title: William B. Davis

text: While his time at the Vancouver Playhouse was short-lived, he remained in Vancouver where he founded his own acting school, the William Davis Centre for Actors Study, a training ground for several future stars including New Zealand actress Lucy Lawless. Acting roles became more frequent, leading up to his iconic role as the Cigarette Smoking Man (also called the "Cancer Man") on the hit TV series "The X-Files", where he made frequent appearances for the next nine years. Davis has also had a wide range of roles in other series, including "Stargate SG-1" and "Smallville," and has participated in a host of television movies and other projects. From time to time he attends fan conventions, signing autographs and copies of his memoir.


title: William B. Davis

text: In recent years Davis has returned to directing theatre and film. He wrote and directed three short films, and co-wrote and directed several episodes of a television series for CBC Television, "49th & Main". In 2011 he directed two plays for The United Players of Vancouver: "Waste" by Harley Granville Barker, and "Hay Fever" by Noël Coward. Most recently he directed "The Habit of Art" (2013) by Alan Bennett, "Sherlock Holmes" "and the Case of the Jersey Lily (2015)" by Katie Forgette, and Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" at the Jericho Arts Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia.


title: William B. Davis

text: During that period, he also appeared in 10 episodes of the Canadian hit show "Continuum" as Older Alec Sadler on Showcase. Most recently, he reprised his iconic "X-Files" role in the six-episode Season 10.


title: William B. Davis

text: Despite being known for his smoking character, Davis quit smoking in the 1970s. When "The X-Files" started, he was given a choice between herbal cigarettes and tobacco cigarettes. At first he chose to use tobacco, but switched to herbal because he feared becoming addicted to them again. He used his notoriety on the show to assist the Canadian Cancer Society in its programs to combat smoking. In 2014, he donated his investments that supported fossil fuels to the David Suzuki Foundation in an effort to both ethically invest, and help fund work to fight climate change. He is a passionate advocate for action in response to climate change, believing it a critical issue of our time and speaking on the subject often. Taking action on a personal level, he drives a Tesla powered by hydroelectricity.


title: William B. Davis

text: He is also a former national champion water skier and for a time held records in older age divisions. In a conversation with Brendan Beiser, he said he held the record for tricks in his age category, adding: "I did hold the slalom record until this past year until some young whippersnapper of 65 from Ontario took the record away from me."


title: William B. Davis

text: In 2011, Davis married Emmanuelle Herpin. He has two daughters, Melinda and Rebecca, from an earlier marriage, and two grandchildren.


title: William B. Davis

text: While on "The X-Files", Davis was constantly challenged by fans of the show about his non-belief in the paranormal and aliens. Davis credits Barry Beyerstein and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) for introducing him to the sceptic community. Davis became increasingly involved in the sceptic movement and began to give lectures as a sceptic spokesman at universities across North America and at sceptic conventions, including CSI's CSICon in New Orleans.


title: William B. Davis

text: When asked about his belief in the paranormal at the London Film and Comic Con in 2010, Davis replied, "The onus is on you to prove the extraordinary ... I did a lot of research and saw where a lot of the arguments were wanting."


title: William B. Davis

text: Interviewed by Jacob Fortin on guilt about being a sceptic yet acting in a show that Richard Dawkins campaigned against, Davis replied that at first he had some trepidation until realizing that Dawkins "had no evidence whatsoever and presented none" that the show encouraged people to think uncritically. "The show is fiction ... it isn't a documentary." In another interview with Justin Trottier of the Centre for Inquiry Canada, Davis answered similarly, adding that from his own informal polls of audiences of "X-Files" fans it seemed there was no greater belief in the paranormal than the normal population and he comforted himself with this thought.


title: William B. Davis

text: Asked about a debate Davis moderated with alien abduction believer John E. Mack, Davis said that many people expected him to support Mack, but they discovered that he was "way on the other side". Davis recounted that he had some great discussions with Mack; "He was brilliant ... he was wrong, but he was very good ... One of the problems with human intelligence is that we are so good at defending ideas that we arrived at irrationally."


title: William B. Davis

text: In 2002, Davis narrated a Discovery Science Channel docuseries, "The Critical Eye". Produced in association with "Skeptical Inquirer" magazine, the series examined pseudoscientific and paranormal phenomena.


title: Whipped cream

text: Whipped cream is liquid heavy cream that is whipped by a whisk or mixer until it is light and fluffy and holds its shape, or by the expansion of dissolved gas, forming a firm colloid. It is often sweetened, typically with white sugar, and sometimes flavored with vanilla. Whipped cream is also called Chantilly cream (or crème Chantilly; ).


title: Whipped cream

text: The cream used as "whipping cream" has a high butterfat content—typically 30%–36%—as fat globules contribute to forming stable air bubbles.


title: Whipped cream

text: During whipping, partially coalesced fat molecules create a stabilized network which traps air bubbles. The resulting colloid is roughly double the volume of the original cream. If, however, the whipping is continued, the fat droplets will stick together destroying the colloid and forming butter. Lower-fat cream (or milk) does not whip well, while higher-fat cream produces a more stable foam.


title: Whipped cream

text: Cream is usually whipped with a whisk, an electric hand mixer, or a food processor. Results are best when the equipment and ingredients are cold. The bubbles in the whipped cream immediately start to pop, and it begins to liquefy, giving it a useful lifetime of one to two hours. Many 19th-century recipes recommend adding gum tragacanth to stabilize whipped cream, while a few include whipped egg whites. Various other substances, including gelatin and diphosphate, are used in commercial stabilizers.


title: Whipped cream

text: Whipped cream may also be made instantly in a aerosol can or in a whipping siphon with a whipped-cream charger. A gas dissolves in the butterfat under pressure. When the pressure is released, the gas leaves solution, producing bubbles. The gas is typically nitrous oxide, as carbon dioxide tends to give a sour taste. Other names for cream sold in an aerosol can are skooshy cream (Scottish), squirty cream, spray cream, or aerosol cream. A common brand in the United States is Reddi-Wip. In some jurisdictions, sales of canned whipped cream are limited to avoid potentially dangerous nitrous oxide abuse.


title: Whipped cream

text: Whipped cream, often sweetened and aromatised, was popular in the 16th century, with recipes in the writings of Cristoforo di Messisbugo (Ferrara, 1549), Bartolomeo Scappi (Rome, 1570), and Lancelot de Casteau (Liège, 1604). It was called milk or cream snow ("neve di latte", "neige de lait", "neige de crème"). A 1545 English recipe, "A Dyschefull of Snow", includes whipped egg whites as well, and is flavored with rosewater and sugar ("cf." snow cream). In these recipes, and until the end of the 19th century, naturally separated cream is whipped, typically with willow or rush branches, and the resulting foam ("snow") on the surface would from time to time be skimmed off and drained, a process taking an hour or more. By the end of the 19th century, centrifuge-separated, high-fat cream made it much faster and easier to make whipped cream.


title: Whipped cream

text: The French name "crème fouettée" 'whipped cream' is attested in 1629, and the English name "whipped cream" in 1673. The name "snow cream" continued to be used in the 17th century.


title: Whipped cream

text: Various desserts consisting of whipped cream in pyramidal shapes with coffee, liqueurs, chocolate, fruits, and so on either in the mixture or poured on top were called "crème en mousse" 'cream in a foam', "crème fouettée", "crème mousseuse" 'foamy cream', "mousse" 'foam', and "fromage à la Chantilly" 'Chantilly-style molded cream', as early as 1768. Modern mousses, including mousse au chocolat, are a continuation of this tradition.


title: Whipped cream

text: Cream whipped in a whipping siphon with nitrous oxide was invented in the 1930s by both Charles Getz, working with G. Frederick Smith, and Marshall Reinecke. Both filed patents, which were later litigated. The Getz patents were originally deemed invalid, but were upheld on appeal.


title: Whipped cream

text: "Crème Chantilly" is another name for whipped cream. The difference between "whipped cream" and "crème Chantilly" is not systematic. Some authors distinguish between the two, with crème Chantilly being sweetened, and whipped cream not. However, most authors treat the two as synonyms, with both being sweetened, neither being sweetened, or treating sweetening as optional. Many authors use only one of the two names (for the sweetened or unsweetened version), so it is not clear whether they distinguish the two.


title: Whipped cream

text: The invention of crème Chantilly is often credited incorrectly, and without evidence, to François Vatel, "maître d'hôtel" at the Château de Chantilly in the mid-17th century. But the name Chantilly is first connected with whipped cream in the mid-18th century, around the time that the Baronne d'Oberkirch praised the "cream" served at a lunch at the Hameau de Chantilly—but did not say what exactly it was, or call it Chantilly cream.


title: Whipped cream

text: The names "crème Chantilly", "crème de Chantilly", "crème à la Chantilly", or "crème fouettée à la Chantilly" only become common in the 19th century. In 1806, the first edition of Viard's "Cuisinier Impérial" mentions neither "whipped" nor "Chantilly" cream, but the 1820 edition mentions both.


title: Whipped cream

text: The name "Chantilly" was probably used because the château had become a symbol of refined food; the word has since become a culinary shorthand for "cream".


title: Whipped cream

text: Imitations of whipped cream, often called whipped topping (formerly whip topping), are commercially available. They may be used to avoid dairy ingredients, to provide extended shelf life, or to reduce the price (although some popular brands cost twice as much as whipped cream).


title: Whipped cream

text: The earliest known recipe for a non-dairy whipped cream was published by Ella Eaton Kellogg in 1904; consistent with her Seventh-day Adventist practices, it replaced cream with almond butter. Based on research sponsored by Henry Ford, a soy-based whip topping was commercialized by Delsoy Products by 1945. Delsoy did not survive, but Bob Rich's Rich Products frozen "Whip Topping", also introduced in 1945, succeeded. Rich Products topping was reformulated with coconut oil replacing soy oil in 1956.


title: Whipped cream

text: Artificial whipped topping normally contains some mixture of partially hydrogenated oil, sweeteners, water, and stabilizers and emulsifiers added to prevent syneresis. In regulatory contexts, this is called "whipped edible oil topping".


title: Whipped cream

text: It may be sold frozen in plastic tubs ("e.g.", Cool Whip), or in aerosol containers or in liquid form in cartons, reminiscent of real whipping cream.


title: Whipped cream

text: Whipped cream is a popular topping for fruit and desserts such as pie, ice cream (especially sundaes), cupcakes, cakes, milkshakes, waffles, hot chocolate, cheesecakes, Jello and puddings. It is also served on coffee, especially in the Viennese coffee house tradition, where coffee with whipped cream is known as "Melange mit Schlagobers". Whipped cream is used as an ingredient in many desserts, for example as a filling for profiteroles and layer cakes.


title: Whipped cream

text: Mousse is usually based on whipped cream, often with added egg white foam. Similarly, ' is made of whipped cream and whipped egg whites. and ' include whipped cream and whipped fromage frais, and are typically served in a cheese drainer (), recalling the former process of draining whipped cream.


title: Pandu

text: In the Hindu epic "Mahabharata", Pandu () was a king of the Kuru Kingdom. He was the foster-father of the five Pandava brothers, who were the boons bestowed upon his wife Kunti by a number of deities, owing to his inability to bear children following sage Kindama's curse. He belonged to the lunar dynasty of the class of Kshatriyas.


title: Pandu

text: When Vichitravirya died of a sickness, Bhishma was unable to ascend the throne because of his vow, and Bahlika's line was unwilling to leave the Bahlika Kingdom. There ensued a succession crisis in Hastinapura. Satyavati then invited her son Vyasa to impregnate the queens Ambika and Ambalika under the Niyoga practice. When Vyasa approached Ambalika, she was frightened by his scary appearance, and she had become pale in disgust; hence, her son was born pale. Thus, Pandu's name means pale.


title: Pandu

text: Pandu was taught in the fields of archery, politics, administration and religion by Bhishma. He was an excellent archer and Maharathi (warrior). He became the successor to his kingdom and was crowned King of the Kuru Kingdom. He was married to Kunti, the adoptive daughter of Kuntibhoja and the daughter of Shurasena (father of Vasudeva Anakadundubhi and grandfather of Krishna). His second wife was the princess of the Madra kingdom Madri. The marriage was proposed by Bhishma. Pandu later conquered the territories of the Sindhu Kingdom, Kashi, Anga, Trigarta Kingdom, Kalinga, Magadha, etc., and thus re-established their supremacy over all the kings and increased the span of his empire.


title: Pandu

text: While hunting in a forest (looking from a distance, his vision partially obscured by plants and trees), Pandu saw a couple of deer in the process of coitus, and shot arrows at them; he later discovered that it was the sage Kindama and his wife who were making love in the form of deer. The dying sage placed a curse on Pandu, for not only had he killed them in the midst of lovemaking, but was not remorseful for his actions either. King Pandu argued with sage Kindama by misquoting sage Agastya's ruling on the right of Kshatriyas' on hunting. Sage Kindama then cursed Pandu that were he to approach his wives with the intent of making love, he would die.


title: Pandu

text: Upset and seeking to repent his deed, Pandu handed his kingdom to Dhritarashtra and left for exile in the forest. There, he started to lead the life of an ascetic with his wives.


title: Pandu

text: One day, Pandu was regaling the story of his birth and his wish of becoming a father to his first wife, Kunti. Kunti told him about the child-bearing mantra taught to her by the sage Durvasa. Pandu was overjoyed and told Kunti to use it to gain sons from suitable deities. He wanted his son to be righteous, and so he suggested Dharmaraja, the deity of death and righteousness. Kunti chanted her mantra and the deity granted her Yudhishthira. Later, Pandu expressed his desire for a powerful son. This time, Kunti invoked Vayu and Bhima was born. Pandu suggested Kunti to invoke Indra and a valiant son, Arjuna, was born. Pandu felt bad for Madri's childlessness, and thus requested Kunti to share her mantra with her. Heeding his request, Kunti revealed her mantra once to Pandu's younger wife. Madri invoked the Ashvin twins, and then gave birth to Nakula and Sahadeva.


title: Pandu

text: One day, Pandu forgot about the curse and was suddenly filled with lust for Madri. Despite her pleas, he proceeded to engage in sexual intercourse with her. After the act, his curse was fulfilled and he died. His body was cremated within the forest. Attributing her husband's death to herself and swept by remorse, Madri took her own life (possibly through self-immolation) after handing her children over to Kunti.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: The House of the Spirits (, 1982) is the debut novel of Isabel Allende. The novel was rejected by several Spanish-language publishers before being published in Buenos Aires in 1982. It became an instant best-seller, was critically acclaimed, and catapulted Allende to literary stardom. The novel was named Best Novel of the Year in Chile in 1982, and Allende received the country's "Panorama Literario" award. "The House of the Spirits" has been translated into over 20 languages.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: The book was first conceived by Allende when she received news that her 100-year-old grandfather was dying. She began to write him a letter that ultimately became the manuscript of "The House of the Spirits". Her novel is influenced by Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, "One Hundred Years of Solitude".


title: The House of the Spirits

text: The story details the life of the Trueba family, spanning four generations, and tracing the post-colonial social and political upheavals of Chile – though the country's name and the names of figures closely paralleling historical ones, such as "the Candidate/President" (Salvador Allende) or "the Poet" (Pablo Neruda), are never explicitly given. The story is told mainly from the perspective of two protagonists (Esteban and Alba) and incorporates elements of magical realism.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: The story starts with the del Valle family, focusing upon the youngest and the oldest daughters of the family, Clara and Rosa. The youngest daughter, Clara del Valle, has paranormal powers and keeps a detailed diary of her life. Using her powers, Clara predicts that an accidental death will occur in the family. Shortly after this, Clara's sister, Rosa the Beautiful, is killed by poison intended for her father who is running for the Senate. Clara is shocked into muteness after witnessing the autopsy performed on her sister's body. Rosa's fiancé, a poor miner named Esteban Trueba, is devastated and attempts to mend his broken heart by devoting his life to restoring his family hacienda, Las Tres Marías, which has fallen into poverty and disrepair. He sends money to his spinster sister who takes care of their arthritic mother in town. Through a combination of intimidation and reward, he enforces respect and labor from the fearful peasants and turns Tres Marías into a "model hacienda". He turns the first peasant who spoke to him upon arrival, Pedro Segundo, into his foreman, who quickly becomes the closest thing that Trueba ever has to an actual friend during his life. He rapes many of the peasant women and children, and his first victim, then 15 year old Pancha García, becomes the mother of his bastard son, Esteban García. Throughout the novel, he visits Transito Soto, a prostitute. With Esteban's help, she becomes a wildly successful brothel madam in the city and always is willing to repay the favor to him.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Esteban returns to the city to see his dying mother. After her death, Esteban decides to fulfill her dying wish for him to marry and have legitimate children. He goes to the Del Valle family to ask for Clara's hand in marriage. Clara accepts Esteban's proposal; she herself has predicted her engagement two months prior, speaking for the first time in nine years. During the period of their engagement, Esteban builds what everyone calls "the big house on the corner," a large mansion in the city where the Trueba family will live for generations. After their wedding, Esteban's sister Férula comes to live with the newlyweds in the big house on the corner. Férula develops a strong dedication to Clara, which fulfills her need to serve others. However, Esteban's wild desire to possess Clara and to monopolize her love causes him to throw Férula out of the house. She curses him, telling him that he will shrink in body and soul, and die like a dog. Although she misses her sister-in-law, Clara is unable to find her by any means - the gap between her and her husband widens as she devotes more time to her daughter and the mystic arts.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Clara gives birth to a daughter named Blanca and later, to twin boys Jaime and Nicolás. The family, which resides in the capital, stays at the hacienda during the summertime. Upon arriving at Tres Marías for the first time, Blanca immediately befriends a young boy named Pedro Tercero, who is the son of her father's foreman. Blanca and Pedro grow up together as best friends despite them being of two different social and economic classes. During their teenage years, Blanca and Pedro Tercero eventually become lovers. After an earthquake that destroys part of the hacienda and leaves Esteban injured, the Truebas move permanently to Las Tres Marías. Clara spends her time teaching, caring for her husband's battered body, and writing in her journals while Blanca is sent to a convent school and the twin boys back to an English boarding school, both of which are located in the city. Blanca fakes an illness so as to be sent back to Las Tres Marías, where she can be with Pedro Tercero, but when she arrives home she finds that Pedro Tercero has been banished from the hacienda by Esteban on account of his revolutionary socialist ideas. Pedro Tercero meets with Blanca in secret adopting disguises while also spreading his ideas in the form of song to neighboring haciendas.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: A visiting French count to the hacienda, Jean de Satigny, reveals Blanca's nightly romps with Pedro Tercero to her father. Esteban furiously goes after his daughter and brutally whips her. When Clara expresses horror at his actions, Esteban slaps her, knocking out her front teeth. Clara decides to never speak to him again, reclaims her maiden name and moves out of Tres Marías and back to the city, taking Blanca with her. Esteban, furious and lonely, blames Pedro Tercero for the whole matter; putting a price on the boy's head with the corrupt local police. At this point, Pedro Segundo deserts Esteban, telling him he does not want to be around when Trueba inevitably catches his son. Enraged by Pedro Segundo's departure, Trueba begins hunting for Pedro Tercero himself, eventually tracking him down to a small shack near his hacienda. He only succeeds in cutting off three of Pedro's fingers, and is filled with regret for his uncontrollable furies.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Blanca finds out she is pregnant with Pedro Tercero's child. Esteban, desperate to save the family honor, gets Blanca to marry the French count by telling her that he has killed Pedro Tercero. At first, Blanca gets along with her new husband, but she leaves him when she discovers his participation in sexual fantasies with the servants. Blanca quietly returns to the Trueba household and gives birth to her daughter, Alba. Meanwhile, Jaime and Nicholas both fall in love with a young drug addict named Amanda; Amanda initially loves Nicholas and becomes pregnant by him. Jaime has to perform an abortion, ruining his relationship with Nicholas. Amanda and her little brother Miguel stay for a short time at the Trueba house; Miguel is able to witness Alba's birth, his future lover.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Esteban Trueba eventually moves to the Trueba house in the capital as well, although he continues to spend periods of time in Tres Marías. He becomes isolated from every member of his family except for little Alba, whom he is very fond of. Esteban runs as a senator for the Conservative Party but is nervous about whether or not he will win. Clara speaks to him, through signs, informing him that "those who have always won will win again" – this becomes his motto. Clara then begins to speak to Esteban through signs, although she keeps her promise and never actually speaks to him again. A few years later, Clara dies peacefully and Esteban is overwhelmed with grief.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Alba is a solitary child who enjoys playing make-believe in the basement of the house and painting the walls of her room. Blanca has become very poor since leaving Jean de Satigny's house, getting a small income out of selling pottery and giving pottery classes to mentally handicapped children, and is once again dating Pedro Tercero, now a revolutionary singer/songwriter. Alba and Pedro are fond of each other, but do not know they are father and daughter, although Pedro suspects this. Alba is also fond of her uncles. Nicolás is eventually kicked out by his father, supposedly moving to North America.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: When she is older, Alba attends a local college where she meets Miguel, now a grown man, and becomes his lover. Miguel is a revolutionary, and out of love for him, Alba involves herself in student protests against the conservative government. After the victory of the People's Party (a socialist movement), Alba celebrates with Miguel.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Fearing a Communist dictatorship, Esteban Trueba and his fellow politicians plan a military coup of the socialist government. However, when the military coup is set into action, the military men relish their power and grow out of control. Esteban's son Jaime is killed by power-driven soldiers along with other supporters of the government. After the coup, people are regularly kidnapped and tortured. Esteban helps Blanca and Pedro Tercero flee to Canada, where the couple finally find their happiness.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: The military regime attempts to eliminate all traces of opposition and eventually comes for Alba. She is made the prisoner of Colonel Esteban García, the son of Esteban Trueba's and Pancha Garcia's illegitimate son, and hence the grandson of Esteban Trueba. During an earlier visit to the Trueba house, García had molested Alba as a child. In pure hatred of her privileged life and eventual inheritance, García tortures Alba repeatedly, looking for information on Miguel. He rapes her, thus completing the cycle that Esteban Trueba put into motion when he raped Pancha García. When Alba loses her will to live, she is visited by Clara's spirit who tells her not to wish for death, since it can easily come, but to wish to live. She becomes to write down her family's story in her mind.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: García, fearful of his growing attachment to Alba, discards her. Esteban Trueba manages to free Alba with the help of Miguel and Tránsito Soto, his old friend and the brothel madam. After helping Alba write their memoir, Esteban Trueba dies in the arms of Alba, accompanied by Clara's spirit; he is smiling, having avoided Férula's prophecy that he will die like a dog. Alba is pregnant, though whether the child is Miguel's or the product of her rape is unknown. Alba embraces this ambiguity, however, loving her unborn child as above all, it is her own. Alba resolves that she will not seek vengeance on those who have injured her, choosing to believe in the hope that one day the human cycle of hate and revenge will be broken. Alba is revealed to be the narrator of the novel, which she writes while she waits for Miguel and for the birth of her child.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Some of the characters' names are significant, particularly the women's names, which often indicate the personalities of the characters. The names Nívea, Clara, Blanca, and Alba are more or less synonyms, and this is mentioned as a family tradition. (Nívea means snow-white, and can be translated as "white" as can all the others, though they have specific meanings.) Férula's name means "rod" in Latin; when used in Spanish it refers to an object used to immobilize a limb, such as a splint or cast.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Clara (one of its translations is the equivalent of English "clear", although it is also a common female name) is the key female figure in the novel. She is a clairvoyant and telekinetic who is rarely attentive to domestic tasks, but she holds her family together with her love for them and her uncanny predictions. She is the youngest daughter of Severo and Nívea del Valle, wife of Esteban Trueba, and mother of Blanca, Jaime, and Nicolás. Even as a child her strangeness is noticed and seen as a threat to many in her community. Otherwise, her family and devoted Nana protect her from her strangeness. She and her uncle Marcos use her powers to run a fortune-telling centre as she develops other paranormal activities like dream reading. Her uncle eventually leaves in a primitive airplane he built himself, disappearing for many months, assumed dead but later is found to die instead as the result of a 'mysterious African plague' contracted during his travels. Clara practices divining and moving inanimate objects, most notably a three-legged table, and she is surrounded by friends such as the psychic Mora sisters and The Poet. Severo and Nívea del Valle are main characters in another Allende novel. As Clara grows up, she develops her abilities and is even able to communicate with ghosts and spirits. Clara represents love and cherishment. Clara's marriage to Esteban Trubea is something she accepts but she never truly loves him and knows from the beginning that she will never do so. She is uninterested in material things and takes for granted her own high economic standing. It is not until later, after great tragedy, that she takes the role of helper/servant instead of dreamy bystander.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Esteban Trueba is the central male character of the novel and is one of the story's main narrators along with his granddaughter Alba. In his youth, he seeks the mermaid-like and green-haired Rosa the Beautiful, daughter of Severo and Nívea del Valle, toiling in the mines to earn a suitable fortune so that he can support her. However, she dies by accidental poisoning while he is working in the mines, a cruel stroke of fate that hardens his heart. He works hard to develop his estate at Tres Marias ("Three Marys," a nickname for Orion's Belt), and seduces and rapes many local peasant women, fathering many illegitimate children, including Esteban García (by Pancha García, sister of Pedro Segundo). Although he eventually marries Clara (Rosa's sister and youngest daughter of the Del Valles) and raises a large family, Esteban's stubborn and violent ways alienate all those around him. Esteban has a tense relationship with his daughter Blanca but shows genuine love and devotion to his granddaughter Alba. Despite his often violent behavior, he is also devoted to his wife Clara, entering into a state of permanent mourning following her death. As a self-made man who earned all of his wealth from years of work spent improving Tres Marías, Esteban scorns communists and believes them to be lazy and stupid. Later in life, he turns to politics where he spends his money and effort trying to prevent the rising Socialist movement within the country. However, after the military coup he loses much of his power and suddenly has to face the fact that he has become an old and weak man. Yet it is not the loss of power, so much as the injury done to his country, that agonizes the highly patriotic Esteban. His realization that he desires the love of his family and peace in his country leads to a pivotal change in his character. In his last days, he slowly loses the rage that has been driving him all his life. He begins to make amends to the remaining members of his family—first, by helping Blanca and Pedro Tercero escape the country so they can live happily, and then, after Alba is kidnapped by the military, by persuading his longtime friend Tránsito Soto (who has influence in the military) to help him rescue her. With the success of both of his efforts, Esteban dies happily, knowing that he has achieved Clara's posthumous forgiveness.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Blanca (literally, "white") is Clara and Esteban's first-born daughter. She spends her childhood between the Truebas' house in the capital and Tres Marías, where she forms an intense connection with a boy named Pedro Tercero García, the son of Esteban's foreman. Their friendship endures, though they only see each other in the summer, and upon adolescence they become lovers. Their love persists even after Pedro is run out of the hacienda by Esteban, because he is putting communist ideas in the other workers' heads. After she becomes pregnant with Pedro Tercero's child, her father forces her to marry Count Jean de Satigny, whom she does not love. After Blanca leaves the Count and returns to the Trueba home, she sees Pedro sporadically, resisting his attempts to persuade her to marry, but their relationship continues. Blanca's reconciliation with her father eventually allows her to flee to Canada with Pedro, where they finally are able to achieve happiness together. Blanca is also able to earn large amounts of money for the first time by selling her clay figurines, which are seen as folk art by Canadians.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Pedro is the son of the tenant and foreman of Tres Marías, Pedro Segundo García. At a young age, he falls in love with Blanca and is the father of her only child, Alba. In his youth, he spreads socialist ideals to the workers on the hacienda, and later he becomes a revolutionary and a songwriter (his character may be modeled after revolutionary songwriter Victor Jara). After the coup d'état in his country, he and Blanca exile themselves to Canada with Esteban's help. It is mentioned that he resumes his political crusade during his exile in Canada where his music is embraced in translation even if "chickens and foxes are underdeveloped creatures" in comparison with the "eagles and wolves" of the North.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Alba (Spanish for "Dawn," Latin for "white") is the daughter of Blanca and Pedro Tercero García, although for many years of her life she was led to believe that Count de Satigny was her father. From before her birth, her grandmother Clara decreed that she was blessed by the stars. Because of this, Clara said she didn't need to go to school; as a result, Alba was raised at home until she was seven. The novel ends with Esteban's death, and Alba sits alone in the vast Trueba mansion beside his body. The last paragraph reveals that she is pregnant, although she does not know (or care) whether the child is Miguel's or the product of the rapes that she endured at the hands of security police, during her imprisonment.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Severo (literally, "severe") and Nívea ("snowy") are the parents of Rosa, Clara, and several other children. Severo's candidacy for the Liberal Party of Chile promptly came to an end after someone tried to poison him, but killed his daughter Rosa instead. Nívea, however, would come to become a prominent social activist for women's liberation. The couple pass away in a gruesome car accident in which Nívea is decapitated and her head lost. The details of the accident were hidden from their daughter Clara, because she was pregnant at the time. However, her intuition brings her to the location of the lost head, which ends up being hidden in the basement since the body had already been buried.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Having served the Del Valle and Trueba families all her life, Nana is emotionally close to all the children that she has taken care of, especially Clara. She even takes care of Clara's children after Severo's and Nívea's death. Nana passes away in an earthquake and is buried without fanfare. Her body is later moved to the mausoleum with Clara's and Rosa's bodies.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: The oldest daughter of Severo and Nívea, Rosa was born with green hair and great beauty. Her unearthly beauty intimidates everyone in the village except for Esteban Trueba, who is deeply enamored of her and seeks her hand in marriage. Rosa waits patiently while Esteban slowly accumulates wealth by working in the mines so that he will feel worthy of Rosa. Esteban returns to find that Rosa has died from a dose of poison meant for her father. Though never truly forgetting Rosa, Esteban marries her sister Clara instead.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: Jaime is the son of Clara and Esteban Trueba. A shy, bookish, and compassionate doctor who treats the poor, he serves as a contrast to his outgoing twin brother Nicolas and his cantankerous father. Jaime has always had a strained relationship with his father, especially given Jaime's revolutionary ideals. He becomes friends with the Candidate whilst under the impression that the revolution is to be peaceful. Jaime also becomes good friends with Alba, whom he treats as a sister. He is summoned to the Presidential Palace during the coup and is killed for refusing to announce that the president has drunkenly committed suicide. Esteban doesn't believe it until Jaime appears in spirit to Clara, showing her how he had been murdered by the regime.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: The novel has been taught in a significant number of school curricula around the world, notably for its use of magical realism, and as a translated Latin American novel. Educational organizations such as the International Baccalaureate recognize it as a world literature study book.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: However, "The House of the Spirits" in United States school curriculum has been challenged on multiple occasions, most often for the stated reasons of explicit sexual content and depictions of violence. For instance, in Virginia, a parent initially brought attention to the novel’s explicit content in 1997 by passing out “packets of excerpts from "The House of Spirits" with the heading “Would you allow your 16-year-old daughter to read this material? And if not, why should the public school be allowed to require my 16-year-old daughter to read this material?” Despite this demonstration, the Virginia county’s school board voted not to ban the novel from school curriculum. Similarly, in Maryland, the novel was brought to the attention of the school board in Montgomery County for its explicit content, specifically the depiction of necrophilia—“in which a young medical student kisses a female corpse,” referring to the molestation of the body of Rosa the Beautiful. In California counties in 1999 and 2000, the novel was challenged for its anti-Christian views, pornographic depictions, and “violence and sexual abuse”.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: After the debut of "The House of the Spirits", Allende began to follow a rule of starting to write all her books on January 8. She is quoted as saying:


title: The House of the Spirits

text: In 1993, the book was adapted into a film ("The House of the Spirits") by Danish director Bille August. The movie starred Jeremy Irons as Esteban Trueba, Meryl Streep as Clara del Valle Trueba, Winona Ryder as Blanca Trueba, Glenn Close as Férula Trueba and Antonio Banderas as Pedro Tercero García. While the film won some minor international awards, it was widely viewed as a critical failure. Two oft-cited reasons were its diffusely episodic structure and its cast of mostly Anglo-American actors in Latin American roles. The film was also a box office bomb, making back only $6.2 million of its $40 million budget.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: The novel has also been adapted for the theater in a version written by Caridad Svich, which was commissioned by Repertorio Espanol in New York City. That adaptation premiered in 2009 and received the HOLA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting from the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors. Unlike the film and the previous adaptation, this version was written and performed in Spanish and has been staged in Latin American countries such as Chile and Costa Rica. Svich also wrote an English language version of the play which won the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for its production at Denver Center Theatre Company in 2010.


title: The House of the Spirits

text: On May 23, 2018, it was announced that Hulu was developing a television series adaptation of the novel with production company FilmNation Entertainment. Allende is expected to serve as an executive producer on the project. On October 19, 2021, it was announced that Eva Longoria would star in the project.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (later Morton; c. September 20, 1890 – July 10, 1941), known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated. His composition "Jelly Roll Blues", published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Morton also wrote "King Porter Stomp", "Wolverine Blues", "Black Bottom Stomp", and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say", the last being a tribute to New Orleans musicians from the turn of the 20th century.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Morton's claim to have invented jazz in 1902 was criticized. Music critic Scott Yanow wrote, "Jelly Roll Morton did himself a lot of harm posthumously by exaggerating his worth...Morton's accomplishments as an early innovator are so vast that he did not really need to stretch the truth." Gunther Schuller says of Morton's "hyperbolic assertions" that there is "no proof to the contrary" and that Morton's "considerable accomplishments in themselves provide reasonable substantiation".


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Morton was born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe into the Creole community in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans around 1890; he claimed to have been born in 1885. Both parents traced their Creole ancestry four generations to the 18th century. Morton's birth date and year of birth are uncertain, given that no birth certificate was ever issued for him. The law requiring birth certificates for citizens was not enforced until 1914. His parents were Edward Joseph (Martin) Lamothe, a bricklayer and occasional trombonist, and Louise Hermance Monette, a domestic worker. His father left his mother when Morton was three (they were never married). When his mother married William Mouton in 1894, Ferdinand adopted his stepfather's surname, anglicizing it to Morton.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: At the age of fourteen, Morton began as a piano player in a brothel. He often sang smutty lyrics and used the nickname "Jelly Roll", which was African-American slang for female genitalia. While working there, he was living with his churchgoing great-grandmother. He convinced her that he worked as a night watchman in a barrel factory. After Morton's grandmother found out he was playing jazz in a brothel, she disowned him for disgracing the Lamothe name. "When my grandmother found out that I was playing jazz in one of the sporting houses in the District, she told me that I had disgraced the family and forbade me to live at the house...She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall..." The cornetist Rex Stewart recalled that Morton had chosen "the nom de plume 'Morton' to protect his family from disgrace if he was identified as a whorehouse 'professor'."


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Around 1904, Morton started touring in the US South, working in minstrel shows such as Will Benbow's Chocolate Drops, gambling, and composing. His songs "Jelly Roll Blues", "New Orleans Blues", "Frog-I-More Rag", "Animule Dance", and "King Porter Stomp" were composed during this period. Stride pianists James P. Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith saw him perform in Chicago in 1910 and New York City in 1911.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: In 1912–14, Morton toured with his girlfriend Rosa Brown as a vaudeville act before living in Chicago for three years. By 1914, he was putting his compositions on paper. In 1915 "Jelly Roll Blues" was one of the first jazz compositions to be published. Jelly Roll Morton was employed by Shook around 1916. Ben Shook Jr was associated with a Jubilee club led by Mabel Lewis, a contralto singer and former member of the original Fisk University Jubilee Singers. In 1917 he went to California with bandleader William Manuel Johnson and Johnson's sister Anita Gonzalez. Morton's tango "The Crave" was popular in Hollywood. He was invited to perform at the Hotel Patricia nightclub in Vancouver, Canada. Author Mark Miller described his arrival as "an extended period of itinerancy as a pianist, vaudeville performer, gambler, hustler, and, as legend would have it, pimp". Morton returned to Chicago in 1923 to claim authorship of "The Wolverines", which had become popular as "Wolverine Blues". He released the first of his commercial recordings, first as piano rolls, then on record, both as a piano soloist and with jazz bands.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: In 1926, Morton signed a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company, giving him the opportunity to bring a well-rehearsed band to play his arrangements in the Victor recording studios in Chicago. These recordings by Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers included Kid Ory, Omer Simeon, George Mitchell, Johnny St. Cyr, Barney Bigard, Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, and Andrew Hilaire.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: After Morton moved to New York City, he continued to record for Victor. Although he had trouble finding musicians who wanted to play his style of jazz, he recorded with Omer Simeon, George Baquet, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard, Russell Procope, Lorenzo Tio and Artie Shaw, the trumpeters Ward Pinkett, Bubber Miley, Johnny Dunn and Henry "Red" Allen, Sidney Bechet, Paul Barnes, Bud Freeman, Pops Foster, Paul Barbarin, Cozy Cole, and Zutty Singleton. His New York sessions failed to produce a hit.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Due in part to the Great Depression, RCA Victor did not renew Morton's recording contract for 1931. He continued playing in New York but struggled financially. He briefly had a radio show in 1934, then toured in a burlesque band. In 1935, his 30-year-old composition "King Porter Stomp", arranged by Fletcher Henderson, became Benny Goodman's first hit and a swing standard, but Morton received no royalties from the recordings.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: In 1935, Morton moved to Washington, D.C., to become the manager and piano player at a bar called, at various times, the Music Box, Blue Moon Inn, and Jungle Inn, at 1211 U Street NW in Shaw, an African-American neighborhood. Morton was master of ceremonies, bouncer, and bartender. The club owner allowed her friends free admission and drinks, which prevented Morton from making the business a success. During Morton's brief residency at the Music Box, the folklorist Alan Lomax heard him play. In May 1938, Lomax invited Morton to record music and interviews for the Library of Congress. The sessions were intended to be a short interview with musical examples for researchers at the Library of Congress, but the sessions expanded to over eight hours, with Morton talking and playing piano. Lomax conducted longer interviews, taking notes but not recording. Lomax was interested in Morton's days in Storyville, New Orleans, and the ribald songs of the time. Although reluctant to record these, Morton obliged Lomax. Because of the suggestive nature of the songs, some of the Library of Congress recordings were not released until 2005.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: In these interviews, Morton claimed to have been born in 1885. Morton scholars, such as Lawrence Gushee, say that Morton was aware that if he had been born in 1890, he would have been too young to claim to be the inventor of jazz. However, Morton may not have known his actual birthdate, and there remains the possibility that he was telling the truth. He said Buddy Bolden played ragtime but not jazz, a view not accepted by some of Bolden's contemporaries in New Orleans. The contradictions may stem from different definitions of "ragtime" and "jazz".


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: In 1938, Morton was stabbed by a friend of the Music Box's owner and suffered wounds to the head and chest. A nearby whites-only hospital refused to treat him, as the city had racially segregated facilities. He was transported to a black hospital farther away. When he was in the hospital, doctors left ice on his wounds for several hours before attending to the injury. His recovery from his wounds was incomplete, and thereafter he was often ill and became short of breath easily. After this incident, his wife Mabel demanded they leave Washington. Worsening asthma sent him to a hospital in New York for three months. He continued to suffer from respiratory problems when he travelled to Los Angeles with the intent to restart his career. He died on July 10, 1941, after an eleven-day stay in Los Angeles County General Hospital.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: According to the jazz historian David Gelly in 2000, Morton's arrogance and "bumptious" persona alienated so many musicians that few of them attended his funeral. An article about the funeral appeared in the August 1, 1941, issue of "DownBeat" and reported that his pallbearers were Kid Ory, Mutt Carey, Fred Washington, and Ed Garland. Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford were absent, though both were appearing in Los Angeles at the time. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington's son did attend the funeral. The article was reproduced in "Mister Jelly Roll", a 1950 biography of Morton by Alan Lomax.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: He was a "very devout Catholic", according to Anita Gonzales, his longtime companion. His gravesite features a large rosary rather than any music imagery.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: In 2013, Katy Martin published an article arguing that Alan Lomax's book of interviews put Morton in a negative light. Martin disagreed that Morton was an egotist.In being called a supreme egotist, Jelly Roll was often a victim of loose and lurid reporting. If we read the words that he himself wrote, however, we learn that he almost had an inferiority complex and said that he created his own style of jazz piano because 'All my fellow musicians were much faster in manipulations, I thought than I, and I did not feel as though I was in their class.' So he used a slower tempo to permit flexibility through the use of more notes, a pinch of Spanish to give a number of right seasoning, the avoidance of playing triple forte continuously, and many other points.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Morton's piano style was formed from early secondary ragtime and "shout", which also evolved separately into the New York school of stride piano. Morton's playing was also close to barrelhouse, which produced boogie-woogie.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Morton often played the melody of a tune with his right thumb, while sounding a harmony above these notes with the fingers of the right hand. This could add a rustic or “out-of-tune” sound due to the playing of a diminished 5th above the melody. This technique may still be recognized as belonging to New Orleans. Morton also walked in major and minor sixths in the bass, instead of tenths or octaves. He played basic swing rhythms with both the left and the right hand.


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: Several of Morton's compositions were musical tributes to himself, including "Winin' Boy", "The Jelly Roll Blues" (subtitled "The Original Jelly-Roll"); and "Mr. Jelly Lord". In the big-band era, his "King Porter Stomp", which Morton had written decades earlier, was a big hit for Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman; it became a standard covered by most other swing bands of that time. Morton claimed to have written some tunes that were copyrighted by others, including "Alabama Bound" and "Tiger Rag". "Sweet Peter", which Morton recorded in 1926, appears to be the source of the melody of the hit song "All of Me", which was credited to Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons in 1931


title: Jelly Roll Morton

text: His musical influence continues in the work of Dick Hyman, David Thomas Roberts, and Reginald Robinson.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Thomas Lincoln (January 6, 1778 – January 17, 1851) was an American farmer, carpenter, and father of the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Unlike some of his ancestors, Thomas could not write. He struggled to make a successful living for his family and faced difficult challenges in Kentucky real estate boundary and title disputes, the early death of his first wife, and the integration of his second wife's family into his own family, before making his final home in Illinois.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Lincoln was descended from Samuel Lincoln, a respected Puritan weaver, businessman and trader from the County of Norfolk in East Anglia who landed in Hingham in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637. Some Lincolns later migrated into Berks County, Pennsylvania, where they intermarried with Quakers, but did not retain the peculiar ways. According to the National Humanities Center, both Quakers and Puritans were opposed to slavery even though many profited from it.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Noteworthy ancestors include Samuel's grandson, Mordecai (1686–1736) who married Hannah Salter from a prominent political family, and made a name for himself in Pennsylvania society as a wealthy landowner and ironmaster. Mordecai and Hannah's son, John Lincoln (1716–1788) settled in Rockingham County, Virginia and built a large, prosperous farm nestled in the Shenandoah Valley.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: John Lincoln gave 210 acres of prime Virginia land to his first son, Captain Abraham Lincoln (1744–1786), who was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. In 1770, Abraham married Bathsheba Herring (c. 1742–1836), who was born in Rockingham County, Virginia. Bathsheba was the daughter of Alexander Herring and wife Abigail Harrison, of the Harrison family of Virginia.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: The Lincolns later sold the land in the 1780s to move to western Virginia, now Springfield, Kentucky. He amassed an estate of 5,544 acres of prime Kentucky land, realizing the bounty as advised by Daniel Boone, a relative of the Lincoln family.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: In May 1786, Lincoln witnessed the murder of his father by Native Americans "... when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest." Lincoln's life was saved that day by his brother, Mordecai. One of the most profound stories of Lincoln's memory was:


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Between September 1786 and 1788 Bathsheba moved the family to Beech Fork in Nelson County, Kentucky, now Washington County, (near Springfield). A replica of the cabin is located at the Lincoln Homestead State Park. As the oldest son, and in accordance with Virginia law at the time, Mordecai inherited his father's estate and of the three boys seems to have inherited more than his share of talent and wit. Josiah and Thomas were forced to make their own way. "The tragedy," wrote historian David Herbert Donald, "abruptly ended his prospects of being an heir of a well-to-do Kentucky planter; he had to earn his board and keep." From 1795 to 1802, Thomas Lincoln held a variety of ill-paying jobs in several locations.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: He served in the state militia at the age of 19 and became a Cumberland County constable at 24. He moved to Hardin County, Kentucky in 1802 and bought a farm the following year for £118; It was located seven miles north of Elizabethtown, Kentucky on Mill Creek. When he lived in Hardin County, he was a jury member, a petitioner for a road, and a guard for county prisoners. Lincoln was also active in community and church affairs in Hardin County. The following year his sister Nancy Brumfield, brother-in-law William Brumfield and his mother Bathsheba moved from Washington County to Mill Creek and lived with Lincoln.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: In 1805, Lincoln constructed most of the woodwork, including mantels and stairways, for the Hardin house, now restored and called the Lincoln Heritage House at Freeman Lake Park in Elizabethtown. In 1806, he ferried merchandise on a flatboat to New Orleans down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers on behalf of the Bleakley & Montgomery store in Elizabethtown.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: On June 12, 1806, Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks at Beechland in Washington County, Kentucky. Nancy Hanks, born in what was Hampshire County, Virginia, was the daughter of Lucy Hanks and a man whom Abraham believed to be "a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter." She was also called Nancy Sparrow as the adopted daughter of Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow. Dennis Hanks, Abraham's friend and second cousin, reported that Nancy Hanks Lincoln had remarkable perception. Nathaniel Grisby, a friend and neighbor, said that she was "superior" to her husband. Nancy taught young Abraham to read using the Bible, and modeled "sweetness and benevolence". Abraham said of her, "All that I am or hope ever to be I get from my mother".


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Thomas Lincoln developed a modicum of talent as a carpenter and although called "an uneducated man, a plain unpretending plodding man", he was respected for his civil service, storytelling ability and good-nature. He was also known as a "wandering" laborer, shiftless and uneducated. A rover and drifter, he kept floating about from one place to another, taking any kind of job he could get when hunger drove him to it. Aside from making cabinets and other carpentry work, Lincoln also worked as a manual laborer.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Their first child, a daughter named Sarah Lincoln, was born on February 10, 1807, near Elizabethtown, Kentucky, at Mill Creek. By early 1809, Lincoln bought another farm, , near Hodgenville at Nolin Creek, located 14 miles southeast of Elizabethtown and near the home of Betsy (Elizabeth) and Thomas Sparrow. Although their cabin was a standard dirt floor, one room log cabin, their property was named Sinking Spring Farm for the "magnificent spring that bubbled from the bottom of a deep cave." On February 12, 1809, the Lincolns' second child, a son named Abraham Lincoln, was born.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Seeking more fertile property, Lincoln and his family moved to Knob Creek Farm in 1811. Situated 10 miles northeast of the Sinking Spring Farm on Nolin Creek, the Knob Creek Farm was also adjacent to the Louisville and Nashville Turnpike. It was at Knob Hill that Abraham had some of his first memories. For instance, he remembered the death of his parents' third child, his brother Thomas, Jr. a few days after his birth in 1812. He also remembered the cultivation of corn and pumpkins and sometimes attending a limited, "A.B.C." school with his sister within a couple of miles of the family's cabin. It was while living at Knob Creek that Lincoln was made annual road surveyor and became 15th wealthiest of 98 property owners by 1814.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Lincoln lost farms three times after boundary disputes due to defective titles and Kentucky's chaotic land laws, complicated by the absence of United States land surveys and the use of subjective or arbitrary landmarks to determine land boundaries. He did not have the money to pay attorney's fees to resolve title disputes, such as liens against previous owners and survey errors. In addition, as a farmer, Lincoln was unable to compete with those who had slaves to work their fields.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Reluctant to discuss the extreme poverty of his youth, Abraham Lincoln quoted Gray's Elegy in 1860, saying his life could be summed up as "The short and simple annals of the poor." Without the food and clothing that they needed, they were considered among the "very poorest people" while in Kentucky. Abraham recounted years later, in a discussion with homeless boys in New York, that he had been poor and could remember "when my toes stuck out through my broken shoes in the winter; when my arms were out at the elbows; when I shivered with the cold."


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Thomas Lincoln moved the family to Indiana in December 1816, and purchased land in accordance with the land ordinance of 1785, partly because slavery had been excluded in Indiana by the Northwest Ordinance. Abraham Lincoln claimed many years later that his father's move from Kentucky to Indiana was "partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty of land titles in Kentucky."


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: In December 1816, the Lincolns settled in the Little Pigeon Creek Community in what was then Perry County and is now Spencer County, Indiana. There Thomas and Abraham set to work carving a home from the Indiana wilderness. Father and son worked side by side to clear the land, plant the crops and build a home. Thomas also found that his skills as a carpenter were in demand as the community grew. Nancy's aunt Elisabeth Sparrow, uncle Thomas Sparrow, and cousin Dennis Hanks settled at Little Pigeon Creek the following fall. While Abraham was ten years younger than his second cousin Dennis, the boys were good friends.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: In October 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln contracted milk sickness by drinking milk of a cow that had eaten the white snakeroot plant. There was no cure for the poison and on October 5, 1818, Nancy died.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Abraham and Sarah Lincoln, as well as Sophie and Dennis Hanks (whose guardians had also died of milk sickness), lived alone for six months when Lincoln went back to Kentucky to seek a bride and courted Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow from Elizabethtown, Kentucky. On December 2, 1819, he married her and she brought her three children, Elizabeth, Matilda, and John, to join Abe, Sarah, and Dennis Hanks to make a new family of eight. Lincoln assisted in building the Little Pigeon Baptist Church, became a member of the church, and served as church trustee. By 1827, Lincoln had become the proud owner of 100 acres of Indiana land.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: The family continued to live in extreme poverty in Indiana, according to family members, neighbors, and friends. There were times that the only food in the house was potatoes, and the children did not have sufficient clothes to wear. Abraham was not invited to a wedding because he did not have appropriate clothes to wear. Sarah was taken in by a local family and earned her room and board by performing housekeeping chores. Abraham's life was considered "one of hard labor and great privation."


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: David Herbert Donald, noting that Thomas Lincoln's eyesight began to fail in the 1820s, described his struggle to support his family:


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Lincoln had a restless nature, and when John Hanks, a cousin who had once lived with the Lincolns, moved to Illinois and sent back glowing reports of fertile prairie that didn't need the backbreaking work of clearing forest before crops could be planted, he sold his Indiana land early in 1830 and moved first to Macon County, Illinois, west of Decatur and eventually to Coles County in 1831. The homestead site on Goosenest Prairie, about south of Charleston, Illinois, is preserved as the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site, although his original saddlebag log cabin was lost after being disassembled and shipped to Chicago for display at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Lincoln, already in his fifties, remained a resident of the county for the rest of his life. In 1851, at the age of 73, Lincoln died and was buried at nearby Shiloh Cemetery, which was 3 miles from his home. Sarah, his widow, remained at their home until her death in 1869.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: During Lincoln's youth, and particularly after the death of his mother, Abraham's relationship with his father changed and became increasingly strained. Due to his failing eyesight and likely declining health, Lincoln relied on Abraham to perform work needed to run the farm. He also sent Abraham to work for neighbors, generating money for Thomas. Michael Burlingame, in his book "The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln" classified Abe's subservience: "Abraham Lincoln was like a slave to his father," he penned in a secret biography.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Historians differ on Thomas' parental treatment of Abraham. Burlingame, citing testimony from Lincoln relatives like Dennis Hanks, characterized Thomas as abusive and hostile to his son's efforts to better himself, saying he "avoided whipping or scolding his son in front of visitors but would administer punishment after they had left." David Herbert Donald, citing similar testimony, concluded that Thomas, "generally an easygoing man ... was not a harsh father or brutal disciplinarian," and noted that Thomas enrolled his children in public schools during the few periods when they were available to the family. He quoted Sarah Bush Lincoln, Abraham's stepmother, who said that "Mr. Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do anything if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first." Both Burlingame and Donald agree that Thomas struck his son if he appeared overly neglectful of his chores, or if he thrust himself into adult conversations. As Abraham got older, he eagerly awaited coming of age so that he could move away and have as little to do with his father as possible.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Although the degree to which it impacted their relationship is not clear, there seemed to be a struggle between Abraham's yearning for knowledge and Thomas' lack of understanding about the importance of study to Abraham's life. Abraham seemed particularly critical of his father's lack of education and lack of an earnest drive to see that his children received a good education. Historian Ronald C. White wrote that negative portraits of Thomas Lincoln come "from a son who said his father 'grew up literally without education,' the very value Abraham Lincoln would come to prize the most." Abraham Lincoln, in turn, appears to have been unaware of his father's early struggles, particularly how the death of his grandfather forced Thomas to become a laborer: "Abraham Lincoln never fully understood how hard his father had to struggle during his early years. It required an immense effort for Thomas, who earned three shillings a day for manual labor or made a little more when he did carpentry or cabinetmaking, to accumulate enough money to buy his first farm." Father and son also differed in their beliefs about religion; Thomas was a conventional Baptist. Growing up in a nonconformist household, Abe developed on his own as a free-thinker. Lastly, some say that Thomas favored John Johnston, his stepson, over Abraham. Their relationship had become strained after Abraham left his father's house and even more so after Abraham reluctantly bailed Thomas out of financial situations. His stepbrother, John D. Johnston, also made repeated requests for money.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Although Abraham provided financial assistance on a few occasions and once visited Thomas during a bout of ill-health, when he was on his deathbed Abraham sent word to a stepbrother to: "Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous meeting with many loved ones gone before; and where the rest of us, through the help of God, hope ere-long to join them." Abraham preferred not to attend his father's funeral and would not pay for a headstone for his father's grave. Aside from the strained and distant relationship between father and son, Abraham's actions may have been influenced by a "painful midlife crisis" and depression.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: During Thomas Lincoln's lifetime, he and his wife were not invited to Abraham's wedding and never met Abraham's wife or children. David Herbert Donald stated in his 1995 book "Lincoln" that "In all his published writings, and indeed, even in reports of hundreds of stories and conversations, he had not one favorable word to say about his father." Abraham, did, however, name his fourth son Thomas, the choice of which, Donald speculates, "suggested that Abraham Lincoln's memories of his father were not all unpleasant – and perhaps hinted at guilt for not having attended his funeral."


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: Abraham, likely in response to his unhappy relationship with his stern, demanding father, was a caring and indulgent father with his own children.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: As a young man, Lincoln became active in the Primitive Baptist church (also known as Predestinarian or Separate Baptists), and eventually became a leader in the denomination. According to several historians, Thomas Lincoln was "one of the five or six most important men" among the Indiana Separates, and "for all effective purposes, Abraham Lincoln's life in Indiana was lived in an atmosphere of what William Barton called 'a Calvinism that would have out-Calvined Calvin.' " In Indiana, Lincoln served as a trustee of the Pigeon Creek Baptist Church and helped to build the church meeting house with Abraham. Thomas Lincoln had religious grounds for disliking slavery, and these served as a partial reason for moving from Kentucky to north of the Ohio River where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. After moving to Coles County, Illinois, Lincoln and his wife became Church of Christ members.


title: Thomas Lincoln

text: A 1970 episode of "Daniel Boone", although fictionalized, portrays the courtship of Thomas Lincoln (played by actor Burr DeBenning) and Nancy Hanks (Marianna Hill). Sarah Bush Johnston is referred to but not seen. It is mentioned that the couple will name their first son after Tom's father, Abraham. Daniel remarks, "He might even be President someday."


title: Worldview

text: A worldview or world-view or Weltanschauung is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge, culture, and point of view. A worldview can include natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics.


title: Worldview

text: The term "worldview" is a calque of the German word Weltanschauung , composed of "Welt" ('world') and "Anschauung" ('perception' or 'view'). The German word is also used in English. It is a concept fundamental to German philosophy, especially epistemology and refers to a "wide world perception". Additionally, it refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it as a social reality.


title: Worldview

text: Within cognitive philosophy and the cognitive sciences is the German concept of "Weltanschauung". This expression is used to refer to the "wide worldview" or "wide world perception" of a people, family, or person. The "Weltanschauung" of a people originates from the unique world experience of a people, which they experience over several millennia. The language of a people reflects the "Weltanschauung" of that people in the form of its syntactic structures and untranslatable connotations and its denotations.


title: Worldview

text: The term "Weltanschauung" is often wrongly attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of German ethnolinguistics. However, Humboldt's key concept was "Weltansicht". "Weltansicht" was used by Humboldt to refer to the overarching conceptual and sensorial apprehension of reality shared by a linguistic community (Nation). On the other hand, "Weltanschauung", first used by Immanuel Kant and later popularized by Hegel, was always used in German and later in English to refer more to philosophies, ideologies and cultural or religious perspectives, than to linguistic communities and their mode of apprehending reality.


title: Worldview

text: In 1911, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey published an essay entitled "The Types of Worldview (Weltanschauung) and their Development in Metaphysics" that became quite influential. Dilthey characterized worldviews as providing a perspective on life that encompasses the cognitive, evaluative, and volitional aspects of human experience. Although worldviews have always been expressed in literature and religion, philosophers have attempted to give them conceptual definition in their metaphysical systems. On that basis, Dilthey found it possible to distinguish three general recurring types of worldview. The first of these he called naturalism because it gives priority to the perceptual and experimental determination of what is and allows contingency to influence how we evaluate and respond to reality. Naturalism can be found in Democritus, Hobbes, Hume and many other modern philosophers. The second type of worldview is called the idealism of freedom and is represented by Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Bergson among others. It is dualistic and gives primacy to the freedom of the will. The organizational order of our world is structured by our mind and the will to know. The third type is called objective idealism and Dilthey sees it in Heraclitus, Parmenides, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel. In objective idealism the ideal does not hover above what is actual but inheres in it. This third type of worldview is ultimately monistic and seeks to discern the inner coherence and harmony among all things. Dilthey thought it impossible to come up with a universally valid metaphysical or systematic formulation of any of these worldviews, but regarded them as useful schema for his own more reflective kind of life philosophy. See Makkreel and Rodi, Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, volume 6, 2019.


title: Worldview

text: Anthropologically, worldviews can be expressed as the "fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives."


title: Worldview

text: If it were possible to draw a map of the world on the basis of "Weltanschauung", it would probably be seen to cross political borders—"Weltanschauung" is the product of political borders and common experiences of a people from a geographical region, environmental-climatic conditions, the economic resources available, socio-cultural systems, and the language family. (The work of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza aims to show the gene-linguistic co-evolution of people).


title: Worldview

text: Worldview is used very differently by linguists and sociologists. It is for this reason that James W. Underhill suggests five subcategories: world-perceiving, world-conceiving, cultural mindset, personal world, and perspective.


title: Worldview

text: One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical or consistent theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven (in the logical sense) within the worldview – precisely because they are axioms, and are typically argued "from" rather than argued "for". However their coherence can be explored philosophically and logically.


title: Worldview

text: If two different worldviews have sufficient common beliefs it may be possible to have a constructive dialogue between them.


title: Worldview

text: On the other hand, if different worldviews are held to be basically incommensurate and irreconcilable, then the situation is one of cultural relativism and would therefore incur the standard criticisms from philosophical realists.


title: Worldview

text: Additionally, religious believers might not wish to see their beliefs relativized into something that is only "true for them".


title: Worldview

text: Subjective logic is a belief-reasoning formalism where beliefs explicitly are subjectively held by individuals but where a consensus between different worldviews can be achieved.


title: Worldview

text: A third alternative sees the worldview approach as only a methodological relativism, as a suspension of judgment about the truth of various belief systems but not a declaration that there is no global truth. For instance, the religious philosopher Ninian Smart begins his "Worldviews: Cross-cultural Explorations of Human Beliefs" with "Exploring Religions and Analysing Worldviews" and argues for "the neutral, dispassionate study of different religious and secular systems—a process I call worldview analysis."


title: Worldview

text: The comparison of religious, philosophical or scientific worldviews is a delicate endeavor, because such worldviews start from different presuppositions and cognitive values. Clément Vidal has proposed metaphilosophical criteria for the comparison of worldviews, classifying them in three broad categories:


title: Worldview

text: While Leo Apostel and his followers clearly hold that individuals can construct worldviews, other writers regard worldviews as operating at a community level, or in an unconscious way. For instance, if one's worldview is fixed by one's language, as according to a strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, one would have to learn or invent a new language in order to construct a new worldview.


title: Worldview

text: According to Apostel, a worldview is an ontology, or a descriptive model of the world. It should comprise these six elements:


title: Worldview

text: A worldview, according to terror management theory (TMT), serves as a buffer against death anxiety. It is theorized that living up to the ideals of one's worldview provides a sense of self-esteem which provides a sense of transcending the limits of human life (e.g. literally, as in religious belief in immortality; symbolically, as in art works or children to live on after one's death, or in contributions to one's culture). Evidence in support of terror management theory includes a series of experiments by Jeff Schimel and colleagues in which a group of Canadians found to score highly on a measure of patriotism were asked to read an essay attacking the dominant Canadian worldview.


title: Worldview

text: Using a test of death-thought accessibility (DTA), involving an ambiguous word completion test (e.g. "COFF__" could either be completed as either "COFFEE" or "COFFIN" or "COFFER"), participants who had read the essay attacking their worldview were found to have a significantly higher level of DTA than the control group, who read a similar essay attacking Australian cultural values. Mood was also measured following the worldview threat, to test whether the increase in death thoughts following worldview threat were due to other causes, for example, anger at the attack on one's cultural worldview. No significant changes on mood scales were found immediately following the worldview threat.


title: Worldview

text: To test the generalisability of these findings to groups and worldviews other than those of nationalistic Canadians, Schimel "et al" conducted a similar experiment on a group of religious individuals whose worldview included that of creationism. Participants were asked to read an essay which argued in support of the theory of evolution, following which the same measure of DTA was taken as for the Canadian group. Religious participants with a creationist worldview were found to have a significantly higher level of death-thought accessibility than those of the control group.


title: Worldview

text: Goldenberg "et al" found that highlighting the similarities between humans and other animals increases death-thought accessibility, as does attention to the physical rather than meaningful qualities of sex.


title: Worldview

text: Nishida Kitaro wrote extensively on "the Religious Worldview" in exploring the philosophical significance of Eastern religions.


title: Worldview

text: According to Neo-Calvinist David Naugle's "World view: The History of a Concept", "Conceiving of Christianity as a worldview has been one of the most significant developments in the recent history of the church."


title: Worldview

text: The Christian thinker James W. Sire defines a worldview as "a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic construction of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being." He suggests that "we should all think in terms of worldviews, that is, with a consciousness not only of our own way of thought but also that of other people, so that we can first understand and then genuinely communicate with others in our pluralistic society."


title: Worldview

text: The commitment mentioned by James W. Sire can be extended further. The worldview increases the commitment to serve the world. With the change of a person's view towards the world, he/she can be motivated to serve the world. This serving attitude has been illustrated by Tareq M Zayed as the 'Emancipatory Worldview' in his writing "History of emancipatory worldview of Muslim learners".


title: Worldview

text: David Bell has also raised questions on religious worldviews for the designers of superintelligences – machines much smarter than humans.


title: Tony Thomas (producer)

text: Charles Anthony Thomas ("né" Jacobs; born December 7, 1948) is an Academy Award nominated American television and film producer. He was a producer for the feature film "Dead Poets Society" for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1989", Insomnia," among other films.


title: Tony Thomas (producer)

text: He is also the producer of many successful television series from the 1970s into the 1990s such as "Golden Girls" for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series twice and won three consecutive Golden Globe Awards for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy. Thomas was the producer of "Blossom" and many other TV series. He is the co-founder of Witt/Thomas Productions.


title: Tony Thomas (producer)

text: Born Charles Anthony Jacobs in Hollywood, California, Thomas is the son of actor and philanthropist Danny Thomas and his wife, Rose Marie (Cassaniti) Thomas. His father was of Lebanese descent and his mother was of Italian descent. He is the younger brother of actresses Terre Thomas and Marlo Thomas.


title: Tony Thomas (producer)

text: Thomas began working in Hollywood film/TV production at Screen Gems as an associate producer on the acclaimed television movie "Brian's Song". In 1974, he teamed with producer Paul Junger Witt and wife Susan Harris to form a TV production company, Witt/Thomas Productions (alternately Witt/Thomas/Harris Productions), which produced numerous successful television series from the 1970s into the 1990s.


title: Tony Thomas (producer)

text: He has produced many TV series, including "The Practice" (1976–1977), "Nurses", "Herman's Head", "Soap", "Blossom", "Empty Nest", "Benson", "Beauty and the Beast", "The Golden Girls", "Brotherly Love", "The John Larroquette Show" and "It's a Living". He was a producer for the feature film "Dead Poets Society".


title: Tony Thomas (producer)

text: Thomas serves as a member of the ALSAC/St. Jude Boards of Directors and Governors, directing the operation of the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital that his father had founded.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: The Battle of Baghdad, also known as the Fall of Baghdad, was a military battle that took place in Baghdad in early April 2003, as part of the invasion of Iraq.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Three weeks into the invasion of Iraq, Coalition Forces Land Component Command elements, led by the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division, captured Baghdad. Over 2,000 Iraqi soldiers as well as 34 coalition troops were killed in the battle.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: After the fall of Baghdad, Coalition forces entered the city of Kirkuk on April 10 and Tikrit on April 15, 2003. The United States officially declared victory against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein on April 14, and President George W. Bush gave his Mission Accomplished Speech on May 1.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Baghdad suffered serious damage to its civilian infrastructure, economy, and cultural inheritance from the battle and following unrest, including from looting and arson.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: During the invasion, the Al-Yarmouk Hospital in south Baghdad saw a steady rate of about 100 new patients an hour.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Limited bombing began on March 19, 2003 as United States forces unsuccessfully attempted to kill Saddam Hussein. Attacks continued against a small number of targets until March 21, 2003, when, at 17:00 UTC, the main bombing campaign of the US and their allies began. Its forces launched approximately 1700 air sorties (504 using cruise missiles). The invasion of the city commenced three days after Allied forces led by Major General Buford Blount and the 3rd Infantry Division had secured the Baghdad airport.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: US officials said that their forces fought skirmishes there with Iraq's Special Republican Guard, with two task forces going up to the Tigris river from the southern outskirts of the city before moving west towards the airport. Major General Victor Renuart said the intention was to indicate to the Iraqi leader that coalition forces could move in and out of Baghdad whenever they wished. "The Guardian" reported that US forces occupied two "presidential palaces". The Army also surrounded the Information Ministry and other key government installations for a while.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: On March 24, retired US Army general Barry McCaffrey, told BBC Newsnight: "If [the Iraqis] actually fight, clearly it's going to be brutal, dangerous work and we could take, bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties". In order to avoid the disastrous effects of house to house urban combat, US military planners agreed that seizing western Baghdad (now known as the Green Zone) was one of the main military objectives for securing Baghdad. By seizing only critical nodes and infrastructure in a rapid manner, it was believed such targeted assaults would weaken the regime of Saddam Hussein and hasten its collapse, all the while avoiding the deployment of troops to clear every single block of Baghdad. In preparation for the impending attack, Iraqi military planners organised hybrid groups of paramilitary and regular army units, deployed improvised barriers and destroyed the eastern Diyala River bridges to block US army mechanised units.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: The invasion of Baghdad was led by the United States Army's 3rd Infantry Division and the United States Marine Corps' 1st Marine Division, equipped with M1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M113 armored personnel carriers, LAV 25s, and Amphibious Assault Vehicles. These forces, supported by American and British aircraft including B-52s, Harrier GR7 attack jets and A10 Warthogs, confronted 36,000 soldiers of the Iraqi Special Republican Guard protected in sprawling bunkers outside Baghdad, armed with Asad Babil tanks and heavy artillery.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: At the time of invasion, coalition aircraft were making bombing runs on Baghdad at the rate of 1,000 sorties a day, most of them aimed at the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Royal Air Force Tornados from 9 and 617 Squadrons attacked the radar defense systems protecting Baghdad, but lost a Tornado on March 22 along with the pilot and navigator (Flight Lieutenant Kevin Main and Flight Lieutenant Dave Williams) in a friendly fire incident, shot down by an American Patriot missile as they returned to their airbase in Kuwait. On April 2, a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and a United States Navy F/A-18C Hornet were shot down near Karbala. On 8 April, an A-10 Warthog attack plane was shot down in the fighting around Jumhuriya Bridge by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: On April 4, 2003, the 2nd Tank Battalion Marine Corps had a stiff fight with the Al Nida Division of the Republican Guards and foreign Islamist fighters on the outskirts of Baghdad. By the end of the day, the Al Nida was considered rendered "combat-ineffective", but three US Marines (1st Lieutenant Brian McPhillips, Sergeant Duane Rios and Corporal Bernard Gooden) were killed in the At Tuwayhah fighting and a tank lost. That day, the 5th Regimental Combat Team reported that two supporting Abrams tanks were destroyed battling the Fedayeen and Al Nida Republican Guards, the latter attempting to use anti-aircraft guns in the ground role.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: On the morning of April 3, 2003, US forces advanced on Saddam International Airport. This location turned out to be the best defended Iraqi position of the entire war and two US soldiers were killed by mortar fire early in the fighting. After several hours of combat, the First Brigade, Third Infantry Division succeeded in taking control of Baghdad International Airport, which would become the hub of American logistics in Iraq for the next seven years. Before sunrise on April 4, the Americans were subjected to a fierce counter-attack by Iraqi troops. The First Brigades Tactical Operations Center (TOC) began receiving small arms and mortar fire. Under the cover of darkness, a number of T-72 tanks managed to get within several hundred meters of their position. According to one source: "It was not until a chemical reconnaissance vehicle was fired on, and a Bradley actually was hit by a T-72 main gun round, that the battalion became aware of its peril."


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Fortunately for the crew, the hit was only a glancing one, and they were able to drive their vehicle to safety. A fireteam with a Javelin ATGM destroyed two of the Iraqi tanks, while the rest were destroyed by a passing M1 Abrams. As dawn approached, the attack on the TOC intensified, and Iraqi infantry flooded into the position on foot. During the fighting, Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith was killed by enemy fire while fighting off an Iraqi attack on his team in an action that resulted in the posthumous awarding of division's first Medal of Honor since World War II. During the softening up bombardment of Baghdad Airport on April 3, 2003, an Air Force F-15E fighter mistakenly attacked Battery C, First Battalion, 3-13th Field Artillery (supporting Third Infantry Division), destroying two Humvees and killing Sergeant 1st Class Randy Rehn and Sergeants Donald Oaks and Todd Robins. Five other soldiers from the unit were injured in the air attack. Sergeant 1st Class Wilbert Davis is also reported to have been killed along with American journalist Michael Kelly on April 3 after coming under fire, during operations to secure Baghdad Airport.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: On April 5, Task Force 1–64 Armor of the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division, 2nd Brigade, executed a raid, later called the "Thunder Run", to test remaining Iraqi defenses. The operation began south of Baghdad and went through main roads to the newly secured airport. Iraqi resistance was disorganized, and the unit sustained few casualties. The unit was forced to abandon one tank due to a recoilless rifle or RPG strike in the rear that penetrated a fuel cell and set the engine on fire. The crew was unharmed. Later, the Air Force bombed the tank to destroy it in place, and the Iraqi Information Ministry claimed credit for destroying it.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Two days later, the entire 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division was ordered to conduct another "Thunder Run", following the same route as before. This route had been fortified in the intervening period, and senior leaders feared much more substantial resistance than during the prior encounter. Colonel David Perkins, the brigade's commander, followed the original Thunder Run route north into Baghdad, but then veered east into the government districts instead of west towards the airport. The 2nd Brigade easily took control of what is now the "Green Zone" in one day, dramatically speeding up the end of conventional ground combat in Iraq.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: This portion of the battle was described in detail in the book "Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad" by David Zucchino, published March 22, 2004.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: On April 7, 2003, intense fighting took place at three locations known as objectives Moe, Larry, and Curly (named after the characters in The Three Stooges). Each objective was a cloverleaf where east–west roads intersected with the main north–south route (Highway 8) being used for the Thunder run. Successfully holding these highway interchanges was essential to keep Highway 8 open thus allowing US forces to remain in the city center following the second Thunder run. Objective Moe was at the junction of Highway 8 and the Qadisiyah expressway, Larry at Qatar Al-Nada street leading to the Al Jadriyah bridge, and Curly at the Dora expressway. At the southernmost location, Objective Curly, an 18-hour battle by the 3–15 Infantry resulted in the deaths of two US soldiers (Staff Sergeant Robert Stever and Sergeant 1st Class John Marshall) killed by RPG rounds and about 40 wounded with 350 to 500 Iraqi casualties (Special


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Republican Guard, Fedayeen and Syrian fighters). US tank (1st and 4th Battalions of the 64th Armored Regiments) and infantry units nearly ran out of fuel and ammunition and were almost overrun until reinforcements broke through and were able to resupply Objective Curly. Toward the end of the fighting, an Ababil-100 SSM missile or an Iraqi FROG-7 rocket exploded among the parked vehicles of the headquarters of 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, killing two soldiers (Private 1st Class Anthony Miller and Staff Sergeant Lincoln Hollinsaid) and two embedded journalists (Julio Parrado and Christian Liebig), wounding 15 others and destroying 17 military vehicles.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: On April 7, US troops took control of a major presidential palace along the Tigris river. It had been hoped that leaders of the regime would be found in the complex, located near Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. American commanders on the ground said that they would remain in the city center rather than return to the outskirts as they had done previously.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Within hours of a palace seizure and with television coverage of this spreading through Iraq, US forces ordered Iraqi forces within Baghdad to surrender, or the city would face a full-scale assault. Iraqi government officials had either disappeared or had conceded defeat.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: On April 8, 2003, some 500 Iraqi soldiers, including Republican Guard mounted a fierce counterattack across the Jumhuriya Bridge, forcing part of the US forces on the western side of Baghdad to initially retreat, but the Iraqis reportedly lost 50 soldiers in the fighting that included the use of A-10 Warthogs on the part of the US forces. An A-10 attack plane was shot down in combating the counterattack by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: As the American forces secured control of the capital, Iraqi civilians immediately began looting the palaces, as well as government offices.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: At the Yarmuk Hospital, not only all beds, but all medical equipment was stolen. One other hospital managed to keep on functioning in a manner by organizing local civilians as armed guards.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Serious looting was described at National Museum of Iraq, and the Saddam Arts Center, the University of Baghdad, three five-star hotels: the Al-Rashid, the Al-Mansour and Babel Hotel, state-owned supermarkets, many embassies, and state-owned factories.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: At the National Museum of Iraq, which had been a virtual repository of treasures from the ancient Mesopotamian cultures as well as early Islamic culture, many of the 170,000 irreplaceable artifacts were either stolen or broken (partially found safe and well later). On April 14, the Iraq National Library and National Archives were burned down, destroying thousands of manuscripts from civilizations dating back as far as 7,000 years.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: Within eight days following the 2003 invasion, only 35, or 5% of the 700 animals in the Baghdad Zoo survived. This was a result of theft of some animals for human food, and starvation of caged animals that had no food or water. Survivors included larger animals like lions, tigers, and bears. Notwithstanding the chaos brought by the invasion, South African Lawrence Anthony and some of the zoo keepers cared for the animals and fed the carnivores with donkeys they had bought locally.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: As the U.S. forces were occupying the Republican Palace and other central landmarks and ministries on April 9, Saddam Hussein had emerged from his command bunker beneath the Al A'Zamiyah district of northern Baghdad, and greeted excited members of the local public. This impromptu walkabout was probably his last and his reasons for doing so are still unclear. It is possible that he wished to take what he thought might be his last opportunity to greet his people as their country's president. The walkabout was captured on film and broadcast several days after the event on Al-Arabia Television and was also witnessed by ordinary people who corroborated the date afterwards. He was accompanied by bodyguards and other loyal supporters including at least one of his sons and his personal secretary. After the walkabout Hussein returned to his bunker and made preparations for his family.


title: Battle of Baghdad (2003)

text: On April 9, 2003, Baghdad was formally occupied by Coalition forces. Much of Baghdad remained unsecured however, and fighting continued within the city and its outskirts well into the period of occupation. Saddam, certain members of his family and close subordinates had vanished, and his whereabouts were unknown.