title: Stephen, King of England

text: After Stephen's death, Henry II succeeded to the throne of England. Henry vigorously re-established royal authority in the aftermath of the civil war, dismantling castles and increasing revenues, although several of these trends had begun under Stephen. The destruction of castles under Henry was not as dramatic as once thought, and although he restored royal revenues, the economy of England remained broadly unchanged under both rulers. Stephen's son William was confirmed as the Earl of Surrey by Henry, and prospered under the new regime, with the occasional point of tension with Henry. Stephen's daughter Marie I, Countess of Boulogne, also survived her father; she had been placed in a convent by Stephen, but after his death she left and married. Stephen's middle son, Baldwin, and second daughter, Matilda, had died before 1147 and were buried at Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate. Stephen probably had three illegitimate sons, Gervase, Abbot of Westminster, Ralph and Americ, by his mistress Damette; Gervase became abbot in 1138, but after his father's death he was removed by Henry in 1157 and died shortly afterwards.


title: Stephen, King of England

text: Much of the modern history of Stephen's reign is based on accounts of chroniclers who lived in, or close to, the middle of the 12th century, forming a relatively rich account of the period. All of the main chronicler accounts carry significant regional biases in how they portray the disparate events. Several of the key chronicles were written in the south-west of England, including the "Gesta Stephani", or "Acts of Stephen", and William of Malmesbury's "Historia Novella", or "New History". In Normandy, Orderic Vitalis wrote his "Ecclesiastical History", covering Stephen's reign until 1141, and Robert of Torigni wrote a later history of the rest of the period. Henry of Huntingdon, who lived in the east of England, produced the "Historia Anglorum" that provides a regional account of the reign. The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" was past its prime by the time of Stephen but is remembered for its striking account of conditions during "the Anarchy". Most of the chronicles carry some bias for or against Stephen, Robert of Gloucester or other key figures in the conflict. Those writing for the church after the events of Stephen's later reign, such as John of Salisbury for example, paint the King as a tyrant due to his argument with the Archbishop of Canterbury; by contrast, clerics in Durham regarded Stephen as a saviour, due to his contribution to the defeat of the Scots at the battle of the Standard. Later chronicles written during the reign of Henry II were generally more negative: Walter Map, for example, described Stephen as "a fine knight, but in other respects almost a fool". A number of charters were issued during Stephen's reign, often giving details of current events or daily routine, and these have become widely used as sources by modern historians.


title: Stephen, King of England

text: Historians in the "Whiggish" tradition that emerged during the Victorian era traced a progressive and universalist course of political and economic development in England over the medieval period. William Stubbs focused on these constitutional aspects of Stephen's reign in his 1874 volume the "Constitutional History of England", beginning an enduring interest in Stephen and his reign. Stubbs' analysis, focusing on the disorder of the period, influenced his student John Round to coin the term "the Anarchy" to describe the period, a label that, whilst sometimes critiqued, continues to be used today. The late-Victorian scholar Frederic William Maitland also introduced the possibility that Stephen's reign marked a turning point in English legal history—the so-called "tenurial crisis".


title: Stephen, King of England

text: Stephen remains a popular subject for historical study: David Crouch suggests that after King John he is "arguably the most written-about medieval king of England". Modern historians vary in their assessments of Stephen as a king. Historian R. H. C. Davis's influential biography paints a picture of a weak king: a capable military leader in the field, full of activity and pleasant, but "beneath the surface ... mistrustful and sly", with poor strategic judgement that ultimately undermined his reign. Stephen's lack of sound policy judgement and his mishandling of international affairs, leading to the loss of Normandy and his consequent inability to win the civil war in England, is also highlighted by another of his biographers, David Crouch. Historian and biographer Edmund King, whilst painting a slightly more positive picture than Davis, also concludes that Stephen, while a stoic, pious and genial leader, was also rarely, if ever, his own man, usually relying upon stronger characters such as his brother or wife. Historian Keith Stringer provides a more positive portrayal of Stephen, arguing that his ultimate failure as king was the result of external pressures on the Norman state, rather than the result of personal failings.


title: Stephen, King of England

text: Stephen and his reign have been occasionally used in historical fiction. Stephen and his supporters appear in Ellis Peters' historical detective series "The Cadfael Chronicles", set between 1137 and 1145. Peters' depiction of Stephen's reign is an essentially local narrative, focused on the town of Shrewsbury and its environs. Peters paints Stephen as a tolerant man and a reasonable ruler, despite his execution of the Shrewsbury defenders after the taking of the city in 1138. In contrast, he is depicted unsympathetically in both Ken Follett's historical novel "The Pillars of the Earth" and the TV mini-series adapted from it.


title: Western Europe

text: Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's countries and territories vary depending on context.


title: Western Europe

text: The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the ancient Mediterranean world, the Roman Empire (Western Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire), and medieval "Christendom" (Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity). Beginning with the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, roughly from the 15th century, the concept of "Europe" as "the West" slowly became distinguished from and eventually replaced the dominant use of "Christendom" as the preferred endonym within the region. By the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the concepts of "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe" were more regularly used.


title: Western Europe

text: Prior to the Roman conquest, a large part of Western Europe had adopted the newly developed La Tène culture. As the Roman domain expanded, a cultural and linguistic division appeared between the mainly Greek-speaking eastern provinces, which had formed the highly urbanized Hellenistic civilization, and the western territories, which in contrast largely adopted the Latin language. This cultural and linguistic division was eventually reinforced by the later political east–west division of the Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire controlled the two divergent regions between the 3rd and the 5th centuries.


title: Western Europe

text: The division between these two was enhanced during Late antiquity and the Middle Ages by a number of events. The Western Roman Empire collapsed, starting the Early Middle Ages. By contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire, mostly known as the Greek or Byzantine Empire, survived and even thrived for another 1000 years. The rise of the Carolingian Empire in the west, and in particular the Great Schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, enhanced the cultural and religious distinctiveness between Eastern and Western Europe.


title: Western Europe

text: After the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, center of the Eastern Orthodox Church, by the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, and the gradual fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire (which had replaced the Carolingian Empire), the division between Roman Catholic and Protestant became more important in Europe than that with Eastern Orthodoxy.


title: Western Europe

text: In East Asia, Western Europe was historically known as in China and in Japan, which literally translates as the "Far West". The term Far West became synonymous with Western Europe in China during the Ming dynasty. The Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci was one of the first writers in China to use the Far West as an Asian counterpart to the European concept of the Far East. In Ricci's writings, Ricci referred to himself as "Matteo of the Far West". The term was still in use in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.


title: Western Europe

text: Christianity is the largest religion in Western Europe. According to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, 71.0% of Western Europeans identified as Christians.


title: Western Europe

text: In 1054, the East–West Schism divided Christianity into Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity. This split Europe in two, with Western Europe primarily under the Catholic Church, and Eastern Europe under the Eastern Orthodox Church. Ever since the Reformation in the 16th century, the primary Christian denominations in Western Europe have been Catholicism and Protestantism.


title: Western Europe

text: Under this definition of Eastern and Western Europe, Eastern Europe contains Southeastern European countries as well, while Western Europe includes Northern and Central European countries.


title: Western Europe

text: During the four decades of the Cold War, the definition of East and West was rather simplified by the existence of the Eastern Bloc. Historians and social scientists generally view the Cold War definition of Western and Eastern Europe as outdated or relegating.


title: Western Europe

text: During the final stages of World War II, the future of Europe was decided between the Allies in the 1945 Yalta Conference, between the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin.


title: Western Europe

text: Post-war Europe would be divided into two major spheres: the Western Bloc, influenced by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc, influenced by the Soviet Union. With the onset of the Cold War, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain. This term had been used during World War II by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and, later, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk in the last days of the war; however, its use was hugely popularized by Winston Churchill, who used it in his famous "Sinews of Peace" address on 5 March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri:


title: Western Europe

text: Although some countries were officially neutral, they were classified according to the nature of their political and economic systems. This division largely defines the popular perception and understanding of Western Europe and its borders with Eastern Europe.


title: Western Europe

text: The world changed dramatically with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. West Germany peacefully absorbed East Germany, in the German reunification. Comecon and the Warsaw Pact were dissolved, and in 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Several countries which had been part of the Soviet Union regained full independence.


title: Western Europe

text: In 1948 the Treaty of Brussels was signed between Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It was further revisited in 1954 at the Paris Conference, when the Western European Union was established. It was declared defunct in 2011 after the Treaty of Lisbon, and the Treaty of Brussels was terminated. When the Western European Union was dissolved, it had 10 member countries, six associate member countries, five observer countries and seven associate partner countries.


title: Western Europe

text: The United Nations geoscheme is a system devised by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) which divides the countries of the world into regional and subregional groups, based on the M49 coding classification. The partition is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories.


title: Western Europe

text: EuroVoc is a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union. In this thesaurus, the countries of Europe are grouped into sub-regions. The following countries are included in the sub-group Western Europe:


title: Western Europe

text: The Western European and Others Group is one of several unofficial Regional Groups in the United Nations that act as voting blocs and negotiation forums. Regional voting blocs were formed in 1961 to encourage voting to various UN bodies from different regional groups. The European members of the group are:


title: Western Europe

text: In addition, Australia, Canada, Israel and New Zealand are members of the group, with the United States as observer.


title: Western Europe

text: Using the CIA classification strictly would give the following calculation of Western Europe's population. All figures based on the projections for 2018 by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.


title: Western Europe

text: Using the CIA classification a little more liberally and including "South-Western Europe", would give the following calculation of Western Europe's population.


title: Western Europe

text: The climate of Western Europe varies from subtropical and semi-arid in the coasts of Italy, Portugal and Spain to alpine in the Pyrenees and the Alps. The Mediterranean climate of the south is dry and warm. The western and northwestern parts have a mild, generally humid climate, influenced by the North Atlantic Current. Western Europe is a heatwave hotspot, exhibiting upward trends that are three-to-four times faster compared to the rest of the northern midlatitudes.


title: Western Europe

text: Western European languages mostly fall within two Indo-European language families: the Romance languages, descended from the Latin of the Roman Empire; and the Germanic languages, whose ancestor language (Proto-Germanic) came from southern Scandinavia.


title: Western Europe

text: Romance languages are spoken primarily in the southern and central part of Western Europe, Germanic languages in the northern part (the British Isles and the Low Countries), as well as a large part of Northern and Central Europe.


title: Western Europe

text: Other Western European languages include the Celtic group (that is, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton) and Basque, the only currently living European language isolate.


title: Western Europe

text: Multilingualism and the protection of regional and minority languages are recognized political goals in Western Europe today. The Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the Council of Europe's European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages set up a legal framework for language rights in Europe.


title: Western Europe

text: Western Europe is one of the richest regions of the world. Germany has the highest gross domestic product in Europe and the largest financial surplus of any country, Luxembourg has the world's highest GDP per capita, and Germany has the highest net national wealth of any European state.


title: Western Europe

text: Switzerland and Luxembourg have the highest average wage in the world, in nominal and PPP, respectively. Norway ranks highest in the world on the Social Progress Index.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: Girl with a Pearl Earring () is an oil painting by Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, dated 1665. Going by various names over the centuries, it became known by its present title towards the end of the 20th century after the earring worn by the girl portrayed there. The work has been in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902 and has been the subject of various literary and cinematic treatments.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: The painting is a tronie, the Dutch 17th-century description of a 'head' that was not meant to be a portrait. It depicts a European girl wearing "exotic dress", an "oriental turban", and what appears to be a very large pearl as an earring. In 2014, Dutch astrophysicist raised doubts about the material of the earring and argued that it looks more like polished tin than pearl on the grounds of the specular reflection, the pear shape and the large size of the earring.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: The work is oil on canvas and is high and wide. It is signed "IVMeer" but not dated. It is estimated to have been painted around 1665.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: After the most recent restoration of the painting in 1994, the subtle colour scheme and the intimacy of the girl's gaze toward the viewer have been greatly enhanced. During the restoration, it was discovered that the dark background, today somewhat mottled, was originally a deep enamel-like green. This effect was produced by applying a thin transparent layer of paint—a glaze—over the black background seen now. However, the two organic pigments of the green glaze, indigo and weld, have faded.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: On the advice of Victor de Stuers, who for years tried to prevent Vermeer's rare works from being sold to parties abroad, Arnoldus Andries des Tombe purchased the work at an auction in The Hague in 1881, for only two guilders plus thirty cents buyer's premium (around €24 at current purchasing power). At the time, it was in poor condition. Des Tombe had no heirs and donated this and other paintings to the Mauritshuis in 1902.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: The painting was exhibited as part of a Vermeer show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1965 and 1966, and in another Vermeer exhibition in 1995-96. In 2012, as part of a travelling exhibition while the Mauritshuis was being renovated and expanded, the painting was exhibited in Japan at the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, and in 2013–2014 in the United States, where it was shown at the High Museum in Atlanta, the de Young Museum in San Francisco and in New York City at the Frick Collection. Later in 2014 it was exhibited in Bologna, Italy. In June 2014, it returned to the Mauritshuis museum which stated that the painting would not leave the museum in the future.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: As a result of its promotion, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" has become one of the world's most recognizable paintings and has been compared to the "Mona Lisa". In 2006, the Dutch public selected it as the most beautiful painting in the Netherlands.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: The painting was investigated by the scientists of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage and FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) Amsterdam.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: The ground is dense and yellowish in colour and is composed of chalk, lead white, ochre and very little black. The dark background of the painting contains bone black, weld (luteolin, reseda luteola), chalk, small amounts of red ochre, and indigo. The face and draperies were painted mainly using ochres, natural ultramarine, bone black, charcoal black and lead white.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: In February-March 2018 an international team of art experts spent two weeks studying the painting in a specially constructed glass workshop in the museum, open to observation by the public. The non-invasive research project included removing the work from its frame for study with microscopes, X-ray equipment and a special scanner to learn more about the methods and materials used by Vermeer. The project, with the name "The Girl in the Spotlight", was headed by Abbie Vandivere, conservator at the Mauritshuis, and results were published by the Mauritshuis. A blog by Vandivere reveals many details of the project.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: Results included the presence of delicate eyelashes, a green curtain behind the head, changes made, and details of the pigments used and where they came from. The lack of eyebrows and featureless background had led to speculation that Vermeer was painting an idealised or abstract face; the later discoveries showed that he was painting a real person in a real space. The pearl has been described as an illusion due to having "no contour and also no hook to hang it from the girl’s ear".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: The painting has gone under a number of titles in various countries over the centuries. Originally it may have been one of the two tronies "painted in the Turkish fashion" ("Twee tronijnen geschildert op sijn Turx") recorded in the inventory at the time of Vermeer’s death. It may later have been the work appearing in the catalogue to a 1696 sale of painting in Amsterdam, where it is described as a "Portrait in Antique Costume, uncommonly artistic" ("Een Tronie in Antique Klederen, ongemeen konstig").


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: After the bequest to the Mauritshuis, the painting became known as "Girl with a Turban" ("Meisje met tulband") and it was noted of its original description in the 1675 inventory that the turban had become a fashion accessory of some fascination during the period of European wars against the Turks. By 1995, the title "Girl with a Pearl" ("Meisje met de parel") was considered more appropriate. Pearls, in fact, figure in 21 of Vermeer's pictures, including very prominently in "Woman with a Pearl Necklace". Earrings alone are also featured in "A Lady Writing a Letter", "Study of a Young Woman", "Girl with a Red Hat", and "Girl with a Flute". Similarly shaped ear-pieces were used as convincing accessories in 20th-century fakes that were briefly attributed to Vermeer, such as "Young Woman with a Blue Hat", "Smiling Girl" and "The Lace Maker".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: Generally, the English title of the painting was simply "Head of a Young Girl", although it was sometimes known as "The Pearl". One critic explained that this name was given, not just from the detail of the earring, but because the figure glows with an inner radiance against the dark background.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: Some of the first literary treatments of the painting were in poems. For Yann Lovelock in his sestina, "Vermeer’s Head of a Girl", it is the occasion for exploring the interplay between imagined beauty interpreted on canvas and living experience. W. S. Di Piero reimagined how the "Girl with Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer" might look in the modern setting of Haight Street in San Francisco, while Marilyn Chandler McEntyre commented on the girl's private, self-possessed personality.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: There have also been three fictional appearances. As "La ragazza col turbante" (Girl with a Turban, 1986), it features as the general title of Marta Morazzoni’s collection of five short novellas set in the Baroque era. In the course of the title story, a Dutch art dealer sells Vermeer’s painting to an eccentric Dane in the year 1658. Indifferent to women in real life, the two men can only respond to the idealization of the feminine in art. In the following decade, Iain McClure's 1996 BBC radio play 'Paint Her Well', takes inspiration from Vermeer's painting (and his life) in its story of a king searching for a woman he has painted, having dreamt about her. The mysterious young woman, ethereally beautiful, her large pearl earring catching light from the left, is otherwise in darkness. Tracy Chevalier's 1999 historical novel "Girl with a Pearl Earring" fictionalized the circumstances of the painting's creation. There, Vermeer becomes close to a servant whom he uses as an assistant and has sit for him as a model while wearing his wife's earrings. The novel was adapted into a 2003 film of the same name and a 2008 play.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: The painting also appeared in the 2007 film "St Trinian's", where a group of unruly schoolgirls steal it to raise funds to save their school. At that period, too, fellow artists made iconic use of Vermeer's painting. Ethiopian American Awol Erizku recreated it as a print in 2009, centering a young black woman and replacing the pearl earring with bamboo earrings as a commentary on the lack of black figures in museums and galleries. His piece is titled "Girl with a Bamboo Earring". And in 2014 the English street artist Banksy reproduced the painting as a mural in Bristol, incorporating an alarm box in place of the pearl earring and calling the artwork "Girl with a Pierced Eardrum".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring

text: A climate protestor representing the Just Stop Oil campaign attempted to glue his head to the glass protecting the painting in October 2022, and was covered in tomato soup by another protestor. The protest did not damage the painting, and three people were arrested for public violence against goods.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten (February 28, 1960 – August 14, 1980), known professionally as Dorothy Stratten, was a Canadian Playboy Playmate and actress. Stratten was the "Playboy" Playmate of the Month for August 1979 and Playmate of the Year in 1980, and appeared in three comedy films and in at least two episodes of shows broadcast on American network television. She was murdered shortly after starring in the movie "Galaxina" at the age of 20 by her estranged husband and manager Paul Snider, who committed suicide on the same day.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Stratten's death inspired two motion pictures, the 1981 TV movie "" and the 1983 theatrical release "Star 80", as well as the book "The Killing of the Unicorn" and the songs "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, "The Best Was Yet to Come" by Bryan Adams, and "Cover Girl" by Prism.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Dorothy Stratten was born in Grace Maternity Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on February 28, 1960, to Simon and Nelly Hoogstraten, who had emigrated from the Netherlands. In 1961, her brother John Arthur was born; her sister Louise followed in May 1968.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In 1977, Stratten was attending Centennial High School in Coquitlam. Concurrently, she was working part-time at a local Dairy Queen, where she met 26-year-old Vancouver-area club promoter and pimp Paul Snider, who began dating her. Snider later had a photographer take professional nude photos of Stratten which were sent to "Playboy" magazine in the summer of 1978. She was under the age of 19 (the legal age of majority in British Columbia), so she had to persuade her mother to sign the model release form.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In August 1978, Stratten moved to Los Angeles, California, United States, where she was chosen as a finalist for the 25th Anniversary Great Playmate Hunt. Snider joined her in October, and they married in June the following year. With her surname shortened to Stratten, she became "Playboy's" Miss August 1979 and began working as a bunny at the Playboy Club in Century City, Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner had high hopes that Stratten could have meaningful crossover success as an actress. She featured in episodes of the television series "Buck Rogers" and "Fantasy Island" in 1979. Also that year, she had small roles in the films "Americathon", the roller disco comedy "Skatetown, U.S.A.", and a lead role in the exploitation film "Autumn Born", all released in 1979.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Hefner reportedly encouraged Stratten to sever ties with Snider, calling him a "hustler and a pimp." Rosanne Katon and other friends warned Stratten about Snider's behavior. Several contemporary playmates including Pamela Bryant, Gail Stanton and Marcy Hanson befriended Stratten and protected her from some of Hefner's friends, whom they considered to be sexual predators.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: On March 22, 1980, Stratten flew to New York City to begin work on what became her last film project, "They All Laughed" (1981), a romantic comedy being directed by Peter Bogdanovich. "Laughed" would be Stratten's fifth movie in a career that had only begun the year before and represented her first substantial role in a big-budget picture, playing the unhappily-married love interest of John Ritter, one of the film's stars. Bogdanovich, who also wrote the screenplay, said in an interview that he had based the backstory of Stratten's character on what he had learned about her marriage to Snider. Stratten and Bogdanovich began an affair during the production.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Stratten had spent the first two and a half months of 1980 completing her Playmate of the Year shoot and making her previous movie, "Galaxina", in southern California. With all her work close to home, Snider assumed the role of his wife's chauffeur, as well as her ersatz manager and acting coach. However, Snider's near-constant presence, as well as his criticism of and almost daily arguments with his wife, caused Stratten so much stress that her co-workers at "Playboy" and the "Galaxina" set took notice of the tension in the relationship. As the spring of 1980 approached, Snider insisted on accompanying his wife to New York for the shoot for "They All Laughed", but Stratten recognized the problems he could cause on set and wanted the freedom to pursue her relationship with Bogdanovich. Stratten convinced Snider to remain in Los Angeles after explaining that the director had decided to close the set of his new film to all but the cast and immediate crew. Stratten and Bogdanovich consummated their affair on the day after her arrival in New York.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In April, Stratten briefly returned to California to prepare for her upcoming introduction as the new Playmate of the Year and follow-on publicity tour. With several months of filming left to be completed in New York, this was the last time that she would live with Snider in their Los Angeles-area home.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: On Wednesday, April 30, at a luncheon held on the grounds of the Playboy Mansion, Stratten was presented to the assembled entertainment press as the 1980 Playmate of the Year. In his introductory remarks, Hefner noted that Stratten was from Canada and had received $200,000 in cash and gifts in addition to the title. In a fleeting comment, he also acknowledged the effect that Stratten's charming combination of beauty, intelligence, and sensitivity had on many who knew her when he said, "...and she is something rather special. They always are, but Dorothy is really quite unique." After taking the lectern, Stratten thanked Mario Casilli, the photographer who shot both her Playmate of the Month and Year pictorials, several Playboy executives, and finally Hefner, whom she declared "has made me probably the happiest girl in the world today." Later that evening, Stratten appeared as a guest on NBC's "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson".


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: The next day, Stratten began a two-week promotional tour in Canada. Having no events scheduled over the first weekend, she flew to New York on a whim to surprise Bogdanovich. Increasingly conflicted about her marriage, Stratten wrote to Snider from Canada asking for more freedom in their relationship. With his wife beyond his immediate control and fearing the worst, Snider telephoned from Los Angeles in response and flew into a rage when Stratten answered. Stratten's tour was arranged to end in her hometown of Vancouver so Stratten might relax for a few days with family before returning to New York. However, Snider appeared in Vancouver at the last minute and coerced her into spending some of her brief vacation making personal appearances at several local nightclubs. Since Snider knew many of the club owners, he personally negotiated and collected Stratten's appearance fees and then pocketed the entire sum when she returned to New York. During this time, it was reported that Stratten and Snider had a particularly heated argument. At some point during the fight, Stratten offered to give up her acting career and suggested the couple permanently return to Canada; however, Snider rebuffed his wife's attempt to save their marriage.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In the days and weeks after Snider returned to Los Angeles, he found it increasingly difficult to get in touch with Stratten. In late June, just a few weeks after their first wedding anniversary, Snider received another letter from Stratten, this one announcing that they were now physically and financially separated. Snider had several responses to the second letter; he emptied the couples' joint bank account, he had a brief affair with an old girlfriend, and, now convinced that Stratten was having an affair of her own with Bogdanovich, hired a private detective to gather evidence of his wife's infidelity.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: As a foreign national living in the U.S. without a green card that would allow him to hold a job and having no other source of regular income, Snider relied on Stratten, now through her business manager, to pay the monthly household bills. Little was left over for extravagances, such as the expenses incurred by a private detective working a case 3,000 miles from home. Therefore, over the summer of 1980, Snider began selling Stratten's Playmate of the Year prizes at a loss for quick cash, the most notable example being a Jaguar sportscar that "Playboy" had valued at $26,000.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: By mid-July, principal photography on "They All Laughed" was completed and the New York production wrapped. On Wednesday, July 30, Stratten and Bogdanovich returned to Los Angeles after having spent a ten-day holiday together in England. Stratten's official Los Angeles residence was now at the address of a newly rented Beverly Hills apartment, but in actuality she had quietly moved into Bogdanovich's mansion in Bel Air.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: On the night of July 31, 1980, Snider, by now aware that his estranged wife was back in Los Angeles and living with Bogdanovich, hid among the shadows just outside the director's estate carrying a borrowed handgun, intending to shoot anyone who appeared at the entrance to the property. After several hours of inactivity, Snider grew impatient and left, drove up into the hills overlooking the city and, he admitted later to a friend, had thoughts of suicide.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: At approximately noon on Friday, August 8, Stratten and Snider saw each other for the first time in nearly three months at Snider's (and Stratten's former) house in West Los Angeles. After having already persuaded Stratten to pose for "Playboy" and then marry him, Snider was supremely confident before the meeting that he would convince his wife to take him back. But his hopes of a reconciliation were quickly dashed when Stratten admitted that she had fallen in love with Bogdanovich and wanted to finalize their separation. A dejected Snider agreed to meet Stratten one more time the following week to discuss a monetary settlement. Later that afternoon, less than a week before Stratten's murder, Snider had to return the borrowed gun to its owner. Over the next five days, he would become obsessed with getting another.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: On August 9, the day after his meeting with Stratten, Snider and the private detective he had hired went to a local gun store. After being told that the store could not sell him a firearm because of his Canadian citizenship, Snider asked the private detective to buy the gun Snider wanted for him; the detective refused. When Snider saw the private detective again the following day, he tried to convince the man to buy him a machine gun for "home protection", but the detective talked him out of the idea. The next day, August 11, Snider drove out into the San Fernando Valley to look at a gun he had found for sale in a newspaper. He got lost, however, and eventually gave up and went home before finding the owner's address.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: On August 13, 1980 the second anniversary of Stratten's first arrival in Los Angeles Snider bought a used 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun from a private seller he found in a local classified ad. Later that evening in a conversation with friends, Snider described how he had purchased a gun that day and finished his story by cryptically declaring that he was "going to take up hunting." Snider casually brought up the subject of Playmates who had unexpectedly died; in particular, he spoke of Claudia Jennings, an actress and former Playmate of the Year who had been killed in a car accident the year before. Snider made several morbid remarks to his companions related to the problems at "Playboy" magazine caused by Jennings' death, including a comment about how the editors would pull nude photos of a dead Playmate from the next issue if there was time.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Stratten arrived for her meeting with Snider at his rented West Los Angeles house at approximately noon on Thursday, August 14. She had spent the morning conferring with her business manager, and one of the topics the pair discussed was the amount of the property settlement Stratten would offer her estranged husband that afternoon. The police later found $1,100 in cash among Stratten's belongings in the house, which she had apparently brought for Snider as a down payment. Towards the end of her morning meeting, Stratten's business manager made a fateful observation: that his young client could avoid spending any more time with Snider by handing off the remaining separation and divorce negotiations to her lawyer. Stratten replied that the process would go easier if she dealt with Snider personally, explaining that he was being nice about everything and finally adding, "I'd like to remain his friend."


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Snider's two roommates had left in the morning, so the couple was alone when Stratten stepped into the house that she had shared with her husband until just a few months earlier. By all appearances, Stratten had spent some time in the living room, where her purse was found lying open, before she and Snider went into his bedroom.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: By 8:00 that evening, both of the roommates had returned to the house. They saw Stratten's car parked out front and noted that Snider's bedroom door was closed. Assuming that the couple had reconciled and wanted their privacy, the roommates spent the next several hours watching television in the living room.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Alerted by Snider's private detective, the roommates entered the bedroom shortly after 11:00 P.M. and discovered the bodies of Stratten and Snider. Each had been killed by a single blast from Snider's shotgun. Both bodies were nude. According to the police timeline, Snider had shot Stratten that afternoon within an hour of her arrival at the house, then committed suicide approximately one hour after the murder.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Some time after midnight in the early morning of August 15, the private detective telephoned the Playboy Mansion and told Hefner that Stratten had been murdered. Hefner then called Bogdanovich. After collapsing at the news, Bogdanovich was sedated. Stratten's mother was told of her daughter's death at her Vancouver-area home later that morning by an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Stratten's body was cremated and the remains interred at the Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery in Los Angeles. The epitaph on Stratten's grave marker includes a passage, chosen by Bogdanovich, from Chapter 34 of the Ernest Hemingway novel "A Farewell to Arms". Three years after the murder, the author's granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway, played Stratten in "Star 80", the Bob Fosse biopic about the doomed Playmate and her husband.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In August 1981, a year after Stratten's death, her final film, the romantic comedy "They All Laughed", which was written and directed by Bogdanovich, had its U.S. release. After a disappointing limited run in a handful of theaters in the southwest, the upper midwest, and the northeast, the picture was quietly withdrawn.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Upset that what would be his only project with Stratten did not have a nationwide release, and determined that her last screen performance have a chance to be seen by a broader audience, Bogdanovich bought the theatrical rights to the picture. Out of his own pocket, he paid for a re-release of "They All Laughed" in nearly a dozen large markets across North America beginning in late 1981 and rolling into the following year. Despite generally favorable reviews and strong attendance in some theaters, Bogdanovich ultimately sank more than five million dollars, his entire net worth at the time, into the vanity project to properly promote and distribute the movie and rescue Stratten's film legacy.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Bogdanovich declared bankruptcy in 1985. In the process, he lost his Los Angeles home where Stratten had lived for the last few weeks of her life.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In the years since its inauspicious debut, "They All Laughed" has been recognized by filmmakers, critics, and others as being one of Bogdanovich's best pictures. "One Day Since Yesterday", a documentary about the making and cultural importance of Bogdanovich's romantic comedy, which includes interviews with the director and his remembrances of Stratten, premiered in 2014.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In August 1984, four years after Stratten's death, the publisher William Morrow released a book by Bogdanovich titled "The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980".


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: "The Killing of the Unicorn" is, by turns, a biography of Stratten, a memoir of Bogdanovich's affair with the married Playmate who was half his age, and a scathing, feminist attack on Hefner, his Playboy philosophy, and the hedonistic sexual mores he celebrated in his magazine and practiced at his mansion, and the entire Playboy organization. By far the most controversial part of the book is the director's claim that Hefner had sexually assaulted a then eighteen-year-old Stratten in August 1978. According to Bogdanovich's allegation the assault occurred while the two were alone in a secluded area of the Playboy Mansion at the end of Stratten's first day of posing for the magazine's photographer. (Bogdanovich chose to use the word "seduced" to describe Hefner's behavior in the book; however, he originally used the word "raped" in the drafts of his manuscript. Bogdanovich and the publisher made the change after being threatened with a lawsuit by Hefner's lawyers.)


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Among the other allegations that Bogdanovich made in his book, the most significant are: 1) That Stratten had not married Snider out of love, but rather used her marriage as an excuse to block the advances of Hefner who, Bogdanovich claimed, pursued Stratten as a sexual partner after the purported assault, 2) That Stratten loathed nude modeling and dealing with Playboy in general, and only tolerated the humiliating work in order to promote her acting career, and 3) That Hefner was responsible, in part, for enabling Snider's killing rage when he was banned from entering the Playboy Mansion just days before the murder. Bogdanovich's underlying assertion for the last charge is that Snider was banned because Hefner hated the man. In his defense, Hefner explained that the purpose of the ban was to encourage Stratten and Bogdanovich to appear at the mansion as a couple.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Nearly every review of "The Killing of the Unicorn" in the U.S. press was negative. While few objected to Bogdanovich's attacks on Hefner and "Playboy", many were skeptical of his newfound feminism, pointing out, for example, that he "seemed oblivious to his own sexist susceptibility to 'the whore/Madonna complex' in his view of women." The review that appeared in the "Chicago Tribune", for instance, had its tone concisely summarized in the blunt headline that led off the piece, "Shabby little shocker." Film critic Roger Ebert, writing for the crosstown "Chicago Sun-Times", managed to express empathy for Bogdanovich and the tragedy of Stratten's death, but was no less critical, stating that he could understand why Bogdanovich felt the need to write the book, "but I wish he hadn't published it."


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In an article that appeared shortly after the murder, Hefner, who was 33 years older than Stratten, used the word "friendship" to describe his relationship with her and was said to see himself as a "father figure" to the Playmate. The image that Hefner presented to the public as a supportive, benevolent, paternal figure to Stratten was emphasized the following spring when "Playboy" published her biography in its May 1981 issue. It was reported that Hefner had personally supervised the editing of the article.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In 1985, when asked again about his relationship with Stratten after the release of "The Killing of the Unicorn", Hefner did concede to a crucial detail that lay at the heart of Bogdanovich's allegation. Namely, Hefner admitted that several weeks after Stratten first arrived in Los Angeles, the two had taken a nude soak in the Jacuzzi on the Playboy Mansion grounds, the place where Bogdanovich claimed the sexual assault had occurred. In the same interview, while allowing that they had "hugged" in the Jacuzzi, Hefner denied having forced himself on Stratten. Hefner also denied, despite his reputation, that he had ever so much as made a pass at the young Canadian, suggesting that his sexual interest in Stratten had ended in the Jacuzzi after learning that she expected to become engaged to her boyfriend. (This conversation would have occurred approximately two months before Hefner first met Snider.)


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Stratten's murder was depicted in two films. In the made-for-television "" (1981), Jamie Lee Curtis portrayed Stratten and Bruce Weitz played Paul Snider. Bob Fosse's feature film "Star 80" (1983) starred Mariel Hemingway as Stratten and Eric Roberts as Snider.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In 1983, film critic Vincent Canby wrote "Miss Stratten possessed a charming screen presence and might possibly have become a first-rate comedienne with time and work".


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: In December 1988, at age 49, Bogdanovich married Stratten's sister, Louise, who was 20. Bogdanovich had paid for Louise's private schooling and modeling classes following Stratten's death. They divorced in 2001 after being married for 13 years.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Singer-songwriter Bryan Adams, along with co-writer Jim Valance, wrote the song "The Best Was Yet to Come" as the closing track for Adams' 1983 LP "Cuts Like a Knife" as a dedication to Dorothy Stratten. Adams also co-wrote with Lindsay Mitchell of the Canadian band Prism the track "Cover Girl" for their greatest hits collection "All the Best From Prism" (1980), which had not appeared on any prior album.


title: Dorothy Stratten

text: Bush's song "Dead Meat" is written in her memory. and "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers makes reference to her.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Reid Garrett Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners and a co-founder of Inflection AI. On the "Forbes" 2021 list of the world's billionaires, Hoffman was ranked #1580 with a net worth of US$2.4 billion.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: His paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Theophilus Adam Wylie, a Christian Presbyterian minister and Indiana University president pro tempore. Hoffman's uncle Eric Hoffman is a writer.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman described himself an avid tabletop roleplaying gamer as a child. His first paid job (at age 12) was as an editor at the game company Chaosium, then based in Oakland near his home. Although he was only 14 years old at the time, Hoffman's name was featured on the box of Chaosium's RuneQuest role-playing game release "Borderlands" (1982), receiving equal billing with game designers Steve Perrin, Sandy Petersen and Greg Stafford.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman attended high school at The Putney School, where he farmed maple syrup, drove oxen and studied epistemology. He graduated from Stanford University in 1990, where he won both a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award, with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science. He went on to earn an M.St. in Philosophy from Wolfson College, Oxford in 1993 as a Marshall Scholar.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: While in college, according to Hoffman, he formed a conviction that he wanted to try to influence the state of the world on a large scale. He saw academia as an opportunity to make an "impact," but later realized that the business world would provide him with a larger platform. "When I graduated from Stanford my plan was to become a professor and public intellectual. That is not about quoting Kant. It's about holding up a lens to society and asking 'who are we?' and 'who should we be, as individuals and a society?' But I realized academics write books that 50 or 60 people read and I wanted more impact."


title: Reid Hoffman

text: With that in mind, Hoffman pursued a career in business and entrepreneurship. His first job was an internship at Inglenook, a winery in Napa Valley. He later joined Apple Computer in 1994, where he worked on eWorld, an early attempt at building an online service. AOL acquired eWorld in 1996. He later worked at Fujitsu before co-founding his first company – SocialNet.com in 1997. It focused "on online dating and matching up people with similar interests, like golfers who were looking for partners in their neighborhood." Peter Thiel has said SocialNet.com was "literally an idea before its time. It was a social network 7 or 8 years before that became a trend.". Philosophy still greatly influences Hoffman's worldview as he wrote the foreword to the book, "The Entrepreneurs Weekly Nietzsche" which came out in May 2021 and laid out why he believes that a fundamental understanding of philosophy can be a powerful tool for entrepreneurship in an episode of the Greymatter podcast called "The Philosopher Entrepreneur".


title: Reid Hoffman

text: While at SocialNet, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors during the founding of PayPal, an electronic money transmission service. In January 2000, he left SocialNet and joined PayPal full-time as the company's COO. Allen Blue, whom Hoffman hired at PayPal, said that "PayPal had to scratch and claw for every advantage it had, and Reid became an expert at competing effectively in an extremely competitive environment." Hoffman was responsible for all external relationships for PayPal, including payments infrastructure (Visa, Mastercard, ACH, Wells Fargo), business development (eBay, Intuit, and others), government (regulatory, judicial), and legal. Peter Thiel, Hoffman's boss at PayPal, has said that Hoffman "was the firefighter-in-chief at PayPal. Though that diminishes his role because there were many, many fires." At the time of PayPal's acquisition by eBay for $1.5B in 2002, he was executive vice president of PayPal.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in December 2002 with two former colleagues from SocialNet (including Allen Blue), from his time at Fujitsu. It launched on May 5, 2003, as one of the first business-oriented online social networks. Peter Thiel, a colleague of Hoffman's at PayPal, invested in LinkedIn. By November 2014, LinkedIn had over 332 million members in more than 200 countries and territories and now has nearly 800 million members. The site allows registered users to create professional profiles and connect with each other. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection. According to Forbes, "LinkedIn is, far and away, the most advantageous social networking tool available to job seekers and business professionals today."


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman was LinkedIn's founding CEO for the first four years before becoming chairman and president of products in February 2007. He became executive chairman in June 2009. With the IPO of LinkedIn on May 19, 2011, Hoffman owns a stake worth an estimated $2.34 billion, not including any potential benefits from Greylock Partners, where he was named a partner in 2009. Hoffman believes that many people still do not know how to use its service and it is LinkedIn's job to help them out. In an interview, Hoffman said that "you have to think proactively about how to use a tool that enables your ability to move in ways that you weren't able to move before, and most of people are not very good at that".


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Microsoft proposed to acquire LinkedIn on June 13, 2016 for $26.2 billion in cash. Hoffman became a Microsoft board member on March 14, 2017.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: In March 2022, it was announced that Hoffman was co-founding a new startup, Inflection AI, with his long-time friend and Greylock colleague, Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind. CNBC reported that "Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Inflection will aim to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers."


title: Reid Hoffman

text: After the PayPal sale to eBay, Hoffman became one of Silicon Valley's most prolific and successful angel investors. According to venture capitalist David Sze, Hoffman "is arguably the most successful angel investor in the past decade." Dave Goldberg, former CEO of SurveyMonkey, said that Hoffman "is the person you want to talk to when you are starting a company." In 2010 Hoffman joined Greylock Partners and made his first, early investment in AirBNB. His areas of focus at Greylock include consumer and services, enterprise software, consumer Internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: In 2020, Greylock, the venture capital firm where Hoffman is a partner, created an ongoing partnership with Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) to get more Black, Latino and Indigenous people into tech startups. As part of this partnership. Greylock’s partners also donated $5 million to anchor MLT’s first-ever impact fund, which allows MLT to participate as a limited partner in Greylock’s latest $1 billion fund.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: According to David Kirkpatrick's book "The Facebook Effect", Hoffman arranged the first meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, which led to Thiel's initial $500,000 angel investment in Facebook. Hoffman invested alongside Thiel in Facebook's first financing round.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman's current venture capital investments include Aurora, Blockstream, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Joby Aviation, Nauto, Neeva, Nuro, Taptap Send and Helion Energy.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Past investments include 3DSolve, Airbnb, Coupons.com, Digg, Edmodo, Flickr, Gixo, IronPort, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Nanosolar, One Kings Lane, Permuto, Ping.fm, Shopkick, SixApart, thesixtyone, Swipely, Tagged, Technetto, TrialPay, Vendio, VigLink, Viki, Wikia, Wrapp, and Xapo. He served on Zynga's board of directors from March 2008 to June 2014 and currently serves on several public boards including Aurora, Joby Aviation and Microsoft.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman is arguably one of the most important investors for the future of transportation, making investments in Aurora (autonomous trucking), Convoy (trucking logistics marketplace), Nauto (AI software for driver safety), Nuro (autonomous, zero-occupant delivery vehicles for goods) and Joby Aviation (electric, aerial ride-sharing) among others.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: An early advocate for cryptocurrency, Hoffman led the 2014 Series A financing round in Xapo, a company that created a combination between a bitcoin vault and a bitcoin wallet and was an early supporter of Celo, an open platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. In 2015, he was interviewed at Davos and said crypto “could open up the advantages of banking to regions of the world that do not yet benefit from the banking system” and then wrote an article in WiredUK evangelizing for why the blockchain matters. In 2019, Hoffman created a "Bitcoin Rap Battle Debate: Hamilton vs. Satoshi" and posted it on YouTube, racking up over 2 million views.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman has spoken at the XPrize Foundation's conference, the TED conference in Long Beach in 2012, and Fast Forward's Accelerate Good Global in 2020. He is a frequent lecturer at Stanford University, Oxford University, Harvard University, the MIT Media Lab, and others. He has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, Fareed Zakaria's Global Public Square on CNN and other current affairs television programs.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: In 2021, he appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt in September to talk about blitzscaling and Greylock's new $500 million seed fund among other things, at the Bloomberg Equality Summit in October to talk about the important of diversity in tech and at the Knight Foundation Symposium "Lessons from the First Internet Ages" in November to discuss what we've learned from web 1.0 and 2.0.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman has published a variety of posts as a "LinkedIn Influencer" on LinkedIn. He published an essay proposing a new form of credentialing for university students and professionals entitled "Disrupting the Diploma." On his personal website, he published "LinkedIn's Series B Pitch to Greylock: Pitch Advice for Entrepreneurs," in which he analyzed LinkedIn's 2004 Series B venture funding pitch deck and offered advice to prospective entrepreneurs on how to formulate a pitch deck.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman has also written op-eds in the Washington Post, including one published in 2009 entitled "Let Startups Bail Us Out" encouraging funding for grassroots innovation in the wake of the financial crisis and another in June 2013 entitled "Immigration promotes entrepreneurship and prosperity" advocating for immigration reform. He has written for Strategy+Business on professional networking and is an "Influencer" on LinkedIn where he posts original written content.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman is co-author, with Ben Casnocha, of the career book "The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform your Career".


title: Reid Hoffman

text: The book was released in the United States on February 14, 2012. It argues that individuals should think of themselves as businesses-of-one – the "CEO of their own career" – and draws many parallels between lessons learned from the stories of successful Silicon Valley technology companies and an individual's career.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: "Publishers Weekly" reviewed the book positively, saying, "with plenty of valuable guidance relevant to any career stage, this book will help readers not only survive professionally in times of uncertainty but stand out from the pack and flourish." The Economist said that "Hoffman and Casnocha make a number of astute observations about shifts in the world of work."


title: Reid Hoffman

text: As of September 2012 it had sold more than 100,000 copies. It became both a "New York Times" and "Wall Street Journal" bestseller. "Business Insider" republished visual summaries of "The Start-Up of You", which have received over 13 million views.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman is co-author, with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh, of the management book "The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age".


title: Reid Hoffman

text: The book was released in the United States on July 8, 2014. It argues that previous career models of lifetime employment and free agency no longer work in a business world defined by continuous change. Instead, it proposes that employers and employees should think of each other as "allies" and move from a transactional approach to employment to a "relational" one. It proposes a new framework for managers and employers to organize their work, described as "tours of duty." Further, it argues why managers should encourage their employees to gather "network intelligence" and why companies and managers should maintain a lifelong relationship with former employees via a corporate alumni network.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: The book became a "New York Times" bestseller. Arianna Huffington named "The Alliance" "the must-read book of the summer" in 2014.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: On April 25, 2017, Reid Hoffman announced the launch of a new podcast called "Masters of Scale." In each episode, Reid acts as the host, introducing a counterintuitive business theory and proving it out through the episode through a series of conversations with successful entrepreneurs. "Masters of Scale" is committed to a 50-50 gender balance. The official podcast launched on May 5, 2017, on the Entrepreneur Magazine website but is now hosted at mastersofscale.com. Masters of Scale Episodes so far feature guests such as Mark Cuban, Sir Richard Branson, Beth Ford (CEO of Land O'Lakes), Jessica Alba, Sheila Lirio Marcelo (Care.com), Ray Dalio, Brian Chesky (AirBNB), Tory Burch, John Elkann, Tyra Banks, Daymond John (FUBU, Shark Tank), Stacy Brown-Philpot, Sheryl Sandberg, Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Mark Zuckerberg, Shellye Archambeau, Diane Greene, Indra Nooyi (former CEO Pepsi), Sara Blakely (Spanx), Robert Reffkin (Compass), Robert F. Smith (investor) and Barack Obama.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman is co-author, with Chris Yeh, of the book "Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies". The book was released in the United States on October 9, 2018. It argues that the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies is “blitzscaling”, a set of techniques for “scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water.”


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn's CEO, has said that "Reid's true north is making a positive and lasting impact on the world, in a very profound way." Hoffman currently serves on the boards of Kiva.org (peer-peer microlending pioneer that allows people to lend money via the internet to low-income/underserved entrepreneurs and students), Endeavor Global (an organization that finds and supports high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets), and New America (a think tank that focuses on a range of public policy issues, including national security, technology, health, gender, education, and the economy). Hoffman also serves on the advisory council of the MIT Media Lab and is a supporter and chair of the advisory board for QuestBridge (a provider of talented low-income students to top colleges/universities). Hoffman was also the first major funder of Crisis Text Line, a free, 24/7 crisis service via SMS in the US.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: In 2013, Hoffman provided a $250,000 matching grant to Code for America. In July 2016, Hoffman funded the $250,000 cash-prize MIT Media Lab MIT Disobedience Award, an award created by Hoffman and Joi Ito to honor and recognize acts of disobedience resulting in positive social impact. In November 2016, Hoffman and his wife, Michelle Yee, donated $20 million to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a charity dedicated to eradicating disease by 2100. Hoffman and Yee's donation was for the Biohub, the Initiative's San Francisco laboratory. Hoffman also joined the board of the Biohub project. In May 2018, Hoffman and Yee joined the Giving Pledge, "a global effort to help address society’s most pressing problems by encouraging the wealthiest individuals and families to give the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes."


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman is also a long-time supporter of Second Harvest of Silicon Valley and in 2021, in response to the massive increased need due to the pandemic, offered to match any donations to the food bank, up to $2million


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman is included in many efforts around the future AI and is one of the financial backers of OpenAI, a non-profit company aimed at the safe development of artificial general intelligence as well as the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, a joint venture between the MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University . He is also on the Board of HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence) at Stanford University whose mission is to "advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition" and launched the Hoffman-Yee Research Grants to "fund interdisciplinary teams with research spanning HAI’s key areas of focus: understanding the human and societal impact of AI, augmenting human capabilities, and developing AI technologies inspired by human intelligence". In 2018 made a gift of to the University of Toronto's iSchool to endow a chair "to study how the new era of artificial intelligence (AI) will affect our lives.". Hoffman has also mentioned many times that when one must have Spiderman ethics as a tech leader - "With great power, comes great responsibility."


title: Reid Hoffman

text: To increase diversity and inclusion in the start-up ecosystem Hoffman is a donor and advocate for HimforHer, which aims to accelerate diversity on corporate boards and All Raise, whose goal is to create a tech culture where women are leading, shaping, and funding the future. He’s also the founding donor and long-time board member at Opportunity@Work, an organization that seeks to eliminate the opportunity gap and provide millions of highly skilled but under-credentialed Americans (often from marginalized, rural and racially diverse backgrounds) better pathways to higher-paying jobs and careers. On the hot button issue of the death penalty, Hoffman has also argued for its abolishment on moral grounds and because of racial biases and other instances of unequally applied justice. Hoffman is also a strong supporter of Shaka Senghor, the writer, mentor, and motivational speaker whose story of redemption after he was sent to jail for murder has inspired many to become more involved with criminal justice reform.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Since 2011 Hoffman is a member of the Bilderberg Group, which gathers 120-150 North American and European "political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media" for an annual invitation-only closed-door conference. Since then he has attended every year with the exception of 2013. Hoffman is also listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, to which he was elected in 2015.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: In April 2013, a pro-immigration lobbying group called FWD.us was launched, with Reid Hoffman listed as one of the founders. In 2014, Hoffman donated $150,000 to the Mayday PAC. Also in 2014, Hoffman contributed $500,000 toward David Chiu's State Assembly campaign by funding an independent expenditure committee devoted to negative campaigning against his opponent: San Franciscans to Hold Campos Accountable — Vote No for Campos for State Assembly 2014.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: In 2016, Hoffman contributed $220,000 in support of Democratic candidate for Vermont governor Matt Dunne, according to a mass-media disclosure filed at the Vermont Secretary of State's Office.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: In 2016, Hoffman created a card game modeled after Cards Against Humanity intended to poke fun at US presidential candidate Donald Trump. In December 2018, the "New York Times" broke a story alleging that Hoffman had "put $100,000 into an experiment that adopted Russia-inspired political disinformation tactics on Facebook" during the 2017 special Senate race in Alabama, which allegedly targeted Roy Moore voters. Hoffman did not immediately respond. He apologized later that month, also stating he was unaware what the non-profit—Washington, D.C., based American Engagement Technologies, or AET—had been doing.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: In 2018, Hoffman helped fund Alloy, a company founded to legally exchange data with affiliated Democrat groups like super PACs. Hoffman supplied half of the 35 million dollars to start it. The company shut down in 2021 after failing to live up to its promise.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman has been an outspoken proponent of democratic institutions and voting rights and in 2021 published a piece on LinkedIn entitled "Protecting Voting Rights: Good for America, Good for American Business". In this piece he discusses how "former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault and Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier led corporate America to take an active role in this situation, by explicitly advocating for the rights of all American citizens to make their voices heard through the core democratic act of voting.". In 2020, Hoffman also penned a piece that argued for making Voting Day a holiday.


title: Reid Hoffman

text: Hoffman gave at least $500,000 to the Mainstream Democrats super PAC, which was founded in February 2022 and has since spent more than $1 million supporting the campaigns of moderate Democrats Henry Cuellar and Kurt Schrader.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Kathryn Ann Bigelow (; born November 27, 1951) is an American filmmaker. Covering a wide range of genres, her films include "Near Dark" (1987), "Point Break" (1991), "Strange Days" (1995), "" (2002), "The Hurt Locker" (2008), "Zero Dark Thirty" (2012), and "Detroit" (2017).


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow was the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director with "The Hurt Locker", the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction. She was also the first woman to win the Saturn Award for Best Director, with "Strange Days".


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, the only child of Gertrude Kathryn (née Larson; 1917–1994), a librarian, and Ronald Elliot Bigelow (1915–1992), a paint factory manager. Her mother was of Norwegian descent. She attended Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, California.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow's early creative endeavors were as a student of painting. She enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972. While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program in New York City. For a while, Bigelow lived as an impoverished artist, staying with painter Julian Schnabel in performance artist Vito Acconci's loft. She had a minor role in Richard Serra's video "Prisoner's Dilemma" (1974). Bigelow teamed up with Philip Glass on a real-estate venture in which they renovated distressed apartments downtown and sold them for a profit.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University, where she studied theory and criticism and earned her master's degree. Her professors included Vito Acconci, Sylvère Lotringer, and Susan Sontag, as well as Andrew Sarris and Edward W. Said, and she worked with the Art & Language collective and Lawrence Weiner. She also taught at the California Institute of the Arts. While working with Art & Language Bigelow published an article, "Not on the Development of Contradiction," in the short-lived Art & Language magazine "The Fox", and began a short film, "The Set-Up" (1978), which found favor with director Miloš Forman, then teaching at Columbia University, and which Bigelow later submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow's short "The Set-Up" is a 20-minute deconstruction of violence in film. The film portrays "two men fighting each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over." Bigelow asked her actors to actually beat and bludgeon each other throughout the film's all-night shoot.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Her first full-length feature was "The Loveless" (1981), a biker film that she co-directed with Monty Montgomery. It featured Willem Dafoe in his first starring role.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Next, she directed "Near Dark" (1987), which she co-scripted with Eric Red. With this film, she began her lifelong fascination with manipulating movie conventions and genre. The main cast included three actors who had appeared in the film "Aliens". In the same year, she directed a music video for the New Order song "Touched by the Hand of God"; the video is a spoof of glam metal imagery.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow's subsequent films, "Blue Steel", "Point Break", and "Strange Days", "merged her philosophically minded manipulation of pace with the market demands of mainstream film-making".


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: "Blue Steel" starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer who is stalked by a psychopathic killer, played by Ron Silver. As with "Near Dark", Eric Red co-wrote the screenplay. The film, originally bankrolled for $10 million, was shot on location in New York due to financial considerations and because Bigelow doesn't "like movies where you see a welfare apartment and it's the size of two football fields."


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow followed "Blue Steel" with the cult classic "Point Break" (1991), which starred Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who poses as a surfer to catch the "Ex-Presidents", a team of surfing armed robbers led by Patrick Swayze who wear Reagan, Nixon, LBJ and Jimmy Carter masks when they hold up banks. "Point Break" was Bigelow's most profitable 'studio' film, taking approximately $80 million at the global box office during the year of its release, and yet it remains one of her lowest rated films, both in commercial reviews and academic analysis. Critics argued that it conformed to some of the clichés and tired stereotypes of the action genre and that it abandoned much of the stylistic substance and subtext of Bigelow's other work.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: In 1993, she directed an episode of the TV series "Wild Palms" and appeared in one episode as Mazie Woiwode (uncredited).


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow's 1995 film "Strange Days" was written and produced by her ex-husband James Cameron. Despite some positive reviews, the film was a commercial failure. Furthermore, many attributed the creative vision to Cameron, diminishing Bigelow's perceived influence on the film.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Based on Anita Shreve's novel of the same name, Bigelow's 2000 film "The Weight of Water" is a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: In 2002, she directed "", starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, about a group of men aboard the Soviet Union's first nuclear-powered submarine. The film fared poorly at the box office and was received with mixed reactions by critics.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow next directed "The Hurt Locker", which was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008, was the Closing Night selection for Maryland Film Festival in May 2009, and theatrically released in the US in June 2009. It qualified for the 2010 Oscars as it did not premiere in an Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles until mid-2009. Set in post-invasion Iraq, the film received "universal acclaim" (according to Metacritic) and a 97% "fresh" rating from the critics aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes. The film stars Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie, with cameos by Guy Pearce, David Morse and Ralph Fiennes. She won the Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (becoming the first woman to win the award) and also received a Golden Globe nomination for her direction. In 2010, she won the award for Best Director and "The Hurt Locker" won Best Picture at the 63rd British Academy Film Awards. She became the first woman to receive an Academy Award for Best Director for "The Hurt Locker." She was the fourth woman in history to be nominated for the honor, and only the second American woman. A competitor in the category was her ex-husband, James Cameron, who directed the sci-fi film "Avatar."


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: In her acceptance speech for her Academy Award, Bigelow surprised many audience members when she didn't mention her status as the first woman to ever receive an Oscar for Best Director. In the past, Bigelow has refused to identify herself as a "woman filmmaker" or a "feminist filmmaker." She has been criticized for the violence in her films by writers like Mark Salisbury, who asked in "The Guardian", "Why does she make the kind of movie she makes?" and by Marcia Froelke Coburn, who asked in the "Chicago Tribune", "What's a nice woman like Bigelow doing making erotic, violent vampire movies?"


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow's next film was "Zero Dark Thirty", a dramatization of American efforts to find Osama bin Laden. "Zero Dark Thirty" was acclaimed by film critics but also attracted controversy and strong criticism for its allegedly pro-torture stance. Bigelow won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director for the film, making her the first woman to win the award twice. She had already won previously for directing "The Hurt Locker". She was also the first woman to receive the National Board of Review Award for Best Director.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow collaborated with Mark Boal for the third time on the film "Detroit", set during the 1967 Detroit riots. "Detroit" began filming in the summer of 2016 and was released in July 2017, around the time of the 50th anniversary of the riots, and on the anniversary day of the Algiers Motel incident, which is depicted in the film. John Boyega, Hannah Murray, Will Poulter, Jack Reynor, Anthony Mackie, and Joseph David-Jones starred in the film.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: She served as executive producer of "Triple Frontier", a film that she was originally going to direct. She gave up directing duties to J. C. Chandor to focus on other projects.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: In March 2022, it was announced that Bigelow will direct an adaptation of David Koepp’s book, "Aurora" for Netflix, with Koepp writing the script.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow also directs commercials. She is represented internationally by commercial production company SMUGGLER, where she has directed commercials for the Army National Guard, Budweiser and AT&T, some of which were broadcast during the Super Bowl. In 2022, Bigelow was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for Apple's "Hollywood In Your Pocket".


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: In 2014, Bigelow announced plans to direct two movies: an adaptation of Anand Giridharadas's non-fiction book "The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas" starring Tom Hardy and a feature based on the life of Bowe Bergdahl written by Mark Boal.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Bigelow is known for her shifting relationship with Hollywood and its conventional film standards and techniques. Her work "both satisfies and transcends the demands of formula to create cinema that's ideologically complex, viscerally thrilling, and highly personal". She has had success both ascribing to conventional Hollywood cinema techniques as well as creating her own unique style that pushes against mainstream conventions. She is also known for entrenching social issues of gender, race, and politics into her work of all genres.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: While her films are often categorized in the action genre, she describes her own style as an exploration of "film's potential to be kinetic". Her frequent and notable action sequences are unique because of her use of "purpose-built" camera equipment to create unique mobile shots that are very distinctive and indicative of the physicality of her work. In many of her films, such as "The Hurt Locker", "Point Break", and "Strange Days", she has used utilized mobile and hand-held cameras.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Perhaps what Bigelow is most well known for is her use of extensive violence in her films. Most of her films include violent sequences and many of them revolve around the theme of violence. Violence has been a staple in her films from the beginning of her career. In her first short film "The Set-Up" (1978), two professors deconstruct two men beating each other up and reflect on the "fascistic appeal of screen violence". For this film Bigelow asked the two actors, including a then unknown Gary Busey, to actually beat each other up in the film's all-night shoot. This interest in violence seeped its way into her first full-length feature film "The Loveless", starring Willem Dafoe, which follows a 1950s motorcycle gang's visit to a small town and the ensuing violence that occurs. Her next film, "Near Dark", follows a young boy who falls in love with a vampire after being bitten by her. The film was originally conceived of as a Western but the genre was so unpopular at the time that Bigelow had to adjust her script and invert the genres conventions. She still used the violent staples of the genre including sieges, shoot-outs, and horseback chases. It is regarded for its combination of the Western and horror genre and its exploration of "homosexuality and 'white America's illusion of safety and control'". The film became a cult classic within the horror genre community. Bigelow herself saw a screening of it in Greenwich Village with a horror genre crowd.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: "Blue Steel" was her first venture into the action film genre, with which she has stayed throughout her career and has found most success. The film revolves around a female police officer who is falsely accused of a murder and who in the process of clearing her name investigates a killing spree connected to the original murder. Similarly to "Near Dark", Bigelow inverts the typical action genre conventions by placing a female protagonist at the center. The film digs deeply into feminist issues and is often taught and studied by feminist film scholars. Her next film "Point Break", starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, was her breakout film in terms of mainstream success. The film follows a detective who goes undercover in a suspected criminal gang of surfers who primarily rob banks. It marks the first time that Bigelow used lengthy Steadicam tracking shots. It was also her biggest financial success yet, grossing $83.5 million worldwide with a budget of $24 million. Although her next film, "Strange Days", which ruminates on the relationships between media, sex, race, class, and technology, had a budget of $42 million, it only grossed just under $8 million. Although the film flopped, it led Bigelow and her team to spend over a year developing a camera that intended to approximate human vision. Sequences filmed by this camera are widely regarded as innovative and startling regardless of the film's success.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: The commercial failure of "Strange Days" was followed by a stream of commercial and critical flops for Bigelow. Her films "The Weight of Water" and "" received negative reviews from critics and little attention from the general public. With her independently produced film "The Hurt Locker" she made a commercial and critical comeback. This film was her transition into political and historical film. "The Hurt Locker", which follows members of a bomb squad serving in the Iraq War, was Bigelow's first venture into pseudo-documentary style film, abandoning the aesthetic stylization found in "Strange Days" and "Near Dark". The film utilizes the genre's tendency to use quick cuts, shaky camera, and rapid zooms. It also breaks with the conventional narrative structures of her previous films, following a more unorganized and experimental narrative structure. Her next film, "Zero Dark Thirty", is widely seen as a direct extension of "The Hurt Locker", going further in-depth of historical analysis and addressing issues of geopolitics and American foreign policy. The film is her most controversial to date, with heavy criticism on the depiction of the CIA's torture practices.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: Throughout her career, Bigelow has been known for her tendency to go to extremes for her films. In "Point Break", while filming the skydiving scene, Bigelow was on the airplane with a parachute on, as she filmed Patrick Swayze throw himself into the sky. During surfing scenes in the same film, she would either paddle on a longboard or lean over a nearby boat as far as possible to get shots of Keanu Reeves surfing. For the opening of "Strange Days" she controlled a crane that dropped a camera man off the edge of a tall building. For "The Hurt Locker", Bigelow filmed in Jordan in up to heat.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: In 1975, Bigelow published an article in the third and final issue of the Art & Language Foundation magazine "The Fox" entitled "Not on the Development of Contradiction." In it, Bigelow argued that the magazine's function was "the unintelligible manifestation of contradiction" (p. 38) and that it was connected to "a mode of socialization reproducing bourgeois-liberal thinking" (p. 39). The article quotes from writings by Jurgen Habermas and Mao Tse-Tung to substantiate this proposition.


title: Kathryn Bigelow

text: In the early 1980s, Bigelow modeled for a Gap advertisement. Her acting credits include Lizzie Borden's 1983 film "Born in Flames" as a feminist newspaper editor, and as the leader of a cowgirl gang in the 1988 music video of Martini Ranch's "Reach", which was directed by James Cameron.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: The Rashidun Caliphate () was the first caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was ruled by the first four successive caliphs of Muhammad after his death in 632 CE (11 AH). During its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in West Asia.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: The caliphate arose following Muhammad’s passing in June 632 and the subsequent debate over the succession to his leadership. Muhammad's childhood friend and close companion Abu Bakr (), of the Banu Taym clan, was elected the first caliph in Medina and he began the conquest of the Arabian Peninsula. His brief reign ended in August 634 when he died and was succeeded by Umar (), his appointed successor from the Banu Adi clan. Under Umar, the caliphate expanded at an unprecedented rate, ruling more than two-thirds of the Byzantine Empire and nearly the entire Sasanian Empire. Umar was assassinated in November 644 and was succeeded by Uthman (), a member of the Banu Umayya clan, who was elected by a six-person committee arranged by Umar. Under Uthman, the caliphate concluded its conquest of Persia in 651 and continued expeditions into the Byzantine territories. Uthman's nepotistic policies earned him vehement opposition from the Muslim elite and he was eventually assassinated by rebels in June 656.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: He was subsequently succeeded by Ali (), a member of Muhammad's Banu Hashim clan, who transferred the capital to Kufa. Ali presided over the civil war called the First Fitna as his suzerainty was unrecognized by Uthman's kinsman and Syria's governor Mu'awiya I (), who believed that Uthman was unlawfully killed and his murderers should be punished. Additionally, a third faction known as Kharijites, who were former supporters of Ali, rebelled against both Ali and Mu'awiya after refusing to accept the arbitration in the Battle of Siffin. The war led to the overthrow of the Rashidun Caliphate and the establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate in 661 by Mu'awiya. The civil war permanently consolidated the divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims, with Shia Muslims believing Ali to be the first rightful caliph and Imam after Muhammad, favouring his bloodline connection to Muhammad.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: The Rashidun Caliphate is characterized by a twenty-five-year period of rapid military expansion followed by a five-year period of internal strife. The Rashidun Army numbered more than 100,000 men at its peak. By the 650s, in addition to the Arabian Peninsula, the caliphate had subjugated the Levant to the Transcaucasus in the north; North Africa from Egypt to present-day Tunisia in the west; and the Iranian Plateau to parts of Central Asia and South Asia in the east. The four Rashidun caliphs were chosen by a small electoral body consisting of prominent members of the Quraysh tribal confederation called (, ).


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: After Muhammad's death in 632 CE, his Medinan companions debated which of them should succeed him in running the affairs of the Muslims while Muhammad's household was busy with his burial. Umar and Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah pledged their loyalty to Abu Bakr, with the Ansar and the Quraysh soon following suit. Abu Bakr adopted the title of "Khalīfaṫ Rasūl Allāh" (, "Successor of the Messenger of God") or simply caliph. Abu Bakr embarked on campaigns to propagate Islam. First he would have to subdue the Arabian tribes, which had claimed that although they pledged allegiance to Muhammad and accepted Islam, they owed nothing to Abu Bakr. As a caliph, Abu Bakr was not a monarch and never claimed such a title; nor did any of his three successors. Rather, their election and leadership were based upon merit.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: Notably, according to Sunnis, all four Rashidun Caliphs were connected to Muhammad through marriage, were early converts to Islam, were among ten who were explicitly promised paradise, were his closest companions by association and support and were often highly praised by Muhammad and delegated roles of leadership within the nascent Muslim community. These caliphs are collectively known in Sunni Islam as the "Rashidun", or "Rightly Guided" caliphs (, ""). According to Sunni Muslims, the term Rashidun Caliphate is derived from a famous hadith of Muhammad, where he foretold that the caliphate after him would last for 30 years (the length of the Rashidun Caliphate) and would then be followed by kingship (the Umayyad Caliphate was a hereditary monarchy). Furthermore, according to other hadiths in Sunan Abu Dawood and Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal, towards the end times, the Rightly Guided Caliphate will be restored once again by God. However, this term is not used in Shia Islam, as most Shia Muslims do not consider the rule of the first three caliphs legitimate. On the other hand, the Zaydi Shia Muslims believe the first three caliphs to be legitimate leaders.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: After Muhammad's death in June 632, a gathering of the Ansar (), the natives of Medina, took place in the "Saqifah" (courtyard) of the Banu Sa'ida clan. The general belief at the time was that the purpose of the meeting was for the Ansar to decide on a new leader of the Muslim community among themselves, with the intentional exclusion of the Muhajirun (migrants from Mecca), though this has later become the subject of debate.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: Nevertheless, Abu Bakr and Umar, both prominent companions of Muhammad, upon learning of the meeting became concerned about a potential coup and hastened to the gathering. Upon arriving, Abu Bakr addressed the assembled men with a warning that any attempt to elect a leader outside of Muhammad's own tribe, the Quraysh, would likely result in dissension as only they can command the necessary respect among the community. He then took Umar and another companion, Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah, by the hand and offered them to the Ansar as potential choices. He was countered with the suggestion that the Quraysh and the Ansar choose a leader each from among themselves, who would then rule jointly. The group grew heated upon hearing this proposal and began to argue amongst themselves. Umar hastily took Abu Bakr's hand and swore his own allegiance to the latter, an example followed by the gathered men.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: Abu Bakr was near-universally accepted as head of the Muslim community (under the title of Caliph) as a result of Saqifah, though he did face contention as a result of the rushed nature of the event. Several companions, most prominent among them being Ali ibn Abi Talib, initially refused to acknowledge his authority. Ali may have been reasonably expected to assume leadership, being both cousin and son-in-law to Muhammad. The theologian Ibrahim al-Nakha'i stated that Ali also had support among the Ansar for his succession, explained by the genealogical links he shared with them. Whether his candidacy for the succession was raised during Saqifah is unknown, though it is not unlikely. Abu Bakr later sent Umar to confront Ali to gain his allegiance, resulting in an altercation which may have involved violence. However, after six months the group made peace with Abu Bakr and Ali offered him his fealty.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: Troubles emerged soon after Muhammad's death, threatening the unity and stability of the new community and state. Apostasy spread to every tribe in the Arabian Peninsula with the exception of the people in Mecca and Medina, the Banu Thaqif in Ta'if and the Bani Abdul Qais of Oman. In some cases, entire tribes apostatized. Others merely withheld zakat, the alms tax, without formally challenging Islam. Many tribal leaders made claims to prophethood; some made it during the lifetime of Muhammad. The first incident of apostasy was fought and concluded while Muhammad still lived; a supposed prophet Aswad Ansi arose and invaded South Arabia; he was killed on 30 May 632 (6 Rabi' al-Awwal, 11 Hijri) by Governor Fērōz of Yemen, a Persian Muslim. The news of his death reached Medina shortly after the death of Muhammad. The apostasy of al-Yamama was led by another supposed prophet, Musaylimah, who arose before Muhammad's death; other centers of the rebels were in the Najd, Eastern Arabia (known then as "al-Bahrayn") and South Arabia (known as "al-Yaman" and including the "Mahra"). Many tribes claimed that they had submitted to Muhammad and that with Muhammad's death, their allegiance was ended. Caliph Abu Bakr insisted that they had not just submitted to a leader but joined an "ummah" (, community) of which he was the new head. The result of this situation was the Ridda wars.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: Abu Bakr planned his strategy accordingly. He divided the Muslim army into several corps. The strongest corps, and the primary force of the Muslims, was the corps of Khalid ibn al-Walid. This corps was used to fight the most powerful of the rebel forces. Other corps were given areas of secondary importance in which to bring the less dangerous apostate tribes to submission. Abu Bakr's plan was first to clear Najd and Western Arabia near Medina, then tackle Malik ibn Nuwayrah and his forces between the Najd and al-Bahrayn, and finally concentrate against the most dangerous enemy, Musaylimah and his allies in al-Yamama. After a series of successful campaigns Khalid ibn al-Walid defeated Musaylimah in the Battle of Yamama. The Campaign on the Apostasy was fought and completed during the eleventh year of the Hijri. The year 12 Hijri dawned on 18 March 633 with the Arabian peninsula united under the caliph in Medina.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: After Abu Bakr unified Arabia under Islam, he began the incursions into the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Empire. Whether or not he intended a full-out imperial conquest is hard to say; he did, however, set in motion a historical trajectory that in just a few short decades would lead to one of the largest empires in history. Abu Bakr began with Iraq, the richest province of the Sasanian Empire. He sent general Khalid ibn al-Walid to invade the Sassanian Empire in 633. He thereafter also sent four armies to invade the Roman province of Syria, but the decisive operation was only undertaken when Khalid, after completing the conquest of Iraq, was transferred to the Syrian front in 634.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: Before dying in August 634 from an illness, Abu Bakr appointed Umar () as his successor. Upon his accession, Umar adopted the title , which later became the standard title of caliphs. The new caliph continued the war of conquests begun by his predecessor, pushing further into the Sassanian Empire, north into Byzantine territory, and went into Egypt. These were regions of great wealth controlled by powerful states, but the long conflict between Byzantines and Persians had left both sides militarily exhausted, and the Islamic armies easily prevailed against them. By 640, they had brought all of Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine under the control of the Rashidun Caliphate; Egypt was conquered by 642, and the entire Sassanian Empire by 643.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: While the caliphate continued its rapid expansion, Umar laid the foundations of a political structure that could hold it together. He created the Diwan, a bureau for transacting government affairs. The military was brought directly under state control and into its pay. Crucially, in conquered lands, Umar did not require that non-Muslim populations convert to Islam, nor did he try to centralize government. Instead, he allowed subject populations to retain their religion, language, and customs, and he left their government relatively untouched, imposing only a governor ("amir") and a financial officer called an "amil". These new posts were integral to the efficient network of taxation that financed the empire.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: With the bounty secured from conquest, Umar was able to support its faith in material ways: the companions of Muhammad were given pensions on which to live, allowing them to pursue religious studies and exercise spiritual leadership in their communities and beyond. Umar is also remembered for establishing the Islamic calendar; it is lunar-like the Arabian calendar, but the origin is set in 622, the year of the Hijra when Muhammad emigrated to Medina.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: While Umar was leading the morning prayers in 644, he was assassinated by the Persian slave Abu Lu'lu'a Firuz. He appointed Suhayb ibn Sinan to lead the prayers.


title: Rashidun Caliphate

text: Before Umar died, he appointed a committee of six men to decide on the next caliph and charged them with choosing one of their own numbers. All of the men, like Umar, were from the tribe of Quraysh.