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Elizabeth Chapman 1771 with her 2 husbands Baptist the 4th Earl of Gainsborough 1751 and his cousin Thomas Noel 1788
"Sacred to the memory of Baptist the 4th Earl of Gainsborough, Elizabeth his wife & Thomas Noel esq of Walcot in the county of Northampton, who in his last Will requested that a monument might be placed in this church in the memory of himself and Elziabeth Countess of Gainsborough, who sometime after the decease of Baptist Earl of Gainsborough became the wife of Thomas Noel esq.
Soon after his death, this monument was erected by his executor Henry Earl of Gainsborough; who from a deep & lively sense of respect & affection for his father Baptist Earl of Gainsborough has devoted this monument to the grateful remembrance of his parents as well as to the memory of his truly respected friend, and father in law, Thomas Noel esq AD 1790
To names like these, it is unnecessary to add any praise, as they will be long remembered here with love, with veneration and with gratitude.
To posterity and to the stranger, it may suffice to add that the figure placed here expressive of liberality and beneficence could not anywhere appear with more distinguished propriety than upon this tomb
Baptist the 4th Earl of Gainsborough died March 21st 1751 aged 43
Elizabeth Countess of Gainsborough died December 15th 1771 aged 64
Thomas Noel esq died June 18th 1788 aged 83"
Monument by Nollekens
Baptist Noel, 4th Earl of Gainsborough 1708 –1751 was the son of Baptist Noel, 3rd Earl of Gainsborough 1714 2nd son of Baptist Noel 3rd Viscount Campden and Lady Elizabeth Bertie +++ www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/5LjATY by Susanna heiress of Sir Thomas Fanshawe of Jenkins in Barking & great grand daughter of Francis Wellesborne of Hanney 1602 flic.kr/p/hDmceD
He m Elizabeth daughter of William Chapman his gamekeeper. (Elizabeth m2 her late husband's cousin Thomas Noel, of Walcot son of Hon John Noel 3rd son of Baptist Noel 3rd Viscount Campden and Lady Elizabeth Bertie +++ www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/5LjATY & Elizabeth d1746 daughter of Bennet Sherard, 2nd Baron Sherard www.flickr.com/photos/52219527@N00/7766156936/widow of Edward Ingram 2nd Viscount Irwin 1686 of Whitkirk flic.kr/p/h9hAqF )
Children
1. Baptist Noel, 5th Earl 1740-1759
2. Henry Noel, 6th Earl 1743-1898
3. Hon Charles Noel - died young
1. Lady Elizabeth Noel - died young
2. Lady Jane Noel m 1754 Gerard Anne Edwardes of Welham Grove, co. Leicester illegitimate son of Lord Anne Hamilton by his mistress Mary heiress of Francis Edwardes 3rd son of James 4th Duke of Hamilton
3. Lady Juliana Noel m Feb 1760 (1st wife) George Evans 3rd Baron Carbery and died December 1760
4. Lady Penelope Noel - died young
5. Lady Lucy Noel m 1765 Sir Horatio Mann 2nd Bart., of Egerton Kent
6. Lady Mary Noel- died young
7. Lady Susanna Noel- died young
8. Lady Sophia Noel 1829 m Christopher Neville 1829 of Wellingore Hall (parents of Rev Henry William Nevile 1843 of Cottesmore www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/96b5v6 )
On the death of the 6th Earl all his titles became extinct and his estates were inherited by his nephew Sir Gerald Noel Edwardes later Noel, 2nd Bart. In 1841 his eldest son, Sir Charles Noel Edwardes later Noel, 3rd Bt., was created Earl of Gainsborough who m Frances Stapleton www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/14X332 ) - Church of Saints Peter & Paul, Exton Rutland
Filmed in Xaara Pavillion.
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Dress is: S/D Mesh Spaghetti Minidress in Checkerboard L$1
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Boots are: Mooonshine Allerhand Gift L$1
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Collar is: **RE** Inked Collar RLV * ENGRAVABLE * MESH * (*LUX** Collection*)
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"Hopelessly Devoted to You"
Olivia Newton-John
Guess mine is not the first heart broken
My eyes are not the first to cry
I'm not the first to know
There's just no getting over you
I know I'm just a fool who's willing
To sit around and wait for you
But baby, can't you see there's nothing else for me to do?
I'm hopelessly devoted to you
But now there's nowhere to hide
Since you pushed my love aside
I'm out of my head
Hopelessly devoted to you
Hopelessly devoted to you
Hopelessly devoted to you
My head is sayin', "Fool, forget him"
My heart is sayin', "Don't let go
Hold on to the end", that's what I intend to do
I'm hopelessly devoted to you
But now there's no way to hide
Since you pushed my love aside
I'm outta my head
Hopelessly devoted to you
Hopelessly devoted to you
Hopelessly devoted to you
Songwriters: J. Farrar
For non-commercial use only.
Data from: Musixmatch
therainbowfashionista.blogspot.com/2013/02/devoted-viole-...
Skin: cStar Limited - Maiden 2 - Blush
Hair: >TRUTH< - Hollana - Elvira (Available at Collabor88)
Eyes: cStar Limited - Megan's Eyes Blue
Lashes: .ploom. - Lashes 1
Collar: (red)Mint ~ Posture Collar ~ No.02
Necklace: .Olive. - the FOX Head Neckalce - Onxy
Outfit: Sn@tch - Have a Heart Outfit - Purple Sweater
Nails: :{MV}: - Can't Kill the Metal Nails
Boots: Razorblade Jacket - Regulator Combat Boots
Pose: Apple Spice - Blogger 001
More than a decade ago, Suzuki developed a machine so unique that it instantly attracted a devoted following around the world. Like its namesake, the Japanese peregrine falcon, the Hayabusa is famed for cutting through the air with incredible agility and performance.
Through countless engineering refinements of the original design, the Hayabusa spirit has endured. In 2014, the model received Brembo Monobloc high-performance calipers and an Antilock Brake System. Its incomparable performance delivers a fun and sporty ride at any speed, setting the bar high for rivals and defining the “Ultimate Sport Bike.” The radically original yet timeless styling also reflects the spirit of the person who owns a Hayabusa. Its sensational power, speed, smooth ride and overwhelming presence continue to fascinate owners and onlookers alike. Because the Hayabusa is, and always will be, the ultimate sport bike.
This summer, an exhibition devoted to signage in the trenches took place at the Abri Mémoire in Uffholtz. This exhibition presented, among other things, a collection of panels collected at the end of the conflict by a resident of one of the neighboring municipalities of the Hartmannswillerkopf.
This collection survived the years sheltered from bad weather and was bequeathed to Les Amis du Hartmannswillerkopf (The Friends of Hartmannswillerkopf) association after the death of its curator.
Les Amis du Hartmannswillerkopf have chosen to exhibit part of this exceptional heritage that we share here through a series of photos.
I have no idea what this sign means. I am open to all suggestions.
Cet été avait lieu à l'Abri Mémoire d'Uffholtz une exposition consacrée à la signalétique dans les tranchées. Cette exposition présentait, entre autre, une collection de panneaux rassemblés dès la fin du conflit par un habitant de l'une des communes voisines du Hartmannswillerkopf.
Cette collection a traversé le temps à l'abri des intempéries et été léguée à l'association des Amis du Hartmannswillerkopf après le décès de son conservateur.
Les Amis du Hartmannswillerkopf ont choisi d'exposer une partie de ce patrimoine exceptionnel que nous partageons ici à travers une série de photos.
Je n'ai pas la moindre idée quant à la signification de ce panneau. Je suis ouvert à toutes les suggestions.
"I'll never hurt you, I'll never lie
I'll never be untrue
I'll never give you reason to cry
I'd be unhappy if you were blue"
"Devoted to You" The Everly Brothers
Photo credit: JHC Archives
Mother’s Day is an occasion to honor strong and devoted women in our lives. This year it was also a cause for celebration at the Jay Heritage Center as they announced their receipt of an exceptional collection of 19th century daguerreotypes of Jay women and their family members who lived in Rye at the historic 1838 Mansion. The gift was applauded on Saturday, May 12 with a gathering of Jay descendants and members of the Jay Heritage Center Board of Trustees. Westchester's Deputy County Executive, Kevin Plunkett presented Jay Heritage Center President, Suzanne Clary with a Proclamation from County Executive Rob Astorino commending her non-profit's organization for their work in preservation and education. Also on hand were Senator Suzi Oppenheimer and NY State Assemblyman George Latimer.
The highlight of the new collection is a never before seen mother and daughter portrait circa 1848 of Mrs. John Clarkson Jay (nee Laura Prime, daughter of NY banker Nathaniel Prime) and her eldest child Laura at 16 years old. Yet another charming vignette dated 1850 shows 2 of the youngest daughters, Alice and Sarah, in gingham dresses at age 4 and 2. These rare and luminous treasures were generously donated by architectural historian and preservationist, Anne Andrus Grady of Lexington, Massachusetts in memory of her aunt, Miriam Jay Wurts Andrus, a direct descendant of John Jay. Mrs. Andrus was born in New York City, the only child of Edith Maud Benedict and Pierre Jay Wurts. A 1931 graduate of Vassar College, she also attended Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins University where she studied international relations. During her lifetime she was known as an accomplished photographer as well as a civic activist and noted philanthropist. Her range of volunteer efforts benefited many academic and cultural institutions like the League of Women Voters, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Center Stage Theatre in Baltimore and Vassar College to name just a few. Mrs. Andrus’ niece, Anne Andrus Grady has distinguished herself as well as an outstanding champion of historic preservation in Massachusetts. She has authored numerous Historic Structure Reports and National Historic Landmark nominations, advising on the preservation of many of that state’s most prominent buildings such as Boston’s Old South Meeting House. Her work of 3 decades culminated in a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Historical Commission in 2010. She is delighted that the Jay daguerreotypes will be conserved and find a permanent home in Rye where they can be studied and interpreted.
The Andrus Collection is composed of 8 leather cased daguerreotype plates several of which are hand-tinted. For the Jay Heritage Center, a gift with this most meaningful provenance, including plates produced in the studios of well known New York Daguerrians, Rufus Anson and Jeremiah Gurney, opens the door to new educational programming about America’s “New Art” as photography was then dubbed. This magical method of capturing images on silvered copper plates was introduced in the United States by none other than Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse, who was a colleague of John Jay’s eldest son, Peter Augustus Jay, first brought the daguerreotype process back to America in 1839. Morse’s earliest students included Gurney, as well as a young man named Edward Anthony. Anthony produced popular steroviews during the Civil War and also branched out into the photographic supplies business, creating many of the decorative book-like cases in which Gurney’s and other Daguerrians’ photos were sealed. (Coincidentally Anthony’s granddaughter married John Clarkson Jay III in 1903.)
An opening reception and exhibit on the Andrus collection is scheduled for this fall at the 1838 Jay Mansion accompanied by a series of lectures on early American photography.
###
Jay Heritage Center
210 Boston Post Road
Rye, NY 10580
(914) 698-9275
Email: jayheritagecenter@gmail.com
Follow and like us on:
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Facebook www.facebook.com/jayheritagecenter
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www.instagram.com/jayheritagecenter/
A National Historic Landmark since 1993
Member of the African American Heritage Trail of Westchester County since 2004
Member of the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area since 2009
On NY State's Path Through History (2013)
A long walk through central Moscow on a beautiful sunny day saw the streets full of people. The following shots are from the walk. The first of the images is devoted to public love.
I know I only posted an update yesterday on the single cygnet at Ladyton but they caught my eye again. The cygnet seems to spend a lot of time with the cob.
FATHER AND SON yusuf islam CAT STEVENS VIÑA DEL MAR 2015
The photo is part of a collection devoted to the Indians of the Colorado Valley. The young woman in the photo is identified as Won-Si-Vu, or Young Antelope, and she was in the Kai-vav-its tribe of the Pai Utes, living on the Kai-bab Plateau, near the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. The photo was taken by Hillers in 1874 during the Powell expeditions. John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran and professor of geology at Wesleyan College in Illinois, proposed a geological and geographical survey by boat of the Colorado River and its tributaries. Powell's initial expedition exploring the Colorado River from May 24 to late August 1869 received favorable media coverage, in part due to Powell's entertaining lectures. However, the survey yielded very little in the way of physical data.
For the second expedition Powell turned to the U.S. Congress as a means to supplement funds that he was currently receiving from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In June of 1872, Powell was granted $10,000 to lead a second expedition, the Geographical and Topographical Survey of the Colorado River of the West.
Powell's primary interest was in geology and ethnology, and his investigations centered on the problem of aridity and human adaptation in the lands of the West. Powell's travels by foot and by boat brought him into contact with what he called the plateau tribes; the Paiutes, the Shivwits, the Unikarits, the Utes, and others. Inspired by these encounters and by the ancient ruins of cities he saw while on the Colorado River, Powell later became the Smithsonian Institution's first Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a post he held from 1872 until his death in 1902. [From the Online Nevada Encyclopedia at www.onlinenevada.org/]
(Note: An inexpensive viewer can turn the side-by-side images on the computer screen into a 3-D image. The viewer is available from the following source:
Photo in the Parisian magazine "Le Theatre," No. 249, May 1909. Special issue devoted to "La Saison Russe a Paris." The 1909 season was, essentially, the premiere of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, although that name was not used until the following year. Most of the dancers were principals of the Imperial Ballet of Saint Petersburg, hired by Diaghilev to perform in Paris during the Imperial Ballet's summer recess.
Vera Karalli was born in Moscow and graduated from the Moscow Theatre School in 1906 under the direction of the prominent Russian instructor Alexander Gorsky. She performed with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the premier season in Paris in 1909, as well as 1919 and 1920. Vera was often paired with danseur Mikhail Mordkin. In the 1920s, Vera Karalli taught dance in Kaunas, Lithuania and from 1930 until 1935 she was the ballet mistress of the Romanian Opera in the capital city of Bucharest. From 1938 until 1941 Karalli lived in Paris, France. Later, she settled in Vienna, Austria and taught ballet there until her death in 1972.
Mikhail Mordkin was one of two of the male stars of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1909. Mordkin was trained at the Bolshoi, in Moscow, graduating from the Bolshoi Ballet School in 1899. In the same year he was appointed ballet master. He joined Diaghilev for his Paris season as a leading dancer, ranking above Nijinsky. After the first season, he remained in Paris to dance with Anna Pavlova going on to form his own company, All Star Imperial Russian Ballet, which toured America in 1911 and 1912. Mikhail returned to the Bolshoi and was appointed its director in 1917.
He left Russia after the October Revolution, first working in Lithuania, and finally settling in the United States in 1924. He founded the Mordkin Ballet in 1926, but after a European tour the company disbanded in the same year. From among his students in America, he formed a new Mordkin Ballet in 1937, now American Ballet Theatre. His student, Lucia Chase, helped to initially finance the company and after the first season, she took over the management from Mordkin.
[Source: www.russianballethistory.com/diaghilevsdancers.htm]
Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens is the only National Park Service site devoted to the propagation and display of aquatic plants. There are about 10 acres of aquatic gardens. The peak season for their signature pink lotus is early July, but (a bit to my surprise) the gardens have proven to be an interesting and beautiful place to visit all summer and now into autumn.
Many more photos from Kenilworth (all seasons) are here: flic.kr/s/aHskaK5qNr
.........-1988 Wild or Natural habitat
1988-2009 Existing potted
sunshine on my shoulder - John Denver
They devoted the city to the lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it - men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.
The Book of Joshua 6:21
“…HERE WILL RISE A FITTING STRUCTURE—A SYMBOL OF DEVOTED PATRIOTISM AND UNSELFISH SERVICE. WE IN AMERICA DO NOT BUILD MONUMENTS TO WAR: WE DO NOT BUILD MONUMENTS TO CONQUESTS; WE BUILD MONUMENTS TO COMMEMORATE THE SPIRIT OF SACRIFICE IN WAR—REMINDERS OF OUR DESIRE FOR PEACE. THE MEMORY OF THOSE, WHOM THE WAR CALLED TO THE BEYOND, URGES US TO CONSECRATE THE BEST THAT IS IN US TO THE SERVICE OF COUNTRY IN TIMES OF PEACE. WE BEST HONOR THE MEMORY OF THOSE DEAD BY STRIVING FOR PEACE, THAT THE TERROR OF THE DAYS OF WAR WILL BE WITH US NO MORE. MAY THE BEAUTY OF THIS MONUMENT, WHICH WILL RISE ON THIS SITE, CAST A BENEFICENT LIGHT ON THE MEMORIES OF OUR COMRADES, MAY A SUBSTANTIAL STRUCTURE TYPIFY THE STRENGTH OF THEIR PURPOSE, AND MAY IT INSPIRE FUTURE GENERATIONS WITH A DESIRE TO BE OF SERVICE TO THEIR FELLOWS AND THEIR COUNTRY.”
-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the dedication of the site for the Soldiers Memorial building in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 14, 1936.
Opening on Memorial Day, May 30, 1938, the Soldiers' Memorial in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, was originally designed by the architectural firm of Mauran, Russell & Crowell to commemorate the St. Louis citizens who gave their lives in World War I. The building houses the Soldiers Memorial Military Museum, which contains military displays and memorabilia from World War I and subsequent American wars.
Operated for many years by the St. Louis Board of Public Service, the City of St. Louis recently signed an agreement to turn over operations to the Missouri Historical Society. Beginning February 28, 2016, the Historical Society will close the museum for approximately two years to begin a multi-million dollar renovation of the historic structure in order to create a state-of-the-art museum facility.
This is a view of the exterior of the building which is made of Bedford limestone. Four large figures sculptured from stone stand at the entrances to the atrium which separates the east and west wings of the building; two on the south side along Chestnut street representing Courage [male] and Vision [female], and two on the north side along Pine Street representing Loyalty [male] and Sacrifice [female]. These sculptures are the work of native St. Louisan Walker Hancock.
© All rights reserved - - No Usage Allowed in Any Form Without the Written Consent of the photographer.
The best way to view my photostream is on Flickriver: Nikon66's photos on Flickriver
The Mausoleum of Genghis Khan, Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China,
The Mausoleum of Genghis Khan is a temple devoted to the worship of Genghis Khan. It is located along a river in Kandehuo Enclosure, Xinjie Town, Ejen Khoruu Banner, Ordos Prefecture-Level City , Inner Mongolia, People's Republic of China.
Genghis Khan worship is a religion popular among Mongolians, with ties to traditional Mongolian shamanism. There are other temples of this worship culture in Inner Mongolia and Northern China.
The mausoleum is a cenotaph, where the coffin contains no body but only headdresses and accessories, because the actual Tomb of Genghis Khan has never been discovered. It was built between 1954 and 1956 by the government of the PRC in the traditional Mongol style. The mausoleum is located in the town of Ejin Horo Qi, 115 kilometers north of Yulin, and 55 kilometers south of Dongsheng.
After Genghis Khan died around Gansu, his coffin was carried to central Mongolia. According to his will, he was buried without any markings. The burial place is unknown. Instead of the real tomb, portable mausoleums called naiman tsagaan ger (eight white yurts) enshrined him. They were originally palaces where Genghis Khan lived, but were altered to mausoleums by Ögedei Khan. They settled at the base of the Khentii Mountains. The site, located in Delgerkhaan Sum, Khentii Aimag, Mongolia, is called the Avraga site.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Genghis_Khan
Genghis Khan's Mausoleum
Statue of Genghis Khan, Baotou
Statue of Genghis Khan, BaotouGenghis Khan is a Mongolian hero. He reunified the chaotic Inner Mongolia prairie and led his people to be a great civilization. He made great contributions to the founding of the powerful Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and the unification of China which enhanced greatly the interactions of the peoples of China. Due to this great feat, he was named 'Genghis Khan' by Mongolian tribes, meaning 'powerful king' in Mongolian. Today, Genghis Khan is still worshipped and remembered by his people.
www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/inner_mongolia/baotou...
Meenakshi Amman Temple (also called: Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple, Tiru-aalavaai and Meenakshi Amman Kovil) is a historic Hindu temple located on the southern bank of the Vaigai River in the temple city of Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. It is dedicated to Parvati, known as Meenakshi, and her consort, Shiva, here named Sundareswarar. The temple forms the heart and lifeline of the 2,500 year old city of Madurai and is a significant symbol for the Tamil people, mentioned since antiquity in Tamil literature though the present structure was built between 1623 and 1655 CE. It houses 14 gopurams (gateway towers), ranging from 45–50m in height. The tallest is the southern tower, 51.9 metres high, and two golden sculptured vimanas, the shrines over the garbhagrihas (sanctums) of the main deities. The temple attracts 15,000 visitors a day, around 25,000 on Fridays, and receives an annual revenue of sixty million INR. There are an estimated 33,000 sculptures in the temple. It was on the list of top 30 nominees for the "New Seven Wonders of the World". The annual 10-day Meenakshi Tirukalyanam festival, celebrated during April and May, attracts 1 million visitors.
LEGEND
Meenakshi (IAST Mīnākṣī Tamil மீனாட்சி) is an avatar of the Hindu goddess Parvati - the consort of Shiva, one of the few Hindu female deities to have a major temple devoted to her. The name "Mīnachchi" means fish-eyed and is derived from the words "mīna" meaning fish and "akṣi" meaning eyes. The lady goddess Meenakshi is the principal deity of the temple, not Sundareswarar, unlike most Shiva temples in South India where Shiva is the principal deity. According to Hindu legend, in order to answer the prayers of the second Pandya king Malayadwaja Pandya and his wife Kanchanamalai, Parvati appeared out of the holy fire of the Putra Kameshti Yagna (sacrifice for childhood) performed by the king. According to another legend, the goddess herself gave notice to Kanchanamalai in one of her previous births that Kanchanamalai would have the privilege of mothering the goddess. The girl who came out of the holy fire had three breasts. A voice from the heavens told the king not to worry about the abnormality and added that the third breast would vanish as soon as the girl met her future husband. The happy king named the girl "Tadaatagai" and as the heir to the throne, Tadaatagai was trained carefully in all the 64 sastras, the fields of science.
As the time came for Tadaatagai's coronation, she had to wage war in three worlds encompassing eight directions. After conquering Brahma's Abode, Sathyaloka, Vishnu's Abode, Vaikunta, and Devas' abode Amaravati, she advanced to Shiva's Abode Kailasha. She very easily defeated the bhoota ganas (IAST: Bhūtagana, meaning Shiva's army) and Nandi, the celestial bull of Shiva, and headed to attack and conquer Shiva. The moment she looked at Shiva, she was unable to fight and bowed her head down due to shyness, and the third breast vanished immediately. Tadaatagai realized that Shiva was her destined husband. She also realized that she was the incarnation of Parvati. Both Shiva and Tadaatagai returned to Madurai and the king arranged the coronation ceremony of his daughter, followed by her marriage with Shiva.
The marriage was to be the biggest event on earth, with the whole earth gathering near Madurai. Vishnu, the brother of Meenakshi, prepared to travel from his holy abode at Vaikuntam to preside over the marriage. Due to a divine play, he was tricked by the Deva, Indra and was delayed on the way. After the marriage, the pair ruled over Madurai for a long time and then assumed divine forms as Sundareswarar and Meenakshi, the presiding deities of the temple. Following the tradition, every evening, before closing the temple, a ritual procession lead by drummers and a brass ensemble carries the image of Sundareswarar to Meenakshi's bedroom to consummate the union, to be taken back the next morning in dawn. The marriage is celebrated annually as Chithirai Thiruvizha in Madurai. During the period of Nayakar rule in Madurai, the ruler Thirumalai Nayakar linked the festival Azhakar Thiruvizha and the Meenakshi wedding ceremony.
HISTORY
The Meenatchi temple is believed to have been founded by Indra (king of Deva celestial deities) while he was on a pilgrimage to atone for his misdeeds. He felt his burden lifting as he neared the swayambu lingam (self formed lingam, a representation of Shiva used for worship in temples) of Madurai. He ascribed this miracle to the lingam and constructed the temple to enshrine it. Indra worshipped Shiva, who caused golden lotuses to appear in the nearby pool. Tamil literature speaks of the temple over the last two millennia. Thirugnanasambandar, the famous Hindu saint of Saiva philosophy, mentioned this temple as early as the 7th century, and described the deity as Aalavai Iraivan. The temple is believed to have been sacked by the infamous Muslim invader Malik Kafur in 1310 and all the ancient elements were destroyed. The initiative to rebuild the structure was taken by first Nayak king of Madurai, Viswanatha Nayak (1559–1600) under the supervision of Ariyanatha Mudaliar, the prime minister of the Nayak Dynasty and the founder of the Poligar System. The original design by Vishwanatha Nayak in 1560 was substantially expanded to the current structure during the reign of Thirumalai Nayak (1623–55). He took considerable interest in erecting many complexes inside the temple. His major contributions are the Vasantha Mandapam for celebrating vasanthorsavam (spring festival) and Kilikoondu Mandapam (corridor of parrots). The corridors of the temple tank and Meenatchi Nayakar Mandapam were built by Rani Mangammal.
Rous Peter (1786–1828), the Collector of Madurai in 1812, got nickname 'Peter Pandian’ as he respected and treated people of all faiths equally. He donated a set of golden stirrups studded with diamonds and red stones to the temple.Goddess Meenatchi is believed to have saved Rous Peter from a fatal incident. He also wished that after his death, his body be buried in a position that would enable his eyes to face the temple.
THE TEMPLE
ARCHITECTURE
The temple is the geographic and ritual center of the ancient city of Madurai and one of the largest temple complexes in Tamil Nadu. The temple complex is divided into a number of concentric quadrangular enclosures contained by high masonry walls. It is one of the few temples in Tamil Nadu to have four entrances facing four directions. Vishwantha Nayaka allegedly redesigned the city of Madurai in accordance with the principles laid down by Shilpa Shastras (Sanskrit: śilpa śāstra, also anglicized as silpa sastra meaning rules of architecture) relevant to urban planning. The city was laid out in the shape of square with a series of concentric streets culminating from the temple. These squares continue to retain their traditional names, Aadi, Chittirai, Avani-moola and Masi streets, corresponding to Tamil month names. Ancient Tamil classics mention that the temple was the center of the city and the streets happened to be radiating out like lotus and its petals. The temple prakarams (outer precincts of a temple) and streets accommodate an elobrate festival calendar in which dramatic processions circumabulate the shrines at varying distances from the centre. The vehicles used in processions are progressively more massive the further they travel from the centre. The complex is in around 180,000 m2.
GOPURAMS
The temple is surrounded by gopurams (gateway tower), - There are ten gopuram the tallest of which, the famous southern tower, rises to over 52 m and was built in 1559. The oldest gopuram is the eastern one, built by Maravarman Sundara Pandyan during 1216-1238 Each gopuram is a multi-storeyed structure, covered with thousands of stone figures of animals, gods and demons painted in bright hues. The outer gopuram presents steeply pyramidal tower encrusted with plaster figures, while the inner gopuram serves as the entrance to the inner enclosure of Sundareswarar shrine.
SHRINES
The central shrine of Meenakshi Amman temple and her consort Sundareswarar are surrounded by three enclosures and each of these are protected by four minor towers at the four points of the compass, the outer tower growing larger and reaching higher to the corresponding inner one. The Meenakshi shrine has the emerald-hued black stone image of Meenakshi. The Sundareswarar shrine lies at the centre of the complex, suggesting that the ritual dominance of the goddess developed later. Both the Meenakshi and Sundareswarar shrines have gold plated Vimanam (tower over sanctum). The golden top can be seen from a great distance in the west through the apertures of two successive towers. The area covered by the shrine of Sundareswarar is exactly one fourth of the area of the temple and that of Meenakshi is one fourth that of Sundareswarar.
The tall sculpture of Ganesh carved of single stone located outside the Sundareswarar shrine in the path from Meenashi shrine is called the Mukuruny Vinayakar. A large measure of rice measuring 3 kurini (a measure) is shaped into a big ball of sacrifice and hence the Ganesh is called Mukkurni Vinayagar (three kurinis). This deity is believed to be found during a 17th-century excavation process to dig the Mariamman temple tank.
TEMPLE TANK & SURROUNDING PORTICO
The sacred temple tank Porthamarai Kulam ("Pond with the golden lotus"), is 50 m by 37 m in size. According to legend, Shiva promised a stork that no fish or other marine life would grow here and thus no marine animals are found in the lake. In the Tamil legends, the lake is supposed to judge the worth of a new piece of literature. Authors place their works here and the poorly written works are supposed to sink and the scholastic ones are supposed to float, Tirukkural by Tiruvalluvar was one such work.
Only a fraction of 17th and 18th century paintings of Nayak period survives and one such portion is found in the small portico on the western side of the tank. It depicts the marriage of Sundareswarar and Meenkashi attended by Vijayaranga Chokkanatha and Rani Mangammal. The painting is executed on a vivid red background, with delicate black linework and large areas of white, green and ochre. The celestial couple is seated inside an architectural frame with a flowering tree in the background.
HALLS
The corridor surrounding the sanctum the Meenakshi is called kilikoondu Mandapam ("bird cage corridor"). The space was once used to keep green parrots that were trained to utter the name of Meenakshi. There are two large cages full of squawking green parrots.
The Kambatadi Mandapam ("Hall of temple tree") with its seated Nandi (sacred bull) has various manifestations of Shiva carved and also contains the famous "Marriage of Meenakshi" sculpture. Sculptures of Shiva and Kali trying to out-dance one another are pelted with balls of ghee by devotees. A golden flagstaff with 32 sections symbolizes the human backbone and is surrounded by various gods, including Durga and Siddar.
The Puthu Mandapam ("new hall") constructed by Tirumala Nayak contains large number of sculptures. It is situated opposite to the east gopuram.
The Ashta Shakthi Mandapam ("Hall of eight goddess") is the first hall in the entrance of Meenakshi shrine tower near to East Tower. Ashta indicates eight and Shakthi refers to goddess - the hall has statues of eight goddesses. The gopurams (towers) can be viewed from this hall. The passage was named for eight forms of goddess Sakthi carved on its pillars. Other sculptures and paintings depict the Tiruvilayadal (holy games of Shiva). The sculptures of heroes of Mahabharata, the Pancha pandavas can be seen in the Pancha Pandava Mandapam (Hall of Pandavas).
The Viravasantharaya Mandapam is a large hall with huge corridors. To the south of this hall is the kalyana mandapam, to the south of the pillared hall, is where the marriage of Shiva and Parvati is celebrated every year during the Chithirai Festival in mid-April. The golden images of Meenakshi and Sundareswarar are carried into the 16th century oonjal mandapam (swing corridor) and placed on the swing every Friday at 5:30 p.m. The shrine has a 3-storied gopuram guarded by two stern dwarapalakas (guardians) and supported by golden, rectangular columns that bear lotus markings. Along the perimeter of the chamber, granite panels of the divine couple are present. The hall is situated in the western bank of the temple tank.
The Mudali Pillai Mandapam or Iruttu Mandapam (Dark hall) is a wide and long hall built by Muthu Pillai during 1613. On the pillars of the halls, there are fine sculptures depicting the story of Shiva taking the form of Bikshadanar to teach the sages a lesson.
The Mangayarkarasi mandapam is a newly built hall situated opposite to the marriage halls and bears the name of saindy queen, Mangayarkarasi who contributed to Saivism and Tamil language. To the south of Mangayarkarasi mandapam lies the Servaikarar Mandapam, a hall built by Marudu brothers in 1795. The Nagara mandapam (Hall of beating drums) lies opposite to Sundareswarar shrine was built by Achaya Rayar, the minister of Rani Mangammal in 1635. The Kolu Mandapam is a hall for displaying dolls during the Navarathri festival celebrated during September–October. This hall is situated in the second corridor of the Meenakshi shrine at the western side.
HALL OF THOUSAND PILLARS
The Meenakshi Nayakkar Mandapam ("Hall of 1000 pillars") has two rows of pillars carved with images of yali (mythological beast with body of lion and head of an elephant), commonly used as the symbol of Nayak power. It is situated to the north of Sundareswarar flag staff hall. The Thousand Pillar Hall contains 985 (instead of 1000) carved pillars. The hall was built by Ariyanatha Mudaliar in 1569 and blends engineering skill and artistic vision. Ariyanatha Mudaliar was prime minister and general of Viswanatha Nayak, the first Nayaka of Madurai (1559–1600). He was also the founder of Poligar System, the quasi-feudal organization of the country dividing it into multiple palayams or small provinces in which each palayam was ruled by a palayakkarar or a petty chief. At the entrance of the hall is the statue of Ariyanatha Mudaliar seated on a horse-back, flanking one side of the entrance to the temple. The statue is periodically garlanded by worshippers. Each pillar in the hall is a carved monument of the Dravidian sculpture. The more prominent among the carved figures are those of Rati (wife of Kama), Karthikeya, Ganesha, Shiva as a wandering mendicant and endless number of yalis (mythical figures of lions). There is a Temple Art Museum in the hall where icons, photographs, drawings, and other exhibits of the 1200 years old history of the temple are displayed. Just outside this hall, towards the west, are the Musical Pillars. Each pillar, when struck, produces a different musical note.
RELIGIOUS SIGNIFANCE OF THE TEMPLE
A distinct feature of Meenakshi in terms of iconography is the presence of parrot in her right hand. The parrot is generally associated with the Vaishnava azhwar saint Andal. "Pancha Sabhai" refers to the five royal courts of Nataraja (dancing form of Shiva) where he performed cosmic dance. The Tamil word velli means silver and ambalam means stage or altar. This massive Nataraja sculpture is enclosed in a huge silver altar and hence called "Velli Ambalam" (silver abode). This is a special figure of Natarja which usually differs from Chola bronzes; in the Chola images, Nataraja is shown dancing with his left leg raised, but this sculpture has the right leg raised. According to the Tiruvilayaadal Puranam (Shiva's sacred games), this is on the request of Rajasekara Pandya, who was a sincere devotee of Shiva. He requested the deity to change his position, as he felt that keeping the same foot raised would put enormous strain and got a graceful acquiescence from the divine master.
RITUALS
WORSHIP
There are close to 50 priests in the temple who perform the puja (rituals) during festivals and on a daily basis. Like other Shiva temples of Tamil Nadu, the priests belong to Shivaite to the Adishaivas, a Brahmin sub-caste. The priests live in a closed area north of the temple. The temple has a six time pooja calendar everyday, each comprising four rituals namely abhisheka (sacred bath), alangaram (decoration), neivethanam (food offerings) and deepa aradanai (waving of lamps) for both Meenakshi and Sundareswarar. The puja (worship) ceremonies are held amidst music with nadhaswaram (pipe instrument) and tavil (percussion instrument), religious instructions in the Vedas by priests and prostration by worshippers in front of the temple mast. The common practise is to worship Meenakshi before Sundareswarar. Margazhi (December–January) ritual is prominent one for winning a perfect, god-like husband - it is Meenakshi's ennai kappu festival. Aligned with the cardinal points, the street plans forms a giant mandala (group) whose sacred properties are believed to be activated during the mass clockwise circumambulation of the central temple.
FESTIVALS
The most important festival associated with the temple is the "Meenakshi Thirukalyanam" (the divine marriage of Meenakshi) that is celebrated in April every year. The wedding of the divine couple is regarded as a classic instance of south Indian female-dominated marriage, an arrangement referred as "Madurai marriage". The male dominated marriage is called "Chidambaram marriage", referring to Shiva's uncontested dominance, ritual and mythic, at the famous Shiva temple of Chidhambaram. The marriage brings together rural and urban people, deities and mortals, Saivas (those who worship Shiva) and Vaishnavas (those who worship Vishnu) in order to celebrate Meenakshi as the royal monarch. During the one month period, there are a number of events including the "Ther Thiruvizhah" (chariot festival) and "Theppa Thiruvizhah" (float festival). Major Hindu festivals like Navrathri and Shivrathri are celebrated in the temple. Like most Shakti temples in Tamil Nadu, the Fridays during the Tamil months of Aadi (July–August) and Thai (January–February) are celebrated in the temple by thousands of devotees. "Avani Moola Utsavam" is a 10-day festival mainly devoted to Sundareswarar describes his various Thiruvilayadal meaning Shiva's sacred games.
LITERARY MENTION
Down the centuries, the temple has been a centre of education of Tamil culture, literature, art, music and dance. All three assemblies of Tamil language, the Tamil Sangam (about the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE), were held at Madurai. Tamil poets of different epochs participated in these assemblies and their composition is called Sangam literature. During the third Tamil sangam, the comparative merit of the poets was decided by letting the works float in the lotus tank of the temple. It was believed that a divine force would cause the work of superior merit to float on the surface while the inferior literary work would sink. Tevaram, the 7th-8th century Tamil canonoical work on Shiva, are works by the three prominent Nayanars (Saivites) namely Appar, Sundarar and Thirugnanasambandar. The temple has been glorified by the hymns of Tevaram by all the three poets. Different hymns of Sambandar on the temple mention the queen of Pandya Nadu, his desire to defeat Jains in debate, the miracles performed by him curing the king's fever, the Jains' provocation of Sambandar by burning his house and challenging him to debate, and Sambandar's eventual victory over them. A poem from the Third Tirumurai by Sambandar is as under –
"Lady who has eyes that are comparable to the startled eyes of the deer!
the great chief queen of the Vaḻuti! listen to what I say. Do not feel distressed that I am such a young boy from whose mouth milk is flowing. when the god in Tiruvālavāy stands by my side as help, I can not be easily defeated by the low people who inflict many sufferings on others and who live in hills beginning with great Āṉaimalai."
There are few poets in Tamil history who sang about goddess Parvati. The notable among them is Kumaraguruparar, a 17th-century Tamil poet, who composed Meenakshi Pillaitamil on Meenakshi of this temple. King Tirumalai Nayak's patronage of Kumaraguruparar has an important place in the history of pillaitamil (a genre of Tamil literature). Kumaraguruparar visited a lot of temples and when he visited this temple, he composed Meenakshi pillaitamil on Meenakshi. Legend has it that goddess appeared in the dreams of Nayak directing him to arrange the recital of Kumaraguruparar before a learned assembly. The king made elobrate arrangements for the event. Meenakshi impersonated herself in the form of a small girl and enjoyed the recital. As Kumaraguruparar was explaining the 61st verse, the goddess appreciated by garlanding the poet with a string of pearls and disappeared.
WIKIPEDIA
Archaeologist and painter Edward Dodwell (1767-1832), who came from a noble and rich Irish family, was born in Dublin and studied literature and archeology at Trinity College in Cambridge. Thanks to the economic comfort provided by his great fortune, he stayed away from the need to acquire a profession, and he devoted himself to the researches about the Mediterranean civilizations.
In 1801, he traveled with Ionian Islands (Corfu, Zante etc.) and the region of Troy together with Atkins and well-known traveler W. Gell. In 1805-06, he travels to Rumeli with his traveling companion, Simone Pomardi. He then settled in Naples and Rome and marries a woman thirty years younger from him. He was an honorary member of many European cultural foundations. He died of sickness while exploring in the mountains of Italy. The large archaeological collection he created (coins, 115 copper items, 143 amphoras) was sold to the Munich Sculpture Museum after being housed in his home in Rome for a while.
As a productive writer and visual artist at the same time, Dodwell reveals his multi-faceted talent, which includes his sense of curiosity, critical gaze and artistic sensitivity as an archaeologist in his works that are unique for the era. For the first time in his work, we can recognize the true discovery of a "place": walking; It becomes a form of discovery and recognition (reading) of the view, which includes monuments, history, contemporary people and proven information.
The journey, which is described in these two volumes of publications and has rich data in archeology and topography material, creates an infinite wealth of information about the public and private lives of the Greeks in the period before the rebellion (before 1821). In late April 1801, Dodwell took a smart and well-read Greek from Santorini, whom he met in Italy, as an interpreter and set off from Venice. In one month, he crossed the Adriatic sea and arrived in Corfu under Russian-ottoman occupation with his companions. Their journey continues towards Paksos islands, Parga, Santa Mavra. Dodwell writes about the nose of Lefkata, where ancient Greek poet Saffo, according to ancient ruins, products, villages and legend, fell into the sea because of his desperate love for Faon. From here go to Preveza and go to Nikopolis. He travels to the archeological site at the village, continues to Ithaka island and writes about the geography and economic situation there and about the search for ancient ruins. Finally, he came to Kefalonia and completed his first trip to the regions of Greece with William Gell.
In 1805, Dodwell, along with the artist Simone Pomardi, arrives in Zante from the city of Messina in Sicily, where he writes about the villages, population, products; he then goes to Mesolongi. Tepedelenli Ali Pasha writes about the persecution of local people, local products, the Akheloos river and the Echinades archipelago. After the journey, he reached Patra and became the guest of the consul Nikolaos Stranis. Stranis's mansion had been the meeting place of many European guests for years. Dodwell's visit to Patra confirms his theoretical knowledge about them. Speaking of Contemporary Patra, the city's architectural arrangement is easily understandable (noting that "the houses of Greeks are lime and the houses of Turks are painted in red"), writes about its economic condition (including products exported from the region). In Patra, he visits the castle, the famous big-bodied cypress tree, the church of Saint Andrea and the holy spring. He adds the pattern that his travel companion Pomardi has drawn and displays the sacred source. Noting that many black slaves were found in Patra, Dodwell also made efforts to acquire some archaeological artifacts. As he writes about Patra, he especially portrays the city's historical memory. It documents its own knowledge in a scientific way with the old sources it used to showcase the contemporary reality of Greece on its route and previous travel testimonies. adds the pattern drawn by and displaying the sacred source. Noting that many black slaves were found in Patra, Dodwell also made efforts to acquire some archaeological artifacts. As he writes about Patra, he especially portrays the city's historical memory. It documents its own knowledge in a scientific way with the old sources it used to showcase the contemporary reality of Greece on its route and previous travel testimonies. adds the pattern drawn by and displaying the sacred source. Noting that many black slaves were found in Patra, Dodwell also made efforts to acquire some archaeological artifacts. As he writes about Patra, he especially portrays the city's historical memory. It documents its own knowledge in a scientific way with the old sources it used to showcase the contemporary reality of Greece on its route and previous travel testimonies.
Dodwell chooses to go to Athens in another way due to an epidemic in Peloponnese and passes through Inebahti, Galaksidi (watches carnival shows here) and passes through Amfisa (here is a guest at a Kefalonian doctor's house and visits the voivodeship), makes his way up to Parnasos mountain, stops in Hriso village and stay in Kastri and tour the Kastalya fountain and very few ancient ruins that can be seen in Delfi. The road passes through Arahova and Distomo and takes it to the ancient site of Trophonius priests in Livadia, from there it continues to other Boeotia villages (Orchomenos, Aliartos, Thespiae). Crossing the Eleutherae road and the Eleusis plain, on March 26, Lord Elgin's work teams arrive in Athens when the Acropolis was removing the relief marbles. Dodwell stayed here until September and almost all of Attica (Pendeli mountain, Fili, Acharnai, Kifisia, Vrauron, Porto Rafti, Thorikos, Lavrion, Sunion, Piraeus) and Aegina and Salamis islands. In addition to archaeological issues, he also writes about the dances, music and games of the Greeks, as well as about baths and even insects and birds.
After Athens, it passes through Thiva (Thebai), Kopais lake, Thermopylae and Lamia, Stylis and Almyros to Volos and Pelion; in his article he mentions all the ancient city ruins he met along the way. After that, Larissa and Ambelakia come to the superior level of life here, highly influenced by cultured people and the cotton yarn dyeing industry. Thessaly plain returns to Athens after passing through Lilaia, Amfikleia, Fokida, Boeotia and stopping at Chalkida and Marathon. He stays here all summer. In December of 1805, we find him visiting the Argos-Corinth region: Dafni monastery, Eleusis and its religious mysteries, Megara, Corinthian isthmus, Corinthian fortress, Kechries, Nemea and its vineyards, the acropolis and ancient theater in Argos, the treasure of Mycenae and Atreus, Tiryns and Nauplion, The ruins of the Epidaurus and Asclepius temple, Troizina, Methana, Poros are places he traveled and wrote. Then, on the road of Aegion, Sikyon passes through Xylokastron and stops in the local inns, and after Patra, he reaches Olympia on January 24, 1806 by describing all villages of Achaia and Ileia. In the continuation of the trip, Messini visits Sparta in late February after visiting the ruins in Megalopolis and Vassai. After crossing Arkadiya and Achaia (by stopping at Tegea, Tripoli, Mantineia, Orchomenos, Stymphalia, Feneos, Kalavryta, Mega Spilaion), it reaches Patra in the spring and finally reaches Rome on September 18, 1806. passing through, stops in the local inns, and after Patra, he describes all the villages of Achaia and Ileia and arrives at Olympia on January 24, 1806. In the continuation of the trip, Messini visits Sparta in late February after visiting the ruins in Megalopolis and Vassai. After crossing Arkadiya and Achaia (by stopping at Tegea, Tripoli, Mantineia, Orchomenos, Stymphalia, Feneos, Kalavryta, Mega Spilaion), it reaches Patra in the spring and finally reaches Rome on September 18, 1806. passing through, stops at the inns of the region and after Patra, he describes all the villages of Achaia and Ileia and arrives at Olympia on January 24, 1806. In the continuation of the trip, Messini visits Sparta in late February after visiting the ruins in Megalopolis and Vassai. After crossing Arkadiya and Achaia (stop by Tegea, Tripoliçe, Mantineia, Orchomenos, Stymphalia, Feneos, Kalavryta, Mega Spilaion), it reaches Patra in the spring and finally reaches Rome on September 18, 1806.
In the appendix of the publication: place names and different spelling forms, catalog of Kefalonia and Zante islands, Livadia, Amfisa, Lamia, Thebai cities and their major settlements, Corfu, Delfi, Fokis, Thespiae There are inscriptions from the islands of Piraeus, Tinos and Lezbos, musical instruments used in Attica, and the price catalog of products in Athens, as well as a catalog of fruits and vegetables on sale as long as they stay there.
After documenting and archiving the archaeological remains that he visited, using the camera obscura technique, Dodwell aimed to combine art with the scientific view. In his published three volumes of his work, which is a basic resource for all travelers who traveled to Greece after him, and which is still a very useful work in archaeological research, there are nearly 400 pictures of landscape and historical monuments drawn by Dodwell. Recently, dozens more patterns have appeared that have not been known to date.
Written By: İoli Vingopoulou
~
Okay, I can take a joke, but…
Susan and I had devoted the month of January for a road trip to Florida, camping and kayaking the clear springs across the state. We worked for weeks to get everything ready, eager with anticipation. Finally, a couple of days before the new year, we strapped the boats on top of the truck, loaded all the gear, but then had to hold back for a weekend, as it was raining heavily. (It’s not fun to start a tent camping trip in a puddle.)
Once we made our first stop in Charleston for New Year’s festivities, we checked the weather. More heavy rain was on the way, so we cancelled our next beach camping plan in lieu of a cabin in the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia. While comfortable there, we couldn’t paddle due to high winds and constant rain. I suppose that’s okay, because as it turns out, almost 3/4 of the acreage in the swamp burned badly in 2011. We used to escape to the Okefenokee, as it was the quietest, most primordial-looking place we had ever known. Now it looks like a war zone, with charred sticks that used to be beautiful cypress trees, and it will take many years for it to grow back to its former glory. (That said, fire is a good thing. The Okefenokee is not so much a swamp as it is a peat bog. If the peat doesn’t burn from time to time, the entire area would fill in, with no waterways available.)
We had anticipated staying in the tent in the Okefenokee for a few more days, but weather forecasts indicated that we should move further south for warmth and dryness, so we re-routed to Silver Springs, Florida. More on that wonderful place later.
A full week after leaving the house, we managed to get a paddle in on the Silver River, although it was cool and overcast. When we landed back at the camp and checked the weather, we saw the massive, record-breaking cold front coming down on us. Poring over the forecasts, we decided that rather than enduring 20F cold, we would move down to Jupiter, Florida. Yes, it was much warmer down there, but being at the edge of the cold front, we were inundated with Gulf moisture and high winds. Three days, no paddling.
We had planned to go to the southernmost point of Florida, Flamingo, then to the west coast, but every place we had planned was subject to some of the most rotten camping weather imaginable.
We called a Full Retreat. Enough was enough. Two weeks out on the road living out of the truck; changing plans at every stop; only had one paddle trip; one day of sunshine. Home starts to look pretty good after a while.
On the way back north, we managed to snag this beautiful cabin back in Silver Springs. Surrounded by Live Oak trees draped in Spanish Moss, these “cabins” are more like full-sized houses, with a huge wraparound porch that we enjoyed to the fullest extent. (Yes, it rained that night.)
There were several good moments and highlights along the way; it wasn’t all bad. But as I sat on the porch and contemplated our fortunes, I couldn’t help but think that someone was up there, looking down at me with their thumb on the weather button, and saying, “You know, Rob: You… just… tick… me… off.”
~
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---- a very young girl devoted ----
---- una giovanissima devota ----
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Questo un racconto fotografico breve e lungo, sulla processione del Venerdì Santo che si è svolta quest'anno nel paese Siciliano della città medioevale di Randazzo: a differenza di ciò che si osserva nei riti del Venerdì Santo, a Randazzo si porta in processione penitenziale il simulacro del SS. Crocifisso, anzicchè il simulacro del Cristo Morto. La processione viene organizzata dalla "Confraternita della Vergine Addolorata" appartenente alla chiesa di S.Pietro, nella quale sono custoditi il Crocifisso ligneo del seicento, e la statua della Madonna Addolorata, le cui vare vengono portate in spalla dai devoti; alla manifestazione religiosa partecipano ovviamente tutte le confraternite della città, con la presenza di tantissimi "personaggi" (impersonati da bambini-e, ragazzi-e, tutti in costume, come S. Giovanni Battista, la Veronica, le tre Pie donne, Marta, Maria e Maddalena, l'Angelo, i due Nicodemi, Giuseppe d'Arimatea e Nicodemo); infine la processione è animata dalla presenza del popolo, del clero, delle autorità civili e quelle militari. Il Crocifisso è caratteristicamente illuminato da candele che si trovano racchiuse dentro bocce di vetro, al pari anche la vara della Vergine Addolorata è illuminata da candele, racchiuse dentro "fanali di antica memoria" in vetro. La processione (accompagnata dal suono mesto della banda musicale, dalle giaculatorie gridate dai devoti che invocano continuamente il SS.Crocifisso e la Vergine Addolorata) percorre un lungo percorso, che diventa anche molto faticoso per la presenza di una ripida salita (la salita di San Bartolo);
La processione giunge così nella chiesa di S. Giorgio per poi ritornare indietro, raggiungendo la chiesa di San Pietro, dalla quele era partita, oramai in tarda serata.
Archaeologist and painter Edward Dodwell (1767-1832), who came from a noble and rich Irish family, was born in Dublin and studied literature and archeology at Trinity College in Cambridge. Thanks to the economic comfort provided by his great fortune, he stayed away from the need to acquire a profession, and he devoted himself to the researches about the Mediterranean civilizations.
In 1801, he traveled with Ionian Islands (Corfu, Zante etc.) and the region of Troy together with Atkins and well-known traveler W. Gell. In 1805-06, he travels to Rumeli with his traveling companion, Simone Pomardi. He then settled in Naples and Rome and marries a woman thirty years younger from him. He was an honorary member of many European cultural foundations. He died of sickness while exploring in the mountains of Italy. The large archaeological collection he created (coins, 115 copper items, 143 amphoras) was sold to the Munich Sculpture Museum after being housed in his home in Rome for a while.
As a productive writer and visual artist at the same time, Dodwell reveals his multi-faceted talent, which includes his sense of curiosity, critical gaze and artistic sensitivity as an archaeologist in his works that are unique for the era. For the first time in his work, we can recognize the true discovery of a "place": walking; It becomes a form of discovery and recognition (reading) of the view, which includes monuments, history, contemporary people and proven information.
The journey, which is described in these two volumes of publications and has rich data in archeology and topography material, creates an infinite wealth of information about the public and private lives of the Greeks in the period before the rebellion (before 1821). In late April 1801, Dodwell took a smart and well-read Greek from Santorini, whom he met in Italy, as an interpreter and set off from Venice. In one month, he crossed the Adriatic sea and arrived in Corfu under Russian-ottoman occupation with his companions. Their journey continues towards Paksos islands, Parga, Santa Mavra. Dodwell writes about the nose of Lefkata, where ancient Greek poet Saffo, according to ancient ruins, products, villages and legend, fell into the sea because of his desperate love for Faon. From here go to Preveza and go to Nikopolis. He travels to the archeological site at the village, continues to Ithaka island and writes about the geography and economic situation there and about the search for ancient ruins. Finally, he came to Kefalonia and completed his first trip to the regions of Greece with William Gell.
In 1805, Dodwell, along with the artist Simone Pomardi, arrives in Zante from the city of Messina in Sicily, where he writes about the villages, population, products; he then goes to Mesolongi. Tepedelenli Ali Pasha writes about the persecution of local people, local products, the Akheloos river and the Echinades archipelago. After the journey, he reached Patra and became the guest of the consul Nikolaos Stranis. Stranis's mansion had been the meeting place of many European guests for years. Dodwell's visit to Patra confirms his theoretical knowledge about them. Speaking of Contemporary Patra, the city's architectural arrangement is easily understandable (noting that "the houses of Greeks are lime and the houses of Turks are painted in red"), writes about its economic condition (including products exported from the region). In Patra, he visits the castle, the famous big-bodied cypress tree, the church of Saint Andrea and the holy spring. He adds the pattern that his travel companion Pomardi has drawn and displays the sacred source. Noting that many black slaves were found in Patra, Dodwell also made efforts to acquire some archaeological artifacts. As he writes about Patra, he especially portrays the city's historical memory. It documents its own knowledge in a scientific way with the old sources it used to showcase the contemporary reality of Greece on its route and previous travel testimonies. adds the pattern drawn by and displaying the sacred source. Noting that many black slaves were found in Patra, Dodwell also made efforts to acquire some archaeological artifacts. As he writes about Patra, he especially portrays the city's historical memory. It documents its own knowledge in a scientific way with the old sources it used to showcase the contemporary reality of Greece on its route and previous travel testimonies. adds the pattern drawn by and displaying the sacred source. Noting that many black slaves were found in Patra, Dodwell also made efforts to acquire some archaeological artifacts. As he writes about Patra, he especially portrays the city's historical memory. It documents its own knowledge in a scientific way with the old sources it used to showcase the contemporary reality of Greece on its route and previous travel testimonies.
Dodwell chooses to go to Athens in another way due to an epidemic in Peloponnese and passes through Inebahti, Galaksidi (watches carnival shows here) and passes through Amfisa (here is a guest at a Kefalonian doctor's house and visits the voivodeship), makes his way up to Parnasos mountain, stops in Hriso village and stay in Kastri and tour the Kastalya fountain and very few ancient ruins that can be seen in Delfi. The road passes through Arahova and Distomo and takes it to the ancient site of Trophonius priests in Livadia, from there it continues to other Boeotia villages (Orchomenos, Aliartos, Thespiae). Crossing the Eleutherae road and the Eleusis plain, on March 26, Lord Elgin's work teams arrive in Athens when the Acropolis was removing the relief marbles. Dodwell stayed here until September and almost all of Attica (Pendeli mountain, Fili, Acharnai, Kifisia, Vrauron, Porto Rafti, Thorikos, Lavrion, Sunion, Piraeus) and Aegina and Salamis islands. In addition to archaeological issues, he also writes about the dances, music and games of the Greeks, as well as about baths and even insects and birds.
After Athens, it passes through Thiva (Thebai), Kopais lake, Thermopylae and Lamia, Stylis and Almyros to Volos and Pelion; in his article he mentions all the ancient city ruins he met along the way. After that, Larissa and Ambelakia come to the superior level of life here, highly influenced by cultured people and the cotton yarn dyeing industry. Thessaly plain returns to Athens after passing through Lilaia, Amfikleia, Fokida, Boeotia and stopping at Chalkida and Marathon. He stays here all summer. In December of 1805, we find him visiting the Argos-Corinth region: Dafni monastery, Eleusis and its religious mysteries, Megara, Corinthian isthmus, Corinthian fortress, Kechries, Nemea and its vineyards, the acropolis and ancient theater in Argos, the treasure of Mycenae and Atreus, Tiryns and Nauplion, The ruins of the Epidaurus and Asclepius temple, Troizina, Methana, Poros are places he traveled and wrote. Then, on the road of Aegion, Sikyon passes through Xylokastron and stops in the local inns, and after Patra, he reaches Olympia on January 24, 1806 by describing all villages of Achaia and Ileia. In the continuation of the trip, Messini visits Sparta in late February after visiting the ruins in Megalopolis and Vassai. After crossing Arkadiya and Achaia (by stopping at Tegea, Tripoli, Mantineia, Orchomenos, Stymphalia, Feneos, Kalavryta, Mega Spilaion), it reaches Patra in the spring and finally reaches Rome on September 18, 1806. passing through, stops in the local inns, and after Patra, he describes all the villages of Achaia and Ileia and arrives at Olympia on January 24, 1806. In the continuation of the trip, Messini visits Sparta in late February after visiting the ruins in Megalopolis and Vassai. After crossing Arkadiya and Achaia (by stopping at Tegea, Tripoli, Mantineia, Orchomenos, Stymphalia, Feneos, Kalavryta, Mega Spilaion), it reaches Patra in the spring and finally reaches Rome on September 18, 1806. passing through, stops at the inns of the region and after Patra, he describes all the villages of Achaia and Ileia and arrives at Olympia on January 24, 1806. In the continuation of the trip, Messini visits Sparta in late February after visiting the ruins in Megalopolis and Vassai. After crossing Arkadiya and Achaia (stop by Tegea, Tripoliçe, Mantineia, Orchomenos, Stymphalia, Feneos, Kalavryta, Mega Spilaion), it reaches Patra in the spring and finally reaches Rome on September 18, 1806.
In the appendix of the publication: place names and different spelling forms, catalog of Kefalonia and Zante islands, Livadia, Amfisa, Lamia, Thebai cities and their major settlements, Corfu, Delfi, Fokis, Thespiae There are inscriptions from the islands of Piraeus, Tinos and Lezbos, musical instruments used in Attica, and the price catalog of products in Athens, as well as a catalog of fruits and vegetables on sale as long as they stay there.
After documenting and archiving the archaeological remains that he visited, using the camera obscura technique, Dodwell aimed to combine art with the scientific view. In his published three volumes of his work, which is a basic resource for all travelers who traveled to Greece after him, and which is still a very useful work in archaeological research, there are nearly 400 pictures of landscape and historical monuments drawn by Dodwell. Recently, dozens more patterns have appeared that have not been known to date.
Written By: İoli Vingopoulou
This is an old photo I never tried in black and white until now -- such a difference! It makes a perfect companion piece to the previous photo, I think.
This was taken at the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, Ohio. I was kneeling in the grass, my attention entirely devoted to the bark of a remarkable birch tree (some photos posted previously here and here), when this hawk suddenly flew in and landed on a tree directly in front of me. I don't have a proper lens for photographing wildlife, so this was a rare chance for me. The bird was only about 5 meters away from where I was kneeling. It stayed there for what seemed like a long time, but in truth probably no more than 5 minutes...
What the heck is the American Legion? I've been going by American Legion posts for years without ever delving into that question. It's time to shed some light on the subject.
Here's who they are in their own words:
The American Legion was chartered and incorporated by Congress in 1919 as a patriotic veterans organization devoted to mutual helpfulness. It is the nation’s largest wartime veterans service organization, committed to mentoring youth and sponsorship of wholesome programs in our communities, advocating patriotism and honor, promoting strong national security, and continued devotion to our fellow servicemembers and veterans.
Hundreds of local American Legion programs and activities strengthen the nation one community at a time. American Legion Baseball is one of the nation’s most successful amateur athletic programs, educating young people about the importance of sportsmanship, citizenship and fitness. The Operation Comfort Warriors program supports recovering wounded warriors and their families, providing them with "comfort items" and the kind of support that makes a hospital feel a little bit more like home. The Legion also raises millions of dollars in donations at the local, state and national levels to help veterans and their families during times of need and to provide college scholarship opportunities.
The American Legion is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization with great political influence perpetuated by its grass-roots involvement in the legislation process from local districts to Capitol Hill. Legionnaires’ sense of obligation to community, state and nation drives an honest advocacy for veterans in Washington. The Legion stands behind the issues most important to the nation's veterans community, backed by resolutions passed by volunteer leadership.
The American Legion’s success depends entirely on active membership, participation and volunteerism. The organization belongs to the people it serves and the communities in which it thrives.
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Here's the very long story of Raymond, Washington:
The blanket of old growth forest that covered the Willapa Hills surrounding Raymond, on the Willapa River in Pacific County, fueled the town's growth from a handful of farms to a mill town bustling with trains filled with freshly cut logs, mills running 24 hours a day, and ships laden with lumber bound for the East Coast, South American, San Francisco, and Hawaii in less than a decade after its founding in 1903.
When a combination of overharvesting, environmental laws, and changes in the global market severely reduced logging and milling in the 1980s and 1990s, Raymond residents looked to new, more sustainable ways to utilize the surrounding hills, rivers, and bay to create jobs and sustain their community.
First Peoples
The Willapa River, with headwaters in the Willapa Hills, winds through the Willapa Valley until it is reaches the sea at Willapa Bay. A few miles upstream from the river's mouth, the South Fork of the Willapa joins the main river. Sloughs thread through the lowland forming what is called the Island, though it is not technically completely encircled by water.
Prior to contact with Europeans, three tribes lived around the Willapa's mouth, the Shoalwater (or Willapa) Chinook, the Lower Chehalis, and, seasonally, the Kwalhiloqua. Epidemic diseases brought by European and white American traders wreaked havoc in the Indian communities because they lacked immunities to the diseases. A malaria epidemic in the 1830s, probably brought to the area by sailors who had been in the tropics, decimated tribes in the lower Columbia River region.
After the epidemic, the Kwalhioqua all but disappeared, and the few remaining individuals joined the Willapa Chinook and Lower Chehalis. The northern part of Willapa Bay and the Willapa River formed a boundary between the Chinooks to the south and the Lower Chehalis to the north. The two groups intermarried and traded often.
These are the people who oystermen met when they came to Willapa Bay in the 1850s to harvest shellfish for the San Francisco market. The Indians worked with the oystermen in harvesting the shellfish.
Loggers, Farmers, and Indians
It was not long before the area's forests attracted loggers and sawmill operators. Brothers John (b. ca. 1830) and Valentine Riddell (b. ca. 1817) established a mill at what would become South Bend in 1869. Others followed, included John Adams' mill on the north side of the junction of the Willapa River with the South Fork.
Several farmers staked claims in the vicinity of the junction. The community, known as Riverside, had a school in 1875 and a post office.
The Indians in the area continued to work with oystermen, and in the more recently established salmon canneries and saw mills. They also continued to visit their traditional gathering places for berries and other plant materials.
The tribes had not yet formally agreed to allow the white Americans to live on their land, so, in February 1855, Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens (1818-1862) met with the Quinault, Queets, Lower Chehalis, Upper Chehalis, Shoalwater Bay, Chinook, and Cowlitz tribes at the Chehalis River Treaty Council (at the location of Cosmopolis today). The tribes did not object to ceding their lands, but once they heard the terms of the treaty they rejected the provision that required them to move to a shared reservation away from their traditional lands with the location of the reservation to be determined later. The tribes refused to accept those conditions and Stevens left without an agreement.
The absence of a treaty did not prevent white settlers from claiming lands along the Willapa River, thereby leaving less and less room for the Indians to live. On September 22, 1866 President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875) established the Shoalwater Bay Tribes Reservation by reserving 335 acres near Tokeland for the Lower Chehalis and Willapa Chinook who lived along Willapa Bay. The reservation is and has been used by a number of the tribes' members, but many also live in the surrounding communities (and elsewhere).
Raymond is Formed
In 1889 the promise of a Northern Pacific Railway terminus in South Bend, just downstream from the river junction, led to a land boom. Lots in South Bend and along the river in both directions sold for incredible profits until 1893 when a national financial panic led to a bust in South Bend. South Bend had the county seat and retained the railroad and some operating mills, but a grant of land to the Northern Pacific on the waterfront tied up many of its choicest industrial sites.
Upriver, at the river junction, a group of residents, some with Homestead Act claims and others who had bought land at low prices following the bust in South Bend, formed the Raymond Land and Development Company in 1903.
Incorporators of the land company included Leslie (1874-1961) (often referred to as L. V.) and Stella (1875-1960) Raymond, who had a farm on the Island. Stella had inherited the land from her father, Captain George Johnson (1823-1882), who had established a Homestead Act Claim for almost 179 acres. Presumably Johnson or the Raymonds purchased part of their holdings, because they brought 310 acres to the partnership.
L. V. and Stella, who married in 1897, moved to the farm in 1899 and Raymond became the name of the town that grew up on and around their land. L. V. served as the town's first postmaster, first Northern Pacific Railway agent, and developed a water system for the town. The Raymonds donated land and their time to community projects, such as a playfield and the fire department. A bequest from the Raymonds established the Raymond Foundation in 1962 as a non-profit organization to fund scholarships and community development projects.
Building a River Town
Alexander C. Little (1860-1932) was also a partner in the land company. After a career in local and state politics that included serving as Aberdeen's mayor, helping elect Governor John R. Rogers, and serving on the State Fisheries Commission, in 1903 Little decided to shift to the private sector. According to Pacific County historian Douglas Allen, "Raymond was named for L. V. but from the beginning A.C. Little formed the character of the town" (Allen, 65).
According to Allen, Little contributed two key elements to the town's success. First, he recommended that the land company offer free riverfront lots to mills, thereby ensuring an economic foundation for the town. Second, Little brought Harry C. Heermans (1852-1943) into the partnership. Heermans's engineering background helped solve issues associated with building a town on a river. The sloughs that laced the land rose and fell with the tides, but uphill development would have taken mills too far from the riverfront. Besides, the hills surrounding the river junction rose abruptly and would have posed their own engineering challenges.
Other incorporators of the land company included J. B. Duryea, Winfield S. Cram (b.1866), and John T. Welsh (1866-1954). A second land company, the Great West Land Company, also formed in 1903, had some of the same investors and also worked to develop the town.
In 1903, the first mill, operated by Jacob Siler and Winfield Cram, began operations. Several more mills, including the West Coast Veneer & Manufacturing Company mill run by Little, followed and businesses grew up nearby.
On April 16, 1904, the Raymond Land Company filed a plat for the town of Raymond. The business district consisted of a store, a saloon, and a mess house that served mill workers. A drug store and hotel were coming soon.
Lots Sold by the Gallon
To allow people to cross the water-sodden landscape, the town constructed 2,900 feet of elevated wooden sidewalks. These sidewalks ran down either side of what would become 1st Street, which was really an open space onto which the buildings fronted. Additional wooden sidewalks crossed the void at regular intervals.
Lillian Smith (1875-1960), a teacher from Michigan who came to teach in Raymond for a year not long after the town's founding, remembered her first impressions of the town,
"At first I seemed to be crossing the river no matter what street I took. It was like losing oneself with Alice on the other side of the Looking Glass where you had to keep going in order to stand still, and vice versa. Imagine streets like long bridges built on piles driven into the slough (pronounced slu). Wooden railings on either side, and beyond these narrower wooden bridges of sidewalk width, these too with railings — a perfect maze of railings, necessary to keep careless pedestrians from falling into the slough" (Smith, 3).
Still, the town's location provided enough benefits to outweigh the difficulties of being what Smith called, "an amphibious town" (Smith, 6). It was located at the head of navigable waters, close to the bay and to the forests that fed its mills. It also had access to the Northern Pacific Railway, without having had to give up its waterfront lots the way South Bend had.
Navigation on the river depended on assistance from the Army Corps of Engineers. Early in its history Willapa Bay was known as Shoalwater Bay because of its many shallow areas. These made ideal oyster grounds, but limited ships' access to ports. The Corps, under the provisions of several different Rivers and Harbors Acts, had dredged the river up to Willapa City, just upstream from the Raymond townsite, and kept it clear of snags. The Corps also maintained a channel through the bar at the mouth of the bay.
Businesses besides lumber mills diversified the economy. In 1907 Stewart L. Dennis (1873-1952) and Perry W. Shepard (b. ca. 1871) formed a transfer company that would become an important retail business in Pacific County, now known as the Dennis Company, and John W. Dickie and his son, David, came to Raymond to establish a boatyard.
The Dickies had worked in the San Francisco Bay area and, according to local historian Ina E. Dickie, came to Raymond because the more-isolated Willapa Bay offered better access to lumber and to employees who accepted lower wages and had not yet formed unions. Dickie & Son built steamships -- the first was the Willapa -- at Raymond over the next several years. All were built for the coastwise lumber trade, which was booming following the 1906 earthquake and fires in San Francisco.
On August 6, 1907, voters approved a measure to incorporate the town of Raymond. A handful of residents resisted the town's boundaries because they included some outlying farms in anticipation of the town's growth.
Little served as the first mayor, an office he would hold for 10 of the next 11 years. When asked in 1910 to serve as president of the Southwest Washington Development Association, Little replied that he was "disqualified because of his partiality for the place where lots are sold by the gallon at high tide" ("Southwest Part of the State Unites").
A Lumber Town
The first council consisted of seven men: C. Frank Cathcart, president of Raymond Transfer and Storage and Northern Pacific agent, Winfield S. Cram, Timothy H. Donovan, superintendent of the Pacific & Eastern Railway and Sunset Timber Company, Floyd Lewis, real estate agent, Charles Myers, sawyer at the Siler Mill, L. V. Raymond, and Willard G. Shumway a clerk. P. T. Johnson served as the first treasurer and Neal Stupp as the clerk and secretary.
By 1910 the population had increased to 2,540, but that was just the start of the flood of new residents. In 1911, there were about 5,000 people in Raymond. They were needed for the kind of production boasted of by a promotional brochure from 1912. It lists the output of the towns mills for the previous year as 27,834,779 board feet of lumber, 226,712,250 shingles, 105 million berry baskets (made from veneer), and 33 million pieces of lath for plaster walls. The newcomers included business people, mill owners, mill workers, and loggers from all parts of the world.
Labor v. Capital
The 1910s, although economically prosperous, saw a series of disputes between labor unions and mill owners up and down the West Coast. Working conditions in the lumber industry were dismal and lumber workers struck for better wages and better logging camp conditions.
On March 25, 1912, mill workers in Raymond walked off the job to prevent the lumber companies from using their Raymond mills to replace lost production at Grays Harbor mills, where workers had begun a strike two weeks earlier. The town's business community's response was swift and severe. They held a meeting the second day of the strike. A. C. Little led the discussion, railing against the strike's organizers, the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The meeting participants decided that they should protect "any man who might want to work" ("Strikes Close Raymond Mills"). To that stated end, several committees formed to support the effort. Over the next several days the sheriff swore in 460 deputies to "protect property and the working men" ("Strikes Close Raymond Mills").
To prevent the mill workers from gathering, the city closed all the saloons and brothels for the duration of the strikes. Likewise, three "Socialists speakers," were arrested upon disembarking the Raymond depot ("Strikes Close Raymond Mills").
A few days later, on March 30, 1912, the mill owners blew their whistles for the start of work. Anyone who did not heed to the call found themselves and their families rounded up by about 200 men with rifles and shotguns and loaded onto a railroad car bound for Centralia. The South Bend Journal identified those who refused to work as Finns and Greeks.
The Greek workers were taken to Centralia, where the Greek consul from Tacoma, Hans Heldner, met them and protested their treatment. The Finns had been removed by boat to Nahcotta. From there they traveled on to Astoria where there was a large Finnish American community. After the strike ended, the South Bend Journal said that the Greek mill workers asked to return, but, "American flags have been hoisted on the mills and only Americans or civilized foreigners need apply" ("Agitators Banished from Raymond"). Other strikes would come to Raymond and labor unions led fights for improved safety, better conditions, and higher pay.
Despite labor problems, the mills kept prospering in Raymond. In 1912 there were 14 mills in operation. They used an average of 50 railroad cars full of logs from logging camps in the surrounding fills. The mills produced an average of 20 railroad cars a day of lumber and other forest products. These included shingles, cascara bark, used for medications, doors, and window frames.
Growth and Development
In 1912 the town also started to fill the sloughs that ran through town so residents could have actual streets and so that houses would not flood at high tide. In 1915 the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad began passenger and freight service between Raymond and Puget Sound. The mayors of Raymond and South Bend presented the railroad's representatives with a wooden key "symbolical [sic] of the freedom of Willapa Harbor" (Krantz). The train service was a vital link between the Willapa River towns and the interior of Washington. Not until 1917 would a road through the Willapa Hills open. The precursor of State Route 6, it was not reliably useable. It featured steep switchbacks and its gravel surface routinely suffered from water damage.
The late 1910s saw Raymond operating at full bore. Six saw mills, two veneer plants, a box factory, five shingle mills, and a woodworking plant were joined by the Sanderson & Porter shipyard, which employed 1,000 workers in building ships for the United States Navy during World War I. In the postwar era, the population dropped to about 4,500.
Port of Willapa Harbor
In 1928 residents of Raymond joined with South Bend to form the Port of Willapa Harbor, a public port district. The Port built a public dock on land between Raymond and South Bend that allowed smaller sawmills access to the river. This facilitated the transport of logs, which could be floated down the river from logging camps in the Willapa Hills, and the shipping of finished lumber. Before the public dock was completed in 1930, sawmills and other forest-products factories that did not have riverfront property had to send their goods to Grays Harbor or Puget Sound via the railroad, adding significantly to transport costs and time.
The Port dedicated the dock on October 8, 1930, and the city of South Bend dedicated a reconstructed city dock and improved slip. The same day, state highway officials led a celebration of the opening of Highway 101 between Aberdeen and Raymond-South Bend. For the first time travelers could follow a road through the Willapa Hills to the north of South Bend. It also connected Aberdeen with Ilwaco and the Long Beach Peninsula. This provided drivers with a direct route to the ferries that crossed the Columbia River to Astoria.
The Port's dock housed a sawmill, owned first by Ralph Tozier (1920-2005) and then Ben Cheney (1905-1971), who owned Cheney Lumber Company. According to Med Nicholson, writing in the Sou'wester, in 1945, Cheney was faced with a problem of wasted wood that resulted from cutting logs for ties. In order to square up the logs, large slabs were cut off each of four sides. Cheney had the insight that the slabs were eight feet long (the length of railroad ties) and house ceilings were eight and one-half feet tall. At the time home builders were buying studs in 10- and 12-foot lengths and cutting them down, also resulting in a lot of wasted wood. Cheney cut the slabs into a "Cheney Stud," what are now known as eight-foot two-by-four and sold them to home builders. Eight-foot ceilings became standard in houses, "putting to use an enormous amount of formerly wasted timber and incidentally saving American homeowners uncounted millions of dollars in heating expense" ("The Ben Cheney Story," 10).
Raymond's Great Depression
Unfortunately, the advantages presented by the new port and highway were hampered by the Great Depression. The economic downturn resulted in drastically decreased demand for lumber and Raymond residents struggled to find jobs. The decline of the Great Depression would reduce the town's population to 4,000. A steady decline after the Depression brought the population to just under 3,000 by 1990, where it has stayed since.
Though circumstances improved slightly when Weyerhaeuser purchased two mills in Raymond and one in South Bend and reorganized them in 1931, larger economic forces made it nearly impossible for commerce to continue in Raymond. In 1932 the Raymond Chamber of Commerce, faced with a near stoppage of business following the failure of the First Willapa Harbor National Bank, printed its own currency called "oyster money" to carry people over until real money became available again.
The Port of Willapa Harbor continued its efforts to improve the port's facilities. The Army Corps of Engineers carried out at federally funded dredging and channel straightening project on the river in 1936. The dredge spoils created Jensen Island and the new channel allowed deeper-draft boats to reach Raymond.
Logging and Lumber
A 1954 report by Nathaniel H. Engle and Delbert C. Hastings of the University of Washington's Bureau of Business Research, draws an interesting portrait of Pacific County's average male citizen as delineated by the 1950 Federal Census:
"Mr. Average Citizen of Pacific County, at the last census, 1950, was white and 33 years of age. He had had two years of high school education. He was employed as a laborer or an operative in the lumber industry. His income for the year was about $3,042. He was married and had two children. He lived in a 4 or 5 room house in good condition, with hot and cold running water, toilet, and bath. He had mechanical refrigeration, and a radio, but no central heating. His home was worth close to $4,000 and was owned clear of debt. Thus Pacific County's average citizen rates as a substantial American wage earner, somewhat better off, on the whole, than the average American, although not quite up to the average in Washington state" (Engle and Hastings, 5).
The lumber industry supported a significant number of these "average" residents. Where Grays Harbor had nearly cleared much its surrounding forest lands in the 1920s, Pacific County still had considerable standing timber in the 1950s. In 1951 more than 66 million board feet of logs and more than 90 million board feet of lumber left Raymond on ships and railroad cars. This may have been the result of a high concentration of ownership by large companies such as Weyerhaeuser, which owned 380 square miles (nearly half of the county), Crown-Zellerbach, owner of 60 square miles, and Rayonier, owner of 50 square miles.
Engle and Hastings described the logging companies' success as resulting from the companies' willingness to use sustained yield practices, rather than cutting the forests as quickly as the mills could cut the logs. Sustained yield did lead to more selective and more reseeding, but it did not maintain forests that could support diverse ecosystems because most of the reseeding was of single, productive species such as Douglas fir. Wildlife populations were further damaged by hunting programs designed to eliminate animals such as deer or bear that browsed on seedlings and new growth on older trees.
In 1954 and 1955, Weyerhaeuser carried out a two-part renovation of the old Willapa Lumber Company mill that it had acquired in 1931. First they replaced all the mill's facilities and then they rebuilt the mill itself. This mill, known as Mill W, remains in operation in 2010, the last softwood lumber mill in operation in Raymond,
In the 1970s the region saw another lumber boom. According to Richard Buck, of The Seattle Times, a new generation of baby boomers began buying houses, which increased the demand for lumber, leading to increased competition and prices. Prices reached $337 per 1,000 board feet.
The next decade, the declines in the national economy devastated the local economy rather than driving it. Prices dropped by two-thirds to $102 per 1,000 board feet in 1985. According to Buck this was due to a decline in housing starts and the increase in the value of the dollar and interest rates, which made Canadian lumber cheaper. Also, deregulation of the transportation industry increased the disadvantage West Coast lumber mills had compared to Southern and Midwestern lumber mills' proximity to East Coast markets.
In addition to the economic forces battering the lumber industry, in the late 1980s the local environment could no longer support the intense logging of the previous century. Historical overharvest and increased environmental regulations reduced the acreage of public forestland open to logging. In 1990, the Northern Spotted Owl was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. With the owl's listing, communities in Pacific County had to adjust to reduced logging and fewer jobs at the area's sawmills. The effects of the environmental regulations were compounded by plant modernization, which also led to fewer jobs in the mills. Many smaller mills could not compete with the larger companies' more efficient mills and a number went out of business.
The closure of the federal forests combined with changes in how Weyerhaeuser managed its lands and utilized mills in Pacific County led to the closure of numerous mills. This, in turn, led to fewer jobs in the forest products industry, as well as other sectors of the county's economy.
According to a Seattle Times article, "Some residents liken the area to a Third World nation, an underdeveloped colony whose resources are removed by 'foreign' corporations. Weyerhaeuser, they note, owns more than 50 percent of the land in Pacific County" (Hatch). Additionally, they accused Weyerhaeuser of using profits gained in Pacific County to build the very mills in the American South, where wages were lower, that undermined the viability of Raymond's mills. Although there is certainly a component of anger at outside companies taking a tremendous amount of natural resources out of the surrounding hills without investing a significant portion of the resulting profits in the local community, this sentiment also reflects the frustration that resulted from one company owning so much of the county's land and making decisions driven by the global market.
Strategies for Change
Raymond residents have created multiple strategies to address the changes to the regional economy. When one mill, the Mayr Brothers sawmill, closed in 1986, the Port of Willapa Harbor bought the land and buildings and leased them to Pacific Hardwoods. When that mill closed in 2001, a group of Raymond investors banded together and reopened it as Willapa Bay Hardwoods, employing 35 people. It planned to cut 17.5 million board feet a year, a far more sustainable volume than during the boom years.
The Port of Willapa Harbor has been involved in other economic development projects. The Port developed two industrial parks and received grants to construct light manufacturing buildings at one of the industrial parks and at the Port dock. A variety of industries have leased Port buildings, including a chitosan (a natural polymer produced from shellfish shells) producer, seafood processors, and an airplane prototype design company. Additionally, some of the buildings are used by retail stores, including a saw shop and a health club.
The Raymond community, in conjunction with the city government and the Port of Willapa Harbor, has developed attractions that will draw tourists to the region as a way to build the economy. The former railroad bed across the Willapa Hills has been turned into a hiking and biking trail. The city has begun redeveloping its riverfront and a regional consortium developed the Willapa Water Trail, which small boats can follow to explore Willapa Bay.
Over the past century the environment in and around Raymond has attracted people, many of whom have sought to remove as much of it as possible for sale in markets far from Pacific County. The town's future lies in a more sustainable use of those resources, including the intangible ones that have to be experienced in person.
Starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall, John Wengraf, Philip Van Zandt, and William Schallert. Directed by Herbert L. Strock.
When two scientists at a top-secret government installation devoted to space research are killed -- in their own test chamber, seemingly by an experiment gone awry -- Dr. David Sheppard (Richard Egan) is sent out from Washington to investigate. Sheppard mixes easily enough with the somewhat eccentric team of scientists, though he always seems in danger of being distracted by the presence of Joanne Merritt (Constance Dowling), who serves as the aide to the project director Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall) but is, in reality, another security agent. Sheppard is as puzzled as anyone else by the seemingly inexplicable series of events overtaking the installation -- properly operating equipment suddenly undergoing lethal malfunctions, and the radar tracking aircraft that aren't there -- until he puts it together with the operations of NOVAC (Nuclear Operated Variable Automatic Computer), the central brain of the complex. But the mystery deepens when he discovers that NOVAC was shut down during one of the "accidents" -- and even the computer's operators can't account fully for the whereabouts of GOG and MAGOG, the two robots under the computer's control.
"...and then without warning, the machine became a frankenstein of steel," says the sensationalist poster text. This is the third story in Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy. His first "Office of Scientific Investigation" story was Magnetic Monster in early 1953. The second was Riders to the Stars in early '54. With Gog the loose trilogy is complete. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy in which the stories build upon each other, each of the three OSI stories are separate tales which have nothing to do with each other. The common thread is the idea of there being a sort of Science FBI agency whose job it is, is to check out the scientifically strange. In that regard, Tors' OSI is a bit like a foreshadowing of the X-Files TV series, but without any of the New Age paranormal focus.
In keeping with the previous two stories, Gog is more of a detective murder mystery movie. Tors was a huge fan of "hard" science, not fanciful fiction fluff, so Gog, like the other two movies, is chock full of reveling in sciencey stuff in an almost geeky way. This reverence for real science keeps things from getting out on shaky limb, as many sci-fi films to. The events are much more plausible, less fantastic.
Synopsis
At a secret underground research facility, far out in the desert, scientists working on preparations for a manned space mission, are getting murdered mysteriously. Two agents from the OSI are dispatched to solve the mystery and keep the super secret space station program on track. The scientists are killed in various ways, mostly through equipment malfunctions. The facility director and the agents suspect sabotage. Small transmitter/receiver boxes are found within equipment in different parts of the facility. They suggest that someone on the outside is transmitting in the "malfunctions" in order to kill off the program's scientists. Occasional alarms indicate some flying high intruder, but nothing is clearly found. One of the base's two robots, named Gog, kills another technician while it's mate, Magog, tries to set up an overload within the base's atomic pile. The OSI agents stop Magog with a flame thrower. Meanwhile, interceptor jets scramble and find the highflying spy jet and destroy it with missiles. Once the trouble is past, the Director announces that they will be launching their prototype space station the next day, despite the sabotage attempts to stop it. The End.
The time spent reveling in techno-geekery has a certain Popular Science charm to it. There's an evident gee-whiz air about space and defense sciences which is fun to see. People were fascinated with things rockety and atomic. For various fun bits, see the Notes section.
Gog oozes Cold War from every frame. First is the base's underground location to make them safe from A-bombs. Next is the mysterious killer trying to stop the space station program. The high-flying mystery plane is "not one of ours." (that leaves: Them, and we all knew who they were.) The space station is to be powered by a solar mirror. Even that benign mirror has sinister possibilities. While demonstrating the mirror, the scientists use it to burn a model of a city. "This could happen...if we're not the first to reach space," says the Director. Space is the next "high ground" to be contested. At the end of the movie, when discussing the launch (despite the sabotage attempt) of the prototype space station, the Director says, "Through it's eye, we'll be able to see everything that goes on upon this tired old earth." The Defense Secretary says, "Nothing will take us by surprise again." An obvious reference to Pearl Harbor.
B-films often re-used props and sets from prior films in order to save on their budgets. Gog, even though shot in Eastman Color, was no exception. Two old prop friends show up in Gog. One is our venerable old friend, the space suits from Destination Moon ('50). Look for the centrifuge scene. The research assistants are dressed in them, and as an added bonus, they wear the all-acrylic fish bowl helmets used in Abbot and Costello Go to Mars ('53). Our second old friend is scene in the radar / security room, (the one with the annoying tuning fork device). Check out the monitor wall. It's been gussied up a bit, but it is the spaceship control panel wall from Catwomen of the Moon and Project Moon Base -- complete with the empty 16mm film reels on the right side. It's fun to see old friends.
B-films often include stock footage of military units, tanks, jets, battleships, etc. to fill things out. Gog is no different, and even commits the common continuity error of showing one type of plane taking off, but a different kind in the air.
What amounts to a small treat amid the usual stock footage of jets, some shots of a rather obscure bit of USAF hardware -- the F-94C Starfire with its straight wings and huge wing tanks. In 1954, the Starfire was one of America's coolest combat jets, yet we hear little about it. The swept-wing F-86 Sabers (which we see taxiing and taking off) were the agile fighter which gained fame over Korea. They're common stock footage stars. The F-94, with its onboard radar (in the nose cone) was deemed too advanced to risk falling into enemy hands. So, it didn't see much action , and therefore little fame. The heavier, yet powerful F-94C (one of the first US jets to have an afterburner) was 1954 America's hottest Interceptor -- designed to stop high flying Soviet bombers. It's blatant cameo appearance in Gog, intercepting the high-flying mystery plane, was a fun little bit of patriotic showing off.
The very name of the movie, Gog, is charged with meaning to American audiences of the mid 50s, though virtually lost on viewers of the 21st century. The names of the two robots, Gog and Magog, come from the Bible. More specifically, from the prophecies of Ezekiel (Chapter 38) and the Book of Revelation (chapter 20). While just who they are (nations? kings?) has been debated for centuries, their role as tools of Satan in the battle of Armageddon is clear. Mainstream American patriotic Christendom had settled on the idea that the Soviet Union was the prophesied "nations from the north" who would join Satan to oppose God. This gives the title of the movie a special Cold War significance. It also puts an interesting spin on the Dr. Zeitman character for having named the two robots in the first place. Since they were tools of the mega-computer NOVAC, what was he saying about NOVAC?
It is interesting that the base's radar could not detect the mystery plane (which was beaming in the 'kill' instructions to NOVAC) because it was made of "fiberglass" which rendered it invisible to radar. Now, fiberglass itself isn't sturdy enough for high-speed jets, and it would take until the 1990s before composite materials advanced to make the dream of a stealth aircraft a reality. Nonetheless, the dream (or nightmare) of stealth aircraft was on-screen in 1954 in Gog.
The super computer, NOVAC, controlled everything on the base. Even though the machines were not really killing scientists on their own, but following human orders from the mystery plane, there was the on-screen depiction of machines having a murderous mind of their own. (all pre-Steven King) In the techno starry-eyed 50s, it was fairly uncommon for the technology itself to be turning on its masters. This idea would gain traction later in the 50s, and especially in the 60s, but in '54, it was unusual.
A cautionary subtext to Gog is the danger of trusting in a supercomputer to manage defenses and a whole base. NOVAC doesn't go bad on its own, as the computer will in The Invisible Boy, Hal in 2001 or Colossus in The Forbin Project. In this movie, it was the nefarious "others" who hacked into NOVAC to make it do the killing, but this just demonstrates the danger. People were getting a little nervous about letting machines take over too much responsibility. We were starting to distrust our creations.
Until Gog, robots were fairly humanoid.
They had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. Audiences had seen the mechanical Maria in Metropolis ('27), the fedora-wearing metal men in Gene Autrey's Phantom Empire serial ('35). The water-heater-like Republic robot appeared in several rocketman serials. There was the gleaming giant Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51) and the cute left over fedora-dudes in Captain Video ('51). The metal giant in Devil Girl from Mars ('54) was also humaniod, in a chunky way. Gog and Magog were a departure from the stereotype. They were noticeably in-human, which was part of the mood.
Bottom line? Gog seems a bit bland, as far as sci-fi tends to go, but it has a lot in it for fans of 50s sci-fi.
In this second of the series of colliery railways, the 1st being that devoted to the Thurgoland Branch, which left the Woodhead Main line, just before the Thurgoland Tunnel, to head of north-east to the Stanhope Silkstone Main Colliery, see-
www.flickr.com/photos/daohaiku/30979712625/
this second line is much more contemporary having survived into the 1980s. The reason for the line resulted from the sinking of pits in the area, the 1st sod being cut on 14 November 1913 and a Wagonway was built to transport coal south to the Dun Navigation. what later became the Sheffield & S.Yorks Navigation(S&SYN). Initially, the movement of coal from the pits, used what was at first a Wagonway, the 'Low Stubbin Incline', and Rail Tramway, to deliver the 'black nuggets' of coal to the staithes at the northern end of the Earl's short canal which had a junction with S&SYN. This waterway, the Greasbrough canal, was opened in 1780 to serve the pits of the Marquess of Rockingham on the west and north side of Rawmarsh; the Marquess died two years later and the estate passed to Earl Fitzwilliam. He owned the pits at High Stubbin & Swallow Wood and from the early 19th century these were joined to the canal by a Wagonway or 'Incline', so the coal could be either delivered to the coke ovens or trans-shipped further afield. This was is was the situation for a goodly number of years until the Sheffield & Rotherham Railway arrived in 1839, and built a branch line from its line at Holmes Junction, opened the year before, and joined the Earle's Incline railway at Parkgate alongside the canal. The Earl's estate bought a steam locomotive in 1840 for use on the line and the wagonway was re-built to accommodate a standard gauge loco to provide the motive power for the transport of the coal to the coke ovens of the SOuth Yorkshire Chemical Co. Ltd; they in turn proved coke for the blast furnaces at the Parkgate Iron & Steel works, a short distance away. Coal was also transferred onto barges at the coal staithes at the northern end of the canal, which had a junction with the main cut at Parkgate, the South Yorkshire & Sheffield Navigation, the coal then being transported onwards to Hull and Sheffield. Once the North Midland had built its railway in the area in the 1840s, between Derby and Leeds, the line passing through its station at Masbrough, the original connection of the colliery branch which went off to Holmes Junction was not required anymore and the line was finally closed in 1977. In the later years of the 1800s, the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway built its own line through the area and to the south of the Midland's line, providing a junction at Rotherham Road for a line which ran alongside the Greasbrough Canal to the canal head with its coke ovens and coal staithes. As seen in the video, the line can be divided into two parts, both originally using the Incline, the lower section serving New Stubbin Colliery, sunk between 1913 and 1915, was changed to locomotive working when the Midland and MSLR railway lines finally arrived, the upper section retaining its Wagonway. The final steam motive power was provided by two examples built by Hudswell Clarke & Co. of Leeds, No. 34, an outside cylinder, six-coupled side tank locomotive, No.1523, built in 1925, originally at the Appleby-Frodingham Steel Company in Scunthorpe, and which came to the line in the 1950s. The other was No.37, an outside cylinder, six-coupled saddle tank and they both worked until the mid-1960s, when the line became fully dieselised, Hudswell Clarke again supplying the power. The colliery ceased production on 6 July 1978 but the buildings were retained for a while as an underground store, until the mid-1980s when the site was cleared.
This first, mosaic image, in the pair of pieces on the Stubbin Colliery branch, shows the scene as it looked from the turn of the last century upto the situation in around 1960; there being no point in showing anything after that, map-wise, as changes in industrial usage around the southern end at Parkgate has obliterated almost all signs of what the area's past history was. The video which follows is in two parts, as mentioned above, the southern end around the canal and the second part from the Westfield Pumping station to the northern end of the New Stubbin site. Here are the details relating to the pictures in this mosaic-
1. Top left. An aerial view taken in 1947 from the 'Britain from Above' website, albeit in low resolution, showing all aspects of the colliery and associated Brickworks to the north-east. The line of the Low Stubbin Incline can clearly be seen heading towards the High Stubbin Colliery over to the left. The Incline then ran from the High Stubbin colliery area, north-east to yet another of the Earl Fitzwilliam sites at Low Stubbin, next to Wentworth Lane. Presumably the coal tubs were sent down the incline under gravity to end up at the rail head at the New Stubbin Colliery to the south. This picture also shows the open, and essentially vegetation free nature of the landscape in those years. There are a multitude of coal wagons around the place at the colliery site and the Brickworks appears to be supplied from material in the quarry right next door to it; called Bank Pit. At left is the hamlet of Upper Haugh with farmland occupying most of the other space and, in the right background, Swinton.. 'Twas a different world', back then, 2 or 3 years after the end of World War II and most attempting to recover from 5 years of nightmare ... lest hope recent events don't result in a nightmare of different proportions.
2. Centre. Main map of the area in 1905, from the junction with the GC line at Parkgate in the south and heading north-west, running to the west of Rawmarsh and passing Nether & Upper Haugh before turning to the north-east, past Higher Stubbin and on to terminate at Low Stubbin. The northern extremity was close to Warren House on Wentworth Road and this whole area is now covered in new housing, some of it in the process of expansion at the present time. Earl Fitzwilliam established colliers at Low and High Stubbin, and eventually at New Stubbin further south, and coal was transported away from there using an incline, built in two sections, one from Low Stubbin Colliery to High Stubbin and then on from High Stubbin to the coal staithes at the top of the Greasbrough Canal. This was until the arrival of the railways, when a branch line was built from a junction off the GC at Parkgate, and in fact as the map shows, there was also a connection to the Midland line, the branch line extending as far as the New Stubbin Colliery. This 1905 map shows that at this time there were Coke Ovens on the north-west side of the end of the canal, a bridge over the canal just south of the ovens which took a line over to the east, fanning out into a mass of sidings closer to Parkgate. The end of the canal branch from the Sheffield & South Yorkshire Navigation can be seen on the map with yet another set of sidings come of the branch line and heading south-west towards Parkgate. The end of the canal was just south of Mangham Road and that too has now been populated with a host of industrial units on both sides of the road completely obliterating any sign of the railway there; however, in 1982 Adrian Wynn was about with his camera and in the associated video, I have included this picture, with his permission. It is a stark testament to how things were starting to change in 1982 after the big industrial clearances of the area, here and all over. Mangham Quarry is also shown on the map, just above Mangham Road not far from the branch line rail alignment. The bridge over which the freight movements pass, shown in the associated video, can be seen to the south where the branch line curves round to form a junction with the GC's main line at Rotherham Road, home to both the GC's signalbox, also shown in the video and the Rotherham Road Station. The station is visible at the bottom of the map, juts under the Rotherham to Rawmarsh road bridge, and the map also shows, at this time, the signalbox in its old position, just beyond the station and next to the swing bridge over the Greasbrough Canal. The box must have been moved further west alongside the Stubbin Colliery Branch, when the swing bridge fell out of use and when the station finally succumbed to the closures in the 1970s; the final position of the signal box is also shown in the video. As can be seen from the terrain shown in picture 1 at top left and inspection of the map, the colliery branch wended its way northwards through countryside and behind housing and garden allotments to ride in grade towards the main colliery almost totally obliterated from view in the surrounding area; itself heavily festooned with iron & steel works, collieries and other heavy manufacturing concerns, all of which would have been enough to hide the site of the coal works further north. In this map, just as the alignment veers off from direct north to slightly north-west, a line comes off the branch and heads to the Earl Fitzwilliam pumping shaft at the Westfield Pump House on Westfield Road. The area of the pump house is still extant, as is the splendid looking pump house and this too is featured in the accompanying video. This facility was still in operation in 1923, the epoch of the map detail in picture 3, but by the 1950s, shown in the map in picture 6, the single track line to the pump house had gone, but the pumping station was still in place; as it was in October this year, see video! Apart from the main colliery sites, the map shows other colliery shafts, 'New Deep', a Roman Ridge(Road), Bank Pit brickworks, Kent's Main Colliery, Low Pottery, a 'Fever Hospital', the British Wagon Works, Car House Colliery and in the lower left corner, 'Primrose Bridge' over the Midland Main Line, which many of us will recognise as a vantage point for photography, and which is also still in place. This map identifies some of the features, shown in blue, mentioned here in the text, including the location of the long gone 'Swallow Wood Colliery', opened in 1828, and as can be seen here on this 1905 map, it had gone by this time, with only 'Old Shafts' marked, indicting where it used to be. Just a little further north from the Swallow Wood site, a road bridge passes over the Low Stubbin Incline, the route of this Incline later being used to extend the railway as far as Bank Pit Brick Works and the New Stubbin Colliery. This bridge is shown in the video as a 'Then & Now' piece featuring a picture by the noted railway photographer and writer, Adrian Booth, and a picture I took on the 15th September this year; the contrast between the two pictures couldn't be more stark. This change in the fortunes of the branch is also reflected in a similar fashion with the 'Then & Now' pictures, four and five, featured on this page, see the details which follow next.
3. Top right. Detail from the top of the 1905 map at centre, but this time in 1923, showing the end of the colliery Incline to both the Higher & Lower Stubbin sites. Now things have changed in the 18 or so years since the 1905 map and the two-part Incline has gone, there just being a track on the map to indicate its location. In addition, both the Higher and Low Stubbin collieries have gone and the sites look to have been cleared. The space where the collieries were located were left almost untouched for decades but over the last 10 or 20 years new housing development, Upper Haugh, on and near the Low Stubbin site, along with the Marquis Public house, built right on the old Wagonway trackbed and with some limited residential dwellings built on the site of Higher Stubbin. At the lower edge of this map, the New Stubbin Colliery and its railway can be seen which had its first 'sod cut', on 14 November 1913 and it took until 1915 to complete the sinking; this map is from 1923.
4. A picture taken in 1978 by Adrian Booth, the railway photographer and writer, and reproduced here with his permission. This shows the Hudswell-Clark diesel shunter, #D1128, backing a rake of MGR coal wagons down grade, alongside the Greasbrough Canal. It will soon pass under what is now the Midland Main line bridge, see next picture, past the South Yorkshire Chemical Works behind the train on the right and on to the junction and sidings of the MSLR's main line at Rotherham Road. There was limited room for manoeuvre of the loco along the branch line and it looks as if the shunter always 'faced north', and depending on the grade was either at the high-end of the rake of wagons, as here, or at the low-end, as will be seen as the shunter passes under the road bridge, in the video which follows next. The shunter isn't far off the Rotherham Road sidings here and it must be backing the rake, wrong-line? back along the main line towards the sidings from where, after uncoupling, it will set off back to the colliery, 'funnel first'.
5. Lower right. The best I could do, looking south towards the MSLR's main line, this picture shows a similar vantage point, a little further up the branch line than that shown in picture 4. The bank on the right, behind the fisherman and palisade fence protecting the Midland line, was where the diesel shunter was reversing its rake of coal wagons down grade to the Rotherham Road sidings. This view being taken from the 'tow path', on the same side of the canal as in the previous picture, the canal banks now much showing much more in the way of unkempt undergrowth along the bank sides. Passing north across the bridge on the Midland Main line is a Cross Country class 220, 'Voyager', heading to Glasgow Central on the 1S35, eight hour service from Bath Spa, having departed around 06:00 that morning. It would have been interesting to see a similar picture with the shunter reversing under the Midland line with traction of that era, 1978, passing over the top!
6. Lower left. A later, 1950s, map showing the colliery branch, with all of the line up to the New Stubbin Colliery still in place, beyond that, the formation up to the Higher & Low Stubbin Collieries & the Low Stubbin Incline, have all been abandoned and removed. The South Yorkshire Chemical Works now stands prominent at the southern end of the line with the coke ovens & coal staithes surrounding the head of the canal still in situ as shown on the 1905 map at centre. The short line off the branch line, to the Westfield Pumping house has been removed but the pumping station was still in place at that time and in fact it is still there in 2016, see video. PArts of the Pumping Station site are now given over to small businesses as is part of the Pumping Station house itself. What this map also shows, once again, is the extent of the workings and rail-related infra-structure which once existed in this very dense area of old industry, the Parkgate Iron & Steel Works and the associated colliery taking up much of the land in-between and to either side of the two main lines, North Midland & MSLR to its south. 'Park Gate' has now become 'Parkgate' on the latest maps, the collieries have all gone and now only the Aldwarke site remains withe its U.E.S. United Engineering Steels division and still, currently owned by TATA.
Les femmes d'Alger (Women of Algiers)
1955
oil on canvas, 18 1/8 in. x 21 5/8 in.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish (Málaga, Spain, 1881 - 1973, Mougins, France)
Acquired 1964, Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Wilbur D. May, © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 64.4
This work depicts three figures in the intimate setting of an Algerian interior. A dramatic reclining blue nude dominates the picture plane while a seated, semi-clothed figure to the left holds the tube of a small triangular narghile (water pipe). In the background a servant stands in the doorway, seemingly beckoning the viewer across the threshold. The choice of blue for the central figure may be a tribute to the signature blue nudes of Picasso's contemporary, Henri Matisse, who had died a few months earlier. Moreover, the painting is a direct reference to a nineteenth-century work of the same title by the French realist Eugene Delacroix.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) was opened in 1935 under director Grace L. McCann Morley as the San Francisco Museum of Art, the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. For its first sixty years, the museum occupied upper floors of the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Civic Center. Under director Henry T. Hopkins, the museum added "Modern" to its title in 1975, and established an international reputation. In 1995 the museum moved to its current location, a large cubistic building designed by Mario Botta Architetto of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum at 151 Third Street.
Don't use this image on websites, blogs, facebook or other media without my explicit permission. Copyright © Claudia Merighi-Lamerighi All rights reserved.
Margaret Hassan, who has been murdered aged 59, devoted more than 30 years of her life to helping the disadvantaged people of Iraq.
For the past 12 years she had been Care International`s country director for Iraq, refusing to leave when many other aid agencies fled as a result of the war. Care`s offices were surrounded by sandbags and she gave her 60-strong staff bicycles so they could get about more easily in the event of an attack. Last November the premises were struck by a grenade, and threatening letters arrived. Expatriate staff left the country, but Margaret Hassan, who saw herself as an Iraqi, remained.
Care International is the largest humanitarian charity in the world; that it is also American cannot have counted in Margaret Hassan`s favour. In Iraq it concentrated on supplying medical facilities, clean water, food, blankets and generators to communities devastated by years of sanctions and violence.
During the airstrikes, Care technicians would go around Baghdad restoring power supplies to hospitals, converting lorries into emergency water tankers and repairing buildings.
Margaret Hassan was a familiar and immensely popular figure on the streets of Baghdad. Felicity Arbuthnot, who filmed a documentary about her work, has described Margaret Hassan being mobbed during a visit to a water sanitation plant. "A crowd gathered and tiny children rushed up and threw their arms round her knees, saying, `Madam Margaret, Madam Margaret`, and everywhere she went, people just beamed."
Although no Western woman had previously been kidnapped in Iraq, Margaret Hassan was aware of the risks she ran, conscious that many Iraqi women had been abducted, ransomed, raped and murdered by the Baghdad mafia.
On October 19, as she was leaving home for work in the Khadra district of western Baghdad, she was seized by unknown gunmen. Hours after her capture, the first in a series of harrowing videos was released on the Arab television station al-Jazeera. It showed her pleading: "I beg of you, the British people, to help me. I don`t wan`t to die like [Kenneth] Bigley." A second video showed her calling on Tony Blair to withdraw troops from Iraq and "not bring them to Baghdad".
Devoted to her adopted country and its people, she learnt fluent Arabic and took Iraqi citizenship. Under Care`s rules she was forbidden from talking about politics, but she nonetheless became a vehement campaigner against the United Nations sanctions, which she held responsible for the fact that ordinary Iraqis had to make do with shortages of food, medical provisions and adequate sanitation. "This is a man-made disaster," she said in 1998.
In the build-up to the American-led invasion last year, she travelled to the UN security council in New York and the House of Commons in London to campaign against the war. "The Iraqi people are already living through a terrible emergency," she said. "They do not have the resources to withstand an additional crisis brought about by military action."
As Care began stockpiling fuel, food and medical supplies in readiness for war, she said: "We will do what we can, but we do not expect to work miracles here."
Source: The Daily Telegraph, 18 November 2004
Picture kindly provided by CARE
Fans (mostly young women) line up hours in advance for a concert on Toronto's Danforth Ave. They braved the cold wind and rain all day to get close to the stage when the doors would open at 6 p.m. The act was "5 Seconds of Summer" an Australian pop-rock band.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov[b] (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.
Born to a schoolteacher's family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He relocated to Saint Petersburg in 1893 where he became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye in Siberia for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Following Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he initially campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and the rise of socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia and played a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new government.
Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations had secured independence from Russia after 1917, but five were forcibly re-united into the new Soviet Union in 1922, while others repelled Soviet invasions. His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.
Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism, communism, anti-imperialism and the working class, while his critics accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that oversaw mass killings and political repression of dissidents.
University and political radicalisation: 1887–1893
Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into a nearby flat. There, he joined a zemlyachestvo, a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This group elected him as its representative to the university's zemlyachestvo council, and he took part in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in the demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. There, he read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?
Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to allow him to return to the city of Kazan, but not the university. On his return, he joined Nikolai Fedoseev's revolutionary circle, through which he discovered Karl Marx's 1867 book Capital. This sparked his interest in Marxism, a socio-political theory that argued that society developed in stages, that this development resulted from class struggle, and that capitalist society would ultimately give way to socialist society and then communist society. Wary of his political views, Lenin's mother bought a country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast, in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the house as a summer home.
In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to the city of Samara, where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko's socialist discussion circle. There, Lenin fully embraced Marxism and produced a Russian language translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. He began to read the works of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, agreeing with Plekhanov's argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat, or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with the view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the People's Freedom Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev and befriended several Narodniks.
In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as the widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid. Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to support a Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought.
Revolutionary activity
Early activism and imprisonment: 1893–1900
In late 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg. There, he worked as a barrister's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself the Social-Democrats after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Championing Marxism within the socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and meticulously covered his tracks to evade police spies. He began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya, a Marxist schoolteacher. He also authored a political tract criticising the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894.
Hoping to cement connections between his Social-Democrats and Emancipation of Labour, a group of Russian Marxists based in Switzerland, Lenin visited the country to meet group members Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod. He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research the Paris Commune of 1871, which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government. Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before travelling to Berlin, where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht. Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travelled to various cities distributing literature to striking workers. While involved in producing a news sheet, Rabochee delo (Workers' Cause), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition.
Refused legal representation or bail, Lenin denied all charges against him but remained imprisoned for a year before sentencing. He spent this time theorising and writing. In this work he noted that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia had caused large numbers of peasants to move to the cities, where they formed a proletariat. From his Marxist perspective, Lenin argued that this Russian proletariat would develop class consciousness, which would in turn lead them to violently overthrow tsarism, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie and to establish a proletariat state that would move toward socialism.
In February 1897, Lenin was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. He was granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and used this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who had renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. His journey to eastern Siberia took 11 weeks, for much of which he was accompanied by his mother and sisters. Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to Shushenskoye, Minusinsky District, where he was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and snipe.
In May 1898, Nadya joined him in exile, having been arrested in August 1896 for organising a strike. She was initially posted to Ufa, but persuaded the authorities to move her to Shushenskoye, where she and Lenin married on 10 July 1898. Settling into a family life with Nadya's mother Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in Shushenskoye the couple translated English socialist literature into Russian. There, Lenin wrote A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats to criticise German Marxist revisionists like Eduard Bernstein who advocated a peaceful, electoral path to socialism. He also finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), his longest book to date, which criticised the agrarian-socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of Russian economic development. Published under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin, upon publication it received predominantly poor reviews.
Munich, London, and Geneva: 1900–1905
After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900. There, he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra (Spark), a new organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, Lenin left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met other Russian Marxists, and at a Corsier conference they agreed to launch the paper from Munich, where Lenin relocated in September. Containing contributions from prominent European Marxists, Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication for 50 years. He first adopted the pseudonym Lenin in December 1901, possibly based on the Siberian River Lena; he often used the fuller pseudonym of N. Lenin, and while the N did not stand for anything, a popular misconception later arose that it represented Nikolai. Under this pseudonym, in 1902 he published his most influential publication to date, the pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, which outlined his thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution.
Nadya joined Lenin in Munich and became his secretary. They continued their political agitation, as Lenin wrote for Iskra and drafted the RSDLP programme, attacking ideological dissenters and external critics, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR),[ a Narodnik agrarian-socialist group founded in 1901. Despite remaining a Marxist, he accepted the Narodnik view on the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, accordingly, penning the 1903 pamphlet To the Village Poor. To evade Bavarian police, Lenin moved to London with Iskra in April 1902, where he befriended fellow Russian-Ukrainian Marxist Leon Trotsky. Lenin fell ill with erysipelas and was unable to take such a leading role on the Iskra editorial board; in his absence, the board moved its base of operations to Geneva.
The second RSDLP Congress was held in London in July 1903. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of Julius Martov. Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of the party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasising the need for a strong leadership with complete control over the party. Lenin's supporters were in the majority, and he termed them the "majoritarians" (bol'sheviki in Russian; Bolsheviks); in response, Martov termed his followers the "minoritarians" (men'sheviki in Russian; Mensheviks). Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks continued after the conference; the Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while the Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Enraged at the Mensheviks, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he holidayed in Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by spring 1905, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded the newspaper Vperyod (Forward).
Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath: 1905–1914
In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a spate of civil unrest in the Russian Empire known as the Revolution of 1905. Lenin urged Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the events, encouraging violent insurrection. In doing so, he adopted SR slogans regarding "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that the Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks; many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the Third RSDLP Congress, held in London in April 1905. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, published in August 1905. Here, he predicted that Russia's liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a transition to constitutional monarchy and thus betray the revolution; instead, he argued that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry."
The uprising has begun. Force against Force. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown up, rifles are cracking, guns are booming. Rivers of blood are flowing, the civil war for freedom is blazing up. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the proletariat of St. Petersburg. The slogan of the workers has become: Death or Freedom!
In response to the revolution of 1905, which had failed to overthrow the government, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto. In this climate, Lenin felt it safe to return to St. Petersburg. Joining the editorial board of Novaya Zhizn (New Life), a radical legal newspaper run by Maria Andreyeva, he used it to discuss issues facing the RSDLP. He encouraged the party to seek out a much wider membership, and advocated the continual escalation of violent confrontation, believing both to be necessary for a successful revolution. Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance the Bolsheviks' activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the lead of Leonid Krasin, a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best-known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks acting under the leadership of Joseph Stalin committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis, Georgia.
Although he briefly supported the idea of reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin's advocacy of violence and robbery was condemned by the Mensheviks at the Fourth RSDLP Congress, held in Stockholm in April 1906. Lenin was involved in setting up a Bolshevik Centre in Kuokkala, Grand Duchy of Finland, which was at the time an autonomous state within the Russian Empire, before the Bolsheviks regained dominance of the RSDLP at its Fifth Congress, held in London in May 1907. As the Tsarist government cracked down on opposition, both by disbanding Russia's legislative assembly, the Second Duma, and by ordering its secret police, the Okhrana, to arrest revolutionaries, Lenin fled Finland for Switzerland. There, he tried to exchange those banknotes stolen in Tiflis that had identifiable serial numbers on them.
Alexander Bogdanov and other prominent Bolsheviks decided to relocate the Bolshevik Centre to Paris; although Lenin disagreed, he moved to the city in December 1908. Lenin disliked Paris, lambasting it as "a foul hole", and while there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bike. Lenin became very critical of Bogdanov's view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture in order to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead the working-classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov, influenced by Ernest Mach, believed that all concepts of the world were relative, whereas Lenin stuck to the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. Bogdanov and Lenin holidayed together at Maxim Gorky's villa in Capri in April 1908 on returning to Paris, Lenin encouraged a split within the Bolshevik faction between his and Bogdanov's followers, accusing the latter of deviating from Marxism.
In May 1908, Lenin lived briefly in London, where he used the British Museum Reading Room to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism, an attack on what he described as the "bourgeois-reactionary falsehood" of Bogdanov's relativism. Lenin's factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev. The Okhrana exploited his factionalist attitude by sending a spy, Roman Malinovsky, to act as a vocal Lenin supporter within the party. Various Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, although it is unclear if the latter was aware of the spy's duplicity; it is possible that he used Malinovsky to feed false information to the Okhrana.
In August 1910, Lenin attended the Eighth Congress of the Second International, an international meeting of socialists, in Copenhagen as the RSDLP's representative, following this with a holiday in Stockholm with his mother. With his wife and sisters, he then moved to France, settling first in Bombon and then Paris. Here, he became a close friend to the French Bolshevik Inessa Armand; some biographers suggest that they had an extra-marital affair from 1910 to 1912. Meanwhile, at a Paris meeting in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to move their focus of operations back to Russia, ordering the closure of the Bolshevik Centre and its newspaper, Proletari. Seeking to rebuild his influence in the party, Lenin arranged for a party conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticised for his factionalist tendencies and failed to boost his status within the party.
Moving to Kraków in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a culturally Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he used Jagiellonian University's library to conduct research. He stayed in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing the Duma's Bolshevik members to split from their parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin, whom Lenin referred to as the "wonderful Georgian", visited him, and they discussed the future of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Empire. Due to the ailing health of both Lenin and his wife, they moved to the rural town of Biały Dunajec, before heading to Bern for Nadya to have surgery on her goitre.
First World War: 1914–1917
The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of the thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie.
Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern, before relocating to Zürich in February 1916. Lenin was angry that the German Social-Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across the continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, Lenin's mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution.
In September 1917, Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism, as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Aristotle, all of whom had been key influences on Marx. This changed Lenin's interpretation of Marxism; whereas he once believed that policies could be developed based on predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only test of whether a policy was correct was its practice. He still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that a "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle-classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution.
February Revolution and the July Days: 1917
In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War, as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. The unrest spread to other parts of Russia, and fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took over control of the country, establishing the Russian Provisional Government and converting the Empire into a new Russian Republic. When Lenin learned of this from his base in Switzerland, he celebrated with other dissidents. He decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. He organised a plan with other dissidents to negotiate a passage for them through Germany, with which Russia was then at war. Recognising that these dissidents could cause problems for their Russian enemies, the German government agreed to permit 32 Russian citizens to travel by train through their territory, among them Lenin and his wife. For political reasons, Lenin and the Germans agreed to a cover story that Lenin had travelled by sealed train carriage through German territory, but in fact the train was not truly sealed, and the passengers were allowed to disembark to, for example, spend the night in Frankfurt. The group travelled by train from Zürich to Sassnitz, proceeding by ferry to Trelleborg, Sweden, and from there to the Haparanda–Tornio border crossing and then to Helsinki before taking the final train to Petrograd in disguise.
Arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station in April, Lenin gave a speech to Bolshevik supporters condemning the Provisional Government and again calling for a continent-wide European proletarian revolution. Over the following days, he spoke at Bolshevik meetings, lambasting those who wanted reconciliation with the Mensheviks and revealing his "April Theses", an outline of his plans for the Bolsheviks, which he had written on the journey from Switzerland. He publicly condemned both the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet, for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering the government to be just as imperialist as the Tsarist regime, he advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets, the nationalisation of industry and banks, and the state expropriation of land, all with the intention of establishing a proletariat government and pushing toward a socialist society. By contrast, the Mensheviks believed that Russia was insufficiently developed to transition to socialism and accused Lenin of trying to plunge the new Republic into civil war. Over the coming months Lenin campaigned for his policies, attending the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, prolifically writing for the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, and giving public speeches in Petrograd aimed at converting workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants to his cause.
Sensing growing frustration among Bolshevik supporters, Lenin suggested an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response. Amid deteriorating health, he left the city to recuperate in the Finnish village of Neivola. The Bolsheviks' armed demonstration, the July Days, took place while Lenin was away, but upon learning that demonstrators had violently clashed with government forces, he returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Responding to the violence, the government ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, raiding their offices, and publicly alleging that he was a German agent provocateur. Evading arrest, Lenin hid in a series of Petrograd safe houses. Fearing that he would be killed, Lenin and fellow senior Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev escaped Petrograd in disguise, relocating to Razliv. There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution, an exposition on how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving a pure communist society. He began arguing for a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection to topple the government, but at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee this idea was rejected. Lenin then headed by train and by foot to Finland, arriving at Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid away in safe houses belonging to Bolshevik sympathisers.
October Revolution: 1917
In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed the Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena. Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressuring the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with the Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the workers' sections of both the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets.
Recognising that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd. There he attended a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October, where he again argued that the party should lead an armed insurrection to topple the Provisional Government. This time the argument won with ten votes against two. Critics of the plan, Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence for Lenin's assertion that all of Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution. The party began plans to organise the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October. This was the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during Kornilov's alleged coup.
In October, the MRC was ordered to take control of Petrograd's key transport, communication, printing and utilities hubs, and did so without bloodshed. Bolsheviks besieged the government in the Winter Palace and overcame it and arrested its ministers after the cruiser Aurora, controlled by Bolshevik seamen, fired a blank shot to signal the start of the revolution. During the insurrection, Lenin gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks declared the formation of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom. Lenin initially turned down the leading position of Chairman, suggesting Trotsky for the job, but other Bolsheviks insisted and ultimately Lenin relented. Lenin and other Bolsheviks then attended the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 and 27 October and announced the creation of the new government. Menshevik attendees condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war. In these early days of the new regime, Lenin avoided talking in Marxist and socialist terms so as not to alienate Russia's population, and instead spoke about having a country controlled by the workers. Lenin and many other Bolsheviks expected proletariat revolution to sweep across Europe in days or months.
Lenin's government
Organising the Soviet government: 1917–1918
The Provisional Government had planned for a Constituent Assembly to be elected in November 1917; against Lenin's objections, Sovnarkom agreed for the vote to take place as scheduled. In the constitutional election, the Bolsheviks gained approximately a quarter of the vote, being defeated by the agrarian-focused Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin argued that the election was not a fair reflection of the people's will, that the electorate had not had time to learn the Bolsheviks' political programme, and that the candidacy lists had been drawn up before the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split from the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the newly elected Russian Constituent Assembly convened in Petrograd in January 1918. Sovnarkom argued that it was counter-revolutionary because it sought to remove power from the soviets, but the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks denied this. The Bolsheviks presented the Assembly with a motion that would strip it of most of its legal powers; when the Assembly rejected the motion, Sovnarkom declared this as evidence of its counter-revolutionary nature and forcibly disbanded it.
Lenin rejected repeated calls, including from some Bolsheviks, to establish a coalition government with other socialist parties. Although refusing a coalition with the Mensheviks or Socialist-Revolutionaries, Sovnarkom partially relented; they allowed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries five posts in the cabinet in December 1917. This coalition only lasted four months until March 1918, when the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries pulled out of the government over a disagreement about the Bolsheviks' approach to ending the First World War. At their 7th Congress in March 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their official name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the Russian Communist Party, as Lenin wanted to both distance his group from the increasingly reformist German Social Democratic Party and to emphasise its ultimate goal, that of a communist society.
Although ultimate power officially rested with the country's government in the form of Sovnarkom and the Executive Committee (VTSIK) elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (ARCS), the Communist Party was de facto in control in Russia, as acknowledged by its members at the time. By 1918, Sovnarkom began acting unilaterally, claiming a need for expediency, with the ARCS and VTSIK becoming increasingly marginalised, so the soviets no longer had a role in governing Russia. During 1918 and 1919, the government expelled Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. Russia had become a one-party state.
Within the party was established a Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisation Bureau (Orgburo) to accompany the existing Central Committee; the decisions of these party bodies had to be adopted by Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence. Lenin was the most significant figure in this governance structure as well as being the Chairman of Sovnarkom and sitting on the Council of Labour and Defence, and on the Central Committee and Politburo of the Communist Party. The only individual to have anywhere near this influence was Lenin's right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov, who died in March 1919 during a flu pandemic. In November 1917, Lenin and his wife took a two-room flat within the Smolny Institute; the following month they left for a brief holiday in Halila, Finland. In January 1918, he survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd; Fritz Platten, who was with Lenin at the time, shielded him and was injured by a bullet.
Concerned that the German Army posed a threat to Petrograd, in March 1918 Sovnarkom relocated to Moscow, initially as a temporary measure. There, Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders moved into the Kremlin, where Lenin lived with his wife and sister Maria in a first-floor apartment adjacent to the room in which the Sovnarkom meetings were held. Lenin disliked Moscow, but rarely left the city centre during the rest of his life. He survived a second assassination attempt, in Moscow in August 1918; he was shot following a public speech and injured badly. A Socialist-Revolutionary, Fanny Kaplan, was arrested and executed. The attack was widely covered in the Russian press, generating much sympathy for Lenin and boosting his popularity. As a respite, he was driven in September 1918 to the luxurious Gorki estate, just outside Moscow, recently nationalized for him by the government.
Social, legal, and economic reform: 1917–1918
To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. The Soviet authority will at once propose a democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard the transfer without compensation of all land—landlord, imperial, and monastery—to the peasants' committees; it will defend the soldiers' rights, introducing a complete democratisation of the army; it will establish workers' control over industry; it will ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date set; it will supply the cities with bread and the villages with articles of first necessity; and it will secure to all nationalities inhabiting Russia the right of self-determination ... Long live the revolution!
Upon taking power, Lenin's regime issued a series of decrees. The first was a Decree on Land, which declared that the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church should be nationalised and redistributed to peasants by local governments. This contrasted with Lenin's desire for agricultural collectivisation but provided governmental recognition of the widespread peasant land seizures that had already occurred. In November 1917, the government issued the Decree on the Press that closed many opposition media outlets deemed counter revolutionary. They claimed the measure would be temporary; the decree was widely criticised, including by many Bolsheviks, for compromising freedom of the press.
In November 1917, Lenin issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which stated that non-Russian ethnic groups living inside the Republic had the right to secede from Russian authority and establish their own independent nation-states. Many nations declared independence (Finland and Lithuania in December 1917, Latvia and Ukraine in January 1918, Estonia in February 1918, Transcaucasia in April 1918, and Poland in November 1918). Soon, the Bolsheviks actively promoted communist parties in these independent nation-states, while at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in July 1918 a constitution was approved that reformed the Russian Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Seeking to modernise the country, the government officially converted Russia from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar used in Europe.
In November 1917, Sovnarkom issued a decree abolishing Russia's legal system, calling on the use of "revolutionary conscience" to replace the abolished laws. The courts were replaced by a two-tier system, namely the Revolutionary Tribunals to deal with counter-revolutionary crimes, and the People's Courts to deal with civil and other criminal offences. They were instructed to ignore pre-existing laws and base their rulings on the Sovnarkom decrees and a "socialist sense of justice." November also saw an overhaul of the armed forces; Sovnarkom implemented egalitarian measures, abolished previous ranks, titles, and medals, and called on soldiers to establish committees to elect their commanders.
Earth of Filth".
In October 1917, Lenin issued a decree limiting work for everyone in Russia to eight hours per day. He also issued the Decree on Popular Education that stipulated that the government would guarantee free, secular education for all children in Russia, and a decree establishing a system of state orphanages. To combat mass illiteracy, a literacy campaign was initiated; an estimated 5 million people enrolled in crash courses of basic literacy from 1920 to 1926. Embracing the equality of the sexes, laws were introduced that helped to emancipate women, by giving them economic autonomy from their husbands and removing restrictions on divorce. Zhenotdel, a Bolshevik women's organisation, was established to further these aims. Under Lenin, Russia became the first country to legalize abortion on demand in the first trimester. Militantly atheist, Lenin and the Communist Party wanted to demolish organised religion. In January 1918, the government decreed the separation of church and state, and prohibited religious instruction in schools.
In November 1917, Lenin issued the Decree on Workers' Control, which called on the workers of each enterprise to establish an elected committee to monitor their enterprise's management. That month they also issued an order requisitioning the country's gold, and nationalised the banks, which Lenin saw as a major step toward socialism. In December, Sovnarkom established a Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), which had authority over industry, banking, agriculture, and trade. The factory committees were subordinate to the trade unions, which were subordinate to VSNKh; the state's centralised economic plan was prioritised over the workers' local economic interests. In early 1918, Sovnarkom cancelled all foreign debts and refused to pay interest owed on them. In April 1918, it nationalised foreign trade, establishing a state monopoly on imports and exports. In June 1918, it decreed nationalisation of public utilities, railways, engineering, textiles, metallurgy, and mining, although often these were state-owned in name only. Full-scale nationalisation did not take place until November 1920, when small-scale industrial enterprises were brought under state control.
A faction of the Bolsheviks known as the "Left Communists" criticised Sovnarkom's economic policy as too moderate; they wanted nationalisation of all industry, agriculture, trade, finance, transport, and communication. Lenin believed that this was impractical at that stage and that the government should only nationalise Russia's large-scale capitalist enterprises, such as the banks, railways, larger landed estates, and larger factories and mines, allowing smaller businesses to operate privately until they grew large enough to be successfully nationalised. Lenin also disagreed with the Left Communists about the economic organisation; in June 1918, he argued that centralised economic control of industry was needed, whereas Left Communists wanted each factory to be controlled by its workers, a syndicalist approach that Lenin considered detrimental to the cause of socialism.
Adopting a left-libertarian perspective, both the Left Communists and other factions in the Communist Party critiqued the decline of democratic institutions in Russia. Internationally, many socialists decried Lenin's regime and denied that he was establishing socialism; in particular, they highlighted the lack of widespread political participation, popular consultation, and industrial democracy. In late 1918, the Czech-Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky authored an anti-Leninist pamphlet condemning the anti-democratic nature of Soviet Russia, to which Lenin published a vociferous reply, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg echoed Kautsky's views, while Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin described the Bolshevik seizure of power as "the burial of the Russian Revolution."
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: 1917–1918
[By prolonging the war] we unusually strengthen German imperialism, and the peace will have to be concluded anyway, but then the peace will be worse because it will be concluded by someone other than ourselves. No doubt the peace which we are now being forced to conclude is an indecent peace, but if war commences our government will be swept away and the peace will be concluded by another government.
Upon taking power, Lenin believed that a key policy of his government must be to withdraw from the First World War by establishing an armistice with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. He believed that ongoing war would create resentment among war-weary Russian troops, to whom he had promised peace, and that these troops and the advancing German Army threatened both his own government and the cause of international socialism. By contrast, other Bolsheviks, in particular Nikolai Bukharin and the Left Communists, believed that peace with the Central Powers would be a betrayal of international socialism and that Russia should instead wage "a war of revolutionary defence" that would provoke an uprising of the German proletariat against their own government.
Lenin proposed a three-month armistice in his Decree on Peace of November 1917, which was approved by the Second Congress of Soviets and presented to the German and Austro-Hungarian governments. The Germans responded positively, viewing this as an opportunity to focus on the Western Front and stave off looming defeat. In November, armistice talks began at Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German high command on the Eastern Front, with the Russian delegation being led by Trotsky and Adolph Joffe. Meanwhile, a ceasefire until January was agreed. During negotiations, the Germans insisted on keeping their wartime conquests, which included Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, whereas the Russians countered that this was a violation of these nations' rights to self-determination. Some Bolsheviks had expressed hopes of dragging out negotiations until proletarian revolution broke out throughout Europe. On 7 January 1918, Trotsky returned from Brest-Litovsk to St. Petersburg with an ultimatum from the Central Powers: either Russia accept Germany's territorial demands or the war would resume.
In January and again in February, Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to accept Germany's proposals. He argued that the territorial losses were acceptable if it ensured the survival of the Bolshevik-led government. The majority of Bolsheviks rejected his position, hoping to prolong the armistice and call Germany's bluff. On 18 February, the German Army launched Operation Faustschlag, advancing further into Russian-controlled territory and conquering Dvinsk within a day. At this point, Lenin finally convinced a small majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the Central Powers' demands. On 23 February, the Central Powers issued a new ultimatum: Russia had to recognise German control not only of Poland and the Baltic states but also of Ukraine or face a full-scale invasion.
On 3 March, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. It resulted in massive territorial losses for Russia, with 26% of the former Empire's population, 37% of its agricultural harvest area, 28% of its industry, 26% of its railway tracks, and three-quarters of its coal and iron deposits being transferred to German control. Accordingly, the Treaty was deeply unpopular across Russia's political spectrum, and several Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries resigned from Sovnarkom in protest. After the Treaty, Sovnarkom focused on trying to foment proletarian revolution in Germany, issuing an array of anti-war and anti-government publications in the country; the German government retaliated by expelling Russia's diplomats. The Treaty nevertheless failed to stop the Central Powers' defeat; in November 1918, the German Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and the country's new administration signed the Armistice with the Allies. As a result, Sovnarkom proclaimed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk void.
Anti-Kulak campaigns, Cheka, and Red Terror: 1918–1922
[The bourgeoisie] practised terror against the workers, soldiers and peasants in the interests of a small group of landowners and bankers, whereas the Soviet regime applies decisive measures against landowners, plunderers and their accomplices in the interests of the workers, soldiers and peasants.
By early 1918, many cities in western Russia faced famine as a result of chronic food shortages. Lenin blamed this on the kulaks, or wealthier peasants, who allegedly hoarded the grain that they had produced to increase its financial value. In May 1918, he issued a requisitioning order that established armed detachments to confiscate grain from kulaks for distribution in the cities, and in June called for the formation of Committees of Poor Peasants to aid in requisitioning. This policy resulted in vast social disorder and violence, as armed detachments often clashed with peasant groups, helping to set the stage for the civil war. A prominent example of Lenin's views was his August 1918 telegram to the Bolsheviks of Penza, which called upon them to suppress a peasant insurrection by publicly hanging at least 100 "known kulaks, rich men, [and] bloodsuckers."
The requisitions disincentivised peasants from producing more grain than they could personally consume, and thus production slumped. A booming black market supplemented the official state-sanctioned economy, and Lenin called on speculators, black marketeers and looters to be shot. Both the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries condemned the armed appropriations of grain at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918. Realising that the Committees of the Poor Peasants were also persecuting peasants who were not kulaks and thus contributing to anti-government feeling among the peasantry, in December 1918 Lenin abolished them.
Lenin repeatedly emphasised the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order and ensuring the success of the revolution. Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want [...] to organise violence in the interests of the people." He strongly opposed suggestions to abolish capital punishment. Fearing anti-Bolshevik forces would overthrow his administration, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the establishment of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police force led by Felix Dzerzhinsky.
In September 1918, Sovnarkom passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror, a system of repression orchestrated by the Cheka secret police.[261] Although sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the entire bourgeoisie, Lenin did not want to exterminate all members of this class, merely those who sought to reinstate their rule. The majority of the Terror's victims were well-to-do citizens or former members of the Tsarist administration; others were non-bourgeois anti-Bolsheviks and perceived social undesirables such as prostitutes. The Cheka claimed the right to both sentence and execute anyone whom it deemed to be an enemy of the government, without recourse to the Revolutionary Tribunals. Accordingly, throughout Soviet Russia the Cheka carried out killings, often in large numbers. For example, the Petrograd Cheka executed 512 people in a few days. There are no surviving records to provide an accurate figure of how many perished in the Red Terror; later estimates of historians have ranged between 10,000 and 15,000, and 50,000 to 140,000.
Lenin never witnessed this violence or participated in it first-hand, and publicly distanced himself from it. His published articles and speeches rarely called for executions, but he regularly did so in his coded telegrams and confidential notes. Many Bolsheviks expressed disapproval of the Cheka's mass executions and feared the organisation's apparent unaccountability. The Communist Party tried to restrain its activities in February 1919, stripping it of its powers of tribunal and execution in those areas not under official martial law, but the Cheka continued as before in swathes of the country. By 1920, the Cheka had become the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia, exerting influence over all other state apparatus.
A decree in April 1919 resulted in the establishment of concentration camps, which were entrusted to the Cheka, later administered by a new government agency, Gulag. By the end of 1920, 84 camps had been established across Soviet Russia, holding about 50,000 prisoners; by October 1923, this had grown to 315 camps and about 70,000 inmates. Those interned in the camps were used as slave labour. From July 1922, intellectuals deemed to be opposing the Bolshevik government were exiled to inhospitable regions or deported from Russia altogether; Lenin personally scrutinised the lists of those to be dealt with in this manner. In May 1922, Lenin issued a decree calling for the execution of anti-Bolshevik priests, causing between 14,000 and 20,000 deaths. The Russian Orthodox Church was worst affected; the government's anti-religious policies also harmed Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, and Islamic mosques.
Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War: 1918–1920
The existence of the Soviet Republic alongside the imperialist states over the long run is unthinkable. In the end, either the one or the other will triumph. And until that end will have arrived, a series of the most terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois governments is unavoidable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it only wishes to rule and is to rule, must demonstrate this also with its military organization.
Lenin expected Russia's aristocracy and bourgeoisie to oppose his government, but he believed that the numerical superiority of the lower classes, coupled with the Bolsheviks' ability to effectively organise them, guaranteed a swift victory in any conflict. In this, he failed to anticipate the intensity of the violent opposition to Bolshevik rule in Russia. A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Bolshevik Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It also encompassed ethnic conflicts on Russia's borders, and anti-Bolshevik peasant and left-wing uprisings throughout the former Empire. Accordingly, various historians have seen the civil war as representing two distinct conflicts: one between the revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries, and the other between different revolutionary factions.
The White armies were established by former Tsarist military officers, and included Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army in South Russia, Alexander Kolchak's forces in Siberia, and Nikolai Yudenich's troops in the newly independent Baltic states. The Whites were bolstered when 35,000 members of the Czech Legion, who were prisoners of war from the conflict with the Central Powers, turned against Sovnarkom and allied with the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), an anti-Bolshevik government established in Samara. The Whites were also backed by Western governments who perceived the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the Allied war effort and feared the Bolsheviks' calls for world revolution. In 1918, Great Britain, France, United States, Canada, Italy, and Serbia landed 10,000 troops in Murmansk, seizing Kandalaksha, while later that year British, American, and Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok. Western troops soon pulled out of the civil war, instead only supporting the Whites with officers, technicians and armaments, but Japan remained because they saw the conflict as an opportunity for territorial expansion.
Lenin tasked Trotsky with establishing a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and with his support, Trotsky organised a Revolutionary Military Council in September 1918, remaining its chairman until 1925. Recognising their valuable military experience, Lenin agreed that officers from the old Tsarist army could serve in the Red Army, although Trotsky established military councils to monitor their activities. The Reds held control of Russia's two largest cities, Moscow and Petrograd, as well as most of Great Russia, while the Whites were located largely on the former Empire's peripheries. The latter were therefore hindered by being both fragmented and geographically scattered, and because their ethnic Russian supremacism alienated the region's national minorities. Anti-Bolshevik armies carried out the White Terror, a campaign of violence against perceived Bolshevik supporters which was typically more spontaneous than the state-sanctioned Red Terror. Both White and Red Armies were responsible for attacks against Jewish communities, prompting Lenin to issue a condemnation of antisemitism, blaming prejudice against Jews on capitalist propaganda.
In July 1918, Sverdlov informed Sovnarkom that the Ural Regional Soviet had overseen the murder of the former Tsar and his immediate family in Yekaterinburg to prevent them from being rescued by advancing White troops. Although lacking proof, biographers and historians like Richard Pipes and Dmitri Volkogonov have expressed the view that the killing was probably sanctioned by Lenin; conversely, historian James Ryan cautioned that there was "no reason" to believe this. Whether Lenin sanctioned it or not, he still regarded it as necessary, highlighting the precedent set by the execution of Louis XVI in the French Revolution.
After the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had abandoned the coalition and increasingly viewed the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution. In July 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Yakov Blumkin assassinated the German ambassador to Russia, Wilhelm von Mirbach, hoping that the ensuing diplomatic incident would lead to a relaunched revolutionary war against Germany. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries then launched a coup in Moscow, shelling the Kremlin and seizing the city's central post office before being stopped by Trotsky's forces. The party's leaders and many members were arrested and imprisoned but were treated more leniently than other opponents of the Bolsheviks.
By 1919, the White armies were in retreat and by the start of 1920 were defeated on all three fronts. Although Sovnarkom were victorious, the territorial extent of the Russian state had been reduced, for many non-Russian ethnic groups had used the disarray to push for national independence. In March 1921, during a related war against Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia sought to re-conquer all newly independent nations of the former Empire, although their success was limited. Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania all repelled Soviet invasions, while Ukraine, Belarus (as a result of the Polish–Soviet War), Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were occupied by the Red Army. By 1921, Soviet Russia had defeated the Ukrainian national movements and occupied the Caucasus, although anti-Bolshevik uprisings in Central Asia lasted until the late 1920s.
After the German Ober Ost garrisons were withdrawn from the Eastern Front following the Armistice, both Soviet Russian armies and Polish ones moved in to fill the vacuum. The newly independent Polish state and the Soviet government each sought territorial expansion in the region. Polish and Russian troops first clashed in February 1919, with the conflict developing into the Polish–Soviet War. Unlike the Soviets' previous conflicts, this had greater implications for the export of revolution and the future of Europe. Polish forces pushed into Ukraine and by May 1920 had taken Kiev from the Soviets. After forcing the Polish Army back, Lenin urged the Red Army to invade Poland itself, believing that the Polish proletariat would rise up to support the Russian troops and thus spark European revolution. Trotsky and other Bolsheviks were sceptical, but agreed to the invasion. The Polish proletariat did not rise, and the Red Army was defeated at the Battle of Warsaw. The Polish armies pushed the Red Army back into Russia, forcing Sovnarkom to sue for peace; the war culminated in the Peace of Riga, in which Russia ceded territory to Poland.
Death and funeral: 1923–1924
Lenin's funeral, as painted by Isaac Brodsky, 1925
In March 1923, Lenin had a third stroke and lost his ability to speak; that month, he experienced partial paralysis on his right side and began exhibiting sensory aphasia. By May, he appeared to be making a slow recovery, regaining some of his mobility, speech, and writing skills. In October, he made a final visit to the Kremlin. In his final weeks, Lenin was visited by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin; the latter visited him at his Gorki mansion on the day of his death. On 21 January 1924, Lenin fell into a coma and died later that day at age 53. His official cause of death was recorded as an incurable disease of the blood vessels. "Good dog", are said to have been Lenin's last words, upon his dog having brought him a dead bird.
The Soviet government publicly announced Lenin's death the following day. On 23 January, mourners from the Communist Party, trade unions, and Soviets visited his Gorki home to inspect the body, which was carried aloft in a red coffin by leading Bolsheviks. Transported by train to Moscow, the coffin was taken to the House of Trade Unions, where the body lay in state. Over the next three days, around a million mourners came to see the body, many queuing for hours in the freezing conditions. On 26 January, the eleventh All-Union Congress of Soviets met to pay respects, with speeches by Kalinin, Zinoviev, and Stalin. Notably, Trotsky was absent; he had been convalescing in the Caucasus, and he later claimed that Stalin sent him a telegram with the incorrect date of the planned funeral, making it impossible for him to arrive in time. Lenin's funeral took place the following day, when his body was carried to Red Square, accompanied by martial music, where assembled crowds listened to a series of speeches before the corpse was placed into the vault of a specially erected mausoleum. Despite the freezing temperatures, tens of thousands attended.
Against Krupskaya's protestations, Lenin's body was embalmed to preserve it for long-term public display in the Red Square mausoleum. During this process, Lenin's brain was removed; in 1925 an institute was established to dissect it, revealing that Lenin had had severe sclerosis. In July 1929, the Politburo agreed to replace the temporary mausoleum with a permanent one in granite, which was finished in 1933. His sarcophagus was replaced in 1940 and again in 1970. For safety amid the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945 the body was temporarily moved to Tyumen. As of 2023, his body remains on public display in Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square.
The Mausoleum of Genghis Khan, Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China,
The Mausoleum of Genghis Khan is a temple devoted to the worship of Genghis Khan. It is located along a river in Kandehuo Enclosure, Xinjie Town, Ejen Khoruu Banner, Ordos Prefecture-Level City , Inner Mongolia, People's Republic of China.
Genghis Khan worship is a religion popular among Mongolians, with ties to traditional Mongolian shamanism. There are other temples of this worship culture in Inner Mongolia and Northern China.
The mausoleum is a cenotaph, where the coffin contains no body but only headdresses and accessories, because the actual Tomb of Genghis Khan has never been discovered. It was built between 1954 and 1956 by the government of the PRC in the traditional Mongol style. The mausoleum is located in the town of Ejin Horo Qi, 115 kilometers north of Yulin, and 55 kilometers south of Dongsheng.
After Genghis Khan died around Gansu, his coffin was carried to central Mongolia. According to his will, he was buried without any markings. The burial place is unknown. Instead of the real tomb, portable mausoleums called naiman tsagaan ger (eight white yurts) enshrined him. They were originally palaces where Genghis Khan lived, but were altered to mausoleums by Ögedei Khan. They settled at the base of the Khentii Mountains. The site, located in Delgerkhaan Sum, Khentii Aimag, Mongolia, is called the Avraga site.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Genghis_Khan
Genghis Khan's Mausoleum
Statue of Genghis Khan, Baotou
Statue of Genghis Khan, BaotouGenghis Khan is a Mongolian hero. He reunified the chaotic Inner Mongolia prairie and led his people to be a great civilization. He made great contributions to the founding of the powerful Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and the unification of China which enhanced greatly the interactions of the peoples of China. Due to this great feat, he was named 'Genghis Khan' by Mongolian tribes, meaning 'powerful king' in Mongolian. Today, Genghis Khan is still worshipped and remembered by his people.
www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/inner_mongolia/baotou...
He's still laying next to my desk and not budging. I'm beginning to wonder if he knows something I don't know.
honoring the beautiful, nurturing devotion of this parent warming its eggs in the nest it made
blessed be *
Harvested hand picked large sweet potatoes, at Kirby Farms in Mechanicsville, VA on Friday, Sept. 20, 2013. 200 acres of the farm are devoted to eggplant, spinach, beets, tomato, jalapeno peppers, melons and a variety of greens. Soybeans and small grain are grown on the remaining 300 acres. Using rotational crop practices allows Kirby Farms to double and triple crop yields. Wholesalers, who buy from this farm, sell the produce to major supermarkets in the Mid-Atlantic region, from North Carolina to Maryland. Restaurants in the local area prepare and serve the local bought produce to patrons in the Richmond, VA metropolitan area. For more information about this farm operation, please see the photoset description at flic.kr/s/aHsjLgeD4J. For information about the USDA, please go to www.usda.gov. USDA photo by Lance Cheung.