title: Folk music

text: Around this time, composers of classical music developed a strong interest in collecting traditional songs, and a number of composers carried out their own field work on traditional music. These included Percy Grainger and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England and Béla Bartók in Hungary. These composers, like many of their predecessors, both made arrangements of folk songs and incorporated traditional material into original classical compositions.


title: Folk music

text: The advent of audio recording technology provided folklorists with a revolutionary tool to preserve vanishing musical forms. The earliest American folk music scholars were with the American Folklore Society (AFS), which emerged in the late 1800s. Their studies expanded to include Native American music, but still treated folk music as a historical item preserved in isolated societies as well. In North America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through the offices of traditional music collectors Robert Winslow Gordon, Alan Lomax and others to capture as much North American field material as possible. John Lomax (the father of Alan Lomax) was the first prominent scholar to study distinctly American folk music such as that of cowboys and southern blacks. His first major published work was in 1911, "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads". and was arguably the most prominent US folk music scholar of his time, notably during the beginnings of the folk music revival in the 1930s and early 1940s. Cecil Sharp also worked in America, recording the traditional songs of the Appalachian Mountains in 1916–1918 in collaboration with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell and is considered the first major scholar covering American folk music. Campbell and Sharp are represented under other names by actors in the modern movie "Songcatcher".


title: Folk music

text: One strong theme amongst folk scholars in the early decades of the 20th century was regionalism, the analysis of the diversity of folk music (and related cultures) based on regions of the US rather than based on a given song's historical roots. Later, a dynamic of class and circumstances was added to this. The most prominent regionalists were literary figures with a particular interest in folklore. Carl Sandburg often traveled the U.S. as a writer and a poet. He also collected songs in his travels and, in 1927, published them in the book "The American Songbag". Rachel Donaldson, a historian who worked for Vanderbilt, later stated this about The American Songbird in her analysis of the folk music revival. "In his collections of folk songs, Sandburg added a class dynamic to popular understandings of American folk music. This was the final element of the foundation upon which the early folk music revivalists constructed their own view of Americanism. Sandburg's working class Americans joined with the ethnically, racially, and regionally diverse citizens that other scholars, public intellectuals, and folklorists celebrated their own definitions of the American folk, definitions that the folk revivalists used in constructing their own understanding of American folk music, and an overarching American identity".


title: Folk music

text: Prior to the 1930s, the study of folk music was primarily the province of scholars and collectors. The 1930s saw the beginnings of larger scale themes, commonalities, and linkages in folk music developing in the populace and practitioners as well, often related to the Great Depression. Regionalism and cultural pluralism grew as influences and themes. During this time folk music began to become enmeshed with political and social activism themes and movements. Two related developments were the U.S. Communist Party's interest in folk music as a way to reach and influence Americans, and politically active prominent folk musicians and scholars seeing communism as a possible better system, through the lens of the Great Depression. Woody Guthrie exemplifies songwriters and artists with such an outlook.


title: Folk music

text: Folk music festivals proliferated during the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt was a fan of folk music, hosted folk concerts at the White House, and often patronized folk festivals. One prominent festival was Sarah Gertrude Knott's National Folk Festival, established in St. Louis, Missouri in 1934. Under the sponsorship of the Washington Post, the festival was held in Washington, DC at Constitution Hall from 1937 to 1942. The folk music movement, festivals, and the wartime effort were seen as forces for social goods such as democracy, cultural pluralism, and the removal of culture and race-based barriers.


title: Folk music

text: The American folk music revivalists of the 1930s approached folk music in different ways. Three primary schools of thought emerged: "Traditionalists" (e.g. Sarah Gertrude Knott and John Lomax) emphasized the preservation of songs as artifacts of deceased cultures. "Functional" folklorists (e.g. Botkin and Alan Lomax) maintained that songs only retain relevance when used by those cultures which retain the traditions which birthed those songs. "Left-wing" folk revivalists (e.g. Charles Seeger and Lawrence Gellert) emphasized music's role "in 'people's' struggles for social and political rights". By the end of the 1930s these and others had turned American folk music into a social movement.


title: Folk music

text: Sometimes folk musicians became scholars and advocates themselves. For example, Jean Ritchie (1922–2015) was the youngest child of a large family from Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many of the old Appalachian traditional songs. Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians had opened up to outside influence, was university educated and ultimately moved to New York City, where she made a number of classic recordings of the family repertoire and published an important compilation of these songs.


title: Folk music

text: In January 2012, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, with the Association for Cultural Equity, announced that they would release Lomax's vast archive of 1946 and later recording in digital form. Lomax spent the last 20 years of his life working on an Interactive Multimedia educational computer project he called the Global Jukebox, which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, and 5,000 photographs. As of March 2012, this has been accomplished. Approximately 17,400 of Lomax's recordings from 1946 and later have been made available free online. This material from Alan Lomax's independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and offered by the Association for Cultural Equity, is "distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This earlier collection—which includes the famous Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax's prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) — is the provenance of the American Folklife Center" at the library of Congress.


title: Folk music

text: Africa is a vast continent and its regions and nations have distinct musical traditions. The music of North Africa for the most part has a different history from Sub-Saharan African music traditions.


title: Folk music

text: The music and dance forms of the African diaspora, including African American music and many Caribbean genres like soca, calypso and Zouk; and Latin American music genres like the samba, Cuban rumba, salsa; and other clave (rhythm)-based genres, were founded to varying degrees on the music of African slaves, which has in turn influenced African popular music.


title: Folk music

text: Many Asian civilizations distinguish between art/court/classical styles and "folk" music. For example, the late Alam Lohar is an example of a South Asian singer who was classified as a folk singer.


title: Folk music

text: Khunung Eshei/Khuland Eshei is an ancient folk song from India, a country of Asia, of Meiteis of Manipur, that is an example of Asian folk music, and how they put it into its own genre.


title: Folk music

text: Archaeological discoveries date Chinese folk music back 7000 years; it is largely based on the pentatonic scale.


title: Folk music

text: Han traditional weddings and funerals usually include a form of oboe called a suona, and apercussive ensembles called a chuigushou. Ensembles consisting of mouth organs (sheng), shawms (suona), flutes (dizi) and percussion instruments (especially yunluo gongs) are popular in northern villages; their music is descended from the imperial temple music of Beijing, Xi'an, Wutai shan and Tianjin. Xi'an drum music, consisting of wind and percussive instruments, is popular around Xi'an, and has received some commercial popularity outside of China. Another important instrument is the sheng, a type of Chinese pipe, an ancient instrument that is ancestor of all Western free reed instruments, such as the accordion. Parades led by Western-type brass bands are common, often competing in volume with a shawm/chuigushou band.


title: Folk music

text: In southern Fujian and Taiwan, Nanyin or Nanguan is a genre of traditional ballads. They are sung by a woman accompanied by a xiao and a pipa, as well as other traditional instruments. The music is generally sorrowful and typically deals with love-stricken people. Further south, in Shantou, Hakka and Chaozhou, zheng ensembles are popular. Sizhu ensembles use flutes and bowed or plucked string instruments to make harmonious and melodious music that has become popular in the West among some listeners. These are popular in Nanjing and Hangzhou, as well as elsewhere along the southern Yangtze area. Jiangnan Sizhu (silk and bamboo music from Jiangnan) is a style of instrumental music, often played by amateur musicians in tea houses in Shanghai. Guangdong Music or Cantonese Music is instrumental music from Guangzhou and surrounding areas. The music from this region influenced Yueju (Cantonese Opera) music, which would later grow popular during the self-described "Golden Age" of China under the PRC.


title: Folk music

text: Folk songs have been recorded since ancient times in China. The term Yuefu was used for a broad range of songs such as ballads, laments, folk songs, love songs, and songs performed at court (Birrell, "Balladry and Popular Song" in Mair 2001, p.954). For an English-language translation of ancient ballads see Birrell (1993). China is a vast country, with a multiplicity of linguistic and geographic regions. Folk songs are categorized by geographic region, language type, ethnicity, social function (e.g. work song, ritual song, courting song) and musical type.  Han Kuo-Huang distinguishes between ten regional types and one sub-ethnicity in his study of the folk songs of the Han Chinese, the majority population of China (1989). Sue Tuohy has explained the importance of language and regional differences in Chinese folk songs (See “The Choices and Challenges of Local Distinction" in Berger and Carroll 2003, pp.153-186). Modern anthologies collected by Chinese folklorists distinguish between traditional songs, revolutionary songs, and newly-invented songs (Gibbs 2019, p.98). The songs of northwest China are known as “flower songs” ("hua’er"), a reference to beautiful women. In the past they were notorious for their erotic content (Yang Mu 1994). The village “mountain songs” ("shan’ge") of Jiangsu province were also well-known for their amorous themes (Schimmelpenninck 1997; McLaren 2022). Other regional song traditions include the “strummed lyrics” ("tanci") of the Lower Yangtze Delta, the Cantonese Wooden Fish tradition ("muyu" or "muk-yu") and the Drum Songs ("guci") of north China (Bender, "Regional Literatures" in Mair 2001, p.1019‒1031). For Chinese folk songs in English translation see Mair and Bender (2011, pp.90-178).


title: Folk music

text: Heroic and mythic songs of epic length, often performed for ritual purposes, are known amongst the Mongol, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Kazaks, and Kirghiz people (Karl Reichl, 2019). See also Epic Poetry Non-European forms


title: Folk music

text: In the twenty-first century many cherished Chinese folk songs have been inscribed in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Howard and Ingram 2020, pp. 20-24, 39, 53-54). In the process, songs once seen as vulgar are now being reconstructed as romantic courtship songs (Man Beryl Yang 2020). Regional song competitions, popular in many communities, have promoted professional folk singing as a career. Some individual folk singers have gained national prominence (Gibbs 2018).


title: Folk music

text: The art, music and dance of Sri Lanka derive from the elements of nature, and have been enjoyed and developed in the Buddhist environment. The music is of several types and uses only a few types of instruments. The folk songs and poems were used in social gatherings to work together. The Indian influenced classical music has grown to be unique. The traditional drama, music and songs of Sinhala Light Music are typically Sri Lankan.


title: Folk music

text: The temple paintings and carvings feature birds, elephants, wild animals, flowers, and trees, and the Traditional 18 Dances display the dancing of birds and animals. For example:


title: Folk music

text: The classical Sinhalese orchestra consists of five categories of instruments, but among the percussion instruments, the drum is essential for dance.


title: Folk music

text: The vibrant beat of the rhythm of the drums form the basic of the dance. The dancers' feet bounce off the floor and they leap and swirl in patterns that reflect the complex rhythms of the drum beat. This drum beat may seem simple on the first hearing but it takes a long time to master the intricate rhythms and variations, which the drummer sometimes can bring to a crescendo of intensity. There are six common types of drums falling within 3 styles (one-faced, two-faced, and flat-faced):


title: Folk music

text: Folk song traditions were taken to Australia by early settlers from England, Scotland and Ireland and gained particular foothold in the rural outback. The rhyming songs, poems and tales written in the form of bush ballads often relate to the itinerant and rebellious spirit of Australia in The Bush, and the authors and performers are often referred to as bush bards. The 19th century was the golden age of bush ballads. Several collectors have catalogued the songs including John Meredith whose recording in the 1950s became the basis of the collection in the National Library of Australia.


title: Folk music

text: The songs tell personal stories of life in the wide open country of Australia. Typical subjects include mining, raising and droving cattle, sheep shearing, wanderings, war stories, the 1891 Australian shearers' strike, class conflicts between the landless working class and the squatters (landowners), and outlaws such as Ned Kelly, as well as love interests and more modern fare such as trucking. The most famous bush ballad is "Waltzing Matilda", which has been called "the unofficial national anthem of Australia".


title: Folk music

text: Indigenous Australian music includes the music of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, who are collectively called Indigenous Australians; it incorporates a variety of distinctive traditional music styles practiced by Indigenous Australian peoples, as well as a range of contemporary musical styles of and fusion with European traditions as interpreted and performed by indigenous Australian artists. Music has formed an integral part of the social, cultural and ceremonial observances of these peoples, down through the millennia of their individual and collective histories to the present day. The traditional forms include many aspects of performance and musical instruments unique to particular regions or Indigenous Australian groups. Equal elements of musical tradition are common through much of the Australian continent, and even beyond. The culture of the Torres Strait Islanders is related to that of adjacent parts of New Guinea and so their music is also related. Music is a vital part of Indigenous Australians' cultural maintenance.


title: Folk music

text: Celtic music is a term used by artists, record companies, music stores and music magazines to describe a broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic peoples. These traditions include Irish, Scottish, Manx, Cornish, Welsh, and Breton traditions. Asturian and Galician music is often included, though there is no significant research showing that this has any close musical relationship. Brittany's Folk revival began in the 1950s with the "bagadoù" and the "kan-ha-diskan" before growing to world fame through Alan Stivell's work since the mid-1960s.


title: Folk music

text: In Ireland, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem (although its members were all Irish-born, the group became famous while based in New York's Greenwich Village), The Dubliners, Clannad, Planxty, The Chieftains, The Pogues, The Corrs, The Irish Rovers, and a variety of other folk bands have done much over the past few decades to revitalise and re-popularise Irish traditional music. These bands were rooted, to a greater or lesser extent, in a tradition of Irish music and benefited from the efforts of artists such as Seamus Ennis and Peter Kennedy.


title: Folk music

text: In Scotland, The Corries, Silly Wizard, Capercaillie, Runrig, Jackie Leven, Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart, Alasdair Roberts, Dick Gaughan, Wolfstone, Boys of the Lough, and The Silencers have kept Scottish folk vibrant and fresh by mixing traditional Scottish and Gaelic folk songs with more contemporary genres. These artists have also been commercially successful in continental Europe and North America. There is an emerging wealth of talent in the Scottish traditional music scene, with bands such as Mànran, Skipinnish, Barluath and Breabach and solo artists such as Patsy Reid, Robyn Stapleton and Mischa MacPherson gaining a lot of success in recent years.


title: Folk music

text: During the Communist era national folk dancing in the Eastern Bloc was actively promoted by the state. Dance troupes from Russia and Poland toured non-communist Europe from about 1937 to 1990. The Red Army Choir recorded many albums, becoming the most popular military band. Eastern Europe is also the origin of the Jewish Klezmer tradition.


title: Folk music

text: The polka is a central European dance and also a genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas. It originated in the middle of the 19th century in Bohemia. Polka is still a popular genre of folk music in many European countries and is performed by folk artists in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Slovakia. Local varieties of this dance are also found in the Nordic countries, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Latin America (especially Mexico), and in the United States.


title: Folk music

text: German Volkslieder perpetuated by Liederhandschriften manuscripts like "Carmina Burana" date back to medieval Minnesang and Meistersinger traditions. Those folk songs revived in the late 18th century period of German Romanticism, first promoted by Johann Gottfried Herder and other advocates of the Enlightenment, later compiled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano ("Des Knaben Wunderhorn") as well as by Ludwig Uhland.


title: Folk music

text: The Volksmusik and folk dances genre, especially in the Alpine regions of Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland ("Kuhreihen") and South Tyrol, up to today has lingered in rustic communities against the backdrop of industrialisation—Low German shanties or the Wienerlied ("Schrammelmusik") being notable exceptions. Slovene folk music in Upper Carniola and Styria also originated from the Alpine traditions, like the prolific Lojze Slak Ensemble. Traditional "Volksmusik" is not to be confused with commercial "Volkstümliche Musik", which is a derivation of that.


title: Folk music

text: The Hungarian group Muzsikás played numerous American tours and participated in the Hollywood movie "The English Patient" while the singer Márta Sebestyén worked with the band Deep Forest. The Hungarian "táncház" movement, started in the 1970s, involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and enthusiastic amateurs. However, traditional Hungarian folk music and folk culture barely survived in some rural areas of Hungary, and it has also begun to disappear among the ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania. The táncház movement revived broader folk traditions of music, dance, and costume together and created a new kind of music club. The movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities elsewhere in the world.


title: Folk music

text: Balkan folk music was influenced by the mingling of Balkan ethnic groups in the period of the Ottoman Empire. It comprises the music of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, North Macedonia, Albania, some of the historical states of Yugoslavia or the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro and geographical regions such as Thrace. Some music is characterised by complex rhythm.


title: Folk music

text: An important part of the whole Balkan folk music is the music of the local Romani ethnic minority, which is called Tallava and Brass band music.


title: Folk music

text: Nordic folk music includes a number of traditions in Northern European, especially Scandinavian, countries. The Nordic countries are generally taken to include Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Greenland. Sometimes it is taken to include the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.


title: Folk music

text: The many regions of the Nordic countries share certain traditions, many of which have diverged significantly, like Psalmodicon of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. It is possible to group together the Baltic states (or, sometimes, only Estonia) and parts of northwest Russia as sharing cultural similarities, although the relationship has gone cold in recent years. Contrast with Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Atlantic islands of Iceland and the Faroe Islands, which share virtually no similarities of that kind. Greenland's Inuit culture has its own unique musical traditions. Finland shares many cultural similarities with both the Baltic nations and the Scandinavian nations. The Sami of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia have their own unique culture, with ties to the neighboring cultures.


title: Folk music

text: Swedish folk music is a genre of music based largely on folkloric collection work that began in the early 19th century in Sweden. The primary instrument of Swedish folk music is the fiddle. Another common instrument, unique to Swedish traditions, is the nyckelharpa. Most Swedish instrumental folk music is dance music; the signature music and dance form within Swedish folk music is the polska. Vocal and instrumental traditions in Sweden have tended to share tunes historically, though they have been performed separately. Beginning with the folk music revival of the 1970s, vocalists and instrumentalists have also begun to perform together in folk music ensembles.


title: Folk music

text: The folk music of the Americas consists of the encounter and union of three main musical types: European traditional music, traditional music of the American natives, and tribal African music that arrived with slaves from that continent.


title: Folk music

text: The particular case of Latin and South American music points to Andean music among other native musical styles (such as Caribbean and pampean), Iberian music of Spain and Portugal, and generally speaking African tribal music, the three of which fused together evolving in differentiated musical forms in Central and South America.


title: Folk music

text: Andean music comes from the region of the Quechuas, Aymaras, and other peoples that inhabit the general area of the Inca Empire prior to European contact. It includes folklore music of parts of Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. Andean music is popular to different degrees across Latin America, having its core public in rural areas and among indigenous populations. The Nueva Canción movement of the 1970s revived the genre across Latin America and brought it to places where it was unknown or forgotten.


title: Folk music

text: Nueva canción (Spanish for 'new song') is a movement and genre within Latin American and Iberian folk music, folk-inspired music, and socially committed music. In some respects its development and role is similar to the second folk music revival in North America. This includes evolution of this new genre from traditional folk music, essentially contemporary folk music except that that English genre term is not commonly applied to it. Nueva cancion is recognized as having played a powerful role in the social upheavals in Portugal, Spain and Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s.


title: Folk music

text: Nueva cancion first surfaced during the 1960s as "The Chilean New Song" in Chile. The musical style emerged shortly afterwards in Spain and areas of Latin America where it came to be known under similar names. Nueva canción renewed traditional Latin American folk music, and with its political lyrics it was soon associated with revolutionary movements, the Latin American New Left, Liberation Theology, hippie and human rights movements. It would gain great popularity throughout Latin America, and it is regarded as a precursor to Rock en español.


title: Folk music

text: Trova and Son are styles of traditional Cuban music originating in the province of Oriente that includes influences from Spanish song and dance, such as Bolero and contradanza as well as Afro-Cuban rhythm and percussion elements.


title: Folk music

text: Moda de viola is the name designated to Brazilian folk music. It is often performed with a 6-string nylon acoustic guitar, but the most traditional instrument is the viola caipira. The songs basically detailed the difficulties of life of those who work in the country. The themes are usually associated with the land, animals, folklore, impossible love and separation. Although there are some upbeat songs, most of them are nostalgic and melancholic.


title: Folk music

text: Canada's traditional folk music is particularly diverse. Even prior to liberalizing its immigration laws in the 1960s, Canada was ethnically diverse with dozens of different Indigenous and European groups present. In terms of music, academics do not speak of a Canadian tradition, but rather ethnic traditions (Acadian music, Irish-Canadian music, Blackfoot music, Innu music, Inuit music, Métis fiddle, etc.) and later in Eastern Canada regional traditions (Newfoundland music, Cape Breton fiddling, Quebecois music, etc.)


title: Folk music

text: "Knowledge of the history of Canada", wrote Isabelle Mills in 1974, "is essential in understanding the mosaic of Canadian folk song. Part of this mosaic is supplied by the folk songs of Canada brought by European and Anglo-Saxon settlers to the new land." She describes how the French colony at Québec brought French immigrants, followed before long by waves of immigrants from Great Britain, Germany, and other European countries, all bringing music from their homelands, some of which survives into the present day. Ethnographer and folklorist Marius Barbeau estimated that well over ten thousand French folk songs and their variants had been collected in Canada. Many of the older ones had by then died out in France.


title: Folk music

text: Music as professionalized paid entertainment grew relatively slowly in Canada, especially remote rural areas, through the 19th and early 20th centuries. While in urban music clubs of the dance hall/vaudeville variety became popular, followed by jazz, rural Canada remained mostly a land of traditional music. Yet when American radio networks began broadcasting into Canada in the 1920s and 1930s, the audience for Canadian traditional music progressively declined in favour of American Nashville-style country music and urban styles like jazz. The Americanization of Canadian music led the Canadian Radio League to lobby for a national public broadcaster in the 1930s, eventually leading to the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1936. The CBC promoted Canadian music, including traditional music, on its radio and later television services, but the mid-century craze for all things "modern" led to the decline of folk music relative to rock and pop. Canada was however influenced by the folk music revival of the 1960s, when local venues such as the Montreal Folk Workshop, and other folk clubs and coffee houses across the country, became crucibles for emerging songwriters and performers as well as for interchange with artists visiting from abroad.


title: Folk music

text: American traditional music is also called roots music. Roots music is a broad category of music including bluegrass, country music, gospel, old time music, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Cajun and Native American music. The music is considered American either because it is native to the United States or because it developed there, out of foreign origins, to such a degree that it struck musicologists as something distinctly new. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, contemporary folk music, rhythm and blues, and jazz. Some of these genres are considered to be traditional folk music.


title: Folk music

text: "Folk music revival" refers to either a period of renewed interest in traditional folk music, or to an event or period which transforms it; the latter usually includes a social activism component. A prominent example of the former is the British folk revival of approximately 1890–1920. The most prominent and influential example of the latter (to the extent that it is usually called ""the" folk music revival") is the folk revival of the mid 20th century, centered in the English-speaking world which gave birth to contemporary folk music. See the "Contemporary folk music" article for a description of this revival.


title: Folk music

text: One earlier revival influenced western classical music. Such composers as Percy Grainger, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Béla Bartók, made field recordings or transcriptions of folk singers and musicians.


title: Folk music

text: In Spain, Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) produced piano works reflect his Spanish heritage, including the "Suite Iberia" (1906–1909). Enrique Granados (1867–1918) composed "zarzuela", Spanish light opera, and "Danzas Españolas" – Spanish Dances. Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) became interested in the cante jondo of Andalusian flamenco, the influence of which can be strongly felt in many of his works, which include "Nights in the Gardens of Spain" and "Siete canciones populares españolas" ("Seven Spanish Folksongs", for voice and piano). Composers such as Fernando Sor and Francisco Tarrega established the guitar as Spain's national instrument. Modern Spanish folk artists abound (Mil i Maria, Russian Red, et al.) modernizing while respecting the traditions of their forebears.


title: Folk music

text: Flamenco grew in popularity through the 20th century, as did northern styles such as the Celtic music of Galicia. French classical composers, from Bizet to Ravel, also drew upon Spanish themes, and distinctive Spanish genres became universally recognized.


title: Folk music

text: Folk music revivals or roots revivals also encompass a range of phenomena around the world where there is a renewed interest in traditional music. This is often by the young, often in the traditional music of their own country, and often included new incorporation of social awareness, causes, and evolutions of new music in the same style. Nueva canción, a similar evolution of a new form of socially committed music occurred in several Spanish-speaking countries.


title: Folk music

text: It is sometimes claimed that the earliest United States folk music festival was the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, 1928, in Asheville, North Carolina, founded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The National Folk Festival (USA) is an itinerant folk festival in the United States. Since 1934, it has been run by the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) and has been presented in 26 communities around the nation. After leaving some of these communities, the National Folk Festival has spun off several locally run folk festivals in its wake including the Lowell Folk Festival, the Richmond Folk Festival, the American Folk Festival and, most recently, the Montana Folk Festival.


title: Folk music

text: The Newport Folk Festival is an annual folk festival held near Newport, Rhode Island. It ran most years from 1959 to 1970 and from 1985 to the present, with an attendance of approximately 10,000 people each year.


title: Folk music

text: The four-day Philadelphia Folk Festival began in 1962. It is sponsored by the non-profit Philadelphia Folksong Society. The event hosts contemporary and traditional artists in genres including World/Fusion, Celtic, Singer-Songwriter, Folk Rock, Country, Klezmer, and Dance. It is held annually on the third weekend in August. The event now hosts approximately 12,000 visitors, presenting bands on 6 stages.


title: Folk music

text: Sidmouth Festival began in 1954, and Cambridge Folk Festival began in 1965. The Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England is noted for having a very wide definition of who can be invited as folk musicians. The "club tents" allow attendees to discover large numbers of unknown artists, who, for ten or 15 minutes each, present their work to the festival audience.


title: Folk music

text: The National Folk Festival is Australia's premier folk festival event and is attended by over 50,000 people. The Woodford Folk Festival and Port Fairy Folk Festival are similarly amongst Australia's largest major annual events, attracting top international folk performers as well as many local artists.


title: Folk music

text: Stan Rogers is a lasting fixture of the Canadian folk festival Summerfolk, held annually in Owen Sound, Ontario, where the main stage and amphitheater are dedicated as the "Stan Rogers Memorial Canopy". The festival is firmly fixed in tradition, with Rogers' song "The Mary Ellen Carter" being sung by all involved, including the audience and a medley of acts at the festival. The Canmore Folk Music Festival is Alberta's longest running folk music festival.


title: Folk music

text: Urkult Näsåker, Ångermanland held August each year is purportedly Sweden's largest world-music festival.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Carroll Hall Shelby (January 11, 1923 – May 10, 2012) was an American automotive designer, racing driver, and entrepreneur. Shelby is best known for his involvement with the AC Cobra and Mustang for Ford Motor Company, which he modified during the late 1960s and early 2000s. He established Shelby American in 1962 to manufacture and market performance vehicles. His autobiography, "The Carroll Shelby Story", was published in 1967. As a race car driver, his highlight was as a co-driver of the winning 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans entry.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Carroll Shelby was born on January 11, 1923, to Warren Hall Shelby, a rural mail carrier, and his wife, Eloise Shelby (nee Lawrence), in Leesburg, Texas. Shelby suffered from heart valve leakage problems by age 7 and experienced related health complications throughout his life. From a young age, Shelby was fascinated with the concept of speed, which led to an interest in cars and airplanes. He moved to Dallas, Texas, at age 7 with his family, and around age 10, he would ride his bicycle to dirt tracks nearby to watch races. Eager for a car of his own, at age 15, he was driving and taking care of his father's Ford. Shelby's education as a pilot began in the military in November 1941 at the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center, later known as Lackland Air Force Base. Before racing and building cars, Shelby was a poultry farmer, which was a livelihood he continued until 1952.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby honed his driving skills with his Willys automobile while attending Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, graduating in 1940. He later enrolled at The Georgia Institute of Technology in the Aeronautical Engineering program. After enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps, Shelby began pilot training in November 1941. He graduated with the rank of staff sergeant pilot in September 1942 at Ellington Field. In December 1942, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant after undergoing air students' training, later serving as a flight instructor and test pilot in the Beechcraft AT-11 Kansan and Curtiss AT-9 Jeep. He went on to fly the Douglas B-18 Bolo, the North American B-25 Mitchell, the Douglas A-26 Invader, and finally the Boeing B-29 Superfortress at Denver, Colorado, before being discharged following V-J Day.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: After the war, he started his own dump truck business, worked briefly as an oil-well roughneck from 1948–49, and then as a poultry farmer before going bankrupt.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby started driving professionally at age 29.Starting out as an amateur, Shelby raced his friend Ed Wilkin's MG TC in January 1952 at the Grand Prairie Naval Air Station drag meet, followed by other races. Then, he raced Charles Brown's Cadillac-Allards at Caddo Mills, Texas. At the end of 1952, Shelby won 4 races, taking home only trophies, not accepting any prize money.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 1953, Shelby raced Brown's Cad-Allard, followed by Roy Cherryhomes' Cad-Allard, winning 8 or 9 races. Then in 1954, he drove in the Mil Kilometros de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, sponsored by the Automobile Club of Argentina and the Sports Car Club of America. This is where he met John Wyer, Aston Martin's team manager, who asked Shelby to drive their DBR3 at Sebring. The DBR3 did not finish Sebring in 1954 due to a broken rear axle.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby traveled to Europe in April 1954, where he raced a DBR3 for John Wyer at Aintree, followed by Le Mans. Teaming up with Graham Whitehead, their Aston Martin took fifth at the Thousand Kilometers at Monza on 27 June. He then drove in the 3-car factory team effort at Silverstone on 17 July with Peter Collins and Roy Salvadori, all three cars taking the three top places.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In August 1954, Shelby drove with Donald Healey, and his team. In an Austin-Healey 100S and supercharged 100S, they set Class D National speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Shelby, Healey, Captain G.E.T. Eyston, Mortimer Morris Goodall, and Roy Jackson-Moore set about 70 new records, with Shelby setting 17 on his own.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby was severely injured in a crash while racing an Austin-Healey in the Carrera Panamericana. Though he underwent eight months of operations, he continued to drive in 1955, winning about ten races, and a second-place showing at Sebring driving Allen Guiberson's Ferrari Monza. He then started driving Tony Paravano's Ferraris in August 1955. He won a further 30 races with the Ferrari in 1956, started driving for John Edgar, and opened Carroll Shelby Sports Cars in Dallas.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: He drove in the Mount Washington Hillclimb Auto Race in a specially prepared Ferrari 375 GP roadster, to a record run of 10 minutes, 21.8 seconds on his way to victory in 1956. He also set records at Giants Despair Hillclimb, and raced at Brynfan Tyddyn.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Racing John Edgar's 4.5-liter Maserati at the Riverside International Raceway in September 1957, he was involved in a crash that caused injuries requiring 72 stitches and plastic surgery for broken bones in his nose and cheekbones. However, he returned in November, winning with the same car at the same course, against Masten Gregory and Dan Gurney.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby joined John Wyer and the Aston Martin team in Europe and drove a DBR3 at the Belgian Sports Car Grand Prix on 18 May 1958, followed by a DBR1 at the Nürburgring 1000 km with co-driver Salvadori. Shelby was teamed up with Salvadori at Le Mans, but Shelby came down with dysentery and had to be replaced by Stuart Lewis-Evans after a few hours into the race. Shelby then drove a Maserati 250F for Mimo Dei's Scuderia Centro Sud in 3 Grand Prix races to gain Formula 1 and open-wheel car experience, including the Portuguese Grand Prix. Shelby finished the year driving John Edgar's 4.5L Maserati in the Tourist Trophy at Nassau.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby and Salvadori started the 1959 sports car season by driving the DBR1/300 at Sebring in March. In June, Shelby drove Wolfgang Seidel's Porsche in the Nürburgring 1000 km. The highlight of his racing career came in June 1959 when he co-drove an Aston Martin DBR1 (with Englishman Roy Salvadori) to victory in the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans. In September, Shelby drove with Jack Fairman in the Goodwood Tourist Trophy.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: The 1959 Grand Prix season saw Shelby driving the Aston Martin DBR4 in the Dutch Grand Prix in May, followed by the British Grand Prix at Aintree in July. Shelby then drove in the Portuguese Grand Prix in August, followed by the Italian Grand Prix in September.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby finished the 1959 racing season driving Casner Motor Racing Division's Birdcage Maserati at the Nassau races in December. In January 1960, he drove Temple Buell's Maserati 250F in the New Zealand Grand Prix, then Camoradi's Porsche in the Cuban Gran Premio Libertad, then their 2.9-liter Birdcage Maserati at Sebring. He won the Grand Prix at Riverside driving one of "Lucky" Cassner's Birdcage Maseratis, and then won the Castle Rock race in June, driving a Scarab. He finished the year driving Max Balchowsky's "Old Yeller II" in the Road America, then a Birdcage Maserati in the Pacific Grand Prix and the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix, which was his last race.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: According to Shelby, "...winning the Twenty-four Hours was probably the greatest thrill I ever got out of racing. I can think of plenty of other races that carry their quota of thrills for the winner, but when you win this one it kind of gives you license to go out and tell people you're good, and that often helps get some other deals together."


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 1961, Shelby, along with Pete Brock, opened the Shelby School of High Performance Driving at the Riverside track.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby's visits to "limited-production factories in Europe" caused him to realize that “America was missing a big bet, a winning bet ... the design and production of an all-purpose, all-American sports or grand touring car that you could drive to market and also race during the weekend..." In particular, Shelby's starting point was putting a 300 brake horsepower V8 on an Austin Healey type chassis, so that the combination weighed less than .


title: Carroll Shelby

text: After retiring from driving in October 1960 for health reasons, Shelby opened a high-performance driving school and the Shelby-American performance equipment and customization company in the Los Angeles area. Shelby became interested in the potential of the AC Ace chassis, especially after Bristol Aeroplane Company stopped building automobile engines, and the sales with the Ford Zephyr engine were declining in September 1961. Shelby contacted Charles Hurlock of AC, who agreed to provide the chassis on credit. Dave Evans of Ford Motor Company agreed to provide and V8 engines with transmissions also on credit. The new car, called the Carroll Shelby Experimental or CSX0001, was marketed as the Shelby AC Cobra, then AC Cobra, and eventually, the Ford Cobra. Production began in March 1962, with 75 cars sold by the end of the year. One hundred cars had been built by April 1963, the first 75 with the 260-cubic-inch engine, followed by a engine. The 427 Cobra prototype was built in October 1964.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby started racing his creation in October 1962 at Riverside, with Billy Krause driving the CSX0002. Racing experience from 1963 indicated that further modifications were necessary to make the Cobra competitive with the Ferrari GT cars; in particular, the AC roadster body needed to be replaced with a lower-drag enclosed coupe body for high-speed circuits. The result was the Shelby Daytona Coupe, which took three GT class wins on the 1964 World Sportscar Championship GT circuit, including Le Mans and the Tourist Trophy at Goodwood, plus the Sports Car Club of America's U.S. GT Championship. Then in 1965, Shelby American Cobra won the International Championship for GT Manufacturers.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: After success with the Daytona Coupe in 1964, Shelby-American became more heavily involved in Ford's GT40 Sports Prototype racing program, which had experienced disappointing results. Shelby made changes to running gear, particularly transmissions, to improve reliability, and designed their GT40 Mark II variant around Ford's engine. In 1966, the Mark II earned Ford the overall Constructors' title in the World Sportscar Championship with their 1-2-3 finish at Le Mans. Ford was also developing a radical new prototype with a lightweight chassis based on aluminum honeycomb panels. Shelby was brought in to finalize the development of the car after the project experienced setbacks in 1966, which included the death of driver Ken Miles in August. The Mark IV was introduced for the 1967 12 Hours of Sebring and finished in first place. It was prepared for Le Mans and another record-breaking finish. Driver Dan Gurney shook and sprayed champagne on the podium and started a tradition. The Mark IV was Shelby's last prototype racer, as new limits on engine displacement for that class eliminated Ford's engines.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby's early racing successes led to a joint effort of Ford and Shelby-American to produce the Mustang-based Shelby GT350, starting in 1965, then the Shelby GT500, starting in 1967. Shelby produced those cars through 1968, then subsequent cars with the Shelby GT brand were produced in-house by Ford.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: After parting with Ford, Shelby moved on to help develop performance cars with divisions of the two other Big 3 American companies: Dodge () and Oldsmobile (General Motors).


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In the intervening years, Shelby had a series of ventures start and stop relating to the production of "completion" Cobras — cars that were allegedly built using "leftover" parts and frames. In the 1960s, the FIA required entrants (Shelby, Ford, Ferrari, etc.) to produce at least 100 cars for homologated classes of racing. Shelby simply ordered an insufficient number of cars and skipped a large block of Vehicle Identification Numbers, to create the illusion the company had imported large numbers of cars. Decades later in the 1990s, Carroll alleged that he had found the "leftover" frames, and began selling cars that were supposedly finally "completed". After it was discovered the cars were built from scratch in collaboration with McCluskey, Ltd., they were re-termed "continuation" Cobras. The cars are still built to this day, known as the current CSX4000 series of Cobras.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1991, the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1992, the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1992, and the Diecast Hall of Fame in 2009. He was also inducted into the SCCA Hall of Fame on March 2, 2013.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 2003, Ford Motor Co. and Carroll Shelby resumed ties and he became technical advisor to the Ford GT project. In that same year, he formed Carroll Shelby International, Inc., based in Nevada.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby began working with Dodge at the request of Chrysler Corporation chairman Lee Iacocca. Iacocca had previously been responsible for bringing Shelby to the Ford Mustang. After almost a decade of tuning work, Shelby was brought on board as the "Performance Consultant" on the Dodge Viper Technical Policy Committee made up of Chrysler's executive Bob Lutz, Product Design chief Tom Gale, and Engineering Vice President François Castaing. Shelby's wealth of experience helped make the Viper as light and powerful as possible.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: The following cars were limited production vehicles and modified at Shelby's Whittier, California, plant, and then sold as Shelbys:


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby's Series 1 roadster used Oldsmobile's 4.0 L "L47 Aurora" V8, which was the selected because it was the selected engine by Indy for that year but was poorly supported by the ailing GM division. Shelby had already built an Aurora-engined sports prototype together with Racefab in 1997, in an attempt to continue his single-make Can-Am series.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: The Series 1 is the only car ever produced by Carroll Shelby from a clean sheet of paper, and built from the ground up. All other Shelbys were re-engineered models produced by other manufacturers and then modified by Shelby.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Prior to production of the Series 1, significant costs were incurred in testing and certification required to conform to 1999 Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Once completed, a total of 249 production Series 1 cars were constructed by Shelby American as model year 1999 cars.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: During production, Venture Corporation purchased Shelby American, Inc. The purchase included the Series 1 model, but not the rights to produce the "Continuation Series" Shelby Cobras. In 2004, after a subsequent bankruptcy by Venture Corporation (unrelated to the acquisition of Shelby American), Carroll Shelby's new company, Shelby Automobiles, Inc., purchased the Series 1 assets for pennies on the dollar. Included in the asset purchase were enough components to produce several more complete Series 1s.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Because the 1999 Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards certificate had expired, and the cost to re-certify the car was prohibitive, all Series 1's produced after that date were completed as "component cars" and delivered with no engine or transmission. Those "component car" models built in 2005 are identified with a seven-digit vehicle identification number (VIN) and were designated with a CSX5000 series serial number. The original 249 were production cars with a seventeen-digit VIN.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: The Series 1 was produced in both supercharged and normally aspirated versions. Supercharged cars were also outfitted by the factory with larger brakes and a heavy-duty clutch. Performance is near "supercar" category with a 0 to 60 mph time at 4.1 seconds for the supercharged version. The Series 1 had power steering, power disc brakes, factory air conditioning, power windows, and an AM/FM/CD audio system. The convertible top folded away in a compartment located behind the cockpit. Some component cars were sold as roadsters, with no convertible top.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 2004, a new Ford Shelby Cobra Concept was shown off at U.S. car shows. Built with a retro body mimicking the 1960s Cobras mixed with modern touches, it was based on the Ford GT chassis (reworked for front engine/rear wheel drive) powered with a 6.4 L V10 engine that produced 605 hp (451 kW). It received overwhelmingly positive press reviews and has won the "Best In Show" award at Detroit International Auto Show.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: A coupe version of the Shelby Cobra roadster was introduced the following year. The Ford Shelby GR-1 concept car of 2005. While sporting a completely modern design, it showed a nod to the 1960s Shelby Daytona. The GR-1, like the Cobra, is based on the GT's chassis. Press reviews for the GR-1 were positive. The car was featured on the cover of "Motor Trend" and "Car Magazine". The Ford Shelby GR-1 was floated as a possibility of taking over the Ford GT's production line after its production came to an end. Neither Shelby car was built.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 2005, Carroll Shelby built the CSM #00001 V6 Shelby Mustang CS6, to prove to Ford that he could still build high-performance cars. Its V6 produced 380HP, making it faster than Ford's V8 300HP. Because Ford thought the CS6 would hurt Ford Mustang V8 sales, Ford told Shelby to go with the V8 instead. Few CS6 Shelbys were made by Shelby; consequently, these are among the rarest Shelbys in the world.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: The Shelby GT500 was revealed at the New York International Auto Show, and became available in the summer of 2006 as part of the model year 2007 lineup. It was powered by a 5.4 Liter Modular V8, with four-valves-per-cylinder heads borrowed from the $150K Ford GT supercar, an Eaton M122 Roots-type supercharger rated by Ford at and of torque. It had a Tremec T-6060 manual transmission, reworked suspension geometry, 18-inch wheels, functional aerodynamic body kit, and a retro solid rear axle. The GT500 started at an MSRP of $40,930 for the coupe, and $45,755 for the convertible. Although Carroll Shelby had no hands-on involvement in the design of the car, he provided Ford and SVT (Special Vehicle Team) input on what would make the car better and convinced Ford to use wider rear tires (from 255 mm wide to 285 mm wide).


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby, in cooperation with the Hertz Corporation, produced 500 cars named "Shelby GT-H" in 2006, designed after the Shelby G.T.350H "Rent-a-Racer" from 1966 under a similar partnership. This was a special-edition Ford Mustang GT, available for rental from Hertz. A Ford Racing Performance Group FR1 Power Pack increased the GT's 4.6 L V8 engine to . The cars included a custom Shelby hood and black and gold body styling, incorporating a gold-plated "Hertz" nameplate on both sides.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: A consumer version of the Shelby GT-H was available from Shelby through Ford dealers, called the Shelby GT. There were 5,682 vehicles for 2007 and 2,300 for 2008 were built. They had the same engine as the GT-H, but more suspension, appearance, and drivetrain upgrades and were available with either manual or automatic transmission. White and black colors were available for 2007 models and grabber orange or vista blue were available for 2008. A convertible was available in 2008 also. An available upgrade from the Shelby factory in Las Vegas were a few different superchargers. It then was called a Shelby GT/SC. All Shelby GTs are shipped with the Shelby serial number (CSM) on the dashboard badge and in the engine compartment, such as 07SGT0001 or 08SGT0001.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 1963 the Rootes Group, manufacturer of Sunbeam automobiles, wanted Shelby to upgrade their Alpine sports car to a more powerful version, using the Ford small-block V-8 engine, as he had done with the AC Cobra. Shelby did so and Rootes, pleased with the results, named the upgraded model the Tiger. In 1967 Chrysler bought Sunbeam and decided to use their own small block engine in the vehicle. However, their engine would not fit and marketed the cars with Ford engines until the supply ran out and the model was discontinued.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In his later years, Shelby brought several lawsuits against companies making copies of the Cobra body for use on kit cars – ostensibly for copyright, trademark, and patent violations. Despite the litigation, the Cobra kit car industry continues to thrive.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: One of the lawsuits involved the Superformance Brock Coupe, a copy of the original Shelby Daytona Coupe. The Superformance Brock Coupe was designed by Pete Brock, who had also designed the original Daytona Coupe for Shelby. Shelby American sued Superformance after the company had developed and begun production of the Superformance Brock Coupe. Eventually, the litigation was settled, though the terms of the settlement have never been released to the public. As a result of the agreement between the two companies, the product is now known as the Shelby Daytona Coupe, despite being neither designed nor built by Shelby American. Nearly 150 of these new Shelby Daytona Coupes have been built as of February 2007.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 2002, Unique Performance, a company of Farmers Branch, Texas, purchased a license from Carroll Shelby Enterprises to place his name on a series of continuation vintage vehicles. This company specialized in recreating 1960s-style Shelby Mustangs. They purchased used Mustangs and installed updated versions of the Shelby 325-horsepower 302-cubic-inch V8 engine. They also use modern five-speed manual transmissions, brakes, steering, suspension, interiors, and entertainment systems. Because Shelby's license was purchased, these cars have Shelby serial numbers.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In October 2007, Carroll Shelby ended his licensing agreement with Unique Performance due to numerous issues of customer complaints where vehicles were not delivered. Unique Performance was subsequently raided by law enforcement for VIN irregularities and declared bankruptcy, which effectively ended the Shelby continuation "Eleanor" Mustang production. Shelby was in turn sued by victims of Unique Performance for his involvement in the criminal activity,


title: Carroll Shelby

text: The 2000 remake of "Gone in 60 Seconds" movie highlighted the star car character "Eleanor," a customized 1967 Mustang. Some custom car businesses began to reproduce "Eleanor"-looking cars with the trademarked name, causing Denice Halicki to again take legal action to protect the trademark and the copyrighted Eleanor's image. In 2008, Halicki won a case against Carroll Shelby, who was also selling "Eleanor" using the trademark name and copyrighted image.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: The Scaglietti Corvette began when Gary Laughlin, a wealthy Texas oilman, and gentleman racer, had just broken the crankshaft in his Ferrari Monza. Like most Ferrari repairs, this was not going to be a cheap, simple fix. At the time, Laughlin was an active participant in the American sports car racing scene and was a close acquaintance of many of the key figures, including fellow Texan Shelby. The two had witnessed a number of V8-powered home-built specials challenge, and often defeat, the best that Europe had to offer. The idea developed that they should build a dual-purpose car based on the solid mechanicals of the Chevrolet Corvette. European-style alloy coachwork could help the chassis finally realize its potential. By chance, Laughlin owned a few Chevrolet dealerships and had a particularly valuable friend in Peter Coltrin, an automotive journalist who had gained an “in” with the influential Italians. Laughlin met with Jim Hall and Carroll Shelby to begin discussing what form their new Italian-American hybrid would take. The general consensus was that they should create a car that offered the best of both worlds – a Corvette with the distinction, performance, and style of a Ferrari, but with the power and reliability of a Chevrolet. The aim was to create a genuine high-performance GT with enough leg and headroom to meet American expectations. Once this was decided, Coltrin put Laughlin in touch with Sergio Scaglietti. With the help of Chevrolet General Manager Ed Cole, three 1959 Corvette chassis were discreetly acquired from the St. Louis Corvette plant before bodies could be fitted – one was specified with a “fuelie” and a four-speed, the others came with twin four barrels and automatics. During one of his frequent trips through Europe, Laughlin met with Sergio Scaglietti who agreed to produce a small run of bodies for the Corvette chassis. At the time, Scaglietti was busy turning out Ferrari's Tour de France and purpose-built racing cars. The Scaglietti Corvette would follow the lines of the Tour de France, albeit lines adapted to fit the Corvette's larger footprint. In an effort to impress, or perhaps, appease GM management, Laughlin specified a proper Corvette grille. The interior would be similarly hybridized with an intriguing combination of Americana – Stewart Warner gauges, T-handle parking brake, Corvette shift knob; and classic Italian GT – a purposeful crackle-finish dashboard, deeply bolstered leather seats, and elegant door hardware.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: The completed car arrived in Texas in the fall of 1960, almost 18 months after the chassis had been obtained. It proved to be the only one of the three to be finished in Italy and shipped back to the United States as a complete car. When Laughlin received the car, the fit and finish were not quite what he was expecting, especially as the project had taken nearly three years from conception to completion. Enzo Ferrari would have been quite unhappy to hear that his exclusive coachbuilder was working on side projects for a group of Texans, so, to Scaglietti's credit, the car was largely a prototype and the work was executed in a shroud of secrecy. Towards the end of the project, Carroll Shelby, who by then was living in Italy, received a late-night phone call from Ed Cole. Cole had been chastised by GM management and was told to drop the project. It was poor timing. American car companies were under pressure to cut down on their high-performance and racing programs. They simply could not deal with the repercussions of a GM-backed Italian-bodied Corvette. The remaining cars were shipped to Houston in a partially completed state. Jim Hall took delivery of one. Shelby, who had helped conceive the project, ended up declining the remaining car and it was promptly sold.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby licensed his name to many products outside of the automotive industry. Currently, his name and other trademarks associated with him are licensed to other companies by Carroll Shelby Licensing, a subsidiary of holding company Carroll Shelby International.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Carroll Shelby's name is associated with a chili fixings kit. The kit consists of spices in several packets, which used to come in a miniature brown paper bag, but now comes in a box. On the side of the bag is a story related by Shelby about cooking chili during his racing days. On the front of the bag is a depiction of a big western black hat, a trademark piece of clothing for Shelby. He was a founder of the Terlingua International Chili Championship in Terlingua, Texas.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 1967, Shelby marketed a men's grooming product, the "Carroll Shelby's Pit-Stop ... a Real Man's Deodorant" that was promoted in car magazines.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Donzi Marine developed the Donzi Shelby 22 GT, a speedboat based on their Classic line of boats in collaboration with Carroll Shelby.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Carroll Shelby produced a line of eight-spoke alloy wheels for Saab automobiles in the early to mid-1980s. They were available in gold (Goldvane), hammered silver (Silvervane) finish, and a black hammered finish. These wheels were available through Saab dealers and could be fitted to Saab 99 and Saab 900 models manufactured through 1987.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby supported a project with Rucker Performance Motorcycles to manufacture 12 Shelby motorcycles that were designed by William Rucker.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby established the Carroll Shelby Children's Foundation to cover medical bills of children who have heart disease but are unable to pay for treatment.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby wrote his memoir called "The Carroll Shelby Story" published in 1967 by Pocket Books. In 2019, the book was re-released by Graymalkin Media for the opening of "Ford v Ferrari", a 2019 American sports drama film. The memoir describes his days as a race car driver, the challenges, the victories, and the crashes — the worst of which he describes as an “explosion.” The memoir also discusses the genesis for the revolutionary car he created, the Shelby Cobra.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby was married seven times; the first and last marriages lasted 15 years before divorce proceedings.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby's first wife was Jeanne Fields; they married on December 18, 1943. They had three children: Sharon Anne (born September 27, 1944), Michael Hall (born November 2, 1946), and Patrick Bert (born October 23, 1947). They divorced in February 1960.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby later admitted to an extramarital affair with Jan Harrison, an actress. In 1962, Shelby married Harrison, but the marriage was annulled the same year. His third marriage, to a New Zealand woman, which he entered in order to get her into the United States, lasted only a few weeks before ending in divorce. His fourth marriage, to Sandra Brandstetter, lasted a couple of years before ending in divorce.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: In 1989, after 28 years of being single, Carroll married Cynthia Psaros, a former actress, beauty queen, and daughter of a retired US Marine colonel fighter pilot. During this marriage, Carroll received his long-awaited heart transplant. Their marriage lasted a few short years before ending in divorce. In the 1990s he married Helena "Lena" Dahl, a Swedish woman he had met in 1968. She died in a car accident in 1997. It was his only marriage that did not end in divorce, annulment, or separation.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Just four months after Dahl's death, Shelby married his last wife, Cleo (nee Rendell-Roberts), a British former model who drove rally cars. She was 25 years his junior. They were in the process of divorce when he died in 2012.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby died on May 10, 2012, at the age of 89. He had been suffering from a serious heart ailment for decades.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: <nowiki>*</nowiki> After retiring his original car, entered by Scuderia Centro Sud, Shelby took over Masten Gregory's car, entered by Temple Buell, and finished fourth. No points were awarded for the shared drive.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby is portrayed by Matt Damon in "Ford v. Ferrari", a film about the 1960s rivalry between Ford and Ferrari at the Le Mans auto race and Shelby's friendship with legendary race car driver Ken Miles. It was produced by 20th Century Fox, directed by James Mangold. The film began shooting in the summer of 2018 and was released in theaters on November 15, 2019. The film premiered on September 10, 2019 at the Toronto International Film Festival.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: "Shelby American: The Carroll Shelby Story" is a 2019 feature-length documentary about Shelby's life and career.


title: Carroll Shelby

text: Shelby features prominently in Bill Cosby's comedic story "200 M.P.H." (1968). Shelby (voiced by Cosby) convinces Cosby that, since he was an American, he should drive an "American car" – specifically, a custom-made Shelby "Cobra" that was guaranteed to go 200 M.P.H., faster than any foreign sportscar. The story takes up the entire second side of Cosby's seventh album, "200 M.P.H."


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Carthage () was a settlement in what is now known as modern Tunisia that later became a city-state and then an empire. Founded by the Phoenicians in the ninth century BC, Carthage reached its height in the fourth century BC as one of the largest metropolises in the world and the centre of the Carthaginian Empire, a major power in the ancient world that dominated the western Mediterranean. Following the Punic Wars, Carthage was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC, who later rebuilt the city lavishly.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Carthage was settled around 814 BC by colonists from Tyre, a leading Phoenician city-state located in present-day Lebanon. In the seventh century BC, following Phoenicia's conquest by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Carthage became independent, gradually expanding its economic and political hegemony across the western Mediterranean. By 300 BC, through its vast patchwork of colonies, vassals, and satellite states, Carthage controlled the largest territory in the region, including the coast of northwest Africa, southern Iberia (Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar) and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, and the Balearic archipelago.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Among the ancient world's largest and richest cities, Carthage's strategic location provided access to abundant fertile land and major maritime trade routes. Its extensive mercantile network reached as far as west Asia, west Africa and northern Europe, providing an array of commodities from all over the ancient world, in addition to lucrative exports of agricultural products and manufactured goods. This commercial empire was secured by one of the largest and most powerful navies in the ancient Mediterranean, and an army composed heavily of foreign mercenaries and auxiliaries, particularly Iberians, Balearics, Gauls, Britons, Sicilians, Italians, Greeks, Numidians and Libyans.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: As the dominant power of the western Mediterranean, Carthage inevitably came into conflict with many neighbours and rivals, from the indigenous Berbers of North Africa to the nascent Roman Republic. Following centuries of conflict with the Sicilian Greeks, its growing competition with Rome culminated in the Punic Wars (264–146 BC), which saw some of the largest and most sophisticated battles in antiquity. Carthage narrowly avoided destruction after the Second Punic War, and was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC after the third and final Punic War. The Romans later founded a new city in its place. All remnants of Carthaginian civilization came under Roman rule by the first century AD, and Rome subsequently became the dominant Mediterranean power, paving the way for its rise as a major empire.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: In spite of the cosmopolitan character of its empire, Carthage's culture and identity remained rooted in its Phoenician-Canaanite heritage, albeit a localised variety known as Punic. Like other Phoenician people, its society was urban, commercial, and oriented towards seafaring and trade; this is reflected in part by its more famous innovations, including serial production, uncolored glass, the threshing board, and the "cothon" harbor. Carthaginians were renowned for their commercial prowess, ambitious explorations, and unique system of government, which combined elements of democracy, oligarchy, and republicanism, including modern examples of checks and balances.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Despite having been one of the most influential civilizations of antiquity, Carthage is mostly remembered for its long and bitter conflict with Rome, which threatened the rise of the Roman Republic and almost changed the course of Western civilization. Due to the destruction of virtually all Carthaginian texts after the Third Punic War, much of what is known about its civilization comes from Roman and Greek sources, many of whom wrote during or after the Punic Wars, and to varying degrees were shaped by the hostilities. Popular and scholarly attitudes towards Carthage historically reflected the prevailing Greco-Roman view, though archaeological research since the late 19th century has helped shed more light and nuance on Carthaginian civilization.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: The name "Carthage" is the Early Modern anglicisation of Middle French , from Latin and (cf. Greek () and Etruscan "*Carθaza") from the Punic ().


title: Ancient Carthage

text: "Punic", which is sometimes used synonymously with Carthaginian, derives from the Latin and , based on the Ancient Greek word (), (), an exonym used to describe the Canaanite port towns with which the Greeks traded. Latin later borrowed the Greek term a second time as , . Both Punic and Phoenician were used by the Romans and Greeks to refer to Phoenicians across the Mediterranean; modern scholars use the term Punic exclusively for Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean, such as the Carthaginians. Specific Punic groups are often referred to with hyphenated terms, like "Siculo-Punic" for Phoenicians in Sicily or "Sardo-Punic" for those in Sardinia. Ancient Greek authors sometimes referred to the mixed Punic inhabitants of North Africa ('Libya') as 'Liby-Phoenicians'.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: It is unclear what term, if any, the Carthaginians used to refer to themselves. The Phoenician homeland in the Levant was natively known as () and its people as the (). Ancient Egyptian accounts suggest the people from the region identified as "Kenaani" or "Kinaani", equivalent to Canaanite. A passage from Augustine has often been interpreted as indicating that the Punic-speakers in North Africa called themselves "Chanani" (Canaanites), but it has recently been argued that this is a misreading. Numismatic evidence from Sicily shows that some western Phoenicians made use of the term "Phoinix."


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Compared to contemporaneous civilizations such as Rome and Greece, far less is known about Carthage, as most indigenous records were lost in the wholesale destruction of the city after the Third Punic War. Sources of knowledge are limited to ancient translations of Punic texts into Greek and Latin, Punic inscriptions on monuments and buildings, and archaeological findings of Carthage's material culture. The majority of available primary sources about Carthage were written by Greek and Roman historians, most notably Livy, Polybius, Appian, Cornelius Nepos, Silius Italicus, Plutarch, Dio Cassius, and Herodotus. These authors came from cultures that were nearly always in competition with Carthage; the Greeks with respect to Sicily, and the Romans over dominance of the western Mediterranean. Inevitably, foreign accounts of Carthage usually reflect significant bias, especially those written during or after the Punic Wars, when the "interpretatio Romana" perpetuated a "malicious and distorted view". Excavations of ancient Carthaginian sites since the late 19th century has brought to light more material evidence that either contradict or confirm aspects of the traditional picture of Carthage; however, many of these findings remain ambiguous.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: The specific date, circumstances, and motivations concerning Carthage's founding are unknown. All surviving accounts of the city's origins come from Latin and Greek literature, which are generally legendary in nature but may have some basis in fact.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: The standard foundation myth across all sources is that the city was founded by colonists from the ancient Phoenician city-state of Tyre, led by its exiled princess Dido (also known as Queen Elissa or Alissar). Dido's brother, Pygmalion (Phoenician: Pummayaton) had murdered her husband, the high priest of the city, and taken power as a tyrant. Dido and her allies escaped his reign and established Carthage, which became a prosperous city under her rule as queen.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: The Roman historian Justin, writing in the second century AD, provides an account of the city's founding based on the earlier work of Trogus. Princess Dido is the daughter of King Belus II of Tyre, who upon his death bequeaths the throne jointly to her and her brother Pygmalion. After cheating his sister out of her share of political power, Pygmalion murders her husband Acerbas (Phoenician: Zakarbaal), also known as Sychaeus, the High Priest of Melqart, whose wealth and power he covets. Before her tyrannical brother can take her late husband's wealth, Dido immediately flees with her followers to establish a new city abroad.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Upon landing in North Africa, she is greeted by the local Berber chieftain, Iarbas (also called Hiarbas) who promises to cede as much land as could be covered by a single ox hide. With her characteristic cleverness, Dido cuts the hide into very thin strips and lays them end to end until they encircle the entire hill of Byrsa. While digging to set the foundation of their new settlement, the Tyrians discover the head of an ox, an omen that the city would be wealthy "but laborious and always enslaved". In response they move the site of the city elsewhere, where the head of a horse is found, which in Phoenician culture is a symbol of courage and conquest. The horse foretells where Dido's new city will rise, becoming the emblem of Carthage, derived from the Phoenician "Qart-Hadasht", meaning "New City". The city's wealth and prosperity attracts both Phoenicians from nearby Utica and the indigenous Libyans, whose king Iarbas now seeks Dido's hand in marriage. Threatened with war should she refuse, and also loyal to the memory of her deceased husband, the queen orders a funeral pyre to be built, where she commits suicide by stabbing herself with a sword. She is thereafter worshiped as a goddess by the people of Carthage, who are described as brave in battle but prone to the "cruel religious ceremony" of human sacrifice, even of children, whenever they seek divine relief from troubles of any kind.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Virgil's epic poem the "Aeneid"—written over a century after the Third Punic War—tells the mythical story of the Trojan hero Aeneas and his journey towards founding Rome, inextricably tying together the founding myths, and ultimate fates, of both Rome and Carthage. Its introduction begins by mentioning "an ancient city" that many readers likely assumed was Rome or Troy, but goes on to describe it as a place "held by colonists from Tyre, opposite Italy . .. a city of great wealth and ruthless in the pursuit of war. Its name was Carthage, and Juno is said to have loved it more than any other place ... But she had heard that there was rising from the blood of Troy a race of men who in days to come would overthrow this Tyrian citadel ... [and] sack the land of Libya."


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Virgil describes Queen Elissa—for whom he uses the ancient Greek name, Dido, meaning "beloved"—as an esteemed, clever, but ultimately tragic character. As in other legends, the impetus for her escape is her tyrannical brother Pygmalion, whose secret murder of her husband is revealed to her in a dream. Cleverly exploiting her brother's greed, Dido tricks Pygmalion into supporting her journey to find and bring back riches for him. Through this ruse she sets sail with gold and allies secretly in search of a new home.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: As in Justin's account, upon landing in North Africa, Dido is greeted by Iarbas, and after he offers as much land as could be covered by a single ox hide, she cuts the hide into very thin strips and encircles all of Byrsa. While digging to set the foundation of their new settlement, the Tyrians discover the head of a horse, which in Phoenician culture is a symbol of courage and conquest. The horse foretells where Dido's new city will rise, becoming the emblem of the "New City" Carthage. In just seven years since their exodus from Tyre, the Carthaginians build a successful kingdom under Dido's rule. She is adored by her subjects and presented with a festival of praise. Virgil portrays her character as even more noble when she offers asylum to Aeneas and his men, who had recently escaped from Troy. The two fall in love during a hunting expedition, and Dido comes to believe they will marry. Jupiter sends a spirit in the form of the messenger god, Mercury, to remind Aeneas that his mission is not to stay in Carthage with his new-found love Dido, but to sail to Italy to found Rome. The Trojan departs, leaving Dido so heartbroken that she commits suicide by stabbing herself upon a funeral pyre with his sword. As she lies dying, she predicts eternal strife between Aeneas' people and her own, proclaiming "rise up from my bones, avenging spirit" in an invocation of Hannibal. Aeneas sees the smoke from the pyre as he sails away, and though he does not know the fate of Dido, he identifies it as a bad omen. Ultimately, his descendants go on to found the Roman Kingdom, the predecessor of the Roman Empire.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Like Justin, Virgil's story essentially conveys Rome's attitude towards Carthage, as exemplified by Cato the Elder's famous utterance, ""Carthago delenda est""—"Carthage must be destroyed". In essence, Rome and Carthage were fated for conflict: Aeneas chose Rome over Dido, eliciting her dying curse upon his Roman descendants, and thus providing a mythical, fatalistic backdrop for a century of bitter conflict between Rome and Carthage.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: These stories typify the Roman attitude towards Carthage: a level of grudging respect and acknowledgement of their bravery, prosperity, and even their city's seniority to Rome, along with derision of their cruelty, deviousness, and decadence, as exemplified by their practice of human sacrifice.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: To facilitate their commercial ventures, the Phoenicians established numerous colonies and trading posts along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Organized in fiercely independent city-states, the Phoenicians lacked the numbers or even the desire to expand overseas; most colonies had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, and only a few, including Carthage, would grow larger. Motives for colonization were usually practical, such as seeking safe harbors for their merchant fleets, maintaining a monopoly on an area's natural resources, satisfying the demand for trade goods, and finding areas where they could trade freely without outside interference. Over time many Phoenicians also sought to escape their tributary obligations to foreign powers that had subjugated the Phoenician homeland. Another motivating factor was competition with the Greeks, who became a nascent maritime power and began establishing colonies across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: The first Phoenician colonies in the western Mediterranean grew up on the two paths to Iberia's mineral wealth: along the northwest African coast and on Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands. As the largest and wealthiest city-state among the Phoenicians, Tyre led the way in settling or controlling coastal areas. Strabo claims that the Tyrians alone founded three hundred colonies on the west African coast; though clearly an exaggeration, many colonies did arise in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Iberia, and to a much lesser extent, on the arid coast of Libya. They were usually established as trading stations at intervals of about 30 to 50 kilometres along the African coast.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: By the time they gained a foothold in Africa, the Phoenicians were already present in Cyprus, Crete, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and Sicily, as well as on the European mainland, in what are today Genoa and Marseilles. Foreshadowing the later Sicilian Wars, settlements in Crete and Sicily continually clashed with the Greeks, and Phoenician control over all of Sicily was brief. Nearly all these areas would come under the leadership and protection of Carthage, which eventually founded cities of its own, especially after the decline of Tyre and Sidon.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: The site of Carthage was likely chosen by the Tyrians for several reasons. It was located in the central shore of the Gulf of Tunis, which gave it access to the Mediterranean sea while shielding it from the region's infamously violent storms. It was also close to the strategically vital Strait of Sicily, a key bottleneck for maritime trade between the east and west. The terrain proved as invaluable as the geography. The city was built on a hilly, triangular peninsula backed by the Lake of Tunis, which provided abundant supplies of fish and a place for safe harbor. The peninsula was connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land, which combined with the rough surrounding terrain, made the city easily defensible; a citadel was built on Byrsa, a low hill overlooking the sea. Finally, Carthage would be conduit of two major trade routes: one between the Tyrian colony of Cadiz in southern Spain, which supplied raw materials for manufacturing in Tyre, and the other between North Africa and the northern Mediterranean, namely Sicily, Italy, and Greece.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: In contrast to most Phoenician colonies, Carthage grew larger and more quickly thanks to its combination of favorable climate, arable land, and lucrative trade routes. Within just one century of its founding, its population rose to 30,000. Meanwhile, its mother city, which for centuries was the preeminent economic and political center of Phoenician civilization, saw its status begin to wane in the seventh century BC, following a succession of sieges by the Babylonians. By this time, its Carthaginian colony had become immensely wealthy from its strategic location and extensive trade network. Unlike many other Phoenician city-states and dependencies, Carthage grew prosperous not only from maritime commerce but from its proximity to fertile agricultural land and rich mineral deposits. As the main hub for trade between Africa and the rest of the ancient world, it also provided a myriad of rare and luxurious goods, including terracotta figurines and masks, jewelry, delicately carved ivories, ostrich eggs, and a variety of foods and wine.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Carthage's growing economic prominence coincided with a nascent national identity. Although Carthaginians remained staunchly Phoenician in their customs and faith, by at least the seventh century BC, they had developed a distinct Punic culture infused with local influences. Certain deities became more prominent in the Carthaginian pantheon than in Phoenicia; into the fifth century BC, the Carthaginians were worshiping Greek deities such as Demeter. Carthage may have also retained religious practices that had long fallen out of favor in Tyre, such as child sacrifice. Similarly, it spoke its own Punic dialect of Phoenician, which also reflected contributions by neighboring peoples.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: These trends most likely precipitated the colony's emergence as an independent polity. Though the specific date and circumstances are unknown, Carthage most likely became independent around 650 BC, when it embarked on its own colonization efforts across the western Mediterranean. It nonetheless maintained amicable cultural, political, and commercial ties with its founding city and the Phoenician homeland; it continued to receive migrants from Tyre, and for a time continued the practice of sending annual tribute to Tyre's temple of Melqart, albeit at irregular intervals.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: By the sixth century BC, Tyre's power declined further still after its voluntary submission to the Persian king Cambyses ( BC), which resulted in the incorporation of the Phoenician homeland into the Persian empire. Lacking sufficient naval strength, Cambyses sought Tyrian assistance for his planned conquest of Carthage, which may indicate that the former Tyrian colony had become wealthy enough to warrant a long and difficult expedition. Herodotus claims that the Tyrians refused to cooperate due to their affinity for Carthage, causing the Persian king to abort his campaign. Though it escaped reprisal, Tyre's status as Phoenicia's leading city was significantly circumscribed; its rival, Sidon, subsequently garnered more support from the Persians. However, it too remained subjugated, leading the way for Carthage to fill the vacuum as the leading Phoenician political power.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Although the Carthaginians retained the traditional Phoenician affinity for maritime trade and commerce, they were distinguished by their imperial and military ambitions: whereas the Phoenician city-states rarely engaged in territorial conquest, Carthage became an expansionist power, driven by its desire to access new sources of wealth and trade. It is unknown what factors influenced the citizens of Carthage, unlike those of other Phoenician colonies, to create an economic and political hegemony; the nearby city of Utica was far older and enjoyed the same geographical and political advantages, but never embarked on hegemonic conquest, instead coming under Carthaginian influence. One theory is that Babylonian and Persian domination of the Phoenician homeland produced refugees that swelled Carthage's population and transferred the culture, wealth, and traditions of Tyre to Carthage. The threat to the Phoenician trade monopoly—by Etruscan and Greek competition in the west, and through foreign subjugation of its homeland in the east—also created the conditions for Carthage to consolidate its power and further its commercial interests.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Another contributing factor may have been domestic politics: while little is known of Carthage's government and leadership prior to the third century BC, the reign of Mago I ( 550–530), and the political dominance of the Magonid family in subsequent decades, precipitated Carthage's rise as a dominant power. Justin states that Mago, who was also general of the army, was the first Carthaginian leader to "[set] in order the military system", which may have entailed the introduction of new military strategies and technologies. He is also credited with initiating, or at least expanding, the practice of recruiting subject peoples and mercenaries, as Carthage's population was too small to secure and defend its scattered colonies. Libyans, Iberians, Sardinians, and Corsicans were soon enlisted for the Magonid expansionist campaigns across the region.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: By the beginning of the fourth century BC, the Carthaginians had become the "superior power" of the western Mediterranean, and would remain so for roughly the next three centuries. Carthage took control of all nearby Phoenician colonies, including Hadrumetum, Utica, Hippo Diarrhytus and Kerkouane; subjugated many neighboring Libyan tribes, and occupied coastal North Africa from Morocco to western Libya. It held Sardinia, Malta, the Balearic Islands, and the western half of Sicily, where coastal fortresses such as Motya and Lilybaeum secured their possessions. The Iberian Peninsula, which was rich in precious metals, saw some of the largest and most important Carthaginian settlements outside North Africa, though the degree of political influence before the conquest by [[Hamilcar Barca]] (237–228 BC) is disputed. Carthage's growing wealth and power, along with the foreign subjugation of the Phoenician homeland, led to its supplanting of Sidon as the supreme Phoenician city state.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Carthage's empire was largely informal and multifaceted, consisting of varying levels of control exercised in equally variable ways. It established new colonies, repopulated and reinforced older ones, formed defensive pacts with other Phoenician city states, and acquired territories directly by conquest. While some Phoenician colonies willingly submitted to Carthage, paying tribute and giving up their foreign policy, others in Iberia and Sardinia resisted Carthaginian efforts. Whereas other Phoenician cities never exercised actual control of the colonies, the Carthaginians appointed magistrates to directly control their own (a policy that would lead to a number of Iberian towns siding with the Romans during the Punic Wars). In many other instances, Carthage's hegemony was established through treaties, alliances, tributary obligations, and other such arrangements. It had elements of the Delian League led by Athens (allies shared funding and manpower for defense), the Spartan Kingdom (subject peoples serving as serfs for the Punic elite and state) and, to a lesser extent, the Roman Republic (allies contributing manpower and tribute for Rome's war machine).


title: Ancient Carthage

text: In 509 BC, Carthage and Rome signed the first of several treaties demarcating their respective influence and commercial activities. This is the first textual source demonstrating Carthaginian control over Sicily and Sardinia. The treaty also conveys the extent to which Carthage was, at the very least, on equal terms with Rome, whose influence was limited to parts of central and southern Italy. Carthaginian dominance of the sea reflected not only its Phoenician heritage, but an approach to empire-building that differed greatly from Rome. Carthage emphasized maritime trade over territorial expansion, and accordingly focused its settlements and influence on coastal areas while investing more on its navy. For similar reasons, its ambitions were more commercial than imperial, which is why its empire took the form of a hegemony based on treaties and political arrangements more than conquest. By contrast, the Romans focused on expanding and consolidating their control over the rest of mainland Italy, and would aim to extend its control well beyond its homeland. These differences would prove key in the conduct and trajectory of the later Punic Wars.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: By the third century BC, Carthage was the center of a sprawling network of colonies and client states. It controlled more territory than the Roman Republic, and became one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the Mediterranean, with a quarter of a million inhabitants.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Carthage did not focus on growing and conquering land, instead, it was found that Carthage was focused on growing trade and protecting trade routes. The trades through Libya were territories and Carthage paid Libyans for access to this land in Cape Bon for agricultural purposes until about 550 BC. In around 508 BC Carthage and Rome signed a treaty to keep their commercial planes separate from each other. Carthage focused on growing their population by taking in Phoenicians colonies and soon began controlling Libyan, African, and Roman colonies. Many Phoenician cities also had to pay or support the Carthaginian troops. Punic troops would defend cities and these cities had few rights.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Unlike the existential conflict of the later Punic Wars with Rome, the conflict between Carthage and the Greeks centered on economic concerns, as each side sought to advance their own commercial interests and influence by controlling key trade routes. For centuries, the Phoenician and Greek city-states had embarked on maritime trade and colonization across the Mediterranean. While the Phoenicians were initially dominant, Greek competition increasingly undermined their monopoly. Both sides had begun establishing colonies, trading posts, and commercial relations in the western Mediterranean roughly contemporaneously, between the ninth and eighth centuries. Phoenician and Greek settlements, the increased presence of both peoples led to mounting tensions and ultimately open conflict, especially in Sicily.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: Carthage's economic successes, buoyed by its vast maritime trade network, led to the development of a powerful navy to protect and secure vital shipping lanes. Its hegemony brought it into increasing conflict with the Greeks of Syracuse, who also sought control of the central Mediterranean. Founded in the mid seventh century BC, Syracuse had risen to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful Greek city states, and the preeminent Greek polity in the region.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: The island of Sicily, lying at Carthage's doorstep, became the main arena on which this conflict played out. From their earliest days, both the Greeks and Phoenicians had been attracted to the large, centrally-located island, each establishing a large number of colonies and trading posts along its coasts; battles raged between these settlements for centuries, with neither side ever having total, long-term control over the island.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: In 480 BC, Gelo, the tyrant of Syracuse, attempted to unite the island under his rule with the backing of other Greek city-states. Threatened by the potential power of a united Sicily, Carthage intervened militarily, led by King Hamilcar of the Magonid dynasty. Traditional accounts, including by Herodotus and Diodorus, number Hamilcar's army at around 300,000; though likely exaggerated, it was likely of formidable strength.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: While sailing to Sicily, Hamilcar suffered losses due to poor weather. Landing at Panormus (modern-day Palermo), he spent three days reorganizing his forces and repairing his battered fleet. The Carthaginians marched along the coast to Himera, making camp before engaging in battle against the forces of Syracuse and its ally Agrigentum. The Greeks won a decisive victory, inflicting heavy losses on the Carthaginians, including their leader Hamilcar, who was either killed during the battle or committed suicide in shame. As a result, the Carthaginian nobility sued for peace.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: The conflict proved to be a major turning point for Carthage. Though it would retain some presence in Sicily, most of the island would remain in Greek (and later Roman) hands. The Carthaginians would never again expand their territory or sphere of influence on the island to any meaningful degree, instead turning their attention to securing or increasing their hold in North Africa and Iberia. The death of King Hamilcar and the disastrous conduct of the war also prompted political reforms that established an oligarchic republic. Carthage would henceforth constrain its rulers through assemblies of both nobles and the common people.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: By 410 BC, Carthage had recovered from its serious defeats in Sicily. It had conquered much of modern-day Tunisia and founded new colonies across northern Africa. It also extended its reach well beyond the Mediterranean; Hanno the Navigator journeyed down the West African coast, and Himilco the Navigator had explored the European Atlantic coast. Expeditions were also led into Morocco and Senegal, as well as the Atlantic. The same year, the Iberian colonies seceded, cutting off Carthage from a major source of silver and copper. The loss of such strategically important mineral wealth, combined with the desire to exercise firmer control over shipping routes, led Hannibal Mago, grandson of Hamilcar, to make preparations to reclaim Sicily.


title: Ancient Carthage

text: In 409 BC, Hannibal Mago set out for Sicily with his force. He captured the smaller cities of Selinus (modern Selinunte) and Himera—where the Carthaginians had been dealt a humiliating defeat seventy years prior—before returning triumphantly to Carthage with the spoils of war. But the primary enemy, Syracuse, remained untouched and in 405 BC, Hannibal Mago led a second Carthaginian expedition to claim the rest of the island.