow-up single from \"30 Days\" because they all loved it once they demoed it and it gave them a \"really good feeling\" They also said it is a fresh start for a new album, with a \"reggae vibe\", but still a pop record. The Saturdays said that Sean Paul was \"perfect\" for the UK version of the song. They said that he was \"just so nice\" and that he would be present during some of the promotional performances when the single was released.\n\nCritical reception\nRobert Copsey of Digital Spy said that Rochelle Humes asks in a \"curious Jamaican-flecked timbre\" during the intro of \"What About Us\". During the lyrics \"Oh why are we are waiting so long I'm suffocating\", and he went on to say that it is in reference to \"man-related drama\" and also pointing out that there is plenty of that on their reality series, Chasing the Saturdays. Copsey later went on to tip the band for their first number-one single as he said: \"but we suspect it could also be a sly wink at their enduring quest for a number one single\". He said that track was \"radio-friendly\" due to the \"trace beats\" and \"demanding their contrary lover to give up the hard-to-get schtick sharpish\". Although he didn't think that the song was \"original\" enough for the band, but is \"strangely addictive\" and he would be happy to see the song at the top of the charts.\n\n4Music described the song as a \"electro-pop affair with a bucket-load of synths thrown in for good measure. It's quite good, but we wonder if they should reconsider this single choice if they truly want to launch an invasion on America's charts.\" Idolator wrote a mixed review criticizing the track for lacking the group's signature style; \"While the beat is pounding enough to nab the girls a chart hit, it doesn’t feel true to the spirit of The Sats. Then again, maybe it isn’t supposed to.\" Jessica Sager from PopCrush also touched on the departure from their original sound; \"It’s a pretty big departure from their usual sugary oeuvre, but not necessarily in a bad way.\" She went on to praise Sean Paul's feature; \"His presence on the track gives it an air of authenticity and fun, but pretty much only during his own verses and interjections.\" However, she criticised the mediocre attempt at dialect the groups sing in throughout the track; \"When the Saturdays try to emulate island tones, it sounds a little awkward and they start out like that right off the bat, but go in and out of the undistinguished dialect throughout the song.\" She also felt that the heavily Auto-Tuned chorus was not need; \"The Auto-Tune seems extraneous, because the Saturdays can actually sing well without it.\" She end the review by labeling their latest effort as \"generic\" and \"not the best the Saturdays have to offer\", also rating it two and a half stars out of five.\n\nCommercial reception\n\"What About Us\" debuted at number 44 on the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart for the week dated 8 December 2012. This marks their first ever chart entry in the United States and it has since peaked at number twenty-seven. The song debuted at number 79 on the Canadian Hot 100, becoming the highest Canadian debut for a new artist in 2013.\n\nThe Saturdays admitted that they did not want to get their hopes up on debuting at number one on the UK Singles Charts due to being beaten to number-one three times before with \"Forever Is Over\", \"Just Can't Get Enough\" and \"Missing You\", after being number one on the Official Chart Update. During the latter two occasions, it was rapper Flo Rida who had pushed them back to numbers two and three respectively. It was revealed that the Saturdays had knocked Justin Timberlake's \"Mirrors\" off the number-one spot on the UK Singles Chart. This became the band's first ever number-one single in the United Kingdom, it also became Sean Paul's second number one in the United Kingdom after being featured on \"Breathe\" in 2003. For every one copy that Timberlake's \"Mirrors\" sold, the Saturdays sold two more copies of \"What About Us\". \"What About Us\" sold 114,000 copies in the first week of release, making it, at the time, the fastest selling single of 2013. The track sold 40,000 copies more than Timberlake, who was pushed back to number-two on the UK Singles Charts. The band said they were thrilled to be the UK's number-one with \"What About Us\". They went on to thanking their fans for supporting the single and supporting them for the past five years.\n\n\"What About Us\" debuted at number six on the Irish Singles Chart, marking the band's fifth top ten single in that country. \"What About Us\" made its debut at number thirty-six on the New Zealand Singles Chart.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video for \"What About Us\" was filmed during the summer of 2012 in Los Angeles, while the Saturdays were filming their reality television series. The North American version of the video was released via the Saturdays' official Vevo account on YouTube on 11 January 2013. A variant of the video, featuring vocals and additional scenes of the women with Sean Paul, was later released on 5 February 2013.\n\nLive performances and promotion\nThe Saturdays appeared in a number of nightclubs throughout 2012 in the United States performing \"What About Us\" along other hits. On 14 January 2013, the group made their first televised performance of the single on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It was their first performance done on American television. On 16 January, the girls performed \"What About Us\" on The Today Show in New York City. Along with the performances, they appeared on chat shows such as Chelsea Lately, Daybreak, Fashion Police, Lorraine, The Jeff Probst Show, Loose Women, Alan Carr: Chatty Man, Sunday Brunch and What's Cooking? to promote the single.\n\nTrack listings\nUS digital download\n\"What About Us\" - 3:24\n\nCD Single - UK Version Only\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) - 3:40\n\"What About Us\" - 3:24\n\"Somebody Else's Life\" (Acoustic) - 3:18\n\nUS Digital remixes EP\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Radio Edit) - 3:06\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Club Mix) - 6:35\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Dub) - 6:49\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Radio Edit) - 3:59\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Club Mix) - 7:35\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Dub) - 7:20\n\"What About Us\" (The Buzz Junkies Radio Edit) - 3:23\n\"What About Us\" (The Buzz Junkies Club Mix) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Radio Edit) - 4:24\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Club Mix) - 6:36\n\nEurope and Oceania EP - digital download\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) - 3:40\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) [The Buzz Junkies Radio Edit] - 3:23\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) [Seamus Haji Radio Edit] - 3:37\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Radio Edit) - 3:58\n\"What About Us\" (Extended Mix) - 3:49 (only available through pre-order)\n\nUK Digital Remixes EP\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Club Mix) - 7:35\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Club Mix) - 6:36\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Club Mix) - 6:35\n\"What About Us\" (The Buzz Junkies Club Mix) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Radio Edit) - 4:24\n\nRevamped Version\n\"What About Us\" - 3:24\n\"Somebody Else's Life\" (Acoustic) - 3:18\n\"What About Us\" (Extended Mix) - 3:49\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Radio Edit) - 4:24\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Radio Edit) - 3:58\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) [The Buzz Junkies Radio Edit] - 3:23\n\"What About Us\" (featuring Sean Paul) [Seamus Haji Radio Edit] - 3:37\n\"What About Us\" (2nd Adventure Club Mix) - 6:36\n\"What About Us\" (Guy Scheiman Club Mix) - 7:35\n\"What About Us\" (The Buzz Junkies Club Mix) - 4:32\n\"What About Us\" (Seamus Haji Club Mix) - 6:35\n\nCredits and personnel\n\"What About Us\" was recorded at Rollover Studios in London.\n\nOllie Jacobs a.k.a. Art Bastian ~ Songwriter, Producer, Vocal Producer, Mix Engineer\n\nPhillip Jacobs ~ co-writer\nCamille Purcell ~ co-writer\nThe Saturdays ~ vocals\nSean Paul ~ guest vocalist\n\nCharts and certifications\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nRelease and radio history\n\nSee also\n\nList of UK Singles Chart number ones of the 2010s\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n feat. Sean Paul\n\nThe Saturdays songs\nSean Paul songs\n2012 singles\nDance-pop songs\nNumber-one singles in Scotland\nUK Singles Chart number-one singles\nSongs written by Camille Purcell\n2012 songs\nFascination Records singles\nSongs written by Ollie Jacobs",
"No Turning Back: The Story So Far is the first compilation album by Shannon Noll. The album includes tracks from Noll's three studio albums to date, That's What I'm Talking About (2004), Lift (2005) and Turn It Up (2008) and five brand new tracks. The album was released in September 2008 and peaked at number 7 on the ARIA Charts, becoming Noll's fourth consecutive top ten album.\n\nUpon released, Noll said \"It was only once we started talking about the idea that it sank in how many singles there's been, from \"What About Me\" right through to \"Loud\" and \"In Pieces\". All these songs mean so much to me and showcase a journey that I've been through with my songwriting and recording, my career in general. It's great to have the new songs on the album, as they are just a taste of what we've got planned for next year!\"\n\nSingles\nThe first single taken from the album was \"Summertime\", which was originally by 2007 Canadian Idol Brian Melo. The track peaked at number 54 on the ARIA Chart.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Summertime\" – 3:42\n\"Shine\" – 3:34\n\"Lift\" – 3:56\n\"Lonely\" – 4:42\n\"Now I Run\" – 3:44\n\"What About Me\" – 3:21\n\"Drive\" – 3:58\n\"Learn to Fly\" – 4:09\n\"Don't Give Up\" (with Natalie Bassingthwaighte) – 4:40\n\"Loud\" – 3:10\n\"In Pieces\" – 3:32\n\"Tomorrow\" – 3:57\n\"No Turning Back\" – 3:43\n\"Crash\" – 3:21\n\"You're Never Alone\" – 5:01\n\"Sorry Is Just Too Late\" (featuring Kari Kimmel) (iTunes exclusive bonus track) – 3:54\n\nDisc 2 (DVD edition)\n\"What About Me\"\n\"Drive\"\n\"Learn to Fly\"\n\"Lonely\"\n\"Shine\"\n\"Lift\"\n\"Now I Run\"\n\"Loud\"\n\"In Pieces\"\n\"Don't Give Up\" (with Natalie Bassingthwaighte)\n\nOmissions\nThe compilation omits the following singles:\n \"Rise Up\" with Australian Idol Top 12 (2003) – was a collaborative single and is not considered part of Noll's official discography.\n \"New Beginning\" (2004) – was a radio-only single release from That's What I'm Talking About.\n \"C'mon Aussie C'mon\" (2004) – was a charity single only.\n \"Twelve Days of Christmas\" with Dreamtime Christmas All-Stars (2004) – was a collaborative single and is not considered part of Noll's official discography.\n \"Everybody Needs a Little Help\" (2008) – was a radio-only single release from Turn It Up.\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\nShannon Noll albums\nSony BMG albums\n2008 greatest hits albums\nCompilation albums by Australian artists"
] |
[
"Abbey Road",
"\"Her Majesty\""
] | C_8105eda42e114746b1837acf728441f2_0 | Is "Her Majesty" the name of a Beatles' album? | 1 | Is "Her Majesty" the name of a Beatles' album? | Abbey Road | "Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". This is the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album. Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue. CANNOTANSWER | recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. | Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Named after Abbey Road, London, the location of EMI Studios, the cover features the group walking across the street's zebra crossing, an image that became one of the most famous and imitated in popular music. The album's initially mixed reviews were contrasted by its immediate commercial success, topping record charts in the UK and US. The single "Something" / "Come Together" was released in October and topped the US charts.
The album incorporates genres such as blues, rock and pop, and makes prominent use of Moog synthesizer, sounds filtered through a Leslie speaker, and tom-tom drums. It is the Beatles' only album recorded exclusively through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, which afforded a clearer and brighter sound than the group's previous records. Side two contains a medley of shorter song fragments. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" backed with "Old Brown Shoe".
Producer George Martin returned on the condition that the Beatles adhere to the discipline of their earlier records. They found the album's recording more enjoyable than the preceding Get Back sessions, but personal and business issues still affected the working environment. Production lasted from February to August 1969, and the closing track "The End" marked the final occasion that all four members recorded together. John Lennon privately left the group six days before the album's release; Paul McCartney publicly declared the band's break-up the following April.
Upon release, detractors found Abbey Road to be inauthentic and bemoaned the production's artificial effects. Since then, many critics have hailed the album as the Beatles' finest; in particular, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are considered among the best songs George Harrison wrote for the group. The album has also been ranked as one of the Beatles' best-selling, including a multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. Shortly after its release, the cover photograph fuelled rumours of McCartney's purported death. EMI Studios was also renamed Abbey Road Studios in honour of the album. A deluxe version of the album was released in 2019. In 2020, it was ranked fifth in Rolling Stones list of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
After the tense and unpleasant recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
Production
Recording history
The first sessions for Abbey Road began on 22 February 1969, only three weeks after the Get Back sessions, in Trident Studios. There, the group recorded a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston accompanying them on Hammond organ. No further group recording occurred until April because of Ringo Starr's commitments on the film The Magic Christian. After a small amount of work that month and a session for "You Never Give Me Your Money" on 6 May, the group took an eight-week break before recommencing on 2 July. Recording continued through July and August, and the last backing track, for "Because", was taped on 1 August. Overdubs continued through the month, with the final sequencing of the album coming together on 20 August the last time all four Beatles were present in a studio together.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again". Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions. Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension in the group. According to Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had become a permanent presence at Beatles' recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley. Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs", and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
Technical aspects
Abbey Road was recorded on eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines rather than the four-track machines that were used for earlier Beatles albums such as Sgt Pepper, and was the first Beatles album not to be issued in mono. The album makes prominent use of guitar played through a Leslie speaker, and of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog is not merely used as a background effect but sometimes plays a central role, as in "Because", where it is used for the middle eight. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The synthesizer was introduced to the band by Harrison, who acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound. Starr made more prominent use of the tom-toms on Abbey Road, later saying the album was "tom-tom madness ... I went nuts on the toms."
Abbey Road was also the first and only Beatles album to be entirely recorded through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, the TG12345 Mk I, as opposed to earlier thermionic valve-based REDD desks. The TG console also allowed better support for eight-track recording, facilitating the Beatles' considerable use of overdubbing. Emerick recalls that the TG desk used to record the album had individual limiters and compressors on each audio channel and noted that the overall sound was "softer" than the earlier valve desks. In his study of the role of the TG12345 in the Beatles' sound on Abbey Road, music historian Kenneth Womack observes that "the expansive sound palette and mixing capabilities of the TG12345 enabled George Martin and Geoff Emerick to imbue the Beatles' sound with greater definition and clarity. The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different."
Alan Parsons worked as an assistant engineer on the album. He later went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Songs
Side one
"Come Together"
"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.
Beatles author Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait". MacDonald has suggested that the "juju eyeballs" has been claimed to refer to Dr John and "spinal cracker" to Ono. The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" – "Here come old flat-top" – was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". A settlement was reached in 1973 in which Lennon promised to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next album.
"Come Together" was later released as a double A-side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the compilation album Love, Martin described the track as "a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers".
"Something"
Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. Cocker's version appeared on his album Joe Cocker! that November.
"Something" was Lennon's favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Though the song was written by Harrison, Frank Sinatra once commented that it was his favourite Lennon–McCartney composition and "the greatest love song ever written". Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.
The song was issued as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969 and topped the US charts for one week, becoming the Beatles' first number-one single that was not a Lennon–McCartney composition. It was also the first Beatles single from an album already released in the UK. Apple's Neil Aspinall filmed a promotional video, which combined separate footage of the Beatles and their wives.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".
The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, saying "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it". Longtime roadie Mal Evans played the anvil sound in the chorus. This track also makes use of Harrison's Moog synthesizer, played by McCartney.
"Oh! Darling"
"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-wop style, like contemporary work by Frank Zappa. It was tried at the Get Back sessions, and a version appears on Anthology 3. It was subsequently re-recorded in April, with overdubs in July and August.
McCartney attempted recording the lead vocal only once a day. He said: "I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week." Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.
"Octopus's Garden"
As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band. It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album. Starr received a full songwriting credit and composed most of the lyrics, although the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison. The pair would later collaborate as writers on Starr's solo singles "It Don't Come Easy", "Back Off Boogaloo" and "Photograph".
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis writes that the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.
The finished song is a combination of two different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred in February 1969, almost immediately after the Get Back/Let It Be sessions with Billy Preston. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the Abbey Road sessions proper in April. The two sections together ran to nearly eight minutes, making it the Beatles' second-longest released track. Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesizer with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track. During the final edit, Lennon told Emerick to "cut it right there" at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, creating a sudden, jarring silence that concludes the first side of Abbey Road (the recording tape would have run out within 20 seconds as it was). The final mixing and editing of the track occurred on 20 August 1969, the last day all four Beatles were together in the studio.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. The basic track was recorded on 7 July 1969. Harrison sang lead and played acoustic guitar, McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass and Starr played the drums. Lennon was still recuperating from his car accident and did not perform on the track. Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.
Though not released as a single, the song attracted attention and critical praise, and was included on the compilation 1967–1970. It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige. The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton said it was "almost impossible not to sing along to". Since digital downloads have become eligible to chart, it reached number 56 in 2010 after the Beatles' back catalogue was released on iTunes. It is also the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.
Harrison recorded a guitar solo for this track that did not appear in the final mix. It was rediscovered in 2012, and footage of Martin and Harrison's son Dhani listening to it in the studio was released on the DVD of Living in the Material World.
"Because"
"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them." The track features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to give nine voices in the final mix. The group considered the vocals to be some of the hardest and most complex they attempted. Harrison played the Moog synthesizer, and Martin played the harpsichord that opens the track.
Medley
The remainder of side two consists of a 16-minute medley of eight short songs (known during the recording sessions as "The Long One"), recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".
The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this, given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney. The track is a suite of varying styles, ranging from a piano-led ballad at the start to arpeggiated guitars at the end. Both Harrison and Lennon provided guitar solos with Lennon playing the solos at the end of the track.
This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam". These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".
"The End" features Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' catalogue (the drums are mixed across two tracks in "true stereo", unlike most releases at that time where they were hard panned left or right). Fifty-four seconds into the song are 18 bars of lead guitar: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, and the sequence is repeated two more times. Harrison suggested the idea of a guitar solo in the track, Lennon decided they should trade solos and McCartney elected to go first. The solos were cut live against the existing backing track in one take. Immediately after Lennon's third and final solo, the piano chords of the final part of the song begin. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This section was taped separately from the first, and required the piano to be re-recorded by McCartney, which was done on 18 August. An alternative version of the song, with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (and Starr's drum solo heard in the background), appears on the Anthology 3 album and the 2012 digital-only compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed by George Martin not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.
"Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam", as a result of being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although the song was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album.
Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue.
Unreleased material
Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe". The latter was re-recorded by the Beatles in April 1969 and issued as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" the following month. All three of these Harrison demos were later featured on Anthology 3.
During the sessions for the medley, McCartney recorded "Come and Get It", playing all the instruments. It was assumed to be a demo recording for another artist but McCartney later said that he originally intended to put it on Abbey Road. It was instead covered by Badfinger, while McCartney's original recording appeared on Anthology 3.
The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda, and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session, have appeared on bootlegs.
Cover photo
Apple Records creative director Kosh designed the album cover. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world". The front cover was a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing based on ideas that McCartney sketched and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo while he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which would be used on the album sleeve.
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car. In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.
Release
In mid-1969, Lennon formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey". While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August. On 20 September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) he was leaving the group, (or in his words, he wanted a divorce) six days before Abbey Road was released. Apple released "Something" backed with "Come Together" in the US on 6 October 1969. Release of the single in the UK followed on 31 October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's "Cold Turkey" the same month.
The Beatles did little promotion of Abbey Road directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970. By this time, the Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number one, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. Altogether, it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart. Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.
Critical reception
Contemporary
Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Retrospective
Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".
AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Peppers "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
Abbey Road received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. It was voted number 8 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album. In 2020, the magazine ranked the album at number 5 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Beatles record on the list; a previous version of the list from 2012 had ranked it at number 14. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Legacy
Abbey Road crossing and "Paul is dead"
The image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an imposter, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Roads commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?"
Cover versions and influence
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety. One month after Abbey Roads release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. Later in 1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location in Memphis of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
While matching albums such as Sgt. Pepper in terms of popularity, Abbey Road failed to repeat the Beatles' earlier achievements in galvanising their rivals to imitate them. In author Peter Doggett's description, "Too contrived for the rock underground to copy, too complex for the bubblegum pop brigade to copy, the album influenced no one – except [Paul McCartney]", who spent years trying to emulate its scope in his solo career. Writing for Classic Rock in 2014, Jon Anderson of the progressive rock band Yes said his group were constantly influenced by the Beatles from Revolver onwards, but it was the feeling that side two was "one complete idea" that inspired him to create long-form pieces of music.
Several artists have covered some or all of the side-two medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), The String Cheese Incident, Transatlantic and Tenacious D (who performed the medley with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell). Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011. It began with a "Come Together" opener at Boston on 4 March and ended with the entire medley in New York City on 15 March, including "Her Majesty" as an encore.
Continued sales and reissues
In June 1970, Allen Klein reported that Abbey Road was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US with sales of about five million. By 1992, Abbey Road had sold nine million copies. The album became the ninth-most downloaded on the iTunes Store a week after it was released there on 16 November 2010. A CNN report stated it was the best-selling vinyl album of 2011. It is the first album from the 1960s to sell over five million albums since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In the US, the album had sold 7,177,797 copies by the end of the 1970s. , the album had sold over 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the band's best-selling albums. In October 2019, Abbey Road re-entered the UK charts, again hitting number one.
Abbey Road has remained in print since its first release in 1969. The original album was released on 26 September in the UK and 1 October in the US on Apple Records. It was reissued as a limited edition picture disc on vinyl in the US by Capitol on 27 December 1978, while a CD reissue of the album was released in 1987, with a remastered version appearing in 2009. The remaster included additional photographs with additional liner notes and the first, limited edition, run also included a short documentary about the making of the album.
In 2001, Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The album continues to be reissued on vinyl. It was included as part of the Beatles' Collector's Crate series in September 2009 and saw a remastered LP release on 180-gram vinyl in 2012.
A super deluxe version of the album, which featured new mixes by Giles Martin, was released in September 2019 to celebrate the original album's 50th anniversary.
As of October 2019, Abbey Road has sold 2,240,608 pure sales in United Kingdom and overall all consumed sales stand at 2,327,230 units. Post 1994 sales stand at 827,329.
Track listing
Notes
"Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track after "The End" and 14 seconds of silence. Later releases of the album included the song on the track listing, except the vinyl editions.
Some cassette tape versions in the UK and US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped to even out the playing time of each side.
Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn, Ian MacDonald, Barry Miles, Kevin Howlett, and Geoff Emerick.
The Beatles
John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; percussion
Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; bass, rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; sound effects; wind chimes, handclaps and percussion
George Harrison – harmony and background vocals; lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars; bass on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh Darling" and "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight"; harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and percussion; lead vocals (on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun")
Ringo Starr – drums and percussion; background vocals; lead vocals (on "Octopus's Garden")
Additional musicians
George Martin – harpsichord, organ, percussion
Billy Preston – Hammond organ (on "Something" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)")
Mal Evans – anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
Production
"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
"Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney)
Produced by George Martin (with the Beatles)
Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald
Assistant engineering by Alan Parsons
Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with the Beatles)
Moog programming by Mike Vickers
Charts
Original release
1987 reissue
2009 reissue
2019 reissue
Certifications
Release history
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Beatles comments on each song
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road – A track-by-track walkthrough
Live webcam at the Abbey Road zebra crossing
The Beatles y la foto de la portada de Abbey Road
1969 albums
The Beatles albums
Apple Records albums
Albums produced by George Martin
Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios
Albums recorded at Trident Studios
Albums arranged by George Martin
Albums conducted by George Martin
Albums produced by Chris Thomas (record producer)
Albums produced by George Harrison
Albums produced by John Lennon
Albums produced by Paul McCartney
Albums produced by Ringo Starr
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical | true | [
"\"Her Majesty\" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Abbey Road. Written by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney, it is a brief tongue-in-cheek music hall song. Although credited to the band, McCartney is the only Beatle to appear on the track. \"Her Majesty\" is the final cut on the album and appears 14 seconds after the previous song \"The End,\" but was not listed on the original sleeve. It is considered one of the first examples of a hidden track in rock music.\n\nRecording\nThe song was recorded in three takes on 2 July 1969, prior to the Beatles beginning work on \"Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight\". McCartney sang and simultaneously played a fingerstyle acoustic guitar accompaniment. The decision to exclude it from the Abbey Road medley was made on 30 July.\n\nIt runs only 23 seconds, but the Beatles also recorded a longer version during the Get Back sessions.\n\nIn the song, the singer muses about the Queen and his plan to someday \"make her mine.\"\n\nStructure and placement\nThe song was originally placed between \"Mean Mr. Mustard\" and \"Polythene Pam\"; McCartney decided that the sequence did not work and it was edited out of the album's closing medley by Abbey Road Studios tape operator John Kurlander. He was instructed by McCartney to destroy the tape, but EMI policy stated that no Beatles recording was ever to be destroyed. The fourteen seconds of silence between \"The End\" and \"Her Majesty\" are the result of Kurlander's lead-out tape added to separate the song from the rest of the recording.\n\nThe loud chord that occurs at the beginning of the song is the ending, as recorded, of \"Mean Mr. Mustard\". \"Her Majesty\" ends abruptly because its own final note was left at the beginning of \"Polythene Pam\". McCartney applauded Kurlander's \"surprise effect\" and the track became the unintended closer to the LP. The crudely edited beginning and end of \"Her Majesty\" shows that it was not meant to be included in the final mix of the album; as McCartney says in The Beatles Anthology, \"Typical Beatles – an accident.\" The song was not listed on the original vinyl record's sleeve as these had already been printed; on reprinted sleeves, however, it is listed. The CD edition corrects this.\n\nThe CD version also mimics the original LP version in that the CD contains a 14-second long silence immediately after \"The End\" before \"Her Majesty\" starts playing. Digital versions also include a 14-second long silence after \"The End\".\n\nAt 23 seconds long, \"Her Majesty\" is the shortest song in the Beatles' repertoire (contrasting the same album's \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\", their longest song apart from \"Revolution 9\", an 8:22 avant-garde piece from The Beatles). Both of the original sides of vinyl close with a song that ends abruptly (the other being \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\"). The song starts panned hard right and slowly pans to hard left.\n\nIn October 2009, MTV Networks released a downloadable version of the song (as well as the entire album) for the video game The Beatles: Rock Band that gave players the ability to play the missing last chord. Apple Corps granted rights to this and to other changes to Harmonix Music Systems, which developed the game. The alteration garnered controversy among some fans who preferred the recorded version's unresolved close.\n\nThe fiftieth anniversary \"Super Deluxe Edition\" of Abbey Road includes a bonus track, \"The Long One\" that consists of a trial edit and mix of the medley, with \"Her Majesty\" placed between \"Mean Mr. Mustard\" and \"Polythene Pam\".\n\nPersonnel\n Paul McCartney – lead vocals, acoustic guitar\n\nLive performance\nMcCartney performed the song in front of the Queen at the Party at the Palace on \n3 June 2002, part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nThe Beatles songs\n1969 songs\nSong recordings produced by George Martin\nSongs written by Lennon–McCartney\nSongs published by Northern Songs\n2002 singles\nCultural depictions of Elizabeth II\nChumbawamba songs\nSongs about queens",
"Her Majesty may refer to:\n\n Majesty, a style used by monarchs\n Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth\n Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen of Denmark\n \"Her Majesty\" (song), a 1969 song by The Beatles about Queen Elizabeth II\n Her Majesty the Decemberists, an album from The Decemberists\n Her Majesty (2001 film), a New Zealand film about a young girl, her Maori friend and the visit of the young Queen Elizabeth II in New Zealand\n Her Majesty (1922 film), an American silent comedy film\n\nSee also\n His Majesty (disambiguation)\n Majesty (disambiguation)\n Majestic (disambiguation)"
] |
[
"Abbey Road",
"\"Her Majesty\"",
"Is \"Her Majesty\" the name of a Beatles' album?",
"recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road."
] | C_8105eda42e114746b1837acf728441f2_0 | Did the rest of the Beatles' like "Her Majesty"? | 2 | Besides McCartney, did the rest of the Beatles' like "Her Majesty"? | Abbey Road | "Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". This is the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album. Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue. CANNOTANSWER | The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. | Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Named after Abbey Road, London, the location of EMI Studios, the cover features the group walking across the street's zebra crossing, an image that became one of the most famous and imitated in popular music. The album's initially mixed reviews were contrasted by its immediate commercial success, topping record charts in the UK and US. The single "Something" / "Come Together" was released in October and topped the US charts.
The album incorporates genres such as blues, rock and pop, and makes prominent use of Moog synthesizer, sounds filtered through a Leslie speaker, and tom-tom drums. It is the Beatles' only album recorded exclusively through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, which afforded a clearer and brighter sound than the group's previous records. Side two contains a medley of shorter song fragments. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" backed with "Old Brown Shoe".
Producer George Martin returned on the condition that the Beatles adhere to the discipline of their earlier records. They found the album's recording more enjoyable than the preceding Get Back sessions, but personal and business issues still affected the working environment. Production lasted from February to August 1969, and the closing track "The End" marked the final occasion that all four members recorded together. John Lennon privately left the group six days before the album's release; Paul McCartney publicly declared the band's break-up the following April.
Upon release, detractors found Abbey Road to be inauthentic and bemoaned the production's artificial effects. Since then, many critics have hailed the album as the Beatles' finest; in particular, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are considered among the best songs George Harrison wrote for the group. The album has also been ranked as one of the Beatles' best-selling, including a multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. Shortly after its release, the cover photograph fuelled rumours of McCartney's purported death. EMI Studios was also renamed Abbey Road Studios in honour of the album. A deluxe version of the album was released in 2019. In 2020, it was ranked fifth in Rolling Stones list of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
After the tense and unpleasant recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
Production
Recording history
The first sessions for Abbey Road began on 22 February 1969, only three weeks after the Get Back sessions, in Trident Studios. There, the group recorded a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston accompanying them on Hammond organ. No further group recording occurred until April because of Ringo Starr's commitments on the film The Magic Christian. After a small amount of work that month and a session for "You Never Give Me Your Money" on 6 May, the group took an eight-week break before recommencing on 2 July. Recording continued through July and August, and the last backing track, for "Because", was taped on 1 August. Overdubs continued through the month, with the final sequencing of the album coming together on 20 August the last time all four Beatles were present in a studio together.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again". Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions. Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension in the group. According to Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had become a permanent presence at Beatles' recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley. Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs", and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
Technical aspects
Abbey Road was recorded on eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines rather than the four-track machines that were used for earlier Beatles albums such as Sgt Pepper, and was the first Beatles album not to be issued in mono. The album makes prominent use of guitar played through a Leslie speaker, and of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog is not merely used as a background effect but sometimes plays a central role, as in "Because", where it is used for the middle eight. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The synthesizer was introduced to the band by Harrison, who acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound. Starr made more prominent use of the tom-toms on Abbey Road, later saying the album was "tom-tom madness ... I went nuts on the toms."
Abbey Road was also the first and only Beatles album to be entirely recorded through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, the TG12345 Mk I, as opposed to earlier thermionic valve-based REDD desks. The TG console also allowed better support for eight-track recording, facilitating the Beatles' considerable use of overdubbing. Emerick recalls that the TG desk used to record the album had individual limiters and compressors on each audio channel and noted that the overall sound was "softer" than the earlier valve desks. In his study of the role of the TG12345 in the Beatles' sound on Abbey Road, music historian Kenneth Womack observes that "the expansive sound palette and mixing capabilities of the TG12345 enabled George Martin and Geoff Emerick to imbue the Beatles' sound with greater definition and clarity. The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different."
Alan Parsons worked as an assistant engineer on the album. He later went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Songs
Side one
"Come Together"
"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.
Beatles author Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait". MacDonald has suggested that the "juju eyeballs" has been claimed to refer to Dr John and "spinal cracker" to Ono. The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" – "Here come old flat-top" – was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". A settlement was reached in 1973 in which Lennon promised to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next album.
"Come Together" was later released as a double A-side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the compilation album Love, Martin described the track as "a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers".
"Something"
Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. Cocker's version appeared on his album Joe Cocker! that November.
"Something" was Lennon's favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Though the song was written by Harrison, Frank Sinatra once commented that it was his favourite Lennon–McCartney composition and "the greatest love song ever written". Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.
The song was issued as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969 and topped the US charts for one week, becoming the Beatles' first number-one single that was not a Lennon–McCartney composition. It was also the first Beatles single from an album already released in the UK. Apple's Neil Aspinall filmed a promotional video, which combined separate footage of the Beatles and their wives.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".
The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, saying "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it". Longtime roadie Mal Evans played the anvil sound in the chorus. This track also makes use of Harrison's Moog synthesizer, played by McCartney.
"Oh! Darling"
"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-wop style, like contemporary work by Frank Zappa. It was tried at the Get Back sessions, and a version appears on Anthology 3. It was subsequently re-recorded in April, with overdubs in July and August.
McCartney attempted recording the lead vocal only once a day. He said: "I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week." Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.
"Octopus's Garden"
As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band. It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album. Starr received a full songwriting credit and composed most of the lyrics, although the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison. The pair would later collaborate as writers on Starr's solo singles "It Don't Come Easy", "Back Off Boogaloo" and "Photograph".
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis writes that the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.
The finished song is a combination of two different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred in February 1969, almost immediately after the Get Back/Let It Be sessions with Billy Preston. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the Abbey Road sessions proper in April. The two sections together ran to nearly eight minutes, making it the Beatles' second-longest released track. Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesizer with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track. During the final edit, Lennon told Emerick to "cut it right there" at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, creating a sudden, jarring silence that concludes the first side of Abbey Road (the recording tape would have run out within 20 seconds as it was). The final mixing and editing of the track occurred on 20 August 1969, the last day all four Beatles were together in the studio.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. The basic track was recorded on 7 July 1969. Harrison sang lead and played acoustic guitar, McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass and Starr played the drums. Lennon was still recuperating from his car accident and did not perform on the track. Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.
Though not released as a single, the song attracted attention and critical praise, and was included on the compilation 1967–1970. It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige. The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton said it was "almost impossible not to sing along to". Since digital downloads have become eligible to chart, it reached number 56 in 2010 after the Beatles' back catalogue was released on iTunes. It is also the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.
Harrison recorded a guitar solo for this track that did not appear in the final mix. It was rediscovered in 2012, and footage of Martin and Harrison's son Dhani listening to it in the studio was released on the DVD of Living in the Material World.
"Because"
"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them." The track features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to give nine voices in the final mix. The group considered the vocals to be some of the hardest and most complex they attempted. Harrison played the Moog synthesizer, and Martin played the harpsichord that opens the track.
Medley
The remainder of side two consists of a 16-minute medley of eight short songs (known during the recording sessions as "The Long One"), recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".
The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this, given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney. The track is a suite of varying styles, ranging from a piano-led ballad at the start to arpeggiated guitars at the end. Both Harrison and Lennon provided guitar solos with Lennon playing the solos at the end of the track.
This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam". These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".
"The End" features Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' catalogue (the drums are mixed across two tracks in "true stereo", unlike most releases at that time where they were hard panned left or right). Fifty-four seconds into the song are 18 bars of lead guitar: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, and the sequence is repeated two more times. Harrison suggested the idea of a guitar solo in the track, Lennon decided they should trade solos and McCartney elected to go first. The solos were cut live against the existing backing track in one take. Immediately after Lennon's third and final solo, the piano chords of the final part of the song begin. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This section was taped separately from the first, and required the piano to be re-recorded by McCartney, which was done on 18 August. An alternative version of the song, with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (and Starr's drum solo heard in the background), appears on the Anthology 3 album and the 2012 digital-only compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed by George Martin not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.
"Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam", as a result of being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although the song was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album.
Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue.
Unreleased material
Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe". The latter was re-recorded by the Beatles in April 1969 and issued as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" the following month. All three of these Harrison demos were later featured on Anthology 3.
During the sessions for the medley, McCartney recorded "Come and Get It", playing all the instruments. It was assumed to be a demo recording for another artist but McCartney later said that he originally intended to put it on Abbey Road. It was instead covered by Badfinger, while McCartney's original recording appeared on Anthology 3.
The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda, and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session, have appeared on bootlegs.
Cover photo
Apple Records creative director Kosh designed the album cover. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world". The front cover was a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing based on ideas that McCartney sketched and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo while he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which would be used on the album sleeve.
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car. In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.
Release
In mid-1969, Lennon formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey". While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August. On 20 September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) he was leaving the group, (or in his words, he wanted a divorce) six days before Abbey Road was released. Apple released "Something" backed with "Come Together" in the US on 6 October 1969. Release of the single in the UK followed on 31 October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's "Cold Turkey" the same month.
The Beatles did little promotion of Abbey Road directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970. By this time, the Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number one, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. Altogether, it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart. Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.
Critical reception
Contemporary
Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Retrospective
Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".
AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Peppers "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
Abbey Road received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. It was voted number 8 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album. In 2020, the magazine ranked the album at number 5 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Beatles record on the list; a previous version of the list from 2012 had ranked it at number 14. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Legacy
Abbey Road crossing and "Paul is dead"
The image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an imposter, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Roads commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?"
Cover versions and influence
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety. One month after Abbey Roads release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. Later in 1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location in Memphis of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
While matching albums such as Sgt. Pepper in terms of popularity, Abbey Road failed to repeat the Beatles' earlier achievements in galvanising their rivals to imitate them. In author Peter Doggett's description, "Too contrived for the rock underground to copy, too complex for the bubblegum pop brigade to copy, the album influenced no one – except [Paul McCartney]", who spent years trying to emulate its scope in his solo career. Writing for Classic Rock in 2014, Jon Anderson of the progressive rock band Yes said his group were constantly influenced by the Beatles from Revolver onwards, but it was the feeling that side two was "one complete idea" that inspired him to create long-form pieces of music.
Several artists have covered some or all of the side-two medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), The String Cheese Incident, Transatlantic and Tenacious D (who performed the medley with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell). Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011. It began with a "Come Together" opener at Boston on 4 March and ended with the entire medley in New York City on 15 March, including "Her Majesty" as an encore.
Continued sales and reissues
In June 1970, Allen Klein reported that Abbey Road was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US with sales of about five million. By 1992, Abbey Road had sold nine million copies. The album became the ninth-most downloaded on the iTunes Store a week after it was released there on 16 November 2010. A CNN report stated it was the best-selling vinyl album of 2011. It is the first album from the 1960s to sell over five million albums since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In the US, the album had sold 7,177,797 copies by the end of the 1970s. , the album had sold over 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the band's best-selling albums. In October 2019, Abbey Road re-entered the UK charts, again hitting number one.
Abbey Road has remained in print since its first release in 1969. The original album was released on 26 September in the UK and 1 October in the US on Apple Records. It was reissued as a limited edition picture disc on vinyl in the US by Capitol on 27 December 1978, while a CD reissue of the album was released in 1987, with a remastered version appearing in 2009. The remaster included additional photographs with additional liner notes and the first, limited edition, run also included a short documentary about the making of the album.
In 2001, Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The album continues to be reissued on vinyl. It was included as part of the Beatles' Collector's Crate series in September 2009 and saw a remastered LP release on 180-gram vinyl in 2012.
A super deluxe version of the album, which featured new mixes by Giles Martin, was released in September 2019 to celebrate the original album's 50th anniversary.
As of October 2019, Abbey Road has sold 2,240,608 pure sales in United Kingdom and overall all consumed sales stand at 2,327,230 units. Post 1994 sales stand at 827,329.
Track listing
Notes
"Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track after "The End" and 14 seconds of silence. Later releases of the album included the song on the track listing, except the vinyl editions.
Some cassette tape versions in the UK and US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped to even out the playing time of each side.
Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn, Ian MacDonald, Barry Miles, Kevin Howlett, and Geoff Emerick.
The Beatles
John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; percussion
Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; bass, rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; sound effects; wind chimes, handclaps and percussion
George Harrison – harmony and background vocals; lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars; bass on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh Darling" and "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight"; harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and percussion; lead vocals (on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun")
Ringo Starr – drums and percussion; background vocals; lead vocals (on "Octopus's Garden")
Additional musicians
George Martin – harpsichord, organ, percussion
Billy Preston – Hammond organ (on "Something" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)")
Mal Evans – anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
Production
"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
"Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney)
Produced by George Martin (with the Beatles)
Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald
Assistant engineering by Alan Parsons
Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with the Beatles)
Moog programming by Mike Vickers
Charts
Original release
1987 reissue
2009 reissue
2019 reissue
Certifications
Release history
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Beatles comments on each song
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road – A track-by-track walkthrough
Live webcam at the Abbey Road zebra crossing
The Beatles y la foto de la portada de Abbey Road
1969 albums
The Beatles albums
Apple Records albums
Albums produced by George Martin
Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios
Albums recorded at Trident Studios
Albums arranged by George Martin
Albums conducted by George Martin
Albums produced by Chris Thomas (record producer)
Albums produced by George Harrison
Albums produced by John Lennon
Albums produced by Paul McCartney
Albums produced by Ringo Starr
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical | true | [
"\"Her Majesty\" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Abbey Road. Written by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney, it is a brief tongue-in-cheek music hall song. Although credited to the band, McCartney is the only Beatle to appear on the track. \"Her Majesty\" is the final cut on the album and appears 14 seconds after the previous song \"The End,\" but was not listed on the original sleeve. It is considered one of the first examples of a hidden track in rock music.\n\nRecording\nThe song was recorded in three takes on 2 July 1969, prior to the Beatles beginning work on \"Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight\". McCartney sang and simultaneously played a fingerstyle acoustic guitar accompaniment. The decision to exclude it from the Abbey Road medley was made on 30 July.\n\nIt runs only 23 seconds, but the Beatles also recorded a longer version during the Get Back sessions.\n\nIn the song, the singer muses about the Queen and his plan to someday \"make her mine.\"\n\nStructure and placement\nThe song was originally placed between \"Mean Mr. Mustard\" and \"Polythene Pam\"; McCartney decided that the sequence did not work and it was edited out of the album's closing medley by Abbey Road Studios tape operator John Kurlander. He was instructed by McCartney to destroy the tape, but EMI policy stated that no Beatles recording was ever to be destroyed. The fourteen seconds of silence between \"The End\" and \"Her Majesty\" are the result of Kurlander's lead-out tape added to separate the song from the rest of the recording.\n\nThe loud chord that occurs at the beginning of the song is the ending, as recorded, of \"Mean Mr. Mustard\". \"Her Majesty\" ends abruptly because its own final note was left at the beginning of \"Polythene Pam\". McCartney applauded Kurlander's \"surprise effect\" and the track became the unintended closer to the LP. The crudely edited beginning and end of \"Her Majesty\" shows that it was not meant to be included in the final mix of the album; as McCartney says in The Beatles Anthology, \"Typical Beatles – an accident.\" The song was not listed on the original vinyl record's sleeve as these had already been printed; on reprinted sleeves, however, it is listed. The CD edition corrects this.\n\nThe CD version also mimics the original LP version in that the CD contains a 14-second long silence immediately after \"The End\" before \"Her Majesty\" starts playing. Digital versions also include a 14-second long silence after \"The End\".\n\nAt 23 seconds long, \"Her Majesty\" is the shortest song in the Beatles' repertoire (contrasting the same album's \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\", their longest song apart from \"Revolution 9\", an 8:22 avant-garde piece from The Beatles). Both of the original sides of vinyl close with a song that ends abruptly (the other being \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\"). The song starts panned hard right and slowly pans to hard left.\n\nIn October 2009, MTV Networks released a downloadable version of the song (as well as the entire album) for the video game The Beatles: Rock Band that gave players the ability to play the missing last chord. Apple Corps granted rights to this and to other changes to Harmonix Music Systems, which developed the game. The alteration garnered controversy among some fans who preferred the recorded version's unresolved close.\n\nThe fiftieth anniversary \"Super Deluxe Edition\" of Abbey Road includes a bonus track, \"The Long One\" that consists of a trial edit and mix of the medley, with \"Her Majesty\" placed between \"Mean Mr. Mustard\" and \"Polythene Pam\".\n\nPersonnel\n Paul McCartney – lead vocals, acoustic guitar\n\nLive performance\nMcCartney performed the song in front of the Queen at the Party at the Palace on \n3 June 2002, part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nThe Beatles songs\n1969 songs\nSong recordings produced by George Martin\nSongs written by Lennon–McCartney\nSongs published by Northern Songs\n2002 singles\nCultural depictions of Elizabeth II\nChumbawamba songs\nSongs about queens",
"Her Majesty may refer to:\n\n Majesty, a style used by monarchs\n Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth\n Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen of Denmark\n \"Her Majesty\" (song), a 1969 song by The Beatles about Queen Elizabeth II\n Her Majesty the Decemberists, an album from The Decemberists\n Her Majesty (2001 film), a New Zealand film about a young girl, her Maori friend and the visit of the young Queen Elizabeth II in New Zealand\n Her Majesty (1922 film), an American silent comedy film\n\nSee also\n His Majesty (disambiguation)\n Majesty (disambiguation)\n Majestic (disambiguation)"
] |
[
"Abbey Road",
"\"Her Majesty\"",
"Is \"Her Majesty\" the name of a Beatles' album?",
"recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road.",
"Did the rest of the Beatles' like \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album."
] | C_8105eda42e114746b1837acf728441f2_0 | What was the effect that the Beatles' liked? | 3 | What was the effect in the album "Her Majesty" that the Beatles' liked? | Abbey Road | "Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". This is the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album. Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue. CANNOTANSWER | cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". | Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Named after Abbey Road, London, the location of EMI Studios, the cover features the group walking across the street's zebra crossing, an image that became one of the most famous and imitated in popular music. The album's initially mixed reviews were contrasted by its immediate commercial success, topping record charts in the UK and US. The single "Something" / "Come Together" was released in October and topped the US charts.
The album incorporates genres such as blues, rock and pop, and makes prominent use of Moog synthesizer, sounds filtered through a Leslie speaker, and tom-tom drums. It is the Beatles' only album recorded exclusively through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, which afforded a clearer and brighter sound than the group's previous records. Side two contains a medley of shorter song fragments. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" backed with "Old Brown Shoe".
Producer George Martin returned on the condition that the Beatles adhere to the discipline of their earlier records. They found the album's recording more enjoyable than the preceding Get Back sessions, but personal and business issues still affected the working environment. Production lasted from February to August 1969, and the closing track "The End" marked the final occasion that all four members recorded together. John Lennon privately left the group six days before the album's release; Paul McCartney publicly declared the band's break-up the following April.
Upon release, detractors found Abbey Road to be inauthentic and bemoaned the production's artificial effects. Since then, many critics have hailed the album as the Beatles' finest; in particular, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are considered among the best songs George Harrison wrote for the group. The album has also been ranked as one of the Beatles' best-selling, including a multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. Shortly after its release, the cover photograph fuelled rumours of McCartney's purported death. EMI Studios was also renamed Abbey Road Studios in honour of the album. A deluxe version of the album was released in 2019. In 2020, it was ranked fifth in Rolling Stones list of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
After the tense and unpleasant recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
Production
Recording history
The first sessions for Abbey Road began on 22 February 1969, only three weeks after the Get Back sessions, in Trident Studios. There, the group recorded a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston accompanying them on Hammond organ. No further group recording occurred until April because of Ringo Starr's commitments on the film The Magic Christian. After a small amount of work that month and a session for "You Never Give Me Your Money" on 6 May, the group took an eight-week break before recommencing on 2 July. Recording continued through July and August, and the last backing track, for "Because", was taped on 1 August. Overdubs continued through the month, with the final sequencing of the album coming together on 20 August the last time all four Beatles were present in a studio together.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again". Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions. Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension in the group. According to Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had become a permanent presence at Beatles' recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley. Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs", and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
Technical aspects
Abbey Road was recorded on eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines rather than the four-track machines that were used for earlier Beatles albums such as Sgt Pepper, and was the first Beatles album not to be issued in mono. The album makes prominent use of guitar played through a Leslie speaker, and of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog is not merely used as a background effect but sometimes plays a central role, as in "Because", where it is used for the middle eight. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The synthesizer was introduced to the band by Harrison, who acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound. Starr made more prominent use of the tom-toms on Abbey Road, later saying the album was "tom-tom madness ... I went nuts on the toms."
Abbey Road was also the first and only Beatles album to be entirely recorded through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, the TG12345 Mk I, as opposed to earlier thermionic valve-based REDD desks. The TG console also allowed better support for eight-track recording, facilitating the Beatles' considerable use of overdubbing. Emerick recalls that the TG desk used to record the album had individual limiters and compressors on each audio channel and noted that the overall sound was "softer" than the earlier valve desks. In his study of the role of the TG12345 in the Beatles' sound on Abbey Road, music historian Kenneth Womack observes that "the expansive sound palette and mixing capabilities of the TG12345 enabled George Martin and Geoff Emerick to imbue the Beatles' sound with greater definition and clarity. The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different."
Alan Parsons worked as an assistant engineer on the album. He later went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Songs
Side one
"Come Together"
"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.
Beatles author Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait". MacDonald has suggested that the "juju eyeballs" has been claimed to refer to Dr John and "spinal cracker" to Ono. The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" – "Here come old flat-top" – was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". A settlement was reached in 1973 in which Lennon promised to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next album.
"Come Together" was later released as a double A-side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the compilation album Love, Martin described the track as "a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers".
"Something"
Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. Cocker's version appeared on his album Joe Cocker! that November.
"Something" was Lennon's favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Though the song was written by Harrison, Frank Sinatra once commented that it was his favourite Lennon–McCartney composition and "the greatest love song ever written". Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.
The song was issued as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969 and topped the US charts for one week, becoming the Beatles' first number-one single that was not a Lennon–McCartney composition. It was also the first Beatles single from an album already released in the UK. Apple's Neil Aspinall filmed a promotional video, which combined separate footage of the Beatles and their wives.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".
The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, saying "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it". Longtime roadie Mal Evans played the anvil sound in the chorus. This track also makes use of Harrison's Moog synthesizer, played by McCartney.
"Oh! Darling"
"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-wop style, like contemporary work by Frank Zappa. It was tried at the Get Back sessions, and a version appears on Anthology 3. It was subsequently re-recorded in April, with overdubs in July and August.
McCartney attempted recording the lead vocal only once a day. He said: "I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week." Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.
"Octopus's Garden"
As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band. It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album. Starr received a full songwriting credit and composed most of the lyrics, although the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison. The pair would later collaborate as writers on Starr's solo singles "It Don't Come Easy", "Back Off Boogaloo" and "Photograph".
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis writes that the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.
The finished song is a combination of two different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred in February 1969, almost immediately after the Get Back/Let It Be sessions with Billy Preston. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the Abbey Road sessions proper in April. The two sections together ran to nearly eight minutes, making it the Beatles' second-longest released track. Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesizer with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track. During the final edit, Lennon told Emerick to "cut it right there" at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, creating a sudden, jarring silence that concludes the first side of Abbey Road (the recording tape would have run out within 20 seconds as it was). The final mixing and editing of the track occurred on 20 August 1969, the last day all four Beatles were together in the studio.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. The basic track was recorded on 7 July 1969. Harrison sang lead and played acoustic guitar, McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass and Starr played the drums. Lennon was still recuperating from his car accident and did not perform on the track. Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.
Though not released as a single, the song attracted attention and critical praise, and was included on the compilation 1967–1970. It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige. The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton said it was "almost impossible not to sing along to". Since digital downloads have become eligible to chart, it reached number 56 in 2010 after the Beatles' back catalogue was released on iTunes. It is also the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.
Harrison recorded a guitar solo for this track that did not appear in the final mix. It was rediscovered in 2012, and footage of Martin and Harrison's son Dhani listening to it in the studio was released on the DVD of Living in the Material World.
"Because"
"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them." The track features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to give nine voices in the final mix. The group considered the vocals to be some of the hardest and most complex they attempted. Harrison played the Moog synthesizer, and Martin played the harpsichord that opens the track.
Medley
The remainder of side two consists of a 16-minute medley of eight short songs (known during the recording sessions as "The Long One"), recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".
The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this, given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney. The track is a suite of varying styles, ranging from a piano-led ballad at the start to arpeggiated guitars at the end. Both Harrison and Lennon provided guitar solos with Lennon playing the solos at the end of the track.
This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam". These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".
"The End" features Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' catalogue (the drums are mixed across two tracks in "true stereo", unlike most releases at that time where they were hard panned left or right). Fifty-four seconds into the song are 18 bars of lead guitar: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, and the sequence is repeated two more times. Harrison suggested the idea of a guitar solo in the track, Lennon decided they should trade solos and McCartney elected to go first. The solos were cut live against the existing backing track in one take. Immediately after Lennon's third and final solo, the piano chords of the final part of the song begin. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This section was taped separately from the first, and required the piano to be re-recorded by McCartney, which was done on 18 August. An alternative version of the song, with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (and Starr's drum solo heard in the background), appears on the Anthology 3 album and the 2012 digital-only compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed by George Martin not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.
"Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam", as a result of being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although the song was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album.
Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue.
Unreleased material
Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe". The latter was re-recorded by the Beatles in April 1969 and issued as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" the following month. All three of these Harrison demos were later featured on Anthology 3.
During the sessions for the medley, McCartney recorded "Come and Get It", playing all the instruments. It was assumed to be a demo recording for another artist but McCartney later said that he originally intended to put it on Abbey Road. It was instead covered by Badfinger, while McCartney's original recording appeared on Anthology 3.
The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda, and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session, have appeared on bootlegs.
Cover photo
Apple Records creative director Kosh designed the album cover. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world". The front cover was a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing based on ideas that McCartney sketched and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo while he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which would be used on the album sleeve.
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car. In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.
Release
In mid-1969, Lennon formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey". While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August. On 20 September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) he was leaving the group, (or in his words, he wanted a divorce) six days before Abbey Road was released. Apple released "Something" backed with "Come Together" in the US on 6 October 1969. Release of the single in the UK followed on 31 October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's "Cold Turkey" the same month.
The Beatles did little promotion of Abbey Road directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970. By this time, the Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number one, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. Altogether, it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart. Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.
Critical reception
Contemporary
Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Retrospective
Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".
AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Peppers "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
Abbey Road received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. It was voted number 8 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album. In 2020, the magazine ranked the album at number 5 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Beatles record on the list; a previous version of the list from 2012 had ranked it at number 14. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Legacy
Abbey Road crossing and "Paul is dead"
The image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an imposter, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Roads commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?"
Cover versions and influence
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety. One month after Abbey Roads release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. Later in 1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location in Memphis of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
While matching albums such as Sgt. Pepper in terms of popularity, Abbey Road failed to repeat the Beatles' earlier achievements in galvanising their rivals to imitate them. In author Peter Doggett's description, "Too contrived for the rock underground to copy, too complex for the bubblegum pop brigade to copy, the album influenced no one – except [Paul McCartney]", who spent years trying to emulate its scope in his solo career. Writing for Classic Rock in 2014, Jon Anderson of the progressive rock band Yes said his group were constantly influenced by the Beatles from Revolver onwards, but it was the feeling that side two was "one complete idea" that inspired him to create long-form pieces of music.
Several artists have covered some or all of the side-two medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), The String Cheese Incident, Transatlantic and Tenacious D (who performed the medley with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell). Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011. It began with a "Come Together" opener at Boston on 4 March and ended with the entire medley in New York City on 15 March, including "Her Majesty" as an encore.
Continued sales and reissues
In June 1970, Allen Klein reported that Abbey Road was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US with sales of about five million. By 1992, Abbey Road had sold nine million copies. The album became the ninth-most downloaded on the iTunes Store a week after it was released there on 16 November 2010. A CNN report stated it was the best-selling vinyl album of 2011. It is the first album from the 1960s to sell over five million albums since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In the US, the album had sold 7,177,797 copies by the end of the 1970s. , the album had sold over 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the band's best-selling albums. In October 2019, Abbey Road re-entered the UK charts, again hitting number one.
Abbey Road has remained in print since its first release in 1969. The original album was released on 26 September in the UK and 1 October in the US on Apple Records. It was reissued as a limited edition picture disc on vinyl in the US by Capitol on 27 December 1978, while a CD reissue of the album was released in 1987, with a remastered version appearing in 2009. The remaster included additional photographs with additional liner notes and the first, limited edition, run also included a short documentary about the making of the album.
In 2001, Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The album continues to be reissued on vinyl. It was included as part of the Beatles' Collector's Crate series in September 2009 and saw a remastered LP release on 180-gram vinyl in 2012.
A super deluxe version of the album, which featured new mixes by Giles Martin, was released in September 2019 to celebrate the original album's 50th anniversary.
As of October 2019, Abbey Road has sold 2,240,608 pure sales in United Kingdom and overall all consumed sales stand at 2,327,230 units. Post 1994 sales stand at 827,329.
Track listing
Notes
"Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track after "The End" and 14 seconds of silence. Later releases of the album included the song on the track listing, except the vinyl editions.
Some cassette tape versions in the UK and US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped to even out the playing time of each side.
Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn, Ian MacDonald, Barry Miles, Kevin Howlett, and Geoff Emerick.
The Beatles
John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; percussion
Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; bass, rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; sound effects; wind chimes, handclaps and percussion
George Harrison – harmony and background vocals; lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars; bass on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh Darling" and "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight"; harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and percussion; lead vocals (on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun")
Ringo Starr – drums and percussion; background vocals; lead vocals (on "Octopus's Garden")
Additional musicians
George Martin – harpsichord, organ, percussion
Billy Preston – Hammond organ (on "Something" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)")
Mal Evans – anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
Production
"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
"Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney)
Produced by George Martin (with the Beatles)
Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald
Assistant engineering by Alan Parsons
Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with the Beatles)
Moog programming by Mike Vickers
Charts
Original release
1987 reissue
2009 reissue
2019 reissue
Certifications
Release history
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Beatles comments on each song
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road – A track-by-track walkthrough
Live webcam at the Abbey Road zebra crossing
The Beatles y la foto de la portada de Abbey Road
1969 albums
The Beatles albums
Apple Records albums
Albums produced by George Martin
Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios
Albums recorded at Trident Studios
Albums arranged by George Martin
Albums conducted by George Martin
Albums produced by Chris Thomas (record producer)
Albums produced by George Harrison
Albums produced by John Lennon
Albums produced by Paul McCartney
Albums produced by Ringo Starr
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical | true | [
"\"You Know What to Do\" was the second song written and recorded by George Harrison with the Beatles. It was recorded on 3 June 1964 but remained unreleased until its inclusion on the band's 1995 outtakes compilation Anthology 1.\n\nBackground \nDuring a photographic assignment on the morning of 3 June 1964, Ringo Starr was taken ill with tonsillitis and pharyngitis, 24 hours before the Beatles were due to leave for a six-country tour. The recording session booked for that day was originally intended to produce a fourteenth song for the band's A Hard Day's Night album, but this activity was cancelled so that a replacement drummer, Jimmie Nicol, could be brought in and rehearse with the group. After running through six songs in a one-hour rehearsal in EMI's Studio Two, everyone felt satisfied with Nicol's drumming, so he left to pack his suitcase.\n\nThat evening, in a four-hour session in Studio Two, each of the three present Beatles recorded a demo of a newly written song. Harrison recorded \"You Know What to Do\"; John Lennon did \"No Reply\", which eventually ended up as the opening track of their next album, Beatles for Sale; and Paul McCartney did \"It's for You\", a song which was written specifically for Cilla Black to sing. The tape of the session was subsequently misfiled, but was rediscovered in 1993.\n\nHarrison's first contribution to the Beatles' output was \"Don't Bother Me\", recorded in September 1963. His next contribution was not until \"I Need You\", recorded in February 1965. Asked about this gap in 1965, George Martin said that Harrison \"got discouraged some time ago when none of us liked something that he had written\". According to music critic Richie Unterberger, Martin was most likely referring to \"You Know What to Do\".\n\nMusical structure \nThe song is in the key of A major. After an introduction in D chord on the guitar the verse begins in A (I) on \"When I see you I just don't know what to say\" ending that line with E (V). The verse also features a D (IV) chord. Musicologist Dominic Pedler cites the song as an example of how \"one of The Beatles' greatest contributions to pop songwriting was their skill in combining the familiarity of simple I-IV-V sequences with dramatically new harmonic material\". The bridge features an \"8-7-flat7-6\" glide in consecutive semitones down the chromatic scale, a device subsequently used by the Beatles in \"Michelle\", \"Cry Baby Cry\", \"Got to Get You into My Life\", \"And Your Bird Can Sing\" and \"Mother Nature's Son\".\n\nRelease\nIn anticipation of the track's release on Anthology 1, McCartney announced: \"there will be a bunch of people interested in hearing the George Harrison song from thirty years ago that no one to this day has heard – it's not the greatest thing George ever wrote, but it's an undiscovered nugget. If you find a little Egyptian pot, it doesn't have to be the greatest Egyptian pot. The fact that it is Egyptian is enough.\"\n\nUltimate Classic Rock listed \"You Know What to Do\" as the worst of the Beatles' 227 officially released songs, stating: \"When Harrison finally hit his stride, he became the Beatles' ace in the hole. But this early song ... shows why his songs were still being passed over at this point.\"\n\nPersonnel \nGeorge Harrison – vocal, rhythm guitar\nJohn Lennon – tambourine\nPaul McCartney – bass guitar\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Full lyrics for the song at the Beatles' official website\n\n1995 songs\nThe Beatles songs\nSongs written by George Harrison\nSong recordings produced by George Martin\nThe Beatles Anthology",
"Jolly What! England's Greatest Recording Stars: The Beatles & Frank Ifield on Stage is a 1964 compilation album, released by Vee-Jay Records and featuring tracks by English rock band the Beatles and by the Australian-English easy listening and country singer Frank Ifield.\n\nIfield toured the UK in 1963. While Vee-Jay temporarily had the US rights to a number of the Beatles' recordings, they released Jolly What! on 26 February 1964. The LP consisted of four studio Beatles songs (all previously released on Vee-Jay singles), plus eight recordings of Ifield. The original pressing has a drawing of a chubby old man with a moustache and a Beatle wig, and is itself quite rare.\n\nHowever, just before Vee-Jay's publishing rights were about to expire on 10 October 1964, they changed the sleeve cover to a drawing of the Beatles. (This version, titled simply The Beatles & Frank Ifield on Stage, also listed all four Beatles' tracks on the front cover, but none of the eight contributed by Ifield.) Probably less than one hundred copies were pressed, making it one of the rarest Beatles albums. Three sealed stereo copies were discovered in 1976, selling for $600, $900 and $1,800. One of the three was re-sold in 1995 for $22,000.\n\nLike many of the albums rushed out to cash in on the Beatles' success, Jolly What! has been called a \"rip-off\", due to its intentional misleading of buyers. The album consisted entirely of studio recordings (not live, and thus not \"on stage\"), and all the Beatles material had been previously released. The album is also known for a mistake in the liner notes: \"It is with a good deal of pride and pleasure that this copulation has been presented\"—presumably \"copulation\" should have been \"compilation\". (In confirming the matter, Snopes.com noted that \"copulation\" was appropriate, since the makers of the album were \"trying to screw the fans out of their money.\") The album, however, was significant in that, until the release of the Beatles' 1973 compilation album, The Beatles/1962-1966, Jolly What! was the only American Beatles album to include \"From Me to You\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nThis track listing applies to both the original LP (Jolly What!) and the reissued version (The Beatles & Frank Ifield on Stage).\n\nSide 1\n \"Please Please Me\" – The Beatles\n \"Anytime\" – Frank Ifield\n \"Lovesick Blues\" – Frank Ifield\n \"I'm Smiling Now\" – Frank Ifield\n \"Nobody's Darling\" – Frank Ifield\n \"From Me to You\" – The Beatles\n\nSide 2\n \"I Remember You\" – Frank Ifield\n \"Ask Me Why\" – The Beatles\n \"Thank You Girl\" – The Beatles\n \"The Wayward Wind\" – Frank Ifield\n \"Unchained Melody\" – Frank Ifield\n \"I Listen to My Heart\" – Frank Ifield\n\nReferences\n \n\nAlbums produced by George Martin\nThe Beatles compilation albums\n1964 compilation albums\nVee-Jay Records compilation albums\nFrank Ifield albums"
] |
[
"Abbey Road",
"\"Her Majesty\"",
"Is \"Her Majesty\" the name of a Beatles' album?",
"recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road.",
"Did the rest of the Beatles' like \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.",
"What was the effect that the Beatles' liked?",
"cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including \"Her Majesty\"."
] | C_8105eda42e114746b1837acf728441f2_0 | How was "Her Majesty" received by the public? | 4 | How was "Her Majesty" album received by the public? | Abbey Road | "Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". This is the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album. Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Named after Abbey Road, London, the location of EMI Studios, the cover features the group walking across the street's zebra crossing, an image that became one of the most famous and imitated in popular music. The album's initially mixed reviews were contrasted by its immediate commercial success, topping record charts in the UK and US. The single "Something" / "Come Together" was released in October and topped the US charts.
The album incorporates genres such as blues, rock and pop, and makes prominent use of Moog synthesizer, sounds filtered through a Leslie speaker, and tom-tom drums. It is the Beatles' only album recorded exclusively through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, which afforded a clearer and brighter sound than the group's previous records. Side two contains a medley of shorter song fragments. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" backed with "Old Brown Shoe".
Producer George Martin returned on the condition that the Beatles adhere to the discipline of their earlier records. They found the album's recording more enjoyable than the preceding Get Back sessions, but personal and business issues still affected the working environment. Production lasted from February to August 1969, and the closing track "The End" marked the final occasion that all four members recorded together. John Lennon privately left the group six days before the album's release; Paul McCartney publicly declared the band's break-up the following April.
Upon release, detractors found Abbey Road to be inauthentic and bemoaned the production's artificial effects. Since then, many critics have hailed the album as the Beatles' finest; in particular, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are considered among the best songs George Harrison wrote for the group. The album has also been ranked as one of the Beatles' best-selling, including a multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. Shortly after its release, the cover photograph fuelled rumours of McCartney's purported death. EMI Studios was also renamed Abbey Road Studios in honour of the album. A deluxe version of the album was released in 2019. In 2020, it was ranked fifth in Rolling Stones list of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
After the tense and unpleasant recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
Production
Recording history
The first sessions for Abbey Road began on 22 February 1969, only three weeks after the Get Back sessions, in Trident Studios. There, the group recorded a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston accompanying them on Hammond organ. No further group recording occurred until April because of Ringo Starr's commitments on the film The Magic Christian. After a small amount of work that month and a session for "You Never Give Me Your Money" on 6 May, the group took an eight-week break before recommencing on 2 July. Recording continued through July and August, and the last backing track, for "Because", was taped on 1 August. Overdubs continued through the month, with the final sequencing of the album coming together on 20 August the last time all four Beatles were present in a studio together.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again". Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions. Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension in the group. According to Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had become a permanent presence at Beatles' recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley. Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs", and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
Technical aspects
Abbey Road was recorded on eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines rather than the four-track machines that were used for earlier Beatles albums such as Sgt Pepper, and was the first Beatles album not to be issued in mono. The album makes prominent use of guitar played through a Leslie speaker, and of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog is not merely used as a background effect but sometimes plays a central role, as in "Because", where it is used for the middle eight. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The synthesizer was introduced to the band by Harrison, who acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound. Starr made more prominent use of the tom-toms on Abbey Road, later saying the album was "tom-tom madness ... I went nuts on the toms."
Abbey Road was also the first and only Beatles album to be entirely recorded through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, the TG12345 Mk I, as opposed to earlier thermionic valve-based REDD desks. The TG console also allowed better support for eight-track recording, facilitating the Beatles' considerable use of overdubbing. Emerick recalls that the TG desk used to record the album had individual limiters and compressors on each audio channel and noted that the overall sound was "softer" than the earlier valve desks. In his study of the role of the TG12345 in the Beatles' sound on Abbey Road, music historian Kenneth Womack observes that "the expansive sound palette and mixing capabilities of the TG12345 enabled George Martin and Geoff Emerick to imbue the Beatles' sound with greater definition and clarity. The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different."
Alan Parsons worked as an assistant engineer on the album. He later went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Songs
Side one
"Come Together"
"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.
Beatles author Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait". MacDonald has suggested that the "juju eyeballs" has been claimed to refer to Dr John and "spinal cracker" to Ono. The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" – "Here come old flat-top" – was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". A settlement was reached in 1973 in which Lennon promised to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next album.
"Come Together" was later released as a double A-side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the compilation album Love, Martin described the track as "a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers".
"Something"
Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. Cocker's version appeared on his album Joe Cocker! that November.
"Something" was Lennon's favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Though the song was written by Harrison, Frank Sinatra once commented that it was his favourite Lennon–McCartney composition and "the greatest love song ever written". Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.
The song was issued as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969 and topped the US charts for one week, becoming the Beatles' first number-one single that was not a Lennon–McCartney composition. It was also the first Beatles single from an album already released in the UK. Apple's Neil Aspinall filmed a promotional video, which combined separate footage of the Beatles and their wives.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".
The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, saying "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it". Longtime roadie Mal Evans played the anvil sound in the chorus. This track also makes use of Harrison's Moog synthesizer, played by McCartney.
"Oh! Darling"
"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-wop style, like contemporary work by Frank Zappa. It was tried at the Get Back sessions, and a version appears on Anthology 3. It was subsequently re-recorded in April, with overdubs in July and August.
McCartney attempted recording the lead vocal only once a day. He said: "I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week." Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.
"Octopus's Garden"
As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band. It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album. Starr received a full songwriting credit and composed most of the lyrics, although the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison. The pair would later collaborate as writers on Starr's solo singles "It Don't Come Easy", "Back Off Boogaloo" and "Photograph".
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis writes that the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.
The finished song is a combination of two different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred in February 1969, almost immediately after the Get Back/Let It Be sessions with Billy Preston. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the Abbey Road sessions proper in April. The two sections together ran to nearly eight minutes, making it the Beatles' second-longest released track. Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesizer with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track. During the final edit, Lennon told Emerick to "cut it right there" at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, creating a sudden, jarring silence that concludes the first side of Abbey Road (the recording tape would have run out within 20 seconds as it was). The final mixing and editing of the track occurred on 20 August 1969, the last day all four Beatles were together in the studio.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. The basic track was recorded on 7 July 1969. Harrison sang lead and played acoustic guitar, McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass and Starr played the drums. Lennon was still recuperating from his car accident and did not perform on the track. Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.
Though not released as a single, the song attracted attention and critical praise, and was included on the compilation 1967–1970. It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige. The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton said it was "almost impossible not to sing along to". Since digital downloads have become eligible to chart, it reached number 56 in 2010 after the Beatles' back catalogue was released on iTunes. It is also the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.
Harrison recorded a guitar solo for this track that did not appear in the final mix. It was rediscovered in 2012, and footage of Martin and Harrison's son Dhani listening to it in the studio was released on the DVD of Living in the Material World.
"Because"
"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them." The track features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to give nine voices in the final mix. The group considered the vocals to be some of the hardest and most complex they attempted. Harrison played the Moog synthesizer, and Martin played the harpsichord that opens the track.
Medley
The remainder of side two consists of a 16-minute medley of eight short songs (known during the recording sessions as "The Long One"), recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".
The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this, given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney. The track is a suite of varying styles, ranging from a piano-led ballad at the start to arpeggiated guitars at the end. Both Harrison and Lennon provided guitar solos with Lennon playing the solos at the end of the track.
This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam". These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".
"The End" features Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' catalogue (the drums are mixed across two tracks in "true stereo", unlike most releases at that time where they were hard panned left or right). Fifty-four seconds into the song are 18 bars of lead guitar: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, and the sequence is repeated two more times. Harrison suggested the idea of a guitar solo in the track, Lennon decided they should trade solos and McCartney elected to go first. The solos were cut live against the existing backing track in one take. Immediately after Lennon's third and final solo, the piano chords of the final part of the song begin. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This section was taped separately from the first, and required the piano to be re-recorded by McCartney, which was done on 18 August. An alternative version of the song, with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (and Starr's drum solo heard in the background), appears on the Anthology 3 album and the 2012 digital-only compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed by George Martin not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.
"Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam", as a result of being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although the song was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album.
Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue.
Unreleased material
Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe". The latter was re-recorded by the Beatles in April 1969 and issued as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" the following month. All three of these Harrison demos were later featured on Anthology 3.
During the sessions for the medley, McCartney recorded "Come and Get It", playing all the instruments. It was assumed to be a demo recording for another artist but McCartney later said that he originally intended to put it on Abbey Road. It was instead covered by Badfinger, while McCartney's original recording appeared on Anthology 3.
The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda, and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session, have appeared on bootlegs.
Cover photo
Apple Records creative director Kosh designed the album cover. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world". The front cover was a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing based on ideas that McCartney sketched and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo while he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which would be used on the album sleeve.
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car. In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.
Release
In mid-1969, Lennon formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey". While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August. On 20 September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) he was leaving the group, (or in his words, he wanted a divorce) six days before Abbey Road was released. Apple released "Something" backed with "Come Together" in the US on 6 October 1969. Release of the single in the UK followed on 31 October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's "Cold Turkey" the same month.
The Beatles did little promotion of Abbey Road directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970. By this time, the Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number one, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. Altogether, it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart. Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.
Critical reception
Contemporary
Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Retrospective
Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".
AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Peppers "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
Abbey Road received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. It was voted number 8 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album. In 2020, the magazine ranked the album at number 5 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Beatles record on the list; a previous version of the list from 2012 had ranked it at number 14. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Legacy
Abbey Road crossing and "Paul is dead"
The image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an imposter, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Roads commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?"
Cover versions and influence
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety. One month after Abbey Roads release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. Later in 1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location in Memphis of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
While matching albums such as Sgt. Pepper in terms of popularity, Abbey Road failed to repeat the Beatles' earlier achievements in galvanising their rivals to imitate them. In author Peter Doggett's description, "Too contrived for the rock underground to copy, too complex for the bubblegum pop brigade to copy, the album influenced no one – except [Paul McCartney]", who spent years trying to emulate its scope in his solo career. Writing for Classic Rock in 2014, Jon Anderson of the progressive rock band Yes said his group were constantly influenced by the Beatles from Revolver onwards, but it was the feeling that side two was "one complete idea" that inspired him to create long-form pieces of music.
Several artists have covered some or all of the side-two medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), The String Cheese Incident, Transatlantic and Tenacious D (who performed the medley with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell). Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011. It began with a "Come Together" opener at Boston on 4 March and ended with the entire medley in New York City on 15 March, including "Her Majesty" as an encore.
Continued sales and reissues
In June 1970, Allen Klein reported that Abbey Road was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US with sales of about five million. By 1992, Abbey Road had sold nine million copies. The album became the ninth-most downloaded on the iTunes Store a week after it was released there on 16 November 2010. A CNN report stated it was the best-selling vinyl album of 2011. It is the first album from the 1960s to sell over five million albums since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In the US, the album had sold 7,177,797 copies by the end of the 1970s. , the album had sold over 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the band's best-selling albums. In October 2019, Abbey Road re-entered the UK charts, again hitting number one.
Abbey Road has remained in print since its first release in 1969. The original album was released on 26 September in the UK and 1 October in the US on Apple Records. It was reissued as a limited edition picture disc on vinyl in the US by Capitol on 27 December 1978, while a CD reissue of the album was released in 1987, with a remastered version appearing in 2009. The remaster included additional photographs with additional liner notes and the first, limited edition, run also included a short documentary about the making of the album.
In 2001, Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The album continues to be reissued on vinyl. It was included as part of the Beatles' Collector's Crate series in September 2009 and saw a remastered LP release on 180-gram vinyl in 2012.
A super deluxe version of the album, which featured new mixes by Giles Martin, was released in September 2019 to celebrate the original album's 50th anniversary.
As of October 2019, Abbey Road has sold 2,240,608 pure sales in United Kingdom and overall all consumed sales stand at 2,327,230 units. Post 1994 sales stand at 827,329.
Track listing
Notes
"Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track after "The End" and 14 seconds of silence. Later releases of the album included the song on the track listing, except the vinyl editions.
Some cassette tape versions in the UK and US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped to even out the playing time of each side.
Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn, Ian MacDonald, Barry Miles, Kevin Howlett, and Geoff Emerick.
The Beatles
John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; percussion
Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; bass, rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; sound effects; wind chimes, handclaps and percussion
George Harrison – harmony and background vocals; lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars; bass on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh Darling" and "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight"; harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and percussion; lead vocals (on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun")
Ringo Starr – drums and percussion; background vocals; lead vocals (on "Octopus's Garden")
Additional musicians
George Martin – harpsichord, organ, percussion
Billy Preston – Hammond organ (on "Something" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)")
Mal Evans – anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
Production
"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
"Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney)
Produced by George Martin (with the Beatles)
Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald
Assistant engineering by Alan Parsons
Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with the Beatles)
Moog programming by Mike Vickers
Charts
Original release
1987 reissue
2009 reissue
2019 reissue
Certifications
Release history
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Beatles comments on each song
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road – A track-by-track walkthrough
Live webcam at the Abbey Road zebra crossing
The Beatles y la foto de la portada de Abbey Road
1969 albums
The Beatles albums
Apple Records albums
Albums produced by George Martin
Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios
Albums recorded at Trident Studios
Albums arranged by George Martin
Albums conducted by George Martin
Albums produced by Chris Thomas (record producer)
Albums produced by George Harrison
Albums produced by John Lennon
Albums produced by Paul McCartney
Albums produced by Ringo Starr
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical | false | [
"An Appropriation Act is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which, like a Consolidated Fund Act, allows the Treasury to issue funds out of the Consolidated Fund. Unlike a Consolidated Fund Act, an Appropriation Act also \"appropriates\" the funds, that is allocates the funds issued out of the Consolidated Fund to individual government departments and Crown bodies. Appropriation Acts were formerly passed by the Parliament of Great Britain.\n\nFormat\nEach Appropriation Act has a series of schedules which contain tables that set out how the monies issued out of the Consolidated Fund are appropriated. Each department or body which has money appropriated is noted in the tables which contain columns setting out the things the money appropriated may be spent on, the net resources authorised for use, the grants out of the Consolidated Fund, the operating appropriations in aid and the non-operating appropriations in aid. The money may not be spent for purposes other than that it is appropriated for and it must be spent by the end of the fiscal year covered by that appropriation or returned to the Consolidated Fund.\n\nThe typical structure of such an Act begins with the long title, which defines which financial years the Act applies to. This is followed by the preamble, which is different from the normal British public general Act of Parliament preamble in that it includes additional text before the normal preamble:\n\nWhereas the Commons of the United Kingdom in Parliament assembled have resolved to authorise the use of resources and the issue of sums out of the Consolidated Fund towards making good the supply which they have granted to Her Majesty in this Session of Parliament:—\n\nBe it therefore enacted by the Queen's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—\n\nUntil 2000 an older form of preamble was used:\n\nMost Gracious Sovereign,\n\t\nWE, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom in Parliament assembled, towards making good the supply which we have cheerfully granted to Your Majesty in this Session of Parliament, have resolved to grant unto Your Majesty the sums hereinafter mentioned; and do therefore most humbly beseech Your Majesty that it may be enacted and be it enacted by the Queen's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—\n\nEach Appropriation Act typically covers two or more fiscal years, and will normally repeal earlier Appropriation Acts and Consolidated Fund Acts still on the statute books.\n\nEffect\nAn Appropriation Act normally becomes spent on the conclusion of the financial year to which it relates.\n\nList\n\nThe Act 15 Geo 3 c 42 (1775)\nThe Act 39 Geo 3 c 114 (1799)\nThe Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Act (1864) (27 & 28 Vict c 73). The Bill for this Act was the Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill. This Act received royal assent on 29 July 1864.\nThe Appropriation Act 1870 (33 & 34 Vict c 96). This Act received royal assent on 10 August 1870. Section 7 was amended by section 6 of the Appropriation Act 1872, and repealed by section 6 of the Appropriation Act 1877. The Appropriation Act 1870, except sections 6 and 8, was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883. The words \"militia, yeomanry\" in section 6 were repealed by the Territorial Army and Militia Act 1921. The whole Act was repealed for the United Kingdom by the Schedule to the Statute Law Revision Act 1966, and for the Republic of Ireland by Part 4 of the Schedule to the Statute Law Revision Act 1983.\nThe Appropriation Act 1871 (34 & 35 Vict c 89). This Act received royal assent on 21 August 1871, and was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883.\nThe Appropriation Act 1872 (35 & 36 Vict c 87). This Act received royal assent on 10 August 1872. Section 6 was repealed by section 6 of the Appropriation Act 1877. The Appropriation Act 1872 was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883.\nThe Appropriation Act 1873 (36 & 37 Vict c 79). This Act received royal assent on 5 August 1873, and was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883.\nThe Appropriation Act 1874 (37 & 38 Vict c 56). This Act received royal assent on 7 August 1874, and was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883.\nThe Appropriation Act 1875 (38 & 39 Vict c 78). This Act received royal assent on 13 August 1875, and was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883.\nThe Appropriation Act 1876 (39 & 40 Vict c 60). This Act received royal assent on 15 August 1876, and was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883.\nThe Appropriation Act 1877 (40 & 41 Vict c 61). This Act received royal assent on 14 August 1877, and was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883.\nThe Appropriation Act 1878 (41 & 42 Vict c 65). This Act received royal assent on 16 August 1878, and was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1883.\nThe Appropriation Act 1879 (42 & 43 Vict c 51). This Act received royal assent on 15 August 1879, and was repealed by the First Schedule to the Statute Law Revision Act 1894.\nThe Appropriation Act 1880 (43 Vict c 13). This Act received royal assent on 24 March 1880, and was repealed by the First Schedule to the Statute Law Revision Act 1894.\nThe Appropriation Act 1880 (Session 2) (43 & 44 Vict c 40). This Act received royal assent on 7 September 1880, and was repealed by the First Schedule to the Statute Law Revision Act 1894.\nThe Appropriation Act 1881 (44 & 45 Vict c 56). This Act received royal assent on 27 August 1881, and was repealed by the First Schedule to the Statute Law Revision Act 1894.\nThe Appropriation Act 1882 (45 & 46 Vict c 71). This Act received royal assent on 18 August 1882.\nThe Appropriation Act 1883 (46 & 47 Vict c 50). This Act received royal assent on 25 August 1883.\n\nNorthern Ireland\nA number of Appropriation Acts were passed by the Parliament of Northern Ireland. A number of Appropriation Orders in Council have been made for Northern Ireland.\n\nSee also\nList of short titles\nAppropriations bill (United States)\n\nReferences\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\nFurther reading\nNorman Wilding and Philip Laundy. \"Appropriation Act\". An Encyclopaedia of Parliament. Third Edition. Frederick A Praeger. New York and Washington. 1968. Pages 24 and 25. See also pages 3, 129, 167, 168, 250, 253, 254, 536, 596, 599, 601 and 685.\nWill Bateman. Public Finance and Parliamentary Constitutionalism. Cambridge University Press. 2020. Page 31 et seq.\n\nExternal links\n\nUnited Kingdom public law\nLegal history of England\nRepealed Great Britain Acts of Parliament\nGreat Britain Acts of Parliament 1800\nPublic finance of the United Kingdom",
"MV Ocean Majesty is a cruise ship, originally built in 1966 as the ferry Juan March.\nThe ship is now registered in the International Shipping Register of Madeira (MAR), Portugal.\n\nHistory \nOcean Majesty was launched as Juan March for the Madrid based ferry operator Trasmediterránea. She was the first of two near identical Albatros-class sisters, the other being the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. During her service with her original owners Juan March was mainly used to ferry passengers from Spain to the Balearic Islands. In 1985 Juan March was sold to the Sol Mediterranean and became Sol Christina. She was not operated long by these owners, and was sold to become the Kyros Star of Opale Lines. She was then sold to Majestic International Cruises, who rebuilt her from her original ferry-like form into a cruise ship, and she received her current name Ocean Majesty. Majestic International operated her for several years, until they chartered Ocean Majesty to Epirotiki in 1994, the latter company renamed her Homeric. Homeric operated for a year until her charter expired, and she was subsequently returned to Majestic International and named Ocean Majesty once again. Majestic International has chartered her to many different companies since 1995, most frequently to the British vacation company Page & Moy. Since 2013 she has been operated by German cruise company Hansa Touristik between May and October. Since 2021 is laid up at Chalkis Shipyard, Greece.\n\nThe future \nOcean Majesty fulfils SOLAS 2010 in her current construction.\n\nReferences\n\n1965 ships\nCruise ships of Portugal\nPassenger ships of Spain\nCruise ships of the United Kingdom"
] |
[
"Abbey Road",
"\"Her Majesty\"",
"Is \"Her Majesty\" the name of a Beatles' album?",
"recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road.",
"Did the rest of the Beatles' like \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.",
"What was the effect that the Beatles' liked?",
"cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including \"Her Majesty\".",
"How was \"Her Majesty\" received by the public?",
"I don't know."
] | C_8105eda42e114746b1837acf728441f2_0 | Did any other musicians besides the Beatles contribute to "Her Majesty"? | 5 | Did any other musicians besides the Beatles contribute to "Her Majesty"? | Abbey Road | "Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". This is the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album. Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue. CANNOTANSWER | The second engineer, John Kurlander, | Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Named after Abbey Road, London, the location of EMI Studios, the cover features the group walking across the street's zebra crossing, an image that became one of the most famous and imitated in popular music. The album's initially mixed reviews were contrasted by its immediate commercial success, topping record charts in the UK and US. The single "Something" / "Come Together" was released in October and topped the US charts.
The album incorporates genres such as blues, rock and pop, and makes prominent use of Moog synthesizer, sounds filtered through a Leslie speaker, and tom-tom drums. It is the Beatles' only album recorded exclusively through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, which afforded a clearer and brighter sound than the group's previous records. Side two contains a medley of shorter song fragments. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" backed with "Old Brown Shoe".
Producer George Martin returned on the condition that the Beatles adhere to the discipline of their earlier records. They found the album's recording more enjoyable than the preceding Get Back sessions, but personal and business issues still affected the working environment. Production lasted from February to August 1969, and the closing track "The End" marked the final occasion that all four members recorded together. John Lennon privately left the group six days before the album's release; Paul McCartney publicly declared the band's break-up the following April.
Upon release, detractors found Abbey Road to be inauthentic and bemoaned the production's artificial effects. Since then, many critics have hailed the album as the Beatles' finest; in particular, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are considered among the best songs George Harrison wrote for the group. The album has also been ranked as one of the Beatles' best-selling, including a multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. Shortly after its release, the cover photograph fuelled rumours of McCartney's purported death. EMI Studios was also renamed Abbey Road Studios in honour of the album. A deluxe version of the album was released in 2019. In 2020, it was ranked fifth in Rolling Stones list of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
After the tense and unpleasant recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
Production
Recording history
The first sessions for Abbey Road began on 22 February 1969, only three weeks after the Get Back sessions, in Trident Studios. There, the group recorded a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston accompanying them on Hammond organ. No further group recording occurred until April because of Ringo Starr's commitments on the film The Magic Christian. After a small amount of work that month and a session for "You Never Give Me Your Money" on 6 May, the group took an eight-week break before recommencing on 2 July. Recording continued through July and August, and the last backing track, for "Because", was taped on 1 August. Overdubs continued through the month, with the final sequencing of the album coming together on 20 August the last time all four Beatles were present in a studio together.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again". Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions. Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension in the group. According to Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had become a permanent presence at Beatles' recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley. Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs", and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
Technical aspects
Abbey Road was recorded on eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines rather than the four-track machines that were used for earlier Beatles albums such as Sgt Pepper, and was the first Beatles album not to be issued in mono. The album makes prominent use of guitar played through a Leslie speaker, and of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog is not merely used as a background effect but sometimes plays a central role, as in "Because", where it is used for the middle eight. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The synthesizer was introduced to the band by Harrison, who acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound. Starr made more prominent use of the tom-toms on Abbey Road, later saying the album was "tom-tom madness ... I went nuts on the toms."
Abbey Road was also the first and only Beatles album to be entirely recorded through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, the TG12345 Mk I, as opposed to earlier thermionic valve-based REDD desks. The TG console also allowed better support for eight-track recording, facilitating the Beatles' considerable use of overdubbing. Emerick recalls that the TG desk used to record the album had individual limiters and compressors on each audio channel and noted that the overall sound was "softer" than the earlier valve desks. In his study of the role of the TG12345 in the Beatles' sound on Abbey Road, music historian Kenneth Womack observes that "the expansive sound palette and mixing capabilities of the TG12345 enabled George Martin and Geoff Emerick to imbue the Beatles' sound with greater definition and clarity. The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different."
Alan Parsons worked as an assistant engineer on the album. He later went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Songs
Side one
"Come Together"
"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.
Beatles author Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait". MacDonald has suggested that the "juju eyeballs" has been claimed to refer to Dr John and "spinal cracker" to Ono. The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" – "Here come old flat-top" – was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". A settlement was reached in 1973 in which Lennon promised to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next album.
"Come Together" was later released as a double A-side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the compilation album Love, Martin described the track as "a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers".
"Something"
Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. Cocker's version appeared on his album Joe Cocker! that November.
"Something" was Lennon's favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Though the song was written by Harrison, Frank Sinatra once commented that it was his favourite Lennon–McCartney composition and "the greatest love song ever written". Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.
The song was issued as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969 and topped the US charts for one week, becoming the Beatles' first number-one single that was not a Lennon–McCartney composition. It was also the first Beatles single from an album already released in the UK. Apple's Neil Aspinall filmed a promotional video, which combined separate footage of the Beatles and their wives.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".
The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, saying "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it". Longtime roadie Mal Evans played the anvil sound in the chorus. This track also makes use of Harrison's Moog synthesizer, played by McCartney.
"Oh! Darling"
"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-wop style, like contemporary work by Frank Zappa. It was tried at the Get Back sessions, and a version appears on Anthology 3. It was subsequently re-recorded in April, with overdubs in July and August.
McCartney attempted recording the lead vocal only once a day. He said: "I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week." Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.
"Octopus's Garden"
As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band. It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album. Starr received a full songwriting credit and composed most of the lyrics, although the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison. The pair would later collaborate as writers on Starr's solo singles "It Don't Come Easy", "Back Off Boogaloo" and "Photograph".
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis writes that the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.
The finished song is a combination of two different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred in February 1969, almost immediately after the Get Back/Let It Be sessions with Billy Preston. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the Abbey Road sessions proper in April. The two sections together ran to nearly eight minutes, making it the Beatles' second-longest released track. Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesizer with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track. During the final edit, Lennon told Emerick to "cut it right there" at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, creating a sudden, jarring silence that concludes the first side of Abbey Road (the recording tape would have run out within 20 seconds as it was). The final mixing and editing of the track occurred on 20 August 1969, the last day all four Beatles were together in the studio.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. The basic track was recorded on 7 July 1969. Harrison sang lead and played acoustic guitar, McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass and Starr played the drums. Lennon was still recuperating from his car accident and did not perform on the track. Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.
Though not released as a single, the song attracted attention and critical praise, and was included on the compilation 1967–1970. It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige. The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton said it was "almost impossible not to sing along to". Since digital downloads have become eligible to chart, it reached number 56 in 2010 after the Beatles' back catalogue was released on iTunes. It is also the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.
Harrison recorded a guitar solo for this track that did not appear in the final mix. It was rediscovered in 2012, and footage of Martin and Harrison's son Dhani listening to it in the studio was released on the DVD of Living in the Material World.
"Because"
"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them." The track features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to give nine voices in the final mix. The group considered the vocals to be some of the hardest and most complex they attempted. Harrison played the Moog synthesizer, and Martin played the harpsichord that opens the track.
Medley
The remainder of side two consists of a 16-minute medley of eight short songs (known during the recording sessions as "The Long One"), recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".
The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this, given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney. The track is a suite of varying styles, ranging from a piano-led ballad at the start to arpeggiated guitars at the end. Both Harrison and Lennon provided guitar solos with Lennon playing the solos at the end of the track.
This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam". These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".
"The End" features Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' catalogue (the drums are mixed across two tracks in "true stereo", unlike most releases at that time where they were hard panned left or right). Fifty-four seconds into the song are 18 bars of lead guitar: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, and the sequence is repeated two more times. Harrison suggested the idea of a guitar solo in the track, Lennon decided they should trade solos and McCartney elected to go first. The solos were cut live against the existing backing track in one take. Immediately after Lennon's third and final solo, the piano chords of the final part of the song begin. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This section was taped separately from the first, and required the piano to be re-recorded by McCartney, which was done on 18 August. An alternative version of the song, with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (and Starr's drum solo heard in the background), appears on the Anthology 3 album and the 2012 digital-only compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed by George Martin not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.
"Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam", as a result of being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although the song was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album.
Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue.
Unreleased material
Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe". The latter was re-recorded by the Beatles in April 1969 and issued as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" the following month. All three of these Harrison demos were later featured on Anthology 3.
During the sessions for the medley, McCartney recorded "Come and Get It", playing all the instruments. It was assumed to be a demo recording for another artist but McCartney later said that he originally intended to put it on Abbey Road. It was instead covered by Badfinger, while McCartney's original recording appeared on Anthology 3.
The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda, and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session, have appeared on bootlegs.
Cover photo
Apple Records creative director Kosh designed the album cover. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world". The front cover was a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing based on ideas that McCartney sketched and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo while he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which would be used on the album sleeve.
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car. In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.
Release
In mid-1969, Lennon formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey". While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August. On 20 September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) he was leaving the group, (or in his words, he wanted a divorce) six days before Abbey Road was released. Apple released "Something" backed with "Come Together" in the US on 6 October 1969. Release of the single in the UK followed on 31 October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's "Cold Turkey" the same month.
The Beatles did little promotion of Abbey Road directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970. By this time, the Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number one, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. Altogether, it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart. Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.
Critical reception
Contemporary
Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Retrospective
Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".
AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Peppers "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
Abbey Road received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. It was voted number 8 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album. In 2020, the magazine ranked the album at number 5 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Beatles record on the list; a previous version of the list from 2012 had ranked it at number 14. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Legacy
Abbey Road crossing and "Paul is dead"
The image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an imposter, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Roads commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?"
Cover versions and influence
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety. One month after Abbey Roads release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. Later in 1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location in Memphis of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
While matching albums such as Sgt. Pepper in terms of popularity, Abbey Road failed to repeat the Beatles' earlier achievements in galvanising their rivals to imitate them. In author Peter Doggett's description, "Too contrived for the rock underground to copy, too complex for the bubblegum pop brigade to copy, the album influenced no one – except [Paul McCartney]", who spent years trying to emulate its scope in his solo career. Writing for Classic Rock in 2014, Jon Anderson of the progressive rock band Yes said his group were constantly influenced by the Beatles from Revolver onwards, but it was the feeling that side two was "one complete idea" that inspired him to create long-form pieces of music.
Several artists have covered some or all of the side-two medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), The String Cheese Incident, Transatlantic and Tenacious D (who performed the medley with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell). Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011. It began with a "Come Together" opener at Boston on 4 March and ended with the entire medley in New York City on 15 March, including "Her Majesty" as an encore.
Continued sales and reissues
In June 1970, Allen Klein reported that Abbey Road was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US with sales of about five million. By 1992, Abbey Road had sold nine million copies. The album became the ninth-most downloaded on the iTunes Store a week after it was released there on 16 November 2010. A CNN report stated it was the best-selling vinyl album of 2011. It is the first album from the 1960s to sell over five million albums since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In the US, the album had sold 7,177,797 copies by the end of the 1970s. , the album had sold over 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the band's best-selling albums. In October 2019, Abbey Road re-entered the UK charts, again hitting number one.
Abbey Road has remained in print since its first release in 1969. The original album was released on 26 September in the UK and 1 October in the US on Apple Records. It was reissued as a limited edition picture disc on vinyl in the US by Capitol on 27 December 1978, while a CD reissue of the album was released in 1987, with a remastered version appearing in 2009. The remaster included additional photographs with additional liner notes and the first, limited edition, run also included a short documentary about the making of the album.
In 2001, Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The album continues to be reissued on vinyl. It was included as part of the Beatles' Collector's Crate series in September 2009 and saw a remastered LP release on 180-gram vinyl in 2012.
A super deluxe version of the album, which featured new mixes by Giles Martin, was released in September 2019 to celebrate the original album's 50th anniversary.
As of October 2019, Abbey Road has sold 2,240,608 pure sales in United Kingdom and overall all consumed sales stand at 2,327,230 units. Post 1994 sales stand at 827,329.
Track listing
Notes
"Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track after "The End" and 14 seconds of silence. Later releases of the album included the song on the track listing, except the vinyl editions.
Some cassette tape versions in the UK and US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped to even out the playing time of each side.
Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn, Ian MacDonald, Barry Miles, Kevin Howlett, and Geoff Emerick.
The Beatles
John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; percussion
Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; bass, rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; sound effects; wind chimes, handclaps and percussion
George Harrison – harmony and background vocals; lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars; bass on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh Darling" and "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight"; harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and percussion; lead vocals (on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun")
Ringo Starr – drums and percussion; background vocals; lead vocals (on "Octopus's Garden")
Additional musicians
George Martin – harpsichord, organ, percussion
Billy Preston – Hammond organ (on "Something" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)")
Mal Evans – anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
Production
"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
"Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney)
Produced by George Martin (with the Beatles)
Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald
Assistant engineering by Alan Parsons
Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with the Beatles)
Moog programming by Mike Vickers
Charts
Original release
1987 reissue
2009 reissue
2019 reissue
Certifications
Release history
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Beatles comments on each song
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road – A track-by-track walkthrough
Live webcam at the Abbey Road zebra crossing
The Beatles y la foto de la portada de Abbey Road
1969 albums
The Beatles albums
Apple Records albums
Albums produced by George Martin
Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios
Albums recorded at Trident Studios
Albums arranged by George Martin
Albums conducted by George Martin
Albums produced by Chris Thomas (record producer)
Albums produced by George Harrison
Albums produced by John Lennon
Albums produced by Paul McCartney
Albums produced by Ringo Starr
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical | true | [
"\"Her Majesty\" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Abbey Road. Written by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney, it is a brief tongue-in-cheek music hall song. Although credited to the band, McCartney is the only Beatle to appear on the track. \"Her Majesty\" is the final cut on the album and appears 14 seconds after the previous song \"The End,\" but was not listed on the original sleeve. It is considered one of the first examples of a hidden track in rock music.\n\nRecording\nThe song was recorded in three takes on 2 July 1969, prior to the Beatles beginning work on \"Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight\". McCartney sang and simultaneously played a fingerstyle acoustic guitar accompaniment. The decision to exclude it from the Abbey Road medley was made on 30 July.\n\nIt runs only 23 seconds, but the Beatles also recorded a longer version during the Get Back sessions.\n\nIn the song, the singer muses about the Queen and his plan to someday \"make her mine.\"\n\nStructure and placement\nThe song was originally placed between \"Mean Mr. Mustard\" and \"Polythene Pam\"; McCartney decided that the sequence did not work and it was edited out of the album's closing medley by Abbey Road Studios tape operator John Kurlander. He was instructed by McCartney to destroy the tape, but EMI policy stated that no Beatles recording was ever to be destroyed. The fourteen seconds of silence between \"The End\" and \"Her Majesty\" are the result of Kurlander's lead-out tape added to separate the song from the rest of the recording.\n\nThe loud chord that occurs at the beginning of the song is the ending, as recorded, of \"Mean Mr. Mustard\". \"Her Majesty\" ends abruptly because its own final note was left at the beginning of \"Polythene Pam\". McCartney applauded Kurlander's \"surprise effect\" and the track became the unintended closer to the LP. The crudely edited beginning and end of \"Her Majesty\" shows that it was not meant to be included in the final mix of the album; as McCartney says in The Beatles Anthology, \"Typical Beatles – an accident.\" The song was not listed on the original vinyl record's sleeve as these had already been printed; on reprinted sleeves, however, it is listed. The CD edition corrects this.\n\nThe CD version also mimics the original LP version in that the CD contains a 14-second long silence immediately after \"The End\" before \"Her Majesty\" starts playing. Digital versions also include a 14-second long silence after \"The End\".\n\nAt 23 seconds long, \"Her Majesty\" is the shortest song in the Beatles' repertoire (contrasting the same album's \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\", their longest song apart from \"Revolution 9\", an 8:22 avant-garde piece from The Beatles). Both of the original sides of vinyl close with a song that ends abruptly (the other being \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\"). The song starts panned hard right and slowly pans to hard left.\n\nIn October 2009, MTV Networks released a downloadable version of the song (as well as the entire album) for the video game The Beatles: Rock Band that gave players the ability to play the missing last chord. Apple Corps granted rights to this and to other changes to Harmonix Music Systems, which developed the game. The alteration garnered controversy among some fans who preferred the recorded version's unresolved close.\n\nThe fiftieth anniversary \"Super Deluxe Edition\" of Abbey Road includes a bonus track, \"The Long One\" that consists of a trial edit and mix of the medley, with \"Her Majesty\" placed between \"Mean Mr. Mustard\" and \"Polythene Pam\".\n\nPersonnel\n Paul McCartney – lead vocals, acoustic guitar\n\nLive performance\nMcCartney performed the song in front of the Queen at the Party at the Palace on \n3 June 2002, part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nThe Beatles songs\n1969 songs\nSong recordings produced by George Martin\nSongs written by Lennon–McCartney\nSongs published by Northern Songs\n2002 singles\nCultural depictions of Elizabeth II\nChumbawamba songs\nSongs about queens",
"Her Majesty may refer to:\n\n Majesty, a style used by monarchs\n Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth\n Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen of Denmark\n \"Her Majesty\" (song), a 1969 song by The Beatles about Queen Elizabeth II\n Her Majesty the Decemberists, an album from The Decemberists\n Her Majesty (2001 film), a New Zealand film about a young girl, her Maori friend and the visit of the young Queen Elizabeth II in New Zealand\n Her Majesty (1922 film), an American silent comedy film\n\nSee also\n His Majesty (disambiguation)\n Majesty (disambiguation)\n Majestic (disambiguation)"
] |
[
"Abbey Road",
"\"Her Majesty\"",
"Is \"Her Majesty\" the name of a Beatles' album?",
"recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road.",
"Did the rest of the Beatles' like \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.",
"What was the effect that the Beatles' liked?",
"cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including \"Her Majesty\".",
"How was \"Her Majesty\" received by the public?",
"I don't know.",
"Did any other musicians besides the Beatles contribute to \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The second engineer, John Kurlander,"
] | C_8105eda42e114746b1837acf728441f2_0 | What year was "Her Majesty" created? | 6 | What year was "Her Majesty" album created by the Beatles? | Abbey Road | "Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". This is the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album. Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue. CANNOTANSWER | Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July | Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Named after Abbey Road, London, the location of EMI Studios, the cover features the group walking across the street's zebra crossing, an image that became one of the most famous and imitated in popular music. The album's initially mixed reviews were contrasted by its immediate commercial success, topping record charts in the UK and US. The single "Something" / "Come Together" was released in October and topped the US charts.
The album incorporates genres such as blues, rock and pop, and makes prominent use of Moog synthesizer, sounds filtered through a Leslie speaker, and tom-tom drums. It is the Beatles' only album recorded exclusively through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, which afforded a clearer and brighter sound than the group's previous records. Side two contains a medley of shorter song fragments. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" backed with "Old Brown Shoe".
Producer George Martin returned on the condition that the Beatles adhere to the discipline of their earlier records. They found the album's recording more enjoyable than the preceding Get Back sessions, but personal and business issues still affected the working environment. Production lasted from February to August 1969, and the closing track "The End" marked the final occasion that all four members recorded together. John Lennon privately left the group six days before the album's release; Paul McCartney publicly declared the band's break-up the following April.
Upon release, detractors found Abbey Road to be inauthentic and bemoaned the production's artificial effects. Since then, many critics have hailed the album as the Beatles' finest; in particular, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are considered among the best songs George Harrison wrote for the group. The album has also been ranked as one of the Beatles' best-selling, including a multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. Shortly after its release, the cover photograph fuelled rumours of McCartney's purported death. EMI Studios was also renamed Abbey Road Studios in honour of the album. A deluxe version of the album was released in 2019. In 2020, it was ranked fifth in Rolling Stones list of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
After the tense and unpleasant recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
Production
Recording history
The first sessions for Abbey Road began on 22 February 1969, only three weeks after the Get Back sessions, in Trident Studios. There, the group recorded a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston accompanying them on Hammond organ. No further group recording occurred until April because of Ringo Starr's commitments on the film The Magic Christian. After a small amount of work that month and a session for "You Never Give Me Your Money" on 6 May, the group took an eight-week break before recommencing on 2 July. Recording continued through July and August, and the last backing track, for "Because", was taped on 1 August. Overdubs continued through the month, with the final sequencing of the album coming together on 20 August the last time all four Beatles were present in a studio together.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again". Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions. Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension in the group. According to Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had become a permanent presence at Beatles' recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley. Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs", and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
Technical aspects
Abbey Road was recorded on eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines rather than the four-track machines that were used for earlier Beatles albums such as Sgt Pepper, and was the first Beatles album not to be issued in mono. The album makes prominent use of guitar played through a Leslie speaker, and of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog is not merely used as a background effect but sometimes plays a central role, as in "Because", where it is used for the middle eight. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The synthesizer was introduced to the band by Harrison, who acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound. Starr made more prominent use of the tom-toms on Abbey Road, later saying the album was "tom-tom madness ... I went nuts on the toms."
Abbey Road was also the first and only Beatles album to be entirely recorded through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, the TG12345 Mk I, as opposed to earlier thermionic valve-based REDD desks. The TG console also allowed better support for eight-track recording, facilitating the Beatles' considerable use of overdubbing. Emerick recalls that the TG desk used to record the album had individual limiters and compressors on each audio channel and noted that the overall sound was "softer" than the earlier valve desks. In his study of the role of the TG12345 in the Beatles' sound on Abbey Road, music historian Kenneth Womack observes that "the expansive sound palette and mixing capabilities of the TG12345 enabled George Martin and Geoff Emerick to imbue the Beatles' sound with greater definition and clarity. The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different."
Alan Parsons worked as an assistant engineer on the album. He later went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Songs
Side one
"Come Together"
"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.
Beatles author Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait". MacDonald has suggested that the "juju eyeballs" has been claimed to refer to Dr John and "spinal cracker" to Ono. The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" – "Here come old flat-top" – was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". A settlement was reached in 1973 in which Lennon promised to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next album.
"Come Together" was later released as a double A-side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the compilation album Love, Martin described the track as "a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers".
"Something"
Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. Cocker's version appeared on his album Joe Cocker! that November.
"Something" was Lennon's favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Though the song was written by Harrison, Frank Sinatra once commented that it was his favourite Lennon–McCartney composition and "the greatest love song ever written". Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.
The song was issued as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969 and topped the US charts for one week, becoming the Beatles' first number-one single that was not a Lennon–McCartney composition. It was also the first Beatles single from an album already released in the UK. Apple's Neil Aspinall filmed a promotional video, which combined separate footage of the Beatles and their wives.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".
The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, saying "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it". Longtime roadie Mal Evans played the anvil sound in the chorus. This track also makes use of Harrison's Moog synthesizer, played by McCartney.
"Oh! Darling"
"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-wop style, like contemporary work by Frank Zappa. It was tried at the Get Back sessions, and a version appears on Anthology 3. It was subsequently re-recorded in April, with overdubs in July and August.
McCartney attempted recording the lead vocal only once a day. He said: "I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week." Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.
"Octopus's Garden"
As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band. It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album. Starr received a full songwriting credit and composed most of the lyrics, although the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison. The pair would later collaborate as writers on Starr's solo singles "It Don't Come Easy", "Back Off Boogaloo" and "Photograph".
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis writes that the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.
The finished song is a combination of two different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred in February 1969, almost immediately after the Get Back/Let It Be sessions with Billy Preston. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the Abbey Road sessions proper in April. The two sections together ran to nearly eight minutes, making it the Beatles' second-longest released track. Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesizer with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track. During the final edit, Lennon told Emerick to "cut it right there" at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, creating a sudden, jarring silence that concludes the first side of Abbey Road (the recording tape would have run out within 20 seconds as it was). The final mixing and editing of the track occurred on 20 August 1969, the last day all four Beatles were together in the studio.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. The basic track was recorded on 7 July 1969. Harrison sang lead and played acoustic guitar, McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass and Starr played the drums. Lennon was still recuperating from his car accident and did not perform on the track. Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.
Though not released as a single, the song attracted attention and critical praise, and was included on the compilation 1967–1970. It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige. The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton said it was "almost impossible not to sing along to". Since digital downloads have become eligible to chart, it reached number 56 in 2010 after the Beatles' back catalogue was released on iTunes. It is also the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.
Harrison recorded a guitar solo for this track that did not appear in the final mix. It was rediscovered in 2012, and footage of Martin and Harrison's son Dhani listening to it in the studio was released on the DVD of Living in the Material World.
"Because"
"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them." The track features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to give nine voices in the final mix. The group considered the vocals to be some of the hardest and most complex they attempted. Harrison played the Moog synthesizer, and Martin played the harpsichord that opens the track.
Medley
The remainder of side two consists of a 16-minute medley of eight short songs (known during the recording sessions as "The Long One"), recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".
The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this, given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney. The track is a suite of varying styles, ranging from a piano-led ballad at the start to arpeggiated guitars at the end. Both Harrison and Lennon provided guitar solos with Lennon playing the solos at the end of the track.
This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam". These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".
"The End" features Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' catalogue (the drums are mixed across two tracks in "true stereo", unlike most releases at that time where they were hard panned left or right). Fifty-four seconds into the song are 18 bars of lead guitar: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, and the sequence is repeated two more times. Harrison suggested the idea of a guitar solo in the track, Lennon decided they should trade solos and McCartney elected to go first. The solos were cut live against the existing backing track in one take. Immediately after Lennon's third and final solo, the piano chords of the final part of the song begin. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This section was taped separately from the first, and required the piano to be re-recorded by McCartney, which was done on 18 August. An alternative version of the song, with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (and Starr's drum solo heard in the background), appears on the Anthology 3 album and the 2012 digital-only compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed by George Martin not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.
"Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam", as a result of being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although the song was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album.
Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue.
Unreleased material
Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe". The latter was re-recorded by the Beatles in April 1969 and issued as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" the following month. All three of these Harrison demos were later featured on Anthology 3.
During the sessions for the medley, McCartney recorded "Come and Get It", playing all the instruments. It was assumed to be a demo recording for another artist but McCartney later said that he originally intended to put it on Abbey Road. It was instead covered by Badfinger, while McCartney's original recording appeared on Anthology 3.
The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda, and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session, have appeared on bootlegs.
Cover photo
Apple Records creative director Kosh designed the album cover. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world". The front cover was a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing based on ideas that McCartney sketched and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo while he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which would be used on the album sleeve.
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car. In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.
Release
In mid-1969, Lennon formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey". While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August. On 20 September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) he was leaving the group, (or in his words, he wanted a divorce) six days before Abbey Road was released. Apple released "Something" backed with "Come Together" in the US on 6 October 1969. Release of the single in the UK followed on 31 October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's "Cold Turkey" the same month.
The Beatles did little promotion of Abbey Road directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970. By this time, the Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number one, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. Altogether, it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart. Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.
Critical reception
Contemporary
Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Retrospective
Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".
AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Peppers "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
Abbey Road received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. It was voted number 8 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album. In 2020, the magazine ranked the album at number 5 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Beatles record on the list; a previous version of the list from 2012 had ranked it at number 14. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Legacy
Abbey Road crossing and "Paul is dead"
The image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an imposter, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Roads commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?"
Cover versions and influence
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety. One month after Abbey Roads release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. Later in 1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location in Memphis of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
While matching albums such as Sgt. Pepper in terms of popularity, Abbey Road failed to repeat the Beatles' earlier achievements in galvanising their rivals to imitate them. In author Peter Doggett's description, "Too contrived for the rock underground to copy, too complex for the bubblegum pop brigade to copy, the album influenced no one – except [Paul McCartney]", who spent years trying to emulate its scope in his solo career. Writing for Classic Rock in 2014, Jon Anderson of the progressive rock band Yes said his group were constantly influenced by the Beatles from Revolver onwards, but it was the feeling that side two was "one complete idea" that inspired him to create long-form pieces of music.
Several artists have covered some or all of the side-two medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), The String Cheese Incident, Transatlantic and Tenacious D (who performed the medley with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell). Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011. It began with a "Come Together" opener at Boston on 4 March and ended with the entire medley in New York City on 15 March, including "Her Majesty" as an encore.
Continued sales and reissues
In June 1970, Allen Klein reported that Abbey Road was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US with sales of about five million. By 1992, Abbey Road had sold nine million copies. The album became the ninth-most downloaded on the iTunes Store a week after it was released there on 16 November 2010. A CNN report stated it was the best-selling vinyl album of 2011. It is the first album from the 1960s to sell over five million albums since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In the US, the album had sold 7,177,797 copies by the end of the 1970s. , the album had sold over 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the band's best-selling albums. In October 2019, Abbey Road re-entered the UK charts, again hitting number one.
Abbey Road has remained in print since its first release in 1969. The original album was released on 26 September in the UK and 1 October in the US on Apple Records. It was reissued as a limited edition picture disc on vinyl in the US by Capitol on 27 December 1978, while a CD reissue of the album was released in 1987, with a remastered version appearing in 2009. The remaster included additional photographs with additional liner notes and the first, limited edition, run also included a short documentary about the making of the album.
In 2001, Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The album continues to be reissued on vinyl. It was included as part of the Beatles' Collector's Crate series in September 2009 and saw a remastered LP release on 180-gram vinyl in 2012.
A super deluxe version of the album, which featured new mixes by Giles Martin, was released in September 2019 to celebrate the original album's 50th anniversary.
As of October 2019, Abbey Road has sold 2,240,608 pure sales in United Kingdom and overall all consumed sales stand at 2,327,230 units. Post 1994 sales stand at 827,329.
Track listing
Notes
"Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track after "The End" and 14 seconds of silence. Later releases of the album included the song on the track listing, except the vinyl editions.
Some cassette tape versions in the UK and US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped to even out the playing time of each side.
Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn, Ian MacDonald, Barry Miles, Kevin Howlett, and Geoff Emerick.
The Beatles
John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; percussion
Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; bass, rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; sound effects; wind chimes, handclaps and percussion
George Harrison – harmony and background vocals; lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars; bass on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh Darling" and "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight"; harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and percussion; lead vocals (on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun")
Ringo Starr – drums and percussion; background vocals; lead vocals (on "Octopus's Garden")
Additional musicians
George Martin – harpsichord, organ, percussion
Billy Preston – Hammond organ (on "Something" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)")
Mal Evans – anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
Production
"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
"Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney)
Produced by George Martin (with the Beatles)
Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald
Assistant engineering by Alan Parsons
Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with the Beatles)
Moog programming by Mike Vickers
Charts
Original release
1987 reissue
2009 reissue
2019 reissue
Certifications
Release history
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Beatles comments on each song
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road – A track-by-track walkthrough
Live webcam at the Abbey Road zebra crossing
The Beatles y la foto de la portada de Abbey Road
1969 albums
The Beatles albums
Apple Records albums
Albums produced by George Martin
Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios
Albums recorded at Trident Studios
Albums arranged by George Martin
Albums conducted by George Martin
Albums produced by Chris Thomas (record producer)
Albums produced by George Harrison
Albums produced by John Lennon
Albums produced by Paul McCartney
Albums produced by Ringo Starr
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical | true | [
"Majesty Cruise Line was a Norwegian cruise line that was founded in 1992 and merged into Norwegian Cruise Line in 1997. Majesty was created by Dolphin Cruise Line as a more upmarket brand. \n\nMajesty's first ship, the Royal Majesty, was originally ordered by competitor Birka Line for 24-hour cruise operations out of Stockholm. Following the bankruptcy of shipbuilder Wärtsilä, the contract was resold to Majesty. She initially worked three- and four-night cruises out of Florida, but in 1995 opened a new summer Boston-Bermuda route, terminating at St George's rather than the usual Hamilton in Bermuda. Royal Majesty returned to Florida in the winter. In June 1995, she ran aground on Rose and Crown shoal of Nantucket Island, due to a combination of faulty GPS and inadequate watch being maintained. Royal Majesty was 17 miles off course and was situated for 24 hours before tugs towed her off. See {LD} THIS WAS ADDED today, but I am afraid I still make editing mistakes. The citation of to the article by Dekker is below. \n\nIn 1997, a second ship titled Crown Majesty was added (previously Crown Dynasty). For the 1997 season, she continued the same cruise operations planned for Crown Dynasty, but at the end of that season both ships passed to Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL). Royal Majesty was sold to NCL and was renamed Norwegian Majesty. Crown Majesty also had her charter transferred to NCL.\n\nReferences \n\nDefunct shipping companies of Norway\nCompanies with year of establishment missing\nDefunct cruise lines",
"MV Ocean Majesty is a cruise ship, originally built in 1966 as the ferry Juan March.\nThe ship is now registered in the International Shipping Register of Madeira (MAR), Portugal.\n\nHistory \nOcean Majesty was launched as Juan March for the Madrid based ferry operator Trasmediterránea. She was the first of two near identical Albatros-class sisters, the other being the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. During her service with her original owners Juan March was mainly used to ferry passengers from Spain to the Balearic Islands. In 1985 Juan March was sold to the Sol Mediterranean and became Sol Christina. She was not operated long by these owners, and was sold to become the Kyros Star of Opale Lines. She was then sold to Majestic International Cruises, who rebuilt her from her original ferry-like form into a cruise ship, and she received her current name Ocean Majesty. Majestic International operated her for several years, until they chartered Ocean Majesty to Epirotiki in 1994, the latter company renamed her Homeric. Homeric operated for a year until her charter expired, and she was subsequently returned to Majestic International and named Ocean Majesty once again. Majestic International has chartered her to many different companies since 1995, most frequently to the British vacation company Page & Moy. Since 2013 she has been operated by German cruise company Hansa Touristik between May and October. Since 2021 is laid up at Chalkis Shipyard, Greece.\n\nThe future \nOcean Majesty fulfils SOLAS 2010 in her current construction.\n\nReferences\n\n1965 ships\nCruise ships of Portugal\nPassenger ships of Spain\nCruise ships of the United Kingdom"
] |
[
"Abbey Road",
"\"Her Majesty\"",
"Is \"Her Majesty\" the name of a Beatles' album?",
"recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road.",
"Did the rest of the Beatles' like \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.",
"What was the effect that the Beatles' liked?",
"cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including \"Her Majesty\".",
"How was \"Her Majesty\" received by the public?",
"I don't know.",
"Did any other musicians besides the Beatles contribute to \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The second engineer, John Kurlander,",
"What year was \"Her Majesty\" created?",
"Her Majesty\" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July"
] | C_8105eda42e114746b1837acf728441f2_0 | Was the creation of "Her Majesty" influenced by any other songs? | 7 | Besides McCartney's creativity, was the creation of "Her Majesty" influenced by any other songs | Abbey Road | "Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". This is the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album. Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue. CANNOTANSWER | Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". | Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Named after Abbey Road, London, the location of EMI Studios, the cover features the group walking across the street's zebra crossing, an image that became one of the most famous and imitated in popular music. The album's initially mixed reviews were contrasted by its immediate commercial success, topping record charts in the UK and US. The single "Something" / "Come Together" was released in October and topped the US charts.
The album incorporates genres such as blues, rock and pop, and makes prominent use of Moog synthesizer, sounds filtered through a Leslie speaker, and tom-tom drums. It is the Beatles' only album recorded exclusively through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, which afforded a clearer and brighter sound than the group's previous records. Side two contains a medley of shorter song fragments. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" backed with "Old Brown Shoe".
Producer George Martin returned on the condition that the Beatles adhere to the discipline of their earlier records. They found the album's recording more enjoyable than the preceding Get Back sessions, but personal and business issues still affected the working environment. Production lasted from February to August 1969, and the closing track "The End" marked the final occasion that all four members recorded together. John Lennon privately left the group six days before the album's release; Paul McCartney publicly declared the band's break-up the following April.
Upon release, detractors found Abbey Road to be inauthentic and bemoaned the production's artificial effects. Since then, many critics have hailed the album as the Beatles' finest; in particular, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are considered among the best songs George Harrison wrote for the group. The album has also been ranked as one of the Beatles' best-selling, including a multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. Shortly after its release, the cover photograph fuelled rumours of McCartney's purported death. EMI Studios was also renamed Abbey Road Studios in honour of the album. A deluxe version of the album was released in 2019. In 2020, it was ranked fifth in Rolling Stones list of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
After the tense and unpleasant recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
Production
Recording history
The first sessions for Abbey Road began on 22 February 1969, only three weeks after the Get Back sessions, in Trident Studios. There, the group recorded a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston accompanying them on Hammond organ. No further group recording occurred until April because of Ringo Starr's commitments on the film The Magic Christian. After a small amount of work that month and a session for "You Never Give Me Your Money" on 6 May, the group took an eight-week break before recommencing on 2 July. Recording continued through July and August, and the last backing track, for "Because", was taped on 1 August. Overdubs continued through the month, with the final sequencing of the album coming together on 20 August the last time all four Beatles were present in a studio together.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again". Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions. Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension in the group. According to Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had become a permanent presence at Beatles' recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley. Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs", and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
Technical aspects
Abbey Road was recorded on eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines rather than the four-track machines that were used for earlier Beatles albums such as Sgt Pepper, and was the first Beatles album not to be issued in mono. The album makes prominent use of guitar played through a Leslie speaker, and of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog is not merely used as a background effect but sometimes plays a central role, as in "Because", where it is used for the middle eight. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The synthesizer was introduced to the band by Harrison, who acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound. Starr made more prominent use of the tom-toms on Abbey Road, later saying the album was "tom-tom madness ... I went nuts on the toms."
Abbey Road was also the first and only Beatles album to be entirely recorded through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, the TG12345 Mk I, as opposed to earlier thermionic valve-based REDD desks. The TG console also allowed better support for eight-track recording, facilitating the Beatles' considerable use of overdubbing. Emerick recalls that the TG desk used to record the album had individual limiters and compressors on each audio channel and noted that the overall sound was "softer" than the earlier valve desks. In his study of the role of the TG12345 in the Beatles' sound on Abbey Road, music historian Kenneth Womack observes that "the expansive sound palette and mixing capabilities of the TG12345 enabled George Martin and Geoff Emerick to imbue the Beatles' sound with greater definition and clarity. The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different."
Alan Parsons worked as an assistant engineer on the album. He later went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Songs
Side one
"Come Together"
"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.
Beatles author Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait". MacDonald has suggested that the "juju eyeballs" has been claimed to refer to Dr John and "spinal cracker" to Ono. The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" – "Here come old flat-top" – was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". A settlement was reached in 1973 in which Lennon promised to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next album.
"Come Together" was later released as a double A-side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the compilation album Love, Martin described the track as "a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers".
"Something"
Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. Cocker's version appeared on his album Joe Cocker! that November.
"Something" was Lennon's favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Though the song was written by Harrison, Frank Sinatra once commented that it was his favourite Lennon–McCartney composition and "the greatest love song ever written". Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.
The song was issued as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969 and topped the US charts for one week, becoming the Beatles' first number-one single that was not a Lennon–McCartney composition. It was also the first Beatles single from an album already released in the UK. Apple's Neil Aspinall filmed a promotional video, which combined separate footage of the Beatles and their wives.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".
The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, saying "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it". Longtime roadie Mal Evans played the anvil sound in the chorus. This track also makes use of Harrison's Moog synthesizer, played by McCartney.
"Oh! Darling"
"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-wop style, like contemporary work by Frank Zappa. It was tried at the Get Back sessions, and a version appears on Anthology 3. It was subsequently re-recorded in April, with overdubs in July and August.
McCartney attempted recording the lead vocal only once a day. He said: "I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week." Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.
"Octopus's Garden"
As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band. It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album. Starr received a full songwriting credit and composed most of the lyrics, although the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison. The pair would later collaborate as writers on Starr's solo singles "It Don't Come Easy", "Back Off Boogaloo" and "Photograph".
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis writes that the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.
The finished song is a combination of two different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred in February 1969, almost immediately after the Get Back/Let It Be sessions with Billy Preston. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the Abbey Road sessions proper in April. The two sections together ran to nearly eight minutes, making it the Beatles' second-longest released track. Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesizer with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track. During the final edit, Lennon told Emerick to "cut it right there" at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, creating a sudden, jarring silence that concludes the first side of Abbey Road (the recording tape would have run out within 20 seconds as it was). The final mixing and editing of the track occurred on 20 August 1969, the last day all four Beatles were together in the studio.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. The basic track was recorded on 7 July 1969. Harrison sang lead and played acoustic guitar, McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass and Starr played the drums. Lennon was still recuperating from his car accident and did not perform on the track. Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.
Though not released as a single, the song attracted attention and critical praise, and was included on the compilation 1967–1970. It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige. The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton said it was "almost impossible not to sing along to". Since digital downloads have become eligible to chart, it reached number 56 in 2010 after the Beatles' back catalogue was released on iTunes. It is also the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.
Harrison recorded a guitar solo for this track that did not appear in the final mix. It was rediscovered in 2012, and footage of Martin and Harrison's son Dhani listening to it in the studio was released on the DVD of Living in the Material World.
"Because"
"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them." The track features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to give nine voices in the final mix. The group considered the vocals to be some of the hardest and most complex they attempted. Harrison played the Moog synthesizer, and Martin played the harpsichord that opens the track.
Medley
The remainder of side two consists of a 16-minute medley of eight short songs (known during the recording sessions as "The Long One"), recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".
The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this, given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney. The track is a suite of varying styles, ranging from a piano-led ballad at the start to arpeggiated guitars at the end. Both Harrison and Lennon provided guitar solos with Lennon playing the solos at the end of the track.
This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam". These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".
"The End" features Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' catalogue (the drums are mixed across two tracks in "true stereo", unlike most releases at that time where they were hard panned left or right). Fifty-four seconds into the song are 18 bars of lead guitar: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, and the sequence is repeated two more times. Harrison suggested the idea of a guitar solo in the track, Lennon decided they should trade solos and McCartney elected to go first. The solos were cut live against the existing backing track in one take. Immediately after Lennon's third and final solo, the piano chords of the final part of the song begin. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This section was taped separately from the first, and required the piano to be re-recorded by McCartney, which was done on 18 August. An alternative version of the song, with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (and Starr's drum solo heard in the background), appears on the Anthology 3 album and the 2012 digital-only compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed by George Martin not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.
"Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam", as a result of being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although the song was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album.
Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue.
Unreleased material
Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe". The latter was re-recorded by the Beatles in April 1969 and issued as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" the following month. All three of these Harrison demos were later featured on Anthology 3.
During the sessions for the medley, McCartney recorded "Come and Get It", playing all the instruments. It was assumed to be a demo recording for another artist but McCartney later said that he originally intended to put it on Abbey Road. It was instead covered by Badfinger, while McCartney's original recording appeared on Anthology 3.
The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda, and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session, have appeared on bootlegs.
Cover photo
Apple Records creative director Kosh designed the album cover. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world". The front cover was a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing based on ideas that McCartney sketched and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo while he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which would be used on the album sleeve.
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car. In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.
Release
In mid-1969, Lennon formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey". While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August. On 20 September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) he was leaving the group, (or in his words, he wanted a divorce) six days before Abbey Road was released. Apple released "Something" backed with "Come Together" in the US on 6 October 1969. Release of the single in the UK followed on 31 October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's "Cold Turkey" the same month.
The Beatles did little promotion of Abbey Road directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970. By this time, the Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number one, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. Altogether, it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart. Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.
Critical reception
Contemporary
Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Retrospective
Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".
AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Peppers "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
Abbey Road received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. It was voted number 8 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album. In 2020, the magazine ranked the album at number 5 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Beatles record on the list; a previous version of the list from 2012 had ranked it at number 14. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Legacy
Abbey Road crossing and "Paul is dead"
The image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an imposter, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Roads commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?"
Cover versions and influence
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety. One month after Abbey Roads release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. Later in 1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location in Memphis of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
While matching albums such as Sgt. Pepper in terms of popularity, Abbey Road failed to repeat the Beatles' earlier achievements in galvanising their rivals to imitate them. In author Peter Doggett's description, "Too contrived for the rock underground to copy, too complex for the bubblegum pop brigade to copy, the album influenced no one – except [Paul McCartney]", who spent years trying to emulate its scope in his solo career. Writing for Classic Rock in 2014, Jon Anderson of the progressive rock band Yes said his group were constantly influenced by the Beatles from Revolver onwards, but it was the feeling that side two was "one complete idea" that inspired him to create long-form pieces of music.
Several artists have covered some or all of the side-two medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), The String Cheese Incident, Transatlantic and Tenacious D (who performed the medley with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell). Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011. It began with a "Come Together" opener at Boston on 4 March and ended with the entire medley in New York City on 15 March, including "Her Majesty" as an encore.
Continued sales and reissues
In June 1970, Allen Klein reported that Abbey Road was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US with sales of about five million. By 1992, Abbey Road had sold nine million copies. The album became the ninth-most downloaded on the iTunes Store a week after it was released there on 16 November 2010. A CNN report stated it was the best-selling vinyl album of 2011. It is the first album from the 1960s to sell over five million albums since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In the US, the album had sold 7,177,797 copies by the end of the 1970s. , the album had sold over 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the band's best-selling albums. In October 2019, Abbey Road re-entered the UK charts, again hitting number one.
Abbey Road has remained in print since its first release in 1969. The original album was released on 26 September in the UK and 1 October in the US on Apple Records. It was reissued as a limited edition picture disc on vinyl in the US by Capitol on 27 December 1978, while a CD reissue of the album was released in 1987, with a remastered version appearing in 2009. The remaster included additional photographs with additional liner notes and the first, limited edition, run also included a short documentary about the making of the album.
In 2001, Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The album continues to be reissued on vinyl. It was included as part of the Beatles' Collector's Crate series in September 2009 and saw a remastered LP release on 180-gram vinyl in 2012.
A super deluxe version of the album, which featured new mixes by Giles Martin, was released in September 2019 to celebrate the original album's 50th anniversary.
As of October 2019, Abbey Road has sold 2,240,608 pure sales in United Kingdom and overall all consumed sales stand at 2,327,230 units. Post 1994 sales stand at 827,329.
Track listing
Notes
"Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track after "The End" and 14 seconds of silence. Later releases of the album included the song on the track listing, except the vinyl editions.
Some cassette tape versions in the UK and US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped to even out the playing time of each side.
Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn, Ian MacDonald, Barry Miles, Kevin Howlett, and Geoff Emerick.
The Beatles
John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; percussion
Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; bass, rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; sound effects; wind chimes, handclaps and percussion
George Harrison – harmony and background vocals; lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars; bass on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh Darling" and "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight"; harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and percussion; lead vocals (on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun")
Ringo Starr – drums and percussion; background vocals; lead vocals (on "Octopus's Garden")
Additional musicians
George Martin – harpsichord, organ, percussion
Billy Preston – Hammond organ (on "Something" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)")
Mal Evans – anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
Production
"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
"Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney)
Produced by George Martin (with the Beatles)
Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald
Assistant engineering by Alan Parsons
Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with the Beatles)
Moog programming by Mike Vickers
Charts
Original release
1987 reissue
2009 reissue
2019 reissue
Certifications
Release history
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Beatles comments on each song
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road – A track-by-track walkthrough
Live webcam at the Abbey Road zebra crossing
The Beatles y la foto de la portada de Abbey Road
1969 albums
The Beatles albums
Apple Records albums
Albums produced by George Martin
Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios
Albums recorded at Trident Studios
Albums arranged by George Martin
Albums conducted by George Martin
Albums produced by Chris Thomas (record producer)
Albums produced by George Harrison
Albums produced by John Lennon
Albums produced by Paul McCartney
Albums produced by Ringo Starr
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical | false | [
"Choral Songs in honour of Her Majesty Queen Victoria is a collection of 13 choral songs by 13 British composers issued on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Queen Victoria in 1899.\n\nIn 1897-1898 the Master of the Queen's Music Sir Walter Parratt proposed a volume of choral songs modelled on The Triumphs of Oriana (1601) as part of the planned 80th birthday celebrations. He recruited 13 British composers, and in 1899 a limited edition of only 100 copies was produced entitled Choral Songs in honour of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. \n\nThe actual title on the front of the book is \"Choral Songs by Various Writers & Composers in Honour of Her Majesty Queen Victoria\".\n\nContents\n\nRecordings\n Choral Songs in honour of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Spiritus Chamber Choir dir. Aidan Oliver Toccata Classics 2008\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\nMusic books\n1899 books\nChoral music\nCultural depictions of Queen Victoria\n1899 in the United Kingdom\n1899 compositions",
"\"Her Royal Majesty\" is a song written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King and performed by James Darren. It reached #6 on the U.S. pop chart and #36 on the UK Singles Chart in 1962.\n\nThe song was arranged and produced by Stu Phillips.\n\nThis song is considered a sequel to Darren's previous hit song \"Goodbye Cruel World\" (1961). It's about a sad man, who had lost his love, becoming the king of fools, to her royal majesty. The Music is in the style of a British music Hall number, with a brass and wind section, plus a snare drum rhythm, playing royal coronation music. The song begins with a drum roll, with Darren announcing: \"Ladies and Gentlemen: Presenting her Royal Majesty\".\n\nThe song ranked #80 on Billboard magazine's Top 100 singles of 1962.\n\nOther versions\nLee Dorsey released a version of the song on the 1992 album various artists album Million Dollar Hits.\n\nReferences\n\n1962 songs\n1962 singles\nLee Dorsey songs\nJames Darren songs\nSongs with lyrics by Gerry Goffin\nSongs written by Carole King"
] |
[
"Abbey Road",
"\"Her Majesty\"",
"Is \"Her Majesty\" the name of a Beatles' album?",
"recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road.",
"Did the rest of the Beatles' like \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.",
"What was the effect that the Beatles' liked?",
"cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including \"Her Majesty\".",
"How was \"Her Majesty\" received by the public?",
"I don't know.",
"Did any other musicians besides the Beatles contribute to \"Her Majesty\"?",
"The second engineer, John Kurlander,",
"What year was \"Her Majesty\" created?",
"Her Majesty\" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July",
"Was the creation of \"Her Majesty\" influenced by any other songs?",
"Her Majesty\" opens with the final, crashing chord of \"Mean Mr. Mustard\", while the final note of \"Her Majesty\" remained buried in the mix of \"Polythene Pam\"."
] | C_8105eda42e114746b1837acf728441f2_0 | How much did John Lennon contribute to the song? | 8 | How much did John Lennon contribute to the song "Her Majesty"? | Abbey Road | "Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam". This is the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album. Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Named after Abbey Road, London, the location of EMI Studios, the cover features the group walking across the street's zebra crossing, an image that became one of the most famous and imitated in popular music. The album's initially mixed reviews were contrasted by its immediate commercial success, topping record charts in the UK and US. The single "Something" / "Come Together" was released in October and topped the US charts.
The album incorporates genres such as blues, rock and pop, and makes prominent use of Moog synthesizer, sounds filtered through a Leslie speaker, and tom-tom drums. It is the Beatles' only album recorded exclusively through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, which afforded a clearer and brighter sound than the group's previous records. Side two contains a medley of shorter song fragments. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" backed with "Old Brown Shoe".
Producer George Martin returned on the condition that the Beatles adhere to the discipline of their earlier records. They found the album's recording more enjoyable than the preceding Get Back sessions, but personal and business issues still affected the working environment. Production lasted from February to August 1969, and the closing track "The End" marked the final occasion that all four members recorded together. John Lennon privately left the group six days before the album's release; Paul McCartney publicly declared the band's break-up the following April.
Upon release, detractors found Abbey Road to be inauthentic and bemoaned the production's artificial effects. Since then, many critics have hailed the album as the Beatles' finest; in particular, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are considered among the best songs George Harrison wrote for the group. The album has also been ranked as one of the Beatles' best-selling, including a multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. Shortly after its release, the cover photograph fuelled rumours of McCartney's purported death. EMI Studios was also renamed Abbey Road Studios in honour of the album. A deluxe version of the album was released in 2019. In 2020, it was ranked fifth in Rolling Stones list of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
After the tense and unpleasant recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
Production
Recording history
The first sessions for Abbey Road began on 22 February 1969, only three weeks after the Get Back sessions, in Trident Studios. There, the group recorded a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston accompanying them on Hammond organ. No further group recording occurred until April because of Ringo Starr's commitments on the film The Magic Christian. After a small amount of work that month and a session for "You Never Give Me Your Money" on 6 May, the group took an eight-week break before recommencing on 2 July. Recording continued through July and August, and the last backing track, for "Because", was taped on 1 August. Overdubs continued through the month, with the final sequencing of the album coming together on 20 August the last time all four Beatles were present in a studio together.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again". Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, sharing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions. Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension in the group. According to Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had become a permanent presence at Beatles' recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley. Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs", and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
Technical aspects
Abbey Road was recorded on eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines rather than the four-track machines that were used for earlier Beatles albums such as Sgt Pepper, and was the first Beatles album not to be issued in mono. The album makes prominent use of guitar played through a Leslie speaker, and of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog is not merely used as a background effect but sometimes plays a central role, as in "Because", where it is used for the middle eight. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The synthesizer was introduced to the band by Harrison, who acquired one in November 1968 and used it to create his album Electronic Sound. Starr made more prominent use of the tom-toms on Abbey Road, later saying the album was "tom-tom madness ... I went nuts on the toms."
Abbey Road was also the first and only Beatles album to be entirely recorded through a solid-state transistor mixing desk, the TG12345 Mk I, as opposed to earlier thermionic valve-based REDD desks. The TG console also allowed better support for eight-track recording, facilitating the Beatles' considerable use of overdubbing. Emerick recalls that the TG desk used to record the album had individual limiters and compressors on each audio channel and noted that the overall sound was "softer" than the earlier valve desks. In his study of the role of the TG12345 in the Beatles' sound on Abbey Road, music historian Kenneth Womack observes that "the expansive sound palette and mixing capabilities of the TG12345 enabled George Martin and Geoff Emerick to imbue the Beatles' sound with greater definition and clarity. The warmth of solid-state recording also afforded their music with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that distinguished Abbey Road from the rest of their corpus, providing listeners with an abiding sense that the Beatles' final long-player was markedly different."
Alan Parsons worked as an assistant engineer on the album. He later went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Songs
Side one
"Come Together"
"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.
Beatles author Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait". MacDonald has suggested that the "juju eyeballs" has been claimed to refer to Dr John and "spinal cracker" to Ono. The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" – "Here come old flat-top" – was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". A settlement was reached in 1973 in which Lennon promised to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next album.
"Come Together" was later released as a double A-side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the compilation album Love, Martin described the track as "a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers".
"Something"
Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the Let It Be sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. Cocker's version appeared on his album Joe Cocker! that November.
"Something" was Lennon's favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Though the song was written by Harrison, Frank Sinatra once commented that it was his favourite Lennon–McCartney composition and "the greatest love song ever written". Lennon contributed piano to the recording and while most of the part was removed, traces of it remain in the final cut, notably on the middle eight, before Harrison's guitar solo.
The song was issued as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969 and topped the US charts for one week, becoming the Beatles' first number-one single that was not a Lennon–McCartney composition. It was also the first Beatles single from an album already released in the UK. Apple's Neil Aspinall filmed a promotional video, which combined separate footage of the Beatles and their wives.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".
The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, saying "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it". Longtime roadie Mal Evans played the anvil sound in the chorus. This track also makes use of Harrison's Moog synthesizer, played by McCartney.
"Oh! Darling"
"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-wop style, like contemporary work by Frank Zappa. It was tried at the Get Back sessions, and a version appears on Anthology 3. It was subsequently re-recorded in April, with overdubs in July and August.
McCartney attempted recording the lead vocal only once a day. He said: "I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week." Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.
"Octopus's Garden"
As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band. It was inspired by a trip with his family to Sardinia aboard Peter Sellers's yacht after Starr left the band for two weeks during the sessions for the White Album. Starr received a full songwriting credit and composed most of the lyrics, although the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison. The pair would later collaborate as writers on Starr's solo singles "It Don't Come Easy", "Back Off Boogaloo" and "Photograph".
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis writes that the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.
The finished song is a combination of two different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred in February 1969, almost immediately after the Get Back/Let It Be sessions with Billy Preston. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the Abbey Road sessions proper in April. The two sections together ran to nearly eight minutes, making it the Beatles' second-longest released track. Lennon used Harrison's Moog synthesizer with a white noise setting to create a "wind" effect that was overdubbed on the second half of the track. During the final edit, Lennon told Emerick to "cut it right there" at 7 minutes and 44 seconds, creating a sudden, jarring silence that concludes the first side of Abbey Road (the recording tape would have run out within 20 seconds as it was). The final mixing and editing of the track occurred on 20 August 1969, the last day all four Beatles were together in the studio.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey during a break from stressful band business meetings. The basic track was recorded on 7 July 1969. Harrison sang lead and played acoustic guitar, McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass and Starr played the drums. Lennon was still recuperating from his car accident and did not perform on the track. Martin provided an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer part on 19 August, immediately before the final mix.
Though not released as a single, the song attracted attention and critical praise, and was included on the compilation 1967–1970. It has been featured several times on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, having been chosen by Sandie Shaw, Jerry Springer, Boris Johnson and Elaine Paige. The Daily Telegraph's Martin Chilton said it was "almost impossible not to sing along to". Since digital downloads have become eligible to chart, it reached number 56 in 2010 after the Beatles' back catalogue was released on iTunes. It is also the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.
Harrison recorded a guitar solo for this track that did not appear in the final mix. It was rediscovered in 2012, and footage of Martin and Harrison's son Dhani listening to it in the studio was released on the DVD of Living in the Material World.
"Because"
"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them." The track features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to give nine voices in the final mix. The group considered the vocals to be some of the hardest and most complex they attempted. Harrison played the Moog synthesizer, and Martin played the harpsichord that opens the track.
Medley
The remainder of side two consists of a 16-minute medley of eight short songs (known during the recording sessions as "The Long One"), recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".
The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this, given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney. The track is a suite of varying styles, ranging from a piano-led ballad at the start to arpeggiated guitars at the end. Both Harrison and Lennon provided guitar solos with Lennon playing the solos at the end of the track.
This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam". These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".
"The End" features Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' catalogue (the drums are mixed across two tracks in "true stereo", unlike most releases at that time where they were hard panned left or right). Fifty-four seconds into the song are 18 bars of lead guitar: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, and the sequence is repeated two more times. Harrison suggested the idea of a guitar solo in the track, Lennon decided they should trade solos and McCartney elected to go first. The solos were cut live against the existing backing track in one take. Immediately after Lennon's third and final solo, the piano chords of the final part of the song begin. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This section was taped separately from the first, and required the piano to be re-recorded by McCartney, which was done on 18 August. An alternative version of the song, with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (and Starr's drum solo heard in the background), appears on the Anthology 3 album and the 2012 digital-only compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was originally included in a rough mix of the side two medley (and officially available in this form for the first time on the album's 3CD Super Deluxe edition box set), appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed by George Martin not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.
"Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard", while the final note remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam", as a result of being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley on 30 July. The medley was subsequently mixed again from scratch although the song was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix on the album.
Original US and UK pressings of Abbey Road do not list "Her Majesty" on the album's cover nor on the record label, making it a hidden track. The song title appears on the inlay card and disc of the 1987 remastered CD reissue, as track 17. It also appears on the sleeve, booklet and disc of the 2009 remastered CD reissue, but not on the cover or record label of the 2012 vinyl reissue.
Unreleased material
Three days after the session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Harrison recorded solo demos of "All Things Must Pass" (which became the title track of his 1970 triple album), "Something" and "Old Brown Shoe". The latter was re-recorded by the Beatles in April 1969 and issued as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" the following month. All three of these Harrison demos were later featured on Anthology 3.
During the sessions for the medley, McCartney recorded "Come and Get It", playing all the instruments. It was assumed to be a demo recording for another artist but McCartney later said that he originally intended to put it on Abbey Road. It was instead covered by Badfinger, while McCartney's original recording appeared on Anthology 3.
The original backing track to "Something", featuring a piano-led coda, and "You Never Give Me Your Money", which leads into a fast rock-n-roll jam session, have appeared on bootlegs.
Cover photo
Apple Records creative director Kosh designed the album cover. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world". The front cover was a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing based on ideas that McCartney sketched and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios on Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo while he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which would be used on the album sleeve.
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car. In 2004, news sources published a claim made by retired American salesman Paul Cole that he was the man standing on the pavement to the right of the picture.
Release
In mid-1969, Lennon formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey". While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August. On 20 September, Lennon told McCartney, Starr, and business manager Allen Klein (Harrison was not present) he was leaving the group, (or in his words, he wanted a divorce) six days before Abbey Road was released. Apple released "Something" backed with "Come Together" in the US on 6 October 1969. Release of the single in the UK followed on 31 October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's "Cold Turkey" the same month.
The Beatles did little promotion of Abbey Road directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970. By this time, the Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number one, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. Altogether, it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart. Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.
Critical reception
Contemporary
Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Retrospective
Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous".
AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Peppers "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether Abbey Road is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
Abbey Road received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. It was voted number 8 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album. In 2020, the magazine ranked the album at number 5 on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest Beatles record on the list; a previous version of the list from 2012 had ranked it at number 14. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Legacy
Abbey Road crossing and "Paul is dead"
The image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an imposter, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Roads commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?"
Cover versions and influence
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety. One month after Abbey Roads release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. Later in 1969 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location in Memphis of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
While matching albums such as Sgt. Pepper in terms of popularity, Abbey Road failed to repeat the Beatles' earlier achievements in galvanising their rivals to imitate them. In author Peter Doggett's description, "Too contrived for the rock underground to copy, too complex for the bubblegum pop brigade to copy, the album influenced no one – except [Paul McCartney]", who spent years trying to emulate its scope in his solo career. Writing for Classic Rock in 2014, Jon Anderson of the progressive rock band Yes said his group were constantly influenced by the Beatles from Revolver onwards, but it was the feeling that side two was "one complete idea" that inspired him to create long-form pieces of music.
Several artists have covered some or all of the side-two medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), The String Cheese Incident, Transatlantic and Tenacious D (who performed the medley with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell). Furthur, a jam band including former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, played the entire Abbey Road album during its Spring Tour 2011. It began with a "Come Together" opener at Boston on 4 March and ended with the entire medley in New York City on 15 March, including "Her Majesty" as an encore.
Continued sales and reissues
In June 1970, Allen Klein reported that Abbey Road was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US with sales of about five million. By 1992, Abbey Road had sold nine million copies. The album became the ninth-most downloaded on the iTunes Store a week after it was released there on 16 November 2010. A CNN report stated it was the best-selling vinyl album of 2011. It is the first album from the 1960s to sell over five million albums since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In the US, the album had sold 7,177,797 copies by the end of the 1970s. , the album had sold over 31 million copies worldwide and is one of the band's best-selling albums. In October 2019, Abbey Road re-entered the UK charts, again hitting number one.
Abbey Road has remained in print since its first release in 1969. The original album was released on 26 September in the UK and 1 October in the US on Apple Records. It was reissued as a limited edition picture disc on vinyl in the US by Capitol on 27 December 1978, while a CD reissue of the album was released in 1987, with a remastered version appearing in 2009. The remaster included additional photographs with additional liner notes and the first, limited edition, run also included a short documentary about the making of the album.
In 2001, Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The album continues to be reissued on vinyl. It was included as part of the Beatles' Collector's Crate series in September 2009 and saw a remastered LP release on 180-gram vinyl in 2012.
A super deluxe version of the album, which featured new mixes by Giles Martin, was released in September 2019 to celebrate the original album's 50th anniversary.
As of October 2019, Abbey Road has sold 2,240,608 pure sales in United Kingdom and overall all consumed sales stand at 2,327,230 units. Post 1994 sales stand at 827,329.
Track listing
Notes
"Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track after "The End" and 14 seconds of silence. Later releases of the album included the song on the track listing, except the vinyl editions.
Some cassette tape versions in the UK and US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped to even out the playing time of each side.
Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn, Ian MacDonald, Barry Miles, Kevin Howlett, and Geoff Emerick.
The Beatles
John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; percussion
Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; bass, rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars; acoustic and electric pianos, Moog synthesizer; sound effects; wind chimes, handclaps and percussion
George Harrison – harmony and background vocals; lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars; bass on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh Darling" and "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight"; harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and percussion; lead vocals (on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun")
Ringo Starr – drums and percussion; background vocals; lead vocals (on "Octopus's Garden")
Additional musicians
George Martin – harpsichord, organ, percussion
Billy Preston – Hammond organ (on "Something" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)")
Mal Evans – anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
Production
"Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
"Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney)
Produced by George Martin (with the Beatles)
Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald
Assistant engineering by Alan Parsons
Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with the Beatles)
Moog programming by Mike Vickers
Charts
Original release
1987 reissue
2009 reissue
2019 reissue
Certifications
Release history
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Beatles comments on each song
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road – A track-by-track walkthrough
Live webcam at the Abbey Road zebra crossing
The Beatles y la foto de la portada de Abbey Road
1969 albums
The Beatles albums
Apple Records albums
Albums produced by George Martin
Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios
Albums recorded at Trident Studios
Albums arranged by George Martin
Albums conducted by George Martin
Albums produced by Chris Thomas (record producer)
Albums produced by George Harrison
Albums produced by John Lennon
Albums produced by Paul McCartney
Albums produced by Ringo Starr
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical | false | [
"\"How?\" is a song from John Lennon's second solo album Imagine, released in 1971. Lennon recorded \"How?\" on 25 May 1971 at Ascot Sound Studios, during the sessions for his Imagine album. String overdubs took place on 4 July 1971 at the Record Plant, in New York City.\n\nRobert Christgau wrote enigmatically that “the psychotherapeutically lugubrious ‘How?’ is a question mark.”\n\nPersonnel\nPersonnel per the Beatles Bible.\n\nJohn Lennon – vocals, piano\nNicky Hopkins – piano\nKlaus Voormann – bass guitar\nJohn Barham – vibraphone\nAndy Davis – acoustic guitar\nAlan White – drums\nThe Flux Fiddlers – strings\n\nCovers\n The song was covered by the band Stereophonics as a B-side to the song \"Handbags and Gladrags\".\n The song was covered by English singer Julie Covington on her 1978 eponymous album.\n Ozzy Osbourne released a cover of this song in support of Amnesty International during the same week John Lennon would have become 70. He recorded a music video on the streets of New York to promote the single. Osbourne has previously stated that Lennon's song \"Imagine\" (from the same album as \"How?\") was an inspiration for Osbourne's own song \"Dreamer\".\n The song was covered by American singer/songwriter Amy LaVere on her 2014 record Runaway's Diary.\n\nReferences\n\nJohn Lennon songs\n1971 songs\nSongs written by John Lennon\nSong recordings produced by John Lennon\nSong recordings produced by Phil Spector\nSong recordings produced by Yoko Ono\n2010 singles",
"\"Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)\" is a song written by John Lennon released on his 1973 album Mind Games. The song is included on the 1990 box set Lennon.\n\nLyrics and music\nThe song's lyrics have Lennon apologising to wife Yoko Ono. Aisumasen is a slightly corrupted version of the formal term ai sumimasen, which means \"I'm sorry\" in Japanese. The line \"It's hard enough I know to feel your own pain\" reprises a theme found in a line from Lennon's earlier song \"I Found Out.\" After the lyrics run out, a guitar solo is played. Authors Ken Bielen and Ben Urish interpret this solo as a continuation of the plea for forgiveness. The solo ends abruptly, which Bielen and Urish suggest that this abrupt ending symbolically means that Lennon's plea has been rejected. And in fact, by the time \"Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)\" was released, Lennon and Ono had separated. Author John Blaney agrees that the song implies that Lennon will not get the forgiveness and comfort he needs from Ono, and further states that the song reveals just how much he needed her.\n\n\"Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)\" has some similarities to the Beatles song \"I Want You (She's So Heavy),\" which was also written by Lennon and inspired by Ono. Bielen and Urish claim that \"Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)\" has a similar rhythm to \"a slowed down, semi-acoustic version\" of \"I Want You (She's So Heavy).\" \"I Want You (She's So Heavy)\" also ends abruptly.\n\nLennon had been working on the melody to \"Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)\" since at least 1971. A demo of the song was recorded during sessions for Lennon's Imagine. Originally, the melody belonged to song whose working title was \"Call My Name.\", dating from a demo recorded in December 1971. In \"Call My Name,\" Lennon was offering to comfort someone, but in the final version of the song Lennon is the one asking for forgiveness. In \"Call My Name,\" the melodic line that became \"Aisumasen\" was sung to the words \"I'll ease your pain.\"\n\nReception\nMusic critic Johnny Rogan finds the song to be \"occasionally powerful\" and feels it \"brings some depth\" to the Mind Games album. Keith Spore of The Milwaukee Sentinel called the song \"a lovely ballad\" which serves as a reminder of Lennon's past brilliance. Bielen and Urish consider it to be one of Mind Games strongest songs, although they think it may have been even stronger had Lennon stuck to his original lyrical impulses of \"Call My Name.\" PopMatters feels that the song starts out well, \"like classic Lennon blues,\" but that Lennon \"never finds the conviction to carry the song across the finish line.\"\n\nPersonnel\nThe musicians who performed on the original recording were as follows:\n\nJohn Lennon – vocals, acoustic guitar\nDavid Spinozza – guitar\nPete Kleinow – pedal steel guitar\nKen Ascher – keyboards\nGordon Edwards – bass guitar\nJim Keltner – drums\n\nReferences\n\nJohn Lennon songs\nSongs written by John Lennon\n1973 songs\nSong recordings produced by John Lennon\n1970s ballads\nSongs about Yoko Ono\nRock ballads\nPlastic Ono Band songs"
] |
[
"Duncan Hunter",
"Other legislative actions"
] | C_5b2f3c0a25b34234acd42ed080132a1a_0 | What were some of Hunter's other legislative actions? | 1 | What were some of Duncan Hunter's other legislative actions? | Duncan Hunter | On December 8, 2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375, which would have required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark. Hunter introduced H.R. 552, The Right to Life Act, on February 2, 2005. The purpose of the bill is to "implement equal protection... for the right to life of each born and preborn human person." In the 109th Congress, the legislation collected 101 cosponsors. Hunter states that The Right to Life Act "would legally define "personhood" as the moment of conception and, therefore, guarantee all constitutional rights and protections, including life, to the unborn without utilizing a constitutional amendment." Hearings for H.R. 552 were scheduled for December 12, 2006, but were cancelled right before the House adjourned. On April 28, 2004, Hunter introduced legislation that he said could "turn parents into prosecuting attorneys fighting a wave of obscenity." HR 6390 IH, also called the "Parents Empowerment Act", would allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates material "that is harmful to minors", or specifically, "any pornographic communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other pornographic matter of any kind", if it is distributed in a way that "a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare." In 1994, Hunter legislatively mandated the construction of 14 miles (23 km) of security fencing on the international land border separating San Diego County and Tijuana, Mexico. In 2005, Hunter introduced legislation calling for the construction of a reinforced fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, citing crime statistics as measures of San Diego-Tijuana fence's success. After successfully adding an amendment to a House-passed bill that ultimately stalled in House-Senate negotiations, Hunter's amendment was later incorporated into H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act, introduced by New York Congressman Peter T. King. He has said that if he becomes President, the 754-mile (1,213 km) double layer border fence will be built in less than 12 months. Hunter repeatedly voted against international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). CANNOTANSWER | 2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375, | Duncan Hunter may refer to:
Duncan D. Hunter (born 1976), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (2009–2020)
Duncan L. Hunter (born 1948), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (1981–2009)
See also | false | [
"The Electoral district of Counties of Hunter, Brisbane and Bligh and from 1851, Phillip, Brisbane and Bligh, was an electorate of the partially elected New South Wales Legislative Council, created for the first elections for the Council in 1843. The electoral district included the north western counties of Hunter, Brisbane, Bligh. Polling took place in the towns of Jerrys Plains, nearby Merton, Muswellbrook, Scone, as far north as Murrurundi, Watson's on the Macdonald River, Cassilis and as far west as Montefiores. With the expansion of the Council in 1851 Phillip, the other north west county, was added to the district, replacing Hunter which was combined with the lower Hunter county of Northumberland as Counties of Northumberland and Hunter.\n\nIn 1856 the unicameral Legislative Council was abolished and replaced with an elected Legislative Assembly and an appointed Legislative Council. The district was represented by the Legislative Assembly Phillip, Brisbane and Bligh.\n\nMembers\n\nElection results\n\n1843\n\n1848\n\n1851\n\nReferences\n\nFormer electoral districts of New South Wales Legislative Council\n1843 establishments in Australia\n1851 disestablishments in Australia",
"Joe or Joseph Hunter may refer to:\n\n Joseph Hunter (antiquarian) (1783–1861), English Unitarian Minister and antiquarian, historian of Sheffield and South Yorkshire\n Joe Hunter (cricketer) (1855–1891), English cricketer\n Joseph Hunter (Canadian politician) (1839–1935), member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia for Cariboo\n Joseph Douglas Hunter (1881–1970), Canadian politician in the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia\n Joseph Hunter (British politician) (1875–1935), Scottish politician, Liberal (later National Liberal) Member of Parliament (MP) 1929–1935\n Ivory Joe Hunter (1914–1974), African American songwriter, R&B singer and pianist\n Joe Hunter (musician) (1927–2007), African-American pianist, member of the Funk Brothers\n Joseph Hunter (rugby union) (1899–1984), American rugby union player"
] |
[
"Duncan Hunter",
"Other legislative actions",
"What were some of Hunter's other legislative actions?",
"2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375,"
] | C_5b2f3c0a25b34234acd42ed080132a1a_0 | What is this? | 2 | What is H.R. 6375? | Duncan Hunter | On December 8, 2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375, which would have required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark. Hunter introduced H.R. 552, The Right to Life Act, on February 2, 2005. The purpose of the bill is to "implement equal protection... for the right to life of each born and preborn human person." In the 109th Congress, the legislation collected 101 cosponsors. Hunter states that The Right to Life Act "would legally define "personhood" as the moment of conception and, therefore, guarantee all constitutional rights and protections, including life, to the unborn without utilizing a constitutional amendment." Hearings for H.R. 552 were scheduled for December 12, 2006, but were cancelled right before the House adjourned. On April 28, 2004, Hunter introduced legislation that he said could "turn parents into prosecuting attorneys fighting a wave of obscenity." HR 6390 IH, also called the "Parents Empowerment Act", would allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates material "that is harmful to minors", or specifically, "any pornographic communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other pornographic matter of any kind", if it is distributed in a way that "a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare." In 1994, Hunter legislatively mandated the construction of 14 miles (23 km) of security fencing on the international land border separating San Diego County and Tijuana, Mexico. In 2005, Hunter introduced legislation calling for the construction of a reinforced fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, citing crime statistics as measures of San Diego-Tijuana fence's success. After successfully adding an amendment to a House-passed bill that ultimately stalled in House-Senate negotiations, Hunter's amendment was later incorporated into H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act, introduced by New York Congressman Peter T. King. He has said that if he becomes President, the 754-mile (1,213 km) double layer border fence will be built in less than 12 months. Hunter repeatedly voted against international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). CANNOTANSWER | required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark. | Duncan Hunter may refer to:
Duncan D. Hunter (born 1976), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (2009–2020)
Duncan L. Hunter (born 1948), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (1981–2009)
See also | false | [
"\"This Is What It Feels Like\" is a 2013 song by Armin van Buuren featuring Trevor Guthrie.\n\nThis Is What It Feels Like may also refer to:\n\n This Is What It Feels Like (album), a 2021 studio album by Gracie Abrams\n \"This Is What It Feels Like\", a song by Banks from the 2014 studio album Goddess\n This Is What It Feels Like, a 2019 EP by Clinton Kane\n\nSee also\n This Is What the Truth Feels Like, a 2016 album by Gwen Stefani\n Feels Like (disambiguation)",
"\"What Is This Thing Called Love?\" is a song written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and recorded by American recording artist Alexander O'Neal. It is the second single from the singer's fourth solo album, All True Man (1991). The song's distinctive backing vocals were performed by Lisa Keith. Following the successful chart performances of the All True Man single \"All True Man\", \"What Is This Thing Called Love?\" was released as the album's second single.\n\nRelease\nAlexander O'Neal's 19th hit single and it reached #53 in the UK Singles Chart. In the United States, the single reached #21 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks.\n\nTrack listing\n 12\" Maxi (45 73804) \n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic 12\" Mix)\" - 8:20\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic Radio Mix)\" - 3:37\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (LP Edit)\" - 3:58\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Red Zone Mix)\" - 5:41\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Instrumental Mix)\" - 5:58\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Reprise)\" - 2:13\n\n 7\" Single (656731 7) / Cassette Single (656731 4)\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love?\" - 4:08\n\"Crying Overtime\" - 4:55\n\n CD Single (656731 2)\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Album Version)\" - 6:04\n\"The Lovers (Extended Version)\" - 7:02\n\"If You Were Here Tonight\" - 6:08\n\n CD Single (656731 9) \n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic 12\" Mix)\" - 8:20\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic Radio Mix)\" - 3:37\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Red Zone Mix)\" - 5:41\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Reprise)\" - 2:13\n\n Cassette Single (35T 73810) \n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic Radio Mix)\" - 3:37\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Instrumental Mix)\" - 5:58\n\nPersonnel\nCredits are adapted from the album's liner notes.\n\n Alexander O'Neal - lead vocals \n Jimmy Jam - acoustic piano, keyboards, synthesizer, drum programming, rhythm & vocal arrangements\n Terry Lewis - rhythm & vocal arrangements, backing vocals\n Lee Blaskey - string arrangements\n Susie Allard - strings\n Mynra Rian - strings\n Joanna Shelton - strings\n Carolyn Daws - strings\n Mary Bahr - strings\n Lea Foli - strings\n Julia Persilz - strings\n Hyacinthe Tlucek - strings\n Maricia Peck - strings\n Jeanne Ekhold - strings\n Luara Sewell - strings\n Rudolph Lekhter - strings\n Lisa Keith - backing vocals\n\nCharts\n\nHistory\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love?\" had its bass-line sampled in the 2018 Kanye West and Lil Pump song, \"I Love It\".\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1991 singles\nAlexander O'Neal songs\nSongs written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis\n1991 songs\nSong recordings produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis\nTabu Records singles"
] |
[
"Duncan Hunter",
"Other legislative actions",
"What were some of Hunter's other legislative actions?",
"2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375,",
"What is this?",
"required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark."
] | C_5b2f3c0a25b34234acd42ed080132a1a_0 | What other actions did he initiate? | 3 | Besides H.R. 6375, what other actions did Duncan Hunter initiate? | Duncan Hunter | On December 8, 2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375, which would have required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark. Hunter introduced H.R. 552, The Right to Life Act, on February 2, 2005. The purpose of the bill is to "implement equal protection... for the right to life of each born and preborn human person." In the 109th Congress, the legislation collected 101 cosponsors. Hunter states that The Right to Life Act "would legally define "personhood" as the moment of conception and, therefore, guarantee all constitutional rights and protections, including life, to the unborn without utilizing a constitutional amendment." Hearings for H.R. 552 were scheduled for December 12, 2006, but were cancelled right before the House adjourned. On April 28, 2004, Hunter introduced legislation that he said could "turn parents into prosecuting attorneys fighting a wave of obscenity." HR 6390 IH, also called the "Parents Empowerment Act", would allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates material "that is harmful to minors", or specifically, "any pornographic communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other pornographic matter of any kind", if it is distributed in a way that "a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare." In 1994, Hunter legislatively mandated the construction of 14 miles (23 km) of security fencing on the international land border separating San Diego County and Tijuana, Mexico. In 2005, Hunter introduced legislation calling for the construction of a reinforced fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, citing crime statistics as measures of San Diego-Tijuana fence's success. After successfully adding an amendment to a House-passed bill that ultimately stalled in House-Senate negotiations, Hunter's amendment was later incorporated into H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act, introduced by New York Congressman Peter T. King. He has said that if he becomes President, the 754-mile (1,213 km) double layer border fence will be built in less than 12 months. Hunter repeatedly voted against international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). CANNOTANSWER | H.R. 552, | Duncan Hunter may refer to:
Duncan D. Hunter (born 1976), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (2009–2020)
Duncan L. Hunter (born 1948), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (1981–2009)
See also | false | [
"SOARA (Situation, Objective, Action, Results, Aftermath) is a job interview technique developed by Hagymas Laszlo, Professor of Language at the University of Munich, and Alexander Botos, Chief Curator at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It is similar to the Situation, Task, Action, Result technique. In many interviews, SOARA is used as a structure for clarifying information relating to a recent challenge.\n\nDetails\n\n Situation: The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenge and situation you found yourself in.\n Objective: What did you have to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation.\n Action: What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it and what were the alternatives.\n Results: What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions and did you meet your objectives.\n Aftermath: What did you learn from this experience and have you used this learning since?\n\nJob interview",
"Porter's four corners model is a predictive tool designed by Michael Porter that helps in determining a competitor's course of action. Unlike other predictive models which predominantly rely on a firm's current strategy and capabilities to determine future strategy, Porter's model additionally calls for an understanding of what motivates the competitor. This added dimension of understanding a competitor's internal culture, value system, mindset, and assumptions helps in determining a much more accurate and realistic reading of a competitor's possible reactions in a given situation.\n\nFour corners model\nMotivation – drivers\nThis helps in determining competitor's action by understanding their goals (both strategic and tactical) and their current position vis-à-vis their goals. A wide gap between the two could mean the competitor is highly likely to react to any external threat that comes in its way, whereas a narrower gap is likely to produce a defensive strategy. \nThe question to be answered here is: What is it that drives the competitor? These drivers can be at various levels and dimensions and can provide insights into future goals.\n \nMotivation – management assumptions\nThe perceptions and assumptions the competitor has about itself and its industry would shape strategy. This corner includes determining the competitor's perception of its strengths and weaknesses, organization culture and their beliefs about competitor's goals. If the competitor thinks highly of its competition and has a fair sense of industry forces, it is likely to be ready with plans to counter any threats to its position. On the other hand, a competitor who has a misplaced understanding of industry forces is not very likely to respond to a potential attack.\nThe question to be answered here is: What are competitor's assumption about the industry, the competition and its own capabilities?\n \nActions – strategy\nA competitor's strategy determines how it competes in the market. However, there could be a difference between the company's intended strategy (as stated in the annual report and interviews) and its realized strategy (as is evident in its acquisitions, new product development, etc.). \nIt is therefore important here to determine the competitor's realized strategy and how they are actually performing. If current strategy is yielding satisfactory results, it is safe to assume that the competitor is likely to continue to operate in the same way.\nThe questions to be answered here are: What is the competitor actually doing and how successful is it in implementing its current strategy? \n\nActions – capabilities\nThis looks at a competitor's inherent ability to initiate or respond to external forces. Though it might have the motivation and the drive to initiate a strategic action, its effectiveness is dependent on its capabilities. \nIts strengths will also determine how the competitor is likely to respond to an external threat. An organization with an extensive distribution network is likely to initiate an attack through its channel, whereas a company with strong financials is likely to counter attack through price drops.\nThe questions to be answered here are: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the competitor? Which areas is the competitor strong in?\n\nStrengths\nConsiders implicit aspects of competitive behavior\nFirms are more often than not aware of their rivals and do have a generally good understanding of their strategies and capabilities. However, motivational factors are often overlooked. Sufficiently motivated competitors can often prove to be more competitive than bigger but less motivated rivals. What sets this model apart from others is its insistence on accounting for the \"implicit\" factors such as culture, history, executive, consultants, and board's backgrounds, goals, values and commitments and inclusion of management's deep beliefs and assumptions about what works or does not work in the market. \n\nPredictive in nature\nPorter's four corners model provides a framework that ties competitor's capabilities to their assumptions of the competitive environment and their underlying motivations. Looking at both a firm's capabilities (what the firm can do) and underlying implicit factors (their motivations to follow a course of action) can help predict competitor's actions with a relatively higher level of confidence. The underlying assumption here is that decision makers in firms are essentially human and hence subject to the influences of affective and automatic processes described by neuroscientists. Hence by considering these factors along with a firm's capabilities, this model is a better predictor of competitive behavior.\n\nUse in competitive intelligence and strategy \nDespite its strengths, Porter's four corners model is not widely used in strategy and competitive intelligence. In a 2005 survey by the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals's (SCIP) frequently used analytical tools, Porter's four corners does not even figure in the top ten.\n\nHowever this model can be used in competitive analysis and strategy as follows:\n\nStrategy development and testing: Can be used to determine likely actions by competitors in response to the firm's strategy. This can be used when developing a strategy (such as for a new product launch) or to test this strategy using simulation techniques such as a business war game.\n\n'Early warning: The predictive nature of this tool can also alert firms to possible threats due to competitive action.\n\nPorter's four corners also works well with other analytical models. For instance it complements Porter five forces analysis well. Competitive cluster analysis of industry products in turn complements four corners analysis. Using such models that complement each other can help create a more complete analysis.\n\nSee also\nCompetitive intelligence\nDelta model\nNational Diamond\nSix Forces Model\nValue chain\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading \n\nMichael Porter\nStrategic management\nBusiness planning"
] |
[
"Duncan Hunter",
"Other legislative actions",
"What were some of Hunter's other legislative actions?",
"2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375,",
"What is this?",
"required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark.",
"What other actions did he initiate?",
"H.R. 552,"
] | C_5b2f3c0a25b34234acd42ed080132a1a_0 | What is this? | 4 | What is H.R. 552? | Duncan Hunter | On December 8, 2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375, which would have required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark. Hunter introduced H.R. 552, The Right to Life Act, on February 2, 2005. The purpose of the bill is to "implement equal protection... for the right to life of each born and preborn human person." In the 109th Congress, the legislation collected 101 cosponsors. Hunter states that The Right to Life Act "would legally define "personhood" as the moment of conception and, therefore, guarantee all constitutional rights and protections, including life, to the unborn without utilizing a constitutional amendment." Hearings for H.R. 552 were scheduled for December 12, 2006, but were cancelled right before the House adjourned. On April 28, 2004, Hunter introduced legislation that he said could "turn parents into prosecuting attorneys fighting a wave of obscenity." HR 6390 IH, also called the "Parents Empowerment Act", would allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates material "that is harmful to minors", or specifically, "any pornographic communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other pornographic matter of any kind", if it is distributed in a way that "a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare." In 1994, Hunter legislatively mandated the construction of 14 miles (23 km) of security fencing on the international land border separating San Diego County and Tijuana, Mexico. In 2005, Hunter introduced legislation calling for the construction of a reinforced fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, citing crime statistics as measures of San Diego-Tijuana fence's success. After successfully adding an amendment to a House-passed bill that ultimately stalled in House-Senate negotiations, Hunter's amendment was later incorporated into H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act, introduced by New York Congressman Peter T. King. He has said that if he becomes President, the 754-mile (1,213 km) double layer border fence will be built in less than 12 months. Hunter repeatedly voted against international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). CANNOTANSWER | required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark. | Duncan Hunter may refer to:
Duncan D. Hunter (born 1976), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (2009–2020)
Duncan L. Hunter (born 1948), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (1981–2009)
See also | false | [
"\"This Is What It Feels Like\" is a 2013 song by Armin van Buuren featuring Trevor Guthrie.\n\nThis Is What It Feels Like may also refer to:\n\n This Is What It Feels Like (album), a 2021 studio album by Gracie Abrams\n \"This Is What It Feels Like\", a song by Banks from the 2014 studio album Goddess\n This Is What It Feels Like, a 2019 EP by Clinton Kane\n\nSee also\n This Is What the Truth Feels Like, a 2016 album by Gwen Stefani\n Feels Like (disambiguation)",
"\"What Is This Thing Called Love?\" is a song written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and recorded by American recording artist Alexander O'Neal. It is the second single from the singer's fourth solo album, All True Man (1991). The song's distinctive backing vocals were performed by Lisa Keith. Following the successful chart performances of the All True Man single \"All True Man\", \"What Is This Thing Called Love?\" was released as the album's second single.\n\nRelease\nAlexander O'Neal's 19th hit single and it reached #53 in the UK Singles Chart. In the United States, the single reached #21 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks.\n\nTrack listing\n 12\" Maxi (45 73804) \n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic 12\" Mix)\" - 8:20\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic Radio Mix)\" - 3:37\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (LP Edit)\" - 3:58\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Red Zone Mix)\" - 5:41\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Instrumental Mix)\" - 5:58\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Reprise)\" - 2:13\n\n 7\" Single (656731 7) / Cassette Single (656731 4)\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love?\" - 4:08\n\"Crying Overtime\" - 4:55\n\n CD Single (656731 2)\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Album Version)\" - 6:04\n\"The Lovers (Extended Version)\" - 7:02\n\"If You Were Here Tonight\" - 6:08\n\n CD Single (656731 9) \n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic 12\" Mix)\" - 8:20\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic Radio Mix)\" - 3:37\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Red Zone Mix)\" - 5:41\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Reprise)\" - 2:13\n\n Cassette Single (35T 73810) \n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Classic Radio Mix)\" - 3:37\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dee Instrumental Mix)\" - 5:58\n\nPersonnel\nCredits are adapted from the album's liner notes.\n\n Alexander O'Neal - lead vocals \n Jimmy Jam - acoustic piano, keyboards, synthesizer, drum programming, rhythm & vocal arrangements\n Terry Lewis - rhythm & vocal arrangements, backing vocals\n Lee Blaskey - string arrangements\n Susie Allard - strings\n Mynra Rian - strings\n Joanna Shelton - strings\n Carolyn Daws - strings\n Mary Bahr - strings\n Lea Foli - strings\n Julia Persilz - strings\n Hyacinthe Tlucek - strings\n Maricia Peck - strings\n Jeanne Ekhold - strings\n Luara Sewell - strings\n Rudolph Lekhter - strings\n Lisa Keith - backing vocals\n\nCharts\n\nHistory\n\"What Is This Thing Called Love?\" had its bass-line sampled in the 2018 Kanye West and Lil Pump song, \"I Love It\".\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1991 singles\nAlexander O'Neal songs\nSongs written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis\n1991 songs\nSong recordings produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis\nTabu Records singles"
] |
[
"Duncan Hunter",
"Other legislative actions",
"What were some of Hunter's other legislative actions?",
"2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375,",
"What is this?",
"required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark.",
"What other actions did he initiate?",
"H.R. 552,",
"What is this?",
"The Right to Life Act,"
] | C_5b2f3c0a25b34234acd42ed080132a1a_0 | What does this mean? | 5 | What does The Right to Life Act mean? | Duncan Hunter | On December 8, 2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375, which would have required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark. Hunter introduced H.R. 552, The Right to Life Act, on February 2, 2005. The purpose of the bill is to "implement equal protection... for the right to life of each born and preborn human person." In the 109th Congress, the legislation collected 101 cosponsors. Hunter states that The Right to Life Act "would legally define "personhood" as the moment of conception and, therefore, guarantee all constitutional rights and protections, including life, to the unborn without utilizing a constitutional amendment." Hearings for H.R. 552 were scheduled for December 12, 2006, but were cancelled right before the House adjourned. On April 28, 2004, Hunter introduced legislation that he said could "turn parents into prosecuting attorneys fighting a wave of obscenity." HR 6390 IH, also called the "Parents Empowerment Act", would allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates material "that is harmful to minors", or specifically, "any pornographic communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other pornographic matter of any kind", if it is distributed in a way that "a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare." In 1994, Hunter legislatively mandated the construction of 14 miles (23 km) of security fencing on the international land border separating San Diego County and Tijuana, Mexico. In 2005, Hunter introduced legislation calling for the construction of a reinforced fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, citing crime statistics as measures of San Diego-Tijuana fence's success. After successfully adding an amendment to a House-passed bill that ultimately stalled in House-Senate negotiations, Hunter's amendment was later incorporated into H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act, introduced by New York Congressman Peter T. King. He has said that if he becomes President, the 754-mile (1,213 km) double layer border fence will be built in less than 12 months. Hunter repeatedly voted against international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). CANNOTANSWER | The purpose of the bill is to "implement equal protection... for the right to life of each born and preborn human person. | Duncan Hunter may refer to:
Duncan D. Hunter (born 1976), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (2009–2020)
Duncan L. Hunter (born 1948), member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (1981–2009)
See also | false | [
"What Does Anything Mean? Basically is the second studio album by English post-punk band the Chameleons. It was recorded in January 1985 and released 20 May 1985 by record label Statik.\n\nOne single was released from the album: \"Singing Rule Britannia (While the Walls Close In)\".\n\nRecording \nWhat Does Anything Mean? Basically was recorded in January 1985 at Highland Studios in Inverness, Scotland.\n\nRelease \nThe album's sole single, \"Singing Rule Britannia (While the Walls Close In)\", was released on 1 August 1985. This song used uncredited Lennon-McCartney lyrics, with the final passage of the song quoting key lyrics of the Beatles song \"She Said, She Said\".\n\nWhat Does Anything Mean? Basically was released 20 May 1985 on record label Statik.\n\nReception \n\nWhat Does Anything Mean? Basically has been generally well received by critics.\n\nIn his retrospective review, Ned Raggett of AllMusic called it \"[a] rarity of sophomore albums, something that at once made the band all the more unique in its sound while avoiding a repetition of earlier work. [...] an astounding record.\" Trouser Press called it \"even better\" than Script of the Bridge, \"with much stronger production underscoring both the band's direct power and the ghostly atmospherics of its icy church keyboards and delay-ridden guitars\".\n\nChris Jenkins, in the book The Rough Guide to Rock, however, called it \"as half-baked as its title\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel \n The Chameleons\n\n Mark Burgess – vocals, bass guitar, strings, production\n Dave Fielding – guitar, ARP String Ensemble, production\n Reg Smithies – guitar, acoustic guitar, album cover illustration, production\n John Lever – drums, production\n\n Technical\n\n Colin Richardson – production\n Ian Caple – engineering\n Martin Kay – sleeve design\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n1985 albums\nThe Chameleons albums\nAlbums produced by Colin Richardson",
"The Unforgiving Sounds of Maow is a 1996 album by Vancouver punk band Maow. It was the band's only full-length album, 21 minutes in length.\n\nThe album is notable primarily for being Neko Case's debut as a lead vocalist, although her loud, punk-rock singing on this project is not typical of her later style. On the album, Case shares lead vocal duties with bandmates Tobey Black and Corrina Hammond. \n\nMany of the songs are about partying. The album's best-known song, \"Ms. Lefevre\", celebrates the character \"Renee Lefebvre\" from Woody Allen's movie What's New, Pussycat? A music video was created to publicize the song.\n\nThe album also includes covers of songs by Wanda Jackson (\"Mean Mean Mean\") and Nancy Sinatra (\"How Does That Grab You?\").\n\nCritical reception\nJim Smith compared the group's style to early work by the Go-Gos. The Washington City Paper called the album \"unexceptional\". Robert Kaups at AllMusic gave the album a mixed review. Michael Panontin of Canuckistan praised \"Ms. Lefevre\".\n\nTrack listing\n\"Wank\" – 1:41\n\"Mean Mean Man\" – 0:59 - Wanda Jackson\n\"Sucker\" – 1:51\n\"Ms. Lefevre\" – 1:52\n\"Rock 'N' Roll Boy\" – 1:12\n\"Very Missionary\" – 1:09\n\"Mommie's Drunk\" – 1:32\n\"Woman's Scorn\" – 1:30\n\"Showpie\" – 1:09\n\"J'ai faim\" – 0:39\n\"Man What's Got a Gun\" – 1:05\n\"How Does That Grab You?\" – 2:01 - Nancy Sinatra\n\"Party Tonite!\" – 0:54\n\"Cat's Meow\" – 0:43\n\"One Nite Stand\" – 1:01\n\"Catastrophie\" – 1:03\n\nReferences\n\n1996 albums\nMaow albums\nMint Records albums"
] |
[
"Dion Dublin",
"Manchester United"
] | C_21c5864bd2954ac7a5053b24f3f2b2bb_1 | When did he join Manchester United? | 1 | When did Dion Dublin join Manchester United? | Dion Dublin | Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for PS1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers. He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League. In the 1993-94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through - this incident led directly to Kendall's resignation as Everton manager and Dublin ended up staying at Old Trafford until the end of the season. He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3-2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2-1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and shortly after the start of the 1994-95 season, he was sold to Coventry City for PS2 million. CANNOTANSWER | 7 August 1992, | Dion Dublin (born 22 April 1969) is an English former professional footballer, television presenter and pundit. He is a club director of Cambridge United.
As a player he was a centre-forward, notably playing in the Premier League for Manchester United, Coventry City and Aston Villa. He also had spells in the Scottish Premiership with Celtic and in the Football League with Cambridge United, Barnet, Millwall, Leicester City and Norwich City. He was capped four times for England.
Following on from his retirement, Dublin moved into the entertainment business. He is also an amateur percussionist, and invented a percussion instrument called "The Dube". In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene in a gig at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, he joined the presenting team on the BBC One daytime show Homes Under the Hammer and has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
Club career
Norwich City
Born in Leicester, while at school Dublin played for several Leicestershire youth teams including Wigston Fields and Thurmaston Magpies. Dublin then went on to begin his professional footballing career with Norwich City after leaving school in 1985, but he never made a first-team appearance and was released from the club in 1988.
Cambridge United
In August 1988, he joined Cambridge United on a free transfer, as a centre-forward, which had been his position at Norwich City. However, due to injuries he had to make a number of appearances at centre-half. His prolific goalscoring helped United to successive promotions. During the 1988–89 season, Dublin was then loaned out for a short spell to Barnet. The 1989–90 season saw Cambridge promoted from the Fourth Division via the play-offs, when Dublin became the first ever scorer in a Wembley play-off final.
In the 1990–91 season, the club were champions of the Third Division, and the club also reached the quarter-final of the FA Cup in both seasons, with Dublin scoring at Arsenal in 1991. In the 1991–92 season, he played a big part in helping Cambridge to their highest ever finishing position in the football league, by finishing in fifth place in the last season of the old Second Division, but when Cambridge failed to win promotion to the top flight via the play-offs Dublin was put up for sale. He has since spoken many times of his affection for Cambridge United.
Manchester United
Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for £1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers.
He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992–93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory – 1–0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1–0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League.
In the 1993–94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by the successful partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through – this dispute sparked Kendall's resignation as manager. Dublin would remain a United player for another nine months, but never managed to claim a regular place in the first team.
He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3–2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April, his goal helping secure a vital victory in the title run-in during a spell when United started to drop points and Blackburn Rovers were closing in on them. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2–1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and in September 1994, he was sold to Coventry City for £2 million - a record signing for Coventry City at the time - and also one of the largest fees received by Manchester United.
Coventry City
In four-and-a-half years with Coventry, Dublin established himself as one of the Premier League's top strikers and during the 1997–98 season won the first of his four full England caps. That season, he equalled the Coventry City record for most goals in a top division season with 23 goals in all competitions.
Following Phil Neal's departure in 1995, the arrival of Ron Atkinson and Gordon Strachan would see Dublin fit into an attacking team in the typical Atkinson mould. It included the likes of Noel Whelan, John Salako and Darren Huckerby to add to the already attack minded Peter Ndlovu. The addition of Gary McAllister, following UEFA Euro 1996, should have provided mid-table stability but the team's defensive frailties often undermined Dublin's scoring at the other end. This culminated in possibly one of the greatest escapes in Premier League history in May 1997. Despite having won away to Liverpool (Dublin scoring in the dying seconds) and at home to Chelsea in their previous two games, Coventry City went into the final day second from bottom of the table, needing not only to beat Tottenham Hotspur away from home but also for results elsewhere in the league to go their way for them to escape relegation. Goals from Dublin and Paul Williams gave Coventry a 2–1 win at White Hart Lane, while both Middlesbrough and Sunderland lost, and Coventry finished one point outside the relegation zone.
The following season the Sky Blues improved at home and enjoyed a season of mid table security. Dublin formed an impressive partnership with Darren Huckerby which not only produced some memorable goals but also propelled the Sky Blues to the FA Cup Sixth Round against Sheffield United; a game they narrowly lost in a penalty shoot out. The 1997–98 season also saw Dublin share elite status as the Premier League's top scorer with Blackburn's Chris Sutton and Liverpool's Michael Owen – each Englishman scoring 18 league goals. During this season, Blackburn manager Roy Hodgson tabled a bid which Dublin rejected. He remained at Highfield Road and contributed to Coventry's best finish to date in the Premiership (11th).
Aston Villa
Dublin was controversially excluded from the England 1998 FIFA World Cup squad, despite being the Premier League's joint top-scorer in the 1997–98 season, alongside Michael Owen and Chris Sutton. However, his exploits at club level were still attracting significant attention and in the autumn of 1998, he chose to move to Aston Villa for £5.75 million. In his first four games for the club, he would score seven goals including a memorable hat-trick against Southampton in only his second game for the Villa. As a result, he is one of only six players to score in the first four consecutive games for a Premier League club.
In December 1999, while playing for Aston Villa against Sheffield Wednesday, he sustained a life-threatening broken neck, as a result of which he permanently has a titanium plate holding three neck vertebrae together. Just days before suffering this injury, it was reported in the News of the World that Dublin would soon be sold by Aston Villa for a fee of around £6 million as the club looked to finance a fall in its share value as a result of manager John Gregory's heavy expenditure on players.
However, the injury did not end Dublin's career and he was back in action three months later.
In April 2000, a week after returning to the team, he helped Aston Villa reach their first FA Cup final in 43 years, which they lost 1–0 against Chelsea, scoring a penalty in the semi-final shoot-out against Bolton Wanderers. Having regained his fitness, Dublin remained on the Villa Park payroll until 2002.
Faced with competition for a first team place by Juan Pablo Ángel and Peter Crouch, Dublin spent several weeks on loan at First Division Millwall. In his time there, he scored two goals, against Stockport County, and Grimsby Town in five league matches to help them into the play-offs where despite Dublin's goal in the first leg of the semi final, Millwall lost to Birmingham City 2–1 on aggregate. Returning to Villa, he found himself again a first-choice striker, partnering Darius Vassell up front. Dublin was sent off at Villa Park for a headbutt on Robbie Savage in the Birmingham derby match, which ended 2–0 to Birmingham City.
Leicester City
When his contract expired in the summer of 2004, he was given a free transfer. He was signed by Leicester City, who had been relegated from the Premier League to the Championship. In his first season with the club, he scored only four goals in 38 competitive matches. During the 2005–06 season, Dublin lost his place as the team's main striker, but continued to appear as a defender. His contract at Leicester City was terminated by mutual consent on 30 January 2006.
Celtic
He was snapped up quickly by then Celtic manager Gordon Strachan, to cover for the loss of Chris Sutton, on a contract until the end of the season. At Celtic, Dublin achieved double success, with Scottish League Cup and Scottish Premier League winner's medals. On 19 March 2006, Dublin came on as a substitute and scored the final goal as Celtic defeated Dunfermline 3–0 to win the Scottish League Cup final, and also played enough matches with Celtic to merit a title medal. In the league, he made three league starts and eight substitute appearances for Celtic, scoring once against Kilmarnock on 9 April 2006 in a 4–1 win at Rugby Park. Despite one or two decent performances for the Parkhead outfit, Dublin was released by Strachan in May 2006.
Return to Norwich City
On 20 September 2006, Norwich City announced that Dublin had joined them until the end of the 2006–07 season. It marked a return, almost 20 years after leaving, for Dublin to the club where he began his career. He made his debut on 23 September 2006 when he came on as substitute against Plymouth Argyle. He scored his first competitive goal in Norwich City colours in a 3–3 draw against Queens Park Rangers on 14 October 2006 at Loftus Road. Steve Wilson cited Dublin as the main inspiration behind Norwich's 4–1 FA Cup 3rd Round win at Tamworth, in which the striker scored two goals and set up numerous chances for other teammates.
Dublin was an important figure in Norwich securing safety from relegation to League One and the supporters recognised his contribution by voting him in second place in the Norwich City player of the year award, and on 23 May 2007 he ended speculation about his future by signing a new one-year contract at Norwich, keeping him at the club until the end of the 2007–08 season. On 2 September 2007, while working as a pundit on a match between Aston Villa and Chelsea, Dublin said that this season would be his last as a professional footballer, citing the fact that his "bones have started to talk to him" as the reason, meaning that he did not think his body can handle another season.
In the spring of 2008, Dublin was approached by Jimmy Quinn, then manager of Cambridge United, about joining his old club for the 2008–09 season. However, the player would not change his mind about retiring. He was voted the club's Player of the Year and awarded the Barry Butler trophy on 26 April 2008 in his final season as a footballer, at his penultimate game, and on his final appearance at Carrow Road. Dublin played his final game on 4 May 2008, featuring in Norwich's 4–1 loss to Sheffield Wednesday in front of 36,208 fans at Hillsborough – the highest Championship attendance that season. When he was taken off in the 66th minute, Dublin received a standing ovation from both sets of supporters and players, and referee Mark Clattenburg.
International career
Dublin earned his first cap for England on 11 February 1998, playing the whole 90 minutes in the 2–0 friendly defeat to Chile at Wembley Stadium. In the run-up to the 1998 FIFA World Cup, Dublin played in the King Hassan II International Cup Tournament in May, starting in the 1–0 win against Morocco, and coming off the bench in 0–0 draw with Belgium, a game England lost on penalties. Despite showing good form and versatility throughout the season, including finishing joint top scorer in the Premier League with 18 goals, Glenn Hoddle included Les Ferdinand ahead of Dublin in his 22-man squad for the tournament in France. On 18 November, he started in the 2–0 friendly win against the Czech Republic at Wembley Stadium. This turned out to be Dublin's last cap for his country. He won four caps for England but did not score any goals.
Television career
Since retiring from football, Dublin has worked in the media as a pundit for Sky Sports. As well as appearing on Ford Super Sunday with Richard Keys, Dublin has commentated on a number of games including the UEFA Champions League games with Martin Tyler. He has also been a member of the panel on BBC Radio 5 Live's Fighting Talk. He has also co-presented 606 on BBC Radio 5 Live, Match of the Day 2 and was also a regular on BBC One's Late Kick Off in the East region. He joined Lucy Alexander and Martin Roberts on Homes Under the Hammer in 2015. In July 2021, Dublin returned to Cambridge United after being appointed as a director.
Also for the BBC, he has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
In August 2021 it was announced that Dublin would be a competitor on BBC's Celebrity MasterChef. He reached the final.
Personal life
Away from football, during his spell with Norwich, he invented a percussion instrument called The Dube, a form of cajón. In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene during a gig at the University of East Anglia.
In July 2021, Dublin was appointed as a club director at former club Cambridge United.
Honours
Cambridge United
Football League Third Division: 1990–91
Manchester United
Premier League: 1992–93
FA Charity Shield: 1994
Aston Villa
UEFA Intertoto Cup: 2001
Celtic
Scottish Premier League: 2005–06
Scottish League Cup: 2005–06
Individual
Premier League Golden Boot: 1997–98
Premier League Player of the Month: January 1998, November 1998
Coventry City Hall of Fame
References
External links
Career information at ex-canaries.co.uk
1969 births
Living people
Footballers from Leicester
English footballers
Association football forwards
Association football central defenders
Association football utility players
Norwich City F.C. players
Cambridge United F.C. players
Barnet F.C. players
Manchester United F.C. players
Coventry City F.C. players
Aston Villa F.C. players
Millwall F.C. players
Leicester City F.C. players
Celtic F.C. players
English Football League players
Premier League players
Scottish Premier League players
First Division/Premier League top scorers
England international footballers
English association football commentators
English television presenters
BBC people
FA Cup Final players
Cambridge United F.C. directors and chairmen
Black British sportspeople | true | [
"Ryan Ford (born 3 September 1978) is an English footballer who plays as a midfielder. Born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, Ford began his career with Manchester United. When he failed to break into the first team, he was allowed to join Notts County in February 2000. Two years later, after just one league appearance for the Nottingham club, he moved to non-league Ilkeston Town, but left after only a year. In 2004, he joined Gainsborough Trinity, but again left a year later to join Retford United. He left Retford by mutual consent in February 2010 after failing to agree a new contract, but by September 2010, he was back with the club.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1978 births\nLiving people\nSportspeople from Worksop\nEnglish footballers\nAssociation football midfielders\nManchester United F.C. players\nNotts County F.C. players\nIlkeston Town F.C. (1945) players\nGainsborough Trinity F.C. players\nRetford United F.C. players",
"Stephen Cosgrove (born 29 December 1980 in Glasgow), is a Scottish footballer, who plays as a midfielder.\n\nClub career\nCosgrove began his career with Manchester United. After an unsuccessful trial with Ipswich Town, he returned to Scotland in 2001 to join Motherwell, where he made a handful of appearances. He was one of 19 players controversially released by the Lanarkshire side when they entered into administration in April 2002. Stephen then joined Clyde where he featured in the team which finished runners up in the Scottish First Division. He then left Clyde to join ambitious Gretna, where he played for two years.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nLiving people\n1980 births\nScottish footballers\nManchester United F.C. players\nMotherwell F.C. players\nStirling Albion F.C. players\nClyde F.C. players\nGretna F.C. players\nStenhousemuir F.C. players\nScottish Premier League players\nScottish Football League players\nKilwinning Rangers F.C. players\nAssociation football midfielders"
] |
[
"Dion Dublin",
"Manchester United",
"When did he join Manchester United?",
"7 August 1992,"
] | C_21c5864bd2954ac7a5053b24f3f2b2bb_1 | Why did he decide to play for Manchester United? | 2 | Why did Dion Dublin decide to play for Manchester United? | Dion Dublin | Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for PS1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers. He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League. In the 1993-94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through - this incident led directly to Kendall's resignation as Everton manager and Dublin ended up staying at Old Trafford until the end of the season. He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3-2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2-1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and shortly after the start of the 1994-95 season, he was sold to Coventry City for PS2 million. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Dion Dublin (born 22 April 1969) is an English former professional footballer, television presenter and pundit. He is a club director of Cambridge United.
As a player he was a centre-forward, notably playing in the Premier League for Manchester United, Coventry City and Aston Villa. He also had spells in the Scottish Premiership with Celtic and in the Football League with Cambridge United, Barnet, Millwall, Leicester City and Norwich City. He was capped four times for England.
Following on from his retirement, Dublin moved into the entertainment business. He is also an amateur percussionist, and invented a percussion instrument called "The Dube". In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene in a gig at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, he joined the presenting team on the BBC One daytime show Homes Under the Hammer and has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
Club career
Norwich City
Born in Leicester, while at school Dublin played for several Leicestershire youth teams including Wigston Fields and Thurmaston Magpies. Dublin then went on to begin his professional footballing career with Norwich City after leaving school in 1985, but he never made a first-team appearance and was released from the club in 1988.
Cambridge United
In August 1988, he joined Cambridge United on a free transfer, as a centre-forward, which had been his position at Norwich City. However, due to injuries he had to make a number of appearances at centre-half. His prolific goalscoring helped United to successive promotions. During the 1988–89 season, Dublin was then loaned out for a short spell to Barnet. The 1989–90 season saw Cambridge promoted from the Fourth Division via the play-offs, when Dublin became the first ever scorer in a Wembley play-off final.
In the 1990–91 season, the club were champions of the Third Division, and the club also reached the quarter-final of the FA Cup in both seasons, with Dublin scoring at Arsenal in 1991. In the 1991–92 season, he played a big part in helping Cambridge to their highest ever finishing position in the football league, by finishing in fifth place in the last season of the old Second Division, but when Cambridge failed to win promotion to the top flight via the play-offs Dublin was put up for sale. He has since spoken many times of his affection for Cambridge United.
Manchester United
Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for £1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers.
He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992–93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory – 1–0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1–0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League.
In the 1993–94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by the successful partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through – this dispute sparked Kendall's resignation as manager. Dublin would remain a United player for another nine months, but never managed to claim a regular place in the first team.
He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3–2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April, his goal helping secure a vital victory in the title run-in during a spell when United started to drop points and Blackburn Rovers were closing in on them. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2–1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and in September 1994, he was sold to Coventry City for £2 million - a record signing for Coventry City at the time - and also one of the largest fees received by Manchester United.
Coventry City
In four-and-a-half years with Coventry, Dublin established himself as one of the Premier League's top strikers and during the 1997–98 season won the first of his four full England caps. That season, he equalled the Coventry City record for most goals in a top division season with 23 goals in all competitions.
Following Phil Neal's departure in 1995, the arrival of Ron Atkinson and Gordon Strachan would see Dublin fit into an attacking team in the typical Atkinson mould. It included the likes of Noel Whelan, John Salako and Darren Huckerby to add to the already attack minded Peter Ndlovu. The addition of Gary McAllister, following UEFA Euro 1996, should have provided mid-table stability but the team's defensive frailties often undermined Dublin's scoring at the other end. This culminated in possibly one of the greatest escapes in Premier League history in May 1997. Despite having won away to Liverpool (Dublin scoring in the dying seconds) and at home to Chelsea in their previous two games, Coventry City went into the final day second from bottom of the table, needing not only to beat Tottenham Hotspur away from home but also for results elsewhere in the league to go their way for them to escape relegation. Goals from Dublin and Paul Williams gave Coventry a 2–1 win at White Hart Lane, while both Middlesbrough and Sunderland lost, and Coventry finished one point outside the relegation zone.
The following season the Sky Blues improved at home and enjoyed a season of mid table security. Dublin formed an impressive partnership with Darren Huckerby which not only produced some memorable goals but also propelled the Sky Blues to the FA Cup Sixth Round against Sheffield United; a game they narrowly lost in a penalty shoot out. The 1997–98 season also saw Dublin share elite status as the Premier League's top scorer with Blackburn's Chris Sutton and Liverpool's Michael Owen – each Englishman scoring 18 league goals. During this season, Blackburn manager Roy Hodgson tabled a bid which Dublin rejected. He remained at Highfield Road and contributed to Coventry's best finish to date in the Premiership (11th).
Aston Villa
Dublin was controversially excluded from the England 1998 FIFA World Cup squad, despite being the Premier League's joint top-scorer in the 1997–98 season, alongside Michael Owen and Chris Sutton. However, his exploits at club level were still attracting significant attention and in the autumn of 1998, he chose to move to Aston Villa for £5.75 million. In his first four games for the club, he would score seven goals including a memorable hat-trick against Southampton in only his second game for the Villa. As a result, he is one of only six players to score in the first four consecutive games for a Premier League club.
In December 1999, while playing for Aston Villa against Sheffield Wednesday, he sustained a life-threatening broken neck, as a result of which he permanently has a titanium plate holding three neck vertebrae together. Just days before suffering this injury, it was reported in the News of the World that Dublin would soon be sold by Aston Villa for a fee of around £6 million as the club looked to finance a fall in its share value as a result of manager John Gregory's heavy expenditure on players.
However, the injury did not end Dublin's career and he was back in action three months later.
In April 2000, a week after returning to the team, he helped Aston Villa reach their first FA Cup final in 43 years, which they lost 1–0 against Chelsea, scoring a penalty in the semi-final shoot-out against Bolton Wanderers. Having regained his fitness, Dublin remained on the Villa Park payroll until 2002.
Faced with competition for a first team place by Juan Pablo Ángel and Peter Crouch, Dublin spent several weeks on loan at First Division Millwall. In his time there, he scored two goals, against Stockport County, and Grimsby Town in five league matches to help them into the play-offs where despite Dublin's goal in the first leg of the semi final, Millwall lost to Birmingham City 2–1 on aggregate. Returning to Villa, he found himself again a first-choice striker, partnering Darius Vassell up front. Dublin was sent off at Villa Park for a headbutt on Robbie Savage in the Birmingham derby match, which ended 2–0 to Birmingham City.
Leicester City
When his contract expired in the summer of 2004, he was given a free transfer. He was signed by Leicester City, who had been relegated from the Premier League to the Championship. In his first season with the club, he scored only four goals in 38 competitive matches. During the 2005–06 season, Dublin lost his place as the team's main striker, but continued to appear as a defender. His contract at Leicester City was terminated by mutual consent on 30 January 2006.
Celtic
He was snapped up quickly by then Celtic manager Gordon Strachan, to cover for the loss of Chris Sutton, on a contract until the end of the season. At Celtic, Dublin achieved double success, with Scottish League Cup and Scottish Premier League winner's medals. On 19 March 2006, Dublin came on as a substitute and scored the final goal as Celtic defeated Dunfermline 3–0 to win the Scottish League Cup final, and also played enough matches with Celtic to merit a title medal. In the league, he made three league starts and eight substitute appearances for Celtic, scoring once against Kilmarnock on 9 April 2006 in a 4–1 win at Rugby Park. Despite one or two decent performances for the Parkhead outfit, Dublin was released by Strachan in May 2006.
Return to Norwich City
On 20 September 2006, Norwich City announced that Dublin had joined them until the end of the 2006–07 season. It marked a return, almost 20 years after leaving, for Dublin to the club where he began his career. He made his debut on 23 September 2006 when he came on as substitute against Plymouth Argyle. He scored his first competitive goal in Norwich City colours in a 3–3 draw against Queens Park Rangers on 14 October 2006 at Loftus Road. Steve Wilson cited Dublin as the main inspiration behind Norwich's 4–1 FA Cup 3rd Round win at Tamworth, in which the striker scored two goals and set up numerous chances for other teammates.
Dublin was an important figure in Norwich securing safety from relegation to League One and the supporters recognised his contribution by voting him in second place in the Norwich City player of the year award, and on 23 May 2007 he ended speculation about his future by signing a new one-year contract at Norwich, keeping him at the club until the end of the 2007–08 season. On 2 September 2007, while working as a pundit on a match between Aston Villa and Chelsea, Dublin said that this season would be his last as a professional footballer, citing the fact that his "bones have started to talk to him" as the reason, meaning that he did not think his body can handle another season.
In the spring of 2008, Dublin was approached by Jimmy Quinn, then manager of Cambridge United, about joining his old club for the 2008–09 season. However, the player would not change his mind about retiring. He was voted the club's Player of the Year and awarded the Barry Butler trophy on 26 April 2008 in his final season as a footballer, at his penultimate game, and on his final appearance at Carrow Road. Dublin played his final game on 4 May 2008, featuring in Norwich's 4–1 loss to Sheffield Wednesday in front of 36,208 fans at Hillsborough – the highest Championship attendance that season. When he was taken off in the 66th minute, Dublin received a standing ovation from both sets of supporters and players, and referee Mark Clattenburg.
International career
Dublin earned his first cap for England on 11 February 1998, playing the whole 90 minutes in the 2–0 friendly defeat to Chile at Wembley Stadium. In the run-up to the 1998 FIFA World Cup, Dublin played in the King Hassan II International Cup Tournament in May, starting in the 1–0 win against Morocco, and coming off the bench in 0–0 draw with Belgium, a game England lost on penalties. Despite showing good form and versatility throughout the season, including finishing joint top scorer in the Premier League with 18 goals, Glenn Hoddle included Les Ferdinand ahead of Dublin in his 22-man squad for the tournament in France. On 18 November, he started in the 2–0 friendly win against the Czech Republic at Wembley Stadium. This turned out to be Dublin's last cap for his country. He won four caps for England but did not score any goals.
Television career
Since retiring from football, Dublin has worked in the media as a pundit for Sky Sports. As well as appearing on Ford Super Sunday with Richard Keys, Dublin has commentated on a number of games including the UEFA Champions League games with Martin Tyler. He has also been a member of the panel on BBC Radio 5 Live's Fighting Talk. He has also co-presented 606 on BBC Radio 5 Live, Match of the Day 2 and was also a regular on BBC One's Late Kick Off in the East region. He joined Lucy Alexander and Martin Roberts on Homes Under the Hammer in 2015. In July 2021, Dublin returned to Cambridge United after being appointed as a director.
Also for the BBC, he has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
In August 2021 it was announced that Dublin would be a competitor on BBC's Celebrity MasterChef. He reached the final.
Personal life
Away from football, during his spell with Norwich, he invented a percussion instrument called The Dube, a form of cajón. In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene during a gig at the University of East Anglia.
In July 2021, Dublin was appointed as a club director at former club Cambridge United.
Honours
Cambridge United
Football League Third Division: 1990–91
Manchester United
Premier League: 1992–93
FA Charity Shield: 1994
Aston Villa
UEFA Intertoto Cup: 2001
Celtic
Scottish Premier League: 2005–06
Scottish League Cup: 2005–06
Individual
Premier League Golden Boot: 1997–98
Premier League Player of the Month: January 1998, November 1998
Coventry City Hall of Fame
References
External links
Career information at ex-canaries.co.uk
1969 births
Living people
Footballers from Leicester
English footballers
Association football forwards
Association football central defenders
Association football utility players
Norwich City F.C. players
Cambridge United F.C. players
Barnet F.C. players
Manchester United F.C. players
Coventry City F.C. players
Aston Villa F.C. players
Millwall F.C. players
Leicester City F.C. players
Celtic F.C. players
English Football League players
Premier League players
Scottish Premier League players
First Division/Premier League top scorers
England international footballers
English association football commentators
English television presenters
BBC people
FA Cup Final players
Cambridge United F.C. directors and chairmen
Black British sportspeople | false | [
"David Peter Ryan (born 5 January 1957) is an English former football goalkeeper who played his first league game for Port Vale in 1976, on loan from Manchester United. He later played football for Southport, Northwich Victoria, and Chorley.\n\nPlaying career\nRyan started his career with Manchester United. Whilst with the \"Red Devils\" he was sent on loan to Port Vale in January 1976, as cover for John Connaughton. He made his debut in a 2–1 defeat by Swindon Town at the County Ground on 17 January, but returned to Old Trafford later that month. Ryan was never handed his competitive debut by Tommy Docherty and later left United to play for Southport, Northwich Victoria, and Chorley. He went on to become Head Goalkeeping Coach at the Manchester United Academy and served as Head of Football & Community Development from 1992 to 2013. He also did charity work on behalf of Manchester United.\n\nStatistics\nSource:\n\nReferences\n\n1957 births\nLiving people\nFootballers from Manchester\nEnglish footballers\nAssociation football goalkeepers\nManchester United F.C. players\nPort Vale F.C. players\nSouthport F.C. players\nNorthwich Victoria F.C. players\nChorley F.C. players\nHyde United F.C. players\nEnglish Football League players\nAssociation football coaches\nAssociation football goalkeeping coaches\nManchester United F.C. non-playing staff",
"Harold Dean (born 1910) was an English footballer who played as a centre-forward. Born in Hulme, Manchester, he played for Old Trafford, Manchester United and Mossley.\n\nFollowing Manchester United's relegation to the Second Division at the end of the 1930–31 season, Dean was one of 31 amateur players signed by the club. He joined from the nearby Old Trafford Amateur club and made his debut in a 3–1 win at home to Chesterfield on 26 September 1931, filling in for the absent Tommy Reid. He also played in the next game, a 2–0 defeat at Burnley, but while his speed and effort were praised, his control and shooting were deemed not to be up to scratch. He did not play for Manchester United again and was transferred to Cheshire County League side Mossley in December 1931.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nProfile at StretfordEnd.co.uk\nProfile at MUFCInfo.com\n\n1910 births\nYear of death missing\nPeople from Hulme\nEnglish footballers\nAssociation football forwards\nManchester United F.C. players\nMossley A.F.C. players"
] |
[
"Dion Dublin",
"Manchester United",
"When did he join Manchester United?",
"7 August 1992,",
"Why did he decide to play for Manchester United?",
"I don't know."
] | C_21c5864bd2954ac7a5053b24f3f2b2bb_1 | Did he play well during his time with Manchester United? | 3 | Did Dion Dublin play well during his time with Manchester United? | Dion Dublin | Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for PS1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers. He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League. In the 1993-94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through - this incident led directly to Kendall's resignation as Everton manager and Dublin ended up staying at Old Trafford until the end of the season. He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3-2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2-1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and shortly after the start of the 1994-95 season, he was sold to Coventry City for PS2 million. CANNOTANSWER | He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell. | Dion Dublin (born 22 April 1969) is an English former professional footballer, television presenter and pundit. He is a club director of Cambridge United.
As a player he was a centre-forward, notably playing in the Premier League for Manchester United, Coventry City and Aston Villa. He also had spells in the Scottish Premiership with Celtic and in the Football League with Cambridge United, Barnet, Millwall, Leicester City and Norwich City. He was capped four times for England.
Following on from his retirement, Dublin moved into the entertainment business. He is also an amateur percussionist, and invented a percussion instrument called "The Dube". In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene in a gig at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, he joined the presenting team on the BBC One daytime show Homes Under the Hammer and has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
Club career
Norwich City
Born in Leicester, while at school Dublin played for several Leicestershire youth teams including Wigston Fields and Thurmaston Magpies. Dublin then went on to begin his professional footballing career with Norwich City after leaving school in 1985, but he never made a first-team appearance and was released from the club in 1988.
Cambridge United
In August 1988, he joined Cambridge United on a free transfer, as a centre-forward, which had been his position at Norwich City. However, due to injuries he had to make a number of appearances at centre-half. His prolific goalscoring helped United to successive promotions. During the 1988–89 season, Dublin was then loaned out for a short spell to Barnet. The 1989–90 season saw Cambridge promoted from the Fourth Division via the play-offs, when Dublin became the first ever scorer in a Wembley play-off final.
In the 1990–91 season, the club were champions of the Third Division, and the club also reached the quarter-final of the FA Cup in both seasons, with Dublin scoring at Arsenal in 1991. In the 1991–92 season, he played a big part in helping Cambridge to their highest ever finishing position in the football league, by finishing in fifth place in the last season of the old Second Division, but when Cambridge failed to win promotion to the top flight via the play-offs Dublin was put up for sale. He has since spoken many times of his affection for Cambridge United.
Manchester United
Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for £1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers.
He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992–93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory – 1–0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1–0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League.
In the 1993–94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by the successful partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through – this dispute sparked Kendall's resignation as manager. Dublin would remain a United player for another nine months, but never managed to claim a regular place in the first team.
He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3–2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April, his goal helping secure a vital victory in the title run-in during a spell when United started to drop points and Blackburn Rovers were closing in on them. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2–1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and in September 1994, he was sold to Coventry City for £2 million - a record signing for Coventry City at the time - and also one of the largest fees received by Manchester United.
Coventry City
In four-and-a-half years with Coventry, Dublin established himself as one of the Premier League's top strikers and during the 1997–98 season won the first of his four full England caps. That season, he equalled the Coventry City record for most goals in a top division season with 23 goals in all competitions.
Following Phil Neal's departure in 1995, the arrival of Ron Atkinson and Gordon Strachan would see Dublin fit into an attacking team in the typical Atkinson mould. It included the likes of Noel Whelan, John Salako and Darren Huckerby to add to the already attack minded Peter Ndlovu. The addition of Gary McAllister, following UEFA Euro 1996, should have provided mid-table stability but the team's defensive frailties often undermined Dublin's scoring at the other end. This culminated in possibly one of the greatest escapes in Premier League history in May 1997. Despite having won away to Liverpool (Dublin scoring in the dying seconds) and at home to Chelsea in their previous two games, Coventry City went into the final day second from bottom of the table, needing not only to beat Tottenham Hotspur away from home but also for results elsewhere in the league to go their way for them to escape relegation. Goals from Dublin and Paul Williams gave Coventry a 2–1 win at White Hart Lane, while both Middlesbrough and Sunderland lost, and Coventry finished one point outside the relegation zone.
The following season the Sky Blues improved at home and enjoyed a season of mid table security. Dublin formed an impressive partnership with Darren Huckerby which not only produced some memorable goals but also propelled the Sky Blues to the FA Cup Sixth Round against Sheffield United; a game they narrowly lost in a penalty shoot out. The 1997–98 season also saw Dublin share elite status as the Premier League's top scorer with Blackburn's Chris Sutton and Liverpool's Michael Owen – each Englishman scoring 18 league goals. During this season, Blackburn manager Roy Hodgson tabled a bid which Dublin rejected. He remained at Highfield Road and contributed to Coventry's best finish to date in the Premiership (11th).
Aston Villa
Dublin was controversially excluded from the England 1998 FIFA World Cup squad, despite being the Premier League's joint top-scorer in the 1997–98 season, alongside Michael Owen and Chris Sutton. However, his exploits at club level were still attracting significant attention and in the autumn of 1998, he chose to move to Aston Villa for £5.75 million. In his first four games for the club, he would score seven goals including a memorable hat-trick against Southampton in only his second game for the Villa. As a result, he is one of only six players to score in the first four consecutive games for a Premier League club.
In December 1999, while playing for Aston Villa against Sheffield Wednesday, he sustained a life-threatening broken neck, as a result of which he permanently has a titanium plate holding three neck vertebrae together. Just days before suffering this injury, it was reported in the News of the World that Dublin would soon be sold by Aston Villa for a fee of around £6 million as the club looked to finance a fall in its share value as a result of manager John Gregory's heavy expenditure on players.
However, the injury did not end Dublin's career and he was back in action three months later.
In April 2000, a week after returning to the team, he helped Aston Villa reach their first FA Cup final in 43 years, which they lost 1–0 against Chelsea, scoring a penalty in the semi-final shoot-out against Bolton Wanderers. Having regained his fitness, Dublin remained on the Villa Park payroll until 2002.
Faced with competition for a first team place by Juan Pablo Ángel and Peter Crouch, Dublin spent several weeks on loan at First Division Millwall. In his time there, he scored two goals, against Stockport County, and Grimsby Town in five league matches to help them into the play-offs where despite Dublin's goal in the first leg of the semi final, Millwall lost to Birmingham City 2–1 on aggregate. Returning to Villa, he found himself again a first-choice striker, partnering Darius Vassell up front. Dublin was sent off at Villa Park for a headbutt on Robbie Savage in the Birmingham derby match, which ended 2–0 to Birmingham City.
Leicester City
When his contract expired in the summer of 2004, he was given a free transfer. He was signed by Leicester City, who had been relegated from the Premier League to the Championship. In his first season with the club, he scored only four goals in 38 competitive matches. During the 2005–06 season, Dublin lost his place as the team's main striker, but continued to appear as a defender. His contract at Leicester City was terminated by mutual consent on 30 January 2006.
Celtic
He was snapped up quickly by then Celtic manager Gordon Strachan, to cover for the loss of Chris Sutton, on a contract until the end of the season. At Celtic, Dublin achieved double success, with Scottish League Cup and Scottish Premier League winner's medals. On 19 March 2006, Dublin came on as a substitute and scored the final goal as Celtic defeated Dunfermline 3–0 to win the Scottish League Cup final, and also played enough matches with Celtic to merit a title medal. In the league, he made three league starts and eight substitute appearances for Celtic, scoring once against Kilmarnock on 9 April 2006 in a 4–1 win at Rugby Park. Despite one or two decent performances for the Parkhead outfit, Dublin was released by Strachan in May 2006.
Return to Norwich City
On 20 September 2006, Norwich City announced that Dublin had joined them until the end of the 2006–07 season. It marked a return, almost 20 years after leaving, for Dublin to the club where he began his career. He made his debut on 23 September 2006 when he came on as substitute against Plymouth Argyle. He scored his first competitive goal in Norwich City colours in a 3–3 draw against Queens Park Rangers on 14 October 2006 at Loftus Road. Steve Wilson cited Dublin as the main inspiration behind Norwich's 4–1 FA Cup 3rd Round win at Tamworth, in which the striker scored two goals and set up numerous chances for other teammates.
Dublin was an important figure in Norwich securing safety from relegation to League One and the supporters recognised his contribution by voting him in second place in the Norwich City player of the year award, and on 23 May 2007 he ended speculation about his future by signing a new one-year contract at Norwich, keeping him at the club until the end of the 2007–08 season. On 2 September 2007, while working as a pundit on a match between Aston Villa and Chelsea, Dublin said that this season would be his last as a professional footballer, citing the fact that his "bones have started to talk to him" as the reason, meaning that he did not think his body can handle another season.
In the spring of 2008, Dublin was approached by Jimmy Quinn, then manager of Cambridge United, about joining his old club for the 2008–09 season. However, the player would not change his mind about retiring. He was voted the club's Player of the Year and awarded the Barry Butler trophy on 26 April 2008 in his final season as a footballer, at his penultimate game, and on his final appearance at Carrow Road. Dublin played his final game on 4 May 2008, featuring in Norwich's 4–1 loss to Sheffield Wednesday in front of 36,208 fans at Hillsborough – the highest Championship attendance that season. When he was taken off in the 66th minute, Dublin received a standing ovation from both sets of supporters and players, and referee Mark Clattenburg.
International career
Dublin earned his first cap for England on 11 February 1998, playing the whole 90 minutes in the 2–0 friendly defeat to Chile at Wembley Stadium. In the run-up to the 1998 FIFA World Cup, Dublin played in the King Hassan II International Cup Tournament in May, starting in the 1–0 win against Morocco, and coming off the bench in 0–0 draw with Belgium, a game England lost on penalties. Despite showing good form and versatility throughout the season, including finishing joint top scorer in the Premier League with 18 goals, Glenn Hoddle included Les Ferdinand ahead of Dublin in his 22-man squad for the tournament in France. On 18 November, he started in the 2–0 friendly win against the Czech Republic at Wembley Stadium. This turned out to be Dublin's last cap for his country. He won four caps for England but did not score any goals.
Television career
Since retiring from football, Dublin has worked in the media as a pundit for Sky Sports. As well as appearing on Ford Super Sunday with Richard Keys, Dublin has commentated on a number of games including the UEFA Champions League games with Martin Tyler. He has also been a member of the panel on BBC Radio 5 Live's Fighting Talk. He has also co-presented 606 on BBC Radio 5 Live, Match of the Day 2 and was also a regular on BBC One's Late Kick Off in the East region. He joined Lucy Alexander and Martin Roberts on Homes Under the Hammer in 2015. In July 2021, Dublin returned to Cambridge United after being appointed as a director.
Also for the BBC, he has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
In August 2021 it was announced that Dublin would be a competitor on BBC's Celebrity MasterChef. He reached the final.
Personal life
Away from football, during his spell with Norwich, he invented a percussion instrument called The Dube, a form of cajón. In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene during a gig at the University of East Anglia.
In July 2021, Dublin was appointed as a club director at former club Cambridge United.
Honours
Cambridge United
Football League Third Division: 1990–91
Manchester United
Premier League: 1992–93
FA Charity Shield: 1994
Aston Villa
UEFA Intertoto Cup: 2001
Celtic
Scottish Premier League: 2005–06
Scottish League Cup: 2005–06
Individual
Premier League Golden Boot: 1997–98
Premier League Player of the Month: January 1998, November 1998
Coventry City Hall of Fame
References
External links
Career information at ex-canaries.co.uk
1969 births
Living people
Footballers from Leicester
English footballers
Association football forwards
Association football central defenders
Association football utility players
Norwich City F.C. players
Cambridge United F.C. players
Barnet F.C. players
Manchester United F.C. players
Coventry City F.C. players
Aston Villa F.C. players
Millwall F.C. players
Leicester City F.C. players
Celtic F.C. players
English Football League players
Premier League players
Scottish Premier League players
First Division/Premier League top scorers
England international footballers
English association football commentators
English television presenters
BBC people
FA Cup Final players
Cambridge United F.C. directors and chairmen
Black British sportspeople | false | [
"William Noel McFarlane (20 December 1934 – 19 March 2019) was an Irish footballer who played as a forward. Born in Bray, County Wicklow, he played junior football in Ireland before moving to England to join Manchester United in 1952. After four years in England, he returned to Ireland with Waterford before briefly retiring due to illness, only to return to England to play non-league football with Altrincham.\n\nCareer\nMcFarlane was born in Bray, County Wicklow, and played junior football in the area, earning a call-up to the Republic of Ireland Schoolboys national team. In April 1952, he signed for English club Manchester United, joining a youth team filled with players known as the Busby Babes after the club's manager, Matt Busby. McFarlane was a regular for the youth team during the 1952–53 season, and played in both legs of the inaugural FA Youth Cup final in 1953, scoring twice in a 7–1 win in the first leg, leading to a 9–3 victory on aggregate.\n\nDespite being a mainstay in the youth team, McFarlane was unable to displace Johnny Berry in the senior side and did not make his first-team debut until February 1954, playing on the right wing in a 2–0 home win over Tottenham Hotspur. It was to be his only appearance for the club, with Colin Webster preferred as Berry's understudy, and in June 1956, McFarlane returned to Ireland to play for Waterford. Illness forced him to retire, but he did later return to play non-league football in the Manchester area with Altrincham.\n\nReferences\nBibliography\n\nFootnotes\n\nExternal links\nProfile at StretfordEnd.co.uk\nProfile at MUFCInfo.com\n\n1934 births\n2019 deaths\nPeople from Bray, County Wicklow\nAssociation footballers from County Wicklow\nRepublic of Ireland association footballers\nAssociation football forwards\nManchester United F.C. players\nWaterford F.C. players\nAltrincham F.C. players",
"Luca Ercolani (born 25 November 1999) is an Italian professional footballer who plays as a centre-back for Catania.\n\nClub career\n\nManchester United\nHaving previously been a gymnast in his early years, Ercolani soon turned his attentions to football. He started his youth career with USD Classe, before moving to Ravenna until 2012. After a stint with Rimini, Ercolani moved to Forlì. He was later signed on loan by Cesena, though I Bianconeri would choose not to sign the player. In July 2016, having been scouted by David Williams a year prior, Ercolani completed a transfer to Premier League club Manchester United. He remained with the English club until the start of 2021, appearing at U18, U19, U21 and U23 level; notably featuring in the EFL Trophy and UEFA Youth League. Ercolani did train with the first-team squad on numerous occasions under both José Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjær.\n\nDuring the 2019–20 season, having spent time out with an injury, Ercolani - on the advice of some of the club's coaches - completed his UEFA B coaching qualification.\n\nCarpi\nOn 8 January 2021, having previously extended his Manchester United contract until June 2021 in May 2020, Ercolani returned to Italy with Serie C side Carpi; penning terms until June 2022. He made his senior debut on 20 January during an away match against Matelica, as he featured for the full duration of a 1–0 loss at Stadio Helvia Recina. Further appearances arrived that month versus Sambenedettese and Feralpisalò. Ercolani was sent off for the first time in senior football on 7 February against Imolese. Following the 2020–21 season, Carpi was excluded from the Italian leagues due to debts, making him a free agent.\n\nCatania\nOn 13 August 2021, he signed a contract with Catania for the term of one season with an optional second year.\n\nInternational career\nErcolani won five caps for Italy at U20 level, having made his debut in October 2018.\n\nStyle of play\nErcolani started out as a striker, though later switched to play as a centre-back after joining Forlì. He is also capable of playing at full-back.\n\nCareer statistics\n.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1999 births\nLiving people\nSportspeople from Ravenna\nItalian footballers\nItaly youth international footballers\nAssociation football defenders\nSerie C players\nCarpi F.C. 1909 players\nCalcio Catania players"
] |
[
"Dion Dublin",
"Manchester United",
"When did he join Manchester United?",
"7 August 1992,",
"Why did he decide to play for Manchester United?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he play well during his time with Manchester United?",
"He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell."
] | C_21c5864bd2954ac7a5053b24f3f2b2bb_1 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 4 | Besides the fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | Dion Dublin | Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for PS1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers. He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League. In the 1993-94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through - this incident led directly to Kendall's resignation as Everton manager and Dublin ended up staying at Old Trafford until the end of the season. He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3-2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2-1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and shortly after the start of the 1994-95 season, he was sold to Coventry City for PS2 million. CANNOTANSWER | he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle | Dion Dublin (born 22 April 1969) is an English former professional footballer, television presenter and pundit. He is a club director of Cambridge United.
As a player he was a centre-forward, notably playing in the Premier League for Manchester United, Coventry City and Aston Villa. He also had spells in the Scottish Premiership with Celtic and in the Football League with Cambridge United, Barnet, Millwall, Leicester City and Norwich City. He was capped four times for England.
Following on from his retirement, Dublin moved into the entertainment business. He is also an amateur percussionist, and invented a percussion instrument called "The Dube". In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene in a gig at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, he joined the presenting team on the BBC One daytime show Homes Under the Hammer and has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
Club career
Norwich City
Born in Leicester, while at school Dublin played for several Leicestershire youth teams including Wigston Fields and Thurmaston Magpies. Dublin then went on to begin his professional footballing career with Norwich City after leaving school in 1985, but he never made a first-team appearance and was released from the club in 1988.
Cambridge United
In August 1988, he joined Cambridge United on a free transfer, as a centre-forward, which had been his position at Norwich City. However, due to injuries he had to make a number of appearances at centre-half. His prolific goalscoring helped United to successive promotions. During the 1988–89 season, Dublin was then loaned out for a short spell to Barnet. The 1989–90 season saw Cambridge promoted from the Fourth Division via the play-offs, when Dublin became the first ever scorer in a Wembley play-off final.
In the 1990–91 season, the club were champions of the Third Division, and the club also reached the quarter-final of the FA Cup in both seasons, with Dublin scoring at Arsenal in 1991. In the 1991–92 season, he played a big part in helping Cambridge to their highest ever finishing position in the football league, by finishing in fifth place in the last season of the old Second Division, but when Cambridge failed to win promotion to the top flight via the play-offs Dublin was put up for sale. He has since spoken many times of his affection for Cambridge United.
Manchester United
Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for £1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers.
He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992–93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory – 1–0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1–0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League.
In the 1993–94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by the successful partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through – this dispute sparked Kendall's resignation as manager. Dublin would remain a United player for another nine months, but never managed to claim a regular place in the first team.
He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3–2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April, his goal helping secure a vital victory in the title run-in during a spell when United started to drop points and Blackburn Rovers were closing in on them. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2–1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and in September 1994, he was sold to Coventry City for £2 million - a record signing for Coventry City at the time - and also one of the largest fees received by Manchester United.
Coventry City
In four-and-a-half years with Coventry, Dublin established himself as one of the Premier League's top strikers and during the 1997–98 season won the first of his four full England caps. That season, he equalled the Coventry City record for most goals in a top division season with 23 goals in all competitions.
Following Phil Neal's departure in 1995, the arrival of Ron Atkinson and Gordon Strachan would see Dublin fit into an attacking team in the typical Atkinson mould. It included the likes of Noel Whelan, John Salako and Darren Huckerby to add to the already attack minded Peter Ndlovu. The addition of Gary McAllister, following UEFA Euro 1996, should have provided mid-table stability but the team's defensive frailties often undermined Dublin's scoring at the other end. This culminated in possibly one of the greatest escapes in Premier League history in May 1997. Despite having won away to Liverpool (Dublin scoring in the dying seconds) and at home to Chelsea in their previous two games, Coventry City went into the final day second from bottom of the table, needing not only to beat Tottenham Hotspur away from home but also for results elsewhere in the league to go their way for them to escape relegation. Goals from Dublin and Paul Williams gave Coventry a 2–1 win at White Hart Lane, while both Middlesbrough and Sunderland lost, and Coventry finished one point outside the relegation zone.
The following season the Sky Blues improved at home and enjoyed a season of mid table security. Dublin formed an impressive partnership with Darren Huckerby which not only produced some memorable goals but also propelled the Sky Blues to the FA Cup Sixth Round against Sheffield United; a game they narrowly lost in a penalty shoot out. The 1997–98 season also saw Dublin share elite status as the Premier League's top scorer with Blackburn's Chris Sutton and Liverpool's Michael Owen – each Englishman scoring 18 league goals. During this season, Blackburn manager Roy Hodgson tabled a bid which Dublin rejected. He remained at Highfield Road and contributed to Coventry's best finish to date in the Premiership (11th).
Aston Villa
Dublin was controversially excluded from the England 1998 FIFA World Cup squad, despite being the Premier League's joint top-scorer in the 1997–98 season, alongside Michael Owen and Chris Sutton. However, his exploits at club level were still attracting significant attention and in the autumn of 1998, he chose to move to Aston Villa for £5.75 million. In his first four games for the club, he would score seven goals including a memorable hat-trick against Southampton in only his second game for the Villa. As a result, he is one of only six players to score in the first four consecutive games for a Premier League club.
In December 1999, while playing for Aston Villa against Sheffield Wednesday, he sustained a life-threatening broken neck, as a result of which he permanently has a titanium plate holding three neck vertebrae together. Just days before suffering this injury, it was reported in the News of the World that Dublin would soon be sold by Aston Villa for a fee of around £6 million as the club looked to finance a fall in its share value as a result of manager John Gregory's heavy expenditure on players.
However, the injury did not end Dublin's career and he was back in action three months later.
In April 2000, a week after returning to the team, he helped Aston Villa reach their first FA Cup final in 43 years, which they lost 1–0 against Chelsea, scoring a penalty in the semi-final shoot-out against Bolton Wanderers. Having regained his fitness, Dublin remained on the Villa Park payroll until 2002.
Faced with competition for a first team place by Juan Pablo Ángel and Peter Crouch, Dublin spent several weeks on loan at First Division Millwall. In his time there, he scored two goals, against Stockport County, and Grimsby Town in five league matches to help them into the play-offs where despite Dublin's goal in the first leg of the semi final, Millwall lost to Birmingham City 2–1 on aggregate. Returning to Villa, he found himself again a first-choice striker, partnering Darius Vassell up front. Dublin was sent off at Villa Park for a headbutt on Robbie Savage in the Birmingham derby match, which ended 2–0 to Birmingham City.
Leicester City
When his contract expired in the summer of 2004, he was given a free transfer. He was signed by Leicester City, who had been relegated from the Premier League to the Championship. In his first season with the club, he scored only four goals in 38 competitive matches. During the 2005–06 season, Dublin lost his place as the team's main striker, but continued to appear as a defender. His contract at Leicester City was terminated by mutual consent on 30 January 2006.
Celtic
He was snapped up quickly by then Celtic manager Gordon Strachan, to cover for the loss of Chris Sutton, on a contract until the end of the season. At Celtic, Dublin achieved double success, with Scottish League Cup and Scottish Premier League winner's medals. On 19 March 2006, Dublin came on as a substitute and scored the final goal as Celtic defeated Dunfermline 3–0 to win the Scottish League Cup final, and also played enough matches with Celtic to merit a title medal. In the league, he made three league starts and eight substitute appearances for Celtic, scoring once against Kilmarnock on 9 April 2006 in a 4–1 win at Rugby Park. Despite one or two decent performances for the Parkhead outfit, Dublin was released by Strachan in May 2006.
Return to Norwich City
On 20 September 2006, Norwich City announced that Dublin had joined them until the end of the 2006–07 season. It marked a return, almost 20 years after leaving, for Dublin to the club where he began his career. He made his debut on 23 September 2006 when he came on as substitute against Plymouth Argyle. He scored his first competitive goal in Norwich City colours in a 3–3 draw against Queens Park Rangers on 14 October 2006 at Loftus Road. Steve Wilson cited Dublin as the main inspiration behind Norwich's 4–1 FA Cup 3rd Round win at Tamworth, in which the striker scored two goals and set up numerous chances for other teammates.
Dublin was an important figure in Norwich securing safety from relegation to League One and the supporters recognised his contribution by voting him in second place in the Norwich City player of the year award, and on 23 May 2007 he ended speculation about his future by signing a new one-year contract at Norwich, keeping him at the club until the end of the 2007–08 season. On 2 September 2007, while working as a pundit on a match between Aston Villa and Chelsea, Dublin said that this season would be his last as a professional footballer, citing the fact that his "bones have started to talk to him" as the reason, meaning that he did not think his body can handle another season.
In the spring of 2008, Dublin was approached by Jimmy Quinn, then manager of Cambridge United, about joining his old club for the 2008–09 season. However, the player would not change his mind about retiring. He was voted the club's Player of the Year and awarded the Barry Butler trophy on 26 April 2008 in his final season as a footballer, at his penultimate game, and on his final appearance at Carrow Road. Dublin played his final game on 4 May 2008, featuring in Norwich's 4–1 loss to Sheffield Wednesday in front of 36,208 fans at Hillsborough – the highest Championship attendance that season. When he was taken off in the 66th minute, Dublin received a standing ovation from both sets of supporters and players, and referee Mark Clattenburg.
International career
Dublin earned his first cap for England on 11 February 1998, playing the whole 90 minutes in the 2–0 friendly defeat to Chile at Wembley Stadium. In the run-up to the 1998 FIFA World Cup, Dublin played in the King Hassan II International Cup Tournament in May, starting in the 1–0 win against Morocco, and coming off the bench in 0–0 draw with Belgium, a game England lost on penalties. Despite showing good form and versatility throughout the season, including finishing joint top scorer in the Premier League with 18 goals, Glenn Hoddle included Les Ferdinand ahead of Dublin in his 22-man squad for the tournament in France. On 18 November, he started in the 2–0 friendly win against the Czech Republic at Wembley Stadium. This turned out to be Dublin's last cap for his country. He won four caps for England but did not score any goals.
Television career
Since retiring from football, Dublin has worked in the media as a pundit for Sky Sports. As well as appearing on Ford Super Sunday with Richard Keys, Dublin has commentated on a number of games including the UEFA Champions League games with Martin Tyler. He has also been a member of the panel on BBC Radio 5 Live's Fighting Talk. He has also co-presented 606 on BBC Radio 5 Live, Match of the Day 2 and was also a regular on BBC One's Late Kick Off in the East region. He joined Lucy Alexander and Martin Roberts on Homes Under the Hammer in 2015. In July 2021, Dublin returned to Cambridge United after being appointed as a director.
Also for the BBC, he has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
In August 2021 it was announced that Dublin would be a competitor on BBC's Celebrity MasterChef. He reached the final.
Personal life
Away from football, during his spell with Norwich, he invented a percussion instrument called The Dube, a form of cajón. In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene during a gig at the University of East Anglia.
In July 2021, Dublin was appointed as a club director at former club Cambridge United.
Honours
Cambridge United
Football League Third Division: 1990–91
Manchester United
Premier League: 1992–93
FA Charity Shield: 1994
Aston Villa
UEFA Intertoto Cup: 2001
Celtic
Scottish Premier League: 2005–06
Scottish League Cup: 2005–06
Individual
Premier League Golden Boot: 1997–98
Premier League Player of the Month: January 1998, November 1998
Coventry City Hall of Fame
References
External links
Career information at ex-canaries.co.uk
1969 births
Living people
Footballers from Leicester
English footballers
Association football forwards
Association football central defenders
Association football utility players
Norwich City F.C. players
Cambridge United F.C. players
Barnet F.C. players
Manchester United F.C. players
Coventry City F.C. players
Aston Villa F.C. players
Millwall F.C. players
Leicester City F.C. players
Celtic F.C. players
English Football League players
Premier League players
Scottish Premier League players
First Division/Premier League top scorers
England international footballers
English association football commentators
English television presenters
BBC people
FA Cup Final players
Cambridge United F.C. directors and chairmen
Black British sportspeople | false | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"Dion Dublin",
"Manchester United",
"When did he join Manchester United?",
"7 August 1992,",
"Why did he decide to play for Manchester United?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he play well during his time with Manchester United?",
"He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle"
] | C_21c5864bd2954ac7a5053b24f3f2b2bb_1 | Did he play after breaking his leg? | 5 | Did Dion Dublin play after breaking his leg in a game against Crystal Palace? | Dion Dublin | Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for PS1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers. He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League. In the 1993-94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through - this incident led directly to Kendall's resignation as Everton manager and Dublin ended up staying at Old Trafford until the end of the season. He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3-2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2-1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and shortly after the start of the 1994-95 season, he was sold to Coventry City for PS2 million. CANNOTANSWER | In the 1993-94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, | Dion Dublin (born 22 April 1969) is an English former professional footballer, television presenter and pundit. He is a club director of Cambridge United.
As a player he was a centre-forward, notably playing in the Premier League for Manchester United, Coventry City and Aston Villa. He also had spells in the Scottish Premiership with Celtic and in the Football League with Cambridge United, Barnet, Millwall, Leicester City and Norwich City. He was capped four times for England.
Following on from his retirement, Dublin moved into the entertainment business. He is also an amateur percussionist, and invented a percussion instrument called "The Dube". In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene in a gig at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, he joined the presenting team on the BBC One daytime show Homes Under the Hammer and has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
Club career
Norwich City
Born in Leicester, while at school Dublin played for several Leicestershire youth teams including Wigston Fields and Thurmaston Magpies. Dublin then went on to begin his professional footballing career with Norwich City after leaving school in 1985, but he never made a first-team appearance and was released from the club in 1988.
Cambridge United
In August 1988, he joined Cambridge United on a free transfer, as a centre-forward, which had been his position at Norwich City. However, due to injuries he had to make a number of appearances at centre-half. His prolific goalscoring helped United to successive promotions. During the 1988–89 season, Dublin was then loaned out for a short spell to Barnet. The 1989–90 season saw Cambridge promoted from the Fourth Division via the play-offs, when Dublin became the first ever scorer in a Wembley play-off final.
In the 1990–91 season, the club were champions of the Third Division, and the club also reached the quarter-final of the FA Cup in both seasons, with Dublin scoring at Arsenal in 1991. In the 1991–92 season, he played a big part in helping Cambridge to their highest ever finishing position in the football league, by finishing in fifth place in the last season of the old Second Division, but when Cambridge failed to win promotion to the top flight via the play-offs Dublin was put up for sale. He has since spoken many times of his affection for Cambridge United.
Manchester United
Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for £1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers.
He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992–93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory – 1–0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1–0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League.
In the 1993–94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by the successful partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through – this dispute sparked Kendall's resignation as manager. Dublin would remain a United player for another nine months, but never managed to claim a regular place in the first team.
He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3–2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April, his goal helping secure a vital victory in the title run-in during a spell when United started to drop points and Blackburn Rovers were closing in on them. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2–1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and in September 1994, he was sold to Coventry City for £2 million - a record signing for Coventry City at the time - and also one of the largest fees received by Manchester United.
Coventry City
In four-and-a-half years with Coventry, Dublin established himself as one of the Premier League's top strikers and during the 1997–98 season won the first of his four full England caps. That season, he equalled the Coventry City record for most goals in a top division season with 23 goals in all competitions.
Following Phil Neal's departure in 1995, the arrival of Ron Atkinson and Gordon Strachan would see Dublin fit into an attacking team in the typical Atkinson mould. It included the likes of Noel Whelan, John Salako and Darren Huckerby to add to the already attack minded Peter Ndlovu. The addition of Gary McAllister, following UEFA Euro 1996, should have provided mid-table stability but the team's defensive frailties often undermined Dublin's scoring at the other end. This culminated in possibly one of the greatest escapes in Premier League history in May 1997. Despite having won away to Liverpool (Dublin scoring in the dying seconds) and at home to Chelsea in their previous two games, Coventry City went into the final day second from bottom of the table, needing not only to beat Tottenham Hotspur away from home but also for results elsewhere in the league to go their way for them to escape relegation. Goals from Dublin and Paul Williams gave Coventry a 2–1 win at White Hart Lane, while both Middlesbrough and Sunderland lost, and Coventry finished one point outside the relegation zone.
The following season the Sky Blues improved at home and enjoyed a season of mid table security. Dublin formed an impressive partnership with Darren Huckerby which not only produced some memorable goals but also propelled the Sky Blues to the FA Cup Sixth Round against Sheffield United; a game they narrowly lost in a penalty shoot out. The 1997–98 season also saw Dublin share elite status as the Premier League's top scorer with Blackburn's Chris Sutton and Liverpool's Michael Owen – each Englishman scoring 18 league goals. During this season, Blackburn manager Roy Hodgson tabled a bid which Dublin rejected. He remained at Highfield Road and contributed to Coventry's best finish to date in the Premiership (11th).
Aston Villa
Dublin was controversially excluded from the England 1998 FIFA World Cup squad, despite being the Premier League's joint top-scorer in the 1997–98 season, alongside Michael Owen and Chris Sutton. However, his exploits at club level were still attracting significant attention and in the autumn of 1998, he chose to move to Aston Villa for £5.75 million. In his first four games for the club, he would score seven goals including a memorable hat-trick against Southampton in only his second game for the Villa. As a result, he is one of only six players to score in the first four consecutive games for a Premier League club.
In December 1999, while playing for Aston Villa against Sheffield Wednesday, he sustained a life-threatening broken neck, as a result of which he permanently has a titanium plate holding three neck vertebrae together. Just days before suffering this injury, it was reported in the News of the World that Dublin would soon be sold by Aston Villa for a fee of around £6 million as the club looked to finance a fall in its share value as a result of manager John Gregory's heavy expenditure on players.
However, the injury did not end Dublin's career and he was back in action three months later.
In April 2000, a week after returning to the team, he helped Aston Villa reach their first FA Cup final in 43 years, which they lost 1–0 against Chelsea, scoring a penalty in the semi-final shoot-out against Bolton Wanderers. Having regained his fitness, Dublin remained on the Villa Park payroll until 2002.
Faced with competition for a first team place by Juan Pablo Ángel and Peter Crouch, Dublin spent several weeks on loan at First Division Millwall. In his time there, he scored two goals, against Stockport County, and Grimsby Town in five league matches to help them into the play-offs where despite Dublin's goal in the first leg of the semi final, Millwall lost to Birmingham City 2–1 on aggregate. Returning to Villa, he found himself again a first-choice striker, partnering Darius Vassell up front. Dublin was sent off at Villa Park for a headbutt on Robbie Savage in the Birmingham derby match, which ended 2–0 to Birmingham City.
Leicester City
When his contract expired in the summer of 2004, he was given a free transfer. He was signed by Leicester City, who had been relegated from the Premier League to the Championship. In his first season with the club, he scored only four goals in 38 competitive matches. During the 2005–06 season, Dublin lost his place as the team's main striker, but continued to appear as a defender. His contract at Leicester City was terminated by mutual consent on 30 January 2006.
Celtic
He was snapped up quickly by then Celtic manager Gordon Strachan, to cover for the loss of Chris Sutton, on a contract until the end of the season. At Celtic, Dublin achieved double success, with Scottish League Cup and Scottish Premier League winner's medals. On 19 March 2006, Dublin came on as a substitute and scored the final goal as Celtic defeated Dunfermline 3–0 to win the Scottish League Cup final, and also played enough matches with Celtic to merit a title medal. In the league, he made three league starts and eight substitute appearances for Celtic, scoring once against Kilmarnock on 9 April 2006 in a 4–1 win at Rugby Park. Despite one or two decent performances for the Parkhead outfit, Dublin was released by Strachan in May 2006.
Return to Norwich City
On 20 September 2006, Norwich City announced that Dublin had joined them until the end of the 2006–07 season. It marked a return, almost 20 years after leaving, for Dublin to the club where he began his career. He made his debut on 23 September 2006 when he came on as substitute against Plymouth Argyle. He scored his first competitive goal in Norwich City colours in a 3–3 draw against Queens Park Rangers on 14 October 2006 at Loftus Road. Steve Wilson cited Dublin as the main inspiration behind Norwich's 4–1 FA Cup 3rd Round win at Tamworth, in which the striker scored two goals and set up numerous chances for other teammates.
Dublin was an important figure in Norwich securing safety from relegation to League One and the supporters recognised his contribution by voting him in second place in the Norwich City player of the year award, and on 23 May 2007 he ended speculation about his future by signing a new one-year contract at Norwich, keeping him at the club until the end of the 2007–08 season. On 2 September 2007, while working as a pundit on a match between Aston Villa and Chelsea, Dublin said that this season would be his last as a professional footballer, citing the fact that his "bones have started to talk to him" as the reason, meaning that he did not think his body can handle another season.
In the spring of 2008, Dublin was approached by Jimmy Quinn, then manager of Cambridge United, about joining his old club for the 2008–09 season. However, the player would not change his mind about retiring. He was voted the club's Player of the Year and awarded the Barry Butler trophy on 26 April 2008 in his final season as a footballer, at his penultimate game, and on his final appearance at Carrow Road. Dublin played his final game on 4 May 2008, featuring in Norwich's 4–1 loss to Sheffield Wednesday in front of 36,208 fans at Hillsborough – the highest Championship attendance that season. When he was taken off in the 66th minute, Dublin received a standing ovation from both sets of supporters and players, and referee Mark Clattenburg.
International career
Dublin earned his first cap for England on 11 February 1998, playing the whole 90 minutes in the 2–0 friendly defeat to Chile at Wembley Stadium. In the run-up to the 1998 FIFA World Cup, Dublin played in the King Hassan II International Cup Tournament in May, starting in the 1–0 win against Morocco, and coming off the bench in 0–0 draw with Belgium, a game England lost on penalties. Despite showing good form and versatility throughout the season, including finishing joint top scorer in the Premier League with 18 goals, Glenn Hoddle included Les Ferdinand ahead of Dublin in his 22-man squad for the tournament in France. On 18 November, he started in the 2–0 friendly win against the Czech Republic at Wembley Stadium. This turned out to be Dublin's last cap for his country. He won four caps for England but did not score any goals.
Television career
Since retiring from football, Dublin has worked in the media as a pundit for Sky Sports. As well as appearing on Ford Super Sunday with Richard Keys, Dublin has commentated on a number of games including the UEFA Champions League games with Martin Tyler. He has also been a member of the panel on BBC Radio 5 Live's Fighting Talk. He has also co-presented 606 on BBC Radio 5 Live, Match of the Day 2 and was also a regular on BBC One's Late Kick Off in the East region. He joined Lucy Alexander and Martin Roberts on Homes Under the Hammer in 2015. In July 2021, Dublin returned to Cambridge United after being appointed as a director.
Also for the BBC, he has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
In August 2021 it was announced that Dublin would be a competitor on BBC's Celebrity MasterChef. He reached the final.
Personal life
Away from football, during his spell with Norwich, he invented a percussion instrument called The Dube, a form of cajón. In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene during a gig at the University of East Anglia.
In July 2021, Dublin was appointed as a club director at former club Cambridge United.
Honours
Cambridge United
Football League Third Division: 1990–91
Manchester United
Premier League: 1992–93
FA Charity Shield: 1994
Aston Villa
UEFA Intertoto Cup: 2001
Celtic
Scottish Premier League: 2005–06
Scottish League Cup: 2005–06
Individual
Premier League Golden Boot: 1997–98
Premier League Player of the Month: January 1998, November 1998
Coventry City Hall of Fame
References
External links
Career information at ex-canaries.co.uk
1969 births
Living people
Footballers from Leicester
English footballers
Association football forwards
Association football central defenders
Association football utility players
Norwich City F.C. players
Cambridge United F.C. players
Barnet F.C. players
Manchester United F.C. players
Coventry City F.C. players
Aston Villa F.C. players
Millwall F.C. players
Leicester City F.C. players
Celtic F.C. players
English Football League players
Premier League players
Scottish Premier League players
First Division/Premier League top scorers
England international footballers
English association football commentators
English television presenters
BBC people
FA Cup Final players
Cambridge United F.C. directors and chairmen
Black British sportspeople | false | [
"The Liguilla () of the Primera División de México Apertura 2009 was a final mini-tournament involving eight teams of the Mexican Primera División, in an elimination two-legs playoff.\n\nThe final of the Liguilla was on Sunday December 13, between Cruz Azulagainst Monterrey. As the winner, Monterrey became the Apertura 2009 Champion. Also, both finalist got a berth for the 2010–11 CONCACAF Champions League (Monterreyqualified directly to the Group Stage, while Cruz Azulqualified to the Preliminary Round).\n\nDefending champions UNAM, were not able to defend their past championship, as they did not qualify to the Liguilla.\n\nTeams\n\nAs the 18 teams of the Apertura 2009 were divided in three groups of six teams, it was determined that the two top of each group advanced to the Liguilla, even though having had a low performance at the general table. Alongside those six teams, the two best teams at the general table of the remaining 12, regardless of their group, advanced to the Liguilla.\n\nAfter having finished last at their group and 17th at the general table, the defending champions, UNAM, did not qualified to this Liguilla\n\n1.Best ranked out of the two top of each group.\n2.Although having been 11th, as having been runner-up of Group 1, San Luisadvanced.\n\nTie-breaking criteria\nThe Liguilla has a particular tie-breaking criteria: In case of a tie in the aggregate score, the higher seeded team will advance.\n\nThe exception for this tie-breaking criteria is the final, where the higher seeded team rule is not used. In this case, if the teams remained tied after 90 minutes of play during the second leg of the finals, extra time will be used, followed by a penalty shootout if necessary.\n\nBracket\nThe Liguilla hade those teams play two games against each other on a home-and-away basis. The winner of each match up was determined by aggregate score.\n\nThe teams were seeded one to eight in quarterfinals, and re-seeded one to four in semifinals, depending on their position at the general table of the season. Higher seeded teams play on their home field during the second leg.\n\nAlso, the highest seeded can choose when, if Saturday or Sunday, they want to play the second leg. As the rules mention that one half of the matches must be on Wednesday/Saturday, and the other in Thursday/Sunday, the rest of the teams must suit on that choice. The only exception is the final, as it was set to be played at Thursday December 10 the first leg, and Sunday December 13 the second.\n\n1.Advanced by best position on the general table.\n\nQuarter-finals\nThe quarterfinals are scheduled to be played on November 21 or 22 (first leg) and November 28 or 29 (second leg).\n\n1.Advanced by best position on the general table.\n\nKickoffs are given in local time (UTC-6).\n\nFirst leg\n\nBefore the kickoff, a posthumous homage to Antonio de Nigris, who died on November 16, 2009, took place. He began his youth and senior career in Monterrey.\n\nSecond leg\n\nSemi-finals\nThe semifinals are scheduled to be played on December 2 or 3 (first leg) and December 5 or 6 (second leg).\n\nKickoffs are given in local time (UTC-6).\n\nFirst leg\n\nSecond leg\n\nFinal\n\nThe first and second legs of the final are scheduled to be played on December 10 (first leg) and December 13 (second leg).\n\nKickoffs are given in local time (UTC-6).\n\nFirst leg\n\nSecond leg\n\nGoalscorers\n4 goals\n\n Aldo de Nigris (Monterrey)\n Humberto Suazo (Monterrey)\n\n3 goals\n Nicolás Olivera (Puebla)\n\n2 goals\n\n Jaime Lozano (Cruz Azul)\n Carlos Ochoa (Santos Laguna)\n Cristian Riveros (Cruz Azul)\n Miguel Sabah (Morelia)\n Emanuel Villa (Cruz Azul)\n\n1 goal\n\n Alejandro Acosta (Puebla)\n Pablo Aguilar (San Luis)\n Jared Borgetti (Puebla)\n Isaác Brizuela (Toluca)\n Melvin Brown (Cruz Azul)\n Salvador Cabañas (América)\n Abraham Carreño (Monterrey)\n Alejandro Castro (Cruz Azul)\n Hugo Droguett (Morelia)\n Julio Domínguez (Cruz Azul)\n Héctor Mancilla (Toluca)\n Fausto Pinto (Cruz Azul)\n Javier Orozco (Cruz Azul)\n Mauricio Romero (Morelia)\n Sergio Santana (Monterrey)\n Wilson Tiago (Morelia)\n Gerardo Torrado (Cruz Azul)\n Nicolás Vigneri (Puebla)\n César Villaluz (Cruz Azul)\n\nOwn goal\n Emanuel Villa (Cruz Azul; for Monterrey)\n\nReferences\n\n2009–10 Primera División de México season",
"Melt van der Spuy Hanekom (27 July 1931 – 8 October 1997) was a South African rugby union player.\n\nPlaying career\nHanekom was born and raised in Moorreesburg. He played provincial rugby for and although he was the second choice hooker for Boland, after his teammate, Bertus van der Merwe, he was also selected for the Springboks.\n\nHanekom toured with the Springboks to Australia and New Zealand in 1956. During the second match on tour, he broke his leg, but he did not leave the field and finished the match with the broken leg. The broken leg kept him off the field for just three weeks, after which he resumed his tour. Hanekom did not play in any test matches, but did play in nine tour matches and scored three tries.\n\nSee also\nList of South Africa national rugby union players – Springbok no. 333\n\nReferences\n\n1931 births\n1997 deaths\nBoland Cavaliers players\nRugby union players from Moorreesburg\nSouth Africa international rugby union players\nSouth African rugby union players"
] |
[
"Dion Dublin",
"Manchester United",
"When did he join Manchester United?",
"7 August 1992,",
"Why did he decide to play for Manchester United?",
"I don't know.",
"Did he play well during his time with Manchester United?",
"He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle",
"Did he play after breaking his leg?",
"In the 1993-94 season, Dublin regained his fitness,"
] | C_21c5864bd2954ac7a5053b24f3f2b2bb_1 | Did he continue to play well after that? | 6 | Did Dion continue to play well after suffering a broken leg? | Dion Dublin | Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for PS1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers. He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992-93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory - 1-0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League. In the 1993-94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through - this incident led directly to Kendall's resignation as Everton manager and Dublin ended up staying at Old Trafford until the end of the season. He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3-2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2-1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and shortly after the start of the 1994-95 season, he was sold to Coventry City for PS2 million. CANNOTANSWER | He managed five league appearances that season, | Dion Dublin (born 22 April 1969) is an English former professional footballer, television presenter and pundit. He is a club director of Cambridge United.
As a player he was a centre-forward, notably playing in the Premier League for Manchester United, Coventry City and Aston Villa. He also had spells in the Scottish Premiership with Celtic and in the Football League with Cambridge United, Barnet, Millwall, Leicester City and Norwich City. He was capped four times for England.
Following on from his retirement, Dublin moved into the entertainment business. He is also an amateur percussionist, and invented a percussion instrument called "The Dube". In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene in a gig at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, he joined the presenting team on the BBC One daytime show Homes Under the Hammer and has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
Club career
Norwich City
Born in Leicester, while at school Dublin played for several Leicestershire youth teams including Wigston Fields and Thurmaston Magpies. Dublin then went on to begin his professional footballing career with Norwich City after leaving school in 1985, but he never made a first-team appearance and was released from the club in 1988.
Cambridge United
In August 1988, he joined Cambridge United on a free transfer, as a centre-forward, which had been his position at Norwich City. However, due to injuries he had to make a number of appearances at centre-half. His prolific goalscoring helped United to successive promotions. During the 1988–89 season, Dublin was then loaned out for a short spell to Barnet. The 1989–90 season saw Cambridge promoted from the Fourth Division via the play-offs, when Dublin became the first ever scorer in a Wembley play-off final.
In the 1990–91 season, the club were champions of the Third Division, and the club also reached the quarter-final of the FA Cup in both seasons, with Dublin scoring at Arsenal in 1991. In the 1991–92 season, he played a big part in helping Cambridge to their highest ever finishing position in the football league, by finishing in fifth place in the last season of the old Second Division, but when Cambridge failed to win promotion to the top flight via the play-offs Dublin was put up for sale. He has since spoken many times of his affection for Cambridge United.
Manchester United
Having seen Dublin in a cup tie, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson signed him for £1 million on 7 August 1992, fighting off competition from Chelsea and Everton. Dublin was something of a surprise purchase for United, after Ferguson had tried to sign Alan Shearer from Southampton but lost out to Blackburn Rovers.
He scored in United's fourth Premier League game of the 1992–93 season, a last minute winner in United's first Premier league victory – 1–0 against Southampton at The Dell. However, on 2 September, he suffered a broken leg against Crystal Palace in a 1–0 win at Old Trafford, after a tackle by Eric Young, and was out of action for six months. By the time he had recovered, however, United had signed Eric Cantona and the Frenchman was firmly established as first choice strike partner to Mark Hughes. United won the league that season for the first time since 1967, but Dublin failed to make the 10 Premier League appearances required to automatically gain a title winner's medal. However, he was given a medal as a result of special dispensation from the Premier League.
In the 1993–94 season, Dublin regained his fitness, but his first team chances were restricted by the successful partnership of Cantona and Hughes. In December 1993, Ferguson agreed a deal with Everton manager Howard Kendall, that would have seen Dublin moving to Goodison Park, but a member of Everton's board of directors, apparently feeling that Dublin was not worth the money Kendall had offered United, intervened to prevent the transfer going through – this dispute sparked Kendall's resignation as manager. Dublin would remain a United player for another nine months, but never managed to claim a regular place in the first team.
He managed five league appearances that season, scoring once in a 3–2 home win over Oldham Athletic in early April, his goal helping secure a vital victory in the title run-in during a spell when United started to drop points and Blackburn Rovers were closing in on them. He also managed a further goal in the Football League Cup second round first leg, as United were beaten 2–1 by Stoke City at the Victoria Ground. The goal against Oldham was the only competitive goal that Dublin scored for United at Old Trafford. He was left out of the FA Cup winning team, and failed to make enough appearances to merit another Premier League title winners medal, and in September 1994, he was sold to Coventry City for £2 million - a record signing for Coventry City at the time - and also one of the largest fees received by Manchester United.
Coventry City
In four-and-a-half years with Coventry, Dublin established himself as one of the Premier League's top strikers and during the 1997–98 season won the first of his four full England caps. That season, he equalled the Coventry City record for most goals in a top division season with 23 goals in all competitions.
Following Phil Neal's departure in 1995, the arrival of Ron Atkinson and Gordon Strachan would see Dublin fit into an attacking team in the typical Atkinson mould. It included the likes of Noel Whelan, John Salako and Darren Huckerby to add to the already attack minded Peter Ndlovu. The addition of Gary McAllister, following UEFA Euro 1996, should have provided mid-table stability but the team's defensive frailties often undermined Dublin's scoring at the other end. This culminated in possibly one of the greatest escapes in Premier League history in May 1997. Despite having won away to Liverpool (Dublin scoring in the dying seconds) and at home to Chelsea in their previous two games, Coventry City went into the final day second from bottom of the table, needing not only to beat Tottenham Hotspur away from home but also for results elsewhere in the league to go their way for them to escape relegation. Goals from Dublin and Paul Williams gave Coventry a 2–1 win at White Hart Lane, while both Middlesbrough and Sunderland lost, and Coventry finished one point outside the relegation zone.
The following season the Sky Blues improved at home and enjoyed a season of mid table security. Dublin formed an impressive partnership with Darren Huckerby which not only produced some memorable goals but also propelled the Sky Blues to the FA Cup Sixth Round against Sheffield United; a game they narrowly lost in a penalty shoot out. The 1997–98 season also saw Dublin share elite status as the Premier League's top scorer with Blackburn's Chris Sutton and Liverpool's Michael Owen – each Englishman scoring 18 league goals. During this season, Blackburn manager Roy Hodgson tabled a bid which Dublin rejected. He remained at Highfield Road and contributed to Coventry's best finish to date in the Premiership (11th).
Aston Villa
Dublin was controversially excluded from the England 1998 FIFA World Cup squad, despite being the Premier League's joint top-scorer in the 1997–98 season, alongside Michael Owen and Chris Sutton. However, his exploits at club level were still attracting significant attention and in the autumn of 1998, he chose to move to Aston Villa for £5.75 million. In his first four games for the club, he would score seven goals including a memorable hat-trick against Southampton in only his second game for the Villa. As a result, he is one of only six players to score in the first four consecutive games for a Premier League club.
In December 1999, while playing for Aston Villa against Sheffield Wednesday, he sustained a life-threatening broken neck, as a result of which he permanently has a titanium plate holding three neck vertebrae together. Just days before suffering this injury, it was reported in the News of the World that Dublin would soon be sold by Aston Villa for a fee of around £6 million as the club looked to finance a fall in its share value as a result of manager John Gregory's heavy expenditure on players.
However, the injury did not end Dublin's career and he was back in action three months later.
In April 2000, a week after returning to the team, he helped Aston Villa reach their first FA Cup final in 43 years, which they lost 1–0 against Chelsea, scoring a penalty in the semi-final shoot-out against Bolton Wanderers. Having regained his fitness, Dublin remained on the Villa Park payroll until 2002.
Faced with competition for a first team place by Juan Pablo Ángel and Peter Crouch, Dublin spent several weeks on loan at First Division Millwall. In his time there, he scored two goals, against Stockport County, and Grimsby Town in five league matches to help them into the play-offs where despite Dublin's goal in the first leg of the semi final, Millwall lost to Birmingham City 2–1 on aggregate. Returning to Villa, he found himself again a first-choice striker, partnering Darius Vassell up front. Dublin was sent off at Villa Park for a headbutt on Robbie Savage in the Birmingham derby match, which ended 2–0 to Birmingham City.
Leicester City
When his contract expired in the summer of 2004, he was given a free transfer. He was signed by Leicester City, who had been relegated from the Premier League to the Championship. In his first season with the club, he scored only four goals in 38 competitive matches. During the 2005–06 season, Dublin lost his place as the team's main striker, but continued to appear as a defender. His contract at Leicester City was terminated by mutual consent on 30 January 2006.
Celtic
He was snapped up quickly by then Celtic manager Gordon Strachan, to cover for the loss of Chris Sutton, on a contract until the end of the season. At Celtic, Dublin achieved double success, with Scottish League Cup and Scottish Premier League winner's medals. On 19 March 2006, Dublin came on as a substitute and scored the final goal as Celtic defeated Dunfermline 3–0 to win the Scottish League Cup final, and also played enough matches with Celtic to merit a title medal. In the league, he made three league starts and eight substitute appearances for Celtic, scoring once against Kilmarnock on 9 April 2006 in a 4–1 win at Rugby Park. Despite one or two decent performances for the Parkhead outfit, Dublin was released by Strachan in May 2006.
Return to Norwich City
On 20 September 2006, Norwich City announced that Dublin had joined them until the end of the 2006–07 season. It marked a return, almost 20 years after leaving, for Dublin to the club where he began his career. He made his debut on 23 September 2006 when he came on as substitute against Plymouth Argyle. He scored his first competitive goal in Norwich City colours in a 3–3 draw against Queens Park Rangers on 14 October 2006 at Loftus Road. Steve Wilson cited Dublin as the main inspiration behind Norwich's 4–1 FA Cup 3rd Round win at Tamworth, in which the striker scored two goals and set up numerous chances for other teammates.
Dublin was an important figure in Norwich securing safety from relegation to League One and the supporters recognised his contribution by voting him in second place in the Norwich City player of the year award, and on 23 May 2007 he ended speculation about his future by signing a new one-year contract at Norwich, keeping him at the club until the end of the 2007–08 season. On 2 September 2007, while working as a pundit on a match between Aston Villa and Chelsea, Dublin said that this season would be his last as a professional footballer, citing the fact that his "bones have started to talk to him" as the reason, meaning that he did not think his body can handle another season.
In the spring of 2008, Dublin was approached by Jimmy Quinn, then manager of Cambridge United, about joining his old club for the 2008–09 season. However, the player would not change his mind about retiring. He was voted the club's Player of the Year and awarded the Barry Butler trophy on 26 April 2008 in his final season as a footballer, at his penultimate game, and on his final appearance at Carrow Road. Dublin played his final game on 4 May 2008, featuring in Norwich's 4–1 loss to Sheffield Wednesday in front of 36,208 fans at Hillsborough – the highest Championship attendance that season. When he was taken off in the 66th minute, Dublin received a standing ovation from both sets of supporters and players, and referee Mark Clattenburg.
International career
Dublin earned his first cap for England on 11 February 1998, playing the whole 90 minutes in the 2–0 friendly defeat to Chile at Wembley Stadium. In the run-up to the 1998 FIFA World Cup, Dublin played in the King Hassan II International Cup Tournament in May, starting in the 1–0 win against Morocco, and coming off the bench in 0–0 draw with Belgium, a game England lost on penalties. Despite showing good form and versatility throughout the season, including finishing joint top scorer in the Premier League with 18 goals, Glenn Hoddle included Les Ferdinand ahead of Dublin in his 22-man squad for the tournament in France. On 18 November, he started in the 2–0 friendly win against the Czech Republic at Wembley Stadium. This turned out to be Dublin's last cap for his country. He won four caps for England but did not score any goals.
Television career
Since retiring from football, Dublin has worked in the media as a pundit for Sky Sports. As well as appearing on Ford Super Sunday with Richard Keys, Dublin has commentated on a number of games including the UEFA Champions League games with Martin Tyler. He has also been a member of the panel on BBC Radio 5 Live's Fighting Talk. He has also co-presented 606 on BBC Radio 5 Live, Match of the Day 2 and was also a regular on BBC One's Late Kick Off in the East region. He joined Lucy Alexander and Martin Roberts on Homes Under the Hammer in 2015. In July 2021, Dublin returned to Cambridge United after being appointed as a director.
Also for the BBC, he has appeared as a regular pundit for BBC Sport namely on Football Focus, Match of the Day or Final Score. He also occasionally provides co-commentary on live televised FA Cup games.
In August 2021 it was announced that Dublin would be a competitor on BBC's Celebrity MasterChef. He reached the final.
Personal life
Away from football, during his spell with Norwich, he invented a percussion instrument called The Dube, a form of cajón. In 2011, he accompanied Ocean Colour Scene during a gig at the University of East Anglia.
In July 2021, Dublin was appointed as a club director at former club Cambridge United.
Honours
Cambridge United
Football League Third Division: 1990–91
Manchester United
Premier League: 1992–93
FA Charity Shield: 1994
Aston Villa
UEFA Intertoto Cup: 2001
Celtic
Scottish Premier League: 2005–06
Scottish League Cup: 2005–06
Individual
Premier League Golden Boot: 1997–98
Premier League Player of the Month: January 1998, November 1998
Coventry City Hall of Fame
References
External links
Career information at ex-canaries.co.uk
1969 births
Living people
Footballers from Leicester
English footballers
Association football forwards
Association football central defenders
Association football utility players
Norwich City F.C. players
Cambridge United F.C. players
Barnet F.C. players
Manchester United F.C. players
Coventry City F.C. players
Aston Villa F.C. players
Millwall F.C. players
Leicester City F.C. players
Celtic F.C. players
English Football League players
Premier League players
Scottish Premier League players
First Division/Premier League top scorers
England international footballers
English association football commentators
English television presenters
BBC people
FA Cup Final players
Cambridge United F.C. directors and chairmen
Black British sportspeople | true | [
"Francis Prest McHugh (15 November 1925 – 21 February 2018) was an English first-class cricketer, who played three games for Yorkshire County Cricket Club in 1949, and 92 matches for Gloucestershire from 1952 to 1956.\n\nA right arm fast medium bowler, he took 276 wickets at an average of 24.84, with a best of 7 for 32 for Gloucestershire against his native county. He took five wickets in an innings fifteen times, and ten wickets in a match on four occasions.\n\nInitially McHugh was a distinctly fast bowler who came into the Yorkshire team with a major injury to Ron Aspinall who was heading the bowling averages early in 1949. He did modestly and with the presence of Coxon, Trueman and Appleyard, was discarded and did not play even in the Second Eleven in 1950. McHugh then went to Gloucestershire and upon qualifying he quickly found that his accuracy could only become of county standard when he moderated his pace. Consequently, McHugh became with George Lambert the best pace attack Gloucestershire – a county known for half a century for its near-exclusive reliance on spin bowling – had fielded to that point in the twentieth century. In 1954 he took ninety-two wickets for exactly twenty runs each, and in 1955 did almost as well with over seventy-five wickets, whilst in 1956 his average fell further to only nineteen runs a wicket.\n\nMcHugh's batting was consistently inept. His average of 2.63 is the lowest by anyone to play more than fifty first-class games. 66 of his 111 innings were scoreless (he was dismissed for a duck 38 times), and he reached double figures on only four occasions. It was probably the liability of his batting that caused Gloucestershire to discard him in favour of David Smith for the 1957 season: McHugh had suffered from illness during 1956, and did not play after June, but had bowled so well in his last-ever game with eleven wickets for 112 runs that he was expected to continue in 1957.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nCricinfo Profile\nCricket Archive Statistics\n\nYorkshire cricketers\nGloucestershire cricketers\nPeople from Burmantofts\nEnglish cricketers\n1925 births\n2018 deaths\nSportspeople from Yorkshire",
"Michael Pucillo (; born July 14, 1979) is a former American football player who played offensive guard in the National Football League.\n\nPucillo attended Auburn University and was a letterman in football. In football, he played offensive guard and center, started 25 games, and as a junior, he helped the team average 356.7 total yards per game.\n\nOn February 27, 2007, Pucillo re-signed with the Redskins in a 1-year contract worth $540,000 (veteran minimum).\n\nDue to an injury to Todd Wade, Pucillo got his first start at left guard during the preseason against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Head Coach Joe Gibbs said, \"With Todd being hurt, we gave him a chance to start and I thought he did very well. He continues to be a valuable guy because he can do so many things for you. He can play tight end for you in our [short yardage] package. He can back up Casey at center and now he has a chance to start at guard. So we have to continue to play that out. There's an example of someone seizing an opportunity and he gave it everything he's got. He has been impressive.\" However, the Redskins did not resign Pucillo after the 2007 season so he became a free agent.\n\nAmerican football offensive guards\nAuburn Tigers football players\nBuffalo Bills players\nCleveland Browns players\nPlayers of American football from Cleveland\nWashington Redskins players\n1979 births\nLiving people"
] |
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life"
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | Did Robinson play basketball? | 1 | Did David Robinson play basketball? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. | false | [
"Larry Robinson is an American former professional basketball player better known for his college career at the University of Texas at Austin between 1971 and 1974. Robinson was the first African-American to sign a National Letter of Intent to play basketball at Texas and is considered a pioneer of racial integration at the school, which at the time was mostly Caucasian and predominantly a football school. A native of Hobbs, New Mexico, he was unheralded for most of Hobbs High School career. Texas head coach Leon Black recruited him however, and Robinson enrolled in the fall of 1970.\n\nDue to NCAA rules at the time, freshmen were not eligible to play varsity sports, so Robinson was forced to play on the Texas freshmen basketball team in 1970–71. In the three years that followed, Robinson etched his name into the Longhorns record book. As a sophomore, Robinson led Texas to a Southwest Conference championship and NCAA Tournament appearance, where they made it to the Sweet Sixteen. He was named to the all-conference first-team as well as being voted as the Southwest Conference Player of the Year. As a junior, Texas did not win the conference nor get a postseason invitation. In Robinson's final year (1973–74), he once again led the Longhorns to a conference championship and NCAA Tournament appearance, where they lost in the first round. He earned his second all-conference team and conference player of the year honors. Robinson finished his collegiate career with 1,377 points and 623 rebounds.\n\nHe was selected in the 1974 NBA draft by the Houston Rockets in the fourth round, 59th overall, but never played in the league. Robinson instead played in Europe and spent 10 years in Sweden where he was a star, at one point averaging over 35 points per game for a season. In his post-basketball life, Robinson spent a long time as an executive for Converse in Europe. He was inducted into the University of Texas Hall of Honor in 1989.\n\nReferences\n\nLiving people\nAmerican expatriate basketball people in Sweden\nAmerican men's basketball players\nBasketball players from New Mexico\nForwards (basketball)\nHobbs High School alumni\nHouston Rockets draft picks\nPeople from Hobbs, New Mexico\nTexas Longhorns men's basketball players\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nAlviks BK players",
"Sozhasingarayer Robinson , also widely known as simply S. Robinson (born 23 June 1980 in Pondicherry, India) is a professional Indian basketball player. He currently plays for the Tamil Nadu Basketball Team which competes in the India National Cup.\n\nCareer overview\nSozhasingarayer Robinson, born in Pondicherry, grew up in Gujarat, India. A standout athlete in India, Robinson started to gain international media attention when he led India with 36 points to a surprise victory at the 2004 FIBA Asia Stanković Cup against South Korea, a regular competitor for the title at international tournaments in Asia.\n\nFor unknown reasons, he did not take the offer to play professionally in New Zealand in 2006, following extraordinary performances against the Tall Blacks. In that same year he was banned from representing his state's basketball team for missing its training camp. Robinson is known as being extremely outspoken as he severely criticized the lack of support for India's national basketball team from which he retired in 2006 only to try a comeback a little later. Robinson is one of the most well known figures in Indian basketball. Altogether, he played professional in basketball for the following teams:\n 2003-04 Negar sang Sharekord \n 2004 Indian Overseas Bank Chennai \n 2004 Farsh Mashad \n 2005 Tamil Nadu \n 2005-06 Indian Overseas Bank Chennai \n 2006 offer sheet Auckland Stars , never played\n 2010 Indian Army\n\nAchievements\n 2001, 2005-06 India national basketball team\n 2010: Ramu Memorial Basketball Tournament (RMBT) MVP\n\nReferences\n\n1980 births\nLiving people\nCenters (basketball)\nIndian men's basketball players\nPeople from Gujarat\nPeople from Pondicherry\nPower forwards (basketball)\nYoung Cagers players\nSportspeople from Puducherry",
"Mike Robinson, Jr. (born December 31, 1976) is a retired American professional basketball player and a high school basketball coach. He played professionally for teams in the United States and Argentina.\n\nRobinson graduated from Richwoods High School in Peoria, Illinois, as a three time all-state selection and the Gatorade Player of the Year for the Midwest in 1996. Robinson would score 2,944 career points and play in the McDonald's All-American game. \n\nRobinson attended Purdue University, when he played basketball on two Sweet 16 teams and one Elite 8 squad in March Madness during his four years. His college scoring total was 1,322. After graduating from Purdue, Robinson competed professionally both in the United States and Argentina. \n\nIn 2018 Robinson won a state championship as a high school coach in Virginia, leading the South County Stallions to the Class 6 title. Robinson is married to Michelle Duhart who played for the 1999 champion Purdue women's basketball team.\n\nReferences\n\n1976 births\nLiving people\nAmerican expatriate basketball people in Argentina\nAmerican men's basketball players\nBasketball players from Illinois\nGuards (basketball)\nHigh school basketball coaches in Virginia\nParade High School All-Americans (boys' basketball)\nPurdue Boilermakers men's basketball players\nSportspeople from Peoria, Illinois"
] |
|
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life",
"Did Robinson play basketball?",
"Robinson is well known as a philanthropist."
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | How did he get started? | 2 | How did David Robinson get started? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named | false | [
"How Did This Get Made? is a comedy podcast on the Earwolf network hosted by Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas.\n\nGenerally, How Did This Get Made? is released every two weeks. During the show's off-week, a \".5\" episode is uploaded featuring Scheer announcing the next week's movie, as well as challenges for the fans. In addition to the shows and mini-shows, the How Did This Get Made? stream hosted the first three episodes of Bitch Sesh, the podcast of previous guests Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider, in December 2015. It has also hosted episodes of its own spin-off podcast, the How Did This Get Made? Origin Stories, in which Blake Harris interviews people involved with the films covered by the main show. In December 2017, an episode was recorded for the Pee Cast Blast event, and released exclusively on Stitcher Premium.\n\nEvery episode has featured Paul Scheer as the host of the podcast. The only episode to date in which Scheer hosted remotely was The Smurfs, in which he Skyped in. Raphael has taken extended breaks from the podcast for both filming commitments and maternity leave. Mantzoukas has also missed episodes due to work, but has also Skyped in for various episodes. On the occasions that neither Raphael nor Mantzoukas are available for live appearances, Scheer calls in previous fan-favorite guests for what is known as a How Did This Get Made? All-Stars episode.\n\nList of episodes\n\nMini episodes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n List of How Did This Get Made? episodes\n\nHow Did This Get Made\nHow Did This Get Made",
"How Did This Get Made? (HDTGM) is a podcast on the Earwolf network. It is hosted by Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas. Each episode, which typically has a different guest, features the deconstruction and mockery of outlandish and bad films.\n\nFormat\nThe hosts and guest make jokes about the films as well as attempt to unscramble plots. After discussing the film, Scheer reads \"second opinions\" in the form of five-star reviews posted online by Amazon.com users. The hosts also often make recommendations on if the film is worth watching. The show is released every two weeks.\n\nDuring the show's off week a \".5\" episode (also known as a \"minisode\") is uploaded. These episodes feature Scheer's \"explanation hopeline\" where he answers questions from fans who call in, the movie for the next week is announced, Scheer reads corrections and omissions from the message board regarding last week's episode, and he opens fan mail and provides his recommendations on books, movies, TV shows etc. that he is enjoying.\n\nSome full episodes are recorded in front of a live audience and include a question and answer session and original \"second opinion\" theme songs sung by fans. Not all content from the live shows is included in the final released episode - about 30 minutes of each live show is edited out.\n\nHistory\nHow Did This Get Made? began after Scheer and Raphael saw the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Later, the pair talked to Mantzoukas about the movie and joked about the idea for starting a bad movie podcast. , Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has never been covered on the podcast.\n\nAwards\nIn 2019, How Did This Get Made? won a Webby Award in the category of Podcasts – Television & Film.\n\nIn 2020, How Did This Get Made? won an iHeartRadio award in the category of Best TV & Film Podcast.\n\nIn 2022, How Did This Get Made? won an iHeartRadio award in the category of Best TV & Film Podcast.\n\nSpinoffs\n\nHow Did This Get Made?: Origin Stories\nBetween February and September 2017, a 17-episode spin-off series of the podcast was released. Entitled How Did This Get Made?: Origin Stories, author Blake J. Harris would interview people involved with the movies discussed on the podcast. Guests on the show included director Mel Brooks, who served as executive producer on Solarbabies, and screenwriter Dan Gordon, who wrote Surf Ninjas.\n\nUnspooled\nIn May 2018, Scheer began a new podcast with Amy Nicholson titled Unspooled that is also devoted to movies. Unlike HDTGM?, however, Unspooled looks at films deemed good enough for the updated 2007 edition of the AFI Top 100. This is often referenced in How Did This Get Made? by Mantzoukas and Raphael, who are comically annoyed at how they were not invited to host the podcast, instead being subjected to the bad films that HDTGM covers.\n\nHow Did This Get Played?\nIn June 2019, the Earwolf network launched the podcast How Did This Get Played?, hosted by Doughboys host Nick Wiger and former Saturday Night Live writer Heather Anne Campbell. The podcast is positioned as the video game equivalent of HDTGM?, where Wiger and Campbell review widely panned video games.\n\nEpisodes\n\nAdaptation\nThe program was adapted in France in 2014 under the title 2 heures de perdues (http://www.2hdp.fr/ and available on Spotify and iTunes), a podcast in which several friends meet to analyze bad films in the same style (mainly American, French, and British films). The show then ends with a reading of comments found on AlloCiné (biggest French-speaking cinema website) or Amazon.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n How Did This Get Made on Earwolf\n\nAudio podcasts\nEarwolf\nFilm and television podcasts\nComedy and humor podcasts\n2010 podcast debuts",
"\"How U Get a Record Deal?\" is the lead single released from Big Daddy Kane's fifth studio album, Looks Like a Job For.... The song is notable for being one of the first singles to be produced by the popular production duo, the Trackmasters.\n\nThough the song did not reach the crossover success that its follow-up, \"Very Special\", achieved, it became his sixth top ten hit on the Billboard Hot Rap Singles chart, peaking at number seven.\n\nSingle track listing\n\nA-Side\n\"How U Get a Record Deal?\" (Album Version) – 3:56\n\"How U Get a Record Deal?\" (Clean Radio Edit) – 3:56\n\"How U Get a Record Deal?\" (A cappella) – 3:19\n\nB-Side\n\"Here Comes Kane, Scoob and Scrap\" (Album Version) – 4:24\n\"Here Comes Kane, Scoob and Scrap\" (Instrumental) – 4:23\n\"How U Get a Record Deal?\" (Instrumental) – 3:56\n\nChart history\n\n1993 songs\n1993 singles\nBig Daddy Kane songs\n[[Category:Song recordings produced by Trackmasters\nWarner Records singles\nSongs written by Big Daddy Kane\nCold Chillin' Records singles"
] |
|
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life",
"Did Robinson play basketball?",
"Robinson is well known as a philanthropist.",
"How did he get started?",
"In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named"
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | Did he had any help starting this academy? | 3 | Did David Robinson have any help starting the Carver Academy in San Antonio? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. | false | [
"Enock Asubonteng (born 27 October 2000) is a Ghanaian footballer who currently plays as a midfielder for Ghana Premier League side WAFA.\n\nCareer \nAsubonteng started his career with West African Football Academy in August 2018. He made his debut during the 2019 GFA Normalization Special Competition. He played his first match on 10 April 2019 after coming on in the 76th minute for Michael Danso Agyemang in a 2–1 home victory over Karela United. He was named on the bench for a couple of matches during the truncated 2019–20 season but he however did not make any appearances. With the league set to restart, he was named on the club's squad list for the 2020–21 season. At the start of the season, he assumed a major role within the side, starting in matches week in and week out.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n2000 births\nLiving people\nGhanaian footballers\nAssociation football midfielders\nWest African Football Academy players\nGhana Premier League players",
"The 2020–21 EFL Trophy, known as the Leasing.com Trophy before 28 October 2020 and later the Papa John's Trophy for sponsorship reasons, was the 37th season in the history of the competition, a knock-out tournament for English football clubs in League One and League Two of the English football system, and also including 16 Premier League and Championship \"Academy teams\" with Category One status.\n\nSalford City were the defending champions; however, the 2020 final was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic until the day prior to the 2021 final. Hence, for most of the tournament, Portsmouth (who won the 2019 final and were also in the 2020 final) were the most recent champions.\n\nSunderland won the trophy for the first time after beating Tranmere Rovers 1–0 in the final.\n\nParticipating clubs\n48 clubs from League One and League Two.\n16 invited Category One Academy teams.\nExpelled clubs were automatically eliminated from the tournament.\nCategory One teams relegated to League One missed out on having academies participate in the following tournament.\n\nFour Premier League clubs with Category One academies did not participate: Burnley and Crystal Palace, both in their first full season of Category One status, and Everton and Tottenham Hotspur, who both played in the previous year's competition but declined to participate in this one. A fifth Premier League club's academy, Sheffield United, did not have Category One status. As a result, the academy of Championship-side Norwich City was invited instead.\n\nEligibility criteria for players\nFor EFL clubs\nMinimum of four qualifying outfield players in their starting XI. A qualifying outfield player was one who met any of the following requirements:\nAny player who started the previous or following first-team fixture.\nAny player who was in the top 10 players at the club who had made the most starting appearances in league and domestic cup competitions that season.\nAny player with forty or more first-team appearances in their career.\nAny player on loan from a Premier League club or any EFL Category One Academy club.\nA club could play any eligible goalkeeper in the competition.\n\nCompetition format\nGroup stage\n Sixteen groups of four teams were organised on a regionalised basis.\n All groups included one invited club.\n All clubs played each other once, either home or away (Academies played all group matches away from home).\n Clubs were awarded three points for a win and one point for a draw.\n In the event of a drawn game (after 90 minutes), a penalty shoot-out was held with the winning team earning an additional point.\n Clubs expelled from the EFL were knocked out of the tournament automatically.\n The top two teams progressed to the knockout stage.\n\nKnockout stage\n Round 2 and 3 of the competition were drawn on a regionalised basis.\n In Round 2, the group winners were seeded and the group runners-up were unseeded in the draw.\n In Round 2, teams who played in the same group as each other in the group stage were kept apart from each other.\n\nGroup stage\n\nNorthern Section\n\nGroup A\n\nGroup B\n\nGroup C\n\nGroup D\n\nGroup E\n\nGroup F\n\nGroup G\n\nGroup H\n\nSouthern Section\n\nGroup A\n\nGroup B\n\nGroup C\n\nGroup D\n\nGroup E\n\nGroup F\n\nGroup G\n\nGroup H\n\nRound 2\n\nNorthern section\n\nSouthern section\n\nRound 3\n\nNorthern section\n\nSouthern section\n\nQuarter-finals\n\nSemi-finals\n\nFinal\n\nReferences\n\nEFL Trophy\n2020–21 European domestic association football cups\n2020–21 English Football League",
"Jeremy Michael Allen (born 11 June 1971) is a former Australian cricketer. From Perth, Allen represented Western Australia at both under-17 and under-19 level, and played grade cricket for Subiaco–Floreat. A regular player for the state second XI from the early 1990s, he did not make his senior debut until the 1994–95 season, playing a Mercantile Mutual Cup match against Queensland. On debut at the WACA Ground, he took 3/62 from his ten overs to help Western Australia win by a single run. Despite this performance, Allen did not play any further limited-overs matches for Western Australia, with the state fast-bowling attack including established players Sean Cary, Craig Coulson, and Brendan Julian. His only other match at state level came during the 1996–97 season of the Sheffield Shield. In what was to be his only first-class match, he failed to take a wicket against Tasmania, but did score 30 runs batting tenth in Western Australia's second innings. Although he attended the Australian Cricket Academy in 1996, Allen spent the rest of his career in minor competitions.\n\nReferences\n\n1971 births\nAustralian cricketers\nLiving people\nCricketers from Perth, Western Australia\nWestern Australia cricketers\nSportsmen from Western Australia"
] |
|
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life",
"Did Robinson play basketball?",
"Robinson is well known as a philanthropist.",
"How did he get started?",
"In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named",
"Did he had any help starting this academy?",
"Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes."
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | What other aspects of his personal life are relevant? | 4 | Besides donating 10% of profits to charitable causes, what other aspects of David Robinson's personal life are relevant? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. | false | [
"Sexual function is how the body reacts in different stages of the sexual response cycle, or as a result of sexual dysfunction. Relevant aspects of sexual function are defined on the basis of a modified version of Masters and Johnson's work. The aspects of sexual function defined as being relevant to the assessment include sexual desire, erection, orgasm and ejaculation. Guidelines for assessing sexual function are suggested and divided into four stages:\n\nStage 1 deals with the documentation of the defined aspects of sexual function. The main questions are: \nIs the function intact? For example: Have there been any occurrences of erections or orgasms during a given period of time? \nIf the function is intact, what is the frequency and/or intensity of the function? For example: How often has the person had an orgasm or erections during the given period of time and how intense is the orgasmic pleasure and erection stiffness compared to youth or the best period in life. The suggested explanations for the absence or waning of functions at this stage are physiological and psychological.\n\nStage 2 deals with the assessment of the frequency of different sexual activities, such as intercourse, within a given time frame. The possible explanations for an absence or a decreased frequency of sexual activities may include physiological, psychological, social, religious and ethical reasons.\n\nStage 3 it is estimated if or to what extent waning sexual functions and/or activities cause distress.\n\nStage 4, the association between the distress due to waning sexual function and well-being and emotional isolation is assessed.\n\nThese guidelines were constructed to assess male sexual function in relation with treatment for prostate cancer. However, the concept has been modified and adapted for females.\n\nSee also\nSexual dysfunction\nOrgastic potency\n\nReferences\n\nSexual health\nHuman sexuality",
"The structure of observed learning outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy is a model that describes levels of increasing complexity in students' understanding of subjects. It was proposed by John B. Biggs and Kevin F. Collis.\n\nThe model consists of five levels of understanding:\n Pre-structural – The task is not attacked appropriately; the student hasn't really understood the point and uses too simple a way of going about it. Students in the pre-structural stage of understanding usually respond to questions with irrelevant comments.\n Uni-structural – The student's response only focuses on one relevant aspect. Students in the uni-structural stage of understanding usually give slightly relevant but vague answers that lack depth.\n Multi-structural – The student's response focuses on several relevant aspects but they are treated independently and additively. Assessment of this level is primarily quantitative. Students in the multi-structural stage may know the concept in tidbits but don't know how to present or explain it. \n Relational – The different aspects have become integrated into a coherent whole. This level is what is normally meant by an adequate understanding of some topic. At the relational stage, students can identify various patterns & view a topic from distinct perspectives.\n Extended abstract – The previous integrated whole may be conceptualised at a higher level of abstraction and generalised to a new topic or area. At this stage, students may apply the classroom concepts in real life.\n\nSee also\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding (short-film about Constructive Alignment and The SOLO Taxonomy)\n\nEducational technology\nEducational classification systems\nStage theories",
"\"My Pedagogic Creed\" is an article written by John Dewey and published in School Journal in 1897. The article is broken into 5 sections, with each paragraph beginning \"I believe.\" It has been referenced over 4100 times and continues to be referenced in recent publications as a testament to the lasting impact of the article's ideas.\n\nSummary of John Dewey's My Pedagogic Creed\n\nWhat education is\nAccording to John Dewey's article \"My Pedagogic Creed\" (1897), education is only as individual as our society allows it to be. We (people) are unconsciously trained from birth. Our social consciousness, our cultural ways and what we value are a mock up of a collective social being, according to Dewey. We are all a product of our social surroundings from birth through adulthood and death. Eventually we \"become an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization.\" Dewey exerts that individual best is achieved in the spirit of and for the greater good. \"Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs.\" As a member of society, we are confined to language and its meanings, but also empowered by it.\n\nDewey believes that \"the educational process has two sides.\" Psychological and sociological impacts are two sides of the education process that go hand-in-hand; \"neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following.\" Psychology provides the foundation of education while sociology provides the scenario. Unless what is taught and how we teach relates to students' lives, it can become stressful. Even good grades are not indicative of authentic learning. Students may become disenfranchised. Psychology and social dynamics must exist in conjunction with each other to create a truly internal experience. It is important to know what is happening in the world-at-large, according to Dewey. One must also look at the student's world to ensure success relevant to their own realm of accomplishment. \"We must also be able to project them into the future to see what their outcome and end will be.\" Dewey holds that we must look into the individual future of every student and see what their own outlook is and how we can get there—not a collective outlook defined by blanket societal expectations of success by every person. Dewey states, \"To know what a power really is we must know what its end, use, or function is.\" In sum, a student cannot achieve power over their future until they know what their future can be. Teachers cannot prepare students for a future we cannot foretell as a result of ever-changing technology. People can truly prepare for the future by empowering students. In Dewey's words, \"To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself.\" Hands-on learning that utilizes the senses and capacity of the student creates the most success, intrinsically and externally. Dewey believes \"that the individual who is to be educated as a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals.\" Demonstration of this success shows a psychological process. Utilizing the skills derived from effective psychological learning, social factors can be successfully recognized and addressed.\n\nWhat the school is\nEducation is a social process. According to the creed, it should not be used for the purposes of preparation for living in the future. Dewey said, \"I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.\" We can build a child's self-esteem in not only the classroom but in all aspects of his or her life. Education must always stay true to children and align with their reality in order to be true. Dewey argues that some children are over labeled and misunderstood because we take away authentic experiences by not relating education to natural human order. More importantly he emphasizes, \"Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction….and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.\"\n\nDewey believes that education and school ought to be an extension of home. Personal background is psychological and gives way to new ideas. This is summed up in the quote, \"It is the business of the school to deepen and extend his sense of the values bound up in his home life.\" In schools currently, the information is given, lessons are learned and habits are formed, similar to the banking model of education criticised by Paulo Freire in his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Dewey states that this is not effective. Working together is vital to unity and success. He states, \"The present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral meanings.\"\nWe need to see school as a social experience, according to this creed. The teacher is the guide and chooses what relevant experience will guide each child through the education process. When it comes to assessment, Dewey states that grading should be relevant to the child's own progress. Exams are to be used for social ordering rather than individual upkeep.\n\nThe subject-matter of education\nFollowing suit with his other theories, Dewey believes that subject matter should reflect students' real lives. Schools focus on too many subjects, which may not reflect the students' actual experiences. The child's own activities should determine curriculum. For example, students are often given literature lessons at the beginning of the learning experience, when it is the sum of events, making the subject relevant for the end of learning; This gives the student time to shape his or her own views before being told how history or some one else has seen something. It should be given at the end as a summative reflection. \n\nWe need to let children be constructive and pave their own paths, according to Dewey. \"I believe that the only way to make a child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those fundamental types of activity which makes civilization what it is.\" Dewey takes on a constructive point of view. He says that at times vocations may be more relevant and should be main subjects. In order to learn formal subjects, students need to be relaxed. Dewey explains that in order to achieve that, they must be comfortable with what they have learned up to that point. All subjects are relevant to life.\n\nThe nature of method\n Dewey asserts that active participation far surpasses passive learning. Action must come before anything else. We create children's negative perceptions of school. Ideas come from movement. Symbols give an inaccurate and incomplete view of the big picture. They impact the student's ability to think authentically.\n Envisioning the message helps with retention. Imagery is so important in generating relevancy to one's life.\n It is the teacher's job to pay attention to student's blooming interests and expand on them for a one of a kind learning experience. Interest is power and we must harbor that interest.\n Welcome emotions in education. They are part of the important aspects of learning.\n\nThe school and social progress\nIn Dewey's words, \"education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.\" Social consciousness shapes individual perceptions. Society also has an obligation to reform education. As a society we are responsible for one another. \"I believe it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective instrument of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.\" Education is the perfect combination of art and science. Dewey sees that we must use individuality for the greater good. Dewey recognizes that teaching is noble and selfless. Teachers show us our way.\n\nReferences\n\nPedagogy\nCritical pedagogy\nPhilosophy of education"
] |
|
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life",
"Did Robinson play basketball?",
"Robinson is well known as a philanthropist.",
"How did he get started?",
"In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named",
"Did he had any help starting this academy?",
"Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes.",
"What other aspects of his personal life are relevant?",
"The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque."
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 5 | Other than the David Robinson Plaque, are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged | false | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts",
"This article is about the demographic features of the population of Saint Mary's, including population density, internet access, crime rate, and other aspects of the population.\n\nPopulation \nAccording to the 2011 census the population of Saint Mary was 7,341.\n\nOther demographics statistics (2011)\n\nCensus Data (2011)\n\nIndividual\n\nHousehold \nThere are 2,512 households in Saint Mary Parish.\n\nSee also\nDemographics of Antigua and Barbuda\n\nReferences\n\nAntigua and Barbuda Christians\nDemographics of Antigua and Barbuda"
] |
|
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life",
"Did Robinson play basketball?",
"Robinson is well known as a philanthropist.",
"How did he get started?",
"In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named",
"Did he had any help starting this academy?",
"Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes.",
"What other aspects of his personal life are relevant?",
"The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged"
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | Who encouraged him to become a Christian? | 6 | Who encouraged David Robinson to become a Christian? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. | false | [
"Saint John of Senhout is an Egyptian saint from the 4th century AD.\n\nHe was born in the Egyptian city of Senhout. His father's name was Macarius and his mother's name was Anna. According to Coptic Orthodox manuscripts, a divine inspiration encouraged him to travel to the city of Athribis to confess his Christian faith and become a martyr. The city's governor tortured him, then sent him to Ansena, where he was further tortured and eventually decapitated on 8 Pashons.\n\nThe body of John of Senhout was shrouded by Julius of Akfahs, who also sent the body to Senhout, where it was placed in the city's church. Today, the saint's relics are in Shubra El Khiema, Egypt.\n\nSources\nCoptic Synexarion\n\n4th-century Christian saints\nSaints from Roman Egypt\nEgyptian torture victims",
"Christian Frederik Carl Holm (18 February 1804, Copenhagen – 24 July 1846, Tivoli) was a Danish painter; known primarily for his animal and hunting scenes.\n\nBiography\nHis father was a goldsmith. As an only son, he was expected to follow his father's profession, but after arriving at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, decided to become an artist instead. He began by studying engraving with Johan Frederik Clemens, then did modeling, but eventually settled on being a painter. In 1823, he exhibited copies of paintings by Frans Pourbus the Younger, which he had seen at the Rijksmuseum.\n\nTwo years later, he won a silver medal and was studying with Christian David Gebauer. At first, he wanted to become a battle painter but, owing to a long period of peace, had no opportunity to observe a battle in person. Gebauer then encouraged him to become an animal painter, but he persisted with his plans and presented his interpretations of historical events, such as the Battle of Lützen and the Battle of Colberger Heide. The latter was purchased for the Royal Collection. \n\nIn 1829, he was granted money from the \"\", a fund devoted to supporting the arts and sciences. This was meant to support him for two years but, in 1830, the second half was withheld due to lack of productivity. Nevertheless, he went to Dresden and Munich (apparently at his own expense) and took Gebauer's advice; producing his first serious animal paintings. In 1832, he married Rosalie Petit (1807-1873) and settled in Munich.\n\nIt was there that his career took hold; beginning with the sale of a large painting depicting a reindeer hunt to the prominent Jenisch family of Hamburg. He made several visits to Rome, beginning in 1838, and moved his family there in 1845. Shortly after, King Christian VIII ordered several paintings from him; some of which were not exhibited until after his death.\n\nHe apparently overworked himself in the hot summer sun and developed a fever. He died several days later, watched over by his wife and his friend, Albert Küchler, a painter who later became a Catholic friar. After the burial, his widow Rosalie returned to Copenhagen with their children and took up engraving, which Christian had taught her.\n\nReferences\n\nOther sources\nChristian Holm from Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers @ Google Books.\n Christian Holm. In: Ulrich Thieme, Felix Becker: Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Vol.17, E. A. Seemann, Leipzig 1924, pg.387.\n\nExternal links \n\nArtNet: More works by Holm.\n\n1804 births\n1846 deaths\nRoyal Danish Academy of Fine Arts alumni\n19th-century Danish painters\nDanish male painters\nAnimal paintings\nDanish emigrants to Germany\nArtists from Copenhagen\n19th-century male artists",
"Grace Community School is an inter-denominational Christian school in Delaware, Ohio and offers Kindergarten-twelfth grades.\n\nMission\n\nThe school's mission is \"to assist Christian families in their biblical responsibility to train their children to become Christ-like and to fulfill God's purpose for these children in their home, their church, and society.\"\n\nHistory\n\nEstablished in 2006, Grace Community School is directed by a parent-based school board. Parental involvement is strongly encouraged through PTF meetings and regular school \"family\" functions.\n\nExternal links\n\nPrivate elementary schools in Ohio\nEducation in Delaware County, Ohio"
] |
|
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life",
"Did Robinson play basketball?",
"Robinson is well known as a philanthropist.",
"How did he get started?",
"In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named",
"Did he had any help starting this academy?",
"Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes.",
"What other aspects of his personal life are relevant?",
"The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged",
"Who encouraged him to become a Christian?",
"became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible."
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | What happened after 1991? | 7 | What happened to David Robinson after 1991? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. | false | [
"What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy",
"What Happened may refer to:\n\n What Happened (Clinton book), 2017 book by Hillary Clinton\n What Happened (McClellan book), 2008 autobiography by Scott McClellan\n \"What Happened\", a song by Sublime from the album 40oz. to Freedom\n \"What Happened\", an episode of One Day at a Time (2017 TV series)\n\nSee also\nWhat's Happening (disambiguation)",
"Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books"
] |
|
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life",
"Did Robinson play basketball?",
"Robinson is well known as a philanthropist.",
"How did he get started?",
"In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named",
"Did he had any help starting this academy?",
"Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes.",
"What other aspects of his personal life are relevant?",
"The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged",
"Who encouraged him to become a Christian?",
"became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible.",
"What happened after 1991?",
"Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991."
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | Did he have any children with her? | 8 | Did David Robinson have any children with Valerie Hoggatt? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | They have three sons, | false | [
"Else Hansen (Cathrine Marie Mahs Hansen) also called de Hansen (1720 – 4 September 1784), was the royal mistress of king Frederick V of Denmark. She is his most famous mistress and known in history as Madam Hansen, and was, alongside Charlotte Amalie Winge, one of only two women known to have been long term lovers of the king.\n\nLife\n\nThe background of Else Hansen does not appear to be known. Tradition claims her to be the sister of Frederick's chamber servant Henrik Vilhelm Tillisch, who in 1743 reportedly smuggled in his sister to the king at night, but modern research does not support them to be the same person.\n\nRoyal mistress\nIt is not known exactly when and how Hansen became the lover of the king. Frederick V was known for his debauched life style. According to Dorothea Biehl, the king was known to participate in orgies or 'Bacchus parties', in which he drank alcohol with his male friends while watching female prostitutes stripped naked and danced, after which the king would sometime beat them with his stick and whip them after having been intoxicated by alcohol. These women where economically compensated, but none of them seem to have had any status of a long term mistress, nor did any of the noblewomen and maids-of-honors, which according to rumors where offered to the king by their families in hope of advantages but simply married of as soon as they became pregnant without any potential relationship having been anything but a secret. The relationship between the king and Else Hansen was therefore uncommon.\n\nElse Hansen gave birth to five children with the king between 1746 and 1751, which is why the affair is presumed to have started in 1746 at the latest and ended in 1751 at the earliest. At least her three younger children where all born at the manor Ulriksholm on Funen, a manor owned by Ulrik Frederik von Heinen, brother-in-law of the de facto ruler of Denmark, the kings favorite Adam Gottlob Moltke, who likely arranged the matter. The manor was named after the royal Ulrik Christian Gyldenlove, illegitimate son of a previous king. The king's children with Hansen where baptized in the local parish church near the manor, where they were officially listed as the legitimate children of the wife of a non existent man called \"Frederick Hansen, ship writer from Gothenburg to China\". The frequent trips to Ulriksholm by Hansen as soon as her pregnancies with the king became evident was publicly noted. Neither Else Hansen nor any other of the king's mistresses where ever any official mistress introduced at the royal court, nor did they have any influence upon state affairs whatever, as politics where entrusted by the king to his favorite Moltke.\n\nIn 1752, the relationship between the king and Hansen may have ended – in any case, it was not mentioned more or resulted in any more children. She settled in the property Kejrup near Ulriksholm with her children, officially with the status of \"widow of the late sea captain de Hansen\".\n\nLater life\nAfter the death of Frederick in 1766, she acquired the estate Klarskov on Funen. She sold Klarskov and moved to Odense in 1768. In 1771, however, she bought Klarskov a second time and continued to live there until her death.\n\nHer children were not officially recognized, but unofficially they were taken care of by the royal court: her daughters were given a dowry and married to royal officials and the sons careers where protected, and her grandchildren where also provided with an allowance from the royal house.\n\nAfter Hansen, the king did not have any long term mistress until Charlotte Amalie Winge (1762–66).\n\nLegacy\nAt Frederiksborgmuseet, there are three paintings of Hansen by Jens Thrane the younger from 1764. Hansen is known by Dorothea Biehl's depiction of the decadent court life of Frederick V.\n\nIssue \nHer children were officially listed with the father \"Frederick Hansen, sea captain\".\nFrederikke Margarethe de Hansen (1747–1802)\nFrederikke Catherine de Hansen (1748–1822)\nAnna Marie de Hansen (1749–1812)\nSophie Charlotte de Hansen (1750–1779)\nUlrik Frederik de Hansen (1751–1752)\n\nSources\n Charlotte Dorothea Biehl, Interiører fra Frederik V's Hof, udgivet af Louis Bobé.\n Aage Christens, Slægten de Hansen, 1968.\n\nReferences\n\n1720 births\n1784 deaths\nMistresses of Danish royalty\n18th-century Danish people\n18th-century Danish women landowners\n18th-century Danish landowners",
"Magalene Wilson (1898–2001), also known as Magdalene Wilson, was an American artist. She is associated with the Gee's Bend quilting collective. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and is included in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.\n\nLife \nWilson was close friends with Martha Jane Pettway and Loretta Pettway's grandmother Prissy. She did not have any children. She owned her land and frequently let her neighbors farm on it. She was generous with her neighbors and owned many cats. \n\nShe retired to a community in Mobile, Alabama, but remained self-sufficient and independent.\n\nWork \nAlthough her friends and neighbors often quilted communally, Wilson pieced and sewed her quilts by herself. This allowed her the space and time to quilt meticulously and with tremendous detail.\n\nReferences \n\n1898 births\n2001 deaths\nQuilters\nAmerican centenarians\nWomen centenarians",
"Nathalie Morin is a Canadian citizen, born in Quebec, who has been living in Saudi Arabia with her partner, Saeed Al Shahrani since 2005. She claims that she is physically and psychologically mistreated with her four children. She has stated that she \"does not have any friend[s]\" in Saudi Arabia and is shunned because of her foreign roots. She refuses to leave Saudi Arabia as her husband has custody of their children.\n\nShe has become famous in Quebec. Journalists follow her misfortunes regularly. In 2012, the Canadian and Saudi Arabian governments came reportedly close to a deal, but a solution did not materialise. A Saudi Arabian writer and political activist, Wajeha al-Huwaider, also tried to help her, but without any success so far.\n\nDespite the launch of an-anti domestic violence campaign in Saudi Arabia in 2013, brutally oppressive patriarchal laws allowed Morin to leave the kingdom, but without her children. Two prominent Saudi activists Wajeha Al-Huwaider and Fawzia Al-Oyouni came in support of Morin, but were arrested. Morin's wish to testify in front of her activists was also not granted by the Saudi authorities. As per Morin's mother, three of the four children were born in Saudi Arabia forcefully. She also said Morin is cut off from the world, locked in an apartment in Dammam, victim of physical, psychological and sexual violence from her spouse.\n\nReferences\n\nWomen in Saudi Arabia\nCanadian expatriates in Saudi Arabia\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)"
] |
|
[
"David Robinson (basketball)",
"Personal life",
"Did Robinson play basketball?",
"Robinson is well known as a philanthropist.",
"How did he get started?",
"In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named",
"Did he had any help starting this academy?",
"Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes.",
"What other aspects of his personal life are relevant?",
"The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged",
"Who encouraged him to become a Christian?",
"became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible.",
"What happened after 1991?",
"Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991.",
"Did he have any children with her?",
"They have three sons,"
] | C_79438020b4f9467cb8af40777cdf4790_0 | Did they remain married? | 9 | Did David Robinson and Valerie Hoggatt remain married? | David Robinson (basketball) | Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. Corey attends Notre Dame and was a member of the football team, playing wide receiver, before ending his playing career on medical advice prior to what would have been his senior season in 2016 due to multiple concussions. He will remain very active on campus in his final undergraduate year, having been elected in February 2016 as student body president for the 2016-17 school year. Justin, a 6'8" (2.03 m) forward in basketball and a two-time all-state selection in Texas, has attended Duke since August 2015. He was initially recruited to the Duke team as a "preferred walk-on" with the opportunity to eventually earn a scholarship, but was placed on scholarship before his arrival at Duke. Robinson identifies his religious affiliation as Christian. Robinson has stated that he became a Christian on June 8, 1991 after being encouraged to read the Bible. In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school's day-to-day activities. In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better "understand how businesses work and how to build them.". Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | false | [
"Tanner v Tanner [1975] 1 WLR 1346 is an English land law and family law case, concerning implied licenses and constructive trusts in land between cohabiting couples with children.\n\nFacts\nMr Tanner, ‘milkman by day and a croupier by night’, got involved with Miss Macdermott while still married, she had twins girls in 1969 and changed her name to Mrs Tanner, though he never married her. She moved in with him in 1970, giving up her rent controlled tenancy hoping she would remain there until the twins left school. Mr Tanner did divorce his first wife, but then married another woman, and offered Mrs Tanner £4000 to leave, and maintenance that he had not previously paid. She refused. He brought an action to remove her, and succeeded at first instance. She left, and went to a council flat, but appealed, arguing that he was under a contractual duty to allow her to remain until the twins left school, although she merely claimed damages.\n\nJudgment\nLord Denning MR held that the licence could not be terminated, so that Miss Macdermott was entitled to remain in the house. He said as follows.\n\nSee also\n\nEnglish trusts law\nEnglish land law\nEnglish family law\n\nNotes\n\nEnglish land case law\nCourt of Appeal (England and Wales) cases\n1975 in British law\n1975 in case law\nLord Denning cases",
"Baumbast and R v Secretary of State for the Home Department (2002) C-413/99 is an EU law case, concerning the free movement of citizens in the European Union.\n\nFacts\nMr Baumbast's Colombian family claimed their residence should be renewed by the Home Office, despite the fact that Mr Baumbast was no longer working in the EU and did not have emergency health insurance. Mr Baumbast, a German married a Colombian with two children. He worked in the UK with his family for three years, and left to work in Asia and Africa. He provided for his family, who stayed in the UK. They got German health insurance and went there to get it. The Home Office refused to renew his family's permits. The UK court found that Mr Baumbast was neither a worker nor a person covered by the Citizenship Directive 2004/38, and that sickness insurance did not cover emergency treatment in the UK. The ECJ was asked whether he had an independent right of residence as an EU citizen under TFEU art 21.\n\nIn a joined case, R were the children of an American woman and a French husband who worked in the UK. They were divorced, the children living with the mother.\n\nJudgment\nThe Court of Justice held that Mr Baumbast and his family were not a burden on the UK state, so it would be disproportionate to refuse to recognise his Treaty-based right of residence simply because sickness insurance did not cover emergency treatment. The children in the R case were entitled to remain, to carry on their education, because there would otherwise be an obstacle to free movement. Furthermore, the mother had a right to remain, because Regulation 492/11, read in the light of ECHR art 8, 'necessarily implies' that the children are accompanied by their primary carer, even if the carer does not have independent rights under EU law. (Now Citizens' Rights Directive Article 12(3).)\n\nSee also\n\nEuropean Union law\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nCourt of Justice of the European Union case law",
"In law, an allegation is a claim of an unproven fact by a party in a pleading, charge, or defense. Until they can be proved, allegations remain merely assertions.\n\nThere are also marital allegations: marriage bonds and allegations exist for couples who applied to marry by licence. They do not exist for couples who married by banns. The marriage allegation was the document in which the couple alleged (or most frequently just the groom alleged on behalf of both of them) that there were no impediments to the marriage.\n\nGenerally, in a civil complaint, a plaintiff alleges facts sufficient to establish all the elements of the claim and thus states a cause of action. The plaintiff must then carry the burden of proof and the burden of persuasion in order to succeed in the lawsuit.\n\nA defendant can allege affirmative defenses in its answer to the complaint.\n\nOther allegations are required in a pleading to establish the correct jurisdiction, personal jurisdiction and subject matter jurisdiction.\n\nDisjunctive allegations\nDisjunctive allegations are allegations in a pleading joined together by an \"or\". In a complaint, disjunctive allegations are usually per se defective because such a pleading does not put the party on notice of which allegations they must defend.\n\nOn the other hand, defendants often plead in the alternative by listing seemingly inconsistent defenses. For example, \"I did not do the crime\", \"if I did, I didn't know\", or \"even if I did know, I've got a good excuse\". Such a pleading may be considered disjunctive and may be permissible.\n\nSee also\n Accusation\n False accusation\n Reasonable doubt\n\nReferences\n\nLegal terminology"
] |
|
[
"Sean Combs",
"1999-2000: Forever and Club New York"
] | C_27f904dddde64598977b78eea9c44ed0_1 | What did Sean Combs do at that time? | 1 | What did Sean Combs do between 1999-2000? | Sean Combs | In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs' highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs' attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said that the matter was "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". CANNOTANSWER | In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. | Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher.
Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010).
Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004.
Early life
Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old.
Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry.
Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address.
Career
1990–1996: Career beginnings
Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died.
In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade.
1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out
In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla.
The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs.
1999–2000: Forever and Club New York
In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class.
Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country.
On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun.
With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties".
2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues
Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001).
He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001).
In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang.
In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show.
2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play
On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005.
Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city".
In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud.
Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix".
In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders.
In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell.
2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting
Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season.
Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol.
On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love"
On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015.
In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting.
On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada.
On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all.
In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020.
Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020.
Business career
Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million.
Sean John
In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003.
Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers."
Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped.
In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection.
Other ventures
Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company.
In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.
Personal life
Family
Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship.
Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018.
Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007.
Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018.
Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car.
Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million.
Charity work and honors
Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools.
In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored.
In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition.
Wardrobe style
Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend."
Religious views
Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God."
On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech.
In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture."
Discography
Studio albums
No Way Out (1997)
Forever (1999)
The Saga Continues... (2001)
Press Play (2006)
Awards and nominations
NAACP Image Awards
|-
| 2009
| A Raisin in the Sun
| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special
|
|-
| 2011
| Diddy – Dirty Money
| Outstanding Duo or Group
|
|}
BET Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2002 || "Bad Boy for Life" || rowspan="2" | Video of the Year ||
|-
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" ||
|-
| 2003 || "Bump, Bump, Bump" || Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2007 || "Last Night" || Best Collaboration ||
|-
| Diddy || Best Male Hip-Hop Artist ||
|-
| 2010 || rowspan="3" | Diddy – Dirty Money || rowspan="4" | Best Group ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 ||
|-
| 2016 || Puff Daddy and the Family ||
|}
BET Hip Hop Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2008 || "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." || Track of the Year ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2009 ||
|-
| rowspan="4" | 2010 || "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Reese's Perfect Combo Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" ||
|-
| Best Club Banger ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 || rowspan="2" | "Same Damn Time (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2013 ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2017 ||
|}
MTV Europe Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="4" | 1997 || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || MTV Select ||
|-
| Best Song ||
|-
| rowspan="8" | Sean Combs || Best New Act ||
|-
| Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1998 || Best Male ||
|-
| rowspan="5" | Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| 1999 ||
|-
| 2001 ||
|-
| 2002 ||
|-
| 2006 ||
|-
| 2011 || Diddy – Dirty Money || Best World Stage Performance ||
|}
MTV Movie & TV Awards
|-
| 2018 || Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story || Best Music Documentary ||
|}
MTV Video Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || Best R&B Video ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| rowspan="3" | || rowspan="2" | "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) || Video of the Year ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| "Come with Me" || Best Video from a Film ||
|-
| || "Bad Boy for Life" || Best Rap Video ||
|}
Grammy Awards
!Ref.
|-
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" | 1998
| Puff Daddy
| Best New Artist
|
| rowspan="7"|
|-
| No Way Out
| rowspan="2"|Best Rap Album
|
|-
| Life After Death (as producer)
|
|-
| "Honey" (as songwriter)
| Best Rhythm & Blues Song
|
|-
| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112)
| rowspan="7"|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group
|
|-
| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase)
|
|-
| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase)
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2000
| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2002
| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2003
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2004
| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2016
| "All Day" (as songwriter)
| Best Rap Song
|
|
|}
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Other awards
In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame.
Filmography
Made (2001)
Monster's Ball (2001)
2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006)
Seamless (2005)
Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005)
A Raisin in the Sun (2008)
CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009)
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
I'm Still Here (2010)
Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011)
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012)
Draft Day (2014)
Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
Black-ish (TV series) (2015)
Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017)
The Defiant Ones (2017)
Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021)
Tours
No Way Out Tour (1997–1998)
Forever Tour (2000)
References
Sources
External links
1969 births
20th-century American businesspeople
20th-century American male musicians
20th-century American rappers
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male musicians
21st-century American rappers
Actors from Mount Vernon, New York
African-American businesspeople
African-American designers
African-American fashion designers
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American male rappers
African-American record producers
American chairpersons of corporations
American chief executives in the media industry
American chief executives of fashion industry companies
American corporate directors
American cosmetics businesspeople
American dance musicians
American drink industry businesspeople
American fashion businesspeople
American fashion designers
American film producers
American hip hop record producers
American landlords
American male film actors
American male rappers
American male television actors
American marketing businesspeople
American mass media owners
American music industry executives
American music publishers (people)
American music video directors
American philanthropists
American restaurateurs
American retail chief executives
American television company founders
American television executives
Bad Boy Records artists
Businesspeople from New York City
East Coast hip hop musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners for rap music
Howard University alumni
Living people
Male actors from New York City
Music video codirectors
Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York
Participants in American reality television series
People from Harlem
Pop rappers
Rappers from Manhattan
Record producers from New York (state)
Remixers | false | [
"\"Workin\" is a song written by and performed by American rapper Sean \"Puff Daddy\" Combs. It was released on October 15, 2015 as the first single of Combs' mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch). The album version of the track contains guest verses from Big Sean and Travis Scott.\n\nMusic video \nThe music video directed by Hype Williams. The video was released on November 23, 2015 at Vevo and YouTube.\n\nTrack listing \nDigital download\n\"Workin\" — 3:04\n\nRemixes \nOn November 23, 2015, Combs' released a remix of the song also featuring Travis Scott and Big Sean at Vevo and YouTube account.\n\nReferences\n\n2015 songs\n2015 singles\nSean Combs songs\nBig Sean songs\nBad Boy Records singles\nSongs written by Sean Combs\nSongs written by Cyhi the Prynce",
"\"Doin' This\" is a song by American country music singer Luke Combs, It was released on November 10, 2021, via River House and Columbia Nashville after he debuted the song on the CMA Awards, and after it charted from unsolicited airplay for several months, it was announced as the lead single to his upcoming third studio album with a radio adds date of February 7, 2022. Combs co-wrote the song with Drew Parker and Robert Williford, and produced it with Chip Matthews and Jonathan Singleton.\n\nBackground\nCombs released \"Doin' This\" after he performed at the 2021 CMA Awards. In a press release, Combs stated that regardless how much money or success he had, singing and songwriting was \"always the plan for his life\": \"There was never a plan B. Once I decided that this is what I was gonna do, it's what I was gonna do whether that was at this level or at the level that I was at when I started. Music is the thing that I think makes everybody who does what I do's blood pump and gets them out of bed in the morning, and just to be able to do that and write a song about it that you feel like genuinely can connect with some of your peers is really cool\".\n\nContent\nJon Freeman of Rolling Stone described the song as \"an ode to making music regardless of any fame or riches\". Tricia Despres of Taste of Country stated that the lyrics means \"whether he was playing in some no-name town or on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, Combs would be doing exactly this: Playing music for all who will listen\".\n\nMusic video\nTA Films created the music video for \"Doin' This.\" The video takes a \"behind the scenes\" approach, with a director asking Combs \"If you could be doing anything, what would you be doing if you weren't doing this?\" The question prompts Combs to \"recall a time when a journalist asked him the very same question during an interview\". Combs then goes on to tease a stadium tour and introduce his friend Adam Church, who will be joining him on his tour. Church, who is also a country music singer, attended Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina with Combs and McLonghorn. Combs stated to Taste of Country that Church is \"a married father with an ordinary 9 to 5 kind of job who also fills up bars in western Carolina. He's a pretty big deal in Boone, N.C\". The other parts show \"the life of a small-town guy who never made it big\", who, at the end of the video, \"winds up sitting on his couch with his acoustic guitar and playing a show for two VIPS — his wife and young daughter\" before Combs \"welcomes him out onto a big stage to perform with him\".\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2021 singles\n2021 songs\nLuke Combs songs\nSongs written by Luke Combs\nColumbia Nashville Records singles"
] |
[
"Sean Combs",
"1999-2000: Forever and Club New York",
"What did Sean Combs do at that time?",
"In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records."
] | C_27f904dddde64598977b78eea9c44ed0_1 | Did Sean Combs release any albums during that time frame? | 2 | Did Sean Combs release any albums during 1999-2000? | Sean Combs | In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs' highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs' attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said that the matter was "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". CANNOTANSWER | Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, | Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher.
Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010).
Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004.
Early life
Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old.
Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry.
Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address.
Career
1990–1996: Career beginnings
Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died.
In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade.
1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out
In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla.
The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs.
1999–2000: Forever and Club New York
In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class.
Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country.
On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun.
With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties".
2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues
Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001).
He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001).
In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang.
In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show.
2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play
On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005.
Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city".
In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud.
Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix".
In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders.
In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell.
2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting
Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season.
Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol.
On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love"
On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015.
In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting.
On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada.
On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all.
In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020.
Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020.
Business career
Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million.
Sean John
In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003.
Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers."
Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped.
In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection.
Other ventures
Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company.
In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.
Personal life
Family
Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship.
Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018.
Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007.
Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018.
Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car.
Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million.
Charity work and honors
Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools.
In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored.
In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition.
Wardrobe style
Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend."
Religious views
Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God."
On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech.
In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture."
Discography
Studio albums
No Way Out (1997)
Forever (1999)
The Saga Continues... (2001)
Press Play (2006)
Awards and nominations
NAACP Image Awards
|-
| 2009
| A Raisin in the Sun
| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special
|
|-
| 2011
| Diddy – Dirty Money
| Outstanding Duo or Group
|
|}
BET Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2002 || "Bad Boy for Life" || rowspan="2" | Video of the Year ||
|-
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" ||
|-
| 2003 || "Bump, Bump, Bump" || Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2007 || "Last Night" || Best Collaboration ||
|-
| Diddy || Best Male Hip-Hop Artist ||
|-
| 2010 || rowspan="3" | Diddy – Dirty Money || rowspan="4" | Best Group ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 ||
|-
| 2016 || Puff Daddy and the Family ||
|}
BET Hip Hop Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2008 || "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." || Track of the Year ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2009 ||
|-
| rowspan="4" | 2010 || "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Reese's Perfect Combo Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" ||
|-
| Best Club Banger ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 || rowspan="2" | "Same Damn Time (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2013 ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2017 ||
|}
MTV Europe Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="4" | 1997 || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || MTV Select ||
|-
| Best Song ||
|-
| rowspan="8" | Sean Combs || Best New Act ||
|-
| Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1998 || Best Male ||
|-
| rowspan="5" | Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| 1999 ||
|-
| 2001 ||
|-
| 2002 ||
|-
| 2006 ||
|-
| 2011 || Diddy – Dirty Money || Best World Stage Performance ||
|}
MTV Movie & TV Awards
|-
| 2018 || Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story || Best Music Documentary ||
|}
MTV Video Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || Best R&B Video ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| rowspan="3" | || rowspan="2" | "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) || Video of the Year ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| "Come with Me" || Best Video from a Film ||
|-
| || "Bad Boy for Life" || Best Rap Video ||
|}
Grammy Awards
!Ref.
|-
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" | 1998
| Puff Daddy
| Best New Artist
|
| rowspan="7"|
|-
| No Way Out
| rowspan="2"|Best Rap Album
|
|-
| Life After Death (as producer)
|
|-
| "Honey" (as songwriter)
| Best Rhythm & Blues Song
|
|-
| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112)
| rowspan="7"|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group
|
|-
| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase)
|
|-
| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase)
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2000
| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2002
| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2003
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2004
| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2016
| "All Day" (as songwriter)
| Best Rap Song
|
|
|}
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Other awards
In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame.
Filmography
Made (2001)
Monster's Ball (2001)
2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006)
Seamless (2005)
Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005)
A Raisin in the Sun (2008)
CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009)
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
I'm Still Here (2010)
Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011)
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012)
Draft Day (2014)
Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
Black-ish (TV series) (2015)
Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017)
The Defiant Ones (2017)
Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021)
Tours
No Way Out Tour (1997–1998)
Forever Tour (2000)
References
Sources
External links
1969 births
20th-century American businesspeople
20th-century American male musicians
20th-century American rappers
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male musicians
21st-century American rappers
Actors from Mount Vernon, New York
African-American businesspeople
African-American designers
African-American fashion designers
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American male rappers
African-American record producers
American chairpersons of corporations
American chief executives in the media industry
American chief executives of fashion industry companies
American corporate directors
American cosmetics businesspeople
American dance musicians
American drink industry businesspeople
American fashion businesspeople
American fashion designers
American film producers
American hip hop record producers
American landlords
American male film actors
American male rappers
American male television actors
American marketing businesspeople
American mass media owners
American music industry executives
American music publishers (people)
American music video directors
American philanthropists
American restaurateurs
American retail chief executives
American television company founders
American television executives
Bad Boy Records artists
Businesspeople from New York City
East Coast hip hop musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners for rap music
Howard University alumni
Living people
Male actors from New York City
Music video codirectors
Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York
Participants in American reality television series
People from Harlem
Pop rappers
Rappers from Manhattan
Record producers from New York (state)
Remixers | false | [
"Phenomenon is the seventh studio album by rapper LL Cool J. After the success of his previous release Mr. Smith, the same basic principles are followed here, with several R&B-influenced tracks, and a couple of more hardcore rap tracks. The album was certified Platinum, unlike Mr. Smith, which was certified 2x Platinum. The album is executively produced by Sean \"Puffy\" Combs and therefore features production from his in-house roster of producers The Hitmen.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nChart positions\n\nCertifications\n\nCredits\n Marketing: David A. Belgrave\n\nReferences\n\n1997 albums\nLL Cool J albums\nDef Jam Recordings albums\nAlbums produced by Sean Combs\nAlbums produced by Erick Sermon\nAlbums produced by Trackmasters",
"Usher is the eponymous debut studio album by American singer Usher. It was released on August 30, 1994, by LaFace Records. As executive producer, Sean \"Puffy\" Combs mostly handled production work on the album, as additional production were provided by Chucky Thompson, DeVante Swing and Al B. Sure!, among others. Despite it underperforming on charts, debuting at number 167 on the US Billboard 200, the album did reach number 4 on the US Heatseekers Albums Chart. The release of the album was accompanied by the support of three singles: \"Can U Get wit It\", \"Think of You\" and \"The Many Ways\".\n\nCritical reception\n\nBilly Johnson Jr. of Yahoo! Music called the debut album \"an enjoyable ride.\" Anderson Jones of Entertainment Weekly in a less-than-enthusiastic review of the album called the songs \"sophomoric\" and \"remarkably dull.\"\n\nCommercial performance\nUsher debuted at number 167 on the US Billboard 200 chart. The album has sold over 200,000 copies in the United States to date.\n\nTrack listing\n\nNotes\n denotes co-producer\nSample credits\n \"I'll Make It Right\" contains a sample from \"Top Billin'\" (1987) by Audio Two.\n \"Slow Love\" contains a sample from \"The Show\" (1985) by Doug E. Fresh.\n \"I'll Show You Love\" contains a sample from \"Blind Man Can See It\" (1973) by James Brown.\n \"Final Goodbye\" contains a sample from \"Nobody Beats the Biz\" (1988) by Biz Markie.\n\nPersonnel\nInformation taken from Allmusic.\n\nAssistant engineering – Daniel Beroff\nDrums – Alexander Richbourg\nEngineering – Al B. Sure!, Charles \"Prince Charles\" Alexander, Bob Brockman, Larry Funk, Gerhard Joost, Tony Maserati, Brian Alexander Morgan, Nasheim Myrick, Rob Paustian\nExecutive production – Sean \"Puffy\" Combs, L.A. Reid\nGuitar – Darryl Pearson\nKeyboards – Herb Middleton\nMixing – Charles \"Prince Charles\" Alexander, Bob Brockman, Sean \"Puffy\" Combs, David Dachinger, DeVante Swing, Rob Paustian, John Shrive\n\nMulti-instruments – DeVante Swing, Brian Alexander Morgan, Tim Mosley, Darryl Pearson\nPhotography – Michael Benabib\nProduction – Al B. Sure!, Sean \"Puffy\" Combs, Ward Corbett, DeVante Swing, Edward \"Eddie F\" Ferrell, Kiyamma Griffin, Dave Hall, Isaiah Lee, Brian Alexander Morgan, Darryl Pearson, Alexander Richbourg\nSongwriting – Ward Corbett\nVocals – Usher\nBackground vocals – Darren Benbow, Mary Brown, Faith Evans, Dave Hollister, Crystal Johnson, Darryl Pearson, Laquentis Saxon, Usher, Levar \"Lil' Tone\" Wilson\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n Usher at Discogs\n\n1994 debut albums\nAlbums produced by Sean Combs\nLaFace Records albums\nUsher (musician) albums"
] |
[
"Sean Combs",
"1999-2000: Forever and Club New York",
"What did Sean Combs do at that time?",
"In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records.",
"Did Sean Combs release any albums during that time frame?",
"Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999,"
] | C_27f904dddde64598977b78eea9c44ed0_1 | What was Sean Combs record label during that time? | 3 | What was Sean Combs record label during 1999-2000? | Sean Combs | In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs' highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs' attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said that the matter was "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". CANNOTANSWER | Bad Boy Records | Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher.
Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010).
Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004.
Early life
Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old.
Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry.
Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address.
Career
1990–1996: Career beginnings
Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died.
In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade.
1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out
In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla.
The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs.
1999–2000: Forever and Club New York
In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class.
Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country.
On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun.
With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties".
2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues
Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001).
He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001).
In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang.
In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show.
2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play
On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005.
Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city".
In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud.
Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix".
In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders.
In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell.
2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting
Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season.
Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol.
On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love"
On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015.
In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting.
On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada.
On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all.
In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020.
Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020.
Business career
Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million.
Sean John
In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003.
Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers."
Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped.
In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection.
Other ventures
Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company.
In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.
Personal life
Family
Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship.
Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018.
Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007.
Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018.
Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car.
Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million.
Charity work and honors
Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools.
In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored.
In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition.
Wardrobe style
Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend."
Religious views
Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God."
On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech.
In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture."
Discography
Studio albums
No Way Out (1997)
Forever (1999)
The Saga Continues... (2001)
Press Play (2006)
Awards and nominations
NAACP Image Awards
|-
| 2009
| A Raisin in the Sun
| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special
|
|-
| 2011
| Diddy – Dirty Money
| Outstanding Duo or Group
|
|}
BET Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2002 || "Bad Boy for Life" || rowspan="2" | Video of the Year ||
|-
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" ||
|-
| 2003 || "Bump, Bump, Bump" || Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2007 || "Last Night" || Best Collaboration ||
|-
| Diddy || Best Male Hip-Hop Artist ||
|-
| 2010 || rowspan="3" | Diddy – Dirty Money || rowspan="4" | Best Group ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 ||
|-
| 2016 || Puff Daddy and the Family ||
|}
BET Hip Hop Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2008 || "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." || Track of the Year ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2009 ||
|-
| rowspan="4" | 2010 || "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Reese's Perfect Combo Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" ||
|-
| Best Club Banger ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 || rowspan="2" | "Same Damn Time (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2013 ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2017 ||
|}
MTV Europe Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="4" | 1997 || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || MTV Select ||
|-
| Best Song ||
|-
| rowspan="8" | Sean Combs || Best New Act ||
|-
| Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1998 || Best Male ||
|-
| rowspan="5" | Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| 1999 ||
|-
| 2001 ||
|-
| 2002 ||
|-
| 2006 ||
|-
| 2011 || Diddy – Dirty Money || Best World Stage Performance ||
|}
MTV Movie & TV Awards
|-
| 2018 || Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story || Best Music Documentary ||
|}
MTV Video Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || Best R&B Video ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| rowspan="3" | || rowspan="2" | "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) || Video of the Year ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| "Come with Me" || Best Video from a Film ||
|-
| || "Bad Boy for Life" || Best Rap Video ||
|}
Grammy Awards
!Ref.
|-
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" | 1998
| Puff Daddy
| Best New Artist
|
| rowspan="7"|
|-
| No Way Out
| rowspan="2"|Best Rap Album
|
|-
| Life After Death (as producer)
|
|-
| "Honey" (as songwriter)
| Best Rhythm & Blues Song
|
|-
| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112)
| rowspan="7"|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group
|
|-
| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase)
|
|-
| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase)
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2000
| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2002
| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2003
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2004
| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2016
| "All Day" (as songwriter)
| Best Rap Song
|
|
|}
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Other awards
In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame.
Filmography
Made (2001)
Monster's Ball (2001)
2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006)
Seamless (2005)
Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005)
A Raisin in the Sun (2008)
CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009)
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
I'm Still Here (2010)
Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011)
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012)
Draft Day (2014)
Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
Black-ish (TV series) (2015)
Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017)
The Defiant Ones (2017)
Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021)
Tours
No Way Out Tour (1997–1998)
Forever Tour (2000)
References
Sources
External links
1969 births
20th-century American businesspeople
20th-century American male musicians
20th-century American rappers
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male musicians
21st-century American rappers
Actors from Mount Vernon, New York
African-American businesspeople
African-American designers
African-American fashion designers
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American male rappers
African-American record producers
American chairpersons of corporations
American chief executives in the media industry
American chief executives of fashion industry companies
American corporate directors
American cosmetics businesspeople
American dance musicians
American drink industry businesspeople
American fashion businesspeople
American fashion designers
American film producers
American hip hop record producers
American landlords
American male film actors
American male rappers
American male television actors
American marketing businesspeople
American mass media owners
American music industry executives
American music publishers (people)
American music video directors
American philanthropists
American restaurateurs
American retail chief executives
American television company founders
American television executives
Bad Boy Records artists
Businesspeople from New York City
East Coast hip hop musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners for rap music
Howard University alumni
Living people
Male actors from New York City
Music video codirectors
Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York
Participants in American reality television series
People from Harlem
Pop rappers
Rappers from Manhattan
Record producers from New York (state)
Remixers | true | [
"Sean Diddy Combs\n\nEnyce ([NYC]) is an American hip hop fashion label owned by Sean Diddy Combs. The label was established in New York City in March 1996 by Evan Davis, Lando Macoun, and Tony Shellman. The three co-founders had originally met while working for Seattle-based clothing brand International News. Liz Claiborne acquired the company in February 2004 for $114 million from Sports Brands International. In October 2008 Enyce was purchased by Sean Combs and the Sean John Enterprise for $20 million.\n\nMany have mispronounced the brand name over the years. The pronunciation originates from the phonetic spelling of \"NYC\" (en-y-ce) but sounded out in an Italian fashion. This was because the company started under Fila, an Italian-based company. Employees asked how they would pronounce the word replied \"en-ne-che\", making it the \"correct\" way to say the brand.\n\nEnyce specialises in old school clothing, with an emphasis on puffy jackets and jerseys with their logos on them. They also seem to have an official Instagram account, which is owned and operated by the companies CEO, Sean Diddy Combs. It's last post was made in the year 2016, and most of the account's posts seem to not relate to the actual clothing company at all.\n\nClothing lines\nEnyce\nLady Houy\n\nReferences\n\nClothing companies of the United States\nHip hop fashion\nENYCE",
"Sean John is a privately held fashion lifestyle company created by music mogul Sean Combs. The line made its fashion debut with a men's sportswear collection for the spring 1998 season.\nIndividuals of note who have represented the brand in advertising and marketing include Combs himself, musicians Nelly, T.I., Mariah Carey, Nas, Fabolous, Dolla, Usher, Pharrell Williams, Mary J. Blige, Rick Ross, Mack Wilds, and Busta Rhymes; actors Lauren London, Cassie Ventura, Jamie Foxx, Penélope Cruz, Jussie Smollett, and Vincent Pastore; athlete Dwyane Wade; fashion models Tyson Beckford, Naomi Campbell, Channing Tatum, and many notable DJs.\n\nHistory\n\nIn 1999 Sean Combs launched a signature collection of sportswear under his given name, Sean John. Since its launch, Sean John has enjoyed critical and commercial success with revenues now exceeding $525 million annually. Sean John has often appeared at the award ceremony for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) held annually in New York. For five consecutive years, from 2000 to 2005, Sean John was nominated for its excellence in design. In 2004, Sean John was awarded the CFDA Men's Designer of the Year award.\n\nIn February 2001, Sean John produced the first nationally televised runway show during New York Fashion Week when it simultaneously aired live on E! Television and the Style Network. During fashion week in February 2002, the New York Times ran a front page story on Sean John.\n\nIn 2004, Sean John invested in the high-end label Zac Posen.\n\nIn October 2008, the company purchased streetwear lifestyle brand Enyce from Liz Claiborne for $20 million.\n\nCombs' FIFI Award-winning fragrance, Unforgivable, was joined by Sean John fragrance I AM KING in November 2008. On November 24, 2008, he unveiled a new Times Square billboard for the I Am King line to replace his iconic Sean John ad.\n\nIn May 2010, Sean John made a distribution agreement with Macy's department store in which Macy's and Macys.com would be the sole distributor of Sean John sportswear at the retail and online level. As part of this agreement, Sean John and Macy's expanded the Sean John brand's distribution to many more Macy's stores and entered into exclusive marketing partnerships with the NBA.\n\nIn recent years, Sean John has expanded to a full lifestyle brand with the inclusion of multiple product categories including sportswear, tailored suiting, dress shirts, ties, hosiery, eyewear, childrenswear, fragrances, time pieces, outerwear, underwear, loungewear, cold weather accessories, headwear, and footwear.\n\nIn December 2021, Sean Combs purchased Sean John back from Global Brands Group for $7.5 million, following the company's bankruptcy.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOfficial website\n\nClothing companies of the United States\nClothing companies established in 1998\nSean John\nShops in New York City\nHip hop fashion\nEyewear brands of the United States"
] |
[
"Sean Combs",
"1999-2000: Forever and Club New York",
"What did Sean Combs do at that time?",
"In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records.",
"Did Sean Combs release any albums during that time frame?",
"Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999,",
"What was Sean Combs record label during that time?",
"Bad Boy Records"
] | C_27f904dddde64598977b78eea9c44ed0_1 | Who was Sean Combs dating at that time? | 4 | Who was Sean Combs dating between 1999-2000? | Sean Combs | In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs' highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs' attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said that the matter was "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". CANNOTANSWER | his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez | Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher.
Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010).
Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004.
Early life
Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old.
Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry.
Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address.
Career
1990–1996: Career beginnings
Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died.
In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade.
1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out
In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla.
The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs.
1999–2000: Forever and Club New York
In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class.
Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country.
On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun.
With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties".
2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues
Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001).
He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001).
In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang.
In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show.
2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play
On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005.
Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city".
In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud.
Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix".
In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders.
In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell.
2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting
Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season.
Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol.
On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love"
On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015.
In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting.
On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada.
On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all.
In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020.
Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020.
Business career
Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million.
Sean John
In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003.
Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers."
Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped.
In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection.
Other ventures
Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company.
In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.
Personal life
Family
Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship.
Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018.
Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007.
Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018.
Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car.
Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million.
Charity work and honors
Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools.
In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored.
In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition.
Wardrobe style
Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend."
Religious views
Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God."
On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech.
In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture."
Discography
Studio albums
No Way Out (1997)
Forever (1999)
The Saga Continues... (2001)
Press Play (2006)
Awards and nominations
NAACP Image Awards
|-
| 2009
| A Raisin in the Sun
| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special
|
|-
| 2011
| Diddy – Dirty Money
| Outstanding Duo or Group
|
|}
BET Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2002 || "Bad Boy for Life" || rowspan="2" | Video of the Year ||
|-
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" ||
|-
| 2003 || "Bump, Bump, Bump" || Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2007 || "Last Night" || Best Collaboration ||
|-
| Diddy || Best Male Hip-Hop Artist ||
|-
| 2010 || rowspan="3" | Diddy – Dirty Money || rowspan="4" | Best Group ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 ||
|-
| 2016 || Puff Daddy and the Family ||
|}
BET Hip Hop Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2008 || "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." || Track of the Year ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2009 ||
|-
| rowspan="4" | 2010 || "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Reese's Perfect Combo Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" ||
|-
| Best Club Banger ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 || rowspan="2" | "Same Damn Time (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2013 ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2017 ||
|}
MTV Europe Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="4" | 1997 || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || MTV Select ||
|-
| Best Song ||
|-
| rowspan="8" | Sean Combs || Best New Act ||
|-
| Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1998 || Best Male ||
|-
| rowspan="5" | Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| 1999 ||
|-
| 2001 ||
|-
| 2002 ||
|-
| 2006 ||
|-
| 2011 || Diddy – Dirty Money || Best World Stage Performance ||
|}
MTV Movie & TV Awards
|-
| 2018 || Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story || Best Music Documentary ||
|}
MTV Video Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || Best R&B Video ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| rowspan="3" | || rowspan="2" | "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) || Video of the Year ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| "Come with Me" || Best Video from a Film ||
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| || "Bad Boy for Life" || Best Rap Video ||
|}
Grammy Awards
!Ref.
|-
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" | 1998
| Puff Daddy
| Best New Artist
|
| rowspan="7"|
|-
| No Way Out
| rowspan="2"|Best Rap Album
|
|-
| Life After Death (as producer)
|
|-
| "Honey" (as songwriter)
| Best Rhythm & Blues Song
|
|-
| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112)
| rowspan="7"|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group
|
|-
| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase)
|
|-
| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase)
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2000
| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2002
| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2003
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2004
| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2016
| "All Day" (as songwriter)
| Best Rap Song
|
|
|}
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Other awards
In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame.
Filmography
Made (2001)
Monster's Ball (2001)
2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006)
Seamless (2005)
Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005)
A Raisin in the Sun (2008)
CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009)
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
I'm Still Here (2010)
Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011)
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012)
Draft Day (2014)
Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
Black-ish (TV series) (2015)
Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017)
The Defiant Ones (2017)
Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021)
Tours
No Way Out Tour (1997–1998)
Forever Tour (2000)
References
Sources
External links
1969 births
20th-century American businesspeople
20th-century American male musicians
20th-century American rappers
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male musicians
21st-century American rappers
Actors from Mount Vernon, New York
African-American businesspeople
African-American designers
African-American fashion designers
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American male rappers
African-American record producers
American chairpersons of corporations
American chief executives in the media industry
American chief executives of fashion industry companies
American corporate directors
American cosmetics businesspeople
American dance musicians
American drink industry businesspeople
American fashion businesspeople
American fashion designers
American film producers
American hip hop record producers
American landlords
American male film actors
American male rappers
American male television actors
American marketing businesspeople
American mass media owners
American music industry executives
American music publishers (people)
American music video directors
American philanthropists
American restaurateurs
American retail chief executives
American television company founders
American television executives
Bad Boy Records artists
Businesspeople from New York City
East Coast hip hop musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners for rap music
Howard University alumni
Living people
Male actors from New York City
Music video codirectors
Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York
Participants in American reality television series
People from Harlem
Pop rappers
Rappers from Manhattan
Record producers from New York (state)
Remixers | true | [
"\"Workin\" is a song written by and performed by American rapper Sean \"Puff Daddy\" Combs. It was released on October 15, 2015 as the first single of Combs' mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch). The album version of the track contains guest verses from Big Sean and Travis Scott.\n\nMusic video \nThe music video directed by Hype Williams. The video was released on November 23, 2015 at Vevo and YouTube.\n\nTrack listing \nDigital download\n\"Workin\" — 3:04\n\nRemixes \nOn November 23, 2015, Combs' released a remix of the song also featuring Travis Scott and Big Sean at Vevo and YouTube account.\n\nReferences\n\n2015 songs\n2015 singles\nSean Combs songs\nBig Sean songs\nBad Boy Records singles\nSongs written by Sean Combs\nSongs written by Cyhi the Prynce",
"\"Finna Get Loose\" is a song written by and performed by American rapper Sean \"Puff Daddy\" Combs and American singer Pharrell Williams. Produced by Pharrell, it was released on June 28, 2015 as the first single of Combs' upcoming sixth studio album No Way Out 2.\n\nMusic video \nThe music video directed by Hype Williams, the clip opens in stark black and white. The video was released on August 31, 2015 at Vevo and YouTube.\n\nCommercial performance\n\"Finna Get Loose\" debut for the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs entering the chart at number 44. Its chart debut was supported by first-week digital download sales of 26,000 copies, along with 446,000 domestic streams. The song entering at number 15 on Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles.\n\nTrack listing \nDigital download\n\"Finna Get Loose\" — 3:59\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nReferences\n\n2015 singles\n2015 songs\nSean Combs songs\nPharrell Williams songs\nBad Boy Records singles\nEpic Records singles\nMusic videos directed by Hype Williams\nSongs written by Sean Combs\nSongs written by Pharrell Williams"
] |
[
"Sean Combs",
"1999-2000: Forever and Club New York",
"What did Sean Combs do at that time?",
"In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records.",
"Did Sean Combs release any albums during that time frame?",
"Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999,",
"What was Sean Combs record label during that time?",
"Bad Boy Records",
"Who was Sean Combs dating at that time?",
"his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez"
] | C_27f904dddde64598977b78eea9c44ed0_1 | Which singer did Sean Combs discover at that time? | 5 | Which singer did Sean Combs discover between 1999-2000? | Sean Combs | In April 1999 Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class. Forever, Combs' debut solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs' highest-charting album in that country. On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun. With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs' attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said that the matter was "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties". CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Sean John Combs (born November 4, 1969), also known by his stage name Puff Daddy (previously known as P. Diddy, Diddy, or Puffy), is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, record executive, record producer, and entrepreneur. Born in New York City and raised in the suburb of Mount Vernon, he worked as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his own record label, Bad Boy Records in 1993. Combs has produced and cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher.
Combs' debut album, No Way Out (1997), has been certified seven times platinum. The album was followed by Forever (1999), The Saga Continues..., (2001) and Press Play (2006), all of which were commercially successful. In 2009, Combs formed the musical group Dirty Money; together, they released their highly successful debut album Last Train to Paris (2010).
Combs has won three Grammy Awards and two MTV Video Music Awards and is the producer of MTV's Making the Band. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $740 million. In 1998, he launched his own clothing line Sean John. He was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000 and won in 2004.
Early life
Sean John Combs was born in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City on November 4, 1969. Raised in Mount Vernon, New York, his mother Janice Combs (née Smalls) was a model and teacher's assistant and his father, Melvin Earl Combs, served in the U.S. Air Force and was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33, Melvin was shot to death while sitting in his car on Central Park West, when Sean was two years old.
Combs graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987. He played football for the academy and his team won a division title in 1986. Combs said he was given the nickname "Puff" as a child, because he would "huff and puff" when he was angry.
Combs was a business major at Howard University but left after his sophomore year. In 2014, he returned to Howard University to receive an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and deliver the University's 146th Commencement Address.
Career
1990–1996: Career beginnings
Combs became an intern at New York's Uptown Records in 1990. While working as a talent director at Uptown, he helped develop Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. In his college days Combs had a reputation for throwing parties, some of which attracted up to a thousand participants. In 1991, Combs promoted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D held at the City College of New York (CCNY) gymnasium, following a charity basketball game. The event was oversold, and a stampede occurred in which nine people died.
In 1993, after being fired from Uptown, Combs established his new label Bad Boy Entertainment as a joint venture with Arista Records, taking then-newcomer Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., with him. Both Wallace and Craig Mack quickly released hit singles, followed by successful LPs, particularly Wallace's Ready to Die. Combs signed more acts to Bad Boy, including Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, 112, Total, and Father MC. The Hitmen, his in-house production team, worked with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Lil' Kim, TLC, Mariah Carey, Boyz II Men, SWV, Aretha Franklin, and others. Mase and the Lox joined Bad Boy just as a widely publicized rivalry with the West Coast's Death Row Records was beginning. Combs and Wallace were criticized and parodied by Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight in songs and interviews during the mid-1990s. During 1994–1995, Combs produced several songs for TLC's CrazySexyCool, which finished the decade as number 25 on Billboard's list of top pop albums of the decade.
1997–1998: "Puff Daddy" and No Way Out
In 1997, under the name Puff Daddy, Combs recorded his first commercial vocal work as a rapper. His debut single, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at number one. His debut album, No Way Out, was released on July 22, 1997, through Bad Boy Records. Originally titled Hell up in Harlem, the album underwent several changes after The Notorious B.I.G. was killed on March 9, 1997. Several of the label's artists made guest appearances on the album. No Way Out was a significant success, particularly in the United States, where it reached number one on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, selling 561,000 copies. The album produced five singles: "I'll Be Missing You", a tribute to The Notorious B.I.G., was the first rap song to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100; it remained at the top of the chart for eleven consecutive weeks and topped several other charts worldwide. Four other singles – "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down", "It's All About the Benjamins", "Been Around the World", and "Victory" – were also released. Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page on the song "Come with Me" for the 1998 film Godzilla.
The album earned Combs five nominations at the 40th Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. On September 7, 2000, the album was certified septuple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 7 million copies. In 1997, Combs was sued for landlord neglect by Inge Bongo. Combs denied the charges. By the late 1990s, he was being criticized for watering down and overly commercializing hip hop, and for using too many guest appearances, samples, and interpolations of past hits in his new songs.
1999–2000: Forever and Club New York
In April 1999, Combs was charged with assault as a result of an incident with Steve Stoute of Interscope Records. Stoute was the manager for Nas, with whom Combs had filmed a video earlier that year for the song "Hate Me Now". Combs was concerned that the video, which featured a shot of Nas and Combs being crucified, was blasphemous. He asked for his scenes on the cross to be pulled, but after it aired unedited on MTV on April 15, Combs visited Stoute's offices and injured Stoute. Combs was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief, and was sentenced to attend a one-day anger management class.
Forever, Combs's second solo studio album, was released by Bad Boy Records on August 24, 1999, in North America, and in the UK on the following day. It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, where it remained for one week before being knocked off by Mary J. Blige's fourth album, Mary. The album received positive to mixed reviews from music critics and spawned three singles that have charted on the Billboard charts. It peaked at number four on the Canadian Albums Chart, Combs's highest-charting album in that country.
On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were at Club New York in Manhattan when gunfire broke out. After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. Combs was charged with four weapons-related charges and bribing his driver, Wardel Fenderson, to claim ownership of his gun.
With a gag order in place, the highly publicized trial began. Combs's attorneys were Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Benjamin Brafman. Combs was found not guilty on all charges; Shyne was convicted on five of his eight charges and sentenced to ten years in prison. Combs and Lopez broke up shortly after. A lawsuit filed by Fenderson, who said he suffered emotional damage after the shooting, was settled in February 2004. Lawyers for both sides, having agreed to keep the settlement terms secret, said the matter had been "resolved to the satisfaction of all parties".
2001–2004: "P. Diddy" and The Saga Continues
Combs changed his stage name from "Puff Daddy" to "P. Diddy" in 2001. The gospel album, Thank You, which had been completed just before the beginning of the weapons trial, was due to be released in March that year, but remains unreleased . He appeared as a drug dealer in the film Made and starred with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (both in 2001).
He was arrested for driving on a suspended license in Florida. Combs began working with a series of unusual (for him) artists. For a short period of time, he was the manager of Kelis; they have a collaboration titled "Let's Get Ill". He was an opening act for 'N Sync on their Spring 2002 Celebrity Tour, and he signed California-based pop girl group Dream to his record label. Combs was a producer of the soundtrack album for the film Training Day (2001).
In June 2001, Combs ended Bad Boy Entertainment's joint venture with Arista Records, gaining full control of Bad Boy, its catalogue, and its roster of artists. The Saga Continues..., released on July 10 in North America, was the last studio album released by the joint venture. The album reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, and was eventually certified Platinum. It is the only studio album under the P. Diddy name, and the first album by Sean Combs not to feature any guest appearances by Jay-Z or Lil Kim. Combs was executive producer of the reality TV show Making the Band, which appeared on MTV from 2002 to 2009. The show involves interviewing candidates and creating musical acts that would then enter the music business. Acts who got their start this way include Da Band, Danity Kane, Day26, and Donnie Klang.
In 2003 Combs ran in the New York City Marathon, raising $2million for the educational system of the city of New York. On March 10, 2004, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the marathon, which he finished in four hours and eighteen minutes. In 2004 Combs headed the campaign "Vote or Die" for the 2004 presidential election. On February 1, 2004, Combs (as P. Diddy) performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show.
2005–2009: "Diddy" and Press Play
On August 16, 2005, Combs announced on Today that he was altering his stage name yet again; he would be calling himself "Diddy". Combs said fans didn't know how to address him, which led to confusion. In November 2005, London-based musical artist and DJ Richard Dearlove, who had been performing under the name "Diddy" since 1992 nine years before Combs started using even "P. Diddy" sought an injunction in the High Court of Justice in London. He accepted an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 in damages and more than £100,000 in costs. Combs can no longer use the name Diddy in the UK, where he is still known as P. Diddy. An assault charge against Combs filed by Michigan television host Rogelio Mills was resolved in Combs's favor in 2005.
Combs starred in the 2005 film Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. He played Walter Lee Younger in the 2004 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and the television adaptation that aired in February 2008. In 2005 Combs sold half of his record company to the Warner Music Group. He hosted the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2005 by Time magazine. He was mentioned in the country song "Play Something Country" by Brooks & Dunn: the lyricist says he "didn't come to hear P. Diddy", which is rhymed with "something thumpin' from the city".
In 2006, when Combs refused to release musician Mase from his contractual obligations to allow him to join the group G-Unit, 50 Cent recorded a diss song, "Hip-Hop". The lyrics imply that Combs knew the identity of The Notorious B.I.G.'s murderer. The two later resolved the feud.
Combs released his first album in four years, Press Play, on October 17, 2006, on the Bad Boy Records label. The album, featuring guest appearances by many popular artists, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart with sales of over 173,009. Its singles "Come to Me" and "Last Night" both reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album became available to preview on MTV's The Leak on October 10, 2006, a week before being sold in stores. Press Play received mixed to positive reviews from critics, and was certified Gold on the RIAA ratings. On September 18, 2007, Combs teamed up with 50 Cent and Jay-Z for the "Forbes I Get Money Billion Dollar Remix".
In March 2008, the Los Angeles Times claimed that The Notorious B.I.G. and Combs orchestrated the 1994 robbery and shooting of Tupac, substantiating the claim with supposed FBI documents; the newspaper later retracted the story, acknowledging that the documents had been fabricated. Dexter Isaac, an associate of record management executive Jimmy Henchman, confessed in 2012 that he had shot Tupac on Henchman's orders.
In June 2008, Combs's representative denied rumors of another name change. Combs ventured into reality television in August 2008 with the premiere of his VH1 series I Want to Work for Diddy. He appeared—credited under his real name—in two episodes of Season 7 of CSI: Miami: "Presumed Guilty" and "Sink or Swim", in the role of lawyer Derek Powell.
2010–2013: Dirty Money and acting
Combs created a rap supergroup in 2010 known as the Dream Team. The group consists of Combs, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, Red Café, and Fabolous. Combs made an appearance at comedian Chris Gethard's live show in January 2010 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. In June 2010 Combs played a role (credited as Sean Combs) in the comedy film Get Him to the Greek, as Sergio Roma, a record company executive. An Entourage series representative announced that Combs would guest star on an episode during the 2010 season.
Last Train to Paris was released by Combs's group Dirty Money on December 13, 2010. The release was preceded by four singles "Angels", "Hello Good Morning", "Loving You No More", and "Coming Home", which experienced mixed success on the Billboard Hot 100. "Coming Home" was the most successful of the songs, peaking at number twelve on the U.S. Hot 100, number four in the UK, and number seven in Canada. On March 10, 2011, Diddy – Dirty Money performed "Coming Home" live on American Idol.
On April 18, 2011, Combs appeared in season one of Hawaii Five-0, guest starring as an undercover NYPD detective. In November 2012 Combs appeared in an episode of the eighth season of the American sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
2014–present: MMM (Money Making Mitch), No Way Out 2, and "Love"
On February 26, 2014, Combs premiered "Big Homie", featuring Rick Ross and French Montana, as the first single from his mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch), which was originally scheduled to be released that year. The song was released for digital download on March 24, and two days later the trailer for the music video was released. The full version of the music video was released on March 31. Combs used his former stage name Puff Daddy for the album. MMM was released as a free mixtape album of 12 tracks on November 4, 2015. In 2014 Combs and Guy Gerber announced that their joint album 11 11 would be available for free download. A new single called "Finna Get Loose" featuring Combs and Pharrell Williams was released on June 29, 2015.
In July 2015, Bad Boy Entertainment artist Gizzle told the press that she is collaborating with Combs on what she describes as his last album, titled No Way Out 2, a sequel to his 1997 debut. She describes the music as unique: "The mindset is to just be classic and to be epic. And to really live up to that... we know it's a tall order, but we welcome the challenge." In April 2016, Combs announced that after this last album and tour, he plans to retire from the music industry to focus on acting.
On May 20 and 21, 2016, Combs launched a tour of Bad Boy Records' biggest names to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the label. The documentary Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story, covering the two shows at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as well as behind-the-scenes events, was released on June 23, 2017. The show toured to an additional twenty venues across the United States and Canada.
On November 5, 2017, Combs announced that he would be going by the name Love, stating "My new name is Love, aka Brother Love". Two days later, he told the press he had been joking, but on January 3, 2018, he announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he had changed his mind again, and will be using the new name after all.
In 2019, Combs announced on Twitter that Making the Band would return to MTV in 2020.
Combs executive-produced Nigerian singer Burna Boy's album, Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020.
Business career
Fortune magazine listed Combs at number twelve on their top 40 of entrepreneurs under 40 in 2002. Forbes Magazine estimates that for the year ending May 2017, Combs earned $130 million, ranking him number one among entertainers. In 2019 his estimated net worth was $740 million.
Sean John
In 1998, Combs started a clothing line, Sean John. It was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000, and won in 2004. California billionaire Ronald Burkle invested $100 million into the company in 2003.
Also in 2003, the National Labor Committee revealed that factories producing the clothing in Honduras were violating Honduran labor laws. Among the accusations were that workers were subjected to body searches and involuntary pregnancy tests. Bathrooms were locked and access tightly controlled. Employees were forced to work overtime and were paid sweatshop wages. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee told The New York Times that "Sean Puff Daddy obviously has a lot of clout, he can literally do a lot overnight to help these workers."
Combs responded with an extensive investigation, telling reporters "I'm as pro-worker as they get". On February 14, 2004, Kernaghan announced that improvements had been implemented at the factory, including adding air conditioning and water purification systems, firing the most abusive supervisors, and allowing the formation of a labor union. In late 2006, the department store Macy's removed Sean John jackets from their shelves when they discovered that the clothing was made using raccoon dog fur. Combs had not known the jackets were made with dog fur, but as soon as he was alerted, he had production stopped.
In November 2008, Combs added a men's perfume called "I Am King" to the Sean John brand. The fragrance, dedicated to Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr., featured model Bar Refaeli in its advertisements. In early 2016, Sean John introduced the brand's GIRLS collection.
Other ventures
Combs is the head of Combs Enterprises, an umbrella company for his portfolio of businesses. In addition to his clothing line, Combs owned two restaurants called Justin's, named after his son. The original New York location closed in September 2007; the Atlanta location closed in June 2012. He is the designer of the Dallas Mavericks alternate jersey. In October 2007 Combs agreed to help develop the Cîroc vodka brand for a 50 percent share of the profits. Combs acquired the Enyce clothing line from Liz Claiborne for $20 million on October 21, 2008. Combs has a major equity stake in Revolt TV, a television network that also has a film production branch. It began broadcasting in 2014. In February 2015, Combs teamed up with actor Mark Wahlberg and businessman Ronald Burkle of Yucaipa Companies to purchase a majority holding in Aquahydrate, a calorie-free beverage for athletes. John Cochran, former president of Fiji Water, is CEO of the company.
In 2019 Combs became a major investor in PlayVS, which provides an infrastructure for competitive gaming in US high schools. The company was also backed by Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.
Personal life
Family
Combs is the father of six children. His first biological child, Justin, was born in 1993 to designer Misa Hylton-Brim. Justin attended UCLA on a football scholarship.
Combs had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kimberly Porter (1970–2018), which lasted from 1994 to 2007. He raised and adopted Quincy (born 1991), Porter's son from a previous relationship with singer-producer Al B. Sure! Together they had a son, Christian (born 1998), and twin daughters, D'Lila Star and Jessie James (born 2006). Porter died of pneumonia on November 15, 2018.
Five months before the birth of his twins, Combs's daughter, Chance, was born to Sarah Chapman. He took legal responsibility for Chance in October 2007.
Combs was in a long-term relationship with Cassie Ventura from 2007 to 2018.
Combs's sons Quincy and Justin both appeared on MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Combs threw Quincy a celebrity-studded party and gave him two cars as his 16th birthday present. For Justin's 16th birthday, Combs presented him with a $360,000 Maybach car.
Combs owns a home in Alpine, New Jersey, which he purchased for $7million.
Charity work and honors
Combs founded Daddy's House Social Programs, an organization to help inner city youth, in 1995. Programs include tutoring, life skills classes, and an annual summer camp. Along with Jay-Z, he pledged $1 million to help support victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and donated clothing from his Sean John line to victims. He has donated computers and books to New York schools.
In 1998, he received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley named October 13, 2006, as "Diddy Day" in honor of Combs's charity work. In 2008, Combs was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first male rapper to be so honored.
In 2014, Combs received an honorary doctorate from Howard University, where he gave the commencement speech for its 146th commencement ceremony. In his speech, Combs acknowledged that his experiences as a Howard student positively influenced his life. In 2016, Combs donated $1 million to Howard University to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund to help students who are unable to pay their tuition.
Wardrobe style
Combs describes his wardrobe style as "swagger, timeless, diverse". On September 2, 2007, Combs held his ninth annual "White Party", at which guests are limited to an all-white dress code. The White Party, which has also been held in St. Tropez, was held in his home in East Hampton, New York. Combs stated, "This party is up there with the top three that I've thrown. It's a party that has legendary status. It's hard to throw a party that lives up to its legend."
Religious views
Combs was raised Catholic, and was an altar server as a boy. In 2008 he told The Daily Telegraph that he does not adhere to any specific religious denomination. He said, "I just follow right from wrong, so I could pray in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. I believe that there is only one God."
On July 3, 2020, Combs invited his Twitter followers to view a 3-hour YouTube video posted by Louis Farrakhan. In the video Farrakhan made multiple anti-Semitic comments and repeatedly used the phrase "Synagogue of Satan". The video was removed from YouTube for violating its policy against hate speech.
In response to comedian Nick Cannon being fired on July 14, 2020, from ViacomCBS for espousing anti-Semitic views, Combs tweeted that Cannon should "come home to RevoltTv" saying "We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture."
Discography
Studio albums
No Way Out (1997)
Forever (1999)
The Saga Continues... (2001)
Press Play (2006)
Awards and nominations
NAACP Image Awards
|-
| 2009
| A Raisin in the Sun
| Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie,Mini-Series or Dramatic Special
|
|-
| 2011
| Diddy – Dirty Money
| Outstanding Duo or Group
|
|}
BET Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2002 || "Bad Boy for Life" || rowspan="2" | Video of the Year ||
|-
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" ||
|-
| 2003 || "Bump, Bump, Bump" || Coca-Cola Viewer's Choice Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2007 || "Last Night" || Best Collaboration ||
|-
| Diddy || Best Male Hip-Hop Artist ||
|-
| 2010 || rowspan="3" | Diddy – Dirty Money || rowspan="4" | Best Group ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 ||
|-
| 2016 || Puff Daddy and the Family ||
|}
BET Hip Hop Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2008 || "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)..." || Track of the Year ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2009 ||
|-
| rowspan="4" | 2010 || "All I Do Is Win (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Reese's Perfect Combo Award ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | "Hello Good Morning (Remix)" ||
|-
| Best Club Banger ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2011 ||
|-
| 2012 || rowspan="2" | "Same Damn Time (Remix)" || rowspan="2" | Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2013 ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | Sean Combs || rowspan="2" | Hustler of the Year ||
|-
| 2017 ||
|}
MTV Europe Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="4" | 1997 || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || MTV Select ||
|-
| Best Song ||
|-
| rowspan="8" | Sean Combs || Best New Act ||
|-
| Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1998 || Best Male ||
|-
| rowspan="5" | Best Hip-Hop ||
|-
| 1999 ||
|-
| 2001 ||
|-
| 2002 ||
|-
| 2006 ||
|-
| 2011 || Diddy – Dirty Money || Best World Stage Performance ||
|}
MTV Movie & TV Awards
|-
| 2018 || Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story || Best Music Documentary ||
|}
MTV Video Music Awards
|-
| rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | "I'll Be Missing You" || Best R&B Video ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| rowspan="3" | || rowspan="2" | "It's All About the Benjamins" (Rock Remix) || Video of the Year ||
|-
| Viewer's Choice ||
|-
| "Come with Me" || Best Video from a Film ||
|-
| || "Bad Boy for Life" || Best Rap Video ||
|}
Grammy Awards
!Ref.
|-
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="7" | 1998
| Puff Daddy
| Best New Artist
|
| rowspan="7"|
|-
| No Way Out
| rowspan="2"|Best Rap Album
|
|-
| Life After Death (as producer)
|
|-
| "Honey" (as songwriter)
| Best Rhythm & Blues Song
|
|-
| "I'll Be Missing You" (featuring Faith Evans & 112)
| rowspan="7"|Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group
|
|-
| "Mo Money Mo Problems" (with The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase)
|
|-
| "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" (featuring Mase)
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2000
| "Satisfy You" (featuring R. Kelly)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2002
| "Bad Boy for Life" (with Black Rob & Mark Curry)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2003
| "Pass the Courvoisier, Part II" (with Busta Rhymes & Pharrell)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2004
| "Shake Ya Tailfeather" (with Nelly & Murphy Lee)
|
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"| 2016
| "All Day" (as songwriter)
| Best Rap Song
|
|
|}
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Other awards
In 2021, Combs was among the inaugural inductees into the Black Music and Entertainment Walk of Fame.
Filmography
Made (2001)
Monster's Ball (2001)
2005 MTV Video Music Awards (2006)
Seamless (2005)
Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005)
A Raisin in the Sun (2008)
CSI Miami: episode "Sink or Swim" (2009)
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
I'm Still Here (2010)
Hawaii Five-0: episode "Hoʻopaʻi" (2011)
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (TV series) (2012)
Draft Day (2014)
Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
Black-ish (TV series) (2015)
Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story (2017)
The Defiant Ones (2017)
Mary J. Blige's My Life (2021)
Tours
No Way Out Tour (1997–1998)
Forever Tour (2000)
References
Sources
External links
1969 births
20th-century American businesspeople
20th-century American male musicians
20th-century American rappers
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male musicians
21st-century American rappers
Actors from Mount Vernon, New York
African-American businesspeople
African-American designers
African-American fashion designers
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American male rappers
African-American record producers
American chairpersons of corporations
American chief executives in the media industry
American chief executives of fashion industry companies
American corporate directors
American cosmetics businesspeople
American dance musicians
American drink industry businesspeople
American fashion businesspeople
American fashion designers
American film producers
American hip hop record producers
American landlords
American male film actors
American male rappers
American male television actors
American marketing businesspeople
American mass media owners
American music industry executives
American music publishers (people)
American music video directors
American philanthropists
American restaurateurs
American retail chief executives
American television company founders
American television executives
Bad Boy Records artists
Businesspeople from New York City
East Coast hip hop musicians
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners for rap music
Howard University alumni
Living people
Male actors from New York City
Music video codirectors
Musicians from Mount Vernon, New York
Participants in American reality television series
People from Harlem
Pop rappers
Rappers from Manhattan
Record producers from New York (state)
Remixers | false | [
"\"Finna Get Loose\" is a song written by and performed by American rapper Sean \"Puff Daddy\" Combs and American singer Pharrell Williams. Produced by Pharrell, it was released on June 28, 2015 as the first single of Combs' upcoming sixth studio album No Way Out 2.\n\nMusic video \nThe music video directed by Hype Williams, the clip opens in stark black and white. The video was released on August 31, 2015 at Vevo and YouTube.\n\nCommercial performance\n\"Finna Get Loose\" debut for the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs entering the chart at number 44. Its chart debut was supported by first-week digital download sales of 26,000 copies, along with 446,000 domestic streams. The song entering at number 15 on Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles.\n\nTrack listing \nDigital download\n\"Finna Get Loose\" — 3:59\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nReferences\n\n2015 singles\n2015 songs\nSean Combs songs\nPharrell Williams songs\nBad Boy Records singles\nEpic Records singles\nMusic videos directed by Hype Williams\nSongs written by Sean Combs\nSongs written by Pharrell Williams",
"\"Workin\" is a song written by and performed by American rapper Sean \"Puff Daddy\" Combs. It was released on October 15, 2015 as the first single of Combs' mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch). The album version of the track contains guest verses from Big Sean and Travis Scott.\n\nMusic video \nThe music video directed by Hype Williams. The video was released on November 23, 2015 at Vevo and YouTube.\n\nTrack listing \nDigital download\n\"Workin\" — 3:04\n\nRemixes \nOn November 23, 2015, Combs' released a remix of the song also featuring Travis Scott and Big Sean at Vevo and YouTube account.\n\nReferences\n\n2015 songs\n2015 singles\nSean Combs songs\nBig Sean songs\nBad Boy Records singles\nSongs written by Sean Combs\nSongs written by Cyhi the Prynce"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family"
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | is craig married? | 1 | Is Craig married? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
Scottish male video game actors
Scottish male voice actors
Scottish memoirists
Scottish stand-up comedians
Scottish television talk show hosts
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from New York (state)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | false | [
"As Man Desires is a 1925 American silent drama film directed by Irving Cummings and starring Viola Dana. It was produced and distributed by First National Pictures.\n\nPlot\nAs described in a review in a film magazine, Major John Craig (Sills) knocks out Colonel Carringford (Nicholson) when he discovers Gloria Gordon (Clifford), his fiancée, has been untrue. Carringford is then murdered by a servant and because Evelyn Beaudine (Theby), a married woman of unsavory reputation, accuses him of the crime, Craig is forced to flee from his British Army post in India. Craig procures a fishing smack and amasses wealth from working pearl beds in the South Seas. He tenders Gorilla Bagsley (Kennedy), a poacher a beating when he finds him annoying Pandora (Dana). She now feels that Craig is \"her man\" and, to spite the memory of the other woman, he marries her. A seaman identifies Craig and notifies the British government. Gloria comes with the representative who tells Craig that Gloria had sacrificed her own reputation to prove his innocence. Gorilla, intending to kill Craig, levels a gun towards his back but Pandora jumps in the way as it is fired. Craig and Gloria are thus united.\n\nCast\n\nPreservation\nWith no prints of As Man Desires located in any film archives, it is a lost film.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1925 films\nAmerican silent feature films\nAmerican films\nLost American films\nFilms directed by Irving Cummings\nFirst National Pictures films\n1925 romantic drama films\nAmerican romantic drama films\nAmerican black-and-white films",
"Anna Elizabeth Craig Holan (born June 2, 1993) is a country-pop singer and songwriter from Hartselle, Alabama and currently living in Fort Bliss, Texas. She released her first EP of five original songs on August 2, 2010.\n\nCraig began getting noticed through YouTube. She posted her first video on August 1, 2008 of her singing Taylor Swift's “Picture to Burn.” Currently she has thousands of subscribers and well over 1.5 million views of her singing on YouTube.\n\nCraig is distantly related to the late country music icon Tammy Wynette, who was Craig's grandfather's second cousin. Craig’s EP has had sales and received radio play in the U.S. and other countries.\n\nCraig signed with Expat Records, who re-released her EP on April 11, 2011.\n\nPersonal life\n\nCraig's parents are Angela (née Pugh) and Brent Craig. She has a younger sister, Emily (b. August 23, 1995).\n\nOn January 23, 2016, Craig was married to Joshua Holan.\n\nIn June 2017, Craig announced on her Instagram that she is pregnant. In December 2017, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican country singer-songwriters\nAmerican women country singers\nPeople from Hartselle, Alabama\nLiving people\n1993 births\n21st-century American singers\n21st-century American women singers\nCountry musicians from Alabama\nSinger-songwriters from Alabama"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family",
"is craig married?",
"Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as \"relationship issues\"."
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | what kind of issues? | 2 | What kind of relationship issues? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | CANNOTANSWER | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
Scottish male video game actors
Scottish male voice actors
Scottish memoirists
Scottish stand-up comedians
Scottish television talk show hosts
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from New York (state)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | false | [
"\"What Kind of Fool\" is a 1981 vocal duet between Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb.\n\nWhat Kind of Fool may also refer to:\n\n \"What Kind of Fool\" (Lionel Cartwright song), a 1991 song by Lionel Cartwright\n \"What Kind of Fool (Heard All That Before)\", a 1992 song performed by Kylie Minogue\n \"What Kind of Fool Am I?\", a 1962 song recorded by several artists\n \"What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am)\", a 1964 song by The Tamms\n \"What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am\", a 1992 song by Lee Roy Parnell\n \"What Kind of Fool\", a 1988 single by All About Eve",
"What Kind of World may refer to:\n\n What Kind of World (The Cables album), 1970, or the title track\n What Kind of World (Brendan Benson album), 2012, or the title track\n \"What Kind of World\", a song by Saint Etienne from their 2017 album Home Counties"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family",
"is craig married?",
"Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as \"relationship issues\".",
"what kind of issues?",
"I don't know."
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | who is his current wife? | 3 | Who is Craig's current wife? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
Scottish male video game actors
Scottish male voice actors
Scottish memoirists
Scottish stand-up comedians
Scottish television talk show hosts
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from New York (state)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | true | [
", known for his stage name is a Japanese radio personality, film critic, and film commentator who is represented by the talent agency Horipro. He is nicknamed . His wife is television caster Izumi Maruoka.\n\nEarly life\nArimura was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1976. His father is the Vice President of Choice Hotels and served as a tourist journalist for Fujimura Nobe Sakana, and his mother was chanson singer Mariko Murasakikura.\n\nArimura got a degree Tamagawa University Faculty of Arts Theater Department, and graduated from the Tokyo Announcement Seminars.\n\nCareer\nHe is mainly a radio personality, and is also a film commentator in magazines and television programs. Arimura was part of Bakademi Kyōkai which they are critics for B-movies. In recent years he is named Sid Arimura.\n\nArimura also appeared in many variety shows.\n\nFilmography\n\nTV series\n\nCurrent\n\nPast\n\nDrama\n\nDrama\n\nRadio\n\nCurrent\n\nPast\n\nCurrent\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n Official profile \n Interview at Tarento Data Bank \n\nJapanese radio personalities\nJapanese film critics\n1976 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Kuala Lumpur",
"Spouse of the Prime Minister of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar is the title held by the wife of the Prime Minister.\n\nThe current wife of Min Aung Hlaing, who assumed the role on 1 August 2021, is Kyu Kyu Hla.\n\nHistory\nIn post-independence Burma, the presidential system is in place, but the real power is the prime minister. U Nu, who succeeded General Aung San, ruled the country for more than a decade in 1962. Therefore, U Nu's wife, Mya Yi, is the first Spouse of the prime minister of Burma.\n\nList of Spouse of Prime Minister of Myanmar\n\nReferences \n\nMyanmar"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family",
"is craig married?",
"Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as \"relationship issues\".",
"what kind of issues?",
"I don't know.",
"who is his current wife?",
"Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham"
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | do they have kids? | 4 | Do Craig and Megan have kids? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles. | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
Scottish male video game actors
Scottish male voice actors
Scottish memoirists
Scottish stand-up comedians
Scottish television talk show hosts
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from New York (state)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | false | [
"\"Hong Kong Kids\" or \"Kong Kids\" (Kong Hai; ; Putonghua: Gǎng Hái) is a derogatory expression that refers to a subset of children or teenagers in Hong Kong who are overly dependent on their families, have low emotional intelligence and lack self-management skills. \nThe term \"Kong Kids\" was coined in 2009 in a book titled Kong Kids: The Nightmares for Parents and Teachers published by MingPao. The book argues that there are five negative characteristics common in children born in Hong Kong after the 1990s.\n\nDescription\nThey are typically born during the 1990s to 2000s, are middle-class families, and are pampered and spoiled by domestic helpers.\n\nKong Kids typically have several common characteristics. For young children, they often lack life skills, such as bathing, cooking, and tying shoelaces. They are used to relying on their parents and foreign domestic helpers.\n\nAccording to a survey by People's Daily Online, almost half of the parents who responded said that their children cannot eat, bathe or dress themselves independently and 15% of the respondents even said their children could not use the toilet independently. When faced with difficulty, \"Kong Kids\" expect others to solve the problems, because they are inexperienced with managing setbacks and have low self-esteem.\n\nThey are usually emotional and self-centred. With low Emotional Quotient (EQ), Kong Kids cannot control their emotion in any circumstances, such as dealing with unpleasant situations. They want to be under the spotlight and cared for by everyone.\n\nKong Kids are almost always not willing or able to solve problems by themselves. Being afraid of failure, they evade adversity and rely on parents.\n\nThey are usually weak in interpersonal communication and self-control. Being self-centred, they cannot put themselves into others' shoes and respect others' opinions. They lack basic manners and come into conflicts easily.\n\nMost of the parents are over-protective of their children and shield them from difficulties and injuries. They are often referred to as \"monster parents\". Parents usually hire foreign domestic helpers to take care of their children, spoil them excessively and satisfy most of their requests. Indulging by parents may lead children to narcissism.\n\nKong Kids often love chasing new trends and pursuing well-known brands. Most of them own brand name goods and electronic gadgets such as mobile phones, iPads, iPods, digital cameras, etc. They do not treasure what they have and look for a materialistic life.\n\nCauses\nNowadays, Hong Kong families typically have one or at most two children. According to some educational experts, some so-called 'monster parents 'protect their children so well that they do not allow children to experience any setback. For instance, in 2010, the Hong Kong students could not get on the planes because of a snowstorm in London. The parents then strongly requested the government to assist students stranded at the airport. This issue induced a lot of criticisms towards parents because of their over-protection. The over-protected children hence have low resilience and can hardly overcome difficulties, which results in Kong Kids.\n\nMost parents in Hong Kong also work full-time. This frequently means they employ a foreign domestic helper to take care of their children. According to a survey, nearly 90% of parents employ a foreign domestic helper to take care of their children. The domestic helpers are not responsible for correcting children's behaviour even though the kids behave wrongly. Therefore, some children become rebellious, impolite and disrespectful of others - characteristics of Kong Kids.\n\nFinally, Hong Kong is an exam-obsessed city where most parents emphasise their children's academic results. The parents understate the need for resilience in their kids. Some children are expected to focus exclusively on academic matters, and not housework or other chores. As a result, these kids become dependent, both physically and psychologically, that is, they become Kong Kids.\n\nEffects\n\nDependent individuals\nKids with \"Kong Kid\" symptoms have little ability to care for themselves and poor problem-solving skills. When faced with adversity, they immediately give up which can lead to feelings of melancholia and, in serious cases, suicide. Kong Kids tend to remain childlike and stunted psychologically.\n\nFor instance, in 2011, a snowstorm paralysed the London Heathrow Airport, many Hong Kong students who came home for holiday were stranded at the airport. They stayed in the banquet rooms of hotels or slept in the airport. During that period, those Hong Kong students complained continuously about the situation and that the banquet rooms were like concentration camps.\n\nKong Kids have negative effects on themselves. Being spoiled, they do not know how to take care of themselves but to depend on others to live their lives. Therefore, Kong Kids have low self-care ability when compared to normal kids. For most of the time, Kong Kids' parents will help them to deal with all difficulties they face, such as handling conflicts between friends and communicating with teachers. In short term, Kong Kids lose a lot of social chances and cannot deal with hurdles by themselves while in long term, Kong Kids will lack essential communication skills and initiation of solving problems.\n\nPoor family situations and relationships\nBecause the children rely excessively on others for care, this pressures parents to be responsible for their child's actions. The embarrassment and frustration of managing children's poor behaviour at home and in public prevents the growth of a healthy parent-child relationship and parents may feel frustrated and humiliated by their children's behaviour.\n\nBurdens for Hong Kong's society \nChildren are the future generations, but Kong Kids may not be equipped to survive in the real world as they are unable to interact with and accommodate others. They do not cherish what they have and are less able to tolerate hardships at work and are at risk for termination of employment. This decreases the effectiveness of the workforce.\n\nKong Kids also negatively impact society. Depending on their parents, Kong Kids have low problem-solving abilities. As a result, once they step into society, they cannot solve problems efficiently, decreasing the productive potential of society. Because their parents solve their problems for them, Kong Kids usually lack motivation to work. The short supply of motivated and enthusiastic citizens reduces the society's competitiveness and therefore its affluence.\n\nSolution\nTo avoid children becoming Kong Kids, parents and schools need to cooperate. According to child and education psychologists, parents should stop over-protecting their children and allow them to learn life self-care skills from daily life like buttoning shirts, tying shoe laces and feeding themselves. They should explain to their children the importance of these skills but not simply tell them to follow. Moreover, parents need to give children room to learn being independent. In order to equip children with the ability to cope with adversity, when they face difficulties, parents should let children solve it on their own rather than tackling it for them. While at school, teachers should guide students to develop interpersonal skills. This is a rare opportunity at home as the family size are usually small.\n\nIn media\nIn the book Kong Kids: The Nightmares for Parents and Teachers, written by Wong Ming Lok, Hong Kong Children are defined as those born from the middle of 90s to the early 2000s, which is an affluent era with information explosion.\nOther literature denote Kong Kids as the \"3-low Kong Kid\". According to the newspaper article which originated this term, Hong Kong children have low autonomy, low emotion quotient and also low studying ability. Some of them do not help with the chores. They do not know how to change their clothes, shower themselves, tie the shoelaces and even tidy up Hong Kong children are vulnerable, not adaptable to challenges and difficulties, some of them may commit suicide due to academic pressure, family and emotional issues.\n\nOn 9 July 2011, a video entitled Tai Po Impolite Kong Kid Scolding Parents () was filmed by witnesses to the incident, posted on websites like YouTube, and was reported by the media.\n\nIn the three-minute video, a young boy with his hands on his hips shouted and condemned his parents for \"forcing\" him to accompany them to the Tai Po supermarket. He threatened to call the police and despite a surrounding crowd, spoke foul language when his parents asked him to be quiet. A passer-by, unable to stand the child's behaviour, gave the child HK$20 so that he could take a taxi home and stop harassing his parents. This video hit the local news and magazines.\n\nSee also\n Education in Hong Kong\n \"Four–two–one\" or \"4–2–1\" phenomenon\n Helicopter parents\n Narcissism\n Princess sickness\n Spoiled child\n\nReferences\n\nCulture of Hong Kong\nHong Kong children\nHong Kong society\nParenting\nSocial issues in China\nStereotypes of East Asians",
"\"DINK\" is an acronym that stands for \"double income, no kids\" or \"dual income, no kids\". It describes a couple without children living together while both partners are receiving an income; because both of their wages are coming into the same household, they are free to live more comfortably than couples who live together and spend their money on raising their children. The term was coined at the height of yuppie culture in the 1980s. The Great Recession solidified this social trend, as more couples waited longer to have children or chose not to have children at all.\n\nVariations\n\"DINKER\" means \"dual (or double) income, no kids, early retirement\".\n\n\"DINKY\" means \"double income, no kids yet\", implying that the couple in question is childless only temporarily and intends to have children later, rather than eschewing having children entirely. The British radio sitcom Double Income, No Kids Yet bore this name.\n\n\"GINK\" means \"green inclinations, no kids\", referring to those who choose not to have children for environmental reasons.\n\n\"DINKWAD\" means \"Double income, no kids, with a dog\" \n\n\"DINKYWAD\" means \"Double income, no kids yet, with a dog\" \n\n\"DINKWAC\" means \"Double income, no kids, with a cat\"\n\nSome marketers have proposed \"yappie\" (\"young affluent parent\", adapted from \"yuppie\") as a term to describe similar couples who do have children.\n\nSee also\n\n Childlessness\n Doug, a TV series on which one of the characters has the last name \"Dink\", in reference to the acronym\n Emerging adulthood\n FIRE movement\n Total fertility rate\n Voluntary childlessness\n\nReferences\n\nAcronyms\nFamily\nSocial class subcultures\n1980s neologisms\nChildfree"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family",
"is craig married?",
"Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as \"relationship issues\".",
"what kind of issues?",
"I don't know.",
"who is his current wife?",
"Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham",
"do they have kids?",
"Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles."
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | was it a boy? | 5 | Was the Ferguson baby a boy? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
Scottish male video game actors
Scottish male voice actors
Scottish memoirists
Scottish stand-up comedians
Scottish television talk show hosts
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from New York (state)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | false | [
"Merry Go Boy (May 4, 1943 – July 7, 1967) was a highly influential Tennessee Walking Horse sire and two-time World Grand Champion. He is credited for producing the most desirable conformation type in his offspring.\n\nLife\n\nMerry Go Boy was foaled on May 4, 1943. He was sired by the stallion Merry Boy, and out of a mare named Wiser's Dimples. Merry Go Boy was black with a white star and near hind sock. He was bred by Archie Wiser of Wartrace, Tennessee, and sold to Wiser's brother Winston for $350 when he was a few weeks old. In 1944, Elroy Mallard from Georgetown, Kentucky bought a half-interest in Merry Go Boy. In 1948, Merry Go Boy was sold again to a Virginia owner for a then-record price of $55,000. Merry Go Boy was euthanized due to arthritis on July 7, 1967, at Belfast, Tennessee.\n\nCareer\n\nMerry Go Boy won the weanling horse colt class at the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration in 1943. In 1944, he won the yearling colt class and the yearling championship. He won the two-year-old stallion class in 1945, and in the following year, 1946, won the three-year-old stallion/gelding junior stake and was then entered in the \"big stake\" or World Grand Championship, which he lost to Midnight Sun.\nHowever, Merry Go Boy won the World Grand Championship title a year afterwards, in 1947, and again in 1948.\n\nMerry Go Boy's last major win was in 1967, when he won the get of sire class at the Celebration.\n\nOffspring\n\nAfter his retirement from showing, Merry Go Boy was put to stud in 1954 at S.W. Beech's stables. He sired three World Grand Champions: Go Boy's Shadow, winner in 1955 and 1956 with Winston Wiser; Go Boy's Sundust, winner in 1967; and Go Boy's Royal Heir, winner in 1968. In the 1960 Breeders' National Futurity, 24 of the 46 awards were given to sons and daughters of Merry Go Boy, although it is not known what became of these horses after they matured. Merry Go Boy is credited with popularizing his black color and fine conformation within his breed.\n\nPedigree\n\nReferences\n\nIndividual Tennessee Walking Horses\n1943 animal births\nWorld Grand Champion Tennessee Walking Horses",
"Boy (also Boye) was a white hunting poodle belonging to Prince Rupert of the Rhine in the 17th century. Parliamentarian propaganda alleged that the dog was \"endowed\" with magical powers.\n\nBoy accompanied his master into battle and was killed at the Battle of Marston Moor on 2 July 1644.\n\nOrigins\n\nBoy was first given to Prince Rupert when he was imprisoned in the fortress of Linz during the Thirty Years' War. The Earl of Arundel, an Englishman who had grown concerned about Rupert's plight, gave him the animal to keep him company during his confinement. The dog was a rare breed of white hunting poodle.\n\nThere were probably two poodles, one black and one white, given to Rupert in Germany. The black was lost early on in the war; it was the white survivor who became notorious. It was sometimes called \"Puddle\" (for \"poodle\"), but it's famous as being called \"Boy\"; although it might have been female. Propaganda was put about that Boy had possession of dark powers as a 'dog-witch'.\n\nBoy was sufficiently impressive and famous across Europe that the Ottoman Sultan of the day, Murad IV, requested that his ambassador attempt to find him a similar animal. Boy accompanied Rupert during his travels until 1644.\n\nPropaganda and magical powers\nBoy accompanied his master from 1642 to 1644 during the English Civil War. \n\nRupert was the iconic Royalist cavalier of the conflict and was frequently the subject of Parliamentarian propaganda. Boy, who often accompanied Rupert into battle, featured heavily in this, and was widely suspected of being a witch's familiar. There were numerous accounts of Boy's abilities; some suggested that he was the Devil in disguise.\n\nJohn Cleveland and other Royalist satirists and parodists mocked these Parliamentarian attitudes and produced lampoons that satirised the alleged \"superstition\" and \"credulity\" of their opponents; Cleveland claimed that Boy was Prince Rupert's shapeshifting familiar, and of demonic origins. Other satirists suggested that Boy was a \"Lapland Lady\" who had been transformed into a white dog. Boy was also \"able\" to find hidden treasure, was invulnerable to attack, could catch bullets fired at Rupert in his mouth, and prophesy as well as the 16th-century soothsayer, Mother Shipton. Royalist soldiers also promoted Boy, as their adopted mascot, to the rank of Sergeant-Major-General.\n\nReportedly, Boy had other endearing attributes, such as cocking his leg when he heard the name of John Pym, leader of the Parliamentarian forces. He was also alleged to have performed for Charles I, slept in Prince Rupert's bed, and played with Princes Charles, James and Harry and Princess Henrietta, and was often fed roast beef and capon breast by Charles I himself.\n\nDeath\n\nBoy died during the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644. He had been left safely tied up in the Royalist camp, but escaped and chased after Rupert. The battle went badly for the Royalists, and Rupert was forced to flee the field; Boy was killed during the ensuing fighting. He was prominently depicted in woodcut scenes drawn of the battle at the time, lying upside down, dead; Simon Ash, a contemporary historian of the event, drew specific attention to the death of this 'much spoken of' dog.\n\nLegacy\nBoy has been recorded as the first official British Army Dog.\n\nContemporary works about Boy\nObservations Upon Prince Rupert's White Dog called Boy (Anonymous, 1642)\nA Dialogue, or Rather a Parley, between Prince Rupert's Dog whose name is Puddle and Tobies Dog, whose name is Pepper (Anonymous, 1643)\nThe Parliament's Unspotted Bitch (Anonymous, 1643)\nThe Parliament's Unspotted Bitch (Cover – Anonymous, 1643)\nA Dog's Elegy: Elegy of Prince Rupert's Tears for the Late Defeat at Marston Moor where his Beloved Dog named Boy was killed by a Valiant Soldier (Anonymous, 1644)\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography\nBence-Jones, Mark. (1976) The Cavaliers. London: Constable.\nGaunt, Peter. (2003) The English Civil Wars 1642-1651. Osprey Publishing.\nLevack, Brian P. (ed) (2001) New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology: Witchcraft in the British Isles and New England. London: Routledge.\nPurkiss, Diane. (2001) Desire and Its Deformities: Fantasies of Witchcraft in the English Civil War. in Levack (ed) (2001).\nPurkiss, Diane. (2007) The English Civil War: A People's History. London: Harper.\nSpencer, Charles. (2007) Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier. London: Phoenix.\nStoyle, Mark. (2011) \"The Prince and the Devil Dog,\" BBC History 12: 5. pp. 22–26.\nWedgwood, C. V. (1970) The King's War: 1641-1647. London: Fontana.\n\nFurther reading\nStoyle, Mark. (2011) The Black Legend of Prince Rupert's Dog. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.\n\nEnglish Civil War\nIndividual dogs\nMilitary animals\n17th-century individual animals\n1644"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family",
"is craig married?",
"Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as \"relationship issues\".",
"what kind of issues?",
"I don't know.",
"who is his current wife?",
"Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham",
"do they have kids?",
"Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles.",
"was it a boy?",
"The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011."
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | does he have any other kids? | 6 | Does Ferguson have any other kids in addition to Liam James? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
Scottish male video game actors
Scottish male voice actors
Scottish memoirists
Scottish stand-up comedians
Scottish television talk show hosts
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from New York (state)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | true | [
"The 'Dead End' Kids \"On Dress Parade\" is a 1939 Warner Bros. film that marked the first time The Dead End Kids headlined a film without any other well-known actors.\n\nPlot\nA hero of World War I, Colonel William Duncan, is on his deathbed. He summons his old friend, Colonel Mitchell Reiker to ask him if he will care for his son Slip when he dies. Reiker agrees, and when Duncan passes, Slip, who does not want to leave the neighborhood he grew up in, is tricked into attending the military school that Reiker is in charge of.\n\nCadet Major Rollins tries to help Slip reform and adapt to military life, but is thrown out a window for his troubles. He continues to have altercations with all of the other cadets, but in the end he winds up saving the life of Cadet Warren during a fire in the camp munitions storeroom. Although he is seriously injured during the rescue, the other cadets respect his efforts and welcome him as one of their own. For his heroics he is given his father's distinguished service cross and given the title of cadet major.\n\nCast\n\nThe Dead End Kids\nBilly Halop as Cadet Major Rollins\nBobby Jordan as Cadet Ronny Morgan\nLeo Gorcey as Slip Duncan\nGabriel Dell as Cadet Georgie Warren\nHuntz Hall as Cadet Johnny Cabot\nBernard Punsly as Dutch\n\nAdditional cast\n\nFrankie Thomas as Cadet Lieutenant Murphy\nJohn Litel as Col. Michael Riker\nCissie Loftus as Mrs. Neely\nSelmer Jackson as Capt. Evans Dover\nAldrich Bowker as Father Ryan\nDouglas Meins as Hathaway\nWilliam Gould as Dr. Lewis\nDon Douglas as Col. Wm. Duncan\nEmory Parnell as Policeman - Paddy\n\nCharacter portrayals\nThis is the only Dead End Kids film in which Gorcey appears in the type of role he would assume throughout the East Side Kids and The Bowery Boys films, as the tough guy malcontent/gang leader. His character's name, Slip, also became his official character name in the Bowery Boys films. In addition, this is Bernard Punsly's briefest appearance in any of their films.\n\nProduction\nAlternate titles for this film are Dead End Kids on Dress Parade and Dead End Kids at Military School.\n\nReception\nVariety wrote, \"They're cleaned up, brushed up, put in military school uniforms, turned into refined little gentlemen--and it's too bad. It's too bad <...> that if the transition had to be made it should be in such a mawkishly sentimental and obvious picture. It just doesn't ring true.\"\n\nHome media\nThe film was released as a double feature DVD by Warner Archives with Hell's Kitchen on January 22, 2013.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n1939 films\nAmerican films\nEnglish-language films\nAmerican black-and-white films\nWarner Bros. films\nFilms directed by Noel M. Smith \nFilms directed by William Clemens\nBoarding school films\nAmerican drama films\n1939 drama films",
"The Boer goat is a breed of goat that was developed in South Africa in the early 1900s and is a popular breed for meat production. Their name is derived from the Afrikaans word boer, meaning farmer.\n\nOrigins and characteristics\nThe Boer goat was bred from the indigenous South African goats kept by the Namaqua, San, and Fooku tribes, with some crossing of Indian and European bloodlines being possible. They were selected for meat rather than milk production; due to selective breeding and improvement, the Boer goat has a fast growth rate and excellent carcass qualities, making it one of the most popular breeds of meat goat in the world. Boer goats have a high resistance to disease and adapt well to hot, dry semideserts. United States production is centered in west-central Texas, particularly in and around San Angelo and Menard. The original US breeding stock came from herds located in New Zealand. Only later were they imported directly from Africa. \n\nBoer goats commonly have white bodies and distinctive brown heads. Some Boer goats can be completely brown or white or paint, which means large spots of a different color are on their bodies. Like the Nubian goat, they possess long, pendulous ears. They are noted for being docile, fast-growing, and having high fertility rates. Does are reported to have superior mothering skills as compared to other breeds. \nBoer goats tend to gain weight at about the same rate as their sire, so a buck from a proven fast-growing bloodline will command the highest price, as its offspring tend to also be fast growers. The primary market for slaughter goats is a kid; kids should reach marketable size at weaning age. The kid of a proven fast-growing sire might weigh at 90 days, while the kid of a poor-quality sire might weigh only at 90 days. An average-quality buck will initially be less expensive to purchase, but it can significantly undermine an operation's long-term profitability.\n\nDue to their versatility on different terrains, Boer goat are frequently used for land maintenance, especially to prevent bush encroachment on rangeland. As typical browsers, the goats are able to suppress re-growth after bush thinning and to browse from plants up to 1.8 meters high, standings on their hind legs.\n\nDoe \nDoes used to breed show-quality goats are normally very large. For commercial meat production, medium-sized does are normally preferred, as they produce the same number of kids, but require less feed to do so. \nAs a general rule, the more kids born per doe, the greater profit margins for the owner. Boer goats are polyestrous (they can breed throughout the year), and they reach sexual maturity at five months of age. A typical breeding program is to produce three kid crops every two years, meaning the does are pregnant for five months, nurse their kids for three months, and then are rebred. Multiple births are common, and a 200% kid crop is achievable in managed herds. Usually, first-time does have one kid, but they may have more. After that, they usually have two kids every other breeding. The kids can be brown, black, white, or mixed.\n\nCrossbreeding \n\nWhile purebred bucks are usually preferred for breeding purposes, crossbred does are commonly used for kid production, with the resulting offspring being 7/8 or more Boer. Common crosses are Boer x Spanish goat, Boer x Angora goat, Boer x Kiko goat, Boer x Nubian goat, Boer x Sirohi, Boer x Osmanabadi, and Boer x Jamnapari goat. An effort to crossbreed with the Malabari goat has been controversial.\n\nPercentage Boer goats are very common in commercial meat herds, and with those just starting out in the Boer goat business due to ease of acquisition and affordability. Over time, percentage animals can be bred up to American purebred status. An American purebred is a Boer goat of 15/16ths Boer blood (F4) for does and 31/32nds blood (F5) for Boer bucks. Bucks must be one generation of Boer breeding higher than does to achieve this status because they have the potential to spread their genetic pool much further than any single doe; a higher level of Boer blood lessens the chances of other breed qualities in the offspring. Although American purebreds can never be registered as Fullblood (FB), many breeders still use a good American purebred buck with excellent results.\n\nMany producers still prefer purebred or fullblood bucks and does, and intentional crossbreeding is far from universal.\n\nNote: The 'F' designation is the commonly used shorthand for indicating the percentage of pure blood (Boer in this case) resulting from crossbreeding of a Pureblood boer buck with does of other breeds:\n\n F1 : 1/2 boer blood (Pureblood buck sire, other breed doe)\n F2 : 3/4 boer blood (Pureblood buck sire, F1 doe)\n F3 : 7/8 boer blood (Pureblood buck sire, F2 doe)\n F4 : 15/16 boer blood (Pureblood buck sire, F3 doe)\n F5 : 31/32 boer blood (Pureblood buck sire, F4 doe)\n\nShow goats \n\nAlthough Boer goats raised specifically for show purposes may seem to have little in common with pastured commercial goats, the difference is superficial. They are bred to be larger than normal goats, and meet specific visual appearances, but these very characteristics are valuable genes to add to the commercial herd. Boer goats were originally imported into the US and other countries for this very reason. Their value to ranchers lies in the improvement the addition of their unique genes can offer any breed of goats being raised for meat. Few producers could afford to maintain a herd of essentially useless animals. Show goats are bred to represent the most desirable characteristics of the Boer goat, and their main purpose is to introduce these animals to the public. It is also a method of recognizing the best of the best, although some really superior goats are not shown preference. Bucks and does bred for show can be and often are used for commercial breeding stock. To show, most Boer goats have to be registered with either the CMGA, ABGA, IBGA, or USBGA. Though Boer goats are often bred to be shown, they can also make very good pets.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\nFirst Boer Goat Studies Europe\nAmerican Boer Goat Association\nUnited States Boer Goat Association\nInternational Boer Goat Association\nAmerican Meat Goat Association (AMGA)\nInformation on the Boer Goat from South Africa\nInformation on the Boer Goat in Norway\n\nGoat breeds\nMeat goat breeds\nGoat breeds originating in South Africa"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family",
"is craig married?",
"Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as \"relationship issues\".",
"what kind of issues?",
"I don't know.",
"who is his current wife?",
"Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham",
"do they have kids?",
"Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles.",
"was it a boy?",
"The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011.",
"does he have any other kids?",
"His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son,"
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | what is the name of his first wife? | 7 | What is the name of Ferguson's first wife? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | Anne Hogarth | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
Scottish male video game actors
Scottish male voice actors
Scottish memoirists
Scottish stand-up comedians
Scottish television talk show hosts
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from New York (state)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | true | [
"Alberic II (died 1183) was the Count of Dammartin, possibly the son of Aubry de Mello, Count of Dammartin, and Adela, daughter of Hugh I, Count of Dammartin.\n\nWhat little is known for sure about Alberic II is confounded by the preponderance of noblemen of the same name in both France and England. What is known is that he married Clémence of Bar, daughter of Reginald I \"One-Eyed\", Count of Bar, one of the leaders of the Second Crusade, and Gisèle de Vaudémont, daughter of Gerard I, Count of Vaudémont.\n\nAlberic and Clémence had one son:\n Alberic III, Count of Dammartin.\n\nAlberic II was succeeded by his son Alberic III as Count of Dammartin upon his death.\n\nThe discussion in Aubry, Count of Dammartin, provides some insight into how Alberic III came to claim the countship. Further complicating the genealogy, Clémence, widowed, married Renaud II, Count of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, her second husband and his second wife. Renaud and his first wife, Adelaide, Countess of Vermandois, were the parents of Mathilde, wife of Alberic III.\n\nSources \n Mathieu, J. N., Recherches sur les premiers Comtes de Dammartin, Mémoires publiés par la Fédération des sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris et de l'Ile-de-France, 1996\n Medieval Lands Project, Comtes de Dammartin (Montdidier)\n\nReferences \n\n1183 deaths\nAlberic",
"Tjan was the wife of the ancient Egyptian king Sobekhotep IV of the 13th Dynasty, during the late 18th century BC.\n\nTjan bears the title King's wife and is known from only several objects. In the British Museum there is a bead with the short inscription: king's wife, Tjan, beloved of Hathor, mistress of Atfih. In the Louvre, there is a scarab with her name and title. In the Egyptian Museum of Cairo there is a box with an inscription stating that a certain [...]hotep begotten of king Khaneferre and born of the king's wife Tjan. The name of the son is only partly preserved. Khaneferre is the throne name of king Sobekhotep IV. This inscription identifies her as the wife of this king. Finally there is a fragment of a faience vase naming her daughter Nebetiunet. Tjan does not appear on monuments of the king. Perhaps she married him late in his reign.\n\nSources\n\nQueens consort of the Thirteenth Dynasty of Egypt\n18th-century BC women\nEgyptian Museum"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family",
"is craig married?",
"Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as \"relationship issues\".",
"what kind of issues?",
"I don't know.",
"who is his current wife?",
"Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham",
"do they have kids?",
"Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles.",
"was it a boy?",
"The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011.",
"does he have any other kids?",
"His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son,",
"what is the name of his first wife?",
"Anne Hogarth"
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? | 8 | Are there any other interesting aspects about this article in addition to Craig's marriages and children? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
Scottish male video game actors
Scottish male voice actors
Scottish memoirists
Scottish stand-up comedians
Scottish television talk show hosts
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from New York (state)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
Writers from Los Angeles
Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | false | [
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"Craig Ferguson",
"Family",
"is craig married?",
"Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as \"relationship issues\".",
"what kind of issues?",
"I don't know.",
"who is his current wife?",
"Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham",
"do they have kids?",
"Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles.",
"was it a boy?",
"The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011.",
"does he have any other kids?",
"His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son,",
"what is the name of his first wife?",
"Anne Hogarth",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001."
] | C_a953667fe2504ed39c4c18b910df7826_0 | why did they split up? | 9 | Why did Craig and Sascha split up? | Craig Ferguson | In an episode of The Late Late Show that aired 8 December 2008, a somber Ferguson talked about his mother, Janet (3 August 1933 - 1 December 2008). He ended the programme by playing her favourite song, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. Ferguson eulogised his father on-air on 30 January 2006. Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His elder sister's name is Janice and his brother's name is Scott. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a successful comedian, presenter, and actress, perhaps most widely known as the voice of Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011. Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice as a result of what he describes as "relationship issues". His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, Milo Hamish Ferguson, born in 2001. He and Corwin share custody of Milo, and live near each other in Los Angeles. On 21 December 2008, Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont. Ferguson announced in July 2010 that they were expecting a child. He wrote: "Holy crackers! Mrs F is pregnant. How did that happen? ... oh yeah I know how. Another Ferguson arrives in 2011. The world trembles." The child, a boy named Liam James, was born 31 January 2011. CANNOTANSWER | relationship issues". | Craig Ferguson (born 17 May 1962) is a Scottish-American comedian, actor, writer and television host. He is best known for hosting the CBS late-night talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–14), for which he won a Peabody Award in 2009 for his interview with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu that year. He also hosted the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game (2014–17), for which he won two Daytime Emmy Awards, and Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (2016) on History. In 2017 he released a six-episode web show with his wife, Megan Wallace Cunningham, titled Couple Thinkers.
After starting his career in the UK with music, comedy, and theatre, Ferguson moved to the U.S., where he appeared in the role of Nigel Wick on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show (1996–2004). Ferguson has written three books: Between the Bridge and the River, a novel; American on Purpose, a memoir; and Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations & Observations. He holds both British and American citizenship.
He has written and starred in three films, directing one of them, and has appeared in several others, including several voice-over roles for animations. He provided voice work for Gobber in the How to Train Your Dragon film series (2010–2019), Owl in Winnie the Pooh (2011) and Lord Macintosh in Brave (2012).
Since 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler on the ABC television network.
Early life and education
Ferguson was born in Stobhill Hospital in the Springburn district of Glasgow, to Robert and Janet Ferguson on 17 May 1962. When he was 6 months old, he and his family moved from their Springburn flat to a Development Corporation house in the nearby New Town of Cumbernauld, where he grew up "chubby and bullied". They lived there as Cumbernauld was rehousing many Glaswegians away from the poor housing conditions and damage to the city from World War II. Ferguson attended Muirfield Primary School and Cumbernauld High School. At age 16, Ferguson left high school and began an apprenticeship to be an electronics technician at a local factory of American company Burroughs Corporation.
His first visit to the United States was in 1975, when he was 13, to visit an uncle who lived on Long Island, near New York City. When he moved to New York City in 1983, he worked in construction in Harlem. Ferguson later became a bouncer at the nightclub Save the Robots before returning to Scotland.
Career
UK career
Ferguson's experience in entertainment began as a teenager as a drummer for Glasgow punk bands such as the Night Creatures and Exposure. Shortly afterward, he had a brief stint as a drummer for the post-punk band Ana Hausen, who released a single for Human Records in 1981. He then joined a punk band called The Bastards from Hell. The band, later renamed Dreamboys, and fronted by vocalist Peter Capaldi, performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson credits Capaldi for inspiring him to try comedy. When he was 18, he worked as a session musician and performed as a drummer for Nico during a few gigs when she toured Scotland.
After a nerve-racking first comedy appearance, he decided to create a character that he described as a "parody of all the über-patriotic native folk singers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland". The character was named "Bing Hitler" by Capaldi. Ferguson first performed as the character in Glasgow, and he later became a hit at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, by the end of the year, Ferguson was already discussing his intention to retire Bing. At the press launch for an alternative pantomime of Sleeping Beauty (which he had co-written with Capaldi), he said "you can't write for just one character forever". A recording of his stage act as Bing Hitler was made at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and released in the 1980s; a Bing Hitler monologue ("A Lecture for Burns Night") appears on the compilation cassette Honey at the Core.
After enjoying success at the Edinburgh Festival, Ferguson appeared on television as 'Confidence' in Red Dwarf, on STV's Hogmanay Shows, and on the 1993 One Foot in the Grave Christmas special One Foot in the Algarve. In 1990, a pilot of The Craig Ferguson Show, a one-off comedy pilot for Granada Television, was broadcast. It co-starred Paul Whitehouse and Helen Atkinson-Wood. In 1991, Channel 4 asked him to host Friday at the Dome, a 75-minute live music show. In 1992, he was given his own BBC Scotland show, 2000 Not Out.
In 1993, he presented a six-part archaeology TV series, The Dirt Detective, for STV. Also in 1993, he was given a six-part TV series on BBC One. The Ferguson Theory was a mix of stand-up and sketches recorded the day before transmission. In 2017, it was announced that he would return to UK television for the first time in 25 years in a guest role in BBC Scotland's comedy Still Game, to be shown in 2018.
Ferguson also found success in musical theatre. Beginning in 1991, he appeared on stage as Brad Majors in the London production of The Rocky Horror Show. In 1994, Ferguson played Father MacLean in production of Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom at the Union Chapel in London. The same year, he appeared again at the Edinburgh Fringe, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.
US career
Ferguson moved to Los Angeles in November 1994, after his soon-to-be agent Rick Siegel saw Ferguson during the Edinburgh Festival and suggested that he come to America. His first US role was as baker Logan McDonough on the short-lived 1995 ABC comedy Maybe This Time, which starred Betty White and Marie Osmond.
His breakthrough in the US came when he was cast on The Drew Carey Show as the title character's boss, Mr. Wick, a role he played from 1996 to 2003. He played the role with an over-the-top posh English accent "to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents". In his comedy special "A Wee Bit o' Revolution", he specifically identified James Doohan's portrayal of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek as the foundation of his "revenge". (At the end of one episode, though, Ferguson broke the fourth wall and began talking to the audience at home in his regular Scottish accent.) His character was memorable for his unique methods of laying employees off, almost always "firing Johnson", the most common last name of the to-be-fired workers. Even after leaving the show in 2003, he remained a recurring character on the series for the last two seasons, and was part of the two-part series finale in 2004.
During the production of The Drew Carey Show, Ferguson devoted his off-time as a cast member to writing, working in his trailer on set in between shooting his scenes. He wrote and starred in three films: The Big Tease, Saving Grace, and I'll Be There; he also directed the latter, for which he won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas, and Valencia film festivals. He was named Best New Director at the Napa Valley Film Festival. These were among other scripts that, "... in the great tradition of the movie business, about half a dozen that I got paid a fortune for but never got made."
His other acting credits in films include Niagara Motel, Lenny the Wonder Dog, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chain of Fools, Born Romantic, The Ugly Truth, Kick-Ass, and, as a voice-over actor, How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Brave, and Winnie the Pooh.
Ferguson has been touring the United States and Canada with a comedy show since the late 2000s, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on 23 October 2010 and a performance at Radio City Music Hall on 6 October 2012. He has performed two stand-up television specials on Comedy Central, both released on DVD: A Wee Bit o' Revolution in 2009 and Does This Need to Be Said? in 2011. His third comedy special, I'm Here to Help, was released on Netflix in 2013, garnering positive reviews of 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix and peaking at number 6 on Billboard top comedy albums. It also received a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album.
Ferguson was awarded the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award by the Banff World Media Festival on 11 June 2013.
The Late Late Show
In December 2004, it was announced that Ferguson would succeed Craig Kilborn on CBS's The Late Late Show. His first show as the regular host aired on 3 January 2005. The show was unique in that it had no "human" sidekicks such as Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Conan O'Brien's Andy Richter. He had a remotely operated robot skeleton named Geoff Peterson and two silent performers in a pantomime horse costume that were added in 2010. His monologues were conducted within a few feet of the camera versus the long distance Johnny Carson kept from the camera and audience.
The Late Late Show averaged 2.0 million viewers in its 2007 season, compared with 2.5 million for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In April 2008, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson beat Late Night with Conan O'Brien for weekly ratings (1.88 million to 1.77 million) for the first time since the two shows went head-to-head with their respective hosts.
In March 2009, Craig Ferguson topped Jimmy Fallon in the ratings with Ferguson getting a 1.8 rating/6 share and Fallon receiving a 1.6 rating/6 share. By 2014, Ferguson's ratings had faltered, trailing those of Late Night with Seth Meyers with an average of 1.35 million viewers versus 2.02 million.
On 28 April 2014, Ferguson announced he would leave The Late Late Show at the end of 2014, with the final episode airing on 19 December. His contract was set to expire in June 2014, but a six-month extension was agreed on to provide a more graceful exit and give CBS more time to find a replacement host. He reportedly received as part of his contract because he was not selected as the replacement for David Letterman's Late Show. Ferguson made the decision prior to Letterman's announcement but agreed to delay making his own decision public until the reaction to Letterman's decision had died down. CBS Entertainment Chair Nina Tassler said, following the announcement, that in his decade as host Ferguson had "infused the broadcast with tremendous energy, unique comedy, insightful interviews and some of the most heartfelt monologues seen on television." CBS continued the franchise with James Corden as the new host.
Television work
Craig Ferguson has made guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, The View, Loveline, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Soup, The Talk, The Price Is Right, Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, The Dennis Miller Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He also co-hosted Live with Regis & Kelly with Kelly Ripa and was guest host on the April Fools' Day episode of The Price Is Right in 2014.
In 2009, Ferguson made a cameo live-action appearance in the episode "We Love You, Conrad" on Family Guy. Ferguson hosted the 32nd annual People's Choice Awards on 10 January 2006. TV Guide magazine printed a "Cheers" (Cheers and Jeers section) for appearing on his own show that same evening. From 2007 to 2010, Ferguson hosted the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on 4 July, broadcast nationally by CBS. Ferguson was the featured entertainer at 26 April 2008 White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Ferguson co-presented the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama with Brooke Shields in 2008. He has done voice work in cartoons, including being the voice of Barry's evil alter-ego in the "With Friends Like Steve's" episode of American Dad!; in Freakazoid! as Roddy MacStew, Freakazoid's mentor; and on Buzz Lightyear of Star Command as the robot vampire NOS-4-A2. He was the voice of Susan the boil on Futurama, which was a parody of Scottish singer Susan Boyle. He makes stand-up appearances in Las Vegas and New York City. He headlined in the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and in October 2008 Ferguson taped his stand up show in Boston for a Comedy Central special entitled A Wee Bit o' Revolution, which aired on 22 March 2009.
British television comedy drama Doc Martin was based on a character from Ferguson's film Saving Grace – with Ferguson getting writing credits for 12 episodes. On 6 November 2009, Ferguson appeared as himself in a SpongeBob SquarePants special titled SpongeBob's Truth or Square. He hosted Discovery Channel's 23rd season of Shark Week in 2010. Ferguson briefly appeared in Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" music video released on 10 October 2011.
In September 2013, Ferguson guest-starred on the season finale of Hot in Cleveland as a priest/tabloid journalist who turns out to be the father of Joy's (Jane Leeves) son. The show reunited him with former co-star and frequent Late Late Show guest Betty White. Ferguson reprised the role for several episodes when the show returned in March 2014.
Celebrity Name Game
In October 2013, it was announced that Ferguson would host the syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game, produced by Coquette Productions, beginning in late 2014. Ferguson's involvement in the project dates back to 2011, when it was originally pitched and piloted as a CBS primetime series. , the series had an initial order of 180 episodes. The syndicated series began airing on 22 September 2014. Ferguson won Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game Show Host for Celebrity Name Game in 2015 and 2016. On 2 December 2016, it was announced that the series would end after three seasons.
Ferguson signed in 2015 to play Prentiss Porter in The King of 7B, a comedy pilot for ABC.<ref name=7B>{{cite news |last=Lyons |first=Beverley |url=http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/late-late-shows-craig-ferguson-5339755 |title=Late Late Show'''s Craig Ferguson begins work on new comedy pilot for US television |work=Daily Record |location=Glasgow, Scotland |date=15 March 2015 |access-date=15 March 2015}}</ref> However, the show was not picked up.
Join or Die with Craig Ferguson
On 18 February 2016, Ferguson began to host a historical talk show on History titled Join or Die with Craig Ferguson. The title is a reference to a Benjamin Franklin political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 9 May 1754, which Ferguson had tattooed on his forearm after becoming an American citizen. Ferguson and a three-guest panel of comedians and historians conduct a humorous discussion of a different topic on each episode, such as the most doomed presidential campaign, greatest Founding Father and greatest invention, with viewers invited to share their opinions via Twitter.
The Hustler
Since January 2021, Ferguson has hosted the American game show The Hustler which broadcasts on the American Broadcasting Company television network. The show follows five contestants who collaborate to build up a cash prize by answering a series of trivia questions presented by Ferguson, whilst one of the contestants is secretly designated as the Hustler beforehand and given the answers to all the questions.
By the end of the game, two of the honest contestants have been eliminated; the other two must correctly choose the Hustler in order to stop him/her from winning the entire prize. The series premiered on January 4, 2021, before moving to its regular timeslot on January 7, 2021, airing on Thursdays at 10 p.m.
Radio
On 27 February 2017, Ferguson launched The Craig Ferguson Show, a two-hour talk radio show on the Comedy Greats channel and Faction Talk on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. His last new show aired 11 May 2018.
Literature
Ferguson's novel Between the Bridge and the River was published on 10 April 2006. He appeared at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, as well as other author literary events. "This book could scare them", he said. "The sex, the violence, the dream sequences and the iconoclasm. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. I understand that. It was very uncomfortable to write some of it." The novel is dedicated to his elder son, Milo, and to his grandfather, Adam. He revealed in an interview that he is writing a sequel to the book, to be titled The Sphynx of the Mississippi. He also stated in a 2006 interview with David Letterman that he intends the book to be the first in a trilogy. As of February 2019, Ferguson has produced no further novels, although he has published non-fiction.
Ferguson signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoirs. The book, entitled American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, focuses on "how and why [he] became an American" and covers his years as a punk rocker, dancer, bouncer and construction worker as well as the rise of his career in Hollywood as an actor and comic. It went on sale 22 September 2009 in the United States. On 1 December 2010 the audiobook version was nominated for a Best Spoken Word Album Grammy.
In July 2009, Jackie Collins was a guest on The Late Late Show to promote her new book Married Lovers. Collins said a character in her book, Don Verona, was based on Ferguson because she was such a fan of him and his show.
Ferguson wrote a short story for In Sunlight or in Shadow (2017, Pegasus Crime), an anthology edited by Lawrence Block and featuring works inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Block is a favorite writer of Ferguson's and appeared multiple times on The Late Late Show.
On 10 October 2018, Ferguson announced his third book via Twitter, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations which released 7 May 2019.
Personal life
Ferguson is a fan of Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C. as well as the British television show Doctor Who. He holds an FAA private pilot certificate, issued in 2009. He has five tattoos which include the Join, or Die political cartoon on his right forearm; a Ferguson family crest with the Latin motto Dulcius ex asperis ("Sweeter out of [or from] difficulty") on his upper right arm in honour of his father; and a Celtic cross with the Ingram clan motto Magnanimus esto (Be great of mind) on his upper left arm in honour of his mother. He has often said that his Join, or Die tattoo is intended to signal his American patriotism. Ferguson returned to live in Scotland in 2019.Pathikrit Sanyal: Why did Craig Ferguson leave America? Talk show host was highly successful but returned to Scotland, here's why. MEAWW, 7 January 2021
Ferguson consumes neither meat nor alcohol, as he is both a vegan (having stated in 2016 that he had been vegan for almost three years) and a recovering alcoholic. Ferguson has been sober since February 18, 1992.
As mentioned in episode 7 of his television show Join or Die, Ferguson also plays the harp (although not well and was kicked out of the band as a result).
Influences
Ferguson has stated that his comedy influences include Monty Python, Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and David Letterman.
Family
Ferguson eulogised his father Robert on an episode of The Late Late Show in January 2006. Following the death of his mother Janet (3 August 1933 – 1 December 2008), he spoke of her on-air, ending the programme by playing her favourite song: "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.
Ferguson has two sisters (one older and one younger) and one older brother. His younger sister, Lynn Ferguson Tweddle, is also a comedian, presenter, and actress, who voiced Mac in the 2000 stop-motion animation film Chicken Run. She was a writer on The Late Late Show until July 2011.
Ferguson has married three times and divorced twice. His first marriage was to Anne Hogarth from 1983 to 1986, during which time they lived in New York. His second marriage was to Sascha Corwin (founder and proprietor of Los Angeles' SpySchool), with whom he has one son, born in 2001. He and Corwin shared custody of their son, and lived near each other in the Hollywood Hills. Ferguson married art dealer Megan Wallace-Cunningham in a private ceremony on her family's farm in Chester, Vermont in 2008. They have a son together, who was born in 2011.
American citizenship
During 2007, Ferguson, who at the time held only British citizenship, used The Late Late Show as a forum for seeking honorary citizenship from every state in the US. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and was "commissioned" as an admiral in the tongue-in-cheek Nebraska Navy. Governors Jon Corzine (New Jersey), John Hoeven (North Dakota), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Jim Gibbons (Nevada) sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their respective states. He received similar honours from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas; Hazard, Kentucky; and Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ferguson became an American citizen on 1 February 2008 and broadcast the taking of his citizenship test as well as his swearing in on The Late Late Show.
Filmography
Film
Television
Web
Video games
Radio
Awards and nominations
Discography
Live at the Tron (as Bing Hitler). Jammy Records. 1986. Catalogue number JRLP 861.
Mental; Bing Hitler Is Dead? Polydor. 1988.
A Big Stoatir. Polydor. 1990.
I'm Here to Help. New Wave Dynamics. 2013.
References
Bibliography
Ferguson, Craig (2019). Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations.'' Penguin Group.
External links
1962 births
20th-century Scottish comedians
20th-century Scottish male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Scottish comedians
21st-century Scottish male actors
21st-century Scottish novelists
American game show hosts
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
21st-century American memoirists
American stand-up comedians
American television talk show hosts
Audiobook narrators
Aviators from California
Burroughs Corporation people
Comedians from Glasgow
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host winners
Living people
Male actors from Glasgow
Male actors from Los Angeles
Male actors from New York City
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Novelists from New York (state)
Peabody Award winners
People from Cumbernauld
Scottish emigrants to the United States
Scottish expatriates in the United States
Scottish game show hosts
Scottish male film actors
Scottish male television actors
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Scottish stand-up comedians
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Screenwriters from California
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The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
Writers from Glasgow
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Writers from New York City
People educated at Cumbernauld Academy
21st-century American male writers | false | [
"Split EP! is a split EP from American indie hip hop artists Why? and Odd Nosdam. It was released on Anticon in 2001. The EP consists of Why?'s You'll Know Where Your Plane Is... and Odd Nosdam's EAT.\n\nReception\nDarren Keast of SF Weekly gave the EP a mixed review, saying: \"While Split EP! provides a welcome respite from the conservatism of rap, it also sends up a red flag -- a warning that Anticon's 'alternative' might evolve into a samey-sounding cottage industry.\"\n\nTrack listing\n You'll Know Where Your Plane Is...\n Untitled (0:24) \n Untitled (2:11)\n Untitled (1:29)\n Untitled (1:50)\n Untitled (1:00)\n Untitled (2:12)\n Untitled (3:49)\n EAT\n Untitled (1:27)\n Untitled (1:51)\n Untitled (1:11)\n Untitled (1:43)\n Untitled (2:09)\n Untitled (1:03)\n Untitled (2:06)\n Untitled (31:07)\n Untitled (7:59)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n2001 EPs\nAnticon EPs\nAlternative hip hop EPs",
"Gasolin' is a 2006 documentary film directed by Anders Østergaard.\n\nThe film is about Denmark's most influential rock band, Gasolin'. For the first time since they split up in 1978, the four band members reflect upon their career and why they parted.\n\nGasolin'\nFranz Beckerlee\nWili Jønsson\nKim Larsen\nSøren Berlev\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\nDanish films\nDanish documentary films\nDanish rock music films\n2006 films\nRockumentaries\nBest Documentary Bodil Award winners\n2000s Danish-language films"
] |
[
"Phonograph",
"Terminology"
] | C_53febef912dd41d38a913351d47c761c_1 | What are some of the terms used for the phonograph? | 1 | What are some of the terms used for the phonograph? | Phonograph | Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record changer". When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks". In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or, most recently, turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker. The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words phone (phone, "sound" or "voice") and graphe (graphe, "writing"). The similar related terms gramophone (from the Greek gramma gramma "letter" and phone phone "voice") and graphophone have similar root meanings. The roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as photograph ("light writing"), telegraph ("distant writing"), and telephone ("distant sound"). The new term may have been influenced by the existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings. Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice the word has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording, involving audio-frequency modulations of a physical trace or groove. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone" and the like were still brand names specific to various makers of sometimes very different (i.e. cylinder and disc) machines; so considerable use was made of the generic term "talking machine", especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech, by simulating the workings of the vocal cords, tongue, and lips - a potential source of confusion both then and now. CANNOTANSWER | The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words phone (phone, "sound" or "voice") and graphe (graphe, "writing"). | A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.
The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, pickup system, and the sound and equalization systems.
The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century. In the mid-1960s the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. In the 1980s, phonograph use declined sharply due to the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc, as well as the later introduction of digital music distribution in the 2000s. However, records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs, collectors, and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone a revival since the 2000s.
Terminology
Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record changer", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks". In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker. The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words (, 'sound' or 'voice') and (, 'writing'). The similar related terms gramophone (from the Greek 'letter' and 'voice') and graphophone have similar root meanings. The roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as photograph ("light writing"), telegraph ("distant writing"), and telephone ("distant sound"). The new term may have been influenced by the existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.
Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice the word has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording, involving audio-frequency modulations of a physical trace or groove. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone", "Graphonole" and the like were still brand names specific to various makers of sometimes very different (i.e. cylinder and disc) machines; so considerable use was made of the generic term "talking machine", especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech, by simulating the workings of the vocal cords, tongue, and lips – a potential source of confusion both then and now.
United Kingdom
In British English, "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc records, which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of that company and any use of the name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in 1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term; it has been so used in the UK and most Commonwealth countries since. The term "phonograph" was usually restricted to machines that used cylinder records.
"Gramophone" generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, -rpm LPs (long-playing records) and 45-rpm "single" or two-song records, and EPs (extended-play recordings), the common name became "record player" or "turntable". Often the home record player was part of a system that included a radio (radiogram) and, later, might also play audiotape cassettes. From about 1960, such a system began to be described as a "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) or a "stereo" (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s).
United States
In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs). "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but from about 1902 on, the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victrola (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were generally called "phonograph records" or simply "records", but almost never "Victrola records".
After electrical disc-playing machines appeared on the market in the late 1920s, often combined with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by the public. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were becoming popular as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers.
In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By the 1980s, the use of a "record changer" was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the present. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records".
Gramophone, as a brand name, was not used in the United States after 1902, and the word quickly fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm.
Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack for a magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input.
Australia
In Australian English, "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English. The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June, 1878 to a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August, 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione, along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone.
Early history
Predecessors to the phonograph
Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877.
Phonautograph
Direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as tuning forks had been made by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807, but the first known device for recording airborne speech, music and other sounds is the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by French typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. In this device, sound waves travelling through the air vibrated a parchment diaphragm which was linked to a bristle, and the bristle traced a line through a thin coating of soot on a sheet of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. The sound vibrations were recorded as undulations or other irregularities in the traced line. Scott's phonautograph was intended purely for the visual study and analysis of the tracings. Reproduction of the recorded sound was not possible with the original phonautograph.
In 2008, phonautograph recordings made by Scott were played back as sound by American audio historians, who used optical scanning and computer processing to convert the traced waveforms into digital audio files. These recordings, made circa 1860, include fragments of two French songs and a recitation in Italian.
Paleophone
Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute.
Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air.
An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a , but Cros himself favored the word , sometimes rendered in French as ('voice of the past').
Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception.
Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45.
The early phonographs
Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone. His first experiments were with waxed paper. He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..."
Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph: "I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible.
"From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice.
"Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of."
The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct."
The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a very cracked voice."
Early machines
Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil, which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings. While the cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis, the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation.
Playback was accomplished by exactly repeating the recording procedure, the only difference being that the recorded foil now served to vibrate the stylus, which transmitted its vibrations to the diaphragm and onward into the air as audible sound. Although Edison's very first experimental tinfoil phonograph used separate and somewhat different recording and playback assemblies, in subsequent machines, a single diaphragm and stylus served both purposes. One peculiar consequence was that it was possible to overdub additional sound onto a recording being played back. The recording was heavily worn by each playing, and it was nearly impossible to accurately remount a recorded foil after it had been removed from the cylinder. In this form, the only practical use that could be found for the phonograph was as a startling novelty for private amusement at home or public exhibitions for profit.
Edison's early patents show that he was aware that sound could be recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct".
Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated incised recording using wax-coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone.
Introduction of the disc record
The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative which thought-experimenter Charles Cros initially favored and which practical experimenter Thomas Edison and others actually tested in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881.
Cylindrical Dictaphone records continued in use until the mid-20th century. The commercialization of sound recording technology had been initially aimed at use in business correspondence, i.e. transcription into writing, in which the cylindrical form offered certain advantages. With paper documents being the end product, the cylinders were considered ephemeral; need to archive large numbers of bulky, fragile sound recordings seemed unlikely, and the ease of producing multiple copies was not a consideration.
In 1887, Emile Berliner patented a variant of the phonograph which he named the Gramophone. Berliner's approach was essentially the same one proposed, but never implemented, by Charles Cros in 1877. The diaphragm was linked to the recording stylus in a way that caused it to vibrate laterally (side to side) as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc very thinly coated with a compound of beeswax. The zinc disc was then immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched a groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played. With some later improvements, the flat discs of Berliner could be produced in large quantities at much lower cost than the cylinders of Edison's system.
In May 1889, in San Francisco, the first "phonograph parlor" opened. It featured a row of coin-operated machines, each supplied with a different wax cylinder record. The customer selected a machine according to the title that it advertised, inserted a nickel, then heard the recording through stethoscope-like listening tubes. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor. The coin-operated mechanism was invented by Louis T. Glass and William S. Arnold. The cabinet contained an Edison Class M or Class E phonograph. The Class M was powered by a wet-cell glass battery that would spill dangerous acid if it tipped over or broke. The Class E sold for a lower price and ran on 120 V DC.
The phenomenon of phonograph parlors peaked in Paris around 1900: in Pathé's luxurious salon, patrons sat in plush upholstered chairs and chose from among many hundreds of available cylinders by using speaking tubes to communicate with attendants on the floor below.
By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.)
Oldest surviving recordings
Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording,
although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial.
Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune made on April 9, 1860.
The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact.
A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned. These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb, not preserved, has been called the first instance of recorded verse.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording.
Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst the earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present.
Improvements at the Volta Laboratory
Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.
Although Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877 the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system.
Volta's early challenge
Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after his invention of the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate.
In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the phonograph, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, which resulted in the selenium-celled Photophone.
Volta Graphophone
By 1881, the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. Rather than apply for a patent at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the consent of two of the three men.
The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables.
One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter was granted on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch.
The preserved Bell and Tainter records are of both the lateral cut and the Edison-style hill-and-dale (up-and-down) styles. Edison for many years used the "hill-and-dale" method on both his cylinders and Diamond Disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut, acid-etched Gramophone record in 1887. The Volta associates, however, had been experimenting with both formats and directions of groove modulation as early as 1881.
The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus.
Graphophone commercialization
In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886 and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone.
After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records.
Shortly after American Graphophone's creation, Jesse H. Lippincott used nearly $1 million of an inheritance to gain control of it, as well as the rights to the Graphophone and the Bell and Tainter patents. Not long later Lippincott purchased the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. He then created the North American Phonograph Company to consolidate the national sales rights of both the Graphophone and the Edison Speaking Phonograph. In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers.
A coin-operated version of the Graphophone, , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company.
The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment.
Disc vs. cylinder as a recording medium
Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped; cylinders could not be until 1901–1902 when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison.
Recordings made on a cylinder remain at a constant linear velocity for the entirety of the recording, while those made on a disc have a higher linear velocity at the outer portion of the disc compared to the inner portion.
Edison's patented recording method recorded with vertical modulations in a groove. Berliner utilized a laterally modulated groove.
Though Edison's recording technology was better than Berliner's, there were commercial advantages to a disc system since the disc could be easily mass-produced by molding and stamping and it required less storage space for a collection of recordings.
Berliner successfully argued that his technology was different enough from Edison's that he did not need to pay royalties on it, which reduced his business expenses.
Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records, and "gramophones". His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (12.7 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced the hard rubber used to make the discs with a shellac compound. Berliner's early records had very poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. By late 1901, ten-inch (25 cm) records were marketed by Johnson and Berliner's Victor Talking Machine Company, and Berliner had sold his interests. In 1904, discs were first pressed with music on both sides and capable of around seven minutes total playing time, as opposed to the cylinder's typical duration on two minutes at that time. As a result of this and the fragility of wax cylinders in transit and storage, cylinders sales declined. Edison felt the increasing commercial pressure for disc records, and by 1912, though reluctant at first, his production of disc records was in full swing. This was the Edison Disc Record. Nevertheless, he continued to manufacture cylinders until 1929 and was last to withdraw from that market.
From the mid-1890s until World War I, both phonograph cylinder and disc recordings and machines to play them on were widely mass-marketed and sold. The disc system superseded the cylinder in Europe by 1906 when both Columbia and Pathe withdrew from that market. By 1913, Edison was the only company still producing cylinders in the USA although in Great Britain small manufacturers pressed on until 1922.
Dominance of the disc record
Berliner's lateral disc record was the ancestor of the 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33⅓ rpm, and all other analogue disc records popular for use in sound recording. See gramophone record.
The 1920s brought improved radio technology. Radio sales increased, bringing many phonograph dealers to near financial ruin. With efforts at improved audio fidelity, the big record companies succeeded in keeping business booming through the end of the decade, but the record sales plummeted during the Great Depression, with many companies merging or going out of business.
Record sales picked up appreciably by the late 30s and early 40s, with greater improvements in fidelity and more money to be spent. By this time home phonographs had become much more common, though it wasn't until the 1940s that console radio/phono set-ups with automatic record changers became more common.
In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for radio transcription discs, and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home use were made from this material. Vinyl was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US soldiers during World War II. This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs "Prince Igor" (Asch Records album S-800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late 1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until the 78-rpm format was completely phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene.
Booms in record sales returned after the Second World War, as industry standards changed from 78s to vinyl, long-playing records (commonly called record albums), which could contain an entire symphony, and 45s which usually contained one hit song popularized on the radio – thus the term "single" record – plus another song on the back or "flip" side. An "extended play" version of the 45 was also available, designated 45 EP, which provided capacity for longer musical selections, or for two regular-length songs per side.
Shortcomings include surface noise caused by dirt or abrasions (scratches) and failure caused by deep surface scratches causing skipping of the stylus forward and missing a section, or groove lock, causing a section to repeat, usually punctuated by a popping noise. This was so common that the phrase: "you sound like a broken record,” was coined, referring to someone who is being annoyingly repetitious.
First all-transistor phonograph
In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all-transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in the fall of 1955, for the price of $59.95. The October 1955 issue of Radio & Television News magazine (page 41), had a full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D" batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors. After the 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes, but by 1961 a $49.95 ($ in ) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available.
By the 1960s, cheaper portable record players and record changers which played stacks of records in wooden console cabinets were popular, usually with heavy and crude tonearms in the portables. The consoles were often equipped with better quality pick-up cartridges. Even pharmacies stocked 45 rpm records at their front counters. Rock music played on 45s became the soundtrack to the 1960s as people bought the same songs that were played free of charge on the radio. Some record players were even tried in automobiles, but were quickly displaced by 8-track and cassette tapes.
The fidelity of sound reproduction made great advances during the 1970s, as turntables became very precise instruments with belt or direct drive, jewel-balanced tonearms, some with electronically controlled linear tracking and magnetic cartridges. Some cartridges had frequency response above 30 kHz for use with CD-4 quadraphonic 4 channel sound. A high fidelity component system which cost well under $1,000 could do a very good job of reproducing very accurate frequency response across the human audible spectrum from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz with a $200 turntable which would typically have less than 0.05% wow and flutter and very low rumble (low frequency noise). A well-maintained record would have very little surface noise.
A novelty variation on the standard format was the use of multiple concentric spirals with different recordings. Thus when the record was played multiple times, different recordings would play, seemingly at random. These were often utilized in talking toys and games.
Records themselves became an art form because of the large surface onto which graphics and books could be printed, and records could be molded into unusual shapes, colors, or with images (picture discs). The turntable remained a common element of home audio systems well after the introduction of other media, such as audio tape and even the early years of the compact disc as a lower-priced music format. However, even though the cost of producing CDs fell below that of records, CDs remained a higher-priced music format than either cassettes or records. Thus, records were not uncommon in home audio systems into the early 1990s.
By the turn of the 21st century, the turntable had become a niche product, as the price of CD players, which reproduce music free of pops and scratches, fell far lower than high-fidelity tape players or turntables. Nevertheless, there is some increase in interest; many big-box media stores carry turntables, as do professional DJ equipment stores. Most low-end and mid-range amplifiers omit the phono input; but on the other hand, low-end turntables with built-in phono pre-amplifiers are widely available. Some combination systems include a basic turntable, a CD player, a cassette deck. and a radio, in a retro-styled cabinet. Records also continue to be manufactured and sold today, albeit in smaller quantities than in the disc phonograph's heyday.
Turntable technology
Turntable construction
Inexpensive record players typically used a flanged steel stamping for the turntable structure. A rubber disc would be secured to the top of the stamping to provide traction for the record, as well as a small amount of vibration isolation. The spindle bearing usually consisted of a bronze bushing. The flange on the stamping provided a convenient place to drive the turntable by means of an idler wheel (see below). While light and cheap to manufacture, these mechanisms had low inertia, making motor speed instabilities more pronounced.
Costlier turntables made from heavy aluminium castings have greater balanced mass and inertia, helping minimize vibration at the stylus, and maintaining constant speed without wow or flutter, even if the motor exhibits cogging effects. Like stamped steel turntables, they were topped with rubber. Because of the increased mass, they usually employed ball bearings or roller bearings in the spindle to reduce friction and noise. Most are belt or direct drive, but some use an idler wheel. A specific case was the Swiss "Lenco" drive, which possessed a very heavy turntable coupled via an idler wheel to a long, tapered motor drive shaft. This enabled stepless rotation or speed control on the drive. Because of this feature the Lenco became popular in the late 1950s with dancing schools, because the dancing instructor could lead the dancing exercises at different speeds.
By the early 1980s, some companies started producing very inexpensive turntables that displaced the products of companies like BSR. Commonly found in "all-in-one" stereos from assorted far-east manufacturers, they used a thin plastic table set in a plastic plinth, no mats, belt drive, weak motors, and often, lightweight plastic tonearms with no counterweight. Most used sapphire pickups housed in ceramic cartridges, and they lacked several features of earlier units, such as auto-start and record-stacking. While not as common now that turntables are absent from the cheap "all-in-one" units, this type of turntable has made a strong resurgence in nostalgia-marketed record players.
Turntable drive systems
From the earliest phonograph designs, many of which were powered by spring-wound mechanisms, a speed governor was essential. Most of these employed some type of flywheel-friction disc to control the speed of the rotating cylinder or turntable; as the speed increased, centrifugal force caused a brake—often a felt pad—to rub against a smooth metal surface, slowing rotation. Electrically powered turntables, whose rotational speed was governed by other means, eventually made their mechanical counterparts obsolete. The mechanical governor was, however, still employed in some toy phonographs (such as those found in talking dolls) until they were replaced by digital sound generators in the late 20th century.
Many modern players have platters with a continuous series of strobe markings machined or printed around their edge. Viewing these markings in artificial light at mains frequency produces a stroboscopic effect, which can be used to verify proper rotational speed. Additionally, the edge of the turntable can contain magnetic markings to provide feedback pulses to an electronic speed-control system.
Idler-wheel drive system
Earlier designs used a rubberized idler-wheel drive system. However, wear and decomposition of the wheel, as well as the direct mechanical coupling to a vibrating motor, introduced low-frequency noise ("rumble") and speed variations ("wow and flutter") into the sound. These systems generally used a synchronous motor which ran at a speed synchronized to the frequency of the AC power supply. Portable record players typically used an inexpensive shaded-pole motor. At the end of the motor shaft there was a stepped driving capstan; to obtain different speeds, the rubber idler wheel was moved to contact different steps of this capstan. The idler was pinched against the bottom or inside edge of the platter to drive it.
Until the 1970s, the idler-wheel drive was the most common on turntables, except for higher-end audiophile models. However, even some higher-end turntables, such as the Lenco, Garrard, EMT, and Dual turntables, used idler-wheel drive.
Belt drive system
Belt drives brought improved motor and platter isolation compared to idler-wheel designs. Motor noise, generally heard as low-frequency rumble, is greatly reduced. The design of the belt drive turntable allows for a less expensive motor than the direct-drive turntable to be used. The elastomeric belt absorbs motor vibrations and noise which could otherwise be picked up by the stylus. It also absorbs small, fast speed variations, caused by "cogging", which in other designs are heard as "flutter."
The "Acoustical professional" turntable (earlier marketed under Dutch "Jobo prof") of the 1960s however possessed an expensive German drive motor, the "Pabst Aussenläufer" ("Pabst outrunner"). As this motor name implied, the rotor was on the outside of the motor and acted as a flywheel ahead of the belt-driven turntable itself. In combination with a steel to nylon turntable bearing (with molybdenum disulfide inside for lifelong lubrication) very low wow, flutter and rumble figures were achieved.
Direct drive system
Direct-drive turntables drive the platter directly without utilizing intermediate wheels, belts, or gears as part of a drive train. This requires good engineering, with advanced electronics for acceleration and speed control. Matsushita's Technics division introduced the first commercially successful direct drive platter, model SP10, in 1969, which was joined by the Technics SL-1200 turntable, in 1972. Its updated model, SL-1200MK2, released in 1978, had a stronger motor, a convenient pitch control slider for beatmatching and a stylus illuminator, which made it the long-standing favourite among disc jockeys (see "Turntablism"). By the beginnings of the 80s, lowering of costs in microcontroller electronics made direct drive turntables more affordable.
Pricing
Audiophile grade turntables start at a few hundred dollars and range upwards of $100,000, depending on the complexity and quality of design and manufacture. The common view is that there are diminishing returns with an increase in price – a turntable costing $1,000 would not sound significantly better than a turntable costing $500; nevertheless, there exists a large choice of expensive turntables.
Arm systems
The tone arm (or tonearm) holds the pickup cartridge over the groove, the stylus tracking the groove with the desired force to give the optimal compromise between good tracking and minimizing wear of the stylus and record groove. At its simplest, a tone arm is a pivoted lever, free to move in two axes (vertical and horizontal) with a counterbalance to maintain tracking pressure.
However, the requirements of high-fidelity reproduction place more demands upon the arm design. In a perfect world:
The tone arm must track the groove without distorting the stylus assembly, so an ideal arm would have no mass, and frictionless bearings, requiring zero force to move it.
The arm should not oscillate following a displacement, so it should either be both light and very stiff, or suitably damped.
The arm must not resonate with vibrations induced by the stylus or from the turntable motor or plinth, so it must be heavy enough to be immune to those vibrations, or it must be damped to absorb them.
The arm should keep the cartridge stylus tangent to the groove it's in as it moves across the record, with minimal variation in angle.
These demands are contradictory and impossible to realize (massless arms and zero-friction bearings do not exist in the real world), so tone arm designs require engineering compromises. Solutions vary, but all modern tonearms are at least relatively lightweight and stiff constructions, with precision, very low friction pivot bearings in both the vertical and horizontal axes. Most arms are made from some kind of alloy (the cheapest being aluminium), but some manufacturers use balsa wood, while others use carbon fiber or graphite. The latter materials favor a straight arm design; alloys' properties lend themselves to S-type arms.
The tone arm got its name before the age of electronics. It originally served to conduct actual sound waves from a purely mechanical "pickup" called a sound box or reproducer to a so-described "amplifying" horn. The earliest electronic record players, introduced at the end of 1925, had massive electromagnetic pickups that contained a horseshoe magnet, used disposable steel needles, and weighed several ounces. Their full weight rested on the record, providing ample tracking force to overcome their low compliance but causing rapid record wear. The tone arms were rudimentary and remained so even after lighter crystal pickups appeared about ten years later. When fine-grooved vinyl records were introduced in the late 1940s, still smaller and lighter crystal (later, ceramic) cartridges with semi-permanent jewel styluses became standard. In the mid-1950s these were joined by a new generation of magnetic cartridges that bore little resemblance to their crude ancestors. Far smaller tracking forces became possible and the balanced arm came into use.
Prices varied widely. The well-known and extremely popular high-end S-type SME arm of the 1970–1980 era not only had a complicated design, it was also very costly. On the other hand, even some cheaper arms could be of professional quality: the "All Balance" arm, made by the now-defunct Dutch company Acoustical, was only €30 [equivalent]. It was used during that period by all official radio stations in the Dutch Broadcast studio facilities of the NOS, as well as by the pirate radio station Veronica. Playing records from a boat in international waters, the arm had to withstand sudden ship movements. Anecdotes indicate this low-cost arm was the only one capable of keeping the needle firmly in the groove during heavy storms at sea.
Quality arms employ an adjustable counterweight to offset the mass of the arm and various cartridges and headshells. On this counterweight, a calibrated dial enables easy adjustment of stylus force. After perfectly balancing the arm, the dial itself is "zeroed"; the stylus force can then be dialed in by screwing the counterweight towards the fulcrum. (Sometimes a separate spring or smaller weight provides fine tuning.) Stylus forces of 10 to 20 mN (1 to 2 grams-force) are typical for modern consumer turntables, while forces of up to 50 mN (5 grams) are common for the tougher environmental demands of party deejaying or turntablism.
Of special adjustment consideration, Stanton cartridges of the 681EE(E) series [and others like them] feature a small record brush ahead of the cartridge. The upforce of this brush, and its added drag require compensation of both tracking force (add 1 gram) and anti-skating adjustment values (see next paragraph for description).
Even on a perfectly flat LP, tonearms are prone to two types of tracking errors that affect the sound. As the tonearm tracks the groove, the stylus exerts a frictional force tangent to the arc of the groove, and since this force does not intersect the tone arm pivot, a clockwise rotational force (moment) occurs and a reaction skating force is exerted on the stylus by the record groove wall away from center of the disc. Modern arms provide an anti-skate mechanism, using springs, hanging weights, or magnets to produce an offsetting counter-clockwise force at the pivot, making the net lateral force on the groove walls near zero.
The second error occurs as the arm sweeps in an arc across the disc, causing the angle between the cartridge head and groove to change slightly. A change in angle, albeit small, will have a detrimental effect (especially with stereo recordings) by creating different forces on the two groove walls, as well as a slight timing shift between left/right channels. Making the arm longer to reduce this angle is a partial solution, but less than ideal. A longer arm weighs more, and only an infinitely long [pivoted] arm would reduce the error to zero. Some designs (Burne-Jones, and Garrard "Zero" series) use dual arms in a parallelogram arrangement, pivoting the cartridge head to maintain a constant angle as it moves across the record. Unfortunately this "solution" creates more problems than it solves, compromising rigidity and creating sources of unwanted noise.
The pivoted arm produces yet another problem which is unlikely to be significant to the audiophile, though. As the master was originally cut in a linear motion from the edge towards the center, but the stylus on the pivoted arm always draws an arc, this causes a timing drift that is most significant when digitizing music and beat mapping the data for synchronization with other songs in a DAW or DJ software unless the software allows building a non-linear beat map. As the contact point of the stylus on the record wanders farther from the linear path between the starting point and center hole, the tempo and pitch tend to decrease towards the middle of the record, until the arc reaches its apex. After that the tempo and pitch increase towards the end as the contact point comes closer to the linear path again. Because the surface speed of the record is lower at the end, the relative speed error from the same absolute distance error is higher at the end, and the increase in tempo is more notable towards the end than the decrease towards the middle. This can be somewhat reduced by a curved arm pivoted so that the end point of the arc stays farther from the linear path than the starting point, or by a long straight arm that pivots perpendicularly to the linear path in the middle of the record. However the tempo droop at the middle can only be completely avoided by a linear tracking arm.
Linear tracking
If the arm is not pivoted, but instead carries the stylus along a radius of the disc, there is no skating force and little to no cartridge angle error. Such arms are known as linear tracking or tangential arms. These are driven along a track by various means, from strings and pulleys, to worm gears or electromagnets. The cartridge's position is usually regulated by an electronic servomechanism or mechanical interface, moving the stylus properly over the groove as the record plays, or for song selection.
There are long-armed and short-armed linear arm designs. On a perfectly flat record a short arm will do, but once the record is even slightly warped, a short arm will be troublesome. Any vertical motion of the record surface at the stylus contact point will cause the stylus to considerably move longitudinally in the groove. This will cause the stylus to ride non-tangentially in the groove and cause a stereo phase error as well as pitch error every time the stylus rides over the warp. Also the arm track can come into touch with the record. A long arm will not completely eliminate this problem but will tolerate warped records much better.
Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in the early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
Of note are Rabco's SL-8, followed by Bang & Olufsen with its Beogram 4000 model in 1972. These models positioned the track outside the platter's edge, as did turntables by Harman Kardon, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Yamaha, Sony, etc. A 1970s design from Revox harkened back to the 1950s attempts (and, record lathes), positioning the track directly over the record. An enclosed bridge-like assembly is swung into place from the platter's right edge to its middle. Once in place, a short tonearm under this "bridge" plays the record, driven across laterally by a motor. The Sony PS-F5/F9 (1983) uses a similar, miniaturized design, and can operate in a vertical or horizontal orientation. The Technics SL-10, introduced in 1981, was the first direct drive linear tracking turntable, and placed the track and arm on the underside of the rear-hinged dust cover, to fold down over the record, similar to the SL-Q6 pictured.
The earliest Edison phonographs used horizontal, spring-powered drives to carry the stylus across the recording at a pre-determined rate. But, historically as a whole, the linear tracking systems never gained wide acceptance, due largely to their complexity and associated production/development costs. The resources it takes to produce one incredible linear turntable could produce several excellent ones. Some of the most sophisticated and expensive tonearms and turntable units ever made are linear trackers, from companies such as Rockport and Clearaudio. In theory, it seems nearly ideal; a stylus replicating the motion of the recording lathe used to cut the "master" record could result in minimal wear and maximum sound reproduction. In practice, in vinyl's heyday it was generally too much too late.
Since the early 1980s, an elegant solution has been the near-frictionless air bearing linear arm that requires no tracking drive mechanism other than the record groove. This provides a similar benefit as the electronic linear tonearm without the complexity and necessity of servo-motor correction for tracking error. In this case the trade-off is the introduction of pneumatics in the form of audible pumps and tubing. A more elegant solution is the mechanically driven low-friction design, also driven by the groove. Examples include Souther Engineering (U.S.A.), Clearaudio (Germany), and Aura (Czech Republic). This design places an exceeding demand upon precision engineering due to the lack of pneumatics.
Pickup systems
Historically, most high-fidelity "component" systems (preamplifiers or receivers) that accepted input from a phonograph turntable had separate inputs for both ceramic and magnetic cartridges (typically labeled "CER" and "MAG"). One piece systems often had no additional phono inputs at all, regardless of type.
Most systems today, if they accept input from a turntable at all, are configured for use only with magnetic cartridges. Manufacturers of high-end systems often have in-built moving coil amplifier circuitry, or outboard head-amplifiers supporting either moving magnet or moving coil cartridges that can be plugged into the line stage.
Additionally, cartridges may contain styli or needles that can be separated according to their tip: Spherical styli, and elliptical styli. Spherical styli have their tip shaped like one half of a sphere, and elliptical styli have their tip shaped like one end of an ellipse. Spherical styli preserve more of the groove of the record than elliptical styli, while elliptical styli offer higher sound quality.
(crystal/ceramic) cartridges
Early electronic phonographs used a piezo-electric crystal for pickup (though the earliest electronic phonographs used crude magnetic pick-ups), where the mechanical movement of the stylus in the groove generates a proportional electrical voltage by creating stress within a crystal (typically Rochelle salt). Crystal pickups are relatively robust, and produce a substantial signal level which requires only a modest amount of further amplification. The output is not very linear however, introducing unwanted distortion. It is difficult to make a crystal pickup suitable for quality stereo reproduction, as the stiff coupling between the crystal and the long stylus prevents close tracking of the needle to the groove modulations. This tends to increase wear on the record, and introduces more distortion. Another problem is the hygroscopic nature of the crystal itself: it absorbs moisture from the air and may dissolve. The crystal was protected by embedding it in other materials, without hindering the movement of the pickup mechanism itself. After a number of years, the protective jelly often deteriorated or leaked from the cartridge case and the full unit needed replacement.
The next development was the ceramic cartridge, a piezoelectric device that used newer and better materials. These were more sensitive, and offered greater compliance, that is, lack of resistance to movement and so increased ability to follow the undulations of the groove without gross distorting or jumping out of the groove. Higher compliance meant lower tracking forces and reduced wear to both the disc and stylus. It also allowed ceramic stereo cartridges to be made.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, ceramic cartridges became common in low-quality phonographs, but better high-fidelity (or "hi-fi") systems used magnetic cartridges. The availability of low-cost magnetic cartridges from the 1970s onwards made ceramic cartridges obsolete for essentially all purposes. At the seeming end of the market lifespan of ceramic cartridges, someone accidentally discovered that by terminating a specific ceramic mono cartridge (the Ronette TX88) not with the prescribed 47 kΩ resistance, but with approx. 10 kΩ, it could be connected to the moving magnet (MM) input too. The result, a much smoother frequency curve extended the lifetime for this popular and very cheap type.
Magnetic cartridges
There are two common designs for magnetic cartridges, moving magnet (MM) and moving coil (MC) (originally called dynamic). Both operate on the same physics principle of electromagnetic induction. The moving magnet type was by far the most common and more robust of the two, though audiophiles often claim that the moving coil system yields higher fidelity sound.
In either type, the stylus itself, usually of diamond, is mounted on a tiny metal strut called a cantilever, which is suspended using a collar of highly compliant plastic. This gives the stylus the freedom to move in any direction. On the other end of the cantilever is mounted a tiny permanent magnet (moving magnet type) or a set of tiny wound coils (moving coil type). The magnet is close to a set of fixed pick-up coils, or the moving coils are held within a magnetic field generated by fixed permanent magnets. In either case, the movement of the stylus as it tracks the grooves of a record causes a fluctuating magnetic field, which causes a small electric current to be induced in the coils. This current closely follows the sound waveform cut into the record, and may be transmitted by wires to an electronic amplifier where it is processed and amplified in order to drive a loudspeaker. Depending upon the amplifier design, a phono-preamplifier may be necessary.
In most moving magnet designs, the stylus itself is detachable from the rest of the cartridge so it can easily be replaced. There are three primary types of cartridge mounts. The most common type is attached using two small screws to a headshell that then plugs into the tonearm, while another is a standardized "P-mount" or "T4P" cartridge (invented by Technics in 1980 and adopted by other manufacturers) that plugs directly into the tonearm. Many P-mount cartridges come with adapters to allow them to be mounted to a headshell. The third type is used mainly in cartridges designed for DJ use and it has a standard round headshell connector. Some mass market turntables use a proprietary integrated cartridge that cannot be upgraded.
An alternative design is the moving iron variation on moving magnet used by ADC, Grado, Stanton/Pickering 681 series, Ortofon OM and VMS series, and the MMC cartridge of Bang & Olufsen. In these units, the magnet itself sits behind the four coils and magnetises the cores of all four coils. The moving iron cross at the other end of the coils varies the gaps between itself and each of these cores, according to its movements. These variations lead to voltage variations as described above.
Famous brands for magnetic cartridges are: Grado, Stanton/Pickering (681EE/EEE), B&O (MM types for its two, non-compatible generations of parallel arm design), Shure (V15 Type I to V), Audio-Technica, Nagaoka, Dynavector, Koetsu, Ortofon, Technics, Denon and ADC.
Strain gauge cartridges
Strain gauge or "semiconductor" cartridges do not generate a voltage, but act like a variable resistor, whose resistance directly depends on the movement of the stylus. Thus, the cartridge "modulates" an external voltage supplied by the (special) preamplifier. These pickups were marketed by Euphonics, Sao Win, and Panasonic/Technics, amongst others.
The main advantages (compared to magnetic carts are):
The electrical connection from the cartridge to the preamplifier is immune to cable capacitance issues.
Being non-magnetic, the cartridge is immune to "hum" induced by stray magnetic fields (same advantage shared with ceramic cartridges).
The combination of electrical and mechanical advantages, plus the absence of magnetic yoke high-frequency losses, make them especially suitable to reproducing frequencies up to 50 kHz. Technics (Matsushita Electric) marketed a line of strain-gauge (labeled "semiconductor") cartridges especially intended for Compatible Discrete 4 quadraphonic records, requiring such high frequency response. Bass response down to 0 Hz is possible.
By using a suitable mechanical arrangement, VTA (vertical tracking angle) stays steady independent of the stylus vertical movements, with the consequent reduction in related distortions.
Being a force sensor, the strain-gauge cartridge can also measure the actual VTF (vertical tracking force) while in use.
The main disadvantage is the need of a special preamplifier that supplies a steady current (typically 5mA) to the semiconductor elements and handles a special equalization than the one needed for magnetic cartridges.
A high-end strain-gauge cartridge is currently sold by an audiophile company, with special preamplifiers available.
Electrostatic cartridges
Electrostatic cartridges were marketed by Stax in the 1950 and 1960 years. They needed individual operating electronics or preamplifiers.
Optical readout
A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with a high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean.
An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software. An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality.
Stylus
A smooth-tipped stylus (in popular usage often called a needle due to the former use of steel needles for the purpose) is used to play the recorded groove. A special chisel-like stylus is used to engrave the groove into the master record.
The stylus is subject to hard wear as it is the only small part that comes into direct contact with the spinning record. In terms of the force imposed on its minute areas of actual contact, the pressure it must bear is enormous. There are three desired qualities in a stylus: first, that it faithfully follows the contours of the recorded groove and transmits its vibrations to the next part in the chain; second, that it does not damage the recorded disc; and third, that it is resistant to wear. A worn-out, damaged or defective stylus tip will degrade audio quality and injure the groove.
Different materials for the stylus have been used over time. Thomas Edison introduced the use of sapphire in 1892 and the use of diamond in 1910 for his cylinder phonographs. The Edison Diamond Disc players (1912–1929), when properly played, hardly ever required the stylus to be changed. The styli for vinyl records were also made out of sapphire or diamond. A specific case is the specific stylus type of Bang & Olufsen's (B&O) moving magnet cartridge MMC 20CL, mostly used in parallel arm B&O turntables in the 4002/6000 series. It uses a sapphire stem on which a diamond tip is fixed by a special adhesive. A stylus tip mass as low as 0.3 milligram is the result and full tracking only requires 1 gram of stylus force, reducing record wear even further. Maximum distortion (2nd harmonic) fell below 0.6%.
Other than the Edison and European Pathé disc machines, early disc players, both external horn and internal horn "Victrola" style models, normally used very short-lived disposable needles. The most common material was steel, although other materials such as copper, tungsten, bamboo and cactus were used. Steel needles needed to be replaced frequently, preferably after each use, due to their very rapid wear from bearing down heavily on the mildly abrasive shellac record. Rapid wear was an essential feature so that their imprecisely formed tips would be quickly worn into compliance with the groove's contours. Advertisements implored customers to replace their steel needles after each record side. Steel needles were inexpensive, e.g., a box of 500 for 50 US cents, and were widely sold in packets and small tins. They were available in different thicknesses and lengths. Thick, short needles produced strong, loud tones while thinner, longer needles produces softer, muted tones. In 1916, in the face of a wartime steel shortage, Victor introduced their "Tungs-Tone" brand extra-long-playing needle, which was advertised to play between 100 and 300 records. It consisted of a brass shank into which a very hard and strong tungsten wire, somewhat narrower than the standard record groove, had been fitted. The protruding wire wore down, but not out, until it was worn too short to use. Later in the 78 rpm era, hardened steel and chrome-plated needles came on the market, some of which were claimed to play 10 to 20 record sides each.
When sapphires were introduced for the 78 rpm disc and the LP, they were made by tapering a stem and polishing the tip to a sphere with a radius of around 70 and 25 micrometers respectively. A sphere is not equal to the form of the cutting stylus and by the time diamond needles came to the market, a whole discussion was started on the effect of circular forms moving through a non-circular cut groove. It can be easily shown that vertical, so called "pinching" movements were a result and when stereophonic LPs were introduced, unwanted vertical modulation was recognized as a problem. Also, the needle started its life touching the groove on a very small surface, giving extra wear on the walls.
Another problem is in the tapering along a straight line, while the side of the groove is far from straight. Both problems were attacked together: by polishing the diamond in a certain way that it could be made doubly elliptic. 1) the side was made into one ellipse as seen from behind, meaning the groove touched along a short line and 2) the ellipse form was also polished as seen from above and curvature in the direction of the groove became much smaller than 25 micrometers e.g. 13 micrometers. With this approach a number of irregularities were eliminated. Furthermore, the angle of the stylus, which used to be always sloping backwards, was changed into the forward direction, in line with the slope the original cutting stylus possessed. These styli were expensive to produce, but the costs were effectively offset by their extended lifespans.
The next development in stylus form came about by the attention to the CD-4 quadraphonic sound modulation process, which requires up to 50 kHz frequency response, with cartridges like Technics EPC-100CMK4 capable of playback on frequencies up to 100 kHz. This requires a stylus with a narrow side radius, such as 5 µm (or 0.2 mil). A narrow-profile elliptical stylus is able to read the higher frequencies (greater than 20 kHz), but at an increased wear, since the contact surface is narrower. For overcoming this problem, the Shibata stylus was invented around 1972 in Japan by Norio Shibata of JVC, fitted as standard on quadraphonic cartridges, and marketed as an extra on some high-end cartridges.
The Shibata-designed stylus offers a greater contact surface with the groove, which in turn means less pressure over the vinyl surface and thus less wear. A positive side effect is that the greater contact surface also means the stylus will read sections of the vinyl that were not touched (or "worn") by the common spherical stylus. In a demonstration by JVC records "worn" after 500 plays at a relatively very high 4.5 gf tracking force with a spherical stylus, played "as new" with the Shibata profile.
Other advanced stylus shapes appeared following the same goal of increasing contact surface, improving on the Shibata. Chronologically: "Hughes" Shibata variant (1975), "Ogura" (1978), Van den Hul (1982). Such a stylus may be marketed as "Hyperelliptical" (Shure), "Alliptic", "Fine Line" (Ortofon), "Line contact" (Audio Technica), "Polyhedron", "LAC", or "Stereohedron" (Stanton).
A keel-shaped diamond stylus appeared as a byproduct of the invention of the CED Videodisc. This, together with laser-diamond-cutting technologies, made possible the "ridge" shaped stylus, such as the Namiki (1985) design, and Fritz Gyger (1989) design. This type of stylus is marketed as "MicroLine" (Audio technica), "Micro-Ridge" (Shure), or "Replicant" (Ortofon).
It is important to point out that most of those stylus profiles are still being manufactured and sold, together with the more common spherical and elliptical profiles. This is despite the fact that production of CD-4 quadraphonic records ended by the late 1970s.
For elliptical and advanced stylus shapes, correct cartridge alignment is critical. There are several alignment methods, each creating different null points at which the stylus will be tangential to the record grooves, optimizing distortion across the record side in different ways. The most popular alignment geometries are Baerwald, Løfgren B and Stevenson.
Common tools to align the stylus correctly are 2-point protractors (which can be used with any turntable as long as the headshells are long enough for the chosen alignment), overhang gauges and arc protractors (model specific).
Record materials
Early materials in the 19th century were hardened rubber, wax, and celluloid, but early in the 20th century a shellac compound became the standard. Since shellac is not hard enough to withstand the wear of steel needles on heavy tone arms, filler made of pulverized shale was added. Shellac was also fragile, and records often shattered or cracked. This was a problem for home records, but it became a bigger problem in the late 1920s with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc motion picture "talkie" system, developed in 1927.
To solve this problem, in 1930, RCA Victor made unbreakable records by mixing polyvinyl chloride with plasticisers, in a proprietary formula they called Victrolac, which was first used in 1931, in motion picture discs, and experimentally, in home records, the same year. However, with Sound-on-film achieving supremacy over sound-on-disc by 1931, the need for unbreakable records diminished and the production of vinyl home recordings was dropped as well, for the time being.
The Victrolac formula improved throughout the 1930s, and by the late 30s the material, by then called vinylite, was being used in records sent to radio stations for radio program records, radio commercials, and later, DJ copies of phonograph records, because vinyl records could be sent through the mail to radio stations without breaking. During WWII, there was a shortage of shellac, which had to be imported from Asia, and the U.S. government banned production of shellac records for the duration of the war. Vinylite was made domestically, though, and was being used for V-discs during the war. Record company engineers took a much closer look at the possibilities of vinyl, possibly that it might even replace shellac as the basic record material.
After the war, RCA Victor and Columbia, by far the two leading records companies in America, perfected two new vinyl formats, which were both introduced in 1948, when the 33 RPM LP was introduced by Columbia and the 45 RPM single was introduced by RCA Victor. For a few years thereafter, however, 78 RPM records continued to be made in shellac until that format was phased out around 1958.
Equalization
Early "acoustical" record players used the stylus to vibrate a diaphragm that radiated the sound through a horn. Several serious problems resulted from this:
The maximum sound level achievable was quite limited, being limited to the physical amplification effects of the horn,
The energy needed to generate such sound levels as were obtainable had to come directly from the stylus tracing the groove. This required very high tracking forces that rapidly wore out both the stylus and the record on lateral cut 78 rpm records.
Because bass sounds have a higher amplitude than high frequency sounds (for the same perceived loudness), the space taken in the groove by low frequency sounds needed to be large (limiting playback time per side of the record) to accommodate the bass notes, yet the high frequencies required only tiny variations in the groove, which were easily affected by noise from irregularities (wear, contaminates, etc.) in the disc itself.
The introduction of electronic amplification allowed these issues to be addressed. Records are made with boosted high frequencies and reduced low frequencies, which allow for different ranges of sound to be produced. This reduces the effect of background noise, including clicks or pops, and also conserves the amount of physical space needed for each groove, by reducing the size of the low-frequency undulations.
During playback, the high frequencies must be rescaled to their original, flat frequency response—known as "equalization"—as well as being amplified. A phono input of an amplifier incorporates such equalization as well as amplification to suit the very low level output from a modern cartridge. Most hi-fi amplifiers made between the 1950s and the 1990s and virtually all DJ mixers are so equipped.
The widespread adoption of digital music formats, such as CD or satellite radio, has displaced phonograph records and resulted in phono inputs being omitted in most modern amplifiers. Some newer turntables include built-in preamplifiers to produce line-level outputs. Inexpensive and moderate performance discrete phono preamplifiers with RIAA equalization are available, while high-end audiophile units costing thousands of dollars continue to be available in very small numbers. Phono inputs are starting to reappear on amplifiers in the 2010s due to the vinyl revival.
Since the late 1950s, almost all phono input stages have used the RIAA equalization standard. Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI, HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc. Recordings made using these other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamplifiers, which include multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage preamplifiers, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished. Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal Processor are also available. These kinds of adjustable phono equalizers are used by consumers wishing to play vintage record collections (often the only available recordings of musicians of the time) with the equalization used to make them.
In the 21st century
Turntables continued to be manufactured and sold in the 2010s, although in small numbers. While some audiophiles still prefer the sound of vinyl records over that of digital music sources (mainly compact discs), they represent a minority of listeners. As of 2015, the sale of vinyl LP's has increased 49–50% percent from the previous year, although small in comparison to the sale of other formats which although more units were sold (Digital Sales, CDs) the more modern formats experienced a decline in sales. The quality of available record players, tonearms, and cartridges has continued to improve, despite diminishing demand, allowing turntables to remain competitive in the high-end audio market. Vinyl enthusiasts are often committed to the refurbishment and sometimes tweaking of vintage systems.
In 2017, vinyl LP sales were slightly decreased, at a rate of 5%, in comparison to previous years' numbers, regardless of the noticeable rise of vinyl records sales worldwide.
Updated versions of the 1970s era Technics SL-1200 (production ceased in 2010) have remained an industry standard for DJs to the present day. Turntables and vinyl records remain popular in mixing (mostly dance-oriented) forms of electronic music, where they allow great latitude for physical manipulation of the music by the DJ.
In hip hop music, and occasionally in other genres, the turntable is used as a musical instrument by DJs, who use turntables along with a DJ mixer to create unique rhythmic sounds. Manipulation of a record as part of the music, rather than for normal playback or mixing, is called turntablism. The basis of turntablism, and its best known technique, is scratching, pioneered by Grand Wizzard Theodore. It was not until Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" in 1983 that the turntablism movement was recognized in popular music outside of a hip hop context. In the 2010s, many hip hop DJs use DJ CD players or digital record emulator devices to create scratching sounds; nevertheless, some DJs still scratch with vinyl records.
The laser turntable uses a laser as the pickup instead of a stylus in physical contact with the disk. It was conceived of in the late 1980s, although early prototypes were not of usable audio quality. Practical laser turntables are now being manufactured by ELPJ. They are favoured by record libraries and some audiophiles since they eliminate physical wear completely.
Experimentation is in progress in retrieving the audio from old records by scanning the disc and analysing the scanned image, rather than using any sort of turntable.
Although largely replaced since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, record albums still sell in small numbers and are available through numerous sources. In 2008, LP sales grew by 90% over 2007, with 1.9 million records sold.
USB turntables have a built-in audio interface, which transfers the sound directly to the connected computer. Some USB turntables transfer the audio without equalization, but are sold with software that allows the EQ of the transferred audio file to be adjusted. There are also many turntables on the market designed to be plugged into a computer via a USB port for needle dropping purposes.
Responding to longtime calls by fans and disc jockeys, Panasonic Corp. said it is reviving Technics turntables–the series that remains a de facto standard player supporting nightclub music scenes.
The new analog turntable, which would come with new direct-drive motor technologies that Panasonic says will improve the quality of sound. Beginning of 2019 Technics unveiled SL-1500C Premium Class Direct Drive Turntable System which inherits the brand's high-end sound quality concept.
See also
Archéophone, used to convert diverse types of cylinder recordings to modern CD media
Audio signal processing
Compressed air gramophone
List of phonograph manufacturers
Talking Machine World
Vinyl killer
Notes
References
Further reading
Bruil, Rudolf A. (January 8, 2004). "Linear Tonearms." Retrieved on July 25, 2011.
Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977. Second rev. ed., [being also the] First Collier Books ed., in series, Sounds of the Century. New York: Collier, 1977. 349 p., ill.
Heumann, Michael. "Metal Machine Music: The Phonograph's Voice and the Transformation of Writing." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC.
Koenigsberg, Allen. The Patent History of the Phonograph, 1877–1912. APM Press, 1991.
Various. "Turntable [wiki]: Bibliography." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC.
Weissenbrunner, Karin. "Experimental Turntablism: Historical overview of experiments with record players / records — or Scratches from Second-Hand Technology." eContact! 14.3 — Turntablism (January 2013). Montréal: CEC.
External links
c.1915 Swiss hot-air engined gramophone at Museum of Retro Technology
Interactive sculpture delivers tactile soundwave experience
Very early recordings from around the world
The Birth of the Recording Industry
The Cylinder Archive
Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project – Over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara, free for download or streamed online.
Cylinder players held at the British Library – information and high-quality images.
History of Recorded Sound: Phonographs and Records
EnjoytheMusic.com – Excerpts from the book Hi-Fi All-New 1958 Edition
Listen to early recordings on the Edison Phonograph
Mario Frazzetto's Phonograph and Gramophone Gallery.
Say What? – Essay on phonograph technology and intellectual property law
Vinyl Engine – Information, images, articles and reviews from around the world
The Analogue Dept – Information, images and tutorials; strongly focused on Thorens brand
45 rpm player and changer at work on YouTube
Historic video footage of Edison operating his original tinfoil phonograph
Turntable History on Enjoy the Music.com
2-point and Arc Protractor generators on AlignmentProtractor.com
Audiovisual introductions in 1877
American inventions
Audio players
Thomas Edison
Sound recording
Hip hop production
Turntablism
19th-century inventions | false | [
"Dan Kelly was an American pioneer recording artist, best known for his 'Pat Brady' series of humorous recitations. Kelly was born in New York City January 22, 1842. Both of his parents were musicians, and he began performing at 13 years old, at Wyatt's Theater in Hartford, Connecticut. He continued in minstrel shows such as Bryant's and Christy's, as well as traveling panorama demonstrations, before moving to Cincinnati to record for the Ohio Phonograph Company (a regional subsidiary of the North American Phonograph Company). Kelly recorded also for the Columbia Phonograph Company and New Jersey Phonograph Company (also subsidiaries of North American at the time). An article in The Phonogram magazine speaks to his popularity in the early 1890s - \"Where is there a phonograph in the United States or Canada without a Brady? The answer is, no-where!\", and \"Kelly [...] stands to-day the acknowledged head of all humorous talkers for the phonograph\". For all of his fame in the earliest days of the phonograph industry, he doesn't seem to have made any recordings later than 1893 or 1894, and it's unclear what he did later in life. Because he only recorded onto 'brown wax' cylinders, few of his recordings survive today.\n\nReferences\n\n19th-century American musicians\n1842 births\nYear of death missing\nPioneer recording artists\nPeople from New York City\nPlace of death missing",
"The Graphophone was the name and trademark of an improved version of the phonograph. It was invented at the Volta Laboratory established by Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, D.C., United States.\n\nIts trademark usage was acquired successively by the Volta Graphophone Company, then the American Graphophone Company, the North American Phonograph Company, and finally by the Columbia Phonograph Company (known today as Columbia Records), all of which either produced or sold Graphophones.\n\nResearch and development \n\nIt took five years of research under the directorship of Benjamin Hulme, Harvey Christmas, Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell at the Volta Laboratory to develop and distinguish their machine from Thomas Edison's Phonograph.\n\nAmong their innovations, the researchers experimented with lateral recording techniques as early as 1881. Contrary to the vertically-cut grooves of Edison Phonographs, the lateral recording method used a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a \"zig zag\" pattern across the record. While cylinder phonographs never employed the lateral cutting process commercially, this later became the primary method of phonograph disc recording.\n\nBell and Tainter also developed wax-coated cardboard cylinders for their record cylinder. Edison's grooved mandrel covered with a removable sheet of tinfoil (the actual recording medium) was prone to damage during installation or removal. Tainter received a separate patent for a tube assembly machine to automatically produce the coiled cardboard tube cores of the wax cylinder records. The shift from tinfoil to wax resulted in increased sound fidelity and record longevity.\n\nBesides being far easier to handle, the wax recording medium also allowed for lengthier recordings and created superior playback quality. Additionally the Graphophones initially deployed foot treadles to rotate the recordings, then wind-up clockwork drive mechanisms, and finally migrated to electric motors, instead of the manual crank on Edison's Phonograph.\n\nCommercialization \n\nIn 1885, when the Volta Laboratory Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886, and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone.\n\nAfter the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in Washington, D.C., businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records. The Howe Machine Factory (for sewing machines) in Bridgeport, Connecticut, became American Graphophone manufacturing plant. Tainter resided there for several months to supervise manufacturing before becoming ill, but later went on to continue his inventive work for many years. The small Bridgeport plant, which initially produced three or four machines a day, later became the Dictaphone Corporation.\n\nSubsequent developments \nShortly after American Graphophone creation, Jesse H. Lippincott used nearly $1 million of an inheritance to gain control of it, as well as the rights to the Graphophone and the Bell and Tainter patents. He directly invested $200,000 into American Graphophone, and agreed to purchase 5,000 machines yearly, in return for sales rights to the Graphophone (except in Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia).\n\nSoon after, Lippincott purchased the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company and its patents for US$500,000, and exclusive sales rights of the Phonograph in the United States from Ezrah T. Gilliand (who had previously been granted the contract by Edison) for $250,000, leaving Edison with the manufacturing rights.\n. He then created the North American Phonograph Company in 1888 to consolidate the national sales rights of both the Graphophone and the Edison Speaking Phonograph.\n\nJesse Lippincott set up a sales network of local companies to lease Phonographs and Graphophones as dictation machines. In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers, resulting in the company's bankruptcy. \n\nA coin-operated version of the Graphophone, , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company.\n\nIn 1889, the trade name Graphophone began to be utilized by Columbia Phonograph Company as the name for their version of the Phonograph. Columbia Phonograph Company, originally established by a group of entrepreneurs licensed by the American Graphophone Company to retail graphophones in Washington DC, ultimately acquired American Graphophone Company in 1893. In 1904, Columbia Phonograph Company established itself in Toronto, Canada. Two years later, in 1906, the American Graphophone company reorganized and changed its name to Columbia Graphophone Company to reflect its association with Columbia. In 1918, Columbia Graphophone Company reorganized to form a retailer, Columbia Graphophone Company—and a manufacturer, Columbia Graphophone Manufacturing Company. In 1923, Louis Sterling bought Columbia Phonograph Co. and reorganized it yet again, giving birth to the future record giant Columbia Records.\n\nEarly machines compatible with Edison cylinders were modified treadle machines. The upper-works connected to a spring or electric motor (called Type K electric) in a boxy case, which could record and play back the old Bell and Tainter cylinders. Some models, like the Type G, had new upper-works that were not designed to play Bell and Tainter cylinders. The name Graphophone was used by Columbia (for disc machines) into the 1920s or 1930s, and the similar name Grafonola was used to denote internal horn machines.\n\nSee also \n Columbia Graphophone Company, one of the earliest gramophone companies in the United Kingdom\n Howe Machine Factory\n List of phonograph manufacturers\n Volta Laboratory and Bureau\n Charles A. Cheever\n\nReferences \n\n This article incorporates text from the United States National Museum, a government publication in the public domain.\n\nExternal links \n Charles Tainter and the Graphophone\n The Development of Sound Recording at the Volta Laboratory, Raymond R. Wile, Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal, 21:2, Fall 1990, retrieved July 2, 2017 \n Type K Electric Graphophone\n Identification guides for Columbia Graphophones:\n Cylinder Graphophones\n Front-mount Graphophones\n Rear-mount Graphophones\n\nAudiovisual introductions in 1886\nAudio players\nAudio equipment manufacturers of the United States\nAlexander Graham Bell\nPhonograph manufacturers\nHistory of Bridgeport, Connecticut\nGeorgetown (Washington, D.C.)\nAmerican inventions\nArticles containing video clips"
] |
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