title: Lewis Grabban

text: On 6 March he scored in a 1–1 draw with Crewe, and scored again the following game as Rotherham beat Plymouth Argyle 1–0. He followed this up with a goal in a 2–1 loss to Oxford on 17 March, and scoring the winner on 31 March against Hereford United. On 21 April he scored his 20th & 21st goals of the season in a 3–2 home win against Morecambe. On 21 May 2012 reports came in that Crawley Town had agreed a deal with the striker, it was later confirmed that Grabban had agreed a deal after announced by Sky Sports News and BBC Sport but Rotherham boss Steve Evans denied the deal being agreed.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: On 31 May 2012, Grabban signed for League One team AFC Bournemouth for a fee believed to be around £300,000. He made his debut on 14 August 2012, in a 0–0 draw against Oxford United in the League Cup. Oxford won the game on penalties, although Grabban scored his penalty in the shoot-out. He made his league debut four days later, in a 1–1 draw against Portsmouth. He scored on his home debut on 21 August, opening the scoring in a 1–1 draw against MK Dons. On 13 October, he scored his second goal for the club in a 2–0 win at home to Leyton Orient. On 27 October, he scored again in a 4–2 win against Carlisle United. On 17 November, he scored a hat-trick in a 4–1 win against Oldham Athletic.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: He scored twice on the opening day of the new season, now in the Championship after Bournemouth won promotion in the previous season, in a 2–1 win against Charlton Athletic. He then scored in the following game, a 6–1 defeat to Watford. He also scored again in the following game, a 1–0 win against Wigan Athletic, meaning he had scored four goals in the opening three matches. After scoring in defeats to Blackpool and Leeds United, Grabban scored in a 5–2 win against Millwall on 5 October, maintaining his excellent start to the season. Grabban then scored in consecutive away wins for Bournemouth against Reading and Sheffield Wednesday in December.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: On 18 January 2014, Grabban signed a new three-and-a-half year deal to end speculation with him to a move to Brighton & Hove Albion. Later that day, he celebrated signing his new deal by scoring in a 1–1 draw against Watford. Later in January, he scored in a 2–1 win against Huddersfield Town, and began February well by scoring in a 2–2 draw against Bolton Wanderers. In March, he took his tally for the season to 15 by scoring in back-to-back wins against Blackpool and Blackburn Rovers. Later that month, he ended a three-game goal drought by scoring twice in a 4–1 win against Leeds United. The win was also the first time that Bournemouth had ever beaten Leeds. Grabban scored 35 goals during his two-year stay with the Cherries.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: On 5 June 2014, Grabban completed a transfer to Norwich City for an undisclosed fee which was reported to be around £3million. After making his debut in a 1–0 loss to Wolves in the opening game of the season, Grabban scored his first goal for the club in his second appearance, helping Norwich to beat Watford 3–0 at Carrow Road. On 23 August, Grabban scored the game's only goal as Norwich beat rivals Ipswich Town in the East Anglian derby, his fourth goal in his first four games for the club. He went on to score 13 goals in 44 games for the club, the first 12 of which played an integral part in the club gaining promotion to the Premier League.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: In August 2015, Grabban was suspended by Norwich after he did not report for their League Cup fixture against Rotherham United, despite being named as a substitute for the match. It emerged that Grabban had fled Norwich's team hotel without permission from the club, with former club Bournemouth having made several bids to sign him. Grabban later apologised to Norwich supporters following the incident, reaffirming his commitment to the club.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: On 11 January 2016, Grabban re-signed for now Premier League side AFC Bournemouth from Norwich City on a three-and-a-half-year deal for an undisclosed fee.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban struggled to make an impact for Bournemouth on returning to the club, failing to score in 16 appearances in the second half of the 2015–16 season.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban fell out of favour at Bournemouth in the 2016–17 season, making only six appearances for the club without scoring.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: On 31 January 2017, Grabban signed for Championship side Reading on loan for the remainder of the 2016–17 season.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban scored three goals in 17 appearances for Reading throughout his loan spell, and he featured in their Championship play-off final defeat to Huddersfield Town.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: On 26 July 2017, Grabban signed for Sunderland on a season long loan. He scored his first goal for Sunderland on his debut in a 1–1 draw with Derby County on 4 August 2017. The following weekend Grabban scored two goals and an own goal in a 3–1 victory over his former club Norwich.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban's impressive form for a struggling Sunderland side saw him request to be recalled to parent club Bournemouth, and they activated this option on 5 January 2018, with Grabban returning as Sunderland's top scorer for the season with 12 goals in 20 games throughout his loan spell.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban joined Championship side Aston Villa on 31 January 2018, on loan until the end of the 2017–18 season. His first goal for the club was an equalising penalty against Preston North End on 20 February 2018.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: During his loan spell he scored 8 goals in 15 games, to help Villa secure a play-off place and defeat Middlesbrough in the two semi finals to reach the final, playing in the final, as Villa lost 1–0 to Fulham in the final and thus missed out on promotion to the Premier League.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban also finished the runner up to Sky Bet Championship Golden Boot winner Matěj Vydra after scoring 20 goals in the competition (for both Aston Villa and Sunderland combined) during the 2017–18 season.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban then joined Championship side Nottingham Forest for an undisclosed fee (believed to be £6 million) on 6 July 2018 on a four-year deal. Manager Aitor Karanka revealed that it took two to three weeks of persuasion before Grabban chose to move to Forest, but eventually he was convinced of the club's ambition. He started slowly at Forest, going six games without scoring, but then scored 15 in 15 games in all competitions, the first of which being in a 2–1 win over Sheffield Wednesday. Grabban then did not score in his next five games and picked up a few niggling injuries, before Karanka was sacked and replaced with Forest club legend Martin O'Neill. Under O'Neill's management and subsequent style of play, Grabban struggled with form, scoring just twice in 14 games, with the forward having to drop deep into his own half to get the ball due to Forest relying more on scoring from set-pieces than goals from open play. In total, Grabban scored 17 goals in 41 games for Forest in the 2018–19 season, 16 of which came in the Championship. This made him Forest's top scorer in an individual league season for the decade commencing 2010, beating Britt Assombalonga's total of 15 in the 2014–15 season.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: On 28 June, Forest made the decision to sack Martin O'Neill and replace him with former France international Sabri Lamouchi, which offered Grabban a reprieve as Lamouchi chose to put his faith in Grabban as a lone striker. This paid off with Grabban once again finishing as Forest's top scorer, becoming the first Forest striker to score 20 goals in a single season since David Johnson and Marlon Harewood both achieved that feat during the 2002–03 season. He received particular praise for the increase in his work rate, with Lamouchi saying "Lewis is so crucial for us. If he is running like that, fighting like that and working hard for the team ... we can achieve anything".


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban was made vice-captain of Nottingham Forest ahead of the new season, following the departure of Ben Watson to Charlton Athletic. Grabban was offered the chance to move to Qatar and join former manager Sabri Lamouchi's new team, Al-Duhail. Grabban turned down the move after the Forest hierarchy convinced him of his worth to the team.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: The 2020–21 season proved to be a much more difficult one for Grabban than his previous years at Forest. He scored no goals in the first seven games of the season before an injury kept him sidelined until December. Although he did manage to score on his return in a 2–0 victory over Sheffield Wednesday, he struggled to get a consistent run of games in the Forest team due to competition with strikers Lyle Taylor and Glenn Murray. He was Forest's top scorer for the third season in a row, scoring 6 goals.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban inherited the Captain's armband for Forest ahead of the 2021–22 season, following Michael Dawson's retirement. The season started slowly for Grabban as he failed to score in the first five matches of the campaign.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: The season started to look up for Forest and Grabban after the arrival of Steve Cooper as head coach. Grabban was considered the main striker under the new coach and started to score consistently as Forest climbed the table. By January, Grabban had doubled his tally of the previous season, including a goal against local rivals Derby County in the East Midland’s Derby, his second against Forest's rivals in his time at the club.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Grabban finished the season with 13 goals in 34 appearances, with an ankle injury keeping him out of the side for much of the second half of the campaign. During that time, he was given credit for acting as a mentor to Keinan Davis and helping the loanee to improve his movement and positioning. As club captain, Grabban lifted the play-off trophy alongside Joe Worrall as Forest were promoted to the Premier League for the first time in 23 years. Grabban's Forest contract ran out on 30 June and his time at the club came to an end when it was announced he had turned down the offer of a new one.


title: Lewis Grabban

text: Although born in London, Grabban is eligible to play for Jamaica in addition to England. In May 2014, it was reported on TV Jamaica that he was called up by German coach Winfried Schäfer to play against Serbia on 26 May 2014 in an international friendly. However the player was not named in the squad due to passport issues. Grabban was later called up to the Jamaica national football team on 27 February 2015 for friendly games against Venezuela and Cuba.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: The political views of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, have presented historians and biographers with some difficulty. His writings and methods were often adapted to need and circumstance, although there were some steady themes, including antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-parliamentarianism, German ('living space'), belief in the superiority of an "Aryan race" and an extreme form of German nationalism. Hitler personally claimed he was fighting against "Jewish Marxism".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler's political views were formed during three periods, namely (1) his years as a poverty-stricken young man in Vienna and Munich prior to World War I, during which he turned to nationalist-oriented political pamphlets and antisemitic newspapers out of distrust for mainstream newspapers and political parties; (2) the closing months of World War I when Germany lost the war, as Hitler is said to have developed his extreme nationalism during this time, desiring to "save" Germany from both external and internal "enemies" who in his view betrayed it; (3) and the 1920s, during which his early political career began and he wrote . Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship on 7 April 1925, but did not acquire German citizenship until almost seven years later in 1932; thereby allowing him to run for public office. Hitler was influenced by Benito Mussolini, who was appointed Prime Minister of Italy in October 1922 after his "March on Rome". In many ways, Hitler epitomizes "the force of personality in political life" as mentioned by Friedrich Meinecke. He was essential to the very framework of Nazism's political appeal and its manifestation in Germany. So important were Hitler's views that they immediately affected the political policies of Nazi Germany. He asserted the ('leader principle'). The principle relied on absolute obedience of all subordinates to their superiors. Hitler viewed the party structure and later the government structure as a pyramid, with himself—the infallible leader—at the apex.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler firmly believed that the force of "will" was decisive in determining the political course for a nation and rationalized his actions accordingly. Given that Hitler was appointed "leader of the German Reich for life", he "embodied the supreme power of the state and, as the delegate of the German people", it was his role to determine the "outward form and structure of the Reich". To that end, Hitler's political motivation consisted of an ideology that combined traditional German and Austrian antisemitism with an intellectualized racial doctrine resting on an admixture of bits and pieces of social Darwinism and the ideasmostly obtained second-hand and only partially understoodof Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de Gobineau and Alfred Rosenberg as well as Paul de Lagarde, Georges Sorel, Alfred Ploetz and others.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: During World War I, Hitler was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack on 15 October 1918 for which he was hospitalised in Pasewalk. While there, Hitler learned of Germany's defeat, with the Armistice to take effect on 11 November. By his own account—upon receiving this news, he suffered a second bout of blindness. Days after digesting this traumatic news, Hitler later stated his decision: "... my own fate became known to me ... I ... decided to go into politics." On 19 November 1918, Hitler was discharged from the Pasewalk hospital and returned to Munich, which at the time was in a state of socialist upheaval. Arriving on 21 November, he was assigned to 7th Company of the 1st Replacement Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. In December he was reassigned to a Prisoner of War camp in Traunstein as a guard. There he would stay until the camp dissolved January 1919.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Returning to Munich, Hitler spent a few months in barracks waiting for reassignment. During this time Munich was a part of the People's State of Bavaria, which was still in a state of chaos with a number of assassinations occurring including that of socialist Kurt Eisner who was shot dead in Munich by a German nationalist on 21 February 1919. Other acts of violence were the killings of both Major Paul Ritter von Jahreiß and the conservative MP . In this political turmoil, Berlin sent in the military, whom the communists called the "White Guards of Capitalism". On 3 April 1919, Hitler was elected as the liaison of his military battalion and again on 15 April. During this time he urged his unit to stay out of the fighting and not join either side. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was officially crushed on 6 May 1919, when Lt. General Burghard von Oven and his military forces declared the city secure. In the aftermath of arrests and executions, Hitler denounced a fellow liaison, Georg Dufter, as a Soviet "radical rabble-rouser." Other testimony he gave to the military board of inquiry allowed them to root out other members of the military that "had been infected with revolutionary fervor." For his anti-communist views he was allowed to avoid discharge when his unit was disbanded in May 1919.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: In June 1919 he was moved to the demobilization office of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. Around this time the German military command released an edict that the army's main priority was to "carry out, in conjunction with the police, stricter surveillance of the population ... so that the ignition of any new unrest can be discovered and extinguished." In May 1919 Karl Mayr became commander of the 6th Battalion of the guards regiment in Munich and from 30 May the head of the "Education and Propaganda Department" (Dept Ib/P) of the Bavarian "Reichswehr", Headquarters 4. In this capacity as head of the intelligence department, Mayr recruited Hitler as an undercover agent in early June 1919. Under Captain Mayr "national thinking" courses were arranged at the Reichswehrlager Lechfeld near Augsburg, with Hitler attending from 10 to 19 July 1919. During this time Hitler so impressed Mayr that he assigned him to an anti-bolshevik "educational commando" as 1 of 26 instructors in the summer of 1919.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: These courses he taught helped popularize the notion that there was a scapegoat responsible for the outbreak of war and Germany's defeat. Hitler's own bitterness over the collapse of the war effort also began to shape his ideology. Like other German nationalists, he believed the "Dolchstoßlegende" (stab-in-the-back myth) which claimed that the German Army, "undefeated in the field", had been "stabbed in the back" on the home front by civilian leaders and Marxists, later dubbed the "November criminals". "International Jewry" was described as a scourge composed of communists relentlessly destroying Germany. Such scapegoating was essential to Hitler's political career and it seems that he genuinely believed that Jews were responsible for Germany's post-war troubles.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: In July 1919, Hitler was appointed "Verbindungsmann" (intelligence agent) of an "Aufklärungskommando" (reconnaissance commando) of the "Reichswehr", both to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate the German Workers' Party (DAP). Much like the political activists in the DAP, Hitler blamed the loss of the war on Jewish intrigue at home and abroad, espousing "völkisch"-nationalist political beliefs with the intention of resurrecting Germany's greatness by smashing the Versailles Treaty. Along those lines, Hitler proclaimed that the "German yoke must be broken by German iron" ("Das deutsche Elend muß durch deutsches Eisen zerbrochen werden").


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: In September 1919 Hitler wrote what is often deemed his first antisemitic text, requested by Mayr as a reply to an inquiry by Adolf Gemlich, who had participated in the same "educational courses" as Hitler. In this report, Hitler argued for a "rational anti-Semitism" which would not resort to pogroms, but instead "legally fight and remove the privileges enjoyed by the Jews as opposed to other foreigners living among us. Its final goal, however, must be the irrevocable removal of the Jews themselves". Most people at the time understood this as a call for forced expulsion. Europe has a long history of expelling Jews and the "auto-da-fé" of the Inquisition.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: While he studied the activities of the German Workers' Party (DAP), Hitler became impressed with founder Anton Drexler's antisemitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist ideas. Drexler was impressed with Hitler's oratory skills, and invited him to join the DAP on 12 September 1919. On the orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party and within a week was accepted as party member 555 (the party began counting membership at 500 to give the impression they were a much larger party). In "Mein Kampf", Hitler later claimed to be the seventh party member, one of many myths in "Mein Kampf" designed, as biographer Ian Kershaw writes, "to serve the Führer legend".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler was discharged from the army on 31 March 1920 and began working full-time for the party. Displaying his talent for oratory and propaganda skills, with the support of Drexler, Hitler became chief of propaganda for the party in early 1920. When early party members promulgated their 25-point manifesto on 24 February 1920 (co-authored by Hitler, Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart), it was Hitler who penned the first point, revealing his intention to unify German-speaking peoples, claiming that the party demanded "all Germans be gathered together in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of all peoples to self-determination". By the spring of 1920, he engineered the change of name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party ("Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" – NSDAP), commonly known as the Nazi Party. Under his influence, the party adopted a modified swastika, a well-known good luck charm that had previously been used in Germany as a mark of "volkishness" and "Aryanism", along with the Roman salute used by Italian fascists. At this time, the Nazi Party was one of many small extremist groups in Munich, but Hitler's vitriolic beer hall speeches began attracting regular audiences. He became adept at using populist themes, including the use of scapegoats, who were blamed for his listeners' economic hardships. He gained notoriety for his rowdy polemic speeches against the Treaty of Versailles, rival politicians and especially against Marxists and Jews. Hitler used personal magnetism and an understanding of crowd psychology to advantage while engaged in public speaking.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: While Hitler and Eckart were on a fundraising trip to Berlin in June 1921, a mutiny broke out within the Nazi Party in Munich. Members of its executive committee wanted to merge with the rival German Socialist Party (DSP). Hitler returned to Munich on 11 July and angrily tendered his resignation. The committee members realised that the resignation of their leading public figure and speaker would mean the end of the party. Hitler announced he would rejoin on the condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich. They capitulated to Hitler's demand and on 29 July 1921 a special congress was convened to formalize Hitler as the new chairman (the vote was 543 for Hitler and one against).


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler asserted the "Führerprinzip" ("leader principle"). The principle relied on absolute obedience of all subordinates to their superiors as he viewed the party structure and later the government structure as a pyramid, with himself—the infallible leader—at the apex. Rank in the party was not determined by elections—positions were filled through appointment by those of higher rank, who demanded unquestioning obedience to the will of the leader.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Early followers of the party included Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring (command of the "Sturmabteilung" (SA) as "Oberster SA-Führer" in 1923), Ernst Röhm (later head of the SA), Alfred Rosenberg (prominent racial theorist), Gregor Strasser, Dietrich Eckart (a key founder of the party), Hermann Esser, Ludwig Maximilian Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and Erich Ludendorff (Field-Marshal who was the party's candidate for President of the Republic in 1925).


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler enlisted the help of World War I General Erich Ludendorff to try to seize power in Munich (the capital of Bavaria) in an attempt later known as the "Beer Hall "Putsch"" of 8–9 November 1923. This would be a step in the seizure of power nationwide, overthrowing the Weimar Republic in Berlin. On 8 November, Hitler's forces initially succeeded in occupying the local Reichswehr and police headquarters; however, neither the army nor the state police joined forces with him. The next day, Hitler and his followers marched from the beer hall to the Bavarian War Ministry to overthrow the Bavarian government on their "March on Berlin". Hitler wanted to emulate Benito Mussolini's "March on Rome" (1922) by staging his own coup in Bavaria to be followed by a challenge to the government in Berlin. However, the Bavarian authorities ordered the police to stand their ground. The putschists were dispersed after a short firefight in the streets near the Feldherrnhalle. In all, sixteen Nazi members and four police officers were killed in the failed coup.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler fled to the home of Ernst Hanfstaengl and by some accounts contemplated suicide, although this state of mind has been disputed. Hitler was depressed but calm when he was arrested on 11 November 1923. Fearing "left-wing" members of the Nazi Party might try to seize leadership from him during his incarceration, Hitler quickly appointed Alfred Rosenberg as the party's temporary leader.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Beginning in February 1924, Hitler was tried for high treason before the special People's Court in Munich. He used his trial as an opportunity to spread his message throughout Germany. At one point during the trial, Hitler discussed political leadership, during which he stated that leading people was not a matter of political science ("Staatswissenschaft") but an innate ability, one of statecraft ("Staatskunst"). He further elaborated by claiming that out of ten thousand politicians only one Otto von Bismarck emerged, subtly implying that he too had been born with this gift. Continuing, he declared that it was not Karl Marx who stirred the masses and ignited the Russian Revolution but Vladimir Lenin, not making his appeal to the mind but to the senses. His rousing speeches during the trial made Hitler famous, but they did not exonerate him. In April 1924, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in Landsberg Prison, where he received preferential treatment from sympathetic guards and received substantial quantities of fan mail, including funds and other forms of assistance. During 1923 and 1924 at Landsberg, he dictated the first volume of "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") to his deputy Rudolf Hess. Originally entitled "Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice", his publisher shortened the title to "Mein Kampf".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: The book, dedicated to Thule Society member Dietrich Eckart, was an autobiography and exposition of his ideology. In "Mein Kampf", Hitler speaks at length about his youth, his early days in the Nazi Party and general ideas on politics, including the transformation of German society into one based on race, with some passages implying genocide. Published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, it sold 228,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. In 1933, Hitler's first year in office, 1,000,000 copies were sold. The book acts as a reference, giving insight into the world view from which Hitler never wavered throughout his life.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: It states that during his childhood, Hitler had little interest in politics as he had ambitions to become a painter. Like other boys in his part of Austria, he was attracted to pan-Germanism, but his intellectual pursuits were generally those of a dilettante. Hitler portrays himself as a born leader interested in knightly adventures, exploration. By the time he was 11, Hitler was a nationalist interested in history.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Ultimately, Hitler never finished his primary schooling since he quit by the time he was 16, devoting his attention instead to his artistic pursuits which led him to Vienna in 1905. It was in Vienna where Hitler was later to proclaim he learned some hard lessons, namely that life was a critical struggle between the weak and the strong where principles of humanity mattered not at all since everything simply boiled down to "victory and defeat".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: While Hitler was incarcerated at the Landsberg prison writing "Mein Kampf", he had routine visits from the respected First World War veteran, Major General Dr. Karl Haushofer, who was the chair of the military science and geography department at the University of Munich. These meetings consisted of lectures and academic briefings on geopolitics, most certainly covering the Nazi ideal of "Lebensraum" and which likely influenced the views Hitler laid out in "Mein Kampf". Perhaps confirming Hitler's assertions, Haushofer espoused the theory that Germany was defeated in the Great War by her lack of sufficient space and autarchy. More importantly, Haushofer believed that nations which rested their power upon command of the sea and maritime trade routes were doomed to fail, since any such control "would soon be broken", writing that human history stood "at the great turning-point in the favourable position of the island empires". Hitler believed that for Germany to expand its influence, it would have to rely on continental space and abundant arable soil which could only be found eastward. Influenced by the theories of Haushofer, Hitler believed it was Germany's right to seize the cultivatable land in Russia since the earth belonged to those people willing to till it "industriously" as opposed to the slothful, incompetent people unworthy to possess it. Describing the Russians in the harshest of terms while intimating that the German people were more deserving by virtue of their alleged superior intellect, Hitler stated: "It is criminal to ask an intelligent people to limit its children in order that a lazy and stupid people next door can literally abuse a gigantic surface of the earth". Presaging this Nazi goal, Hitler wrote in "Mein Kampf": "Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation". In this sense, social Darwinism and geography were merged in Hitler's mind.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Many historians contend that Hitler's essential character and political philosophy can be discovered in "Mein Kampf". Historian James Joll once claimed that "Mein Kampf" constituted "all of Hitler's beliefs, most of his programme and much of his character". According to Andreas Hillgruber, evident within the text of "Mein Kampf" is nothing less than the very crux of Hitler's program. One of Hitler's foremost goals was that Germany should become "a World Power" on the geopolitical stage, or as he stated, "it will not continue to exist at all". Biographer Joachim Fest asserted that "Mein Kampf" contained a "remarkably faithful portrait of its author".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: In his infamous tome, Hitler categorized human beings by their physical attributes, claiming German or Nordic Aryans were at the top of the hierarchy while assigning the bottom orders to Jews and Romani. Hitler claimed that dominated people benefit by learning from superior Aryans and said the Jews were conspiring to keep this "master race" from rightfully ruling the world by diluting its racial and cultural purity and exhorting Aryans to believe in equality rather than superiority and inferiority. Within "Mein Kampf", Hitler describes a struggle for world domination, an ongoing racial, cultural and political battle between Aryans and Jews, the necessary racial purification of the German people and the need for German imperial expansion and colonisation eastwards. According to Hitler and other pan-German thinkers, Germany needed to obtain additional living space or "Lebensraum" which would properly nurture the "historic destiny" of the German people. This was a key idea he made central in his foreign policy. Hitler wrote in "Mein Kampf" of his hatred towards what he believed were the world's twin evils, namely communism and Judaism. He said his aim was to eradicate both from Germany and moreover stressed his intention to unite all Germans in the process of destroying them.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler was a pan-Germanic nationalist whose ideology was built around a philosophically authoritarian, anti-Marxist, antisemitic and anti-democratic worldview. Such views of the world in the wake of the fledgling Weimar government were not uncommon in Germany since democratic/parliamentary governance seemed ineffectual to solve Germany's problems. Correspondingly, veterans of the First World War and like-minded nationalists formed the "Vaterlandspartei" which promoted expansionism, soldierly camaraderie and heroic leadership, all under the guise of "völkisch" traditions like ethnic and linguistic nationalism, but which also included obedience to authority as well as the belief in political salvation through decisive leadership. The "völkisch" parties began to fractionalize during Hitler's absence from the revolutionary scene in Germany after the failed "Beer Hall Putsch" of November 1923. When he re-emerged upon release from Landsberg Prison, his importance to the movement was obvious and he came to believe that he was the realization of "völkisch" nationalistic ideals in a sort of near messianic narcissism which included his conviction to shake off the restrictive Treaty of Versailles and to "restore Germany's might and power", creating a reborn German nation as the chosen leader of the Nazi Party.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: The "völkisch" nationalism of Hitler and Nazis encompassed the notion that the German "Volk" was epitomized by German farmers and peasants, people who remained uncorrupted by modern ideals and whose greatest attribute was their "cheerful subservience" and their capacity to respond to their "monarchical calling". Hitler was their new monarch in a manner of speaking. "Völkisch" nationalism also forged into its ideals, the importance of nature, the centrality of a knightly savior (Hitler in this case) and the belief in the superior Aryan. Antisemitism remained a key component of the "völkisch" movement and a permanent undercurrent throughout conservative parties in German history and after many years culminated with the view that the Jews were the only thing standing in the way of the ideal society. As Germany's newfound "völkisch" nationalist leader, Hitler initiated a policy of ethnic nationalism replete with directives to eliminate Jews and other identified enemies as Nazism ultimately became the religion of the movement and the "irrational became concrete" under the terms of its "ideological framework".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler and the Nazis promoted a socially conservative view concerning many aspects of life, supported by harsh discipline and a militaristic point of view. Conservative opinions about sexuality amid the Nazis led to extreme homophobia which resulted in the systematic persecution of homosexuals. Hitler and his paladins also controlled what constituted acceptable artistic expression in Nazi Germany, abolishing what they considered to be "degenerate art". The Nazis strongly discouraged and in some cases outright rejected the following behaviors, namely the use of cosmetics, premarital sex, prostitution, pornography, sexual vices, smoking and excessive drinking. In many ways, there was a distinct anti-intellectualism present within Nazi philosophy. Hearkening back to a simpler time, Hitler and the Nazis attempted to vindicate the glorious past as the key to a more promising future.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Evidence of Hitler's disdain for Weimar's cultural and social decadence appears on multiple occasions in "Mein Kampf". In his seminal tome, he expresses an ultraconservatism:


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler raved against what he considered to be tasteless and morally destructive art on display throughout Germany in "Mein Kampf", calling some of it morbid and declaring that "people would have benefited by not visiting them at all". Convinced that it was necessary to show the German people what comprised, "degenerate art" so as to protect them in the future, Hitler arranged for a formally commissioned exhibit in July 1937 of specially selected carvings, sculptures, and paintings. Once the exhibit was at an end, selected artists' works were banned from Nazi Germany.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Well known was Hitler's vehement opposition to racial-mixing. He was also a natalist as he believed, as did other pan-Germans, that Germans had an obligation to procreate:


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Another area of concern for Hitler and which was mentioned by his childhood companion in Vienna, August Kubizek, was prostitution. Hitler associated it with venereal disease and cultural decline. Moreover, Hitler found the practice counter to proper family development and displayed a puritanical view in "Mein Kampf", writing:


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: He goes on asserting that prostitution was dangerous and intimated much more significant, destructive socio-political implications. Once Hitler came to power, his regime moved against all forms of sexual deviations and sexual crimes, especially homosexuality, which was prosecuted as a crime as many as 30,000 times between 1934 and 1939. Hitler's social conservatism was so extreme towards homosexuals that he deemed them "enemies of the State" and grouped them in the same category as Jews and communists; a special department of the Gestapo was formed to deal with the matter.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler's general perception about women was ultra-conservative and patriarchal, with their foremost task being a domestic one as a mother of children who worked contentedly at home, ensuring it remained clean and orderly. Meanwhile, it was the woman's role to educate her children to be conscious of their importance as Aryans and instill within them a commitment to their ethnic community. Consequently, Hitler believed women had no place in public or political life due to their differing nature from men. Like many Romantic artists, musicians, and writers, the Nazis valued strength, passion, frank declarations of feelings and deep devotion to family and community (with women being seen as the center of the family in Nazi Germany). So great was Hitler's influence in all political aspects of social life that even education for children was subordinate to his opinion. Profoundly anti-intellectual and against conventional education for children, Hitler determined instead that training and education should be designed to create young German "national comrades" who were utterly convinced of their "superiority to others". Moreover, Hitler wanted to create young German soldiers who were willing to fight for their convictions so they were accordingly indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda, trained in military discipline and taught obedience to authority in the Hitler Youth.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler blamed Germany's parliamentary government for many of the nation's ills. The Nazis and especially Hitler associated democracy with the failed Weimar government and the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Hitler often denounced democracy, equating it with internationalism. Since democratic ideals espoused equality for all men, it represented to Hitler and his Nazi ideologues the notion of mob rule and the hatred of excellence. Not only was democracy antithetical to their social-Darwinist abstractions, but its international-capitalist framework was considered an exclusively Jewish-derived conception. Hitler also thought democracy was nothing more than a preliminary stage of Bolshevism.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler believed in the leader principle (hence his title, the Leader, "der Führer") and considered it ludicrous that an idea of governance or morality could be held by the people above the power of the leader. Joachim Fest described a 1930 confrontation between Hitler and Otto Strasser as such: "Now Hitler took Strasser to task for placing 'the idea' above the Führer and wanting 'to give every party comrade the right to decide the nature of the idea, even to decide whether or not the Führer is true to the so-called idea.' That, he cried angrily, was the worst kind of democracy, for which there was no place in their movement. 'With us the Führer and the idea are one and the same, and every party comrade has to do what the Führer commands, for he embodies the idea and he alone knows its ultimate goal'".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Although Hitler realized that his ascension to power required the use of the Weimar Republic's parliamentary system (founded on democratic principles), he never intended for the continuation of democratic governance once in control. Contrarily, Hitler proclaimed that he would "destroy democracy with the weapons of democracy". The rapid transition made by the Nazis once they assumed control clearly reveals that Hitler succeeded in this regard. For the most part, democratic governance was never embraced by the German masses or by the elite. The ill-fated Weimar democracy's inability to provide economic relief to the German people during the Great Depression further enhanced its image as an ineffectual system of government amid the masses. Hitler offered people the prospect of a "new and better society". He exploited the conditions in Germany in the ultimate expression of political opportunism when he brought his dictatorial and totalitarian government to power and thereafter attempting to impose himself and his system upon the world in the process.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: In Hitler's mind, communism was a major enemy of Germany, an enemy he often mentions in "Mein Kampf". During the trial for his involvement in the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler claimed that his singular goal was to assist the German government in "fighting Marxism". Marxism, Bolshevism, and communism were interchangeable terms for Hitler as evidenced by their use in "Mein Kampf":


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Later in his seminal tome, Hitler advocated for "the destruction of Marxism in all its shapes and forms". According to Hitler, Marxism was a Jewish strategy to subjugate Germany and the world and saw Marxism as a mental and political form of slavery. From Hitler's vantage point, Bolsheviks existed to serve "Jewish international finance". When the British tried negotiating with Hitler in 1935 by including Germany in the extension of the Locarno Pact, he rejected their offer and instead assured them that German rearmament was important in safeguarding Europe against communism, a move which clearly showed his anti-communist proclivities.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: In 1939, Hitler told the Swiss Commissioner to the League of Nations Carl Burckhardt that everything he was undertaking was "directed against Russia" and that "if those in the West are too stupid or too blind to understand this, then I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians to beat the West, and then, after its defeat, turn with all my concerted force against the Soviet Union". When Hitler finally ordered the attack against the Soviet Union, it was the fulfillment of his ultimate goal and the most important campaign in his estimation, as it comprised a struggle of "the chosen Aryan people against Jewish Bolsheviks".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Biographer Alan Bullock avows Hitler "laid great stress" on the need to concentrate on a single enemy, an enemy he lumps together as "Marxism and the Jew". Shortly in the wake of the Commissar Order, a directive pursuant to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS Deputy Reinhard Heydrich informed the SS of Hitler's geopolitical philosophy which conflated Bolshevism and Jews, writing that "eastern Jewry is the intellectual reservoir of Bolshevism and in the Führer's view must therefore be annihilated". Considering the eventual Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), no additional inducements are really requisite concerning Hitler's hatred of communism, particularly since the Nazi persecution and extermination of these groups was not only systematic, but it was extensive both within Germany and only intensified in the occupied zones during the war under Hitler's leadership.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Because Nazism co-opted the popular success of socialism and Communism among working people while simultaneously promising to destroy Communism and offer an alternative to it, Hitler's anti-communist program allowed industrialists with traditional conservative views (tending toward monarchism, aristocracy and "laissez-faire" capitalism) to cast their lot with and help underwrite the . When asked in a 1923 interview why Hitler called himself a National Socialist when the Nazi Party was "the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism", Hitler responded: "Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists."


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Historian Roderick Stackelberg contends that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was the result of "mutually reinforcing ideological, racial, and geopolitical assumptions" that Hitler had plainly laid out in "Mein Kampf". Noted German historian Andreas Hillgruber shares this view. In fact, Hillgruber encapsulates Hitler's political views (which drove German policy throughout his rule) in summary through the invasion of the Soviet Union. He places it within the context of Hitler's intent to create a continental Reich which included the destruction of the Jews. According to Hillgruber, Hitler had the following objectives in mind when he invaded the former Soviet Union:


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Not alone in this interpretation of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union as a move of continental expansion and one with an antisemitic eliminationist political intent, Hillgruber is joined by the likes of historian Karl Dietrich Bracher, among others. In his work "The German Dictatorship", Bracher called the invasion the consequence of Hitler's "ideological obsession" and stated that "Hitler's drive for territorial expansion and the relentless expansion of the SS state ushered in the final phase of National Socialist rule". That final phase proved disastrous for the Jews, Slavs, Roma-Sinti and countless others.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Among scholars of the Nazi era, Hitler's role and relationship to the regime and The Holocaust has been a source of consternation and acrimonious historiographical debate. Biographer Ian Kershaw wrote that for historians Hitler was "unreachable" and that he was "cocooned in the silence of the sources". What Kershaw was referencing was the absence of any clear political directives accompanied by Hitler's signed authorization (primary source documents) regarding the atrocities carried out by his Nazi underlings. Given the abounding circumstantial evidence in Hitler's speeches, writing in "Mein Kampf", administrative meeting notes taken by subordinates and the recollections of those in or near his inner-circle, it seems that his political intention was for Jews, Slavs and other "enemies" of the Nazi state to be persecuted without mercy in lieu of how gradual the process actually developed. A debate between two primary schools of thought emerged about Hitler's political role in Nazi policy and the Holocaust. One is termed intentionalist, represented by scholars who contend that virtually all Nazi policies (including the extermination of the Jews) were resultant from Hitler's desires; whereas the other school, entitled functionalist/structuralist, consists of scholars who see the intensification of Nazi persecution policies due to power struggles within the Nazi government as his minions attempted to "interpret" their master's wishes, often acting autonomously.


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Either way, antisemitism always constituted one of the most important aspects of Hitler's political views. Historian Peter Longerich writes: "There can be no doubt that Hitler's behaviour during his entire political career... was characterised by radical antisemitism". Correspondingly, Germanic cultural and racial purity remained paramount in his understanding of the world, having once exclaimed: "The greatest danger is and remains for us, the alien racial poison in our body. All other dangers are transitory".


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler wrote his first antisemitic letter to Adolf Gemlich on 16 September 1919 stating that Jews were a race and not a religious group and that the aim for the government "must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether". Throughout "Mein Kampf", Hitler employs biological crudity by describing the Jews as "parasites" or "vermin". Reflecting back on the beginning of the First World War, Hitler makes the eerily prescient statement that if "twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: Underlining the argument that Hitler had overt eliminationist intentions for the Jews is the "prophecy" quote from the 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech:


title: Political views of Adolf Hitler

text: German historian Klaus Hildebrand insisted that Hitler's moral responsibility for the Holocaust was the culmination of his pathological hatred of the Jews and his ideology of "racial dogma" formed the basis of Nazi genocide. Historian David Welch asserts that even if Hitler never gave the direct order for the implementation of the Final Solution, this is nothing more than a "red herring" as it fails to recognize his "leadership style" where Hitler's simple verbal statements were sufficient to launch initiatives "from below". Those "working towards the Führer" would often implement "his totalitarian vision without written authority". Throughout his work "Hitler and the Final Solution," historian Gerald Fleming demonstrates that on multiple occasions Heinrich Himmler referenced a Führer-Order concerning the destruction of the Jews, making it abundantly clear that Hitler had at the very least verbally issued a command on the matter. The diary entries of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels allude to Hitler being the driving force behind the Nazi genocide, that he followed the subject closely and that Goebbels even described Hitler as "uncompromising" about eliminating the Jews. Taking the scale of the logistical operations that the Holocaust comprised in the middle of a war into consideration alone, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that the extermination of so many people and the coordination of such an extensive effort could have occurred in the absence of Hitler's authorization. As Welch relates, if Himmler was the "architect of genocide", he was merely "an instrument of Hitler's will". In the final analysis, Hitler was essentially omnipotent as the Führer of Nazi Germany with all encompassing power as the "supreme legislator, supreme administrator, and supreme judge" along with being the "leader of the Party, the Army, and the people". Hitler ruled the Nazi Party autocratically by asserting the (leader principle). The principle relied on absolute obedience of all subordinates to their superiors; thus he viewed the government structure as a pyramid, with himself—the infallible leader—at the apex.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: TracFone Wireless, Inc. (TFWI) is an American prepaid, no-contract mobile phone provider. TFWI is a subsidiary of Verizon Communications, and offers products and services under several brands. It operates as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), holding agreements with the three largest United States wireless network operators to provide service: AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile US, and Verizon.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: In 2021, Verizon acquired TracFone Wireless, Inc. from Mexico-based América Móvil (owner of Claro) in a deal worth up to $6.9 billion, involving 20 million subscribers. The deal was approved by the Federal Communications Commission on November 22, 2021, and closed the following day.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: TracFone Wireless, Inc. was established in 1996 as Topp Telecom Inc., a prepaid mobile phone company, in Miami, Florida. It was founded by David Topp and F.J. Pollak. Pollak acted as the CEO of Tracfone until his death in 2016. In February 1999, Topp received a major infusion of capital from Teléfonos de México (), a.k.a. TelMex, Mexico's largest telephone company. TelMex paid $57.5 million for a 55 percent controlling interest in the company.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: In 2000, TelMex spun off their mobile unit, creating América Móvil, of which Topp Telecom became a subsidiary. In November 2000, Topp Telecom Inc. changed its name to TracFone Wireless Inc.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: In May 2013, América Móvil purchased Page Plus Cellular, which had 1.4 million subscribers. On January 6, 2014, regulatory approval was received and Page Plus Cellular began operating as a subsidiary of América Móvil.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: LTE service was inaugurated by TracFone's brands over a year and a half, with Sprint networks handsets first supporting it in May 2013, followed by AT&T four months later in September, then T-Mobile in March 2014. Verizon's TracFone headsets began to be supported in December 2014.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: Originally, TracFone service was limited to TracFone-branded phones, which are locked to the TracFone service using an internal SIM card. Other GSM phones, even those that were unlocked from another carrier, could not accept a TracFone SIM card, because these are bound to a specific handset. In 2013, TracFone began to open up its device pool with a 'bring your own device' program, selling SIM cards that could be inserted into qualifying non-TracFone phones (such as Verizon CDMA phones) to connect with the TracFone network. In 2015, the program was expanded to unlocked and compatible GSM handsets.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: On September 14, 2020, Verizon Wireless announced its intent to acquire TracFone in a cash-and-stock deal worth up to $6.9 billion. The deal closed on November 23, 2021. The acquisition will likely wind down the agreements to use the AT&T and T-Mobile GSM networks in favor of the Verizon LTE network (as the slower last-generation CDMA network for Verizon is being wound down itself), and as of September 2022, Straight Talk has transitioned to Verizon SIMs and Verizon-compatible phones, along with encouragements to replace TracFone GSM handsets.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: On February 9, 2007, a preliminary settlement in a class-action lawsuit against TracFone was carried out by Jeanette Wagner, and approved in the Boone County Circuit Court in Kentucky. The complainants alleged that TracFone misled consumers by charging a roaming rate in their home calling area (they were charged for 2 units per minute, not the usual 1 unit per minute), and that it refused to extend their prepaid service time during handset repairs. As a result of the settlement, Tracfone gave each of their customers an extra 20 units of airtime.


title: TracFone Wireless

text: In January 2015, the Federal Trade Commission started a class action lawsuit naming TracFone and its affiliates, saying that the company cut off or slowed down "unlimited" data to its customers after they reached a fixed 30-day limit. TracFone was being sued over lying to their consumers about "unlimited" data. This led to $40 million in consumer refunds as a result.


title: 45th parallel north

text: The 45th parallel north is a circle of latitude that is 45 degrees north of Earth's equator. It crosses Europe, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North America, and the Atlantic Ocean.


title: 45th parallel north

text: The 45th parallel north is often called the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, but the true halfway point is north of it (approximately between 45°08'36" and 45°08'37") because Earth is an oblate spheroid; that is, it bulges at the equator and is flattened at the poles.


title: 45th parallel north

text: At this latitude, the sun is visible for 15 hours 37 minutes during the summer solstice, and 8 hours 46 minutes during the winter solstice. The midday Sun stands 21.6° above the southern horizon at the December solstice, 68.4° at the June solstice, and exactly 45.0° at either equinox.


title: 45th parallel north

text: In Europe the 45th parallel hits the Bay of Biscay coast of France in the west. It crosses the river Rhône at Pont-de-l'Isère, just north of Valence, Drôme and through Grenoble. It then continues across the Massif Central and into the Aquitaine region. The city of Bordeaux is just south of the parallel. East of Bordeaux, in the municipality of Saint Seurin sur l'Isle, it intersects the Prime Meridian in the corner of an unremarkable field by the side of the A89 highway. There is no marker or other indication of this singular point on the parallel. It can, however, be visited easily by taking secondary roads from Saint Seurin and consulting a standard GPS signal.


title: 45th parallel north

text: In northern Italy it parallels the river Po, near Rovigo, passing by Voghera, then just south of Turin before passing into France in the Cottian Alps.


title: 45th parallel north

text: Further east it passes through the Balkans: Romania (just north of Ploiești, and through Târgu Jiu), the Serbian autonomous province of Vojvodina, the eastern tip of Croatia, the northern edge of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a section of Adriatic Croatia. The capital city of Serbia – Belgrade is just south of the parallel.


title: 45th parallel north

text: In Russia it runs from the west coast of the Caspian Sea to the east coast of the Black Sea, through the Republic of Kalmykia, Stavropol Krai and its capital Stavropol, and Krasnodar Krai and its capital Krasnodar. In Ukraine it crosses the Crimea and its capital Simferopol.


title: 45th parallel north

text: After leaving Russia the parallel passes through southern Kazakhstan, skirting the northern edge of the Ustyurt Plateau. It intersects the city of Burylbaytal at the southern tip of Lake Balkhash and the city of Qyzylorda further west. At the border with Uzbekistan it bisects the Aral Sea and its toxic Vozrozhdeniya Island peninsula, site of an abandoned Soviet bioweapons laboratory.


title: 45th parallel north

text: In northwest China it passes through the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang and the oil city of Karamay. Transecting southern Mongolia it passes through the provinces of Sükhbaatar, Dornogovi (and its capital Sainshand), Dundgovi, Övörkhangai, Bayankhongor, Govi-Altai, and Khovd. At Khanka Lake it enters northeast China, cutting across Heilongjiang and continuing through part of Jilin and eastern Inner Mongolia.


title: 45th parallel north

text: It leaves the Asian mainland on the coast of Primorsky Krai in Russia, north of Vladivostok and continues through the northern part of the Sea of Japan. It passes through Rishiri-Rebun-Sarobetsu National Park and the adjacent town of Horonobe on the northern tip of Hokkaidō, the northernmost of Japan's main islands, before heading east across the North Pacific Ocean.


title: 45th parallel north

text: Throughout the United States the parallel is marked in many places on highways by a sign proclaiming that the location is halfway between the North Pole and the equator.


title: 45th parallel north

text: The 45th parallel forms some boundaries of or passes through many U.S. states: Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, as well as going through the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The parallel once formed the northern boundary of the original Colony of Virginia, as outlined in the London Company charter.


title: 45th parallel north

text: Going from west to east, the line makes landfall at the Pacific coast in Oregon. After crossing Idaho and the Rocky Mountains, it makes up most of the boundary between Montana and Wyoming. It then passes through the Great Plains and continues further East directly through Minneapolis, MN.


title: 45th parallel north

text: In Michigan, the Old Mission Peninsula in Grand Traverse Bay ends just shy of the 45th parallel. Many guidebooks and signs at the Mission Point Lighthouse describe it as being halfway between the equator and north pole. When the Grand Traverse Bay recedes below normal level, it is possible to walk out to the exact line.


title: 45th parallel north

text: Further east, the 45th parallel roughly marks the Canada–United States border between the St. Lawrence and Connecticut rivers, between the Canadian province of Quebec and the states of New York and Vermont. The parallel is sometimes called the "Canada line" or the Collins–Valentine line. After the Seven Years' War, the 45th parallel was declared the boundary between New York and Quebec. Under the Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842, original measurement errors stand so that the boundary is not exactly at 45 degrees north but is where the survey monuments were erected in 1772. The actual boundary of Vermont lies approximately north of the parallel due to an error in the 1772 survey.


title: 45th parallel north

text: All of mainland New Brunswick lies north of the 45th parallel. Approximately two-thirds of Deer Island, plus all of Campobello and Grand Manan islands, are south of the 45th parallel.


title: Jack McCoy

text: John James McCoy is a fictional character in the television drama "Law & Order". He was created by Dick Wolf and Michael S. Chernuchin and has been portrayed by Sam Waterston during both the show's original run from 1994 to 2010 and since its return in 2022. He is the longest-tenured character on the show, appearing in 18 seasons. He has appeared in 382 episodes of "Law & Order", four episodes of "", two episodes of "", two episodes of "", and the made-for-TV movie "".


title: Jack McCoy

text: Waterston's performance as McCoy on the New York–based series was so popular that it resulted in him being declared a "Living Landmark" by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, along with fellow longtime series cast member Jerry Orbach (who portrayed the popular police detective Lennie Briscoe for almost 12 years).


title: Jack McCoy

text: Jack McCoy brings 24 years of experience with him as he is introduced as Executive Assistant District Attorney by Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) in the season five premiere episode "Second Opinion". He quickly establishes himself as more unconventional and ruthless than his predecessor as Executive Assistant District Attorney, Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty). He often bends—and sometimes breaks—trial rules to get convictions, finds tenuous rationales for charging defendants with crimes when the original charges fail to stick, and charges innocent people to frighten them into testifying against the actual guilty parties. McCoy is found in contempt of court 80 times for such behavior, and his tactics occasionally incur negative publicity for the DA's office. His underlying motivation, however, is not, he maintains, corruption but a sincere desire to see justice done. To that end, McCoy has gone after defendants accused of perverting the justice system to arrange wrongful convictions with just as much determination as his more mundane cases. Such aggressive actions in the courts have earned him the nickname "Hang 'em High McCoy". He describes himself as a "junkyard dog". He has developed a reputation with both colleagues and rival attorneys, once referred to as "the top of the legal food chain" by a rival attorney during a trial.


title: Jack McCoy

text: Following the 17th season (2006–2007), Jack McCoy is appointed interim district attorney, taking over from Arthur Branch (Fred Thompson). McCoy's appearance on "" on the November 13, 2007, episode "Blinded", marked his first appearance in the "Law & Order" universe as district attorney. The replacement for his former position is Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), a prosecutor with a penchant for recklessness not unlike McCoy's own in his younger days. This occasionally presents political difficulties for the new district attorney. More than once, McCoy berates Cutter for reckless conduct, in the same manner as he was berated by district attorneys when he was executive assistant district attorney.


title: Jack McCoy

text: In the season 19 episode "Lucky Stiff", McCoy begins his election campaign for New York County District Attorney after serving the last season and a half as interim DA. In the season-19 episode "Promote This", in 1991 his wife Ellen (whom he was divorcing) is revealed to have unknowingly employed an undocumented immigrant as a nanny. This causes McCoy political havoc during a murder case where the motive was racism against illegal immigrants of Hispanic descent. In the episode "Skate or Die", the place where his final campaign fundraiser would be held is discovered by the organizers to be owned by a man who served a 20-year prison sentence for racketeering. Eventually, the final campaign fundraiser is held at a Chinese seafood restaurant with a kosher section.


title: Jack McCoy

text: McCoy is hand-picked for the interim DA position by Governor Donald Shalvoy (Tom Everett Scott), and the two initially have a friendly, productive working relationship. By the end of the 18th season, however, McCoy discovers that Shalvoy is involved in a prostitution scandal that is tied to a murder case he is prosecuting. Angered and disappointed, McCoy orders Cutter to start investigating Shalvoy, who retaliates by lending his support to McCoy's opponent in the election. In the last episode of season 19, "The Drowned and the Saved", Cutter uncovers evidence that Shalvoy tried to buy a Senate seat for his wife Rita (Alison Elliott), who ordered the murder, and threatens him with public disgrace unless he resigns. McCoy's opponent suddenly has no patron, giving McCoy good prospects for victory. In the opening episode of season 20, McCoy is revealed to have won the election; he serves as DA for the remainder of this final season of "Law & Order".


title: Jack McCoy

text: "Law & Order" originally ceased production in 2010, but McCoy (though not seen) was still occasionally mentioned as being the Manhattan DA in the spin-off series "" in several episodes through 2011. A reference to "the new DA" in a 2013 "SVU" episode would indicate that McCoy had moved on from the position presumably sometime in 2012; his replacement was unnamed. However, McCoy was the DA again as of 2018, showing up in the "SVU" episode "The Undiscovered Country". As of 2022, he once again appears as the DA in the revival of the original "Law & Order".


title: Jack McCoy

text: While he is a brilliant legal mind, McCoy has more than a few personal demons. He was abused by his father, an Irish Chicago policeman who had also beat Jack's mother, and who eventually died of cancer. McCoy says that his determination and unyielding work ethic are a byproduct of having been harshly punished by his father for losing at anything. He also revealed that his father was a racist who once hit him for dating a Polish girl. McCoy disliked his father, calling him a "son-of-a-bitch"; however, he admits he could have easily become like him.


title: Jack McCoy

text: While not a nationalist, he cares enough about his heritage to be offended by a suspect’s father’s insinuation that two murder suspects committed the crime because of their "Irish temper".


title: Jack McCoy

text: McCoy has been divorced twice (one ex-wife having been a former assistant) and has an adult daughter, Rebecca, with first ex-wife Ellen. One of his ex-wives left him because he worked too many late nights. A gossip columnist writes that McCoy has not seen or spoken to his daughter since 1997, and McCoy receives an envelope containing pictures of his daughter. He does not open the envelope; rather, he places it in his bottom left desk drawer, next to a bottle of Jim Beam. In "Fallout", the last scene shows McCoy meeting his daughter (Jamie Schofield) at a restaurant. During a conversation with (fictional) New York Governor Donald Shalvoy, he mentions Rebecca has taken a job in San Diego, and that she drove up to Los Angeles to meet him there for dinner while he was attending a conference on official business; the governor uses this to try to smear McCoy, wrongly implying that he used public funds to visit Rebecca. In the season-20 episode "Dignity", McCoy mentions to EADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache) and ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza) that his daughter is either pregnant or a new mother, thus making him soon to be or already a grandfather. He also has a nephew, which indicates that he has at least one sibling. By 2008, his nephew had a young daughter.


title: Jack McCoy

text: McCoy has a reputation for having romantic affairs with his ADAs. Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy) mentions this when they first meet; he tells her he has had affairs with only three of his ADAs, but by the end of the episode, she realizes that he has only had three female ADAs before her. In the episode "Scoundrels", McCoy reveals that defense attorney Sally Bell (Edie Falco) had been one of those ADAs. He at one point was revealed to have had a romantic relationship with his frequent courtroom adversary, defense attorney Vanessa Galiano (Roma Maffia). Kincaid initially makes it clear that she is not interested in a romantic relationship, and McCoy agrees to her stipulation. However, throughout the two seasons in which the two characters appear together, they are implied to be having an affair, with the relationship eventually confirmed in the season 9 episode "Sideshow", long after the Kincaid character had exited the show. Kincaid is killed in a car accident, a source of ongoing pain for McCoy; her death is implied to be the motivation for his legally questionable prosecution of an alcoholic who has killed several people while driving under the influence. Defense attorneys have used his sexual history against him. Since Kincaid's death, McCoy has kept his relationships with assistants professional, albeit friendly.


title: Jack McCoy

text: McCoy's affairs with his ADAs have often had explosive consequences. For instance, his former ADA Diana Hawthorne (Laila Robins), with whom he had a sexual relationship, was found to have suppressed evidence so they could win a case, resulting in an innocent man going to prison. During her trial for intentionally engineering the wrongful convictions, Hawthorne claims that the convictions earned McCoy a promotion he was seeking. Ironically, in the same trial, during which McCoy is forced to admit he was having an affair with Hawthorne, he is being represented by Kincaid, with whom he is presently having an affair.


title: Jack McCoy

text: In "House Counsel", McCoy tries to prosecute a mobster for bribing and murdering a juror. The man's lawyer, Paul Kopell (Ron Leibman), is one of McCoy's oldest friends, with whom he had a competitive relationship for years, and he proves to be equally aggressive in his approach to his work. As Kopell repeatedly stymies McCoy's prosecutorial efforts, McCoy takes the position that Kopell is not acting as an independent attorney, but as a participant in organized crime, and eventually prosecutes Kopell for conspiracy in the juror's murder. He tells Kopell's wife Anna (Jessica Walter) that the prosecution is not personal, but she angrily replies that McCoy simply wants the final victory over a rival. By the end of the episode, though he has won the case, McCoy is so troubled that he does not even want to share an elevator with Kincaid.


title: Jack McCoy

text: While McCoy was not exactly a part of the 1960s counterculture, he did protest against the policies of the Richard Nixon administration, particularly the Vietnam War. In 1972, he published an article in the "New York University Law Review" in defense of Catholic priests who had been opposed to the conflict. He does retain some of the wild streak from his youth; he is a fan of The Clash and he rides a Yamaha motorcycle. He is opposed to the Iraq War.


title: Jack McCoy

text: Unlike his predecessor Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty), McCoy embraces the option of the death penalty, claiming it is a suitable punishment for particularly heinous crimes and a useful threat in plea bargaining. This often leads to heated arguments with his more liberal colleagues. In "Savages", when the death penalty has just been restored in New York following the election of Governor George Pataki, Kincaid asks McCoy about the probability of executing an innocent individual. McCoy responds that, with the lengthy prosecution process and opportunities for the defendant to appeal the verdict, the probability of wrongful execution is unlikely. Kincaid asks McCoy if he is able to accept the probability of "unlikely"; his hesitation indicates that he has never considered the possibility. In later seasons, his view towards the death penalty has apparently changed: in season 18's "Executioner", he is deeply troubled hearing of a gruesomely botched execution in South Carolina, and in season 20's "Four Cops Shot", he resists efforts by a U.S. attorney to prosecute a suspect in the murder of a police officer under a federal death penalty statute.


title: Jack McCoy

text: He has shown mercy on occasion, such as the 1997 episode "Burned" in which he prosecutes Terence Lawlor (Sam Huntington), a teenage boy with bipolar disorder, for murdering his sister. The boy's grandfather Carl Anderton (Robert Vaughn), a wealthy CEO (and good friend of Schiff's) who also proved to suffer from the disorder, had attempted to get his grandson to plead guilty and go to jail rather than plead insanity and be committed to a mental institution, fearing that a public revelation of the boy's illness would provide enough evidence to reveal his own illness and affect his reputation. McCoy leads the effort to prevent an unjust punishment for the boy. Similarly, in season seven's "Deadbeat", he declines to prosecute a woman who is the sole caregiver for a boy dying of cancer, although he implies that he may do so once the boy has died.


title: Jack McCoy

text: McCoy was raised Catholic, but does not appear to be in practice, and has not been for some time; he describes himself as a "lapsed Catholic". McCoy was educated by the Jesuits. (Michael Moriarty, the actor who played McCoy's predecessor Ben Stone, actually attended University of Detroit Jesuit High School.) On several occasions, religion has been the subject of various cases. In the episode "Thrill", in which two teenaged boys are accused of killing a man for fun, McCoy finds his case particularly complicated when one of the suspects confesses the crime to his uncle, a priest. When the confession tape is labeled privileged, McCoy ignores the bishop's request to preserve the sacrament of reconciliation and instead tries to use the tape as evidence. When Detective Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) tries to dissuade McCoy from doing so, reminding him that he is a Catholic, McCoy responds, "Not when I'm at work."


title: Jack McCoy

text: When a man is accused of killing a drug dealer who killed the man's son, a priest (Denis O'Hare) confesses to the crime. Though McCoy personally believes that the priest is covering for the man, he prosecutes the priest, instead. At the end of the episode, McCoy says that he lost his faith after the death of a childhood friend.


title: Jack McCoy

text: McCoy's unconventional and sometimes ruthless professional conduct has put his job in jeopardy more than once throughout the series. Some of the more serious occurrences are:


title: Jack McCoy

text: McCoy has appeared in four episodes of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"; however, he is often referred to in the series, and his actions affect the ADAs working with the Special Victims Unit.


title: Jack McCoy

text: "Entertainment Weekly" television critic Ken Tucker has praised "Law & Order"s creator Dick Wolf for putting McCoy at the center of "some of the best episodes of the immortal series' 19th season." Tucker elaborates how the character, riding "herd over a couple of stubborn young bucks — assistant DAs Mike Cutter (Linus Roache) and Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza) — McCoy argues, bellows orders, and croaks with outrage when his charges disobey his legal advice."


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: Jeremy Bloom is an American former skier and American football player. As a skier, he is a one-time world champion, two-time Olympian, and 10-time World Cup gold medalist. He was inducted into the National Ski Hall of Fame in 2013.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: Bloom was a freshman All-American at the University of Colorado. He was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in the 2006 NFL Draft and was also a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers, but did not play a competitive game for either team.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: Bloom was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, the son of Charlene, a ski and fly fishing instructor, and Larry Bloom, a clinical psychologist, and grew up in nearby Loveland. His older sister, Molly Bloom, is an author and former organizer of illegal poker games who wrote "Molly's Game", and was the inspiration for the film of the same name. His cousin is ice hockey player Colby Cohen. Bloom's father is Jewish and his mother is Christian.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: Bloom grew up skiing in Keystone, Colorado. At 15 he became the youngest male freestyle skier to ever make the United States Ski Team.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: On November 24, 2008, Bloom announced his intention to attend the United States ski team's training camp to assess the possibility of a 2010 return to Olympic skiing.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: Bloom was featured in "The Weight of Gold" (2020), an HBO Sports Documentary which "explor(es) the mental health challenges that Olympic athletes often face."


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: Bloom was a wide receiver and punt returner for the University of Colorado football team. He was selected to the first-team Freshman All-America list by the FWAA.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: On October 5, 2002, Bloom caught a pass from Robert Hodge against Kansas State in Boulder that resulted in a touchdown. On this play Bloom set four Colorado team records that stood as of 2020: all-time longest passing play, longest scoring play from scrimmage, longest gain on a first career reception, longest gain by a freshman.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: Bloom holds the Colorado team record for most combined return yards (kick & punt) in a single game, set against Baylor University in Waco, Texas on October 4, 2003 (143 kickoff and 107 punt).


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: On April 30, 2006, Bloom was selected by the Philadelphia Eagles in the fifth round (147th overall) of the 2006 NFL Draft. He was featured in the NFL TV show "Hey Rookie, Welcome To The NFL". He practiced with the team all through mini-camp as a punt and kick returner, but injured his hamstring during training camp, placing him on injured reserve. Bloom remained with the team for the 2006 season. After spending his entire rookie year on injured reserve, Bloom averaged 20.3 yards on 12 kickoff returns and 7.8 yards on 10 punt returns during the 2007 preseason. He was released by the Eagles prior to the regular season.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: On December 31, 2007, Bloom was signed by the Pittsburgh Steelers in preparation for the 2008 AFC playoff game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. He began 2008 training camp with the Steelers. He was released by the Steelers on August 25, 2008.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: In March 2003, Bloom won the 30th annual CBS Superstars Competition in Jamaica; he defeated nine professional athletes that included Dexter Jackson, Ahman Green, and Will Allen.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: In April 2010, Bloom along with Hart Cunningham co-founded the marketing software company, Integrate. In 2013, Bloom was a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.


title: Jeremy Bloom

text: Bloom is a college football and Olympic sports television analyst and has worked for ESPN, Fox, NBC and The Pac-12 Network.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Mariana of Austria () or Maria Anna (24 December 163416 May 1696) was Queen of Spain as the second wife of her uncle Philip IV of Spain from their marriage in 1649 until Philip died in 1665. She was then appointed regent for their three-year-old son Charles II, and due to his ill health remained an influential figure until her own death in 1696.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Her regency was overshadowed by the need to manage Spain's post-1648 decline as the dominant global power, internal political divisions and the European economic crisis of the second half of the 17th century. The inability of her son Charles to produce an heir led to constant manoeuvring by other European powers, which ultimately ended in the 1701 to 1714 War of the Spanish Succession. The Mariana Islands consisting of 14 islands in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, and through them the Mariana Trench, are named after her.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Maria Anna was born on 24 December 1634 in Wiener Neustadt, second child of Maria Anna of Spain and her husband Ferdinand (1608-1657), who became Holy Roman Emperor in 1637. Her parents had six children, of whom only Maria Anna and two brothers survived to adulthood; Ferdinand (1633-1654), and Leopold (1640-1705), elected emperor in 1658.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: The Habsburgs often married within the family to retain their lands and properties, and in 1646 Maria Anna was betrothed to her cousin and heir to the Spanish throne, Balthasar Charles, Prince of Asturias. His death three months later left her without a prospective husband and her widowed uncle Philip IV without an heir. On 7 October 1649, the 44-year-old Philip married his 14-year-old niece in Navalcarnero, outside Madrid; from then on, she was known by her Spanish name 'Mariana.' The exclusion of women from political life meant she focused on religion and education, which society viewed as fitting women's role as nurturers and providers of moral guidance.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Only two of their five children survived to adulthood; the eldest, Margaret Theresa (1651-1673), married her maternal uncle Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor in 1666. Mariana's second daughter, Maria Ambrosia, lived only fifteen days, followed by two sons, Philip Prospero (1657-1661) and Ferdinand Thomas (1658-1659). On 6 November 1661, Mariana gave birth to her last child, Charles, later known as El Hechizado or "The Bewitched", in the belief his disabilities were caused by "sorcery." In his case, the so-called Habsburg jaw was so pronounced he spoke and ate with difficulty all his life. He did not learn to walk until he was eight and never attended school, but foreign observers noted his mental capacities remained intact; others speculated the Regents overstated his defects to retain political control.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: It has been suggested Charles suffered from the endocrine disease acromegaly and a combination of rare genetic disorders often transmitted through recessive genes, including combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis. However, his elder sister did not appear to suffer the same issues and the authors of the most significant study state "it has not been demonstrated (his) disabilities...were caused by...recessive alleles inherited from common ancestors." Regardless of the cause, Charles suffered ill health throughout his life, and the Spanish court was split by the struggle between his co-heirs, Louis XIV and Emperor Leopold. His death was expected almost from birth; he was "short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35...repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live."


title: Mariana of Austria

text: When Philip died on 17 September 1665, Charles was only three; Mariana was appointed regent, advised by a Regency Council, until he became a legal adult at the age of 14. She adopted the system of using a "valido" or 'favourite' established by Philip in 1620 and widely used elsewhere in Europe. The first was Juan Everardo Nithard, an Austrian Jesuit and her personal confessor who came with her from Vienna; as Philip's will excluded foreigners from the Regency Council, he had to be naturalised, causing immediate resentment.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: A 'foreigner' herself, the two men habitually identified as her 'favourites' were also outsiders; Nithard was succeeded by Valenzuela, who came from the lower rank of Spanish nobility. Even modern accounts of her reign often reflect contemporary sources that viewed women as incapable of ruling on their own and thus imply a sexual relationship. Mariana used a variety of advisors, including Count Peñaranda and the Marquis de Aytona; historian Silvia Mitchell disputes whether Nithard or Valenzuela were 'validos', since Mariana used them to retain power, rather than delegating it. Despite the emphasis put on her male advisors, she also had female advisors, notably Mariana Engracia Álvarez de Toledo Portugal y Alfonso-Pimentel.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Her son's poor health and lack of an heir led to a constant struggle between Mariana's 'Austrian' faction, and a 'French' faction, nominally led by his illegitimate half-brother, John of Austria the Younger. Spain was also divided into the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, whose very different political cultures made it almost impossible to enact reforms or increase taxes. Government finances were in perpetual crisis, the Crown declaring bankruptcy in 1647, 1652, 1661 and 1666. Mariana faced issues that would have challenged the most competent ruler; Spain was financially exhausted by almost a century of continuous war, while her reign coincided with the Little Ice Age, a period of cold weather during the second half of the 17th century. Between 1692 and 1699, crops failed across Europe and an estimated 5-10% of the population starved to death.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: The new government also inherited a wide range of economic and political problems. The long-running Portuguese Restoration War was the most urgent, followed in May 1667 by the War of Devolution, when France invaded the Spanish Netherlands and the Spanish province of Franche-Comté. The need to reduce spending resulted in the 1668 treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle and Lisbon ended the wars with France and Portugal.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Peace ended the constant drain of Spanish resources, while Aix-La-Chapelle forced France to return most of the territories over-run in 1667 to 1668. Despite this, the army consisted them a humiliation; in June 1668, Joseph Malladas, an Aragonese captain living in Madrid, was executed for plotting to murder Nithard, reputedly on John's behalf. An internal power struggle ended with Nithard becoming Ambassador to Rome in February 1669; he was succeeded by Aytona, who died in 1670 and was replaced by Valenzuela, a member of her household since 1661.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: In 1672, Spain was dragged into the Franco-Dutch War; Valenzuela was dismissed when Charles came of age in 1675, but Spanish policy continued to be undermined by the struggle for power. Mariana reinstated the regency in 1677 on the grounds of Charles's ill-health and Valenzuela was restored, before John finally gained control in 1677.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: John of Austria the Younger died in September 1679 and Mariana became regent once again; one of his final acts was arranging the marriage of Charles to 17-year-old Marie Louise of Orléans, which took place in November 1679.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Marie Louise died in February 1689, without producing an heir; as with many deaths of the period, limited medical knowledge led to allegations she was poisoned. Modern assessments of her symptoms conclude it was almost certainly appendicitis, possibly from the treatments undertaken to improve fertility. Her replacement was Maria Anna of Neuburg, one of 12 children whose family reputation for fertility made them popular choices for royal marriages. Of her sisters, Maria Sophia married Peter II of Portugal, while Eleonore was the third wife of Emperor Leopold. Maria Anna was aunt to future emperors Joseph I and Charles VI, making her an ideal choice for the Austrian faction.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Charles remained childless; by that time, he was almost certainly impotent, his autopsy later revealing he had only one atrophied testicle. As his health declined, internal struggles over the succession became increasingly bitter, leadership of the pro-French faction passing to Fernández de Portocarrero, Cardinal and Archbishop of Toledo.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: Under the influence of the 'Austrians,' in 1690 Spain joined the Grand Alliance in the Nine Years' War with France. It declared bankruptcy again in 1692 and by 1696, France occupied most of Catalonia; Mariana retained power with the support of German auxiliaries under Maria Anna's brother Charles Philip, many of whom were expelled after Mariana's death. She died on 16 May 1696 at the Uceda Palace in Madrid, at the age of sixty-one; the cause is thought to have been breast cancer.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: In 1668, Mariana approved the establishment of a Jesuit mission under Diego Luis de San Vitores and Saint Pedro Calungsod on a series of islands the Spanish referred to as the Ladrones, which were renamed the Mariana Islands in her honour.


title: Mariana of Austria

text: The Portrait of Mariana of Austria painted by Diego Velázquez was commissioned by Philip and is the only known full-length painting of her. The original is in the Prado Museum in Madrid; a copy was sent to her father Ferdinand and is held by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Several other portraits of her were made, including Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo's "Queen Mariana of Spain in Mourning", 1666. She also appears as a detail in Velasquez' masterpiece Las Meninas which features her daughter Margaret Theresa.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: The Duchy of Brittany (, ; ) was a medieval feudal state that existed between approximately 939 and 1547. Its territory covered the northwestern peninsula of Europe, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the English Channel to the north. It was also less definitively bordered by the river Loire to the south, and Normandy, and other French provinces, to the east. The Duchy was established after the expulsion of Viking armies from the region around 939. The Duchy, in the 10th and 11th centuries, was politically unstable, with the dukes holding only limited power outside their own personal lands. The Duchy had mixed relationships with the neighbouring Duchy of Normandy, sometimes allying itself with Normandy, and at other times, such as the Breton-Norman War, entering into open conflict.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: Henry II of England invaded Brittany in the mid-12th century and became Count of Nantes in 1158 under a treaty with Duke Conan IV. Henry's son, Geoffrey, became Duke through his marriage to Constance, the hereditary Duchess. The Angevins remained in control until the collapse of their empire in northern France in 1204. The French Crown maintained its influence over the Duchy for the rest of the 13th century. Monastic orders supported by the Breton aristocracy spread across the Duchy in the 11th and 12th centuries, and in the 13th, the first of the mendicant orders established themselves in Brittany's major towns. Civil war broke out in the 14th century, as rival claimants for the Duchy vied for power during the Breton War of Succession, with different factions supported by England and France.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: The independent sovereign nature of the Duchy began to come to an end upon the death of Francis II in 1488. The Duchy was inherited by his daughter, Anne, but King Charles VIII of France had her existing marriage annulled and then married her himself. As a result, the King of France acquired the title of Duke of Brittany – . The Ducal crown became united with the French crown in 1532 through a vote of the Estates of Brittany, after the death of Queen Claude of France, the last sovereign duchess. Her sons Francis III, Duke of Brittany and then Henry II of France would in any case have created a personal union on the death of their father.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: Following the French Revolution, and as a result of the various republican forms of French government since 1792, the duchy was replaced by the French system of (or departments) which continues under the Fifth Republic of France. In modern times the departments have also joined into administrative regions although the administrative region of Brittany does not encompass the entirety of the medieval duchy.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: The Duchy of Brittany that emerged in the early 10th century was influenced by several earlier polities. Prior to the expansion of the Roman Empire into the region, Gallic tribes had occupied the Armorican peninsula, dividing it into five regions that then formed the basis for the Roman administration of the area, and which survived into the period of the Duchy. These Gallic tribes – termed the "Armorici" in Latin – had close relationships with the Britonnes tribes in Roman Britain. Between the late 4th and the early 7th centuries, many of these Britonnes migrated to the Armorican peninsula, blending with the local people to form the later Britons, who eventually became the Bretons. The reasons for these migrations remain uncertain. These migrations from Britain contributed to Brittany's name.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: Brittany fragmented into small, warring "regna", kingdoms, each competing for resources. The Frankish Carolingian Empire conquered the region during the 8th century, starting around 748 taking the whole of Brittany by 799. The Carolingians tried to create a unitary administration around the centres of Rennes, Nantes, and Vannes using the local rulers, but the kings of Brittany's hold on the region remained tenuous. Carolingian technology and culture began to influence Brittany, and the church in Brittany also began to emulate the Frankish model.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: The greatest influence on the later Duchy, however, was the formation of a unitary Brittany kingdom in the 9th century. In 831 Louis the Pious appointed Nominoe, the Count of Vannes, ruler of the Bretons, imperial "missus", at Ingelheim in 831. After the death of Louis in 840, Nominoe rose to challenge the new emperor, Charles the Bald, emboldened in part by new Viking raids on the empire. Charles the Bald created the Marches of Neustria to defend Western Francia from the Bretons and the Vikings. Erispoe fought Charles the Bald, who felt that a quick attack would successfully challenge the new Breton leader. Erispoe won a victory at the Battle of Jengland and, under their Treaty of Angers in 851, Brittany's independence was secured.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: The new kingdom proved fragile and collapsed under Viking attack. In 853 the Viking Godfried left the Seine with his fleet, sailed around the Breton peninsula and sacked Nantes. Erispoe entered into an alliance with the leader of another Viking fleet, Sidroc, who betrayed him, resulting in Erispoe's defeat at the hands of the Vikings. A weakened Erispoe ruled until 857 when he was assassinated and then followed as Breton ruler by his cousin and rival, Salomon, the Count of Rennes and Nantes. Viking raids continued. Alan I successfully defeated one wave of Vikings around 900, expanding the kingdom to include not only the Breton territories of Léon, Domnonée, Cornouaille, and the Vannetais, but also the Frankish counties of Rennes, Nantes, Coutances, and Avranches, as well as the western parts of Poitou and Anjou. Alan I's military success resulted in a period of peace from Viking invasions and few raids from the Vikings were recorded from 900 through to 907.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: After Alan I's death in 907, Brittany was overrun once again by Vikings. Fulk the Red, Count of Anjou, is said to have occupied Nantes from 907 to 919 when he abandoned it to the invading Vikings. In 919, the great Viking fleet of Rognvaldr landed in Nantes, quickly coming to dominate the region. This invasion accelerated the exodus of Bretons, including that of the "machtierns", "the local hereditary officers upon whom the civil administration depended". Among the refugees were Mathedoi, the Count of Poher, and his son Alan Barbetorte, the grandson of Alan I; they fled to England and lived in exile in the courts of Edward the Elder and Edward's son and successor Æthelstan. The Viking occupation of Brittany lasted until about 936. Little recorded history of this period is available until Alan Barbetorte returned in 937 to expel the Vikings and reestablish a version of the former Carolingian kingdom.


title: Duchy of Brittany

text: The Duchy of Brittany emerged after Alan Barbetorte's return to the region from England in 936. Barbetorte claimed the titles of the Count of Cornouaille and Nantes and, as Alan II, reigned as the new "Brittonum dux". Using a network of small, defended towns and monastic sites, Alan pushed back the Viking advances. On 1 August 939, with the aid of Judicael Berengar, Count of Rennes, and Hugh I, Count of Maine, he defeated the Vikings in the Battle of Trans-la-Forêt, completing their expulsion from Brittany. Alan's duchy was smaller than the previous Kingdom of Brittany, as, despite gaining Magues and Tiffauges in the south, the dukes no longer ruled over the regions of Cotentin, Avranchin, and Mayenne. Alan paid homage to Louis IV of France for Brittany in 942. Despite some older Celtic influences, the new duchy was in many ways similar to the other, post-Carolingian states forming across the region. Over the coming decades, a network of powerful local lords emerged across Brittany, occupying motte and bailey castles and owing a loose feudal loyalty to the duke. The east of Brittany was the first to change, but the practices spread over the next fifty years to the more remote regions of the north- and south-west.