title: Wicca

text: Similar in use to the grimoires of ceremonial magicians, the Book contained instructions for how to perform rituals and spells, as well as religious poetry and chants like "Eko Eko Azarak" to use in those rituals. Gardner's original intention was that every copy of the book would be different because a student would copy from their initiators, but changing things which they felt to be personally ineffective, however amongst many Gardnerian Witches today, particularly in the United States, all copies of the Book are kept identical to the version that the High Priestess Monique Wilson copied from Gardner, with nothing being altered. The Book of Shadows was originally meant to be kept a secret from non-initiates into BTW, but parts of the Book have been published by authors including Charles Cardell, Lady Sheba, Janet Farrar and Stewart Farrar.


title: Wicca

text: The pentacle is a symbol commonly used by Wiccans. Wiccans often understand the pentacle's five points as representing each of the five elements: earth, air, fire, water, and aether/spirit. It is also regarded as a symbol of the human, with the five points representing the head, arms, and legs.


title: Wicca

text: There is no overarching organisational structure to Wicca. In Wicca, all practitioners are considered to be priests and priestesses.


title: Wicca

text: In the 1950s through to the 1970s, when the Wiccan movement was largely confined to lineaged groups such as Gardnerian Wicca and Alexandrian Wicca, a "tradition" usually implied the transfer of a lineage by initiation. However, with the rise of more and more such groups, often being founded by those with no previous initiatory lineage, the term came to be a synonym for a religious denomination within Wicca. There are many such traditions and there are also many solitary practitioners who do not align themselves with any particular lineage, working alone. Some covens have formed but who do not follow any particular tradition, instead choosing their influences and practices eclectically.


title: Wicca

text: Those traditions which trace a line of initiatory descent back to Gerald Gardner include Gardnerian Wicca, Alexandrian Wicca and the Algard tradition; because of their joint history, they are often referred to as British Traditional Wicca, particularly in North America. Other traditions trace their origins to different figures, even if their beliefs and practices have been influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Gardner. These include Cochrane's Craft and the 1734 Tradition, both of which trace their origins to Robert Cochrane; Feri, which traces itself back to Victor Anderson and Gwydion Pendderwen; and Dianic Wicca, whose followers often trace their influences back to Zsuzsanna Budapest. Some of these groups prefer to refer to themselves as "Witches", thereby distinguishing themselves from the BTW traditions, who more typically use the term "Wiccan" (see Etymology). During the 1980s, Viviane Crowley, an initiate of both the Gardnerian and Alexandrian traditions, merged the two.


title: Wicca

text: Pearson noted that "Wicca has evolved and, at times, mutated quite dramatically into completely different forms".


title: Wicca

text: Wicca has also been "customized" to the various national contexts into which it has been introduced; for instance, in Ireland, the veneration of ancient Irish deities has been incorporated into Wicca.


title: Wicca

text: Lineaged Wicca is organised into covens of initiated priests and priestesses. Covens are autonomous and are generally headed by a High Priest and a High Priestess working in partnership, being a couple who have each been through their first, second, and third degrees of initiation. Occasionally the leaders of a coven are only second-degree initiates, in which case they come under the rule of the parent coven. Initiation and training of new priesthood is most often performed within a coven environment, but this is not a necessity, and a few initiated Wiccans are unaffiliated with any coven. Most covens would not admit members under the age of 18. They often do not advertise their existence, and when they do, do so through pagan magazines. Some organise courses and workshops through which prospective members can come along and be assessed.


title: Wicca

text: A commonly quoted Wiccan tradition holds that the ideal number of members for a coven is thirteen, though this is not held as a hard-and-fast rule. Indeed, many U.S. covens are far smaller, though the membership may be augmented by unaffiliated Wiccans at "open" rituals. Pearson noted that covens typically contained between five and ten initiates. They generally avoid mass recruitment due to the feasibility of finding spaces large enough to bring together greater numbers for rituals and because larger numbers inhibit the sense of intimacy and trust that covens utilise.


title: Wicca

text: Covens in the Reclaiming tradition are often single-sex and non-hierarchical in structure. Coven members who leave their original group to form another, separate coven are described as having "hived off" in Wicca.


title: Wicca

text: Initiation into a coven is traditionally preceded by an apprenticeship period of a year and a day. A course of study may be set during this period. In some covens a "dedication" ceremony may be performed during this period, some time before the initiation proper, allowing the person to attend certain rituals on a probationary basis. Some solitary Wiccans also choose to study for a year and a day before their self-dedication to the religion.


title: Wicca

text: Various high priestesses and high priests have reported being "put on a pedestal" by new initiates, only to have those students later "kick away" the pedestal as they develop their own knowledge and experience of Wicca. Within a coven, different members may be respected for having particular knowledge of specific areas, such as the Qabalah, astrology, or the Tarot.


title: Wicca

text: Based on her experience among British Traditional Wiccans in the UK, Pearson stated that the length of time between becoming a first-degree initiate and a second was "typically two to five years". Some practitioners nevertheless chose to remain as first-degree initiates rather than proceed to the higher degrees.


title: Wicca

text: A large number of Wiccans do not exclusively follow any single tradition or even are initiated. These "eclectic Wiccans" each create their own syncretic spiritual paths by adopting and reinventing the beliefs and rituals of a variety of religious traditions connected to Wicca and broader paganism.


title: Wicca

text: While the origins of modern Wiccan practice lie in covenantal activity of a select few initiates in established lineages, eclectic Wiccans are more often than not solitary practitioners uninitiated in any tradition. A widening public appetite, especially in the United States, made traditional initiation unable to satisfy demand for involvement in Wicca. Since the 1970s, larger, more informal, often publicly advertised camps and workshops began to take place. This less formal but more accessible form of Wicca proved successful. Eclectic Wicca is the most variety of Wicca in America and eclectics now significantly outnumber lineaged Wiccans.


title: Wicca

text: Eclectic Wicca is not necessarily the complete abandonment of tradition. Eclectic practitioners may follow their own individual ideas and ritual practices, while still drawing on one or more religious or philosophical paths. Eclectic approaches to Wicca often draw on Earth religion and ancient Egyptian, Greek, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Asian, Jewish, and Polynesian traditions.


title: Wicca

text: In contrast to the British Traditional Wiccans, Reclaiming Wiccans, and various eclectic Wiccans, the sociologist Douglas Ezzy argued that there existed a "Popularized Witchcraft" that was "driven primarily by consumerist marketing and is represented by movies, television shows, commercial magazines, and consumer goods". Books and magazines in this vein were targeted largely at young girls and included spells for attracting or repelling boyfriends, money spells, and home protection spells. He termed this "New Age Witchcraft", and compared individuals involved in this to the participants in the New Age.


title: Wicca

text: Wicca was founded in England between 1921 and 1950, representing what the historian Ronald Hutton called "the only full-formed religion which England can be said to have given the world". Characterised as an "invented tradition" by scholars, Wicca was created from the patchwork adoption of various older elements, many taken from pre-existing religious and esoteric movements. Pearson characterised it as having arisen "from the cultural impulses of the "fin de siècle"".


title: Wicca

text: Wicca took as its basis the witch-cult hypothesis. This was the idea that those persecuted as witches in early modern Europe were actually followers of a surviving pagan religion; not Satanists as the persecutors claimed, nor innocent people who confessed under threat of torture, as had long been the historical consensus. The 'Father of Wicca', Gerald Gardner, claimed his religion was a survival of this European 'witch-cult'. The 'witch-cult' theory had been first expressed by the German Professor Karl Ernest Jarcke in 1828, before being endorsed by German Franz Josef Mone and then the French historian Jules Michelet. In the late 19th century it was then adopted by two Americans, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Charles Leland, the latter of whom promoted a variant of it in his 1899 book, "Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches". The theory's most prominent advocate was the English Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who promoted it in a series of books – most notably 1921's "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe" and 1933's "The God of the Witches".


title: Wicca

text: Almost all of Murray's peers regarded the witch-cult theory as incorrect and based on poor scholarship. However, Murray was invited to write the entry on "witchcraft" for the 1929 edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica", which was reprinted for decades and became so influential that, according to folklorist Jacqueline Simpson, Murray's ideas became "so entrenched in popular culture that they will probably never be uprooted." Simpson noted that the only contemporary member of the Folklore Society who took Murray's theory seriously was Gerald Gardner, who used it as the basis for Wicca. Murray's books were the sources of many well-known motifs which have often been incorporated into Wicca. The idea that covens should have 13 members was developed by Murray, based on a single witness statement from one of the witch trials, as was her assertion that covens met on the four cross-quarter days. Murray was very interested in ascribing naturalistic or religious ceremonial explanations to some of the more fantastic descriptions found in witch trial testimony. For example, many of the confessions included the idea that Satan was personally present at coven meetings. Murray interpreted this as a witch priest wearing horns and animal skins, and a pair of forked boots to represent his authority or rank. Most mainstream folklorists, on the other hand, have argued that the entire scenario was always fictitious and does not require a naturalistic explanation, but Gardner enthusiastically adopted many of Murray's explanations into his own tradition. The witch-cult theory was "the historical narrative around which Wicca built itself", with the early Wiccans claiming to be the survivors of this ancient pagan religion.


title: Wicca

text: The 'witch-cult' theory has since been disproven by further historical research, but it is still common for Wiccans to claim solidarity with witch trial victims. The notion that Wiccan traditions and rituals have survived from ancient times is contested by most recent researchers, who say that Wicca is a 20th-century creation which combines elements of freemasonry and 19th-century occultism. In his 1999 book "The Triumph of the Moon", English historian Ronald Hutton researched the Wiccan claim that ancient pagan customs have survived into modern times after being Christianised in medieval times as folk practices. Hutton found that most of the folk customs which are claimed to have pagan roots (such as the Maypole dance) actually date from the Middle Ages. He concluded that the idea that medieval revels were pagan in origin is a legacy of the Protestant Reformation. Hutton noted that Wicca predates the modern New Age movement and also differs markedly in its general philosophy.


title: Wicca

text: Other influences upon early Wicca included various Western esoteric traditions and practices, among them ceremonial magic, Aleister Crowley and his religion of Thelema, Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. To a lesser extent, Wicca also drew upon folk magic and the practices of cunning folk. It was further influenced both by scholarly works on folkloristics, particularly James Frazer's "The Golden Bough", as well as romanticist writings like Robert Graves' "The White Goddess", and pre-existing modern pagan groups such as the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry and Druidism.


title: Wicca

text: It was during the 1930s that the first evidence appears for the practice of a neopagan 'Witchcraft' religion (what would be recognisable now as Wicca) in England. It seems that several groups around the country, in such places as Norfolk, Cheshire and the New Forest had set themselves up after being inspired by Murray's writings about the "Witch-Cult".


title: Wicca

text: The history of Wicca starts with Gerald Gardner (the "Father of Wicca") in the mid-20th century. Gardner was a retired British civil servant and amateur anthropologist, with a broad familiarity in paganism and occultism. He claimed to have been initiated into a witches' coven in New Forest, Hampshire, in the late 1930s. Intent on perpetuating this craft, Gardner founded the Bricket Wood coven with his wife Donna in the 1940s, after buying the Naturist Fiveacres Country Club. Much of the coven's early membership was drawn from the club's members and its meetings were held within the club grounds. Many notable figures of early Wicca were direct initiates of this coven, including Dafo, Doreen Valiente, Jack Bracelin, Frederic Lamond, Dayonis, Eleanor Bone, and Lois Bourne.


title: Wicca

text: The Witchcraft religion became more prominent beginning in 1951, with the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1735, after which Gerald Gardner and then others such as Charles Cardell and Cecil Williamson began publicising their own versions of the Craft. Gardner and others never used the term "Wicca" as a religious identifier, simply referring to the "witch cult", "witchcraft", and the "Old Religion". However, Gardner did refer to witches as "the Wica". During the 1960s, the name of the religion normalised to "Wicca". Gardner's tradition, later termed Gardnerianism, soon became the dominant form in England and spread to other parts of the British Isles.


title: Wicca

text: Following Gardner's death in 1964, the Craft continued to grow unabated despite sensationalism and negative portrayals in British tabloids, with new traditions being propagated by figures like Robert Cochrane, Sybil Leek, and most importantly Alex Sanders, whose Alexandrian Wicca, which was predominantly based upon Gardnerian Wicca, albeit with an emphasis placed on ceremonial magic, spread quickly and gained much media attention. Around this time, the term "Wicca" began to be commonly adopted over "Witchcraft" and the faith was exported to countries like Australia and the United States.


title: Wicca

text: During the 1970s, a new generation joined Wicca who had been influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s. Many brought environmentalist ideas with them into the movement, as reflected by the formation of groups like the UK-based Pagans Against Nukes.


title: Wicca

text: It was in the United States and in Australia that new, home-grown traditions, sometimes based upon earlier, regional folk-magical traditions and often mixed with the basic structure of Gardnerian Wicca, began to develop, including Victor Anderson's Feri Tradition, Joseph Wilson's 1734 Tradition, Aidan Kelly's New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, and eventually Zsuzsanna Budapest's Dianic Wicca, each of which emphasised different aspects of the faith. It was also around this time that books teaching people how to become Witches themselves without formal initiation or training began to emerge, among them Paul Huson's "Mastering Witchcraft" (1970) and "Lady Sheba's Book of Shadows" (1971). Similar books continued to be published throughout the 1980s and 1990s, fuelled by the writings of such authors as Doreen Valiente, Janet Farrar, Stewart Farrar, and Scott Cunningham, who popularised the idea of self-initiation into the Craft. Among witches in Canada, anthropologist Dr. Heather Botting (née Harden) of the University of Victoria has been one of the most prominent, having been the first recognized Wiccan chaplain of a public university. She is the original high priestess of Coven Celeste.


title: Wicca

text: In the 1990s, amid ever-rising numbers of self-initiates, the popular media began to explore "witchcraft" in fictional films like "The Craft" (1996) and television series like "Charmed" (1998–2006), introducing numbers of young people to the idea of religious witchcraft. This growing demographic was soon catered to through the Internet and by authors like Silver RavenWolf, much to the criticism of traditional Wiccan groups and individuals. In response to the way that Wicca was increasingly portrayed as trendy, eclectic, and influenced by the New Age movement, many Witches turned to the pre-Gardnerian origins of the Craft, and to the traditions of his rivals like Cardell and Cochrane, describing themselves as following "traditional witchcraft". Prominent groups within this Traditional Witchcraft revival included Andrew Chumbley's Cultus Sabbati and the Cornish Ros an Bucca coven.


title: Wicca

text: Originating in Britain, Wicca then spread to North America, Australasia, continental Europe, and South Africa.


title: Wicca

text: The actual number of Wiccans worldwide is unknown, and it has been noted that it is more difficult to establish the numbers of members of Neopagan faiths than many other religions due to their disorganised structure. However, Adherents.com, an independent website which specialises in collecting estimates of world religions, cites over thirty sources with estimates of numbers of Wiccans (principally from the USA and the UK). From this, they developed a median estimate of 800,000 members. As of 2016, Doyle White suggested that there were "hundreds of thousands of practising Wiccans around the globe".


title: Wicca

text: In 1998, the Wiccan high priestess and academic psychologist Vivianne Crowley suggested that Wicca had been less successful in propagating in countries whose populations were primarily Roman Catholic. She suggested that this might be because Wicca's emphasis on a female divinity was more novel to people raised in Protestant-dominant backgrounds. On the basis of her experience, Pearson concurred that this was broadly true.


title: Wicca

text: Wicca has been described as a non-proselytizing religion. In 1998, Pearson noted that there were very few individuals who had grown up as Wiccans although increasing numbers of Wiccan adults were themselves, parents. Many Wiccan parents did not refer to their children as also being Wiccan, believing it important that the latter are allowed to make their own choices about their religious identity when they are old enough.


title: Wicca

text: From her fieldwork among members of the Reclaiming tradition in California during 1980-90, the anthropologist Jone Salomonsen found that many described joining the movement following "an extraordinary experience of revelation".


title: Wicca

text: Based on their analysis of internet trends, the sociologists of religion Douglas Ezzy and Helen Berger argued that, by 2009, the "phenomenal growth" that Wicca has experienced in preceding years had slowed.


title: Wicca

text: From her 1996 survey of British Wiccans, Pearson found that most Wiccans were aged between 25 and 45, with the average age being around 35. She noted that as the Wiccan community aged, so the proportion of older practitioners would increase. She found roughly equal proportions of men and women, and found that 62% were from Protestant backgrounds, which was consistent with the dominance of Protestantism in Britain at large. Pearson's survey also found that half of British Wiccans featured had a university education and that they tended to work in "healing professions" like medicine or counselling, education, computing, and administration. She noted that there thus was "a certain homogeneity about the background" of British Wiccans.


title: Wicca

text: In the United Kingdom, census figures on religion were first collected in 2001; no detailed statistics were reported outside of the six main religions. For the 2011 census a more detailed breakdown of responses was reported with 56,620 people identifying themselves as pagans, 11,766 as Wiccans and a further 1,276 describing their religion as "Witchcraft".


title: Wicca

text: In the United States, the American Religious Identification Survey has shown significant increases in the number of self-identified Wiccans, from 8,000 in 1990, to 134,000 in 2001, and 342,000 in 2008. Wiccans have also made up significant proportions of various groups within that country; for instance, Wicca is the largest non-Christian faith practised in the United States Air Force, with 1,434 airmen identifying themselves as such. In 2014, the Pew Research Center estimated 0.3% of the US population (~950,000 people) identified as Wiccan or pagan based on a sample size of 35,000.


title: Wicca

text: In 2018, a Pew Research Center study estimated the number of Wiccans in the United States to be at least 1.5 million.


title: Wicca

text: Wicca emerged in predominantly Christian England, and from its inception the religion encountered opposition from certain Christian groups as well as from the popular tabloids like the "News of the World". Some Christians still believe that Wicca is a form of Satanism, despite important differences between these two religions. Detractors typically depict Wicca as a form of malevolent Satanism, a characterisation that Wiccans reject. Due to negative connotations associated with witchcraft, many Wiccans continue the traditional practice of secrecy, concealing their faith for fear of persecution. Revealing oneself as a Wiccan to family, friends or colleagues is often termed "coming out of the broom-closet". Attitudes to Christianity vary within the Wiccan movement, stretching from outright rejection to a willingness to work alongside Christians in interfaith endeavours.


title: Wicca

text: The religious studies scholar Graham Harvey wrote that "the popular and prevalent media image [of Wicca] is mostly inaccurate". Pearson similarly noted that "popular and media perceptions of Wicca have often been misleading".


title: Wicca

text: In the United States, a number of legal decisions have improved and validated the status of Wiccans, especially "Dettmer v. Landon" in 1986. However, Wiccans have encountered opposition from some politicians and Christian organisations, including former president of the United States George W. Bush, who stated that he did not believe Wicca to be a religion.


title: Wicca

text: In 2007 the United States Department of Veterans Affairs after years of dispute added the Pentacle to the list of emblems of belief that can be included on government-issued markers, headstones, and plaques honoring deceased veterans.


title: Wicca

text: In Canada, Dr. Heather Botting ("Lady Aurora") and Dr. Gary Botting ("Pan"), the original high priestess and high priest of Coven Celeste and founding elders of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church, successfully campaigned the British Columbian government and the federal government in 1995 to allow them to perform recognised Wiccan weddings, to become prison and hospital chaplains, and (in the case of Heather Botting) to become the first officially recognized Wiccan chaplain in a public university.


title: Wicca

text: The oath-based system of many Wiccan traditions makes it difficult for "outsider" scholars to study them. For instance, after the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann revealed information about what she learned as an initiate of a Wiccan coven in her academic study, various Wiccans were upset, believing that she had broken the oaths of secrecy taken at initiation.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: Blumhouse Productions (; also known as BH Productions or simply BH) is an American film and television production company founded in 2000 by Jason Blum.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: It is known mainly for producing horror films, such as "Paranormal Activity", "Insidious", "The Purge", "Split", "Get Out", "Happy Death Day", "Halloween", "Us", "The Invisible Man", "Freaky" and "The Black Phone". It has also produced drama films, such as "Whiplash" and "BlacKkKlansman", which both earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture. "Get Out" and "BlacKkKlansman" won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, respectively.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: It has worked with directors such as Leigh Whannell, Jordan Peele, Scott Derrickson, Christopher Landon, James Wan, Mike Flanagan, James DeMonaco, Damien Chazelle, and M. Night Shyamalan.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: Most of Blumhouse's theatrically-released films since 2014 are owned and distributed by Universal Pictures as part of a 10-year first-look deal.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: Blumhouse's company model is to produce films on a small budget, give directors creative freedom, and release films widely through the studio system. Blumhouse was originally known as Blum Israel Productions, with Amy Israel with a first-look deal at Miramax when the company was founded. In 2002, Blum and Israel parted ways, and the company became Blumhouse Productions. In 2015, Crypt TV was created by Jack Davis and Eli Roth which is backed Blum and the company.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: Blumhouse's low-budget model began in 2007 with "Paranormal Activity", which was made for $15,000 and grossed over $193 million worldwide. It produced "Insidious", which grossed over $100 million worldwide on a budget of $1.5 million; and "Sinister", which grossed over $87 million worldwide from a budget of $3 million.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: In 2010, Haunted Movies was formed as a division for Blumhouse which released "Insidious", "The River", "The Bay" and "The Lords of Salem".


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: In 2018, it produced "", "Truth or Dare", "The First Purge", and "Halloween". Blumhouse announced a partnership with DreamWorks Animation to co-produce "Spooky Jack" but the film was removed from DreamWorks Animation's slate in 2019.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: In 2020, it produced "Fantasy Island", "The Invisible Man", "The Hunt", "You Should Have Left", "", "Nocturne," and "Freaky".


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: In 2022, it produced "Dashcam", "The Black Phone", "Mr. Harrigan's Phone", "Halloween Ends", "Run Sweetheart Run", "Soft & Quiet" and "Nanny".


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: On November 16, 2022, it was announced that James Wan's Atomic Monster Productions was in talks to merge with Blumhouse with Atomic Monster having a shared first look deal with Universal Pictures. Both companies would continue to operate as separate labels, with each maintaining its own creative autonomy and brand identity.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: In 2023, they will release "M3GAN", "", "They Listen" and "The Exorcist". They are also in pre-production for "Five Nights at Freddy's".


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: In 2012, Blumhouse opened the "Blumhouse of Horrors", an interactive haunted house experience in Downtown Los Angeles.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: It had also collaborated with Halloween Horror Nights to bring mazes, a terror tram, and scare zones from films and properties such as "Insidious", "The Purge", "Happy Death Day", "Sinister", "Truth or Dare", "Unfriended", "Us", "Freaky", "The Black Phone" and Crypt TV.


title: Blumhouse Productions

text: BH Tilt was established on September 9, 2014 to produce movies from Blumhouse and other filmmakers for multi-platform release. On September 7, 2017, Blumhouse partnered up with distribution company Neon to manage BH Tilt. BH Tilt's releases are "The Green Inferno", "The Darkness", "Incarnate", "The Resurrection of Gavin Stone", "The Belko Experiment", "Sleight", "Lowriders", "Birth of the Dragon", "Upgrade", "" and "Don't Let Go".


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang Zemin (17 August 1926 – 30 November 2022) was a Chinese politician who served as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1989 to 2002, as chairman of the Central Military Commission from 1989 to 2004, and as president of China from 1993 to 2003. Jiang was paramount leader of China from 1989 to 2002. He was the core leader of the third generation of Chinese leadership, one of only four core leaders alongside Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang Zemin came to power unexpectedly as a compromise candidate following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, when he replaced Zhao Ziyang as CCP general secretary after Zhao was ousted for his support for the student movement. At the time, Jiang had been the party leader of the city of Shanghai. As the involvement of the "Eight Elders" in Chinese politics steadily declined, Jiang consolidated his hold on power to become the "paramount leader" in the country during the 1990s. Urged by Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in 1992, Jiang officially introduced the term "socialist market economy" in his speech during the 14th CCP National Congress held later that year, which accelerate "opening up and reform".


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Under Jiang's leadership, China experienced substantial economic growth with the continuation of market reforms. The returning of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom in 1997 and of Macau from Portugal in 1999, and entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001, were landmark moments of his era. China also witnessed improved relations with the outside world, while the Communist Party maintained its tight control over the state. Jiang faced criticism over human rights abuses, including the crackdown on the Falun Gong movement. His contributions to party doctrine, known as the "Three Represents", were written into the CCP constitution in 2002. Jiang gradually vacated his official leadership titles from 2002 to 2005, being succeeded in these roles by Hu Jintao, although he and his political faction continued to influence affairs until much later. On 30 November 2022, Jiang died from leukemia and multiple organ failure in Shanghai.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang Zemin was born in the city of Yangzhou, Jiangsu, on 17 August 1926. His ancestral home was the Jiangcun Village () in Jingde County, Anhui. This was also the hometown of a number of prominent figures in Chinese academic and intellectual establishments. Jiang grew up during the years of Japanese occupation. His uncle and his foster father, Jiang Shangqing, died fighting the Japanese in 1939 and was considered in Jiang Zemin's time to be a national hero. After Shangqing's death, Zemin became his male heir.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang attended the Department of Electrical Engineering at the National Central University in Japanese-occupied Nanjing before transferring to National Chiao Tung University (now Shanghai Jiao Tong University). He graduated there in 1947 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Jiang joined the Chinese Communist Party when he was in college. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Jiang received his training at the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow in the 1950s. He also worked for Changchun's First Automobile Works.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In 1962, he returned to Shanghai and became the deputy director of the Shanghai Electric Research Institute. In 1966, he was appointed as the director and deputy party secretary of a thermal engineering research institute in Wuhan, which was established by the First Ministry of Machine Building. When the Cultural Revolution began in the same year,


title: Jiang Zemin

text: he did not suffer greatly during the turmoil, but was pulled down from his position as director of the institute and was sent to a May Seventh Cadre School. In 1970, after leaving the cadre school, he became the deputy director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the ministry and was sent to the Socialist Republic of Romania, where he served as head of the expert team to establish fifteen machinery manufacturing plants in the country. After the completion of his mission in 1972, he returned to China.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In 1979, following a thawing of diplomatic relations between China and the United States, Deng Xiaoping decided to encourage special economic zones (SEZs) as part of his Four Modernizations. China's State Council established two ministerial commissions to increase trade and foreign investment. The commissions were headed by vice premier Gu Mu, who appointed Jiang as vice chairman of both commissions, a position equivalent to vice minister. Jiang's role was to ensure these SEZs increased economic prosperity without becoming "conduits" for foreign ideology. In 1980, Jiang headed a delegation which toured other SEZs in twelve countries; upon his return, he issued a radical report which recommended allowing local authorities to issue tax breaks and land leases, and increasing the power of foreign joint ventures. The report initially "caused consternation" among party leaders, but his pragmatic and empirical presentation appealed to Deng Xiaoping. His proposals were approved at the National People's Congress, cementing Jiang as an "early implementer" of Deng Xiaoping Theory.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In March 1982, he was pushed out as vice chairman of two commissions. After pressure from premier Gu and Shanghai mayor Wang Daohan, "ardent reformist" Zhao Ziyang appointed Jiang as the first vice minister and party secretary of the newly-established Ministry of Electronics Industry.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: At the 12th Party Congress held in September 1982, Jiang became a member of the Central Committee of the CCP, which determines policy and elects the members of the Politburo.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In 1985, Jiang became Mayor of Shanghai. Jiang received mixed reviews as mayor. Many of his critics dismissed him as a "flower pot", a Chinese term for someone who only seems useful, but actually gets nothing done. Many credited Shanghai's growth during the period to Zhu Rongji. Jiang was an ardent believer, during this period, in Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. In an attempt to curb student discontent in 1986, Jiang recited the Gettysburg Address in English in front of a group of student protesters.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: At the 13th National Congress of the CCP held in October 1987, Jiang was promoted from mayor to Shanghai party secretary, the most powerful position in the city, reporting directly to the central government. He also joined the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, in accordance with customs for party secretaries of major cities.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In 1989, former general secretary Hu Yaobang died; he had previously been purged in January 1987 and accused of supporting "bourgeois liberalization". His death catalyzed the Tiananmen Square protest, leading to an ideological crisis between "liberals" (who supported Deng's aggressive reforms) and "conservatives" (who favored slower change). After the "World Economic Herald" tried to publish a eulogy rehabilitating Hu and praising his reformist stance, Jiang took control of the newspaper's editorial board. As the protests continued to grow, the Party imposed martial law in Beijing. In Shanghai, 100,000 protestors marched in the streets, and 450 students went on a hunger strike. After the third day, Jiang personally met with them to assure them that the Party shared their goals, and to promise future dialogue. He simultaneously sent a telegram to the Central Committee firmly supporting their martial law declaration. His careful public appeals were well-received by both pro-democracy students and socialist party elders. On 20 May 1989, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping decided to appoint Jiang as the new general secretary, replacing Zhao Ziyang, who had supported the protestors. Jiang was selected as a compromise candidate over Tianjin's Li Ruihuan, premier Li Peng, elders Li Xiannian, Chen Yun, and the retired elders to become the new general secretary. Before that, he had been considered to be an unlikely candidate.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang was elevated to the country's top job in 1989 with a fairly small power base inside the party, and thus, very little actual power. His most reliable allies were the powerful party elders Chen Yun and Li Xiannian. He was believed to be simply a transitional figure until a more stable successor government to Deng could be put in place. Other prominent Party and military figures like President Yang Shangkun and his brother Yang Baibing were believed to be planning a coup.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: At the first meeting of the new CCP Politburo Standing Committee, after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, Jiang criticized the previous period as "hard on the economy, soft on politics" and advocated increasing political thought work. Anne-Marie Brady wrote that "Jiang Zemin was a long time political cadre with a nose for ideological work and its importance. This meeting marked the beginning of a new era in propaganda and political thought work in China." Soon after, the Central Propaganda Department was given more resources and power, "including the power to go in to the propaganda-related work units and cleanse the ranks of those who had been supportive of the democracy movement." The Politburo also issued a list of "seven things" regarding "matters of universal concern to the masses", with party corruption as the top priority.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In the first few years, Jiang depended on the support of Deng Xiaoping to remain in power, which forced Jiang into an "ultranationalist stance" towards Taiwan and the US. Jiang had supported Deng's calls against "bourgeois liberalization", but while Jiang was seen as a "thoughtful reformer", he "[skewed] to the more conservative views of the elders and his Politburo colleagues". Deng was far more supportive of reforms, saying that "deviating to the Left is an even greater danger" than deviating to the right.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Deng grew critical of Jiang's leadership in 1992. During Deng's southern tour, he subtly suggested that the pace of reform was not fast enough. Jiang grew ever more cautious, and rallied behind Deng's reforms completely. Jiang coined the new "socialist market economy" to move China's centrally-planned socialist economy into essentially a government-regulated capitalist market economy. It was a huge step to take in the realization of Deng's "Socialism with Chinese characteristics." At the same time, Jiang elevated many of his supporters from Shanghai to high government positions, after regaining Deng's confidence. He abolished the outdated Central Advisory Committee in 1992, an advisory body composed of revolutionary party elders. He became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the Central Military Commission in 1989, followed by his election to the presidency in March 1993.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In the early 1990s, post-Tiananmen economic reforms by Zhu Rongji with Jiang's support had stabilized and the country was on a consistent growth trajectory. At the same time, China faced myriad economic and social problems. At Deng's state funeral in 1997, Jiang delivered the elder statesman's eulogy. Jiang had inherited a China rampant with political corruption, and regional economies growing too rapidly for the stability of the entire country. Deng's policy that "some areas can get rich before others" led to an opening wealth gap between coastal regions and the interior provinces. The unprecedented economic growth and the deregulation in a number of heavy industries led to the closing of many state-owned enterprises (SOEs), breaking many people's iron rice bowl and initially removing as many as 40 million jobs from SOEs. As a result, unemployment rates skyrocketed, rising as high as 40% in some urban areas. Stock markets fluctuated greatly. The scale of rural migration into urban areas was unprecedented anywhere, and little was being done to address an ever-increasing urban-rural wealth gap. Official reports put the figure on the percentage of China's GDP being moved and abused by corrupt officials at 10%. Jiang's biggest aim in the economy was stability, and he believed that a stable government with highly centralized power would be a prerequisite, choosing to postpone political reform, which in many facets of governance exacerbated the ongoing problems. After the coastal regions and SEZs were sufficiently developed, Jiang worked to reduce geographic disparities by encouraging richer cities to "provide financial, technological, and managerial assistance to the poorer, western ones."


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Under Jiang's leadership, China continued its style of developmental diplomacy which had been adopted under Deng Xiaoping. China's international behavior was generally both pragmatic and predictable.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang went on a state visit to the United States in 1997, drawing various crowds in protest from the Tibet Independence Movement to supporters of the Chinese democracy movement. He made a speech at Harvard University, part of it in English, but could not escape questions on democracy and freedom. In the official summit meeting with president Bill Clinton, the tone was relaxed as they sought common ground while largely ignoring areas of disagreement. Clinton would visit China in June 1998, and vowed that China and the United States were partners in the world, and not adversaries. When American-led NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, Jiang seemed to have put up a harsh stance for show at home, but in reality only performed symbolic gestures of protest, and no solid action. Jiang's foreign policy was for the most part passive and non-confrontational. A personal friend of former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, Jiang strengthened China's economic stature abroad, attempting to establish cordial relations with countries whose trade is largely confined to the American economic sphere. Despite this, serious flare-ups between China and the US during Jiang's tenure includes the NATO bombing of Serbia, and the Hainan Island incident in April 2001.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: The "People's Daily" and CCTV-1's 7 pm "Xinwen Lianbo" each had Jiang-related events as the front-page or top stories, a fact that remained until Hu Jintao's media administrative changes in 2006. Jiang appeared casual in front of Western media, and gave an unprecedented interview with Mike Wallace of CBS in 2000 at Beidaihe. He would often use foreign languages in front of the camera; once, he gave a 40-minute speech entirely in Russian. In an encounter with Hong Kong reporter Sharon Cheung in 2000 regarding the central government's apparent "imperial order" of supporting Tung Chee-hwa to seek a second term as Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Jiang scolded the Hong Kong journalists as "too simple, sometimes naive" in English. Before he transferred power to a younger generation of leaders, Jiang had his theory of Three Represents written into the Party's constitution, alongside Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory at the 16th CCP Congress in 2002.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In June 1999, Jiang established an extralegal department, the 6–10 Office, to crack down on Falun Gong. Cook and Lemish state this was because Jiang was worried that the popular new religious movement was "quietly infiltrating the CCP and state apparatus." On 20 July, security forces arrested thousands of Falun Gong organizers they identified as leaders. The persecution that followed was characterized a nationwide campaign of propaganda, as well as the large-scale arbitrary imprisonment and coercive reeducation of Falun Gong organizers, sometimes resulting in death due to mistreatment in detention.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: In the run-up to the 16th National Congress of the CCP, Hu Jintao had "almost unanimous support" to become the new General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. To maintain China's image as a stable and respected country, Jiang and Hu emphasized their unity, striving to make this transition the first "smooth and harmonious" one in the PRC's history. Jiang stepped down as general secretary and left the Politburo Standing Committee, but retained the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, which controlled the army and the nation's foreign policy. Jiang would continue conselling Hu from "behind the curtain", and it was formally agreed that Jiang would be "consulted on all matters of state importance". Both men also reached a "tacit understanding" that Hu would not be considered a "core" leader like Jiang, Deng and Mao.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: At the 16th Party Congress, the majority of new members for Standing Committee were considered part of Jiang's so-called "Shanghai Clique", the most prominent being vice president Zeng Qinghong, who had served as Jiang's chief of staff for many years, and vice premier Huang Ju, a former party secretary of Shanghai.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: After Hu succeeded Jiang as general secretary, the latter continued to "[dominate] public life" for several years. The "South China Morning Post" announced that "a new era has begun in China. But it is not that of Vice President Hu Jintao [...] Rather, it is a new era of President Jiang Zemin, who has just stepped down as the Party's general secretary." Early in the 2003 SARS crisis, Jiang remained conspicuously silent, and observers were divided over whether it signified his waning influence, or respect for Hu. It has been argued that the institutional arrangements created by the 16th Congress left Jiang in a position where he could not exercise much influence.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Although Jiang retained the chairmanship of the powerful Central Military Commission, most members of the commission were professional military men. "Liberation Army Daily", a publication thought to represent the views of the CMC majority, printed an article on 11 March 2003 which quotes two army delegates as saying, "Having one center is called 'loyalty', while having two centers will result in 'problems.'" This was interpreted as a criticism of Jiang's attempt to exercise dual leadership with Hu on the model of Deng Xiaoping.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: On 19 September 2004, after the 4th Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee, Jiang, at the age of 78, relinquished his post as chairman of the party's Central Military Commission, his last post in the party. Six months later in March 2005, Jiang resigned his last significant post, chairman of the Central Military Commission of the state, which marked the end of Jiang's political career. This followed weeks of speculation that forces inside the party were pressing Jiang to step aside. Jiang's term was supposed to have lasted until 2007. Hu also succeeded Jiang as the CMC chairman, but, in an apparent political defeat for Jiang, General Xu Caihou, and not Zeng Qinghong was appointed to succeed Hu as vice chairman, as was initially speculated. This power transition formally marked the end of Jiang's era in China, which roughly lasted from 1989 to 2004.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang continued to make official appearances after giving up his last title in 2004. In China's strictly defined protocol sequence, Jiang's name always appeared immediately after Hu Jintao's and in front of the remaining sitting members of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee. In 2007, Jiang was seen with Hu Jintao on stage at a ceremony celebrating the 80th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army, and toured the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution with Li Peng, Zhu Rongji, and other former senior officials. On 8 August 2008, Jiang appeared at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. He also stood beside Hu Jintao during the mass parade celebrating the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China in October 2009.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Beginning in July 2011, false reports of Jiang's death began circulating on the news media outside of mainland China and on the internet. While Jiang may indeed have been ill and receiving treatment, the rumors were denied by official sources. On 9 October 2011, Jiang made his first public appearance since his premature obituary in Beijing at a celebration to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution. Jiang reappeared at the 18th Party Congress in October 2012, and took part in the 65th Anniversary banquet of the founding of the People's Republic of China in October 2014. At the banquet he sat next to Xi Jinping, who had then succeeded Hu Jintao as CCP general secretary. In September 2015, Jiang attended the parade celebrating 70 years since end of World War II; there, Jiang again sat next to Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao. He appeared on 29 May 2017 at Shanghai Technology University.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: After Xi Jinping assumed power in 2012, Jiang's position in the protocol sequence of leaders retreated; while he was often seated next to Xi Jinping at official events, his name was often reported after all standing members of the Communist Party's Politburo. Jiang reappeared at the 19th Party Congress on 18 October 2017. He appeared on 29 July 2019 at the funeral of former premier Li Peng. He also attended the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China mass parade in October 2019, marking his last public appearance prior to his death. He did not attend the 20th Party Congress in October 2022.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang married Wang Yeping, also a native of Yangzhou, in 1949. She was his cousin, as Jiang's adoptive mother was Wang's aunt. Wang graduated from Shanghai International Studies University. They had two sons together, Jiang Mianheng and Jiang Miankang. Jiang Mianheng went on to be an academic and businessman, working within the Chinese space program, and founded Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: It is believed that Jiang had a long-running friendship with the singer Song Zuying, Chen Zhili, and others. Following the rise of Xi Jinping, Song and other Jiang loyalists, including her brother Song Zuyu, fell under investigation for corruption.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang had a passable command of several foreign languages, including English and Russian. He enjoyed engaging foreign visitors in small talk on arts and literature in their native language, in addition to singing foreign songs in the original. Jiang remains the only paramount leader of China known to be able to speak in English.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang died on 30 November 2022, at the age of 96, in Shanghai. According to the Chinese state media Xinhua News Agency, he died at 12:13 pm from leukemia and multiple organ failures.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: According to the government announcement, Jiang Zemin was regarded as an outstanding leader, great Marxist, great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist and diplomat, and a time-tested communist fighter.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: On the day of Jiang's death, the government released a notice that the national flags would be flown half-staff in key locations of Beijing and diplomatic missions abroad. Foreigners were not invited to attend official mourning activities.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: The policies of his successors, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, have widely been seen as efforts to address perceived imbalances and move away from a sole focus on economic growth toward a broader view of development which incorporates non-economic factors such as health and the environment.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Domestically, Jiang's legacy and reputation is mixed. While some people attributed the period of relative stability and growth in the 1990s to Jiang's term, others argue that Jiang did little to correct systemic imbalance and an accumulation of problems which resulted from years of breakneck-pace economic reforms, leaving the next administration facing innumerable challenges, some of which may have been too late to solve.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: The fact that Jiang rose to power as the direct beneficiary of the political aftermath of Tiananmen has shaped the perception of his rule. Following the Tiananmen protests, Jiang threw his support behind elder Chen Yun's conservative economic policies, but subsequently changed his allegiance to Deng Xiaoping's reform-oriented agenda following the latter's "Southern Tour". This shift was not only seen as the exercise of a political opportunist, it also sowed confusion among party loyalists in regards to what direction the party was headed or what the party truly believed in. While continued economic reforms resulted in an explosion of wealth around the country, it also led to the formation of special interest groups in many sectors of the economy, and the exercise of state power without any meaningful oversight. This opened the way for the sub-optimal distribution of the fruits of growth, and an expanding culture of corruption among bureaucrats and party officials.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Historian and former Xinhua journalist Yang Jisheng wrote that Jiang might well have been given a positive historical assessment had it not been for his decision to 'overstay his welcome' by remaining in the Central Military Commission post after Hu had formally assumed the party leadership. Moreover, Jiang took credit for all the gains made during the 13 years "between 1989 and 2002", which not only evoked the memories of Jiang being a beneficiary of Tiananmen, but also neglected the economic foundations laid by Deng, whose authority was still paramount until the mid-1990s. Additionally, Jiang was also criticized for his insistence on writing the "Three Represents" into the party and state constitutions (see below), which Yang called Jiang's attempt at "self-deification", i.e., that he saw himself as a visionary along the same lines as Deng and Mao. Yang contended, "The 'Three Represents' is just common sense. It is not a proper theoretical framework. It's what any ruler would tell the people to justify the continued rule of the governing party."


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Jiang did not specialize in economics, and in 1997 handed most of the economic governance of the country to Zhu Rongji, who became Chinese premier, and remained in office through the Asian financial crisis. Under their joint leadership, Mainland China sustained an average of 8% GDP growth annually, achieving the highest rate of per capita economic growth in major world economies, raising eyebrows around the world with its astonishing speed. This was mostly achieved by continuing the process of a transition to a market economy. Additionally, he helped increase China's international standing with China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 and Beijing winning the bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Formally, Jiang's theory of "Three Represents" was enshrined in both Party and State constitutions as an "important thought", following in the footsteps of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory. However, the theory lacked staying power. By the time of the 17th Party Congress in 2007, the Scientific Outlook on Development had already been written into the constitution of the Communist Party, a mere five years after the Three Represents, overtaking the latter as the guiding ideology for much of Hu Jintao's term. While his successors paid lip service to "Three Represents" in official party documentation and speeches, no special emphasis was placed on the theory after Jiang left office. There was even speculation following Xi Jinping's assumption of CCP general secretary in 2012 that the Three Represents would eventually be dropped from the party's list of guiding ideologies.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: The Three Represents justified the incorporation of the new capitalist business class into the party, and changed the founding ideology of the Chinese Communist Party from protecting the interests of the peasantry and workers to that of the "overwhelming majority of the people", a euphemism aimed at placating the growing entrepreneurial class. Conservative critics within the party, such as hardline leftist Deng Liqun, denounced this as betrayal of "true" communist ideology.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: Some have also associated Jiang with the widespread corruption and cronyism that had become a notable feature of the Communist power apparatus since Jiang's years in power. In the military, the two vice-chairmen who sat atop the Central Military Commission hierarchy – nominally as assistants to then chairman Hu Jintao – Vice-Chairmen Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, were said to have obstructed Hu Jintao's exercise of power in the military. Xu and Guo were characterized as "Jiang's proxies in the military". Eventually, both men were reported to have taken massive bribes, and both fell under the axe of the anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping.


title: Jiang Zemin

text: At the same time, many biographers of Jiang have noted his government resembled an oligarchy as opposed to an autocratic dictatorship. Many of the policies of his era had been attributed to others in government, notably premier Zhu Rongji. Jiang was also characterized as a leader who was mindful to seek the opinion of his close advisers. Jiang is often credited with the improvement in foreign relations during his term, but at the same time many Chinese have criticized him for being too conciliatory towards the United States and Russia. The issue of Chinese unification between the mainland and Taiwan gained ground during Jiang's term. The construction of the Qinghai–Tibet railway and the Three Gorges Dam began under Jiang's leadership.


title: Sofia Carson

text: Sofía Daccarett Char (born April 10, 1993), known professionally as Sofia Carson, is an American actress and singer. Her first appearance on television was as a guest star on the Disney Channel series "Austin & Ally". In 2015, she received recognition as Evie, the daughter of the Evil Queen, in the Disney Channel Original Movie "Descendants". She later reprised her role in its two sequels and other work in the franchise.


title: Sofia Carson

text: Carson has since starred in the films "Adventures in Babysitting" (2016), "" (2016), "" (2016) and "Songbird" (2020). She also starred as Ava Jalali in the Freeform drama series "" (2019). As a voice actress, she also had roles in "" (2021) as Pipp Petals and in "Spider-Man" (2017) as Keemia Marko / Sandgirl. She also starred in the Netflix films "Feel the Beat" (2020) and "Purple Hearts" (2022).


title: Sofia Carson

text: Carson made her singing debut in 2015 with the soundtrack album "Descendants", and in the same year released the single "Rotten to the Core". In 2016, she signed to Hollywood Records, and released her debut single, "Love Is the Name". In 2022, she released her eponymous debut studio album.


title: Sofia Carson

text: Carson was born Sofia Daccarett Char in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to José F. Daccarett and Laura Char Carson, who both moved to Florida from Barranquilla, Colombia. Sofia chose the artistic name "Carson" after her American maternal grandmother, Lauraine Carson. Through her mother, Carson is related to the Char family of Colombian politicians.


title: Sofia Carson

text: She attended St. Hugh School and graduated from Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Miami. She attended In Motion Dance Studio, where she was part of the IMPAC Youth Ensemble program, competing across the United States. She subsequently attended UCLA, majoring in communications with a minor in French.


title: Sofia Carson

text: Carson said she is mainly influenced by pop music and admires artists who "tell stories through their music", cited 20th-century acts like The Beatles and Michael Jackson and modern acts like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift as influences.


title: Sofia Carson

text: In 2013, Carson participated in a BMI Latina musical artist showcase. She performed as part of the cast on the 2015 "Descendants" soundtrack, which reached number one on the "Billboard" 200, including her single version of "Rotten to the Core". She was also featured on the "Descendants 2" and "Descendants 3" soundtracks, which reached numbers 6 and 7, respectively, on the "Billboard" 200.


title: Sofia Carson

text: In an August 2015 interview Carson stated she was working on her first album. In March 2016, Hollywood Records and Republic Records officially announced that Carson had signed a joint worldwide record deal with both companies. Her debut single was "Love Is the Name", an interpolation of Opus' "Live Is Life", and was released on April 8, 2016. "Love is the Name" had an alternate version featuring J. Balvin, and a music video with Carson and Balvin was released for that version. Carson released a promotional single on August 26, 2016, entitled "I'm Gonna Love You". Carson has performed in NBC's 2015 Thanksgiving Parade, ABC's Disney Parks Christmas Celebration, Univision's Feliz 2016 (New Year's Eve Special), and the 2016 Radio Disney Music Awards, and she was a presenter on ABC's Disneyland 60th Anniversary Special. She performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the 2017 "A Capitol Fourth", an annual concert at the United States Capitol in celebration of Independence Day.


title: Sofia Carson

text: On January 27, 2017, she released her single "Back to Beautiful" featuring Alan Walker, and on February 15, 2017, she released the official music video on YouTube. "Back to Beautiful" was written by Julia Michaels, who also wrote Carson's next single, "Ins and Outs". In 2018, Carson was featured on three EDM songs: R3hab's "Rumors", Alan Walker's "Different World" and Galantis's "San Francisco". Following the success of "Rumors", Carson collaborated again with R3hab in her next singles "I Luv U" and "Miss U More Than U Know".


title: Sofia Carson

text: On March 26, 2021, Carson released the single "Fool's Gold", produced by Stargate and Jeff Jones. It reached number 38 on the Mainstream Top 40. The song was remixed by Tiësto; his remix, "Fool's Gold (24 Karat Gold Edition)" was released on April 30, 2021. On May 2, 2021, Carson performed "A Whole New World" (from the 1992 film "Aladdin") on "American Idol" with the show's nine finalists. On September 2, 2021, Carson released "Glowin' Up" as a single as a part of the "" soundtrack, prior to the film's release on September 24. In March 2022, she released her debut studio album, "Sofia Carson".


title: Sofia Carson

text: Carson's acting career launched in 2014 when she guest-starred as Chelsea on the Disney Channel series "Austin & Ally". A few months later, Carson was cast as recurring character Soleil on MTV's series "Faking It". In 2014, she was cast in a starring role in the Disney Channel Original Movie "Descendants", in which she plays Evie, the daughter of the Evil Queen from "Snow White".


title: Sofia Carson

text: On January 9, 2015, Carson was cast in the co-lead role in the Disney Channel Original Movie "Adventures in Babysitting". Filming began in spring 2015, for an early 2016 television premiere. In March 2016, "The Hollywood Reporter" announced that Carson landed the leading role in the fourth installment of the "A Cinderella Story" series, "", directed by Michelle Johnston and produced by Dylan Sellers, which was released direct-to-video.


title: Sofia Carson

text: Carson reprised her role as Evie in the 2017 sequel "Descendants 2", for which she was nominated for an Imagen Award for Best Supporting Actress. Carson played Sloane Silver in the second season of Freeform's "Famous in Love" in 2018. In January 2018, it was announced that Carson would be starring in the television series "", in the role of Ava Jalali; it was picked up to series by Freeform in May 2018 and premiered in March 2019. For her performance, she was nominated for a Teen Choice Award for Choice Drama TV Actress. She once again played Evie for "Descendants 3", the third installment of the franchise, which premiered on August 2, 2019. In July 2019, it was announced that Carson would play April in the Netflix dance film "Feel the Beat", which was released in 2020.


title: Sofia Carson

text: In 2020, Carson joined the cast of the thriller film "Songbird", in which played the main role of Sara. Later that year, it was announced that she had been cast in the romance film "Purple Hearts" as Cassie. Carson is also an executive producer for the movie and wrote and performed on the film's soundtrack. She voiced Pipp Petals in "", which was released on September 24, 2021. In July 2022, "Purple Hearts" was released by Netflix, reaching the number-one position worldwide.


title: Sofia Carson

text: In August 2019, Carson was designated as the first Global Ambassador of the Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation. Her role includes advocating, promoting, and increasing awareness of the foundation's mission and educational programs. Since its establishment five years ago, the Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation has donated more than US$5 million in scholarships, grants, musical instrument donations, and educational events in the United States and Ibero-America.


title: Sofia Carson

text: In January 2020, Carson was named the new global ambassador of beauty brand Revlon. In June 2020, Revlon released Carson's own collection, the Revlon x Sofia Carson collection, which includes lipsticks and nail polishes. In October 2020, she was named a UNICEF Ambassador. On February 28, 2021, she hosted the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Golden Globes Red Carpet Pre-Show. In April 2021, Revlon released a new fragrance for Carson, called One Heart. In 2022, she partnered with the Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation to announce the Sofia Carson Scholarship which will fund a bachelor's degree at Berklee College of Music.


title: Unix

text: Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.


title: Unix

text: Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX). In the early 1990s, AT&T sold its rights in Unix to Novell, which then sold the UNIX trademark to The Open Group, an industry consortium founded in 1996. The Open Group allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems that comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS).


title: Unix

text: Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the "Unix philosophy". According to this philosophy, the operating system should provide a set of simple tools, each of which performs a limited, well-defined function. A unified and inode-based filesystem (the Unix filesystem) and an inter-process communication mechanism known as "pipes" serve as the main means of communication, and a shell scripting and command language (the Unix shell) is used to combine the tools to perform complex workflows.


title: Unix

text: Unix distinguishes itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language, which allows Unix to operate on numerous platforms.


title: Unix

text: Unix was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmers. The system grew larger as the operating system started spreading in academic circles, and as users added their own tools to the system and shared them with colleagues.


title: Unix

text: At first, Unix was not designed to be portable or for multi-tasking. Later, Unix gradually gained portability, multi-tasking and multi-user capabilities in a time-sharing configuration. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools, small programs that can be strung together through a command-line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to using a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are collectively known as the "Unix philosophy". Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike summarize this in "The Unix Programming Environment" as "the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves".


title: Unix

text: By the early 1980s, users began seeing Unix as a potential universal operating system, suitable for computers of all sizes. The Unix environment and the client–server program model were essential elements in the development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks rather than in individual computers.


title: Unix

text: Both Unix and the C programming language were developed by AT&T and distributed to government and academic institutions, which led to both being ported to a wider variety of machine families than any other operating system.


title: Unix

text: The Unix operating system consists of many libraries and utilities along with the master control program, the kernel. The kernel provides services to start and stop programs, handles the file system and other common "low-level" tasks that most programs share, and schedules access to avoid conflicts when programs try to access the same resource or device simultaneously. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the distinction of "kernel space" from user space, the latter being a priority realm where most application programs operate.


title: Unix

text: The origins of Unix date back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric were developing Multics, a time-sharing operating system for the GE-645 mainframe computer.


title: Unix

text: Multics featured several innovations, but also presented severe problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics, but not by its goals, individual researchers at Bell Labs started withdrawing from the project. The last to leave were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna, who decided to reimplement their experiences in a new project of smaller scale. This new operating system was initially without organizational backing, and also without a name.


title: Unix

text: The new operating system was a single-tasking system. In 1970, the group coined the name "Unics" for "Uniplexed Information and Computing Service" as a pun on "Multics", which stood for "Multiplexed Information and Computer Services". Brian Kernighan takes credit for the idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling "Unix". Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Peter G. Neumann also credit Kernighan.


title: Unix

text: The operating system was originally written in assembly language, but in 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in C. Version 4 Unix, however, still had many PDP-11 dependent codes, and was not suitable for porting. The first port to another platform was made five years later (1978) for the Interdata 8/32.


title: Unix

text: Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as "Research Unix". In 1975, the first source license for "UNIX" was sold to Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign Department of Computer Science (UIUC). UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson, who had worked on the Unix kernel at Bell Labs, was instrumental in negotiating the terms of the license.


title: Unix

text: During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (BSD and System V) by commercial startups, which in turn led to Unix fragmenting into multiple, similar but often slightly mutually-incompatible systems including DYNIX, HP-UX, SunOS/Solaris, AIX, and Xenix. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4 (SVR4), which was subsequently adopted by many commercial Unix vendors.


title: Unix

text: In the 1990s, Unix and Unix-like systems grew in popularity and became the operating system of choice for over 90% of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers, as BSD and Linux distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers. In 2000, Apple released Darwin, also a Unix system, which became the core of the Mac OS X operating system, later renamed macOS.


title: Unix

text: In the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort now known as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX around the common structure of the major competing variants of the Unix system, publishing the first POSIX standard in 1988. In the early 1990s, a separate but very similar effort was started by an industry consortium, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative, which eventually became the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) administered by The Open Group. Starting in 1998, the Open Group and IEEE started the Austin Group, to provide a common definition of POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification, which, by 2008, had become the Open Group Base Specification.


title: Unix

text: In 1999, in an effort towards compatibility, several Unix system vendors agreed on SVR4's Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as the standard for binary and object code files. The common format allows substantial binary compatibility among different Unix systems operating on the same CPU architecture.


title: Unix

text: The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard was created to provide a reference directory layout for Unix-like operating systems; it has mainly been used in Linux.


title: Unix

text: The Unix system is composed of several components that were originally packaged together. By including the development environment, libraries, documents and the portable, modifiable source code for all of these components, in addition to the kernel of an operating system, Unix was a self-contained software system. This was one of the key reasons it emerged as an important teaching and learning tool and has had such a broad influence.


title: Unix

text: The inclusion of these components did not make the system large the original V7 UNIX distribution, consisting of copies of all of the compiled binaries plus all of the source code and documentation occupied less than 10 MB and arrived on a single nine-track magnetic tape, earning its reputation as a portable system. The printed documentation, typeset from the online sources, was contained in two volumes.


title: Unix

text: The names and filesystem locations of the Unix components have changed substantially across the history of the system. Nonetheless, the V7 implementation is considered by many to have the canonical early structure:


title: Unix

text: The Unix system had a significant impact on other operating systems. It achieved its reputation by its interactivity, by providing the software at a nominal fee for educational use, by running on inexpensive hardware, and by being easy to adapt and move to different machines. Unix was originally written in assembly language, but was soon rewritten in C, a high-level programming language. Although this followed the lead of CTSS, Multics and Burroughs MCP, it was Unix that popularized the idea.


title: Unix

text: Unix had a drastically simplified file model compared to many contemporary operating systems: treating all kinds of files as simple byte arrays. The file system hierarchy contained machine services and devices (such as printers, terminals, or disk drives), providing a uniform interface, but at the expense of occasionally requiring additional mechanisms such as ioctl and mode flags to access features of the hardware that did not fit the simple "stream of bytes" model. The Plan 9 operating system pushed this model even further and eliminated the need for additional mechanisms.


title: Unix

text: Unix also popularized the hierarchical file system with arbitrarily nested subdirectories, originally introduced by Multics. Other common operating systems of the era had ways to divide a storage device into multiple directories or sections, but they had a fixed number of levels, often only one level. Several major proprietary operating systems eventually added recursive subdirectory capabilities also patterned after Multics. DEC's RSX-11M's "group, user" hierarchy evolved into OpenVMS directories, CP/M's volumes evolved into MS-DOS 2.0+ subdirectories, and HP's MPE group.account hierarchy and IBM's SSP and OS/400 library systems were folded into broader POSIX file systems.


title: Unix

text: Making the command interpreter an ordinary user-level program, with additional commands provided as separate programs, was another Multics innovation popularized by Unix. The Unix shell used the same language for interactive commands as for scripting (shell scripts – there was no separate job control language like IBM's JCL). Since the shell and OS commands were "just another program", the user could choose (or even write) their own shell. New commands could be added without changing the shell itself. Unix's innovative command-line syntax for creating modular chains of producer-consumer processes (pipelines) made a powerful programming paradigm (coroutines) widely available. Many later command-line interpreters have been inspired by the Unix shell.


title: Unix

text: A fundamental simplifying assumption of Unix was its focus on newline-delimited text for nearly all file formats. There were no "binary" editors in the original version of Unix – the entire system was configured using textual shell command scripts. The common denominator in the I/O system was the byte – unlike "record-based" file systems. The focus on text for representing nearly everything made Unix pipes especially useful and encouraged the development of simple, general tools that could be easily combined to perform more complicated "ad hoc" tasks. The focus on text and bytes made the system far more scalable and portable than other systems. Over time, text-based applications have also proven popular in application areas, such as printing languages (PostScript, ODF), and at the application layer of the Internet protocols, e.g., FTP, SMTP, HTTP, SOAP, and SIP.


title: Unix

text: Unix popularized a syntax for regular expressions that found widespread use. The Unix programming interface became the basis for a widely implemented operating system interface standard (POSIX, see above). The C programming language soon spread beyond Unix, and is now ubiquitous in systems and applications programming.


title: Unix

text: Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix (and programs that ran on it) established a set of cultural norms for developing software, norms which became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself; this has been termed the Unix philosophy.


title: Unix

text: The TCP/IP networking protocols were quickly implemented on the Unix versions widely used on relatively inexpensive computers, which contributed to the Internet explosion of worldwide real-time connectivity, and which formed the basis for implementations on many other platforms.


title: Unix

text: The Unix policy of extensive on-line documentation and (for many years) ready access to all system source code raised programmer expectations, and contributed to the launch of the free software movement in 1983.


title: Unix

text: In 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU (short for "GNU's Not Unix") project, an ambitious effort to create a free software Unix-like system; "free" in the sense that everyone who received a copy would be free to use, study, modify, and redistribute it. The GNU project's own kernel development project, GNU Hurd, had not yet produced a working kernel, but in 1991 Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel as free software under the GNU General Public License. In addition to their use in the GNU operating system, many GNU packages – such as the GNU Compiler Collection (and the rest of the GNU toolchain), the GNU C library and the GNU core utilities – have gone on to play central roles in other free Unix systems as well.


title: Unix

text: Linux distributions, consisting of the Linux kernel and large collections of compatible software have become popular both with individual users and in business. Popular distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mandriva Linux, Slackware Linux, Arch Linux and Gentoo.


title: Unix

text: A free derivative of BSD Unix, 386BSD, was released in 1992 and led to the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects. With the 1994 settlement of a lawsuit brought against the University of California and Berkeley Software Design Inc. ("USL v. BSDi") by Unix System Laboratories, it was clarified that Berkeley had the right to distribute BSD Unix for free if it so desired. Since then, BSD Unix has been developed in several different product branches, including OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD.


title: Unix

text: Linux and BSD are increasingly filling the market needs traditionally served by proprietary Unix operating systems, as well as expanding into new markets such as the consumer desktop and mobile and embedded devices. Because of the modular design of the Unix model, sharing components is relatively common; consequently, most or all Unix and Unix-like systems include at least some BSD code, and some systems also include GNU utilities in their distributions.


title: Unix

text: In a 1999 interview, Dennis Ritchie voiced his opinion that Linux and BSD operating systems are a continuation of the basis of the Unix design, and are derivatives of Unix:


title: Unix

text: In the same interview, he states that he views both Unix and Linux as "the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others, many years ago".


title: Unix

text: OpenSolaris was the free software counterpart to Solaris developed by Sun Microsystems, which included a CDDL-licensed kernel and a primarily GNU userland. However, Oracle discontinued the project upon their acquisition of Sun, which prompted a group of former Sun employees and members of the OpenSolaris community to fork OpenSolaris into the illumos kernel. As of 2014, illumos remains the only active open-source System V derivative.


title: Unix

text: In May 1975, RFC 681 described the development of "Network Unix" by the Center for Advanced Computation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Unix system was said to "present several interesting capabilities as an ARPANET mini-host". At the time, Unix required a license from Bell Telephone Laboratories that cost US$20,000 for non-university institutions, while universities could obtain a license for a nominal fee of $150. It was noted that Bell was "open to suggestions" for an ARPANET-wide license.


title: Unix

text: The RFC specifically mentions that Unix "offers powerful local processing facilities in terms of user programs, several compilers, an editor based on QED, a versatile document preparation system, and an efficient file system featuring sophisticated access control, mountable and de-mountable volumes, and a unified treatment of peripherals as special files." The latter permitted the Network Control Program (NCP) to be integrated within the Unix file system, treating network connections as special files that could be accessed through standard Unix I/O calls, which included the added benefit of closing all connections on program exit, should the user neglect to do so. In order "to minimize the amount of code added to the basic Unix kernel", much of the NCP code ran in a swappable user process, running only when needed.


title: Unix

text: In October 1993, Novell, the company that owned the rights to the Unix System V source at the time, transferred the trademarks of Unix to the X/Open Company (now The Open Group), and in 1995 sold the related business operations to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Whether Novell also sold the copyrights to the actual software was the subject of a federal lawsuit in 2006, "SCO v. Novell", which Novell won. The case was appealed, but on August 30, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the trial decisions, closing the case. Unix vendor SCO Group Inc. accused Novell of slander of title.


title: Unix

text: The present owner of the trademark "UNIX" is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called "Unix-like").


title: Unix

text: By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification fee and annual trademark royalties to The Open Group. Systems that have been licensed to use the UNIX trademark include AIX, EulerOS, HP-UX, Inspur K-UX, IRIX, macOS, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX (formerly "Digital UNIX", or OSF/1), and z/OS. Notably, EulerOS and Inspur K-UX are Linux distributions certified as UNIX 03 compliant.


title: Unix

text: Sometimes a representation like "Un*x", "*NIX", or "*N?X" is used to indicate all operating systems similar to Unix. This comes from the use of the asterisk ("*") and the question mark characters as wildcard indicators in many utilities. This notation is also used to describe other Unix-like systems that have not met the requirements for UNIX branding from the Open Group.


title: Unix

text: The Open Group requests that "UNIX" always be used as an adjective followed by a generic term such as "system" to help avoid the creation of a genericized trademark.


title: Unix

text: "Unix" was the original formatting, but the usage of "UNIX" remains widespread because it was once typeset in small caps ("Unix"). According to Dennis Ritchie, when presenting the original Unix paper to the third Operating Systems Symposium of the American Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "we had a new typesetter and "troff" had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps". Many of the operating system's predecessors and contemporaries used all-uppercase lettering, so many people wrote the name in upper case due to force of habit. It is not an acronym.


title: Unix

text: Trademark names can be registered by different entities in different countries and trademark laws in some countries allow the same trademark name to be controlled by two different entities if each entity uses the trademark in easily distinguishable categories. The result is that Unix has been used as a brand name for various products including bookshelves, ink pens, bottled glue, diapers, hair driers and food containers.


title: Unix

text: Several plural forms of Unix are used casually to refer to multiple brands of Unix and Unix-like systems. Most common is the conventional "Unixes", but "Unices", treating Unix as a Latin noun of the third declension, is also popular. The pseudo-Anglo-Saxon plural form "Unixen" is not common, although occasionally seen. Sun Microsystems, developer of the Solaris variant, has asserted that the term "Unix" is itself plural, referencing its many implementations.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: Les Misérables ( , ), colloquially known as Les Mis or Les Miz ( ), is a sung-through musical and an adaptation of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel of the same name, by Claude-Michel Schönberg (music), Alain Boublil, Jean-Marc Natel (original French lyrics) and Herbert Kretzmer (English lyrics). The original French musical premiered in Paris in 1980 with direction by Robert Hossein. Its English-language adaptation by producer Cameron Mackintosh has been running in London since October 1985, making it the longest-running musical in the West End and the second longest-running musical in the world after the original Off-Broadway run of "The Fantasticks".


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: Set in early 19th-century France, "Les Misérables" is the story of Jean Valjean, a French peasant, and his desire for redemption, released in 1815 after serving nineteen years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's starving child. Valjean decides to break his parole and start his life anew after a bishop inspires him with a tremendous act of mercy, but a police inspector named Javert refuses to let him escape justice and pursues him for most of the play. Along the way, Valjean and a slew of characters are swept into a revolutionary period in France, where a group of young idealists attempt to overthrow the government at a street barricade in Paris.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: "Les Misérables" was originally released as a French-language concept album, and the first musical-stage adaptation of "Les Misérables" was presented at the Palais des Sports in 1980.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: In 1983, about six months after producer Cameron Mackintosh had opened "Cats" on Broadway, he received a copy of the French concept album from director Peter Farago. Farago had been impressed by the work and asked Mackintosh to produce an English-language version of the show. Initially reluctant, Mackintosh eventually agreed. Mackintosh, in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company, assembled a production team to adapt the French musical for a British audience. After two years in development, the English-language version opened in London on 8 October 1985, by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Centre, then the London home of the RSC. The success of the West End musical led to a Broadway production.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: Critical reviews for "Les Misérables" were initially negative. At the opening of the London production, "The Sunday Telegraph"s Francis King described the musical as "a lurid Victorian melodrama produced with Victorian lavishness" and Michael Ratcliffe of "The Observer" considered the show "a witless and synthetic entertainment", while literary scholars condemned the project for converting classic literature into a musical. Public opinion differed: the box office received record orders. The three-month engagement sold out, and reviews improved. The original London production ran from October 1985 to July 2019, playing over 13,000 performances and making it the second longest-running musical in the world after "The Fantasticks", the second longest-running West End show after "The Mousetrap", and the longest-running musical in the West End. On 3 October 2010, the show celebrated its 25th anniversary with three productions running in London: the original production at the Queen's Theatre; the 25th Anniversary touring production at the Barbican Centre; and the 25th Anniversary concert at London's O2 Arena.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: The Broadway production opened 12 March 1987 and ran until 18 May 2003, closing after 6,680 performances. At the time of its closing, it was the second-longest-running musical in Broadway history. As of 2022, it remains the sixth longest-running Broadway show. The show was nominated for 12 Tony Awards, of which it won eight, including Best Musical and Best Original Score.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: Subsequently, numerous tours and international and regional productions have been staged, as well as concert and broadcast productions. Several recordings have also been made. A Broadway revival opened in 2006 at the Broadhurst Theatre and closed in 2008, and a second Broadway revival opened in 2014 at the Imperial Theatre and closed in September 2016. The show was placed first in a BBC Radio 2 listener poll of Britain's "Number One Essential Musicals" in 2005, receiving more than forty percent of the votes. A film version directed by Tom Hooper was released at the end of 2012 to generally positive reviews as well as numerous awards.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: The musical's emblem is a picture of the waif Cosette sweeping the Thénardiers' inn (which occurs in the musical during "Castle on a Cloud"). It is usually cropped to a head-and-shoulders portrait, superimposed on the French flag. The image is based on an etching by Gustave Brion, which in turn was based on the drawing by Émile Bayard. Bayard's drawing appeared in several of the novel's earliest French-language editions.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: In 1815 in France, a chain gang of prisoners work at hard labor ("Prologue: Work Song"). After 19 years in prison, Jean Valjean, "Prisoner 24601," is released on parole by the prison guard Javert. By law, Valjean must display a yellow ticket of leave, which identifies him as an ex-convict ("On Parole").


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: As a convict, Valjean is shunned wherever he goes and cannot find regular work with decent wages or lodging. Only the Bishop of Digne offers him food and shelter. Discontented, Valjean steals the Bishop's silver. He is captured by the police, but rather than turn him in, the Bishop tells the police that the silver was a gift, also giving Valjean a pair of silver candlesticks. The Bishop tells Valjean that he must use silver to become an honest man. ("Valjean Arrested, Valjean Forgiven"). Humbled by the Bishop's kindness, Valjean resolves to redeem himself ("Valjean's Soliloquy (What Have I Done?)") and tears up his yellow ticket, breaking his parole.


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: Eight years later, in 1823, Jean Valjean assumed a new identity as Monsieur Madeleine, a wealthy factory owner and mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. Fantine is a single mother working in his factory, trying to support her daughter Cosette, who is being raised by an innkeeper and his wife while Fantine labors in the city. The factory foreman lusts after Fantine, and when she rejects his advances, he takes it out on the other workers, who resent her for it. One day, a coworker steals a letter about Cosette from Fantine, revealing to the other workers that Fantine has a child. A fight breaks out, and the foreman and other workers use the incident as a pretense to fire Fantine ("At the End of the Day"). Fantine reflects on her broken dreams and about Cosette's father, who abandoned them both ("I Dreamed a Dream"). Desperate for money, she sells her locket and hair, finally becoming a prostitute ("Lovely Ladies") and attracting local sailors. When she fights back against an abusive customer named Bamatabois; Javert, now a police inspector stationed in Montreuil-sur-Mer, arrives to arrest her. Valjean passes by the scene and pities Fantine when he realizes she once worked for him. He orders Javert to release her, and Valjean takes her to a hospital ("Fantine's Arrest").


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: Soon afterward, Valjean rescues a man who is pinned by a runaway cart ("The Runaway Cart"). Javert, who has pursued the fugitive Valjean all these years, witnesses the incident. He becomes suspicious, remembering the incredible strength Valjean displayed in the work camp. However, it turns out a man who looks like Valjean has been arrested and is about to go to trial for breaking parole. The real Valjean realizes that this case of mistaken identity could free him forever, but he is not willing to see an innocent man go to prison in his place. He confesses his identity to the court ("Who Am I? (The Trial)"). At the hospital, a delirious Fantine dreams of Cosette. Valjean promises to find Cosette and protect her ("Come to Me (Fantine's Death)"). Relieved, Fantine succumbs to her illness and dies. Javert arrives to take Valjean back into custody, but Valjean asks Javert for time to fetch Cosette. Javert refuses, insisting that a criminal like Valjean can never change for the better. They struggle, but Valjean overpowers Javert and escapes ("The Confrontation").


title: Les Misérables (musical)

text: In Montfermeil, the duplicitous innkeepers, the Thénardiers, use Cosette as a servant and treat her cruelly while extorting money from Fantine to indulge their own daughter Éponine. Cosette dreams of a life with a mother where she is not forced to work and is treated lovingly ("Castle on a Cloud"). The Thénardiers cheat on their customers, stealing their possessions and setting high prices for low-quality services while living a life of criminal depravity ("Master of the House"). Valjean meets Cosette while she's on an errand drawing water, and offers the Thénardiers payment to adopt her ("The Bargain"). The Thénardiers feign concern for Cosette, claiming that they love her like a daughter and that she is in fragile health. Valjean negotiates with the Thénadiers, for whom he pays 1,500 francs in the end. Valjean and Cosette leave for Paris ("The Waltz of Treachery").