title: Thin blue line

text: The "thin blue line" is a term that typically refers to the concept of the police as the line which keeps society from descending into violent chaos. The "blue" in "thin blue line" refers to the blue color of the uniforms of many police departments.


title: Thin blue line

text: The phrase originated as an allusion to the British infantry regiment The Thin Red Line during the Crimean War in 1854, wherein the regiment of Scottish Highlanders—wearing red uniforms—famously held off a Russian cavalry charge. Its use referring specifically to the police was popularized by Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker during the 1950s; author and police officer Joseph Wambaugh in the 1970s, by which time "thin blue line" was used across the United States; and Errol Morris's documentary "The Thin Blue Line"(1988).


title: Thin blue line

text: The "thin blue line" symbol has been used by the "Blue Lives Matter" movement, which began December 2014, after the homicides of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in Brooklyn, New York, in the wake of the homicides of Eric Garner and Michael Brown Jr earlier that year and in the context of the greater Black Lives Matter movement. The "thin blue line" has also been associated with white nationalists in the US, particularly after the Unite the Right rally in 2017, who fly Thin Blue Line flags at their rallies.


title: Thin blue line

text: The term is derived from the Thin Red Line, a formation of the 93rd Highland Regiment of Foot of the British Army at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854, in which the Scottish Highlanders stood their ground against a Russian cavalry charge. This action was widely publicized by the press and recreated in artwork, becoming one of the most famous battles of the Crimean War. The name is now used for firefighters today.


title: Thin blue line

text: In the book "Lawtalk", James Clapp and Elizabeth Thornburg say the term spread to other professions, e.g., a "thin white line of bishops".


title: Thin blue line

text: An early known use of the phrase "thin blue line" is from a 1911 poem by Nels Dickmann Anderson, titled "The Thin Blue Line". In the poem, the phrase is used to refer to the United States Army, alluding both to the Thin Red Line and to the fact that US Army soldiers wore blue uniforms from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century.


title: Thin blue line

text: It is unknown when the term was first used to refer to police. New York police commissioner Richard Enright used the phrase in 1922. In the 1950s, Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker often used the term in speeches, and he also lent the phrase to the department-produced television show "The Thin Blue Line". Parker used the term "thin blue line" to further reinforce the role of the LAPD. As Parker explained, the thin blue line, representing the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order and social and civil anarchy.


title: Thin blue line

text: The "Oxford English Dictionary" records its use in 1962 by "The Sunday Times" referring to police presence at an anti-nuclear demonstration. The phrase is also documented in a 1965 pamphlet by the Massachusetts government, referring to its state police force, and in even earlier police reports of the NYPD. By the early 1970s, the term had spread to police departments across the United States. Author and police officer Joseph Wambaugh helped to further popularize the phrase with his police novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s.


title: Thin blue line

text: The term was used for the title of Errol Morris's 1988 documentary film "The Thin Blue Line" about the murder of the Dallas Police officer Robert W. Wood. Judge Don Metcalfe, who presided over the trial of Randall Adams, states in the film that prosecutor "Doug Mulder's final argument was one I'd never heard before: about the 'thin blue line' of police that separate the public from anarchy." The judge admitted to being deeply moved by the prosecutor's words, though the trial resulted in a wrongful conviction and death sentence.


title: Thin blue line

text: According to a 2018 law review article, "thin blue line" also refers to an unwritten code of silence used to cover up police misconduct, also known as the blue wall of silence, a term dating back to 1978.


title: Thin blue line

text: The "Thin Blue Line" flag is all black, bearing a single horizontal blue stripe across its center. Variations of the flag, often using various national flags rendered in black and white with a blue line through the center, are seen below. The "Blue Lives Matter" movement was created in December 2014, after the homicides of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in Brooklyn, New York in the wake of the homicides of Eric Garner and Michael Brown Jr earlier that year and in the context of the greater Black Lives Matter movement.


title: Thin blue line

text: The skull emblem of the Punisher comics character has become popular within the Blue Lives Matter movement, with many companies producing decals, stickers, and T-shirts featuring the Punisher emblem colored with or alongside the thin blue line. The creator of the Punisher, Gerry Conway, has criticized this usage, saying that police who use the symbol "are embracing an outlaw mentality" and "it's as offensive as putting a Confederate flag on a government building". Conway has also responded by trying to "reclaim the logo" by selling t-shirts adorned with the Punisher logo and Black Lives Matter, with sales going directly to Black Lives Matter-related charities.


title: Thin blue line

text: Variations representing professions other than law enforcement exist, such as the "thin red line" flag, representing firefighters.


title: Thin blue line

text: Critics argue that the "thin blue line" represents an "us versus them" mindset that heightens tensions between officers and citizens and negatively influences police-community interactions by setting police apart from society at large. Many groups view it as a symbol of opposition to the racial justice movement. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has stated that it often encounters Thin Blue Line and 'back the blue' symbols on social media pages used by hate groups. In the USA, white supremacists were documented carrying Thin Blue Line flags alongside the Confederate battle flag and Nazi flags at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.


title: Thin blue line

text: In recent years the use and display of the Thin Blue Line symbol has attracted controversy in several communities.


title: Thin blue line

text: Since 2015, several jurisdictions have issued injunctions against the use of Thin Blue Line imagery on police uniforms or in other official capacities by emergency services.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston ( ) is a coastal resort city and port off the Southeast Texas coast on Galveston Island and Pelican Island in the U.S. state of Texas. The community of , with a population of 47,743 in 2010, is the county seat of surrounding Galveston County and second-largest municipality in the county. It is also within the Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land metropolitan area at its southern end on the northwestern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston, or Galvez' town, was named after 18th-century Spanish military and political leader Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez (1746–1786), who was born in Macharaviaya, Málaga, in the Kingdom of Spain. Galveston's first European settlements on the Galveston Island were built around 1816 by French pirate Louis-Michel Aury to help the fledgling empire of Mexico fight for independence from Spain, along with other colonies in the Western Hemisphere of the Americas in Central and South America in the 1810s and 1820s. The Port of Galveston was established in 1825 by the Congress of Mexico following its independence from Spain. The city was the main port for the fledgling Texas Navy during the Texas Revolution of 1836, and later served temporarily as the new national capital of the Republic of Texas. In 1865, General Gordon Granger arrived at Ashton Villa and announced to some of the last enslaved African Americans that slavery was no longer legal. This event is commemorated annually on June 19, the federal holiday of Juneteenth.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: During the 19th century, Galveston became a major U.S. commercial center and one of the largest ports in the United States. It was, for a time, Texas' largest city, known as the "Queen City of the Gulf". It was devastated by the unexpected Galveston Hurricane of 1900, whose effects included massive flooding and a storm surge which nearly wiped out the town. The natural disaster on the exposed barrier island is still ranked today as the deadliest in United States history, with an estimated death toll between 6,000 and 12,000 people. The city subsequently reemerged during the Prohibition era of 1919–1933 as a leading tourist hub and a center of illegal gambling, nicknamed the Free State of Galveston until this era ended in the 1950s with subsequent other economic and social development.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Much of Galveston's economy is centered in the tourism, health care, shipping, and financial industries. The University of Texas Medical Branch campus with an enrollment of more than 2,500 students is a major economic force of the city. Galveston is home to six historic districts containing one of the largest historically significant collections of 19th-century buildings in the U.S., with over 60 structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places, maintained by the National Park Service in the United States Department of the Interior.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Indigenous inhabitants of Galveston Island called the island "Auia". Though there is no certainty regarding their route and their landings, Cabeza de Vaca and his crew were shipwrecked at a place he called "Isla de Malhado" in November 1528. This could have referred to Galveston Island or San Luis Island.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: During his charting of the Gulf Coast in 1785, the Spanish explorer José de Evia labeled the water features surrounding the island "Bd. de Galvestown" and "Bahia de Galvestowm" [sic]. He was working under the orders of Bernardo de Gálvez. In his early chart, he calls the western end of the island "Isla de San Luis" and the eastern end "Pt. de Culebras". Evia did not label the island itself on his map of 1799. Just five years later Alexander von Humboldt borrowed the place names Isla de San Luis, Pte. De Culebras, and Bahia de Galveston. Stephen F. Austin followed his predecessors in the use of "San Luis Island", but introduced "Galveston" to refer to the little village at the east end of the island. Evidence of the name Galveston Island appears on the 1833 David H. Burr.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The island's first permanent European settlements were constructed around 1816 by the pirate Louis-Michel Aury to support Mexico's rebellion against Spain. In 1817, Aury returned from an unsuccessful raid against Spain to find Galveston occupied by the pirate Jean Lafitte. Lafitte organized Galveston into a pirate "kingdom" he called "Campeche", anointing himself the island's "head of government". Lafitte remained in Galveston until 1821, when the United States Navy forced him and his raiders off the island.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In 1825 the Congress of Mexico established the Port of Galveston and in 1830 erected a customs house. Galveston served as the capital of the Republic of Texas when in 1836 the interim president David G. Burnet relocated his government there. In 1836, the French-Canadian Michel Branamour Menard and several associates purchased of land for $50,000 to found the town that would become the modern city of Galveston. As Anglo-Americans migrated to the city, they brought along or purchased enslaved African-Americans, some of whom worked domestically or on the waterfront, including on riverboats.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In 1839, the City of Galveston adopted a charter and was incorporated by the Congress of the Republic of Texas. The city was by then a burgeoning port of entry and attracted many new residents in the 1840s and later among the flood of German immigrants to Texas, including Jewish merchants. Together with ethnic Mexican residents, these groups tended to oppose slavery, support the Union during the Civil War, and join the Republican Party after the war.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: During this expansion, the city had many "firsts" in the state, with the founding of institutions and adoption of inventions: post office (1836), naval base (1836), Texas chapter of a Masonic order (1840); cotton compress (1842), Catholic parochial school (Ursuline Academy) (1847), insurance company (1854), and gas lights (1856).


title: Galveston, Texas

text: During the American Civil War, Confederate forces under Major General John B. Magruder attacked and expelled occupying Union troops from the city in January 1863 in the Battle of Galveston. On June 19, 1865, two months after the end of the war and almost three years after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, General Gordon Granger of the Union Army informed the enslaved people of Texas that they were now free. This news was transmitted via General Order No. 3, an event now commemorated on the federal holiday of Juneteenth.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In 1867 Galveston suffered a yellow fever epidemic; about 1800 people died in the city. These occurred in waterfront and river cities throughout the 19th century, as did cholera epidemics.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city's progress continued through the Reconstruction era with numerous "firsts": construction of the opera house (1870), and orphanage (1876), and installation of telephone lines (1878) and electric lights (1883). Having attracted freedmen from rural areas, in 1870 the city had a black population that totaled 3,000, made up mostly of former slaves but also by persons who were free men of color and educated before the war. Blacks comprised nearly 25% of the city's population of 13,818 that year.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: During the post–Civil War period, leaders such as George T. Ruby and Norris Wright Cuney, who headed the Texas Republican Party and promoted civil rights for freedmen, helped to dramatically improve educational and employment opportunities for blacks in Galveston and in Texas. Cuney established his own business of stevedores and a union of black dockworkers to break the white monopoly on dock jobs. Galveston was a cosmopolitan city and one of the more successful during Reconstruction; the Freedmen's Bureau was headquartered here. German families sheltered teachers from the North, and hundreds of freedmen were taught to read. Its business community promoted progress, and immigrants stayed after arriving at this port of entry.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: By the end of the 19th century, the city of Galveston had a population of 37,000. Its position on the natural harbor of Galveston Bay along the Gulf of Mexico made it the center of trade in Texas. It was one of the nation's largest cotton ports, in competition with New Orleans. Throughout the 19th century, the port city of Galveston grew rapidly and the Strand was considered the region's primary business center. For a time, the Strand was known as the "Wall Street of the South". In the late 1890s, the government constructed Fort Crockett defenses and coastal artillery batteries in Galveston and along the Bolivar Roads. In February 1897, the (nicknamed Old Hoodoo), the first commissioned battleship of the United States Navy, visited Galveston. During the festivities, the ship's officers were presented with a $5,000 silver service, adorned with various Texas motifs, as a gift from the state's citizens.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: On September 8, 1900, the island was struck by a devastating hurricane. This event holds the record as the United States' deadliest natural disaster. The city was devastated, and an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people on the island were killed. Following the storm, a long, high seawall was built to protect the city from floods and hurricane storm surges. A team of engineers including Henry Martyn Robert (Robert's Rules of Order) designed the plan to raise much of the existing city to a sufficient elevation behind a seawall so that confidence in the city could be maintained.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city developed the city commission form of city government, known as the "Galveston Plan", to help expedite recovery.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Despite attempts to draw investment to the city after the hurricane, Galveston never returned to its levels of national importance or prosperity. Development was also hindered by the construction of the Houston Ship Channel, which brought the Port of Houston into competition with the natural harbor of the Port of Galveston for sea traffic. Finally, the Seawall itself created an insurmountable problem: passive erosion resulting in the gradual disappearance of the once-wide beach and the resort business with it. "Within twenty years, the city had lost one hundred yards of sand. People who once watched auto racing on a wide beach were left with a narrow strip of sand at low tide and a gloomy vista of waves on rocks when the tide was high."


title: Galveston, Texas

text: To further her recovery, and rebuild her population, Galveston actively solicited immigration. Through the efforts of Rabbi Henry Cohen and Congregation B'nai Israel, Galveston became the focus of an immigration plan called the Galveston Movement that, between 1907 and 1914, diverted roughly 10,000 Eastern European Jewish immigrants from the usual destinations of the crowded cities of the Northeastern United States. Additionally numerous other immigrant groups, including Greeks, Italians and Russian Jews, came to the city during this period. This immigration trend substantially altered the ethnic makeup of the island, as well as many other areas of Texas and the western U.S.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Though the storm stalled economic development and the city of Houston developed as the region's principal metropolis, Galveston economic leaders recognized the need to diversify from the traditional port-related industries. In 1905 William Lewis Moody, Jr. and Isaac H. Kempner, members of two of Galveston's leading families founded the American National Insurance Company. Two years later, Moody established the City National Bank, which would become the Moody National Bank.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: During the 1920s and 1930s, the city re-emerged as a major tourist destination. Under the influence of Sam Maceo and Rosario Maceo, the city exploited the prohibition of liquor and gambling in clubs like the Balinese Room, which offered entertainment to wealthy Houstonians and other out-of-towners. Combined with prostitution, which had existed in the city since the Civil War, Galveston became known as the "sin city" of the Gulf. Galvestonians accepted and supported the illegal activities, often referring to their island as the "Free State of Galveston". The island had entered what would later become known as the "open era".


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The 1930s and 1940s brought much change to the Island City. During World War II, the Galveston Municipal Airport, predecessor to Scholes International Airport, was re-designated a U.S. Army Air Corps base and named "Galveston Army Air Field". In January 1943, Galveston Army Air Field was officially activated with the 46th Bombardment Group serving an anti-submarine role in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1942, William Lewis Moody, Jr., along with his wife Libbie Shearn Rice Moody, established the Moody Foundation, to benefit "present and future generations of Texans". The foundation, one of the largest in the United States, would play a prominent role in Galveston during later decades, helping to fund numerous civic and health-oriented programs.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The end of the war drastically reduced military investment in the island. Increasing enforcement of gambling laws and the growth of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a competitive center of gambling and entertainment put pressure on the gaming industry on the island. Finally in 1957, Texas Attorney General Will Wilson and the Texas Rangers began a massive campaign of raids that disrupted gambling and prostitution in the city. As these vice industries crashed, so did tourism, taking the rest of the Galveston economy with it. Neither the economy nor the culture of the city was the same afterward.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In 1947, buildings in the city were damaged when a ship carrying 2,200 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded at the nearby Port of Texas City, in what became known as the Texas City disaster.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The island's economy began a long stagnation. Many businesses relocated off the island during this period, but health care, insurance, and financial industries continue to be strong contributors to the economy. By 1959, the city of Houston had long outpaced Galveston in population and economic growth. Beginning in 1957, the Galveston Historical Foundation began its efforts to preserve historic buildings. The 1966 book "The Galveston That Was" helped encourage the preservation movement. Restoration efforts financed by motivated investors, notably Houston businessman George P. Mitchell, gradually developed the Strand Historic District and reinvented other areas. A new, family-oriented tourism emerged in the city over many years.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In September 1961, Hurricane Carla struck the city, generating an F4 tornado that killed eight and injured 200.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: With the 1960s came the expansion of higher education in Galveston. Already home to the University of Texas Medical Branch, the city got a boost in 1962 with the creation of the Texas Maritime Academy, predecessor of Texas A&M University at Galveston; and by 1967, a community college, Galveston College, had been established.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In the 2000s, property values rose after expensive projects were completed, and demand for second homes by the wealthy increased. It has made it difficult for middle-class workers to find affordable housing on the island.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Hurricane Ike made landfall on Galveston Island in the early morning of September 13, 2008, as a category-2 hurricane with winds of 110 miles per hour. Damage was extensive to buildings along the seawall.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: After the storm, the island was rebuilt with investments in tourism and shipping, and continued emphasis on higher education and health care, notably the addition of the Galveston Island Historic Pleasure Pier and the replacement of the bascule-type drawbridge on the railroad causeway with a vertical-lift-type drawbridge to allow heavier freight.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city of Galveston is situated on Galveston Island, a barrier island off the Texas Gulf coast near the mainland coast. Made up of mostly sand-sized particles and smaller amounts of finer mud sediments and larger gravel-sized sediments, the island is unstable, affected by water and weather, and can shift its boundaries through erosion.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city is about southeast of downtown Houston. The island is oriented generally northeast-southwest, with the Gulf of Mexico on the east and south, West Bay on the west, and Galveston Bay on the north. The island's main access point from the mainland is the Interstate Highway 45 causeway that crosses West Bay on the island's northeast side.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: A deepwater channel connects Galveston's harbor with the Gulf and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of , of which are land and , or 80.31%, are water. The island is southeast of Houston.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The western portion of Galveston is referred to as the "West End". Communities in eastern Galveston include Lake Madeline, Offats Bayou, Central City, Fort Crockett, Bayou Shore, Lasker Park, Carver Park, Kempner Park, Old City/Central Business District, San Jacinto, East End, and Lindale. As of 2009 many residents of the west end use golf carts as transportation to take them to and from residential houses, the Galveston Island Country Club, and stores. In 2009, Chief of Police Charles Wiley said he believed golf carts should be prohibited outside golf courses, and West End residents campaigned against any ban on their use.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In 2011 Rice University released a study, "Atlas of Sustainable Strategies for Galveston Island", which argued the West End of Galveston was quickly eroding and the city should reduce construction and/or population in that area. It recommended against any rebuilding of the West End in the event of damage from another hurricane.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston is home to six historic districts with over 60 structures listed representing architectural significance in the National Register of Historic Places. The Silk Stocking National Historic District, between Broadway and Seawall Boulevard and bounded by Ave. K, 23rd St., Ave. P, and 26th St., contains a collection of historic homes constructed from the Civil War through World War II. The East End Historic District on both sides of Broadway and Market Streets, contains 463 buildings. Other historic districts include Cedar Lawn, Denver Court and Fort Travis.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Strand National Historic Landmark District is a National Historic Landmark District of mainly Victorian era buildings that have been adapted for use as restaurants, antique stores, historical exhibits, museums and art galleries. The area is a major tourist attraction for the island city. It is the center for two very popular seasonal festivals. It is widely considered the island's shopping and entertainment center. Today, "the Strand" is generally used to refer to the five-block business district between 20th and 25th streets in downtown Galveston, near the city's wharf.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Since the early 20th century, Galveston has been popularly known as the 'Oleander City' because of a long history of cultivating Nerium oleander, a subtropical evergreen shrub which thrives on the island. Oleanders are a defining feature of the city; when flowering (between April and October) they add masses of color to local gardens, parks, and streets. Thousands were planted in the recovery following the Hurricane of 1900 and Galvestonians continue to treasure the plant for its low water needs, tolerance of heat, salt spray and sandy soils. This makes them especially resistant to the after-effects of hurricanes and tropical storms. Galveston is reputed to have the most diverse range of Oleander cultivars in the world, numbering over 100, with many varieties developed in the city and named after prominent Galvestonians. In 2005 the month of May was declared "Oleander Month" by the City of Galveston and there are also Oleander-themed tours of the city exploring the history of the plant on the island. Since 1967 the International Oleander Society has operated in Galveston, which promotes the cultivation of the plant, organizes an Oleander festival every spring and maintains a commemorative Oleander garden in the city.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston contains a large and historically significant collection of 19th-century buildings in the United States. Galveston's architectural preservation and revitalization efforts over several decades have earned national recognition.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Located in the Strand District, the Grand 1894 Opera House is a restored historic Romanesque Revival style Opera House that is currently operated as a not-for-profit performing arts theater. The Bishop's Palace, also known as Gresham's Castle, is an ornate Victorian house located on Broadway and 14th Street in the East End Historic District of Galveston, Texas. The American Institute of Architects listed Bishop's Palace as one of the 100 most significant buildings in the United States, and the Library of Congress has classified it as one of the fourteen most representative Victorian structures in the nation.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Galvez Hotel is a historic hotel that opened in 1911. The building was named the Galvez, honoring Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez, for whom the city was named. The hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 4, 1979. The Michel B. Menard House, built in 1838 and the oldest surviving structure in Galveston, is designed in the Greek revival style. In 1880, the house was bought by Edwin N. Ketchum who was police chief of the city during the 1900 Storm. The Ketchum family owned the home until the 1970s. Ashton Villa, a red-brick Victorian Italianate home, was constructed in 1859 by James Moreau Brown. One of the first brick structures in Texas, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a recorded Texas Historic Landmark. The structure is also the site of what was to become the holiday known as Juneteenth, where on June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, standing on its balcony, read the contents of "General Order No. 3", thereby emancipating all slaves in the state of Texas.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: St. Joseph's Church was built by German immigrants in 1859–1860 and is the oldest wooden church building in Galveston and the oldest German Catholic Church in Texas. The church was dedicated in April 1860, to St. Joseph, the patron saint of laborers. The building is a wooden gothic revival structure, rectangular with a square bell tower with trefoil window. The U.S. Custom House began construction in 1860 and was completed in 1861. The Confederate Army occupied the building during the American Civil War, In 1865, the Custom House was the site of the ceremony officially ending the Civil War.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston's modern architecture include the American National Insurance Company Tower (One Moody Plaza), San Luis Resort South and North Towers, The Breakers Condominiums, The Galvestonian Resort and Condos, One Shearn Moody Plaza, US National Bank Building, the Rainforest Pyramid at Moody Gardens, John Sealy Hospital Towers at UTMB and Medical Arts Building (also known as Two Moody Plaza).


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston's climate is classified as humid subtropical ("Cfa" in ), and is part of USDA Plant hardiness zone 9b. Prevailing winds from the south and southeast bring moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Summer temperatures regularly exceed and the area's humidity drives the heat index even higher, while nighttime lows average around . Winters in the area are temperate with typical January highs above and lows near . Snowfall is generally rare; however, of snow fell in February 1895, making the 1894–95 winter the snowiest on record. Annual rainfall averages well over a year with some areas typically receiving over . Temperatures reaching or are quite rare, having last occurred on December 23, 1989, and June 25, 2012, respectively. Record temperatures range from on February 12, 1899, up to on September 5, 2000; the record cold maximum is on February 7, 1895, and again on the date of the all-time low, while, conversely, the record warm minimum is set on August 31September 3, 2020. On average, the warmest night is at , seldom straying far from averages.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Hurricanes are an ever-present threat during the summer and fall season, which puts Galveston in Coastal Windstorm Area. Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula are generally at the greatest risk among the communities near the Galveston Bay. However, though the island and peninsula provide some shielding, the bay shoreline still faces significant danger from storm surge. Talks of building a coastal storm barrier with a mix of federal and state funding to protect Galveston and Houston have been ongoing for years.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: As of the 2020 United States census, there were 53,695 people, 21,683 households, and 11,368 families residing in the city.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the city of Galveston had a population of 50,446 in 2019, a 5.7% increase from the 2010 census. The racial makeup of Galveston was 46.8% non-Hispanic white, 18.3% Black or African American, 0.5% American Indian or Alaska Native, 3.2% Asian, 2.5% from two or more races, and 30.2% Hispanic or Latino of any race. There were an estimated 20,920 households in 2018 with an average of 2.20 persons per household. Galveston had an owner-occupied housing rate of 43.6% and the median value of an owner-occupied dwelling unit was $170,100. The city had a median gross rent of $936. From 2014-2018 the city had a median household income of $44,902 and per capita income of $29,733. Roughly 20.8% of the population lived at or below the poverty line.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: At the census of 2010, there were 47,743 people, 19,943 households, and 10,779 families residing in the city. d, the city had a total population of 50,550. The population density was 1,159 people per square mile (447/km). There were 32,368 dwelling units at an average density of 786 per square mile (303/km). The racial makeup of the city was 62.5% White, 19.2% Black or African American, 0.9% Native American, 3.2% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander, 11.0% from other races, and 3.3% from two or more races. 31.3% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. There were 19,943 households, out of which 20.7% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 34.4% were married couples living together, 14.7% had a female householder with no husband present, and 46.0% were non-families. 36.7% of all households were made up of individuals, and 10.5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.27 and the average family size was 3.02.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In the city, the population was 23.4% under the age of 13, 11.3% from 13 to 24, 29.8% from 25 to 44, 21.8% from 45 to 88, and 13.7% who were 89 years of age or older in 2010. The median age was 36 years. For every 100 females, there were 93.4 males. For every 100 females age 13 and over, there were 90.4 males. The median income for a household in the city was $28,895, and the median income for a family was $35,049. Males had a median income of $30,150 versus $26,030 for females. The per capita income for the city was $18,275. About 17.8% of families and 22.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 32.1% of those under age 13 and 14.2% of those age 89 or over.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Port of Galveston, also called Galveston Wharves, began as a trading post in 1825. Today, the port has grown to of port facilities. The port is located on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, on the north side of Galveston Island, with some facilities on Pelican Island. The port has facilities to handle all types of cargo including containers, dry and liquid bulk, breakbulk, Roll-on/roll-off, refrigerated cargo and project cargoes.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The port also serves as a passenger cruise ship terminal for cruise ships operating in the Caribbean. The terminal was home port to two Carnival Cruise Lines vessels, the "Carnival Conquest" and the "Carnival Ecstasy". In November 2011 the company made Galveston home port to its 3,960-passenger mega-ships "Carnival Magic" and "Carnival Triumph" as well. In 2015, "Carnival Freedom" relocated to Galveston, sailing seven-day cruises. Carnival replaced "Carnival Magic" and "Carnival Triumph" in the first half of 2016 with "Carnival Breeze" and "Carnival Liberty", respectively, but replaced "Liberty" with "Carnival Valor" later in the year due to mechanical issues. "Carnival Breeze" and "Carnival Freedom" sail seven-day Caribbean cruises, and "Carnival Valor" sails four- and five-day Caribbean cruises from Galveston. Carnival planned on replacing "Breeze" with "Carnival Vista" in 2018, and "Valor" with "Carnival Dream" in 2019. Galveston is the home port to Royal Caribbean International's, MS "Liberty of the Seas", which is the largest cruise ship ever based here and one of the largest ships in the world. In September 2012 Disney Cruise Line's "Disney Magic" also became based in Galveston, offering four-, six-, seven-, and eight-day cruises to the Caribbean and the Bahamas.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: American National Insurance Company, one of the largest life insurance companies in the United States, is based in Galveston. The company and its subsidiaries operate in all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa. Through its subsidiary, American National de México, Compañía de Seguros de Vida, it provides products and services in Mexico. Moody National Bank, with headquarters in downtown Galveston, is one of the largest privately owned Texas-based banks. Its trust department, established in 1927, administers over 12 billion dollars in assets, one of the largest in the state. In addition, the regional headquarters of Iowa-based United Fire & Casualty Company are located in the city.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In the late 1800s Galveston was known as the "Playground of the South" Today, it still retains a shared claim to the title among major cities along the Gulf Coast states. Galveston is a popular tourist destination which in 2007 brought $808 million to the local economy and attracted 5.4 million visitors. The city features an array of lodging options, including hotels such as the historic Hotel Galvez and Tremont House, vintage bed and breakfast inns, and beachfront condominiums.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city's tourist attractions include the Galveston Island Historic Pleasure Pier, Galveston Schlitterbahn waterpark, Moody Gardens botanical park, the Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig & Museum, the Lone Star Flight Museum, Galveston Railroad Museum, a downtown neighborhood of historic buildings known as The Strand, many historical museums and mansions, and miles of beach front from the East End's Porretto Beach, Stewart Beach to the West End pocket parks. Previously Galveston had a aquarium theme park called Sea-Arama Marineworld, which opened in 1965, closed in January 1990, and was demolished in 2006.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Strand plays host to a yearly Mardi Gras festival, Galveston Island Jazz & Blues Festival and a Victorian-themed Christmas festival called Dickens on the Strand (honoring the works of novelist Charles Dickens, especially "A Christmas Carol") in early December. Galveston is home to several historic ships: the tall ship "Elissa" (the official Tall Ship of Texas) at the Texas Seaport Museum and USS "Cavalla" and , both berthed at Seawolf Park on nearby Pelican Island. Galveston is ranked the number one cruise port on the Gulf Coast and fourth in the United States.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Galveston Summer Musicals was a professional summer stock theater company performing at Galveston's Moody Gardens. Prior to 2004, they performed at the Mary Moody Northen Amphitheater in West Galveston Island.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Incorporated in 1986, Galveston Arts Center (GAC) is a non-profit, non-collecting arts organization. The center exhibits contemporary art, often by Texas-based artists, and offers educational and outreach programs. Notably, GAC organizes and produces Galveston ArtWalk. Museum entry is free to the public.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston Arts Center is located in the historic 1878 First National Bank Building on the Strand. This Italianate-style 1900 Storm survivor was extensively damaged during Hurricane Ike in 2008, forcing the center to temporarily relocate to a nearby facility on Market Street. After a lengthy fundraising campaign, the total restoration of the original building was completed and Galveston Arts Center returned to the Strand in 2015.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: ArtWalk takes place approximately every six weeks on Saturday evenings throughout the year. ArtWalk is organized by Galveston Arts Center, which releases an ArtWalk brochure featuring a map of participating venues as well as descriptions of shows and exhibits. Venues include GAC, Galveston Artist Residency and artist's studios and galleries. Additionally, art is shown in "other walls"—for example MOD Coffeehouse or Mosquito Cafe—or outdoors at Art Market on Market Street. Musicians perform outdoors and at venues such as the Proletariat Gallery & Public House or Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe. While most ArtWalk events are concentrated downtown, there are a number or participants elsewhere on the island.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston is home to the Galveston Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble of amateur and professional musicians formed in 1979 under the direction of Richard W. Pickar, Musical Director-Conductor.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Galveston Ballet is a regional pre-professional ballet company and academy serving Galveston county. The company presents one full-length classical ballet in the spring of each year and one mixed repertory program in the fall, both presented at the Grand 1894 Opera House.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston Artist Residency (GAR) grants studio space, living space and a stipend to three visual artists each year. Resident artists work in a variety of mediums and exhibit their work in the GAR Gallery and Courtyards. Located in renovated industrial structures on the west side of downtown, GAR also hosts performances and other public events.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The National Hotel Artist Lofts (NHAL) is an Artspace-developed property featuring twenty-seven live/work units designated as affordable housing for artists. The project brought new life to the historic E.S. Levy Building, which was left abandoned for twenty years. Originally built as the Tremont Opera House in 1870, the structure was extensively renovated to serve various functions, from offices and stores to the National Hotel. The building also housed the U.S. National Weather Bureau's Galveston office under Isaac Cline during the 1900 Storm.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Under Property Manager/Creative Director Becky Major, the unused retail space in the front of the building found a new purpose as a DIY art and music venue, despite its gutted and undeveloped state. In May 2015, the newly renovated space reopened as the Proletariat Gallery & Public House. This bar and gallery provides a common area for NHAL and neighborhood residents and a cultural hub for the broader community. Visual art, events and live music are regularly hosted in the space.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: After the hurricane of 1900, the city originated the city commission form of city government (which became known as the "Galveston Plan"). The city has since adopted the council-manager form of government. Galveston's city council serves as the city's legislative branch, while the city manager works as the chief executive officer, and the municipal court system serves as the city's judicial branch.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city council and mayor promote ordinances to establish municipal policies. The Galveston City Council consists of six elected positions, each derived from a specified electoral district. Each city council member is elected to a two-year term, while the mayor is elected to a two-year term. The city council appoints the city manager, the city secretary, the city auditor, the city attorney, and the municipal judge. The city's Tax Collector is determined by the city council and is outsourced to Galveston County. The city manager hires employees, promotes development, presents and administers the budget, and implements city council policies. Craig Brown is Mayor.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston is the seat and second-largest city (after League City, Texas) of Galveston County in population. The Galveston County Justice Center, which houses all the county's judicial functions as well as jail, is located on 59th street. The Galveston County Administrative Courthouse, the seat of civil and administrative functions, is located near the city's downtown. Galveston is within the County Precinct 1; Patrick Doyle serves as the Commissioner of Precinct 1.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Galveston County Sheriff's Office operates its law enforcement headquarters and jail from the Justice Center. The Galveston County Department of Parks and Senior Services operates the Galveston Community Center. Galveston is located in District 23 of the Texas House of Representatives. , Mayes Middleton represents the district. Most of Galveston is within District 17 of the Texas Senate; Joan Huffman represents the district. A portion of Galveston is within District 11 of the Texas Senate; Larry Taylor represents the district. Galveston is in Texas's 14th congressional district and is represented by Republican Randy Weber .


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Established in 1891 with one building and fewer than 50 students, today the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) campus has grown to more than 70 buildings and an enrollment of more than 2,500 students. The campus includes schools of medicine, nursing, allied health professions, and a graduate school of biomedical sciences, as well as three institutes for advanced studies & medical humanities, a major medical library, seven hospitals, a network of clinics that provide a full range of primary and specialized medical care, and numerous research facilities.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston is home to two post-secondary institutions offering traditional degrees in higher education. Galveston College, a junior college that opened in 1967, and Texas A&M University at Galveston, an ocean-oriented branch campus of Texas A&M University.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city of Galveston is served by Galveston Independent School District, which includes six elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school, Ball High School. There is also one magnet middle school, Austin Middle School, serving grades 5 through 8. Galveston has several state-funded charter schools not affiliated with local school districts, including kindergarten through 8th grade Ambassadors Preparatory Academy and pre-kindergarten through 8th Grade Odyssey Academy. In addition opened KIPP Coastal Village in Galveston under the auspices of GISD.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Several private schools exist in Galveston. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston operates two Roman Catholic private schools, including Holy Family Catholic School (K through 8th) and O'Connell College Preparatory School (9-12). Other private schools include Satori Elementary School, Trinity Episcopal School, Seaside Christian Academy, and Heritage Christian Academy.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The "Daily News" (previously "The Galveston County Daily News") founded in 1842, is the city's primary newspaper and the oldest continuously printed newspaper in Texas. It currently serves as the newspaper of record for the city and the "Texas City Post" serves as the newspaper of record for the county. Radio station KGBC, on air from 1947 to 2010, has previously served as a local media outlet. Television station KHOU signed on the air as KGUL-TV on March 23, 1953. Originally licensed in Galveston, KGUL was the second television station to launch in the Houston area after KPRC-TV. One of the original investors in the station was actor James Stewart, along with a small group of other Galveston investors. In June 1959, KGUL changed its call sign to KHOU and moved their main office to Houston. The local hip hop name for Galveston is "G-town".


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston is the home of several of the largest teaching hospitals in the state, located on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Prior to Hurricane Ike, the University employed more than 12,000 people. Its significant growth in the 1970s and 1980s was attributable to a uniquely qualified management and medical faculty including: Mr. John Thompson; Dr. William James McGanity, Dr. William Levin, Dr. David Daeschner and many more.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Ike severely damaged the 550-bed John Sealy Hospital causing the University of Texas System Board of Regents to cut nearly one-third of the hospital staff. Since the storm, the regents have committed to spending $713 million to restore the campus, construct new medical towers, and return John Sealy Hospital to its 550-bed pre-storm capacity.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: In 2011, the UT Board of Regents approved the construction of a new 13 story hospital that will be located next to John Sealy Hospital. Construction will begin in the fall of 2011, with the demolition of the old Jennie Sealy and Shriners hospitals, and continue until completion in 2016. The facility will have 250 room, 20 operating suites and 54 intensive care beds. When the new hospital is complete, along with the renovations at John Sealy, both complexes will have around 600 beds.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The university reopened their Level I Trauma Center on August 1, 2009, which had been closed for eleven months after the hurricane and, , had reopened 370 hospital beds.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city is also home to a 30-bed acute burns hospital for children, the Shriners Burns Hospital at Galveston. The Galveston hospital is one of only four in the chain of 22 non-profit Shriners hospitals, that provides acute burns care. Although the Galveston Hospital was damaged by Hurricane Ike, the Shriners national convention held in July 2009 voted to repair and reopen the hospital.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Galveston Fire Department provides fire protection services through six fire stations and 17 pieces of apparatus. The Galveston Police Department has provided the city's police protection for more than 165 years. Over 170 authorized officers serve in three divisions.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city is served by the Rosenberg Library, successor to the Galveston Mercantile Library, which was founded in 1871. It is the oldest public library in the State of Texas. The library also serves as headquarters of the Galveston County Library System, and its librarian also functions as the Galveston County Librarian.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Galveston Division of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, the first federal court in Texas, is based in Galveston and has jurisdiction over the counties of Galveston, Brazoria, Chambers and Matagorda. It is housed in the United States Post Office, Customs House and Court House federal building in downtown Galveston. The United States Postal Service operates several post offices in Galveston, including the Galveston Main Post Office and the Bob Lyons Post Office Station. In addition the post office has a contract postal unit at the Medical Branch Unit on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch and the West Galveston Contract Postal Unit, located on the west end of Galveston Island in the beachside community of Jamaica Beach.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston is home to several historic ships: the tall ship "Elissa" (the official Tall Ship of Texas) at the Texas Seaport Museum and USS "Cavalla" and USS "Stewart", both berthed at Seawolf Park on nearby Pelican Island. Galveston is ranked the number one cruise port on the Gulf Coast and fourth in the United States.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Scholes International Airport at Galveston is a two-runway airport in Galveston; the airport is primarily used for general aviation, offshore energy transportation, and some limited military operations. The nearest commercial airline service for the city is operated out of Houston through William P. Hobby Airport and George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The University of Texas Medical Branch has two heliports, one for Ewing Hall and one for its emergency room.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The Galveston Railway, originally established and named in 1854 as the Galveston Wharf and Cotton Press Company, is a Class III terminal switching railroad that primarily serves the transportation of cargo to and from the Port of Galveston. The railway operates of yard track at Galveston, over a facility. The Galveston Railroad today owned Rail Link Inc. interchanges with the Union Pacific Railroad Company and BNSF Railway Company on Galveston Island. The two class one Railroads reach Galveston by way of a new vertical lift railroad causeway bridge that crosses Galveston Bay next to the Interstate-45 bridge.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: The city last had direct intercity passenger train service in 1967 with the Santa Fe Railroad's "Texas Chief" from Chicago. Galveston is served by Amtrak Thruway Motorcoach service at Galveston Amtrak bus stop, with service to Houston for Amtrak's "Sunset Limited", continuing further north to Longview for Amtrak's "Texas Eagle".


title: Galveston, Texas

text: John D. Groesbeck surveyed and mapped the town in 1837 and 1838 on behalf of the Galveston City Company. A new Galveston resident most recently from New York City, he laid out the streets based on a gridiron, and named the east–west avenues according to letters of the alphabet, with Avenue A running along the back bay on the north side of the island. He assigned numbers to names of north–south streets, with First Street on the far eastern side of the grid, and the numbered street names increased as they progressed westward. The names of some of the avenues changed over the years. Most notably, Avenue B became known as The Strand, and Avenue J became known as Broadway, a major thoroughfare which runs from the Interstate-45 viaduct to Seawall Boulevard.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Interstate 45 has a southern terminus in Galveston and serves as a main artery to Galveston from mainland Galveston County and Houston. US Route 75 used to reach Galveston before it was decommissioned in 1987 from Dallas. Farm to Market Road 3005 (locally called Seawall Boulevard) connects Galveston to Brazoria County via the San Luis Pass-Vacek Toll Bridge. State Highway 87, known locally as Broadway Street, connects the island to the Bolivar Peninsula via the Bolivar Ferry. A project to construct the proposed Bolivar Bridge to link Galveston to Bolivar Peninsula was cancelled in 2007.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Island Transit, which operates the Galveston Island Trolley manages the city's public transportation services. Intercity bus service to Galveston was previously operated by Kerrville Bus Company; following the company's acquisition by Coach USA, service was operated by Megabus.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston was home to minor league baseball from 1888–1955. The Galveston White Caps (1950–1955), Galveston Buccaneers (1931–1937)


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston Sand Crabs (1889–1890, 1892, 1897–1899, 1907–1911, 1922–1924) Galveston Pirates (1912–1917, 1919–1921) and Galveston Giants (1888) all called Galveston home. Galveston was a member of the Big State League (1954–1955), Gulf Coast League (1950–1953) and Texas League (1888–1890, 1892, 1897–1899, 1907–1917, 1919–1924, 1931–1937). The teams played at Moody Stadium/White Cap Stadium (1931–1937, 1950–1955), Gulfview Park (1921–1924)/Pirate Field (1915–1920) and Beach Park (1888–1915).


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Galveston has been home to many important figures in Texas and U.S. history. During the island's earliest history it became the domain of Jean Lafitte, the famed pirate and American hero of the War of 1812. Richard Bache, Jr. who represented Galveston in the Senate of the Second Texas Legislature in 1847 and assisted in drawing up the Constitution of 1845 was another. He was also the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America and Deborah Read. In 1886, the African-American Galveston civil rights leader Norris Wright Cuney rose to become the head of the Texas Republican Party and one of the most important Southern black leaders of the century. The president of Georgia Tech Blake R. Van Leer also played an important role during the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Van Leer grew up in an orphanage on the Island. Noted portrait and landscape artist Verner Moore White moved from Galveston the day before the 1900 hurricane. While he survived, his studio and much of his portfolio were destroyed. A survivor of the hurricane was the Hollywood director King Vidor, who made his directing debut in 1913 with the film "Hurricane in Galveston". Later Jack Johnson, nicknamed the "Galveston Giant", became the first black world heavyweight boxing champion.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: During the first half of the 20th century, William L. Moody Jr. established a business empire, which includes American National Insurance Company, a major national insurer, and founded the Moody Foundation, one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States. Sam Maceo, a nationally known organized crime boss, with the help of his family, was largely responsible for making Galveston a major U.S. tourist destination from the 1920s to the 1940s. John H. Murphy, a Texas newspaperman for seventy-four years, was the longtime executive vice president of the Texas Daily Newspaper Association. Douglas Corrigan became one of the early transatlantic aviators, and was given the nickname "Wrong Way" for claiming to have mistakenly made the ocean crossing after being refused permission to make the flight. Grammy-award-winning singer-songwriter Barry White was born on the island and later moved to Los Angeles.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Cody Lynn Boyd, Texas singer-songwriter was raised as a child in Galveston, Texas until Hurricane Rita. He moved to the North Texas area after. A portion of his music has some influence from the ghost culture in Galveston, Texas.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: George P. Mitchell, pioneer of hydraulic fracturing technology and developer of The Woodlands, Texas, was born and raised in Galveston.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Anita Martini, pioneering female sports journalist who was the first woman allowed in a major league locker room for a post-game press conference, was born in Galveston. Surfer Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz was born in Galveston.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Professional baseball pitcher Sig Jakucki made Galveston his home after joining the Galveston Buccaneers in 1934. He is best remembered for defeating the New York Yankees in the final game of the 1944 MLB season, giving the St. Louis Browns their only pennant.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Terran Petteway, a basketball player in the Israeli Basketball Premier League, was born in Galveston.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: More recently Tilman J. Fertitta, part of the Maceo bloodline, established the Landry's Restaurants corporation, which owns numerous restaurants and entertainment venues in Texas and Nevada.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Gilbert Pena, former Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives from Pasadena, was born in Galveston in 1949 and lived there in early childhood.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel and was convicted in the US and sentenced to life in jail, was born in Galveston. The film and television actor Lee Patterson, a native of Vancouver, British Columbia, lived in Galveston and died there in 2007.


title: Galveston, Texas

text: Other notable people include Matt Carpenter of the New York Yankees, Mike Evans, wide receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 1998 Heisman Trophy runner-up and pro quarterback Michael Bishop, Pittsburgh Steelers great Casey Hampton, comedian Bill Engvall, actresses Valerie Perrine and Katherine Helmond, painter Ethel Fisher, Tina Knowles fashion designer and creator of House of Deréon, mother of Beyoncé and Solange Knowles, and Grammy award-winning R&B and Jazz legend Esther Phillips, born in Galveston in 1935


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Pierre Bourdieu (; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields (e.g. anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts). During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order is maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Building upon and criticizing the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky and Marcel Mauss among others, his research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and methods, and introduced such influential concepts as cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital (as opposed to traditional economic forms of capital), the cultural reproduction, the habitus, the field or location, and symbolic violence. Another notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his "Pascalian Meditations".


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu was a prolific author, producing hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English. His best-known book is "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste" (1979), in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning. The argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from quantitative surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, Bourdieu attempts to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual. The book would go on to be named "the sixth most important sociological work of the twentieth century" by the International Sociological Association (ISA).


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary post-industrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through formal education.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Pierre Bourdieu was born in Denguin (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), in southern France, to a postal worker and his wife. The household spoke Béarnese, a Gascon dialect. In 1962, Bourdieu married Marie-Claire Brizard, and the couple would go on to have three sons, Jérôme, Emmanuel, and Laurent.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu was educated at the Lycée Louis-Barthou in Pau before moving to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. From there he gained entrance to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), also in Paris, where he studied philosophy alongside Louis Althusser. After getting his agrégation, Bourdieu worked as a lycée teacher at Moulins for a year before his conscription into the French Army in 1955.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: His biographers write that he chose not to enter the Reserve Officer's College like many of his fellow ENS graduates as he wished to stay with people from his own modest social background. Deployed to Algeria in October 1955 during its war of independence from France, Bourdieu served in a unit guarding military installations before being transferred to clerical work.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: After his year-long military service, Bourdieu stayed on as a lecturer in Algiers. During the Algerian War in 1958–1962, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic research into the clash through a study of the Kabyle peoples of the Berbers, laying the groundwork for his anthropological reputation. The result was his first book, "Sociologie de l'Algérie" (1958; "The Sociology of Algeria"), which became an immediate success in France and was published in America in 1962. He later drew heavily on this fieldwork in his 1972 book "Outline of a Theory of Practice", a strong intervention into anthropological theory.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu routinely sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research and his work can be seen as sociology of culture or, as he described it, a "Theory of Practice". His contributions to sociology were both evidential and theoretical (i.e., calculated through both systems). His key terms would be habitus, "capital", and field.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: He extended the idea of capital to categories such as "social capital", "cultural capital", "financial capital", and "symbolic capital". For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional "social space"; a person is not defined only by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital he can articulate through social relations. That capital includes the value of social networks, which Bourdieu showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: In 1960, Bourdieu returned to the University of Paris before gaining a teaching position at the University of Lille, where he remained until 1964. From 1964 onwards Bourdieu held the position of Professor (Directeur d'études) in the VIe section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (the future École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), and from 1981 the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France (held before him by Raymond Aron and Maurice Halbwachs). In 1968, Bourdieu took over the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, founded by Aron, which he directed until his death.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: In 1975, with the research group he had formed at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, he launched the interdisciplinary journal "Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales", with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the "Médaille d'or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS). In 1996 he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California, Berkeley and in 2001 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Bourdieu died of cancer at the age of 71.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Much of Bourdieu's work observes the role of educational and cultural resources in the expression of agency. Bourdieu was in practice both influenced by and sympathetic to the Marxist identification of economic command as a principal component of power and agency within capitalist society.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu's anthropological work was dominated by social hierarchy reproduction analysis. Bourdieu criticized the importance given to economic factors in the analysis of social order and change. He stressed, instead, that the capacity of actors to impose their cultural reproductions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of dominant social structures. Symbolic violence is the self-interested capacity to ensure that the arbitrariness of the social order is either ignored, or argued as natural, thereby justifying the legitimacy of existing social structures. This concept plays an essential part in his sociological analysis, which emphasizes the importance of "practices" in the social world. Bourdieu was opposed to the intellectualist tradition and stressed that social domination and cultural reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the society. Bourdieu fiercely opposed "Rational Choice Theory" because he believed it was a misunderstanding of how social agents operate.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu's work is influenced by much of traditional anthropology and sociology which he undertook to synthesize into his own theory. From Max Weber he retained an emphasis on the domination of symbolic systems in social life, as well as the idea of social orders which would ultimately be transformed by Bourdieu from a sociology of religion into a theory of fields.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: From Marx he gained his understanding of 'society' as the ensemble of social relationships: "what exist in the social world are relations – not interactions between agents or intersubjective ties between individuals, but objective relations which exist 'independently of individual consciousness and will'." (grounded in the mode and conditions of economic production), and of the need to dialectically develop social theory from social practice. (Arnold Hauser earlier published the orthodox application of Marxist class theory to the fine arts in "The Social History of Art" (1951).)


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: From Émile Durkheim, through Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu inherited a certain structuralist interpretation of the tendency of social structures to reproduce themselves, based on the analysis of symbolic structures and forms of classification. However, Bourdieu critically diverged from Durkheim in emphasizing the role of the social "agent" in enacting, through the embodiment of social structures, symbolic orders. He furthermore emphasized that the reproduction of social structures does not operate according to a functionalist logic.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, through him, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl played an essential part in the formulation of Bourdieu's focus on the body, action, and practical dispositions (which found their primary manifestation in Bourdieu's theory of "habitus").


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu was also influenced by Wittgenstein (especially with regard to his work on rule-following) stating that "Wittgenstein is probably the philosopher who has helped me most at moments of difficulty. He's a kind of saviour for times of great intellectual distress". Bourdieu's work is built upon an attempt to transcend a series of oppositions which he thought characterized the social sciences (subjectivism/objectivism, micro/macro, freedom/determinism) of his time. His concepts of habitus, capital, and field were conceived with the intention of overcoming such oppositions.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: During the 1990s, Bourdieu became more and more involved in political debate, becoming one of the most important public faces of intellectual life in France. While a fierce critic of neoliberalism, Bourdieu was also critical of the "total intellectual" role played by Jean-Paul Sartre, and he dismissed Sartre's attempts to intervene in French politics as "irresponsible" and "opportunistic." Bourdieu saw sociology not as a form of "intellectual entertainment" but as a serious discipline of a scientific nature. There is an apparent contradiction between Bourdieu's earlier writings against using sociology for political activism and his later launch into the role of a public intellectual, with some highly "visible political statements." Although much of his early work stressed the importance of treating sociology as a strict scientific discipline,—"""" ()—his later career saw him enter the less academic world of political debate in France, raising the issue of whether the sociologist has political responsibilities extending to the public domain.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Although Bourdieu earlier faulted public intellectuals such as Sartre, he had strong political views which influenced his sociology from the beginning. By the time of his later work, his main concern had become the effect of globalisation and those who benefited least from it. His politics then became more overt and his role as public intellectual was born, from an "urgency to speak out against neoliberal discourse that had become so dominant within political debate."


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu developed a project to investigate the effects—particularly the harm—of neoliberal reforms in France. The most significant fruit of this project was the 1993 study "The Weight of the World", although his views are perhaps more candidly expressed in his articles. "The Weight of the World" represented a heavyweight scientific challenge to the dominant trends in French politics. Since it was the work of a team of sociologists, it also shows Bourdieu's collaborative character, indicating that he was still in 1993 reluctant to accept being singled out with the category of public intellectual.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Nevertheless, Bourdieu's activities as a critical sociologist prepared him for the public stage, fulfilling his "constructionist view of social life" as it relied upon the idea of social actors making change through collective struggles. His relationship with the media was improved through his very public action of organizing strikes and rallies that raised huge media interest in him and his many books became more popular through this new notoriety. One of the main differences between the critical sociologist and public intellectual is the ability to have a relationship with popular media resources outside the academic realm. It is notable that, in his later writings, Bourdieu sounded cautionary notes about such individuals, describing them as "like the Trojan Horse" for the unwanted elements they may bring to the academic world. Again Bourdieu seems wary of accepting the description 'public intellectual', worrying that it might be difficult to reconcile with science and scholarship. Research is needed on what conditions transform particular intellectuals into public intellectuals.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu developed a theory of the action, around the concept of "habitus", which exerted a considerable influence in the social sciences. This theory seeks to show that social agents develop strategies which are adapted to the structures of the social worlds that they inhabit. These strategies are unconscious and act on the level of a bodily logic.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: In Bourdieu's perspective, each relatively autonomous field of modern life (such as economy, politics, arts, journalism, bureaucracy, science or education), ultimately engenders a specific complex of social relations where the agents will engage their everyday practice. Through this practice, they develop a certain disposition for social action that is conditioned by their position on the field. This "disposition", combined with every other disposition the individual develops through their engagement with other fields operating within the social world, will eventually come to constitute a system of dispositions, i.e. "habitus": lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: "Habitus" is somewhat reminiscent of some preexisting sociological concepts, such as socialization, though it also differs from the more classic concepts in several key ways. Most notably, a central aspect of the habitus is its "embodiment": habitus does not only, or even primarily, function at the level of explicit, discursive consciousness. The internal structures become embodied and work in a deeper, practical and often pre-reflexive way. An illustrative example might be the 'muscle memory' cultivated in many areas of physical education. Consider the way we catch a ball—the complex geometric trajectories are not calculated; it is not an intellectual process. Although it is a skill that requires learning, it is more a physical than a mental process and has to be performed physically to be learned. In this sense, the concept has something in common with Anthony Giddens' concept of "practical consciousness".


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: The concept of "habitus" was inspired by Marcel Mauss's notion of body technique and "hexis", as well as Erwin Panofsky's concept of "intuitus". The word "habitus" itself can be found in the works of Mauss, as well as of Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz as re-workings of the concept as it emerged in Aristotle's notion of "hexis", which would become "habitus" through Thomas Aquinas's Latin translation.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: "Disposition"—a key concept in Bourdieu's work—can be defined as a "sense of the game"; a partly rational but partly intuitive understanding of fields and of social order in general, a practical sense, a practical reason, giving rise to opinions, tastes, tone of voice, typical body movements and mannerisms and so on. The dispositions constitutive of habitus are therefore conditioned responses to the social world, becoming so ingrained that they come to occur spontaneously, rather like 'knee-jerk' opinions. It follows that the habitus developed by an individual will typify his position in the social space. By doing so, social agents will often "acknowledge", "legitimate", and "reproduce" the social forms of domination (including prejudices) and the common opinions of each field as self-evident, clouding from conscience and practice even the acknowledgment of other possible means of production (including symbolic production) and power relations.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Though not deterministic, the inculcation of the subjective structures of the "habitus" can be observed through statistical data, for example, while its selective affinity with the objective structures of the social world explains the continuity of the social order through time. As the individual "habitus" is always a mix of multiple engagements in the social world through the person's life, while the social fields are put into practice through the agency of the individuals, no social field or order can be completely stable. In other words, if the relation between individual predisposition and social structure is far stronger than common sense tends to believe, it is not a perfect match.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Some examples of his empirical results include showing that, despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (e.g. classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly tie in with their social position; and showing that subtleties of language such as accent, grammar, spelling and style—all part of cultural capital—are a major factor in social mobility (e.g. getting a higher-paid, higher-status job).


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Sociologists very often look at either social laws (structure) or the individual minds (agency) in which these laws are inscribed. Sociological arguments have raged between those who argue that the former should be sociology's principal interest (structuralists) and those who argue the same for the latter (phenomenologists). When Bourdieu instead asks that dispositions be considered, he is making a very subtle intervention in sociology, asserting a middle ground where social laws and individual minds meet and is arguing that the proper object of sociological analysis should be this middle ground: dispositions.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: According to Bourdieu, agents do not continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria. Rather, social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic—a practical sense—and bodily dispositions. Instead of confining his analysis of social relations and change to voluntaristic agency or strictly in terms of class as a structural relation, Bourdieu uses the agency-structure bridging concept of "field".


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: A "field" can be described as any historical, non-homogeneous social-spatial arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources. In simpler terms, a "field" refers to any setting in which agents and their social positions are located. Accordingly, the position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field, agent's habitus, and agent's capital (social, economic, and cultural). Fields interact with each other, and are hierarchical: most are subordinate to the larger field of power and class relations.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: For Bourdieu, social activity differences led to various, relatively autonomous, social spaces in which competition centers around particular capital. These fields are treated on a hierarchical basis—with economic power usually governing—wherein the dynamics of fields arise out of the struggle of social actors trying to occupy the dominant positions within the field. Bourdieu embraces prime elements of conflict theory like Marx. Social struggle also occurs within fields hierarchically nested under the economic antagonisms between social classes. The conflicts which take place in each social field have specific characteristics arising from those fields and that involve many social relationships which are not economic.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Social agents act according to their "feel for the game", in which the "feel" roughly refers to the habitus, and the "game", to the field.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu's most significant work on cultural production is available in two books: "The Field of Cultural Production" (1993) and "The Rules of Art" (1996). Bourdieu builds his theory of cultural production using his own characteristic theoretical vocabulary of "habitus", "capital" and "field".


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: David Hesmondhalgh writes that: By 'cultural production' Bourdieu intends a very broad understanding of culture, in line with the tradition of classical sociology, including science (which in turn includes social science), law and religion, as well as expressive-aesthetic activities such as art, literature and music. However, his work on cultural production focuses overwhelmingly on two types of field or sub-field of cultural production…: literature and art.According to Bourdieu, "the principal obstacle to a rigorous science of the production of the value of cultural goods" is the "charismatic ideology of 'creation'" which can be easily found in studies of art, literature and other cultural fields. In Bourdieu's opinion, charismatic ideology "directs the gaze towards the apparent producer and prevents us from asking who has created this 'creator' and the magic power of transubstantiation with which the 'creator' is endowed."


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: For Bourdieu, a sociologically informed view of an artist ought to describe: (1) their relations to the field of production (e.g. influences, antagonisms, etc.); and (2) their attitudes to their relations to the field of consumption (e.g. their readers, enthusiasts, or detractors). Further, a work of literature, for example, may not adequately be analysed either as the product of the author's life and beliefs (a naively biographical account), or without any reference to the author's intentions (as Barthes argued). In short, "the subject of a work is a "habitus" in relationship with a 'post', a position, that is, within a field."


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: According to Bourdieu, cultural revolutions are always dependent on the possibilities present in the positions inscribed in the field.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: For Bourdieu, "habitus" was essential in resolving a prominent antinomy of the human sciences: objectivism and subjectivism.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: As mentioned above, Bourdieu used the methodological and theoretical concepts of habitus and field in order to make an epistemological break with the prominent objective-subjective antinomy of the social sciences. He wanted to effectively unite social phenomenology and structuralism. Habitus and field are proposed to do so.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the objective conditions it encounters. In this way, Bourdieu theorizes the inculcation of objective social structures into the subjective, mental experience of agents. For the objective social field places requirements on its participants for membership, so to speak, within the field. Having thereby absorbed objective social structure into a personal set of cognitive and somatic dispositions, and the subjective structures of action of the agent then being commensurate with the objective structures and extant exigencies of the social field, a "doxic" relationship emerges.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: "Doxa" refers to the learned, fundamental, deep-founded, unconscious beliefs, and values, taken as self-evident universals, that inform an agent's actions and thoughts within a particular field. "Doxa" tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, thus privileging the dominant and taking their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable. Therefore, the categories of understanding and perception that constitute a habitus, being congruous with the objective organization of the field, tend to reproduce the very structures of the field. A doxic situation may be thought of as a situation characterized by a harmony between the objective, external structures and the 'subjective', internal structures of the habitus. In the doxic state, the social world is perceived as natural, taken-for-granted and even commonsensical.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu thus sees habitus as an important factor contributing to social reproduction, because it is central to generating and regulating the practices that make up social life. Individuals learn to want what conditions make possible for them, and not to aspire to what is not available to them. The conditions in which the individual lives generate dispositions compatible with these conditions (including tastes in art, literature, food, and music), and in a sense pre-adapted to their demands. The most improbable practices are therefore excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is categorically denied and to will the inevitable.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Amongst any society of individuals, the constant performance of dispositions, trivial and grand, forms an observable range of preferences and allegiances, points and vectors. This spatial metaphor can be analysed by sociologists and realised in diagrammatic form. Ultimately, conceptualising social relations this way gives rise to an image of society as a web of interrelated spaces. These are the social fields.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: For Bourdieu, habitus and field can only exist in relation to each other. Although a field is constituted by the various social agents participating in it (and thus their habitus), a habitus, in effect, represents the transposition of objective structures of the field into the subjective structures of action and thought of the agent.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: The relationship between habitus and field is twofold. First, the field exists only insofar as social agents possess the dispositions and set of perceptual schemata that are necessary to constitute that field and imbue it with meaning. Concomitantly, by participating in the field, agents incorporate into their habitus the proper know-how that will allow them to constitute the field. Habitus manifests the structures of the field, and the field mediates between habitus and practice.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu attempts to use the concepts of habitus and field to remove the division between the subjective and the objective. Bourdieu asserts that any research must be composed of two "minutes," wherein the first minute is an objective stage of research—where one looks at the relations of the social space and the structures of the field; while the second minute must be a subjective analysis of social agents' dispositions to act and their categories of perception and understanding that result from their inhabiting the field. Proper research, Bourdieu argues, thus cannot do without these two together.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu contended there is transcendental objectivity, only when certain necessary historical conditions are met. The scientific field is precisely that field in which objectivity may be acquired. Bourdieu's ideal scientific field is one that grants its participants an interest or investment in objectivity. Further, this ideal scientific field is one in which the field's degree of autonomy advances and, in a corresponding process, its "entrance fee" becomes increasingly strict. The scientific field entails rigorous intersubjective scrutinizing of theory and data. This should make it difficult for those within the field to bring in, for example, political influence.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: However, the autonomy of the scientific field cannot be taken for granted. An important part of Bourdieu's theory is that the historical development of a scientific field, sufficiently autonomous to be described as such and to produce objective work, is an achievement that requires continual reproduction. Having been achieved, it cannot be assumed to be secure. Bourdieu does not discount the possibility that the scientific field may lose its autonomy and therefore deteriorate, losing its defining characteristic as a producer of objective work. In this way, the conditions of possibility for the production of transcendental objectivity could arise and then disappear.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu insists on the importance of a "reflexive sociology" in which sociologists must at all times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, their own set of internalized structures, and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their objectivity. The sociologist, according to Bourdieu, must engage in a "sociology of sociology" so as not to unwittingly attribute to the object of observation the characteristics of the subject. They ought to conduct their research with one eye continually reflecting back upon their own habitus, their dispositions learned through long social and institutional training.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: It is only by maintaining such a continual vigilance that the sociologists can spot themselves in the act of importing their own biases into their work. Reflexivity is, therefore, a kind of additional stage in the scientific epistemology. It is not enough for the scientist to go through the usual stages (research, hypothesis, falsification, experiment, repetition, peer review, etc.); Bourdieu recommends also that the scientist purge their work of the prejudices likely to derive from their social position. In a good illustration of the process, Bourdieu chastises academics (including himself) for judging their students' work against a rigidly scholastic linguistic register, favouring students whose writing appears 'polished', marking down those guilty of 'vulgarity'. Without a reflexive analysis of the snobbery being deployed under the cover of those subjective terms, the academic will unconsciously reproduce a degree of class prejudice, promoting the student with high linguistic capital and holding back the student who lacks it—not because of the objective quality of the work but simply because of the register in which it is written. Reflexivity should enable the academic to be conscious of their prejudices, e.g. for apparently sophisticated writing, and impel them to take steps to correct for this bias.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu also describes how the "scholastic point of view" unconsciously alters how scientists approach their objects of study. Because of the systematicity of their training and their mode of analysis, they tend to exaggerate the systematicity of the things they study. This inclines them to see agents following clear rules where in fact they use less determinate strategies; it makes it hard to theorise the 'fuzzy' logic of the social world, its practical and therefore mutable nature, poorly described by words like 'system', 'structure' and 'logic' which imply mechanisms, rigidity and omnipresence. The scholar can too easily find themselves mistaking "the things of logic for the logic of things"—a phrase of Marx's which Bourdieu is fond of quoting. Again, reflexivity is recommended as the key to discovering and correcting for such errors which would otherwise remain unseen, mistakes produced by an over-application of the virtues that produced also the truths within which the errors are embedded.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu introduced the notion of "capital", defined as sums of particular assets put to productive use. For Bourdieu, such assets could take various forms, habitually referring to several principal forms of capital: "economic", "symbolic", "cultural" and "social". Loïc Wacquant would go on to describe Bourdieu's thought further: Capital comes in 3 principal species: economic, cultural and social. A fourth species, symbolic capital, designates the effects of any form of capital when people do not perceive them as such.Bourdieu developed theories of social stratification based on aesthetic taste in his 1979 work "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste" (in ), published by Harvard University Press. Bourdieu claims that how one chooses to present one's social space to the world—one's aesthetic dispositions—depicts one's status and distances oneself from lower groups. Specifically, Bourdieu hypothesizes that children internalize these dispositions at an early age and that such dispositions guide the young towards their appropriate social positions, towards the behaviors that are suitable for them, and foster an aversion towards other behaviors.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu theorizes that class fractions teach aesthetic preferences to their young. Class fractions are determined by a combination of the varying degrees of social, economic, and cultural capital. Society incorporates “symbolic goods, especially those regarded as the attributes of excellence…[as] the ideal weapon in strategies of distinction.” Those attributes deemed excellent are shaped by the interests of the dominating class. He emphasizes the dominance of cultural capital early on by stating that “differences in cultural capital mark the differences between the classes.”


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: The development of aesthetic dispositions are very largely determined by social origin rather than accumulated capital and experience over time. The acquisition of cultural capital depends heavily on “total, early, imperceptible learning, performed within the family from the earliest days of life.” Bourdieu argues that, in the main, people inherit their cultural attitudes, the accepted “definitions that their elders offer them.”


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: He asserts the primacy of social origin and cultural capital by claiming that social capital and economic capital, though acquired cumulatively over time, depend upon it. Bourdieu claims that “one has to take account of all the characteristics of social condition which are (statistically) associated from earliest childhood with possession of high or low income and which tend to shape tastes adjusted to these conditions.”


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: According to Bourdieu, tastes in food, culture and presentation are indicators of class because trends in their consumption seemingly correlate with an individual's place in society. Each fraction of the dominant class develops its own aesthetic criteria. The multitude of consumer interests based on differing social positions necessitates that each fraction “has its own artists and philosophers, newspapers and critics, just as it has its hairdresser, interior decorator, or tailor.”


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: However, Bourdieu does not disregard the importance of social capital and economic capital in the formation of cultural capital. For example, the production of art and the ability to play an instrument “presuppose not only dispositions associated with long establishment in the world of art and culture but also economic means...and spare time.” However, regardless of one's ability to act upon one's preferences, Bourdieu specifies that “respondents are only required to express a status-induced familiarity with legitimate…culture.”[Taste] functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place,’ guiding the occupants of a given...social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position. Thus, different modes of acquisition yield differences in the nature of preferences. These “cognitive structures…are internalized, ‘embodied’ social structures,” becoming a natural entity to the individual. Different tastes are thus seen as unnatural and rejected, resulting in “disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘feeling sick’) of the tastes of others.”


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Bourdieu himself believes class distinction and preferences are:most marked in the ordinary choices of everyday existence, such as furniture, clothing, or cooking, which are particularly revealing of deep-rooted and long-standing dispositions because, lying outside the scope of the educational system, they have to be confronted, as it were, by naked taste.Indeed, Bourdieu believes that “the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning” would probably be in the tastes of food. Bourdieu thinks that meals served on special occasions are “an interesting indicator of the mode of self-presentation adopted in ‘showing off’ a life-style (in which furniture also plays a part).” The idea is that their likes and dislikes should mirror those of their associated class fractions.


title: Pierre Bourdieu

text: Children from the lower end of the social hierarchy are predicted to choose “heavy, fatty fattening foods, which are also cheap” in their dinner layouts, opting for “plentiful and good” meals as opposed to foods that are “original and exotic.” These potential outcomes would reinforce Bourdieu's “ethic of sobriety for the sake of slimness, which is most recognized at the highest levels of the social hierarchy,” that contrasts the “convivial indulgence” characteristic of the lower classes. Demonstrations of the tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of necessity reveal a distinction among the social classes.