text: John Sacrimoni, boss of the fictional Lupertazzi crime family in the hit HBO television series "The Sopranos", dies at MCFP Springfield in the season 6 episode entitled "Stage 5".


title: United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners

text: Ercole "Eckley" DiMeo of the fictional Soprano crime family in the hit HBO television series "The Sopranos" is the unseen longtime boss of the Soprano crime family and is mentioned in season one that he is incarcerated here.


text: The American crime drama limited series Black Bird follows the true story of James Keene during his time at MCFP Springfield. The series is based on the 2010 autobiographical novel "In with the Devil: a Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption" by James Keene and Hillel Levin.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he preferred instead of "sculptures") but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, photography, painting, installation, and artist's books. He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965. The first biography of the artist, "Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas", by Lary Bloom, was published by Wesleyan University Press in the spring of 2019.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father died when he was 6. His mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, LeWitt traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old Master paintings. Shortly thereafter, he served in the Korean War, first in California, then Japan, and finally Korea. LeWitt moved to New York City in 1953 and set up a studio on the Lower East Side, in the old Ashkenazi Jewish settlement on Hester Street. During this time he studied at the School of Visual Arts while also pursuing his interest in design at "Seventeen" magazine, where he did paste-ups, mechanicals, and photostats. In 1955, he was a graphic designer in the office of architect I.M. Pei for a year. Around that time, LeWitt also discovered the work of the late 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose studies in sequence and locomotion were an early influence for him. These experiences, combined with an entry-level job as a night receptionist and clerk he took in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, would influence LeWitt's later work.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: At MoMA, LeWitt's co-workers included fellow artists Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Gene Beery, and Robert Mangold, and the future art critic and writer, Lucy Lippard who worked as a page in the library. Curator Dorothy Canning Miller's now famous 1960 "Sixteen Americans" exhibition with work by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella created a swell of excitement and discussion among the community of artists with whom LeWitt associated. LeWitt also became friends with Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse, and Robert Smithson.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: LeWitt taught at several New York schools, including New York University and the School of Visual Arts, during the late 1960s. In 1980, LeWitt left New York for Spoleto, Italy. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, LeWitt made Chester, Connecticut, his primary residence. He died at age 78 in New York from cancer complications.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: LeWitt is regarded as a founder of both Minimal and Conceptual art. His prolific two and three-dimensional work ranges from wall drawings (over 1200 of which have been executed) to hundreds of works on paper extending to structures in the form of towers, pyramids, geometric forms, and progressions. These works range in size from books and gallery-sized installations to monumental outdoor pieces. LeWitt's first serial sculptures were created in the 1960s using the modular form of the square in arrangements of varying visual complexity. In 1979, LeWitt participated in the design for the Lucinda Childs Dance Company's piece "Dance".


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In the early 1960s, LeWitt first began to create his "structures," a term he used to describe his three-dimensional work. His frequent use of open, modular structures originates from the cube, a form that influenced the artist's thinking from the time that he first became an artist. After creating an early body of work made up of closed-form wooden objects, heavily lacquered by hand, in the mid-1960s he "decided to remove the skin altogether and reveal the structure." This skeletal form, the radically simplified open cube, became a basic building block of the artist's three-dimensional work. In the mid-1960s, LeWitt began to work with the open cube: twelve identical linear elements connected at eight corners to form a skeletal structure. From 1969, he would conceive many of his modular structures on a large scale, to be constructed in aluminum or steel by industrial fabricators. Several of LeWitt's cube structures stood at approximate eye level. The artist introduced bodily proportion to his fundamental sculptural unit at this scale.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Following early experimentation LeWitt settled on a standard version for his modular cubes, circa 1965: the negative space between the beams would stand to the positive space of the sculptural material itself in a ratio of 8.5:1, or formula_1. The material would also be painted white instead of black, to avoid the "expressiveness" of the black color of earlier, similar pieces. Both the ratio and the color were arbitrary aesthetic choices, but once taken they were used consistently in several pieces which typify LeWitt's "modular cube" works. Museums holding specimens of LeWitt's modular cube works have published lesson suggestions for elementary education, meant to encourage children to investigate the mathematical properties of the artworks.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Beginning in the mid-1980s, LeWitt composed some of his sculptures from stacked cinder blocks, still generating variations within self-imposed restrictions. At this time, he began to work with concrete blocks. In 1985, the first cement "Cube" was built in a park in Basel. From 1990 onwards, LeWitt conceived multiple variations on a tower to be constructed using concrete blocks. In a shift away from his well-known geometric vocabulary of forms, the works LeWitt realized in the late 1990s indicate vividly the artist's growing interest in somewhat random curvilinear shapes and highly saturated colors.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In 2007, LeWitt conceived "9 Towers", a cube made from more than 1,000 light-coloured bricks that measure five meters on each side. It was installed at the Kivik Art Centre in Lilla Stenshuvud, Sweden, in 2014.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In 1968, LeWitt began to conceive sets of guidelines or simple diagrams for his two-dimensional works drawn directly on the wall, executed first in graphite, then in crayon, later in colored pencil and finally in chromatically rich washes of India ink, bright acrylic paint, and other materials. Since he created a work of art for Paula Cooper Gallery's inaugural show in 1968, an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, thousands of LeWitt's drawings have been installed directly on the surfaces of walls. Between 1969 and 1970 he created four "Drawings Series", which presented different combinations of the basic element that governed many of his early wall drawings. In each series he applied a different system of change to each of twenty-four possible combinations of a square divided into four equal parts, each containing one of the four basic types of lines LeWitt used (vertical, horizontal, diagonal left, and diagonal right). The result is four possible permutations for each of the twenty-four original units. The system used in Drawings Series I is what LeWitt termed 'Rotation,' Drawings Series II uses a system termed 'Mirror,' Drawings Series III uses 'Cross & Reverse Mirror,' and Drawings Series IV uses 'Cross Reverse'.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In "Wall Drawing #122", first installed in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the work contains "all combinations of two lines crossing, placed at random, using arcs from corners and sides, straight, not straight and broken lines" resulting in 150 unique pairings that unfold on the gallery walls. LeWitt further expanded on this theme, creating variations such as "Wall Drawing #260" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which systematically runs through all possible two-part combinations of arcs and lines. Conceived in 1995, "Wall Drawing #792: Black rectangles and squares" underscores LeWitt's early interest in the intersections between art and architecture. Spanning the two floors of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, this work consists of varying combinations of black rectangles, creating an irregular grid-like pattern.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: LeWitt, who had moved to Spoleto, Italy, in the late 1970s credited his transition from graphite pencil or crayon to vivid ink washes, to his encounter with the frescoes of Giotto, Masaccio, and other early Florentine painters. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he created highly saturated colorful acrylic wall drawings. While their forms are curvilinear, playful and seem almost random, they are also drawn according to an exacting set of guidelines. The bands are a standard width, for example, and no colored section may touch another section of the same color.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In 2005 LeWitt began a series of 'scribble' wall drawings, so termed because they required the draftsmen to fill in areas of the wall by scribbling with graphite. The scribbling occurs at six different densities, which are indicated on the artist's diagrams and then mapped out in string on the surface of the wall. The gradations of scribble density produce a continuum of tone that implies three dimensions. The largest scribble wall drawing, "Wall Drawing #1268", is on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: According to the principle of his work, LeWitt's wall drawings are usually executed by people other than the artist himself. Even after his death, people are still making these drawings. He would therefore eventually use teams of assistants to create such works. Writing about making wall drawings, LeWitt himself observed in 1971 that "each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently". Between 1968 and his death in 2007, LeWitt created more than 1,270 wall drawings. The wall drawings, executed on-site, generally exist for the duration of an exhibition; they are then destroyed, giving the work in its physical form an ephemeral quality. They can be installed, removed, and then reinstalled in another location, as many times as required for exhibition purposes. When transferred to another location, the number of walls can change only by ensuring that the proportions of the original diagram are retained.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Permanent murals by LeWitt can be found at, among others, the AXA Center, New York (1984–85); The Swiss Re headquarters Americas in Armonk, New York, the Atlanta City Hall, Atlanta ("Wall Drawing #581", 1989/90); the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC ("Wall Drawing #1103", 2003); the Conrad Hotel, New York ("Loopy Doopy (Blue and Purple)", 1999); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo ("Wall Drawing #1268: Scribbles: Staircase (AKAG)", 2006/2010); Akron Art Museum, Akron (2007); the Columbus Circle Subway Station, New York; The Jewish Museum (New York), New York; the Green Center for Physics at MIT, Cambridge ("Bars of Colors Within Squares (MIT)", 2007); the Embassy of the United States in Berlin; the Wadsworth Atheneum; and John Pearson's House, Oberlin, Ohio. The artist's last public wall drawing, "Wall Drawing #1259: Loopy Doopy (Springfield)" (2008), is at the United States Courthouse in Springfield, Massachusetts (designed by architect Moshe Safdie). "Wall Drawing #599: Circles 18" (1989) — a bull's eye of concentric circles in alternating bands of yellow, blue, red and white — was installed at the lobby of the Jewish Community Center, New York, in 2013.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In the 1980s, in particular after a trip to Italy, LeWitt started using gouache, an opaque water-based paint, to produce free-flowing abstract works in contrasting colors. These represented a significant departure from the rest of his practice, as he created these works with his own hands. LeWitt's gouaches are often created in series based on a specific motif. Past series have included "Irregular Forms", "Parallel Curves", "Squiggly Brushstrokes" and "Web-like Grids".


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Although this loosely rendered composition may have been a departure from his earlier, more geometrically structured works visually, it nevertheless remained in alignment with his original artistic intent. LeWitt painstakingly made his own prints from his gouache compositions. In 2012, art advisor Heidi Lee Komaromi curated, "Sol LeWitt: Works on Paper 1983-2003", an exhibition revealing the variety of techniques LeWitt employed on paper during the final decades of his life.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: From 1966, LeWitt's interest in seriality led to his production of more than 50 artist's books throughout his career; he later donated many examples to the Wadsworth Athenaeum's library. In 1976 LeWitt helped found Printed Matter, Inc, a for-profit art space in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City with fellow artists and critics Lucy Lippard, Carol Androcchio, Amy Baker (Sandback), Edit DeAk, Mike Glier, Nancy Linn, Walter Robinson, Ingrid Sischy, Pat Steir, Mimi Wheeler, Robin White and Irena von Zahn. LeWitt was a signal innovator of the genre of the "artist's book," a term that was coined for a 1973 exhibition curated by Dianne Perry Vanderlip at Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Printed Matter was one of the first organizations dedicated to creating and distributing artists' books, incorporating self-publishing, small-press publishing, and artist networks and collectives. For LeWitt and others, Printed Matter also served as a support system for avant-garde artists, balancing its role as publisher, exhibition space, retail space, and community center for the downtown arts scene, in that sense emulating the network of aspiring artists LeWitt knew and enjoyed as a staff member at the Museum of Modern Art.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: LeWitt collaborated with architect Stephen Lloyd to design a synagogue for his congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek; he conceptualized the "airy" synagogue building, with its shallow dome supported by "exuberant wooden roof beams", an homage to the wooden synagogues of eastern Europe.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In 1981, LeWitt was invited by the Fairmount Park Art Association (currently known as the Association for Public Art) to propose a public artwork for a site in Fairmount Park. He selected the long, rectangular plot of land known as the Reilly Memorial and submitted a drawing with instructions. Installed in 2011, "Lines in Four Directions in Flowers" is made up of more than 7,000 plantings arranged in strategically configured rows. In his original proposal, the artist planned an installation of flower plantings of four different colors (white, yellow, red & blue) in four equal rectangular areas, in rows of four directions (vertical, horizontal, diagonal right & left) framed by evergreen hedges of about 2' height, with each color block comprising four to five species that bloom sequentially.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In 2004, "Six Curved Walls" sculpture was installed on the hillside slope of Crouse College on Syracuse University campus. The concrete block sculpture consists of six undulating walls, each 12 feet high, and spans 140 feet. The sculpture was designed and constructed to mark the inauguration of Nancy Cantor as the 11th Chancellor of Syracuse University.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Since the early 1960s he and his wife, Carol Androccio, gathered nearly 9,000 works of art through purchases, in trades with other artists and dealers, or as gifts. In this way he acquired works by approximately 750 artists, including Flavin, Ryman, Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Kazuko Miyamoto, Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Gerhard Richter, and others. In 2007, the exhibition "Selections from The LeWitt Collection" at the Weatherspoon Art Museum assembled approximately 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs, among them works by Andre, Alice Aycock, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jan Dibbets, Jackie Ferrara, Gilbert and George, Alex Katz, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Mario Merz, Shirin Neshat, Pat Steir, and many other artists.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: LeWitt's work was first publicly exhibited in 1964 in a group show curated by Dan Flavin at the Kaymar Gallery, New York.Dan Graham's John Daniels Gallery later gave him his first solo show in 1965. In 1966, he participated in the "Primary Structures" exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York (a seminal show which helped define the minimalist movement), submitting an untitled, open modular cube of 9 units. The same year he was included in the "10" exhibit at Dwan Gallery, New York. He was later invited by Harald Szeemann to participate in "When Attitude Becomes Form," at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in 1969. Interviewed in 1993 about those years LeWitt remarked, "I decided I would make color or form recede and proceed in a three-dimensional way."


title: Sol LeWitt

text: The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague presented his first retrospective exhibition in 1970, and his work was later shown in a major mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1978. In 1972/1973, LeWitt's first museum shows in Europe were mounted at the Kunsthalle Bern and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. In 1975, Lewitt created "The Location of a Rectangle for the Hartford Atheneum" for the third MATRIX exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Later that year, he participated in the Wadsworth Atheneum's sixth MATRIX exhibition, providing instructions for a second wall drawing. MoMA gave LeWitt his first retrospective in 1978-79. The exhibition traveled to various American venues. For the 1987 Skulptur Projekte Münster, Germany, he realized "Black Form: Memorial to the Missing Jews", a rectangular wall of black concrete blocks for the center of a plaza in front of an elegant, white Neoclassical government building; it is now installed at Altona Town Hall, Hamburg. Other major exhibitions since include "Sol LeWitt Drawings 1958-1992", which was organized by the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Netherlands in 1992 which traveled over the next three years to museums in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the United States; and in 1996, the Museum of Modern Art, New York mounted a traveling survey exhibition: "Sol LeWitt Prints: 1970-1995". A major LeWitt retrospective was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: In 2006, LeWitt's "Drawing Series…" was displayed at and was devoted to the 1970s drawings by the conceptual artist. Drafters and assistants drew directly on the walls using graphite, colored pencil, crayon, and chalk. The works were based on LeWitt's complex principles, which eliminated the limitations of the canvas for more extensive constructions.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: "Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective", a collaboration between the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) opened to the public in 2008 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. The exhibition will be on view for 25 years and is housed in a three-story historic mill building in the heart of MASS MoCA's campus fully restored by Bruner/Cott and Associates architects (and outfitted with a sequence of new interior walls constructed to LeWitt's specifications.) The exhibition consists of 105 drawings — comprising nearly one acre of wall surface — that LeWitt created over 40 years from 1968 to 2007 and includes several drawings never before seen, some of which LeWitt created for the project shortly before his death.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Furthermore, the artist was the subject of exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Center, Long Island City ("Concrete Blocks"); the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover ("Twenty-Five Years of Wall Drawings, 1968-1993"); and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford ("Incomplete Cubes"), which traveled to three art museums in the United States. At the time of his death, LeWitt had just organized a retrospective of his work at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: At Naples "Sol LeWitt. L'artista e i suoi artisti" opened at the Museo on December 15, 2012, running until April 1, 2013.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: LeWitt's works are found in the most important museum collections including: Tate Modern, London, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Hallen für Neue Kunst Schaffhausen, Switzerland, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia, Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, , The Jewish Museum in Manhattan, MASS MoCA, North Adams, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The erection of Double Negative Pyramid by Sol LeWitt at Europos Parkas in Vilnius, Lithuania was a significant event in the history of art in post Berlin Wall era.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: Sol LeWitt was one of the main figures of his time; he transformed the process of art-making by questioning the fundamental relationship between an idea, the subjectivity of the artist, and the artwork a given idea might produce. While many artists were challenging modern conceptions of originality, authorship, and artistic genius in the 1960s, LeWitt denied that approaches such as Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Process Art were merely technical or illustrative of philosophy. In his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", LeWitt asserted that Conceptual art was neither mathematical nor intellectual but intuitive, given that the complexity inherent to transforming an idea into a work of art was fraught with contingencies. LeWitt's art is not about the singular hand of the artist; it is the idea behind each work that surpasses the work itself. In the early 21st century, LeWitt's work, especially the wall drawings, has been critically acclaimed for its economic perspicacity. Though modest—most exist as simple instructions on a sheet of paper—the drawings can be made again and again and again, anywhere in the world, without the artist needing to be involved in their production.


title: Sol LeWitt

text: His auction record of $749,000 was set in 2014 for his gouache on paperboard piece "Wavy Brushstroke" (1995) at Sotheby's, New York.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: The Westchester Knicks are an American professional basketball team in the NBA G League based in White Plains, New York, and are affiliated with the New York Knicks. The Knicks typically play their home games at Westchester County Center in White Plains, New York. Due to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the Westchester County Center served as vaccination site, the Westchester Knicks had announced on October 9, 2021 that they would play their 2021–22 season home games at Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport, Connecticut. On June 21, 2022 the Westchester Knicks announced that their home games would continue at the Total Mortgage Arena for the 2022–23 season.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: The Knicks became the seventh D-League team to be owned by an NBA team and replaced the Erie BayHawks as the Knicks' D-League affiliate.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: The Knicks had filed for trademarks for five possible names: New York 914s, New York 'Bockers, New York Plainsmen, New York Empire, and New York Hutch. On May 14, 2014, the Westchester Knicks name and logo were announced; in addition to retaining the parent club's "Knicks" name, the Knicks had also incorporated the original "Father Knickerbocker" logo (drawn by Willard Mullin) which was in use by the parent Knicks from the team's founding in 1946 until 1964. The logo later changed to the current one, which resembles the New York Knicks' current logo.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: On September 3, 2014 The Westchester Knicks acquired 16 players on the 2014 NBA Development League Expansion Draft. On October 13 Kevin Whitted was named as the first coach of Westchester. On November 1, in the 2014 NBA D-League Draft, the Westchester Knicks made second-round guard Joseph Bertrand their first ever selection. On November 16 they made their regular season debut in an 84–91 loss against the local Oklahoma City Blue. Three days later they made their home debut, again losing, this time against the Canton Charge on an 84-88 affair. Their first win came on November 21 against the Grand Rapids Drive in their third game, which they won by 97–83 at home.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: On January 7, 2015, Langston Galloway signed a 10-day contract with the New York Knicks, becoming the first player to be called up to the NBA in franchise history.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: On March 30, 2015, the Knicks announced via Twitter that head coach Kevin Whitted was relieved of his duties and that assistant coach Craig Hodges would serve as the interim head coach for the final week of the 2014–15 season. The Knicks were 10–36 at the time for Whitted's firing, which was second worst in the Development League. Whitted became the first head coach to be fired in franchise history.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: On October 7, 2015, the Westchester Knicks hired Mike Miller to be their head coach. Previously he served as an assistant coach for the Austin Toros. On October 27, 2015, the Westchester Knicks hired Coby Karl and Derrick Alston as the assistant basketball coaches.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: On October 31, 2015, with the second pick in the NBA D-League draft, The Westchester Knicks drafted Jimmer Fredette.


title: Westchester Knicks

text: All NBA D-League prospects — players whose rights are not owned by NBA teams — are free agents and are eligible to be called up to the NBA.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: PAVE PAWS (PAVE Phased Array Warning System) is a complex Cold War early warning radar and computer system developed in 1980 to "detect and characterize a sea-launched ballistic missile attack against the United States". With the first solid-state phased array deployed, the system used a pair of Raytheon AN/FPS-115 phased array radar sets at each site to cover a wide azimuth angle of 240 degrees. Two sites were deployed in 1980 at the periphery of the contiguous United States, then two more in 1987–95, as part of the United States Space Surveillance Network. One system was sold to Taiwan and is still in service.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The radar was built in the Cold War to give early warning of a nuclear attack, to allow time for US bombers to get off the ground and land-based US missiles to be launched, to decrease the chance that a preemptive strike could destroy US strategic nuclear forces. The deployment of submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) by the Soviet Union by the 1970s, significantly decreased the warning time available between the detection of an incoming enemy missile and its reaching its target, because SLBMs can be launched closer to the US than the previous ICBMs, which have a long flight path from the Soviet Union to the continental US. Thus there was a need for a radar system with faster reaction time than existing radars. PAVE PAWS later acquired a second mission of tracking satellites and other objects in Earth orbit as part of the United States Space Surveillance Network.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: A notable feature of the system is its phased array antenna technology, it was one of the first large phased array radars. A phased array was used because a conventional mechanically-rotated radar antenna cannot turn fast enough to track multiple ballistic missiles. A nuclear strike on the US would consist of hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs incoming simultaneously. The beam of the phased array radar is steered electronically without moving the fixed antenna, so it can be pointed in a different direction in milliseconds, allowing it to track many incoming missiles at the same time.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The AN/FPS-115 radar consists of two phased arrays of antenna elements mounted on two sloping sides of the 105 ft high transmitter building, which are oriented 120° apart in azimuth. The beam from each array can be deflected up to 60° from the array's central boresight axis, allowing each array to cover an azimuth angle of 120°, thus the entire radar can cover an azimuth of 240°. The building sides are sloped at an angle of 20°, and the beam can be directed at any elevation angle between 3° and 85°. The beam is kept at least 100 ft above the ground over public-accessible land to avoid the possibility of exposing the public to significant electromagnetic fields.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: Each array is a circle 72.5 ft (22.1 m) in diameter consisting of 2,677 crossed dipole antenna elements, of which 1,792 are powered and serve as both transmitting and receiving antennas, with the rest functioning as receiving antennas. Due to the phenomenon of interference the radio waves from the separate elements combine in front of the antenna to form a beam. The array has a gain of 38.6 dB, and the width of the beam is only 2.2°. The drive current for each antenna element passes through a device called a phase shifter, controlled by the central computer. By changing the relative timing (phase) of the current pulses supplied to each antenna element the computer can instantly steer the beam to a different direction.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The radar operates in the UHF band between 420 - 450 MHz, which is shared with the 70 centimeter amateur band (just below the UHF television broadcast band), that is a wavelength of 71–67 cm, with circular polarization. It is an active array (AESA); each of the 1,792 transmitting elements has its own solid-state transmitter/receiver module, and radiates a peak power of 320 W, so the peak power of each array is 580 kW. It operates in a repeating 54 millisecond cycle in which it transmits a series of pulses, then listens for echoes. Its duty cycle (fraction of time spent transmitting) is never greater than 25% (so the average power of the beam never exceeds 25% of 540 kW, or 145 kW) and is usually around 18%. It is reported to have a range of about 3,000 nautical miles (3,452 statute miles, 5,555 km); at that range it can detect an object the size of a small car, and smaller objects at closer ranges.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The functioning of the radar is completely automatic, controlled by four computers. The software divides the beam time between "surveillance" and "tracking" functions, switching the beam back and forth rapidly between different tasks. In the surveillance mode, which normally consumes about 11% of the duty cycle, the radar repeatedly scans the horizon across its full 240° azimuth in a pattern between 3° and 10° elevation, creating a "surveillance fence" to immediately detect missiles as they rise above the horizon into the radar's field of view. In the tracking mode, which normally consumes the other 7% of the 18% duty cycle, the radar beam follows already-detected objects to determine their trajectory, calculating their launch and target points.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: Fixed-reflector radars with mechanically-scanned beams such as the 1955 GE AN/FPS-17 Fixed Ground Radar and 1961 RCA AN/FPS-50 Radar Set were deployed for missile tracking, and the USAF tests of modified AN/FPS-35 mechanical radars at Virginia and Pennsylvania SAGE radar stations had "marginal ability" to detect Cape Canaveral missiles in summer 1962. A Falling Leaves mechanical radar in New Jersey built for BMEWS successfully tracked a missile during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and "an AN/FPS-85 long-range phased array (Passive electronically scanned array) radar was constructed at Eglin AFB" Site C-6, Florida beginning on 29 October 1962 (the Bendix Radio Division FPS-85 contract had been signed 2 April 1962). Early military phased array radars were also deployed for testing: Bendix AN/FPS-46 Electronically Steerable Array Radar (ESAR) at Towson, MD (powered up in November 1960), White Sands' Multi-function Array Radar (1963), and the Kwajalein Missile Site Radar (1967).


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The Avco 474N Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) Detection and Warning System (SLBMD&W System) was deployed as "an austere…interim line-of-sight system" after approval in July 1965 to modify some Air Defense Command (ADC) Avco AN/FPS-26 Frequency Diversity Radars into Avco AN/FSS-7 SLBM Detection Radars. The 474N sites planned for 1968 also were to include AN/GSQ-89 data processing equipment (for synthesizing tracks from radar returns), as well as site communications equipment that NORAD requested on 10 May 1965 to allow "dual full period dedicated data circuits" to the Cheyenne Mountain 425L System, which was "fully operational" on 20 April 1966. (Cheyenne Mountain Complex relayed 474N data to "SAC, the National Military Command Center, and the Alternate NMCC over BMEWS circuits", for presentation by Display Information Processors—impact ellipses and "threat summary display" with a count of incoming missiles and "Minutes Until First Impact" countdown).


title: PAVE PAWS

text: By December 1965 NORAD decided to use the Project Space Track "phased-array radar at Eglin AFB…for SLBM surveillance on an "on-call" basis" "at the appropriate DEFCON". By June 1966 the refined FPS-85 plan was for it "to have the capability to operate in the SLBM mode [interlaced transmissions] with the Spacetrack surveillance and tracking modes" Rebuilding of the "separate faces for transmitting and receiving" began in 1967 after the under-construction Eglin FPS-85 was "almost totally destroyed by fire on 5 January 1965". FPS-85 IOC was in 1969, 474N interim operations began in July 1970 (474N IOC was 5 May 1972), and in 1972 20% of Eglin FPS-85 "surveillance capability…became dedicated to search for SLBMs," and new SLBM software was installed in 1975. (the FPS-85 was expanded in 1974).


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex with North Dakota phased arrays (four-face Missile Site Radar and single-face GE Perimeter Acquisition Radar, PAR) became operational in 1975 as part of the Safeguard Program for defending against enemy ballistic missiles.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The SLBM Phased Array Radar System (SPARS) was the USAF program initiated in November 1972 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) while the Army's PAR was under construction. A 1974 SPARS proposal for "two new SLBM Phased Array Warning Radars" was submitted to replace the east/west coast 474N detection radars, which had "limitations against Soviet SLBMs, particularly the longer range SS-N-8" on 1973 "Delta" class submarines. Development began in August 1973, SPARS was renamed PAVE PAWS on 18 February 1975, and system production was requested by a 13 June 1975 Request for Proposals (RFP). Rome Air Development Center (RADC) "was responsible for the design, fabrication installation, integration test, and evaluation of" PAVE PAWS through 1980.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The differing USAF AN/FPS-109 Cobra Dane phased array radar in Alaska achieved IOC on 13 July 1977 for "providing intelligence on Soviet test missiles fired at the Kamchatka peninsula from locations in southwestern Russia". The Safeguard PAR station that closed in 1976, had its radar "modified for the ADCOM mission during 1977 [and] ADCOM accepted [the Concrete Missile Early Warning Station] from the Army on 3 October 1977" for "SLBM surveillance of Arctic Ocean areas". By December 1977 RADC had developed the 322 watt PAVE PAWS "solid state transmitter and receiver module", and the System Program Office (ESD/OCL) issued the AN/FPS-115 "System Performance Specification …SS-OCLU-75-1A" on 15 December 1977. IBM's PAVE PAWS "beam-steering and pulse schedules from the CYBER-174" duplexed computers to the MODCOMP IV duplexed radar control computers were "based upon" PARCS program(s) installed for attack characterization in 1977 when the USAF received the Army's PAR. Bell Labs enhanced the PARCS beginning December 1978, e.g., "extending the range" by 1989 for the Enhanced PARCS configuration (EPARCS).


title: PAVE PAWS

text: USAF environmental assessments in August 1975 and March 1976 for PAVE PAWS were followed by the EPA's Environmental Impact Analysis in December 1977. Environmental impacts were litigated in U.S. District Court in Boston. The government asserted the position that Pave Paws would protect the American coastline, while hiding the fact that it had no defensive armaments in the event an incoming missile was detected. The USAF requested the National Research Council (in May 1978) and a contractor, SRI International (April 1978), to assess PAVE PAWS radiation. Two NRC reports were prepared (1979, tbd), SRI's Environmental Impact Statement was reviewed during a 22 January 1979 public hearing at the Sandwich MA high school auditorium (~300 people). The studies found no elevated cancer risk from PAVE PAWS e.g., elevated Ewing's sarcoma rates were not supported by 2005 available data (a December 2007 MA Department of Health report concluded it "appears unlikely that PAVE PAWS played a primary role in the incidence of Ewing family of tumors on Cape Cod.") A followup to a 1978 Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine report concluded in 2005 that power densities beyond were within permissible exposure limits. Consistent with other regulations to prevent interference with aircraft systems, the FAA restricts aircraft at altitudes below to maintain 1 nm (1.85 km) from the Cape Cod SSPARS phased array.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: On May 23, 1975 the USAF announced the Raytheon Corporation would be contracted to build the East Coast facility in Otis Air Force Base and West Coast facility in Beale Air Force Base. On October 27, 1976, ground-breaking ceremonies were held at the East Coast Site.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: System performance testing at the Otis facility began on April 3, 1978 and completed by January 16, 1979. To mitigate interference at the FPS-115 site on Flatrock Hill from the Cape & Islands Emergency Medical Service (CIEMSS), on 8 February 1979 ESD installed six high pass filters—then Raytheon was contracted 24 May to move the EMS Repeater Station to Bourne, Massachusetts (completed 13 July). After a 5–7 March "final review of the East Coast PAVE PAWS EIS was held at Hq AFSC", the site was accepted by ESD on 12 April. The "first radio frequency transmission" from the West Coast Site was 23 March 1979 (it was completed in October 1979). "ADCOM wanted four [PAVE PAWS] sites, but by the end of 1979 only two had been funded".


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The Cape Cod system reached Initial operating capability (IOC) as the Cape Cod Missile Early Warning Station on 4 April 1981 with initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) completed 21 May; Beale AFB reached IOC on 15 August. The two PAVE PAWS, three BMEWS, and the PARCS & FPS-85 radar stations transferred to Strategic Air Command (then Space Command) in 1983. By 1981 Cheyenne Mountain was providing 6,700 messages per hour including those based on input from the PAVE PAWS and the remaining FSS-7 stations. In 1981, as part of the Worldwide Military Command and Control System Information System (WIS), the Pentagon's National Military Command Center was receiving data "directly from the Satellite Early Warning System (SEWS) and directly from the PAVE PAWS sensor systems".


title: PAVE PAWS

text: Beam Steering Unit (BSU) and Receiver Beam Former (REX) replacements were made on the four Cape Cod and Beale radars in the 1980s.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The PAVE PAWS Expansion Program had begun by February 1982 to replace "older FPS-85 and FSS-7 SLBM surveillance radars in Florida with a new PAVE PAWS radar to provide improved surveillance of possible SLBM launch areas southeast of the United States [and for another] to the Southwest." After a 3 June 1983 RFP, Raytheon Company was contracted on 10 November and had a 22–23 February 1984 System Design Review for the Southeast and Southwest radars. The Expansion's Development Test and Engineering testing commenced on 3 February 1986 at the Southeast Site (PAVE PAWS Site 3, Robins Air Force Base—completed 5 June) and 15 August at the Southwest Site (PAVE PAWS Site 4, Eldorado Air Force Station). The Gulf Coast FPS-115s were operational in 1986 (Robins) and May 1987 (Eldorado IOC). In February 1995, all 4 radars were being netted by the "missile warning center at Cheyenne Mountain AS [which was] undergoing a $450 million upgrade program". Other centers receiving PAVE PAWS output were the 19xx Missile Correlation Center and 19xx Space Control Center.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: During the End of Cold War draw down, the Eldorado and Robins radar stations closed in 1995. By October 1999, Cape Cod and Beale radars were providing data via Jam Resistant Secure Communication (JRSC) circuits to the Command Center Processing and Display System in the NMCC. The transition of BMEWS and PAVE PAWS to SSPARS had begun with the 4 AN/FPS-50 BMEWS radars near Thule Air Base being replaced with a Raytheon AN/FPS-120 Solid State Phased Array Radar at Thule Site J (operational "2QFY87").


title: PAVE PAWS

text: An AN/FPS-115 system was sold to Taiwan in 2000 and installed at Loshan or Leshan Mountain, Tai'an, Miaoli in 2006. It was commissioned into service in 2013. The system cost approximately 1.4 billion USD and Raytheon was the prime contractor. It provides up to six minutes notice of Chinese ballistic missile attack. The system spends most of its time observing satellites and orbital debris, this information is shared with the United States. In 2016 Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems was awarded a $26.2 million contract to upgrade Taiwan's radar system. This followed on a $289.5 million sustainment contract with Raytheon was awarded in 2012. It has been reported that the defenses of Taiwan's PAVE PAWS system include a land based Phalanx CIWS.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: Taiwan had explored the acquisition of a second PAVE PAWS set but in 2012 decided against the purchase as the first PAVE PAWS set was significantly over budget and behind schedule. The second system would have been located in the south and together the PAVE PAWS sets would have provided Taiwan with 360-degree coverage.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The radar site in Taiwan sits on top of a mountain at an elevation of over 2,600 m (8,500 ft). Due to its extremely elevated position the Taiwanese set has the unique ability to track surface ships. Detection and tracking data is believed to be shared with the United States in real time, however this has not been officially confirmed.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The radar site was first occupied by a Naval Maritime and Surveillance Command radar surveillance facility which was relocated to a higher peak in the same region to make way for PAVE PAWS.


title: PAVE PAWS

text: The Solid State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) began replacing PAVE PAWS when the first AN/FPS-115 face was taken off-line for the radar upgrade. New Raytheon AN/FPS-123 Early Warning Radars became operational in 19xx (Beale) and 19xx (Cape Cod) in each base's existing PAVE PAWS "Scanner Building". RAF Fylingdales, UK and Clear Space Force Station, Alaska BMEWS stations became SSPARS radar stations when their respective AN/FPS-126 radar (3 faces) and 2001 Raytheon AN/FPS-120 Solid State Phased Array Radar became operational. In 2007, 100 owners/trustees of amateur radio repeaters in the 420 to 450 MHz band near AN/FPS-123 radars were notified to lower their power output to mitigate interference, and AN/FPS-123s were part of the Air Force Space Surveillance System by 2009. The Beale AN/FPS-123 was upgraded to a Raytheon AN/FPS-132 Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR), circa 2012, with capabilities to operate in the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) ABM system—the Beale UEWR included Avionics, Transmit-Receive modules, Receiver Exciter / Test Target Generator, Beam Steering Generator, Signal Processor, and other changes. After additional UEWR installations for GMD at Thule Site J and the UK (contracted 2003), a 2012 ESD/XRX Request for Information for replacement, and remote operation, of the remaining "PAVE PAWS/BMEWS/PARCS systems" at Cape Cod, Alaska, and North Dakota was issued. The Alaska AN/FPS-132 was contracted in fall 2012 and in 2013, the U.S. announced a plan to sell an AN/FPS-132 to Qatar.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Aaron Robin Hall III (born August 10, 1964) is an American singer and songwriter. Hall rose to prominence in 1988 as a member of the R&B and new jack swing group Guy, which he founded in the late '80s along with Teddy Riley and Timmy Gatling, who was later replaced by Hall's brother Damion Hall. In 1988 Guy released their debut album, which went on to sell over a million copies and was certified platinum. Hall provided lead vocals on songs like "Groove Me," "I Like," and "Piece of My Love." He currently resides in Los Angeles with the occupation as a personal dog trainer.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Aaron Robin Hall III was born in the Bronx, New York City, and raised in Brooklyn. He is of African-American and Puerto Rican descent. His father Aaron Hall II was a prominent New York pastor. He is the second oldest son of the Hall family, along with prominent brothers as Damion Hall and minister Todd Hall. Hall explored his vocal talent and began singing in a Baptist church from an young age. A few years before Hall segued into his R&B career, his mother Johnella Romeo Hall was hit by a car on Christmas Eve and died.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Hall developed a speech impediment as a child that would last into adulthood, causing him to struggle to pronounce his own name and restricting his ability to give interviews during his early career. Channeling all his energies into his love for dogs, he later became a dog trainer for his celebrity peers.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Hall's talent encouraged by his friend, Timmy Gatling, who also worked alongside him in a store, Abraham & Straus in the 1980s. Gatling knew Teddy Riley through their early group called Kids at Work, which was managed by Gene Griffin. After Timmy's discovery, the three decided to form a group, Guy.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: In between Hall's traditional gospel voice and erratic singing brought up major comparisons to artists later being in the business. Hall described his own voice as "running on inflections, heavy intonations and very little breathing". His vocal style and ability were influenced on other artists such R. Kelly, Darryl "Dezo" Adams and Joe.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Following the breakup of Guy, Hall signed with Silas Records, a subsidiary label of MCA Records formed by Louil Silas Jr. Hall reunited with his brother and Teddy Riley as Guy for a reunion album, "Guy III" (2000). It features the modest hit, "Dancin'". The trio is still present on tours in later years.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Hall began his solo career after his group Guy collapsed. In 1992, he worked with several producers from the Silas label on his debut album, "The Truth". It included hits like "Don't Be Afraid", "Get a Little Freaky with Me", "Let's Make Love", and others. One of his biggest singles, "I Miss You", reached #2 on the R&B chart and later peaked at #14 on the "Billboard" Hot 100, becoming his biggest pop hit. In later years, he created hits for movie soundtracks and collaborated with other artists.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Hall's hits include the #1 R&B single, "Don't Be Afraid". The original and remix of "Don't Be Afraid" was produced by Hank Shocklee from The Bomb Squad; Shocklee produced Public Enemy's music as well.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Hall released a second studio album in 1998, "Inside of You". After the failed Guy reunion in 1997, which only brought a track for the New York Undercover movie soundtrack, Hall announced he would work on another solo album the following year. He names it as a new approach in his career, including a message to harsh conditions he had experienced in the industry. The album features Faith Evans and hip-hop group Terror Squad, and it includes Fat Joe, Big Pun, Cuban Linx and Unique on a remixed track. The album had success with "All The Places (I Will Kiss You)" becoming a hit single, charting as a top 10 hit on Billboard's Top Hip Hop/R&B Songs and a top 30 song on "Billboard"'s Hot 100 chart.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: In the late 2000s Hall resigned from MCA starting a new independent label named "Artists Only International". It was a music subsidiary of "Headstart Entertainment". He declared he was "..no longer a slave anymore" referring to his former contract with MCA. Hall experimented with different genres mixing R&B, reggae and hip-hop together, giving his approach to music a more distanced critique from reviewers than usual. He defined it as his "last album" and in an article teased that he would later use a new persona, a new name ("E. Kane"). His visions didn't jibe with his future plans. The album was released in July 2005, following the album release of singer K-Ci releasing ("My Book") on the same label in 2006.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: During the spring of 1994, Hall recorded the song, "Gonna Give it to Ya" with Jewell. It is on "Above the Rim's" soundtrack which stars Tupac Shakur and Duane Martin.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: In the final quarter of 1994, he participated in recording Black Men United with Boyz II Men, Brian McKnight, Tevin Campbell, D'Angelo, R. Kelly, Gerald Levert, and Hall's brother Damion Hall in the song "U Will Know" from the "Jason's Lyric" soundtrack. Hall also recorded the song "Heaven's Girl" with R. Kelly, and Ronald Isley & Charlie Wilson on Quincy Jones' 1995 album Q's Jook Joint.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: In 1995, Hall produced a song with Dalvin DeGrate for the Dangerous Minds movie soundtrack named "Curiosity". It was the second most charted song of the album along with "Gangsta's Paradise" by Coolio. The vinyl single includes an exclusive remix by Marley Marl, featuring Redman.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: Hall has a son with hip hop model Gloria Velez. He was featured with 2Pac, K-Ci & JoJo and Danny Boy in the 2Pac single "Toss It Up" in his 1996 album "". Hall also recorded a song with Christopher Wallace called "Why You Tryin' To Play Me". It was produced by "X-tra Large" and recorded around1997 before Wallace's death. It was posthumously released on The Projects Presents "Ballhers Forever" compilation by an X-Mix service label.


title: Aaron Hall (singer)

text: In 2009, Aaron Hall has presented his ability as a dog trainer in a video titled "Aaron Hall's Dog Rehab" on YouTube.


title: A. A. Allen

text: Asa Alonso Allen (March 27, 1911 – June 11, 1970), better known as A. A. Allen, was an American Pentecostal evangelist known for his faith healing and deliverance ministry. He was, for a time, associated with the "Voice of Healing" movement founded by Gordon Lindsay. Allen died of alcoholism and liver failure in a coma at the age of 59 in San Francisco, California, and was buried at his ministry headquarters in Miracle Valley, Arizona.


title: A. A. Allen

text: A. A. Allen's early life was lived in an often unpleasant environment. Having been born of mixed race to white and Native American parents, his family was very poor and his father was an alcoholic.


title: A. A. Allen

text: At the age of 23, Allen became a Christian at the Onward Methodist Church in Miller, Missouri. Later, he learned of the Baptism with the Holy Spirit from a Pentecostal preacher who was conducting meetings in his home. Allen soon felt the call to preach and affiliated himself with the Assemblies of God, subsequently obtaining ordination from them in 1936. He then began to pastor a small church in Colorado. By 1947, Allen was pastoring a large Assemblies of God church in Corpus Christi, Texas.


title: A. A. Allen

text: After attending a tent revival meeting hosted by Oral Roberts in 1949, Allen testified that as he left that meeting he hoped to form a divine healing ministry. Allen asked his church board to allow him to start a radio program, but they refused. Allen soon resigned from his church and began holding healing revival meetings.


title: A. A. Allen

text: Stemming in part from many reported healings, Allen established a large following. He became one of the first ministers to develop a national television ministry, which frequently included excerpts from his "healing line" ministry. By the late 1960s, however, music formed an increasingly dominant part of Allen's programs, which was generally performed by African-American singer and choir leader Gene Martin.


title: A. A. Allen

text: In 1955, Allen purchased a large tent for $8,500. He was soon one of the major healing evangelists on the healing revival circuit. Allen's revival meetings were similar to the other leading evangelists of the time (such as Roberts, Jack Coe, and William Branham) in that meetings were typically characterized by preaching, testimony, music, and praying for the sick. As was the case with other ministers of the time, Allen's healing ministry was facilitated by the use of "prayer cards" obtained in advance by those requesting prayer for healing.


title: A. A. Allen

text: In 1955, Allen was arrested for suspicion of drunk driving after a controversial incident in Knoxville, Tennessee. He resigned from the Assemblies of God shortly afterward. After paying a fine without contest in order to avoid terminating his Knoxville meetings which were then in progress, Allen was re-ordained by his "Miracle Revival Fellowship." His associate Don Stewart claimed that Allen was occasionally drunk after Knoxville, and that his staff covered for him.


title: A. A. Allen

text: Allen continued on the revival circuit, and in 1958 he purchased a tent previously used by Coe that could seat over 22,000. He became one of the first evangelists to propagate the prosperity gospel, calling poverty a "spirit" and expounding God's ability to perform miracles financially. At his peak, Allen appeared on fifty-eight radio stations daily, as well as forty-three television stations. At the time of his death, his headquarters in Miracle Valley, Arizona was with its own airfield.


title: A. A. Allen

text: At that time, A. A. Allen Revivals, Inc. was publishing "well over" 60 million pieces of literature a year. The circulation of "Miracle Magazine", published monthly by the Allen ministry, was 450,000 at the time of his death. The magazine included, at times, accounts of healings, but gave a disclaimer that the magazine does not "assume legal responsibility" of its accuracy. Gerald W. King, the business manager of Miracle Valley, was quoted in 1969, shortly before Allen's death, as saying, "We take in $2 million a year, and our expenses are $2 million a year." He added that Miracle Valley's annual payroll was $84,000.


title: A. A. Allen

text: Few of Allen's supposed miracles ever underwent "scrutiny of physicians" and at his revivals in small print his disclaimer read: "A. A. Allen Revivals, Inc. assumes no legal responsibility for the veracity of any such report." One source, "The Encyclopedia of American Religions", claims that Allen did not like press coverage, which "resulted in his hiring of 'goon squads' to punch out anyone who showed up for Allen's tent revivals with a notepad or camera."


title: A. A. Allen

text: Eventually, most of the evangelists had wheelchairs available for people who had bad backs and couldn't stand in a healing line for hours. But when the evangelist got to them and pulled them up out of the wheelchair, some in the audience thought they were walking for the first time or that they had come to the revival in that wheelchair.


title: A. A. Allen

text: In his television programs, Allen or his ministry associates made frequent mention of the fact that his meetings were racially integrated. African-Americans sat alongside whites in the choir, the ministers' section, and the congregation. African-American musical talent was frequently highlighted in Allen's television programs, especially in the 1960s. This racial attitude also found its expression in Allen's sermon record album titled, "Did God Call the Apostle Paul to Preach the Gospel to the Black Man?" The album cover refers to Allen as "no doubt the first evangelist on a great national or international scale to preach integration to huge crowds in the North and the South..." This was something of an exaggeration, though perhaps in keeping with Allen's personality. Mainstream revivalist Billy Graham, while not always consistent, had desegregated many of his revivals as early as 1953 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and integrated all his revivals following the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision in 1954.


title: A. A. Allen

text: Another major theme in Allen's ministry was his unrelenting attacks on what he characterized as dead, formal, denominational religion. This was a theme of a number of his televised messages and of such Miracle Valley publications as Allen's book titled "Let My People Go!" This was also the theme of a book authored by Clarence G. Mitchell and published by Allen's ministry, titled "Starving Sheep and Overfed Shepherds" (1963). Allen regarded "denominationalism" as a sin. This is reflected in the subtitle of Mitchell's book: "Takes the Cover Off! Brings the Sin of Denominationalism Out into the Open!"


title: A. A. Allen

text: At a revival meeting on January 1, 1958, in Phoenix, Arizona, recent convert Urbane Leiendecker approached Allen and offered him of land. This property, later expanded, was then named "Miracle Valley." As such, it served as the ministry headquarters for A. A. Allen Revivals, Inc. This location housed Miracle Valley Bible College and its dorms and classrooms; a domed church; administrative buildings; a large warehouse; a residential neighborhood called Miracle Valley Estates; a publishing and printing plant; a four-press phonograph record plant; and Miracle Valley Fellowship, which served as a ministerial fellowship with about 10,000 ministers as members. In spite of the presence of its own print shop, however, Miracle Valley business manager Gerald King said in 1969 that the ministry spent $27,000 per month "farming out" jobs to other print shops that could not be handled on site.


title: A. A. Allen

text: In 1963, A. A. Allen Revivals, Inc. successfully sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in an attempt to get the government to refund collections of the Federal Insurance Contributions Act taxes for 1958–59.


title: A. A. Allen

text: In 1967, Allen and his wife, Lexie E. (Scriven) Allen, were divorced. They had four children. One of them, Paul Asa Allen, is the author of "In the Shadow of Greatness – Growing Up Allen".


title: A. A. Allen

text: Allen died at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco, California, on June 11, 1970, at the age of 59. He died after a heavy drinking binge. Don Stewart, his successor, was accused of attempting "to clean up evidence of his mentor's alcoholic binge in a San Francisco hotel before the police arrived". Stewart says he was not trying to cover up anything but was trying to protect Allen. Nonetheless, police found his body in a "room strewn with pills and empty liquor bottles".


title: A. A. Allen

text: However, following a twelve-day investigation and an autopsy, the coroner's report concluded Allen died from liver failure brought on by acute alcoholism. The coroner reported that when Allen died, he had a blood alcohol content of .36 which was "enough to ensure a deep coma".


title: A. A. Allen

text: Stewart says that Allen's problems with alcohol followed his problems with depression associated with extreme pain from arthritic bone spurs for which he was reluctant to seek medical attention because of his faith in divine healing and preaching that relying on doctors was a failure to trust in God.


title: A. A. Allen

text: After Allen's death, Stewart gained possession of Allen's organization, including his Miracle Valley property, which he renamed the Don Stewart Evangelistic Association (and later the Don Stewart Association). Stewart "went from pounding tent stakes at Allen's revivals to driving a truck to preaching". In addition, Stewart "was hit with allegations of embezzlement by Allen's brother-in-law, of pocketing offerings from the revivals" in the wake of Allen's death. Nonetheless, the activities of the Don Stewart Association were moved to Phoenix, and the Bible college continued to operate in Miracle Valley until 1975. Stewart then leased the campus to the Hispanic Assemblies by a twenty-year lease agreement for merely $1 per year. They opened the Spanish-speaking Southern Arizona Bible College.


title: A. A. Allen

text: Between 1979 and early 1983, the Christ Miracle Healing Center and Church (CMHCC) operated on the subdivision property on the north side of Highway 92 across from the bible church. CMHCC, which consisted of approximately 300 African-American members, was led by Allen followers Frances Thomas and her son "Bishop" William Thomas, Jr. Initially relations between locals and CMHCC members relocated from Mississippi – both of whom were followers of Allen – were peaceful and in keeping with Allen's theme of racial harmony and integration; however, once the Thomases and the Chicago-based followers moved to Arizona, relations quickly deteriorated, and church members began to isolate themselves and started professing what locals said was an "anti-white doctrine." CMHCC's doctrine of exclusive use of faith healing resulted in the death of six-year-old Therial Davis, and as many as four additional children.


title: A. A. Allen

text: In 1979, Miracle Valley closed after bankruptcy hearings. In September 1982, the Southern Arizona Bible College's main administration building and vast warehouse were destroyed by arson. The main building was valued at $2 million. Stewart sent multiple donation requests to some people on his 100,000 person mailing list "even though his ministry is not associated with the college and the fire damage was insured." According to the press, one of his letters "gave the impression ... the fire had crippled Stewart's ministry" and another purported to include the building's ashes with a request for $200 donations. Stewart's church had issues over his financing and "questioned Stewart's fundraising techniques" before. In addition, Stewart was accused by his church of arson, something he denies.


title: A. A. Allen

text: The insurance company offered to either pay $1.5 million for the reconstruction of the administration building or $1 million for a "cash-out." Stewart was not interested in rebuilding and intended to take the cash-out; however, the Spanish Assemblies of God (Central Latin American District Council of the Assemblies of God) wanted the facilities to be rebuilt. Subsequently, Stewart accepted the insurance money of $1 million for Miracle Valley, and the Assemblies of God would receive the Miracle Valley campus consisting of fifteen buildings and nearly of land for $6 which equated to $1 per year for the previous six years. However, Stewart forced the Assemblies of God to maintain a Bible college for a minimum of twenty years, or the property would revert to his ministry. In 1995, exactly twenty years later, the Assemblies of God closed Southern Arizona Bible College and put the campus up for sale.


title: A. A. Allen

text: In 1982, the group had several confrontations with utility workers, neighbors, and eventually law enforcement, culminating in what became known as the Miracle Valley shootout in October 1982, during which two members of the church were killed and multiple sheriff's deputies were injured.


title: A. A. Allen

text: Miracle Valley Bible College was purchased by Harter Ministries in August 1999, and the school continued under the administration of Melvin Harter. As the Miracle Valley Bible College and Seminary, the institution taught students in classical Pentecostal theology. However, in January 2009 a Phoenix-based mortgage firm foreclosed on the property, which currently contains several dilapidated buildings. Before the previous owner left the property, the entire north section of Sanctuary roof was removed.


title: A. A. Allen

text: On December 20, 2011, the purchase of the property by the Langevin family was approved by the State of Arizona. The Langevins operate a non-denominational ministry called Miracle Valley Arizona Ministries. In 2014, another group purchased the property with plans to re-establish a Bible college.


title: A. A. Allen

text: Allen formed Miracle Revival Recordings to sell recordings of his singing and preaching, his demon exorcism, and the musical artists who were featured in his tent meetings. Since his death a number of audio and video recordings of his tent revivals and his meetings at Miracle Valley have been released in various formats. The following is a partial list of phonograph recordings featuring Allen:


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: Prostitution in Singapore in itself is not illegal, but various prostitution-related activities are criminalized. This includes public solicitation, living on the earnings of a prostitute and maintaining a brothel. In practice, police unofficially tolerate and monitor a limited number of brothels. Prostitutes in such establishments are required to undergo periodic health checks and must carry a health card.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: The rapid economic development of Singapore in the late nineteenth century combined with the city's gender imbalance (the male population greatly outnumbered the female) resulted in prostitution becoming a flourishing business and brothels a boom industry. The prostitutes were primarily Chinese and Japanese, imported as karayuki-san. It is estimated that 80% of the women and girls coming from China to Singapore in the late 1870s were sold into prostitution. The development of the Japanese enclave in Singapore at Middle Road, Singapore was connected to the establishment of brothels east of the Singapore River, namely along Hylam, Malabar, Malay and Bugis Streets during the late 1890s. By 1905 there were at least 109 Japanese brothels in Singapore.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: Prostitution was seen by the colonial authorities as a necessary evil but a number of steps were taken to place restrictions on prostitution in the city. The registration of prostitutes and brothels was made compulsory in an attempt to prevent forced prostitution, and an Office to Protect Virtue was set up to help anyone unwillingly involved in prostitution. Shortly after the outbreak of World War I the colonial authorities banned prostitution by white women, and as a result the white brothels in Singapore (over twenty in 1914) had all closed by 1916.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: A 1916 report described the misery and indecency of the prostitutes working in the red-light districts around Malay Street and Smith Street, and pressure was placed on the Colonial Office in Britain to further restrict licensed prostitution. Sir Arthur Young, governor-general of the Straits Settlements, considered prostitution indispensable for the colony's economy and labour supply but the sale of women and girls into prostitution was banned in 1917. Influential figures in the city's Japanese community who were concerned about dignity and morality put pressure on the Japanese Consulate to end Japanese prostitution. In 1920 the Consulate ordered the banishment of all Japanese prostitutes from Singapore, though some of the women remained as unlicensed prostitutes. The importation of women and girls for prostitution was banned in 1927 and brothels were banned in 1930, though prostitution remained legal.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: During the Japanese occupation of Singapore (1942–45), brothels were set up for the use of Japanese servicemen. There were about twenty such brothels in the city, typically housed in deserted Chinese mansions. By the time of the surrender of Japan in 1945 prostitution was flourishing.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: In the 1950s striptease acts took place at the city's getai shows, performed by specialist travelling dance troupes. The shows developed a sleazy image, partly as a result of stories about performers working as prostitutes. During this decade the city's police organised operations to reduce prostitution and Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock sought out suggestions as to how prostitution could be limited. Women's rights activist Shirin Fozdar described Singapore as "one big brothel" and the city was a regional centre for prostitution. The People's Action Party under the leadership by Lee Kuan Yew initially banned prostitution when they came to power in the late 1950s, switching to a strategy of containment in the mid 1960s.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: From the 1950s to the early 1980s Bugis Street was famous for its nightly adult-themed shows performed by transvestites and groups of prostitutes would also openly solicit there. Neighbouring Johore Road was also part of the red-light district in the 1960s and the 1970s, with transgender prostitutes soliciting for business in the shophouses and alleys. Suppression of prostitution in the area began in the 1970s, and the trade was dispersed to the surrounding areas such as Jalan Besar. The old Bugis Street was demolished in the mid-1980s and Johore Road disappeared in the late 1990s.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: Any person who obtains for consideration the sexual services of a person under 18 years of age (in other words, has commercial sex with such a person) commits an offence and may be punished with imprisonment of up to seven years or a fine or both. The term "sexual services" is defined to mean sexual services involving sexual penetration of the vagina or anus of a person by a part of another person's body other than the penis or by anything else, or penetration of the vagina, anus or mouth of a person by a man's penis. It is also an offence for a person to communicate with another person for the purpose of having commercial sex with a person under 18. These offences apply to acts that take place in as well as outside Singapore.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: A person who is guilty of the offence may be punished with imprisonment of up to ten years, or a fine, or both.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: The penalty is imprisonment not exceeding five years and a fine not exceeding $10,000. A male person who is convicted of a second or subsequent offence under the first six offences listed above is liable to be caned in addition to being imprisoned.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: Prostitution occupies an ambivalent position in Singaporean society. Major constraints control its practice despite it being legal. Police unofficially tolerate and monitor a limited number of brothels, where the prostitutes are regularly screened for health check-ups; however prostitution outside these brothels also exists such as via social escort agencies that usually adopt an internet website or Facebook presence. Prostitution outside the informally designated red-light areas operates via three main channels: internet advertising, street solicitation, and karaoke box and massage parlor work. The internet-advertised sex workers are based in anonymous hotels, and the profile of each sex worker is available from the internet advertisement. Interested clients contact the sex worker's agent through SMS, who arranges the timing and gives the hotel address to the client. Sex workers operating via such illegal pimps come primarily from Thailand, China and Philippines to Singapore for a short tourist visit, and therefore are not screened for health check-ups. There are also local Singaporean masseurs, therapists, call girls or social escorts in the industry working as sex workers on the pretext of being students at a local educational institution such as a polytechnic, models, working office professionals or ex-air stewardesses. Some of these say that they are certified therapists. Apart from the usual bilingual Singaporean Chinese that speak English as well as a mother tongue such as Mandarin, other ethnic races on the island such as Malay and Indian women also work as social escorts often using an English name, alongside Eurasians and Russians. Vietnamese prostitutes in Singapore charge high prices for their services.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: There are grey areas such as social escorts which do not infringe on the women's charter in Singapore's law.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: Apart from these regulated brothels, commercial sex workers can be found in many "massage" or "spa" establishments. Some massage parlours, including "tui na" outlets, employ women from mainland China and offer massages as a pretext for 'special' sexual services. These activities are illegal, and the operators of such massage establishments risk jail if exposed by anti-vice police raids. Yet, virtually everyone who visits these establishments in particular is fully aware of the sexual services provided within, and are there precisely because of it. The main red-light district in Singapore is located in Geylang. Orchard Towers, nicknamed the "Four Floors of Whores", is a shopping centre frequented by prostitutes. Some bars in Duxton Hill also offer sexual services, the most controversial ones being located at Adelphi basement which also houses a handful of law firms in the same building as well as within walking distance from the Ministry of Law in Singapore.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: As the year 2015 came to an end, there had been an increase of around 40% of commercial crimes including prostitution or sex-related scams involving the internet; the public has been advised by the National Crime Prevention Council (Singapore) to be wary of controversial practices such as sugar mommies, credit-for-sex or internet love scams. With sensual massage parlours and other sex-related vice activities also appearing in suburban heartlands such as Woodlands, Sembawang, Sengkang, Jurong West, Yishun, Chinatown and River Valley, the Government of Singapore is looking at various options of regulating and punishing violations such as cases of unlicensed prostitutions or operators of brothels.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: In 2016, examples of sentencing include Chew Tiong Wei who was jailed 85 months and fined S$130,000 for running an online vice ring and evading S$26,964.65 in income tax.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: There are also reported cases of nightly vice activities involving transvestite prostitutes soliciting at a car park in the old Woodlands Town Garden which is adjacent to the Johor-Singapore Causeway. These are possibly Malaysian transvestites working full-time jobs in Singapore, moonlighting to save money for sex-change operations. Member of Parliament Halimah Yacob announced in 2016 a series of changes involving National Parks Board to clean up the sleaze in the area that involves upgrading the pre-existing park and malls there.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: There are also rare cases of policemen impersonation on the pretext of robbing sex workers. These are offences punishable by the law in Singapore, as in the case of Teo Zhi Jie, Melvin Tan Shen Kang and Lee Qing Yew. Teo Zhi Jie has since been sentenced to two years and seven months in jail and 12 strokes of the cane.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: Singapore is a destination country for women and girls from other Asian countries subjected to sex trafficking and a source country for Singaporean women and children subjected to sex trafficking. Some of the 965,000 foreign work permit holders that comprise more than one-quarter of Singapore's total labor force are vulnerable to trafficking; most victims migrate willingly. Traffickers compel victims into sex exploitation through illegal withholding of their pay, threats of forced repatriation without pay, restrictions on movement, and physical and sexual abuse. Foreign women sometimes arrive in Singapore with the intention of engaging in prostitution, but under the threat of serious harm or other forms of coercion, they become victims of sex trafficking.


title: Prostitution in Singapore

text: The United States Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons ranks Singapore as a 'Tier 2' country.


title: Corpus Hermeticum

text: The is a collection of 17 Greek writings whose authorship is traditionally attributed to the legendary Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The treatises were originally written between and , but the collection as known today was first compiled by medieval Byzantine editors. It was translated into Latin in the 15th century by the Italian humanist scholars Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500).


title: Corpus Hermeticum

text: Although the Latin word is usually reserved for the entire body of extant writings related to some author or subject, the contains only a very small selection of extant Hermetic texts (texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, commonly known as ). Its individual treatises were quoted by many authors from the second and third centuries on, but the compilation as such is first attested only in the writings of the Byzantine philosopher Michael Psellus (c. 1017–1078).


title: Corpus Hermeticum

text: Following their translation into Latin by Ficino and Lazzarelli, the greatly influenced the Western esoteric tradition. It was especially considered to be important during the Renaissance and the Reformation, in which Hermeticism would often function as a type of intermediate position between Christianity and paganism. Hermes' perceived antiquity ensured that any writing attributed to him would take an important place in Ficino's doctrine of the ('ancient theology'), which affirms that a single, true theology exists that is present in all religions and that was given by God to humankind in the distant, primeval past.


title: Corpus Hermeticum

text: Most of the texts are presented in the form of a dialogue, a favorite form for didactic material in Classical antiquity. The most well known treatise in the is its opening treatise, which is called the "Poimandres". However, at least until the 19th century, this name (under various forms, such "Pimander" or "Pymander") was also commonly used to designate the compilation as a whole.


title: Corpus Hermeticum

text: The 15th-century translation of the into Latin provided a seminal impetus in the development of Renaissance thought and culture, having a profound impact on philosophers such as Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597), Robert Fludd (1574–1637), and many others.


title: Corpus Hermeticum

text: In 1462, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was working on a Latin translation of the collected works of Plato for his patron Cosimo de' Medici (the first member of the famous de' Medici family who ruled Florence during the Italian Renaissance). However, when a manuscript of the became available, he immediately interrupted his work on Plato in order to start translating the works of Hermes, which at the time were thought to be much more ancient, and therefore much more authoritative, than those of Plato.


title: Corpus Hermeticum

text: While Ficino translated the first fourteen treatises (I–XIV), Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500) translated the remaining three (XVI–XVIII). The Chapter no. XV of early modern editions was once filled with an entry from the Suda (a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia) and three excerpts from Hermetic works preserved by Joannes Stobaeus (fl. fifth century), but this chapter was left out in later editions, which therefore contain no chapter XV.


title: ESL Investments

text: ESL Investments is managed by Edward Lampert, who founded it in April 1988 and named it after his initials. The firm invests in the American public equity and hedging markets. Managing the fund with a contrarian investing approach, Lampert is the company's chairman and chief executive officer, and William Crowley is its president and chief operating officer. ESL is fairly unusual as a hedge fund in that it takes large stakes in a small number of companies and holds them for many years. Most of ESL's portfolio consists of retail companies, particularly Kmart (now Transform SR Brands LLC), by far the company's largest holding (53.5% ownership as of June 2010). The revenue from Kmart plays a big part in helping ESL acquire other companies.


title: ESL Investments

text: Lampert began trading in stocks at the investment bank Goldman Sachs during the 1980s. In 1988 Lampert founded ESL Investments with the backing of investor Richard E. Rainwater and an initial outside investments worth $28 million.


title: ESL Investments

text: It was reported in 2004 that from 1988 through 2004 the fund returns averaged 29% a year. His clients have included David Geffen (1988 - 2007), Michael Dell, the Tisch family (owners of Loews Corporation), and the Ziff family (owners of Ziff Davis) (1988 - 2013). In 2004, the fund made Lampert the first hedge fund manager ever to make more than $1 billion in a year, when the fund grew 69%, following his decision to buy Kmart and merge it with Sears. At the start of the financial crisis of 2007–2010, however, ESL's retail holdings were severely affected due to a drop in consumer spending, and the company's investment in Citigroup in September 2007 saw a significant drop in value since the fund made its investment. Through the fund, Lampert is worth approximately $2 billion. Lampert, who typically invests in undervalued stocks, is known to have modeled his investing style on Warren Buffett's style by analyzing his annual shareholder letters.


title: Hipster (1940s subculture)

text: Hipster or hepcat, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jazz, in particular bebop, which became popular in the early 1940s. The hipster subculture adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following features: dress, slang, use of cannabis and other recreational drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humble or self-imposed poverty, and relaxed sexual mores.


title: Hipster (1940s subculture)

text: The words "hep" and "hip" are of uncertain origin, with numerous competing theories being proposed. In the early days of jazz, musicians were using the "hep" variant to describe anybody who was "in the know" about an emerging, mostly African-American subculture, which revolved around jazz. They and their fans were known as "hepcats". In 1938, the word "hepster" was used by bandleader Cab Calloway in the title of his dictionary, "Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary", which defines "hep cat" as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive". British author and poet Lemn Sissay remarked that "Cab Calloway was taking ownership of language for a people who, just a few generations before, had their own languages taken away."


title: Hipster (1940s subculture)

text: By the late 1930s, with the rise of swing, "hep" began to be used commonly in mainstream "square" culture, so by the 1940s "hip" rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace "hep". In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified "hepcat" to "hipster" in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk", published in 1944 with the album "Boogie Woogie In Blue", featuring the self-titled hit "Handsome Harry the Hipster". The entry for "hipsters" defined them as "characters who like hot jazz." In 1947, Gibson sought to clarify the switch in the record "It Ain't Hep" which musically describes the difference between the two terms.


title: Hipster (1940s subculture)

text: Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class European American youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely African-American jazz musicians they followed. In "The Jazz Scene" (1959), the British historian and social theorist Eric Hobsbawm (originally writing under the pen name Francis Newton) described hipster language—i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk"—as "an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders". This group crucially included White jazz musicians such as Benny Goodman, Al Cohn, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Mezz Mezzrow, Barney Kessel, Doc Pomus, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Joey Bishop, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Chet Baker, and Gene Krupa who ought to be counted as some of the "true" original hipsters as they were instrumental in turning the White American audience onto jazz and its underground culture in the 1930s and 1940s. Clarinetist Artie Shaw described singer Bing Crosby as "the first hip white person born in the United States."


title: Hipster (1940s subculture)

text: Hipsters were more interested in bebop and "hot" jazz than they were in swing, which by the late 1940s was becoming old-fashioned and watered down by "squares" like Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo and Robert Coates. In the 1940s, White youth began to frequent Black communities for their music and dance. These first youths diverged from the mainstream due to their new philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits. The drug of choice was marijuana, and many hipster slang terms were dedicated to the substance.


title: Hipster (1940s subculture)

text: The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it. In 1957, the American writer and adventurer Jack Kerouac described hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality". Toward the beginning of his poem "Howl", the Jewish-American Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his 1957 essay "The White Negro", the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by the atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".


title: Hipster (1940s subculture)

text: The new philosophy of racial role reversal was transcribed by many popular hipster authors of the time. Norman Mailer's 1957 pamphlet, entitled "The White Negro", has become the paradigmatic example of hipster ideology. Mailer described the hipsters as individuals "with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm." In a nod to Mailer's discussion of hipsterism, the United States' Cold War deployments of African-American culture and personalities for the purposes of public diplomacy has been discussed as "hipster diplomacy".


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Afsharid Iran (), also referred as the Afsharid Empire was an Iranian empire established by the Turkoman Afshar tribe in Iran's north-eastern province of Khorasan, ruling Iran (Persia). The state was ruled by the Afsharid dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century. The dynasty was founded in 1736 by the brilliant military commander Nader Shah, who deposed the last member of the Safavid dynasty and proclaimed himself as the Shah of Iran.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: During Nader's reign, Iran reached its greatest extent since the Sasanian Empire. At its height it controlled modern-day Iran, Armenia, Georgia, Republic of Azerbaijan, parts of the North Caucasus (Dagestan), Afghanistan, Bahrain, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan, and parts of Iraq, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Oman. After his death, most of his empire was divided between the Zands, Durranis, Georgians, and the Caucasian khanates, while Afsharid rule was confined to a small local state in Khorasan. Finally, the Afsharid dynasty was overthrown by Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar in 1796, who would establish a new native Iranian empire and restore Iranian suzerainty over several of the aforementioned regions.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: The dynasty was named after the Turkoman Afshar tribe from Khorasan in north-east Iran, to which Nader belonged. The Afshars had originally migrated from Turkestan to Azerbaijan (Iranian Azerbaijan) in the 13th century. In the early 17th century, Abbas the Great moved many Afshars from Azerbaijan to Khorasan to defend the north-eastern borders of his state against the Uzbeks, after which the Afshars settled in those regions. Nader belonged to the Qereqlu branch of the Afshars.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Nader Shah was born (as Nadr Qoli) into a humble semi-nomadic family from the Afshar tribe of Khorasan, where he became a local warlord. His path to power began when the Ghilzai Mir Mahmud Hotaki overthrew the weakened and disintegrated Safavid shah Sultan Husayn in 1722. At the same time, Ottoman and Russian forces seized Iranian land. Russia took swaths of Iran's Caucasian territories in the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia, as well as mainland northern Iran, by the Russo-Persian War, while the neighbouring Ottomans invaded from the west. By the 1724 Treaty of Constantinople, they agreed to divide the conquered areas between themselves.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: On the other side of the theatre, Nader joined forces with Sultan Husayn's son Tahmasp II and led the resistance against the Ghilzai Afghans, driving their leader Ashraf Khan easily out of the capital in 1729 and establishing Tahmasp on the throne. Nader fought to regain the lands lost to the Ottomans and Russians and to restore Iranian hegemony in Iran. While he was away in the east fighting the Ghilzais, Tahmasp waged a disastrous campaign in the Caucasus which allowed the Ottomans to retake most of their lost territory in the west . Nader, displeased, had Tahmasp deposed in favour of his infant son Abbas III in 1732. Four years later, after he had recaptured most of the lost Persian lands, Nader felt confident enough to have himself proclaimed shah in his own right at a ceremony on the Moghan Plain.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Nader subsequently made the Russians cede the taken territories taken in 1722–23 through the Treaty of Resht of 1732 and the Treaty of Ganja of 1735. Back in control of the integral northern territories, and with a new Russo-Iranian alliance against the common Ottoman enemy, he continued the Ottoman–Persian War. The Ottoman armies were expelled from western Iran and the rest of the Caucasus, and the resultant 1736 Treaty of Constantinople forced the Ottomans to confirm Iranian suzerainty over the Caucasus and recognised Nader as the new Iranian shah (king).


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Tahmasp and the Qajar leader Fath Ali Khan (the ancestor of Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar) contacted Nader and asked him to join their cause and drive the Ghilzai Afghans out of Khorasan. He agreed and thus became a figure of national importance. When Nader discovered that Fath Ali Khan was corresponding with Malek Mahmud and revealed this to the shah, Tahmasp executed him and made Nader the chief of his army instead. Nader subsequently took on the title Tahmasp Qoli (Servant of Tahmasp). In late 1726, Nader recaptured Mashhad.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Nader chose not to march directly on Isfahan. First, in May 1729, he defeated the Abdali Afghans near Herat. Many of the Abdali Afghans subsequently joined his army. The new shah of the Ghilzai Afghans, Ashraf, decided to move against Nader but in September 1729, Nader defeated him at the Battle of Damghan and again decisively in November at Murchakhort, banishing the Afghans from Persian soil forever. Ashraf fled and Nader finally entered Isfahan, handing it over to Tahmasp in December and plundering the city to pay his army. Tahmasp made Nader governor over many eastern provinces, including his native Khorasan, and married him to his sister. Nader pursued and defeated Ashraf, who was murdered by his own followers. In 1738, Nader Shah besieged and destroyed the last Hotaki seat of power, at Kandahar. He built a new city nearby, which he named "Naderabad".


title: Afsharid Iran

text: In the spring of 1735, Nader attacked Persia's archrival, the Ottomans, and regained most of the territory lost during the recent chaos. At the same time, the Abdali Afghans rebelled and besieged Mashhad, forcing Nader to suspend his campaign and save his brother, Ebrahim. It took Nader fourteen months to crush this uprising.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Relations between Nader and the Shah had declined as the latter grew alarmed by his general's military successes. While Nader was absent in the east, Tahmasp tried to assert himself by launching a campaign to recapture Yerevan. He ended up losing all of Nader's recent gains to the Ottomans, and signed a treaty ceding Georgia and Armenia in exchange for Tabriz. Nader, furious, saw that the moment had come to depose Tahmasp. He denounced the treaty, seeking popular support for a war against the Ottomans. In Isfahan, Nader got Tahmasp drunk then showed him to the courtiers asking if a man in such a state was fit to rule. In 1732 he forced Tahmasp to abdicate in favour of the Shah's baby son, Abbas III, to whom Nader became regent.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Nader decided, as he continued the 1730–35 war, that he could win back the territory in Armenia and Georgia by seizing Ottoman Baghdad and then offering it in exchange for the lost provinces, but his plan went badly amiss when his army was routed by the Ottoman general Topal Osman Pasha near the city in 1733. Nader decided he needed to regain the initiative as soon as possible to save his position because revolts were already breaking out in Persia. He faced Topal again with a larger force and defeated and killed him. He then besieged Baghdad, as well as Ganja in the northern provinces, earning a Russian alliance against the Ottomans. Nader scored a decisive victory over a superior Ottoman force at Yeghevard (modern-day Armenia) and by the summer of 1735, Persian Armenia and Georgia were under his rule again. In March 1735, he signed a treaty with the Russians in Ganja by which the latter agreed to withdraw all of their troops from Persian territory, those which had not been ceded back by the 1732 Treaty of Resht yet, mainly regarding Derbent, Baku, Tarki, and the surrounding lands, resulting in the reestablishment of Iranian rule over all of the Caucasus and northern mainland Iran again.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Nader suggested to his closest intimates, after a hunting party on the Moghan plains (presently split between Azerbaijan Republic and Iran), that he should be proclaimed the new king (shah) in place of the young Abbas III. The small group of close intimates, Nader's friends, included Tahmasp Khan Jalayer and Hasan-Ali Beg Bestami. Following Nader's suggestion, the group did not "demur", and Hasan-Ali remained silent. When Nader asked him why he remained silent, Hasan-Ali replied that the best course of action for Nader would be to assemble all the leading men of the state, in order to receive their agreement in "a signed and sealed document of consent". Nader approved of the proposal, and the writers of the chancellery, which included the court historian Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi, were instructed with sending out orders to the military, religious and nobility of the nation to summon at the plains. The summonses for the people to attend had gone out in November 1735, and they began arriving in January 1736. In the same month of January 1736, Nader held a "qoroltai" (a grand meeting in the tradition of Genghis Khan and Timur) on the Moghan plains. The Moghan plain was specifically chosen for its size and "abundance of fodder". Everyone agreed to the proposal of Nader becoming the new king, many—if not most—enthusiastically, the rest fearing Nader's anger if they showed support for the deposed Safavids. Nader was crowned Shah of Iran on March 8, 1736, a date his astrologers had chosen as being especially propitious, in attendance of an "exceptionally large assembly" composed of the military, religious and nobility of the nation, as well as the Ottoman ambassador Ali Pasha.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: In 1738, Nader Shah conquered Kandahar, the last outpost of the Hotaki dynasty and established Naderabad, Kandahar. His thoughts now turned to the Mughal Empire based in Delhi. This once powerful Muslim state to the east was falling apart as the nobles became increasingly disobedient and the Hindu Marathas of the Maratha Empire made inroads on its territory from the south-west. Its ruler Muhammad Shah was powerless to reverse this disintegration. Nader asked for the Afghan rebels to be handed over, but the Mughal emperor refused.


title: Afsharid Iran

text: Nader used the pretext of his Afghan enemies taking refuge in India to cross the border and invade the militarily weak but still extremely wealthy far eastern empire. In a brilliant campaign against the governor of Peshawar, he took a small contingent of his forces on a daunting flank march through nearly impassable mountain passes, and took the enemy forces positioned at the mouth of the Khyber Pass completely by surprise, decisively beating them despite being outnumbered two-to-one. This led to the capture of Ghazni, Kabul, Peshawar, Sindh and Lahore.