title: Ernie Banks

text: In 1984, when the Cubs won the NL East division, the club named Banks an honorary team member. At the 1990 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, the first one held at Wrigley Field since Banks' playing days, he threw out the ceremonial first pitch to starting catcher Mike Scioscia. Banks was named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team in 1999. In the same year, the Society for American Baseball Research listed him 27th on a list of the 100 greatest baseball players. In 2003, he guest starred on an episode of "Yes, Dear".


title: Ernie Banks

text: In June 2006, "Crain's Chicago Business" said Banks was part of a group looking into buying the Chicago Cubs in case the Tribune Company decided to sell the club. Banks established a charity, the Live Above & Beyond Foundation, which assists youth and the elderly with issues including self-esteem and healthcare. In 2008, Banks released a charity wine called Ernie Banks 512 Chardonnay, the proceeds of which were donated to his foundation.


title: Ernie Banks

text: Banks was an ordained minister; he presided at the wedding of MLB pitcher Sean Marshall. On March 31, 2008, a statue of Banks ("Mr. Cub") was unveiled in front of Wrigley Field. That year, Eddie Vedder released a song called "All The Way", which Banks had asked Vedder to write about the Cubs as a birthday gift.


title: Ernie Banks

text: In 2009, Banks was named a Library of Congress Living Legend, a designation that recognizes those "who have made significant contributions to America's diverse cultural, scientific and social heritage". In 2013, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom with 15 other people, including Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. During the ceremony, he presented President Obama with a bat that had belonged to Jackie Robinson. Banks remained close to the Cubs team and made frequent appearances at their spring training grounds, HoHoKam Stadium in Arizona. Author Harry Strong wrote in 2013 that "the Chicago Cubs do not have a mascot, but they hardly need one when the face of the franchise is still so visible".


title: Ernie Banks

text: He was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in 1970, in the area of Sports.


title: Ernie Banks

text: Banks died of a heart attack at a Chicago hospital on January 23, 2015, eight days before his 84th birthday. Following a public visitation, a memorial service was held at the Fourth Presbyterian Church. Several well-known people spoke at the service, including Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and baseball personalities Joe Torre and Billy Williams. After the service, a procession moved from Downtown Chicago past Wrigley Field.


title: Ernie Banks

text: In the weeks after his death, a legal battle arose over Banks' estate and the disposition of his body. His estranged widow Elizabeth said that he had amended his will in October without her knowledge. The new will left all of Banks' assets to his longtime caregiver, Regina Rice. Banks had been diagnosed with dementia shortly before the change in his will. A Chicago funeral home sent Elizabeth a bill for $35,000 in funeral costs, but the bill went unpaid as Elizabeth challenged the legality of Banks' new will. In March 2015, the Chicago Cubs announced that they would pay the funeral home costs.


title: Ernie Banks

text: Banks was buried in Graceland Cemetery, just a few blocks north of Wrigley Field. During the entire 2015 season, the Cubs had the number 14 located behind home plate.


title: Crayon

text: A crayon (or wax pastel) is a stick of pigmented wax used for writing or drawing. Wax crayons differ from pastels, in which the pigment is mixed with a dry binder such as gum arabic, and from oil pastels, where the binder is a mixture of wax and oil.


title: Crayon

text: Crayons are available in a range of prices, and are easy to work with. They are less messy than most paints and markers, blunt (removing the risk of sharp points present when using a pencil or pen), typically non-toxic, and available in a wide variety of colors. These characteristics make them particularly good instruments for teaching small children to draw in addition to being used widely by student and professional artists.


title: Crayon

text: In the modern English-speaking world, the term crayon is commonly associated with the standard wax crayon, such as those widely available for use by children. Such crayons are usually approximately in length and made mostly of paraffin wax. Paraffin wax is heated and cooled to achieve the correct temperature at which a usable wax substance can be dyed and then manufactured and shipped for use around the world. Paraffin waxes are used for cosmetics, candles, for the preparation of printing ink, fruit preserving, in the pharmaceutical industry, for lubricating purposes, and crayons.


title: Crayon

text: Colin Snedeker, a chemist for Binney & Smith (the then-parent company of Crayola), developed the first washable crayons in response to consumer complaints regarding stained fabrics and walls. A patent for the washable solid marking composition utilized in the washable crayons was awarded to Snedeker in 1990.


title: Crayon

text: The history of the crayon is not entirely clear. The French word "crayon", originally meaning "chalk pencil", dates to around the 16th century, and is derived from the word "craie" (chalk) which comes from the Latin word "creta" (Earth). The meaning later changed to simply "pencil" which it still means in modern French.


title: Crayon

text: The notion to combine a form of wax with pigment goes back thousands of years. Encaustic painting is a technique that uses hot beeswax combined with colored pigment to bind color into stone. A heat source was then used to "burn in" and fix the image in place. Pliny the Elder, a Roman scholar, was thought to describe the first techniques of wax crayon drawings.


title: Crayon

text: This method, employed by the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and indigenous people in the Philippines, is still used today. However, the process wasn't used to make crayons into a form intended to be held and colored with and was therefore ineffective for use in a classroom or as crafts for children.


title: Crayon

text: Contemporary crayons are purported to have originated in Europe, where some of the first cylinder shaped crayons were made with charcoal and oil. Pastels are an art medium sharing roots with the modern crayon and date back to Leonardo da Vinci in 1495. Conté crayons, out of Paris, are a hybrid between a pastel and a conventional crayon, used since the late 1790s as a drawing crayon for artists. Later, various hues of powdered pigment eventually replaced the primary charcoal ingredient found in most early 19th century products. References to crayons in literature appear as early as 1813 in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice". French lithographer was also one of the inventors of the modern crayon. Through his Paris business circa 1828, he produced a variety of crayon and color related products. But even as those in Europe were discovering that substituting wax for the oil strengthened the crayon, various efforts in the United States were also developing.


title: Crayon

text: The initial era of wax crayons saw several companies and products competing for the lucrative education and artist markets. The Franklin Mfg. Co, founded in 1876 in Rochester, New York, was one of the first companies to make and sell wax crayons, and in 1883 they appeared with a display of crayons at the World's Columbian Exposition that year.


title: Crayon

text: Some of the earliest records of the modern paraffin wax crayon comes from Charles A. Bowley of Massachusetts, who developed wax coloring crayons in the late 1880s. Bowley had been selling various stationery items in the vicinity of Danvers and had developed clumps of colored wax designed for marking leather. With the need for more accuracy, he went back to his home and formed the wax crayons into more manageable cylinder shapes similar to that of a pencil. He packaged his crayons into decorative boxes and offered them through stationer clients he knew. The demand for his crayons soon exceeded his ability to keep up with production and he partnered with the American Crayon Company, who had been producing chalk crayons, in 1902.


title: Crayon

text: Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith had been long established in the coloring marketplace through Binney's Peekskill, New York, chemical works making lampblack by burning whale and carbon black, as well as their chalk products. In 1902, they developed and introduced the Staonal marking crayon. A year later in 1903, Edwin Binney's wife, Alice Stead Binney, coined the name Crayola by combining the French word for chalk, "craie", with the first part of "oleaginous", another name for the paraffin wax used to make the crayon. Binney and Smith were quick to capitalize on their creation, selling boxes of various sizes and color pallets. The Rubens Crayola line started in 1903 as well, aimed at artist and designed to compete with the Raphael brand of crayons from Europe.


title: Crayon

text: Their most recognizable brand was the Crayola "Gold Medal" line in yellow boxes, which referred to one the company earned with their An-du-Septic dustless chalk during the March 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. They used the award to design a new line of crayons featuring the medal on the front of their box. Initially, they developed and introduced the No. 8 box of eight assorted colors, which became an immediate success; it was even featured on a postage stamp in early 1905. From there they began to phase out other Crayola crayon boxes until their line of Crayola crayons featured the Gold Medal design.


title: Crayon

text: Hundreds of companies entered the crayon market, but only a few exist today, with Crayola dominating the market in the United States. That brand become a generic trademark also used to describe other brands' crayons. In all, there were over 300 documented crayon manufacturers in the United States and many more in other countries.


title: Crayon

text: Beyond Crayola, other brand name crayon manufacturers today include Rose Art Industries and Dixon Ticonderoga, the successor to the American Crayon Company. Numerous suppliers create generic brand or store brand crayons. These are typically found in supermarkets.


title: Crayon

text: In 2000 there was concern about potential contamination of asbestos in many popular brands of crayons after the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" reported in May of that year that they had tests performed finding that three brands of crayons contained asbestos. In a follow-up study released in June the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) found traces of asbestos fibers in three crayons and larger amounts of transitional fibers which can be misinterpreted as asbestos as a result of using talc as a binding agent in additional crayons. CPSC declared the risk to be low, but said that because of the concerns it had asked manufacturers to reformulate the concerned crayons and commended them for their swift agreement to do so.


title: Crayon

text: Early French artists, including François Clouet (1510-1572) and Nicholas L'agneau (1590-1666), used crayons in their early art projects. Clouet used crayons for his modeled portraits, which were so elaborate that he caught the attention of Henry V, who knighted him. He became a court painter for the royalty, and his entire art career began and consisted of some wax crayon art. L'agneau illustrated his portraits with outlines in wax crayons, and with tints of watercolor. His portraits were often of people who looked surprised or unaware of their surroundings.


title: Crayon

text: Sister Gertrude Morgan was most known for preaching the Gospel around New Orleans with simplicity and easy-to-understand crayon drawings. Morgan caught the eye of a gallery owner E. Lorenz Borenstein, and was allowed to show her work, play her music and spread her word of God at the gallery. Her early drawings were that of just very modest and simplicity crayon drawings, depicting biblical text to provide a clearer image to those who were unfamiliar with the Bible. Morgan went on to publish a record of her biblical songs and has artwork featured in the American Folk Art Museum in New York.


title: The Big Wedding

text: The Big Wedding is a 2013 American comedy film written and directed by Justin Zackham. It is an American remake of the original 2006 Swiss/French film "" (My Brother is Getting Married), written by Jean-Stéphane Bron and Karine Sudan.


title: The Big Wedding

text: The film stars a large ensemble cast including Robert De Niro, Katherine Heigl, Diane Keaton, Amanda Seyfried, Topher Grace, Ben Barnes, Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams. It was released on 26 April 2013 by Lionsgate in the United States and Canada.


title: The Big Wedding

text: Don and Ellie Griffin were a New England couple married for twenty years before they divorced. They have three children from their marriage – Lyla, Jared, and adopted son Alejandro, who originates from Colombia.


title: The Big Wedding

text: In preparation for Alejandro's wedding, Ellie arrives at Don's (and her old) home, and lets herself in. She interrupts Don just as he is about to perform oral sex on Bebe, his girlfriend of eight years (and Ellie's former best friend). All are embarrassed, but they make small talk, and he shows Ellie to her room. Meanwhile, Alejandro and his fiancée Missy are meeting with Father Moinighan, the priest who will be marrying them. It is revealed that Alejandro's biological mother Madonna is going to be coming from Colombia to the wedding, which upsets Alejandro since he does not have a "traditional" family, and his Catholic mother would not approve of that or the fact that Don and Ellie had been divorced.


title: The Big Wedding

text: Lyla, who reveals she is separated, goes to the hospital and, after passing out briefly, sees her 29-year-old brother Jared, an obstetrician. They talk and it is revealed that he is a virgin and is waiting for the "right one". Back at home, Alejandro tells Ellie that his mother Madonna is coming to the wedding. Explaining that since she is a devout Catholic and doesn't believe in divorce, Alejandro asks Ellie and Don to pretend to be married for the next three days. Hearing this, Bebe becomes upset with Don and leaves the house. Madonna arrives with Alejandro's biological 20-year-old sister, Nuria. Later, Nuria flirts with Jared, after she brazenly strips naked to skinnydip in the family's lake as he watches.


title: The Big Wedding

text: That evening, the family goes out to dinner with Missy and her parents Muffin and Barry, and Bebe shows up as their waitress, which surprises everyone. Meanwhile, Nuria starts fondling Jared under the table, and Ellie sees Nuria giving Jared a handjob. She takes Nuria to the restroom for a chat, telling her that American women behave differently with men. When they arrive home, Jared tells Nuria he wants to have sex, as she had suggested earlier, but she tells him "No", asking him instead to do romantic things for her such as read her poetry. Don and Ellie, meanwhile, end up having sex after Ellie, still pretending to be Don's wife, sleeps in Don's room.


title: The Big Wedding

text: Ellie and Madonna go for a walk in the woods and talk. Neither understands the other's language, though they think they are communicating on some level. At the same time, Don and Lyla talk privately and Lyla reveals she is pregnant. On the wedding day, before the ceremony, Don tells Bebe he had sex with Ellie. Bebe says she forgives them but then punches him in the face. She also reveals that Ellie cheated on Don with Missy's father before Don cheated on her. Muffin says that she knows about Ellie and Barry, and tells them that she is bisexual, implying that she is interested in a sexual affair with both Bebe and Ellie. Meanwhile, Missy and Alejandro have decided to get married on the family dock to escape the chaos. The family runs after them and, after some of them fall into the lake, the wedding reception is on.


title: The Big Wedding

text: During the reception, Jared goes upstairs to talk to Nuria, who tells him she has decided to no longer follow Ellie's advice (about not being so available sexually), and they sleep together. Back at the reception, Ellie and Bebe have made up. Don surprises Bebe by proposing to her, and they get married on the spot. Lyla's husband Andrew arrives at the wedding and, upon finding out that Lyla is pregnant, reconciles with her. Alejandro's mother realizes she has been lied to about his family and he runs after her as she starts to leave. But she reveals that her own past was not as pure as he thought, that she too had lied to protect him, and she forgives him.


title: The Big Wedding

text: Time passes and it is revealed that Lyla has had a daughter named Jane, as Don attaches a plaque with her name to their family tree.


title: The Big Wedding

text: The film was previously titled "The Wedding". It is an American remake of the original 2006 French film, "" (My brother is getting married), which was written by Jean-Stéphane Bron and Karine Sudan.


title: The Big Wedding

text: Principal photography took place in Greenwich, Connecticut. Locations included St. Agnes Church in Greenwich, Christ Church, Greenwich, Gabriele's Italian Steakhouse, and a private home in the town's Stanwich section.


title: The Big Wedding

text: Director Justin Zackham and producer Clay Pecorin appeared on a season 6 episode of TLC's "Cake Boss". They ordered the wedding cake for the film from Buddy Valastro at Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey.


title: The Big Wedding

text: In reference to the scene where her character jumps into a lake naked, Ana Ayora said, "There was definitely a little bit of anxiousness, but that was Nuria. Nuria wouldn't hesitate, so I didn't hesitate."


title: The Big Wedding

text: The film received largely negative reviews. "The Big Wedding" holds an 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 111 reviews, with an average rating of 3.19/10. The website's critical consensus states, ""The Big Wedding"s all-star cast is stranded in a contrived, strained plot that features broad stabs at humor but few laughs." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 28/100 based on reviews from 32 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". One observer pointed out that "The Big Wedding"s reviews are among the worst of the year. Lou Lumenick of the "New York Post" wrote, "'I'd rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!' De Niro exclaims at one point. I'm not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I'd like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch "The Big Wedding"."


title: The Big Wedding

text: According to business outlets, the movie "was a massive flop at theaters", even though it recouped its production costs by a few million dollars. It opened with box-office receipts of $7.5 million at 2,633 North American locations, leading one observer to state, "Expect domestic exhibitors to file for divorce in the very near future." Another commentator stated that "There's little reason to suspect it will stick around any longer than theater owners are contractually obligated to keep it."


title: The Big Wedding

text: Heigl was nominated for Worst Supporting Actress at the 34th Golden Raspberry Awards in 2013, where she lost to Kim Kardashian for "".


title: Shusha

text: Shusha (, ) or Shushi () is a city in Azerbaijan, in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Situated at an altitude of 1,400–1,800 metres (4,600–5,900 ft) in the Karabakh mountains, the city was a mountain resort in the Soviet era.


title: Shusha

text: Most sources date Shusha's establishment to the 1750s by Panah Ali Khan, founder of the Karabakh Khanate, coinciding with the foundation of the fortress of Shusha. Some attribute this to an alliance between Panah Ali Khan and Melik Shahnazar, the local Armenian prince () of Varanda. In these accounts, the name of the town originated from a nearby Armenian village called Shosh or Shushikent (see for alternative explanations). Conversely, some sources describe Shusha as an important center within the self-governing Armenian melikdoms of Karabakh in the 1720s, and others say the plateau was already the site of an Armenian fortification. From the mid-18th century to 1822, Shusha was the capital of the Karabakh Khanate. The town became one of the cultural centers of the South Caucasus after the Russian conquest of the Caucasus region from Qajar Iran in the first half of the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, the town grew in size to become a city, and was home to many Armenian and Azerbaijani intellectuals, poets, writers and musicians (including Azerbaijani ashiks, mugham singers and kobuz players).


title: Shusha

text: The town has religious, cultural and strategic importance to both groups. Shusha is often considered the cradle of Azerbaijan's music and poetry, and one of the leading centres of the Azerbaijani culture. Shusha also contains a number of Armenian Apostolic churches, including Ghazanchetsots Cathedral and Kanach Zham, and serves as a land link between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, via the Lachin corridor to the west. Throughout modern history, the city fostered a mixed Armenian–Azerbaijani population. The first available demographic information about the city in 1823 suggests the city had an Azerbaijani majority. The Armenian inhabitants of the city steadily grew over time to constitute a majority of the city's population until the Shusha massacre in 1920, in which the Armenian half of the city was destroyed by Azerbaijani forces, resulting in the death or expulsion of the Armenian population, up to 20,000 people.


title: Shusha

text: The city has suffered significant destruction and depopulation during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. After the capture of Shusha in 1992 by Armenian forces during First Nagorno-Karabakh War, the city's Azerbaijani population fled, and most of the city was destroyed. Between May 1992 and November 2020, Shusha was under the "de facto" control of the breakaway Republic of Artsakh and administered as the centre of its Shushi Province. On 8 November 2020, Azerbaijani forces retook the city during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War following a three-day long battle. The Armenian population of the city fled, and multiple reports emerged that the Armenian cultural heritage of the city was being destroyed.


title: Shusha

text: Several historians believe Shusha derives from the New Persian "Shīsha" ("glass, vessel, bottle, flask"). According to the "Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names", when Iranian ruler Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar approached the town with his army, he reportedly told the ruler of Karabakh Ibrahim Khalil Khan:


title: Shusha

text: "Panahabad" ("City of Panah"), Shusha's previous name, was a tribute to Panah Ali Khan, the first ruler of the Karabakh Khanate.


title: Shusha

text: According to the "Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary", published in the final decades of the Russian Empire, the town's name comes from the nearby village Shushikent (called "Shosh" in Armenian), which literally means "Shusha village" in the Azerbaijani language. Conversely, the Armenian historian Leo (1860–1932) considered it more likely that the village Shosh received its name from the fortress, which he considered the older settlement.


title: Shusha

text: According to Armenian sources, the name Shusha most likely derives from the dialectal Armenian word "shosh"/"shush" (Armenian: շոշ/շուշ), meaning tree sprout or, figuratively, a high place, first applied either to the adjacent village Shosh or to Shusha itself. The form "Shusha" can also be explained as the genitive form of "shosh"/"shush", as "-a" or "-ay" is a common declensional ending for placenames in pre-modern and dialectal Armenian. One folk etymology connects it to another definition of "shosh" in the Karabakh dialect derived from Russian "shosse", meaning street or highway, although this is unlikely because the names Shusha and Shosh are older than Russian influence on the Armenian language.


title: Shusha

text: In the first written reference to the settlement in a 15th-century Armenian manuscript, the name is rendered as "Shushu". Besides the common Armenian name Shushi, the town has historically been referred to in Armenian by various names, including "Shoshi/Shushva Berd", "Shoshi Sghnakh", "Shoshvaghala", which all mean "Shosh/Shushi Fortress".


title: Shusha

text: A settlement at Shusha is first recorded in a 15th-century illustrated Armenian gospel kept on display at Yerevan's Matenadaran (archival number 8211), which mentions a "Shushu village". The gospel was written by the scribe and artist Ter-Manuel in 1428, and is the earliest known artifact from the town.


title: Shusha

text: Some Armenian sources identify Shusha with a fortress called "Shikakʻar" or "Kʻaraglukh", where the 9th-century Armenian prince Sahl Smbatean is said to have defeated an invading Arab army. According to several sources, a settlement called Shosh served as an ancient fortress in the Armenian principality of Varanda, and had traditionally belonged to the Melik-Shahnazarian princely dynasty. The fortress was described as a strategic stronghold in one of the Eastern Armenian military districts, called "sghnakhs", playing a key role in the Armenian commander Avan Yuzbashi's campaign against Ottoman forces during their incursion into of the South Caucasus in the 1720s and 1730s. Armenian historian and Shusha native Ashot Hovhannisian wrote that the fortress walls must have been built by Avan Yuzbashi in 1724, if not earlier.


title: Shusha

text: Kehva Chelebi, an early Armenian national activist who maintained correspondence between the meliks of Karabakh and the Russian authorities, in a 1725 report describes Shusha as a town and a fort:


title: Shusha

text: 19th-century Georgian scholar Alexander Tsagareli's work "Letters and other historical documents of the 18th century regarding Georgia, Vol. 1" contains a 1769 letter by Georgian king Erekle II to Russian diplomat Count P. Panin, which states that there was "an ancient fortress in the realm of the Khamsa [melikdoms]" which was "conquered, through deceit" by "one Muslim man from the Jevanshir tribe." The same information about the ancient fortress is confirmed by the Russian field marshal Alexander Suvorov in a letter to Prince Grigory Potemkin. Suvorov writes that the Armenian prince Melik Shahnazar of Varanda surrendered his fortress Shushikala to "certain Panah", whom he calls "chief of an unimportant part of nomadic Muslims living near the Karabakh borders." When discussing Karabakh and Shusha in the 18th century, the Russian diplomat and historian S. M. Bronevskiy writes in his "Historical Notes" that Shusha fortress was a possession of the Melik-Shahnazarian clan, which was given to Panah Ali Khan in return for aid against the other Armenian meliks of Karabakh. Russian historian P. G. Butkov (1775–1857) writes that "Shushi village" was given to Panah Ali Khan by the Melik-Shahnazarian prince after they entered into an alliance, and that Panah Ali Khan fortified the village. The missionary Joseph Wolff (1795–1862), during his mission in the Middle East, visited "Shushee, in the province of Carabagh, in Armenia Major".


title: Shusha

text: Some sources, including Mirza Jamal Javanshir, Mirza Adigozal bey, Abbasgulu Bakikhanov and Mirza Yusuf Nersesov, attest to the foundation of the town in 1750–1752 (according to other sources, 1756–1757) by Panah Ali Khan (), the founder and the first ruler of the Karabakh Khanate (1748–1822), which comprised both Lowland and Highland Karabakh. The mid-18th century foundation is supported by the second edition of the "Encyclopaedia of Islam", and the "Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary".


title: Shusha

text: According to Mirza Jamal Javanshir, the author of the Persian-language text "History of Karabakh", one of the most significant chronicles on the history of Karabakh in 18th-19th centuries, the Karabakh nobility assembled to discuss the danger of invasion from Iran and told Panah Ali Khan, "We must build among the impassable mountains such an inviolable and inaccessible fort, so that no strong enemy could take it." Melik Shahnazar of Varanda, who was the first of the Armenian "meliks" (dukes) to accept the suzerainty of Panah Ali Khan and who would remain his loyal supporter, suggested a location for the new fortress. Thus, Panahabad-Shusha was founded.


title: Shusha

text: According to Mirza Jamal Javanshir, before Panah Ali Khan constructed the fortress there were no buildings there and it was used as cropland and pasture by the people of the nearby village of Shoshi. Panah khan resettled to Shusha the population of Shahbulag and some nearby villages and built strong fortifications.


title: Shusha

text: Another account is presented by Raffi (1835–1888), an Armenian novelist and historian, in his work "The Princedoms of Khamsa", which asserts that the place where Shushi was built was desolate and uninhabited before Panah Ali Khan's arrival. He states, "[Panah-Ali Khan and Melik-Shahnazar of Varanda] soon completed the construction (1762) [of the fortress] and moved the Armenian population of the nearby village of Shosh (Շոշ), called also Shoshi, or Shushi into the fortress.″


title: Shusha

text: Although Panah Ali Khan had been in conflict with Nader Shah, the new ruler of Persia, Adil Shah, issued a "firman (decree)" recognizing Panah Ali as the Khan of Karabakh. Less than a year after Shusha was founded, the Karabakh Khanate was attacked by Mohammad Hassan Khan Qajar, one of the major claimants to the Iranian throne. During the Safavid Empire Karabakh was for almost two centuries ruled by Ziyad-oglu family of the clan of Qajars (of Turkic origin), and therefore, Muhammed Hassan Khan considered Karabakh his hereditary estate.


title: Shusha

text: Muhammed Hassan Khan besieged Shusha (Panahabad at that time) but soon had to retreat because of the attack on his territory by his major opponent, Karim Khan Zand. His retreat was so hasty that he even left his cannons under the walls of Shusha fortress. Panah Ali Khan counterattacked the retreating troops of Mohammad Hassan khan and even briefly took Ardabil across the Aras River.


title: Shusha

text: In 1756 (or 1759), Shusha and the Karabakh Khanate underwent a new attack from Fath-Ali Khan Afshar, ruler of Urmia. With his 30,000 strong army, Fath-Ali Khan also managed to gain support from the "meliks" of Jraberd and Talish (Gulistan), however, Melik Shahnazar of Varanda continued to support Panah Ali Khan. The Siege of Shusha lasted for six months and Fath-Ali Khan eventually had to retreat.


title: Shusha

text: When Karim Khan Zand took control of much of Iran, he forced Panah Ali Khan to come to Shiraz (capital of Zand-ruled Iran), where he died as a hostage. Panah Ali Khan's son Ibrahim Khalil Khan was sent back to Karabakh as governor. Under him, the Karabakh Khanate became one of the strongest state formations and Shusha grew. According to travellers who visited Shusha at the end of 18th-early 19th centuries the town had about 2,000 houses and approximately 10,000 population.


title: Shusha

text: In summer 1795, Shusha was subjected to a major attack by Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar, son of Mohammad Hassan Khan who had attacked Shusha in 1752. Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar's goal was to end with the feudal fragmentation and to restore the old Safavid State in Iran. By early 1795, he had already secured mainland Iran and was directly afterwards poised to bring the entire Caucasus region back within the Iranian domains. For this purpose he also wanted to proclaim himself Shah of Iran. However, according to the Safavid tradition, the shah had to take control over the whole of South Caucasus and Dagestan before his coronation. Therefore, the Karabakh Khanate and its fortified capital Shusha were the first and major obstacle to achieve these ends.


title: Shusha

text: Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar besieged Shusha with the centre part of a 70,000-strong army, after having crossed the Aras River. The right and left wings were sent to resubjugate Shirvan-Dagestan and Erivan respectively. Agha Mohammad Khan himself led the centre part of the main army, besieging Shusha between 8 July and 9 August 1795. Ibrahim Khalil khan mobilized the population for a long-term defense. The number of militia in Shusha reached 15,000. Women fought together with men. The Armenian population of Karabakh also actively participated in this struggle against the Iranians and fought side by side with the Muslim population, jointly organizing ambushes in the mountains and forests.


title: Shusha

text: The siege lasted for 33 days. Not being able to capture Shusha, Agha Mohammad Khan ceased the siege and advanced to Tiflis (present-day Tbilisi), which despite desperate resistance was occupied and exposed to unprecedented destruction. Ibrahim Khalil Khan eventually surrendered to Mohammad Khan after negotiations, including the paying of regular tribute and to surrender hostages, although the Qajar forces were still denied entrance to Shusha. Since the main objective was Georgia, Mohammad Khan was willing to have Karabakh secured by this agreement for now, for he and his army subsequently moved further.


title: Shusha

text: In 1797, Agha Mohammad Shah Qajar, having successfully resubjugated Georgia and the wider Caucasus and having declared himself shah, decided to carry out a second attack on Karabakh.


title: Shusha

text: Trying to avenge his previous humiliating defeat, Agha Mohammad Shah devastated the surrounding villages near Shusha. The population had not recovered from the previous 1795 attack and also suffered from a serious drought which lasted for three years. The artillery of the attackers also inflicted serious losses on the city defenders. Thus, in 1797 Agha Mohammad Shah succeeded in seizing Shusha and Ibrahim Khalil Khan had to flee to Dagestan.


title: Shusha

text: However, several days after the seizure of Shusha, Agha Mohammad Khan was killed in mysterious circumstances by his bodyguards in the town. Ibrahim Khalil Khan returned to Shusha and ordered that the shah's body be honourably buried until further instructions from the nephew and heir of Agha Mohammad Shah, Baba Khan, who soon assumed the title of Fath-Ali Shah. Ibrahim Khan, in order to maintain peaceful relations with Tehran and retain his position as the Khan of Karabakh, gave his daughter Agha Begom, known as Aghabaji, as one of the wives of the new shah.


title: Shusha

text: From the early 19th century, Russian ambitions in the Caucasus to increase its territories at the expense of neighbouring Qajar Iran and Ottoman Turkey began to rise. Following the annexation of Georgia in 1801, some of the khanates agreed to become Russian protectorates in the immediate years afterwards. In 1804, the Russian general Pavel Tsitsianov directly invaded Qajar Iran, initiating the Russo-Persian War of 1804–1813. Amidst the war, in 1805, an agreement was made between the Karabakh Khanate and the Russian Empire on the transfer of the Karabakh Khanate to Russia during the war, but was not fully realized, as both parties were still at war and the Russians were unable to consolidate any effective control over Karabakh.


title: Shusha

text: The Russian Empire consolidated its power in the Karabakh Khanate following the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, when Iran was forced to recognize the Karabakh Khanate, along most of the other khanates they possessed in the Caucasus, as belonging to Russia, comprising present-day Dagestan and most of the modern-day Republic of Azerbaijan, while officially ceding Georgia as well, thus irrevocably losing the greater part of its Caucasian territories. Absolute consolidation of Russian power over Karabakh and the recently conquered parts of the Caucasus from Iran were confirmed with the outcome of the Russo-Persian War of 1826–1828 and the ensuing Treaty of Turkmenchay of 1828.


title: Shusha

text: During the Russo-Persian War of 1826–1828, the citadel at Shusha held out for several months and never fell. After this Shusha ceased to be a capital of a khanate, which was dissolved in 1822, and instead became an administrative capital first of the Karabakh province (1822–1840), and then of the Shusha Uyezd of the Elisabethpol Governorate (1840–1923). Shusha grew and developed, with successive waves of migrants moving to the city, particularly Armenians, who formed a demographic majority in the surrounding highlands.


title: Shusha

text: Beginning from the 1830s the town was divided into two parts: Turkic-speaking Muslims lived in the eastern lower quarters, while Armenian Christians settled in the relatively new western upper quarters of the town. The Muslim part of the town was divided into seventeen quarters. Each quarter had its own mosque, Turkish bath, water-spring and also a quarter representative, who would be elected from among the elders ("aksakals") and would function similarly to the head of a modern-day municipality. The Armenian part of the town consisted of 12 quarters, five churches, a town and district school and a girls' seminary.


title: Shusha

text: The population of the town primarily dealt with trade, horse-breeding, carpet-weaving and wine and vodka production. Shusha was also the biggest centre of silk production in the Caucasus. Most of the Muslim population of the town and of Karabakh, in general, was engaged in sheep and horse-breeding and therefore, had a semi-nomadic lifestyle, spending wintertime in lowland Karabakh in wintering pastures and spring and summer in summering pastures in Shusha and other mountainous parts.


title: Shusha

text: In the 19th century, Shusha was one of the great cities of the Caucasus, larger and more prosperous than either Baku or Yerevan. Standing in the middle of a net of caravan routes, it had ten caravanserais. It was well known for its silk trade, its paved roads, brightly coloured carpets, big stone houses, and fine-bred horses. In 1824, George Keppel, the Earl of Albemarle, passed through the city. He found two thousand houses in the town, with three-quarters of the inhabitants Azerbaijanis and one-quarter Armenian. He furthermore noted regarding the town;


title: Shusha

text: The beginning of the 20th century marked the first Armenian-Tartar clashes throughout Azerbaijan. This new phenomenon had two causes. Firstly, it was the result of increased tensions between the local Muslim population and Armenians, whose numbers increased throughout the 19th century as a result of Russian resettlement policies. Secondly, by the beginning of the 20th-century, the peoples of the Caucasus, similar to other non-Russian peoples in the periphery of the Russian Empire, began to seek cultural and territorial autonomy. Political instability within Russia, particularly the 1905 Revolution and 1917 Revolutions, caused these social movements to acquire the character of national liberation movements.


title: Shusha

text: The initial clashes between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis took place in Baku in February 1905. Soon, the conflict spilled over to other parts of the Caucasus, and on August 5, 1905, first conflict between the Armenian and Azerbaijani inhabitants of Shusha took place. As a result of the mutual pogroms and killings, hundreds of people died and more than 200 houses were burned.


title: Shusha

text: After World War I and subsequent collapse of the Russian Empire, Karabakh was claimed by Azerbaijan to be part of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, a decision hotly disputed by neighbouring Armenia and by Karabakh's Armenian population, which claimed Karabakh as part of the First Republic of Armenia. With the capture of Baku, a small force of Turkish troops entered Shusha on 7 October 1918, also occupying the road to Aghdam. Whilst the Armenians of Shusha did not resist the Turks to avoid violence, the Turks with their limited troops were unable to seize the countryside of Karabakh which was held by an armed milita of local Armenians. After the defeat of Ottoman Empire in the World War I, Armenian forces under Andranik Ozanian defeated Azerbaijani forces under Khosrov bey Sultanov in Abdallyar (Lachin), and began heading down the Lachin corridor towards Shusha. Shortly before Andranik could arrive, British troops under General W. M. Thomson encouraged him to retreat, out of concerns that Armenian military activity could have an adverse effect on the region's status, which was to be decided at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Trusting Thomson, Andranik left, and British troops occupied Karabakh. The British command provisionally affirmed Sultanov (appointed by the Azerbaijani government) as the governor-general of Karabakh and Zangezur, pending the final decision by the Paris Peace Conference.


title: Shusha

text: Ethnic conflict began to erupt in the region. Оn 5 June 1919, 600 Armenian inhabitants of the villages surrounding Shusha were massacred by Azerbaijani and Kurdish irregulars. Sultanov stated that the irregulars were not under his control. In August 1919, the Karabakh National Council was forced to enter into a provisional treaty agreement with the Azerbaijani government, recognizing the authority of the Azerbaijan government until the issue of the mountainous part of Karabakh was settled at the Paris Peace Conference. Despite signing the agreement, the Azerbaijani government continuously violated the terms of the treaty, and Sultanov employed severe measures against them, such as terror, blockade and famine. Sultanov gathered troops in the region and on 19 February 1920 issued an ultimatum to the Armenians, demanding they accept unconditional unification with Azerbaijan, and then massacred the population of several Armenian villages, including Khankendi (Stepanakert). A minority of Karabagh National Council representatives gathered in Shusha to accept Sultanov's demands, while the rest met in nearby Shushikend to reject the ultimatum. The strife culminated in an Armenian uprising, which was suppressed by the Azerbaijani army. In late March 1920, the Armenian half of the police forces was reported by a British journalist to have murdered the Azerbaijani half during the latter's traditional Novruz Bayram holiday celebrations. The Armenian surprise attack was organised and coordinated by the forces of the Armenian Republic. Azerbaijani outrage for this surprise attack ultimately led to the massacre and expulsion of the Armenian population in March 1920, in which 500–8,000 to 20,000 Armenians were killed, others were forced to flee, and the Armenian half of the city, 1,675 of 1,700 homes, were destroyed. A report from Dashnak archives states that 8,000 Armenians escaped from the city, whilst 5,000–6,000 remained behind.


title: Shusha

text: Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote about Shusha in the 1920s, "in this town, which formerly of course was healthy and with every amenity, the picture of catastrophe and massacres was terribly visual. ... They say after the massacres all the wells were full of dead bodies. ... We didn't see anyone in the streets on the mountain. Only in downtown—in the market-square, there were a lot of people, but there wasn't any Armenian among them; all were Muslims".


title: Shusha

text: In 1920, the Bolshevik 11th Red Army invaded Azerbaijan and then Armenia and put an end to the national de facto governments that existed in those two countries. Thereafter, the conflict for the control of Karabakh entered the diplomatic sphere. To attract Armenian public support, the Bolsheviks promised to resolve the issue of the disputed territories, including Karabakh, in favour of Armenia. However, on July 5, 1921, the Kavbiuro of the Communist Party adopted the following decision regarding the future status of Karabakh: "Proceeding from the necessity of national peace among Muslims and Armenians and of the economic ties between upper (mountainous) and lower Karabakh, of its permanent ties with Azerbaijan, mountainous Karabakh is to remain within AzSSR, receiving wide regional autonomy with the administrative centre in Shusha, which is to be included in the autonomous region." As a result, the Mountainous Karabakh Autonomous Region was established within the Azerbaijan SSR in 1923. A few years later, Stepanakert, named after the Armenian communist leader Stepan Shaumyan, became the new regional capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and soon became its largest town.


title: Shusha

text: The decision make Nagorno-Karabakh an autonomous region within Azerbaijan is frequently attributed to Joseph Stalin, who was Commissar of Nationalities at the time, purportedly with the purpose of ensuring Moscow's position as power broker between the Armenian and Azerbaijani SSRs. Stalin participated in the Kavbiuro's meetings on the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh but did not vote.


title: Shusha

text: The town remained half-ruined until the 1960s when the town began to gradually revive due to its recreational potential. In 1977 the Shusha State Historical and Architectural Reserve was established and the town became one of the major resort-towns in the former USSR.


title: Shusha

text: The Armenian quarter continued to lie in ruins until the beginning of the 1960s. In 1961, Baku's communist leadership finally passed a decision to clear away much of the ruins, even though many old buildings still could have been renovated. Three Armenian and one Russian church were demolished and the Armenian part of the town was built up with plain buildings typical of the Khrushchev era.


title: Shusha

text: With the start of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1988 Shusha became the most important Azerbaijani stronghold in Karabakh, from where Azerbaijani forces constantly shelled the capital Stepanakert for half a year, leading to hundreds of Armenian civilian casualties and causing mass destruction in Stepanakert. On May 9, 1992, the town was captured by Armenian forces in an operation to lift the siege of Stepanakert and the Azerbaijani population fled. According to Armenian commander Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan, the city was looted and burnt by Armenian citizens from nearby Stepanakert, who had endured months of bombing and shelling from Azerbaijani forces. He also noted it was part of a Karabakh Armenian superstition of burning houses to prevent the enemy from returning. A British journalist witnessed Armenian soldiers using minarets of a mosque in Shusha as shooting targets. As of 2002, ten years later after the city's capture by the Armenian forces, some 80% of the town was in ruins. Armenians also dismantled and sold off historic dark bronze busts of three Azerbaijani musicians and poets from Shusha. Another British journalist who visited Shusha in 1997 reported that the gravestones in the Azerbaijani cemetery on the edge of town were "methodically smashed and vandalised".


title: Shusha

text: After the end of the war, the town was repopulated by Armenians, mostly refugees from Azerbaijan and other parts of Karabakh, as well as members of the Armenian diaspora. The population of the town was significantly less than the pre-war number, and the demographic of the town had changed from mostly Azerbaijani to completely Armenian. The Goris-Stepanakert Highway passes through the town and is a transit and tourist destination for many. There were some hotels in the city, and cultural monuments such as the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral and the Yukhari Govhar Agha Mosque were restored by Armenian authorities.


title: Shusha

text: After the war, a T-72 tank commanded by the Karabakhi Armenian Gagik Avsharian was placed as a memorial. The tank had been hit during the town's capture, killing the driver and gun operator, but Avsharian jumped free from the hatch. The tank was restored and its number, 442, repainted in white on the side.


title: Shusha

text: During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Armenia accused the Azerbaijani army of shelling civilian areas and the city's Ghazanchetsots Cathedral. Three journalists were wounded while they were inside the cathedral to film the destruction of a previous shelling on the same day. Azerbaijani Ministry of Defence has denied the shelling of the cathedral by stating that "destruction of the church in Shusha has nothing to do with the activities of the Army of Azerbaijan" The House of Culture was also badly damaged in the fighting.


title: Shusha

text: On November 8, 2020, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced that the Azerbaijani army took control of the city of Shusha. The next day, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defence released a video from the city, confirming full Azerbaijani control. On the same day, Artsakh authorities confirmed that they had lost control of Shusha. A ceasefire signed two days later reaffirmed Azerbaijan's gains, resulting in the city staying under its control. The Armenian government and the Armenian Apostolic Church subsequently claimed that Azerbaijani soldiers had vandalised Armenian churches and cultural landmarks, including Ghazanchetsots Cathedral and Kanach Zham, which was supported by reports from FreedomHouse and CaucasusHeritageWatch. Azerbaijani officials claimed that the Mamayi Mosque and a nearby fountain was vandalised by the Armenians forces.


title: Shusha

text: Shusha contains both Armenian and Azerbaijani cultural monuments, while the surrounding territories also include many ancient Armenian villages.


title: Shusha

text: Shusha is often considered the cradle of Azerbaijan's music and poetry and one of the leading centres of the Azerbaijani culture, having been declared the cultural capital of Azerbaijan in January 2021. The city is particularly renowned for its traditional Azerbaijani genre of vocal and instrumental arts called mugham. For the Azerbaijanis, Shusha is the "conservatoire of the Caucasus". Khurshidbanu Natavan, Azerbaijan's most famous woman poet, composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov, opera singer Bulbul and one of Azerbaijan's first twentieth-century novelists, Yusif Vezir Chemenzeminli, were born here. Molla Panah Vagif, a prominent Azerbaijani poet and vizier of the Karabakh khanate, lived and died in Shusha. Vagif Poetry Days were held in Shusha annually since 1982. The tradition was resumed in 2021.


title: Shusha

text: Shusha is also a historical Armenian religious and cultural center. The Armenian population of the town historically had four main churches, each named after the place of origin of the Armenian inhabitants: Ghazanchetsots (after Qazançı; officially named Holy Savior Cathedral), Aguletsos Holy Mother of God Church (after Agulis), Meghretsots Holy Mother of God Church (after Meghri), and Gharabakhtsots (after the region of Karabakh; the church is better known as Kanach Zham). Shusha was also home to a monastery complex called Kusanats Vank ("Virgins' Monastery") or Anapat Kusanats ("Virgins' Hermitage")․ In 1989, Ghazanchetsots Cathedral was made the seat of the newly reestablished Diocese of Artsakh of the Armenian Apostolic Church.


title: Shusha

text: Shusha serves an important role in the history of Armenian music, being the hometown and headquarters of Armenian composer Grikor Suni and his chorus. Suni was an instrumental figure in establishing the national identity of Armenian music and considered one of the many founders of modern Armenian music. In addition, the Khandamirian or Shushi theater which opened in 1891 would become regionally famous for its important contributions to the Armenian cultural arts, especially music. In the Khandamirian theater, Suni gave his first ever performance. By 1902, Suni had organized his Oriental Cultural Ensemble in Shusha and had their first big concert which would get them in trouble with Russian authorities forcing the ensemble out of Shusha where they went on to spread Armenian cultural music around the world. Shusha was also the hometown of Arev Baghdasaryan, the prominent Armenian singer, dancer, and People's Artist of the Armenian SSR.


title: Shusha

text: Shusha is also well known for sileh rugs, floor coverings from the South Caucasus. Those from the Caucasus may have been woven in the vicinity of Shusha. A similar Eastern Anatolian type usually shows a different range of colours.


title: Shusha

text: In November 2020, the organizers of the Turkvision Song Contest stated that they were exploring the possibility of holding the contest's 2021 version in Shusha, and in January 2021, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Culture started preparatory activities on the Khari Bulbul Festival and Days of the Poetry of Vagif.


title: Shusha

text: During the Soviet period, Shusha was home to museums such as the Shusha Museum of History, the house museum of Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov, the house museum of the Azerbaijani singer Bulbul, and the Shusha Carpet Museum. The Azerbaijan State Museum of History of Karabakh was founded in Shusha in 1991 shortly before the outbreak of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.


title: Shusha

text: While the city was under Armenian control, a number of museums were operated there: the State Museum of Fine Arts, G. A. Gabrielyants State Geological Museum, the Shushi History Museum, the Shushi Carpet Museum and the Shushi Art Gallery.


title: Shusha

text: The Shushi History Museum is located in a 19th-century mansion, in the centre of the historical quarter, and had a collection of artefacts related to Shusha from ancient to modern times. The collection of the museum contains many ethnographic materials, including the goods of local masters. The museum contains household articles, photographs, and reproductions illustrating life of 19th-century inhabitants of Shusha. There are also sections dedicated to the 1920 Shusha Massacre and the capture of Shusha by Armenian forces in 1992. The G. A. Gabrielyants State Geological Museum, named after and created by Armenian geologist Grigori Gabrielyants, was opened in the building of Taza Mahalla Mosque in Shusha in 2014. It contains 480 samples of ore and fossil from 47 countries of the world.


title: Shusha

text: Except for the rugs kept at the Shushi Carpet Museum, which were removed, the collections of the museums in Shusha were left behind and remained in the city after the capture of Shusha by Azerbaijani forces in 2020.


title: Shusha

text: In August 2021, satellite images released by Caucasus Heritage Watch (a watchdog group of researchers from Purdue and Cornell) revealed that between April 10 and June 5, 51 sculptures in the park of the Museum of Fine Arts were removed and the area completely cleared: "CHW is concerned about the condition of these artworks, which are the property of that museum. CHW asks Azerbaijani authorities to disclose the location of the confiscated sculptures and plans for public access" read the Facebook page of the organization.


title: Shusha

text: According to the first Russian-held census of 1823 conducted by Russian officials Yermolov and Mogilevsky, in Shusha were 1,111 (72.5%) Muslim families and 421 (27.5%) Armenian families. Seven years later, according to 1830 data, the number of Muslim families in Shusha decreased to 963 (55.8%) and the number of Armenian families increased to 762 (44.2%).


title: Shusha

text: George Keppel, the Earl of Albemarle, who wrote on his way back to England from India arrived in Karabakh from Persia in 1824, wrote that “Sheesha contains two thousand houses: three parts of the inhabitants are Tartars (i.e. Azerbaijanis), and the remainder Armenians”.


title: Shusha

text: A survey prepared by the Russian imperial authorities in 1823 shows that all Armenians of Karabakh compactly resided in its highland portion, i.e. on the territory of the five traditional Armenian principalities, and constituted an absolute demographic majority on those lands. The survey's more than 260 pages recorded that the five districts had 57 Armenian villages and seven Tatar villages.


title: Shusha

text: The 19th century also brought some alterations to the ethnic demographics of the region. Following the invasions from Iran (Persia), Russo-Persian wars and subjection of Karabakh khanate to Russia, many Muslim families emigrated to Iran while many Armenians moved to Shusha.


title: Shusha

text: By the end of the 1880s, the percentage of the Muslim population living in the Shusha district (part of the earlier Karabakh province) decreased even further and constituted only 41.5%, while the percentage of the Armenian population living in the same district increased to 58.2% in 1886.


title: Shusha

text: By the second half of the 19th century, Shusha had become the largest town in the Karabakh region. However, after the pogrom against the Armenian population in 1920 and the burning of the town, out-migration, and its decreasing economic importance in relation to other regional cities like Yerevan and Baku, Shusha was reduced to a small provincial town of some 10,000 people. Its population afterward progressively dropped year by year, reaching 5,104 by 1926. Armenians did not begin to return until after World War II. It was not until the 1960s that the Armenian quarter began to be rebuilt.


title: Shusha

text: According to the last population census in 1989, the town of Shusha had a population of 17,000 and Shusha district had a population of 23,000. 91.7% of the population of Shusha district and 98% of Shusha town were Azerbaijani.


title: Shusha

text: Following the capture of Shusha by the Armenian forces in 1992, the Azerbaijani population of the town, consisting of 15,000 people, was killed and expulsed. Before the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, the population consisted of over 4,000 Armenians, mainly refugees from Baku, and other parts of Karabakh and Azerbaijan. As a result of the first war, no Azerbaijanis live in Shusha today, although Azerbaijani authorities plan to repopulate it with Azerbaijani displaced persons who fled Shusha during the first war. Shusha's Armenian population fled shortly before the city was recaptured by Azerbaijani forces during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War.


title: Shusha

text: While the town was under Armenian control, there were efforts to revive the city's economy by the Shushi Revival Fund, the ArmeniaFund, and by the government of Artsakh. Investment in tourism led to the opening of the Shushi Hotel, the Avan Shushi Plaza Hotel and the Shushi Grand Hotel. A tourist information office was also opened, the first in the Republic of Artsakh. The two remaining Armenian churches (Ghazanchetsots and Kanach Zham) were renovated, and schools, museums and the Naregatsi Arts Institute have opened.


title: Shusha

text: After retaking the town, Azerbaijani authorities renovated and inaugurated Khari Bulbul and Karabakh hotels. In August 2021, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev laid foundation stone for Hotel and Conference Center in Shusha.


title: TimTheTatman

text: Timothy John Betar (born April 8, 1990), better known as TimTheTatman, is an American live streamer and internet personality on YouTube.


title: TimTheTatman

text: Betar started streaming on Twitch in 2012 and has amassed over seven million followers since. Broadcasting games such as "", "Overwatch", "Fortnite", and "World of Warcraft", the variety channel attracts thousands of viewers each day.


title: TimTheTatman

text: Betar is a Monster Energy esports athlete and is also sponsored by Audio-Technica He was a certified Twitch partner and has been a full-time creator since March 2014. After joining YouTube on January 23, 2011, the channel has grown to 3.2 million subscribers with videos viewed over 524 million times.


title: TimTheTatman

text: With the release of Epic Games's "Fortnite" in July 2017, Twitch stream viewership skyrocketed. The game streamed nearly 151 million hours during the first month of release. Streamers such as Betar, Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, and Turner "Tfue" Tenney, saw a steady increase in followers as the game grew in popularity.


title: TimTheTatman

text: During E3 2018, Epic Games held its first-ever Fortnite Celebrity Pro-Am, which paired up celebrities with professional gamers to raise money for charity. Betar teamed up with Mack Wilds for the event. Betar won the award for Fan Favorite Male Streamer/Gamer of the Year at the 2018 Gamers' Choice Awards.


title: TimTheTatman

text: Betar appeared a National Football League commercial during Super Bowl LIII along with Peyton Manning, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and Marshawn Lynch. In September 2021, Betar announced an exclusivity contract with YouTube. He signed with Complexity Gaming as a part-owner and content-creator that same month.


title: TimTheTatman

text: In 2018, Betar teamed up with fellow streamers to raise money for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital under the GuardianCon charity stream marathon. The event raised over $2.7 million for children's medical research. During his time block alone, Betar set the Twitch charitable donation record by raising more than $106,000 in 4 hours.


title: TimTheTatman

text: Betar was born on April 8, 1990. After meeting in high school, Betar and his wife Alexis were married in August 2016. The couple had a son, Brewer, on April 11, 2019.


title: Prateek Kuhad

text: Prateek Kuhad is an Indian singer-songwriter and musician who makes independent music in Hindi and English. He is best known for his track "cold/mess".


title: Prateek Kuhad

text: Kuhad was born in Jaipur, Rajasthan in a Hindu Jat family and has two sisters. He learnt to play the guitar at age of 16 and started songwriting in his late teens. He finished his high school from Maharaja Sawai Man Singh Vidyalaya, Jaipur. Later, He studied Maths and Economics at New York University before moving to Delhi to pursue a full-time career in music. After graduating from New York University, he returned to India, releasing a pair of EPs before releasing his debut album. He also signed a publishing deal with Los Angeles-based company Cutcraft Music. Kuhad became the first Indian to get signed by the American record label Elektra Records in 2020.


title: Prateek Kuhad

text: During his time in NYU, Kuhad discovered Elliott Smith's music which had a great influence on him. He then discovered other singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie along with newer artists like Laura Marling and Fleet Foxes. These artists inspired him to get better at guitar and start writing his own songs. These went on to become his major influences.


title: Prateek Kuhad

text: Kuhad was comfortable with communicating in both English and Hindi from the start and has been writing in both the languages. In his childhood, as there was no internet service in Jaipur, he predominantly listened to Indian pop and Bollywood music and only occasionally to Western music.He is also said to be inspired from a kid of the same name as his whose vocals were outstanding, sometime during his visit to UP. He was also inspired by Lucky Ali.


title: Prateek Kuhad

text: The acoustic guitar is Kuhad's primary instrument while he also plays piano and electric guitar. His music leans towards Americana and folk genres with acoustic sounds and unconventional song structures for most parts. His music has been praised as being "beautifully haunting" by "Us Weekly" and his vocals as being "angelic" by "BrooklynVegan".


title: Prateek Kuhad

text: He mostly writes about love, relationships and his experiences, with vague lyrics that are open to interpretation.


title: Prateek Kuhad

text: Kuhad's 2018 song "cold/mess" was featured on former US president Barack Obama's "Favorite Music of 2019" list.


title: Bitmap index

text: Bitmap indexes have traditionally been considered to work well for "low-cardinality columns", which have a modest number of distinct values, either absolutely, or relative to the number of records that contain the data. The extreme case of low cardinality is Boolean data (e.g., does a resident in a city have internet access?), which has two values, True and False. Bitmap indexes use bit arrays (commonly called bitmaps) and answer queries by performing bitwise logical operations on these bitmaps. Bitmap indexes have a significant space and performance advantage over other structures for query of such data. Their drawback is they are less efficient than the traditional B-tree indexes for columns whose data is frequently updated: consequently, they are more often employed in read-only systems that are specialized for fast query - e.g., data warehouses, and generally unsuitable for online transaction processing applications.


title: Bitmap index

text: Some researchers argue that bitmap indexes are also useful for moderate or even high-cardinality data (e.g., unique-valued data) which is accessed in a read-only manner, and queries access multiple bitmap-indexed columns using the AND, OR or XOR operators extensively.


title: Bitmap index

text: Bitmap indexes are also useful in data warehousing applications for joining a large fact table to smaller dimension tables such as those arranged in a star schema.


title: Bitmap index

text: On the left, Identifier refers to the unique number assigned to each resident, HasInternet is the data to be indexed, the content of the bitmap index is shown as two columns under the heading "bitmaps". Each column in the left illustration under the Bitmaps header is a "bitmap" in the bitmap index. In this case, there are two such bitmaps, one for "has internet" "Yes" and one for "has internet" "No". It is easy to see that each bit in bitmap "Y" shows whether a particular row refers to a person who has internet access. This is the simplest form of bitmap index. Most columns will have more distinct values. For example, the sales amount is likely to have a much larger number of distinct values. Variations on the bitmap index can effectively index this data as well. We briefly review three such variations.


title: Bitmap index

text: Note: Many of the references cited here are reviewed at (John Wu (2007)). For those who might be interested in experimenting with some of the ideas mentioned here, many of them are implemented in open source software such as FastBit, the Lemur Bitmap Index C++ Library, the Roaring Bitmap Java library and the Apache Hive Data Warehouse system.


title: Bitmap index

text: For historical reasons, bitmap compression and inverted list compression were developed as separate lines of research, and only later were recognized as solving essentially the same problem.


title: Bitmap index

text: Software can compress each bitmap in a bitmap index to save space. There has been considerable amount of work on this subject.


title: Bitmap index

text: Though there are exceptions such as Roaring bitmaps, Bitmap compression algorithms typically employ run-length encoding, such as the Byte-aligned Bitmap Code, the Word-Aligned Hybrid code, the Partitioned Word-Aligned Hybrid (PWAH) compression, the Position List Word Aligned Hybrid,<ref name="doi_10.1145/1739041.1739071"></ref> the Compressed Adaptive Index (COMPAX), Enhanced Word-Aligned Hybrid (EWAH) and the COmpressed 'N' Composable Integer SEt (CONCISE). These compression methods require very little effort to compress and decompress. More importantly, bitmaps compressed with BBC, WAH, COMPAX, PLWAH, EWAH and CONCISE can directly participate in bitwise operations without decompression. This gives them considerable advantages over generic compression techniques such as LZ77. BBC compression and its derivatives are used in a commercial database management system. BBC is effective in both reducing index sizes and maintaining query performance. BBC encodes the bitmaps in bytes, while WAH encodes in words, better matching current CPUs. "On both synthetic data and real application data, the new word aligned schemes use only 50% more space, but perform logical operations on compressed data 12 times faster than BBC." PLWAH bitmaps were reported to take 50% of the storage space consumed by WAH bitmaps and offer up to 20% faster performance on logical operations. Similar considerations can be done for CONCISE <ref name="doi_10.1016/j.ipl.2010.05.018"></ref> and Enhanced Word-Aligned Hybrid.


title: Bitmap index

text: The performance of schemes such as BBC, WAH, PLWAH, EWAH, COMPAX and CONCISE is dependent on the order of the rows. A simple lexicographical sort can divide the index size by 9 and make indexes several times faster. The larger the table, the more important it is to sort the rows. Reshuffling techniques have also been proposed to achieve the same results of sorting when indexing streaming data.


title: Bitmap index

text: Basic bitmap indexes use one bitmap for each distinct value. It is possible to reduce the number of bitmaps used by using a different encoding method. For example, it is possible to encode C distinct values using log(C) bitmaps with binary encoding.


title: Bitmap index

text: This reduces the number of bitmaps, further saving space, but to answer any query, most of the bitmaps have to be accessed. This makes it potentially not as effective as scanning a vertical projection of the base data, also known as a materialized view or projection index. Finding the optimal encoding method that balances (arbitrary) query performance, index size and index maintenance remains a challenge.


title: Bitmap index

text: Without considering compression, Chan and Ioannidis analyzed a class of multi-component encoding methods and came to the conclusion that two-component encoding sits at the kink of the performance vs. index size curve and therefore represents the best trade-off between index size and query performance.


title: Bitmap index

text: For high-cardinality columns, it is useful to bin the values, where each bin covers multiple values and build the bitmaps to represent the values in each bin. This approach reduces the number of bitmaps used regardless of encoding method. However, binned indexes can only answer some queries without examining the base data. For example, if a bin covers the range from 0.1 to 0.2, then when the user asks for all values less than 0.15, all rows that fall in the bin are possible hits and have to be checked to verify whether they are actually less than 0.15. The process of checking the base data is known as the candidate check. In most cases, the time used by the candidate check is significantly longer than the time needed to work with the bitmap index. Therefore, binned indexes exhibit irregular performance. They can be very fast for some queries, but much slower if the query does not exactly match a bin.


title: Bitmap index

text: The concept of bitmap index was first introduced by Professor Israel Spiegler and Rafi Maayan in their research "Storage and Retrieval Considerations of Binary Data Bases", published in 1985. The first commercial database product to implement a bitmap index was Computer Corporation of America's Model 204. Patrick O'Neil published a paper about this implementation in 1987. This implementation is a hybrid between the basic bitmap index (without compression) and the list of Row Identifiers (RID-list). Overall, the index is organized as a B+tree. When the column cardinality is low, each leaf node of the B-tree would contain long list of RIDs. In this case, it requires less space to represent the RID-lists as bitmaps. Since each bitmap represents one distinct value, this is the basic bitmap index. As the column cardinality increases, each bitmap becomes sparse and it may take more disk space to store the bitmaps than to store the same content as RID-lists. In this case, it switches to use the RID-lists, which makes it a B+tree index.


title: Bitmap index

text: One of the strongest reasons for using bitmap indexes is that the intermediate results produced from them are also bitmaps and can be efficiently reused in further operations to answer more complex queries. Many programming languages support this as a bit array data structure. For example, Java has the codice_1 class.


title: Bitmap index

text: Some database systems that do not offer persistent bitmap indexes use bitmaps internally to speed up query processing. For example, PostgreSQL versions 8.1 and later implement a "bitmap index scan" optimization to speed up arbitrarily complex logical operations between available indexes on a single table.


title: Bitmap index

text: For tables with many columns, the total number of distinct indexes to satisfy all possible queries (with equality filtering conditions on either of the fields) grows very fast, being defined by this formula:


title: Bitmap index

text: A bitmap index scan combines expressions on different indexes, thus requiring only one index per column to support all possible queries on a table.


title: Bitmap index

text: Applying this access strategy to B-tree indexes can also combine range queries on multiple columns. In this approach, a temporary in-memory bitmap is created with one bit for each row in the table (1 MB can thus store over 8 million entries). Next, the results from each index are combined into the bitmap using bitwise operations. After all conditions are evaluated, the bitmap contains a "1" for rows that matched the expression. Finally, the bitmap is traversed and matching rows are retrieved. In addition to efficiently combining indexes, this also improves locality of reference of table accesses, because all rows are fetched sequentially from the main table. The internal bitmap is discarded after the query. If there are too many rows in the table to use 1 bit per row, a "lossy" bitmap is created instead, with a single bit per disk page. In this case, the bitmap is just used to determine which pages to fetch; the filter criteria are then applied to all rows in matching pages.


title: Roy Ayers

text: Roy Ayers (born September 10, 1940) is an American funk, soul, and jazz composer, vibraphone player, and music producer. Ayers began his career as a post-bop jazz artist, releasing several albums with Atlantic Records, before his tenure at Polydor Records beginning in the 1970s, during which he helped pioneer jazz-funk. He is a key figure in the acid jazz movement, and has been dubbed "The Godfather of Neo Soul". He is best known for his compositions "Everybody Loves the Sunshine", "Searchin", and "Running Away". At one time, he was said to have more sampled hits by rappers than any other artist.


title: Roy Ayers

text: Ayers was born on September 10, 1940, in Los Angeles. He grew up in a musical family, where his father played trombone and his mother played piano. At the age of five, he was given his first pair of vibraphone mallets by Lionel Hampton. The area of Los Angeles that Ayers grew up in, South Park (later known as South Central) was at the center of the Southern California Black music scene. The schools he attended (Wadsworth Elementary, Nevins Middle School, and Thomas Jefferson High School) were all close to the famed Central Avenue, Los Angeles' equivalent of Harlem's Lenox Avenue and Chicago's State Street. Roy would likely have been exposed to music as it not only emanated from the many nightclubs and bars in the area, but also poured out of many of the homes where the musicians who kept the scene alive lived in and around Central. During high school, Ayers sang in the church choir and fronted a band named The Latin Lyrics, in which he played steel guitar and piano. His high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, produced various talented musicians, such as Dexter Gordon. Ayers has 3 known children Roy Ayers Jr, Nabil Ayers and Lauren Faith (Musician).


title: Roy Ayers

text: Ayers started recording as a bebop sideman in 1962 and rose to prominence when he dropped out of City College and joined jazz flautist Herbie Mann in 1966.


title: Roy Ayers

text: In the early 1970s, Roy Ayers started his own band called Roy Ayers Ubiquity, a name he chose because ubiquity means a state of being everywhere at the same time.


title: Roy Ayers

text: Ayers was responsible for the highly regarded soundtrack to Jack Hill's 1973 blaxploitation film "Coffy", which starred Pam Grier. He later moved from a jazz-funk sound to R&B, as seen on "Mystic Voyage", which featured the songs "Evolution" and the underground disco hit "Brother Green (The Disco King)", as well as the title track from his 1976 album "Everybody Loves the Sunshine".


title: Roy Ayers

text: In 1977, Ayers produced an album by the group RAMP, "Come into Knowledge". That fall, he had his biggest hit with "Running Away".


title: Roy Ayers

text: In late 1979, Ayers scored his only top ten single on "Billboard's" Hot Disco/Dance chart with "Don't Stop The Feeling", which was also the leadoff single from his 1980 album "No Stranger to Love", whose title track was sampled in Jill Scott's 2001 song "Watching Me" from her debut album "Who Is Jill Scott?"


title: Roy Ayers

text: In the late 1970s, Ayers toured in Nigeria for six weeks with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, one of the African continent's most recognizable musicians. In 1980, Phonodisk released "Music of Many Colors" in Nigeria, featuring one side led by Ayers' group and the other led by Africa '70.


title: Roy Ayers

text: In 1981, Ayers produced an album with the singer Sylvia Striplin, "Give Me Your Love" (Uno Melodic Records, 1981). That same year, he also produced a second album called "Africa, Center of the World" on Polydor records along with James Bedford and Ayers's bass player William Henry Allen. Allen can be heard talking to his daughter on the track "Intro/The River Niger". The album was recorded at the Sigma Sound Studios, New York.


title: Roy Ayers

text: Ayers performed a solo on John "Jellybean" Benitez's production of Whitney Houston's "Love Will Save The Day" from her second multi-Platinum studio album "Whitney". The single was released in July 1988 by Arista Records.


title: Roy Ayers

text: Ayers has played his live act for millions of people across the globe, including Japan, Australia, England and other parts of Europe.


title: Roy Ayers

text: Ayers is known for helping to popularize feel good music in the 1970s, stating that "I like that happy feeling all of the time, so that ingredient is still there. I try to generate that because it's the natural way I am". The types of music that he used to do this consisted of funk, salsa, jazz, rock, soul and rap.


title: Roy Ayers

text: In 1992, Ayers released two albums, "Drive" and "Wake Up", for the hip-hop label Ichiban Records. and also collaborated with Rick James for an album and is quoted to have been a very close friend of his.


title: Roy Ayers

text: In 1993, Ayers appeared on the record "Guru's Jazzmatazz Vol. 1", playing vibraphone on the song "Take a Look (At Yourself)". The following year he appeared on the Red Hot Organization's compilation album "". The album, meant to raise awareness and funds in support of the AIDS epidemic in relation to the African-American community, was heralded as "Album of the Year" by "Time Magazine".


title: Roy Ayers

text: During the 2000s and 2010s, Ayers ventured into house music, collaborating with such stalwarts of the genre as Masters at Work and Kerri Chandler.


title: Roy Ayers

text: Ayers started two record labels, Uno Melodic and Gold Mink Records. The first released several LPs, including Sylvia Striplin's, while the second folded after a few singles.


title: Roy Ayers

text: In 2004, Ayers put out a collection of unreleased recordings called "Virgin Ubiquity: Unreleased recordings 1976–1981" which allowed fans to hear cuts that didn't make it onto the classic Polydor albums from his more popular years.


title: Roy Ayers

text: He has also worked in collaborations with soul songstress Erykah Badu and other artists on his 2004 album "Mahogany Vibes".


title: Roy Ayers

text: A documentary, "The Roy Ayers Project," featuring Ayers and a number artists who have sampled his music and have been influenced by him and his music, has been in development for a number of years. The Roy Ayers Project has been rebranded as "Roy Ayers Connection", which highlights Roy Ayers and all the people and things that he is connected to.


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: There's Something About Miriam was a British reality television show filmed in 2003, created by Remy Blumenfeld and Gavin Hay and originally broadcast in the United Kingdom in February 2004. Hosted by Tim Vincent, it featured six men wooing 21-year-old Mexican model Miriam Rivera without revealing that she was transgender until the final episode.


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: Remy Blumenfeld first saw Rivera participating in a girl band, after which he planned to cast her in a TV show. The show was produced by the Brighter Pictures subsidiary of Endemol and was originally titled "Find Me a Man". Recruitment ads for contestants promised "the adventure of a lifetime" with a £10,000 prize for men aged 20 to 35 who "want it all" and are "fit and up for everything." The contestants on the show were:


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: Brighter Pictures managing director Gavin Hay said "they had made a point of never referring to Miriam as a woman when getting the men to take part."


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: Rivera said "Several of them wondered about me in the first few days. But as the series unfolded, I really thought that we got to like and know each other as friends and had a lot of fun." In response to allegations that she revealed her big secret by lifting up her skirt she was quoted as saying "I would never lift my skirt up on national TV. My mother brought me up very well." On the version that aired, Rivera chose Rooke as the winner and then said in front of the assembled contestants:


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: Rooke initially accepted the prize money and the trip with Rivera on camera. Rooke later rejected the prize prior to airing and joined the other contestants in a lawsuit that sought to prevent the airing of the show.


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: Following the completion of the show, it was scheduled to air in November 2003, but a lawsuit by the contestants delayed the airing. They alleged conspiracy to commit sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract, and personal injury in the form of psychological and emotional damage.


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: After the men settled for an undisclosed amount, the show premiered 22 February, and the sixth and final episode aired 24 March 2004.


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: The show was aired in Australia by Network Ten in May 2004, in Poland by TVN in January 2005, and in Argentina in 2005 on América TV. The show was picked up by Fox Reality for airing in the United States in April 2006, and was aired in October 2007.


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: Responses from critics were generally unfavourable, calling it part of a trend in shows that exploit unwitting contestants. A British reviewer noted, "The whole premise of "There's Something About Miriam" was not a celebration of transgender people's lives. It was designed to elicit horror from the winning contestant discovering that his dream date had a penis." The show was also criticized by transgender groups, who feared a backlash of public opinion. When the show aired in Australia, reviews were critical of both the premise and Rivera:


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: These guys were duped in more ways than one - while Miriam has a few unexpected bits in her package, she's notably deficient in others. It has become clear Miriam requires a personality implant. It must've been a challenge to find a transsexual pretty enough, mean enough and sufficiently attention-seeking to play this tawdry game, but what these producers found in Miriam is a sultry-looking dill prone to the cheesiest of clichés.


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: Other British commentators contrasted Rivera with the positive response to Nadia Almada, a Portuguese-born transsexual woman who won "Big Brother UK" a few months later. That show was also produced by Endemol.


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: However, the show garnered high ratings in the final episode (970,000 viewers—large viewership for Sky One), and Rivera went on to become a guest on "Big Brother Australia 2004".


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: "There's Something About Miriam" was featured on the 2005 clip show "40 Greatest Pranks" on VH1 and was ranked #11 on the "20 to One" episode "Hoaxes, Cheats and Liars".


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: When the show aired in the United States on the 2007 Transgender Day of Remembrance, trans author Julia Serano noted, "Programs like "There's Something About Miriam" not only reinforce the stereotype that trans people's birth sex is 'real' and our identified/lived sex is 'fake,' but they perpetuate the myth of deception and thus enable violence against us."


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: Video artist Phil Collins featured contestant Mark Dimino in an installation on "people who believe their lives have been ruined by appearing on reality TV."


title: There's Something About Miriam

text: In 2021 Wondery published an investigative podcast series, "," into Rivera's life and her appearance on the show"."


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: Emotions is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey. It was released on September 17, 1991, by Columbia Records. The album deviated from the formula of Carey's 1990 self-titled debut album, as she had more creative control over the material she produced and recorded. Additionally, "Emotions" features influences from a range of genres such as gospel, R&B and 1950s, 1960s and 1970s balladry infusion. On the record, Carey worked with a variety of producers and writers, including Walter Afanasieff, the only holdover from her previous effort. Additionally, Carey wrote and produced the album's material with Robert Clivillés and David Cole from C+C Music Factory and Carole King, with whom she wrote one song.


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: Upon its release, "Emotions" polarized the music critics, while some praised the album's production, Carey's vocals, while other found the lyricism standard, and a few criticized Carey for overusing the whistle register. In retrospect, the album has been positively reviewed, with some contemporary music critics citing it amongst Carey's best works. Commercially, the album was a moderate success, failing to top the charts globally including the United States, where it debuted at number four on the "Billboard" 200, surprising many critics following the success of Carey's debut, which spent eleven weeks atop the chart. In other territories, the album reached the top 10 in eight countries, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. While selling far less than "Mariah Carey", "Emotions" was eventually certified 4× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), denoting shipments of four million copies throughout the country, with estimated sales standing at 3,595,000 copies. The album was particularly successful in Japan shipping over one million copies there, and has sold over eight million copies worldwide.


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: Three singles were released to promote the album. The title track, the album's lead single, became Carey's fifth chart topper on the "Billboard" Hot 100, making her the only artist in history to have their first five singles reach the chart's summit. Additionally, it became Carey's third chart topper in Canada, and reached the top-ten in Greece and New Zealand. "Can't Let Go" was released as the second single from "Emotions" on October 23, 1991. Due to Columbia's removal of the single from stores in an attempt to boost the album's sales, "Can't Let Go" failed to become her sixth chart topper in the US, peaking at number two. European and worldwide success was very limited, reaching the top 20 in only Canada and the UK. Similarly, "Make It Happen" peaked at number five in the US, and achieved relatively weak international charting, prompting Columbia to halt promotion of the album.


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: Following the success of Carey's self-titled debut album, critics wondered whether or not she would tour to promote the album in the major worldwide music markets. However, Carey expressed in several interviews that due to the strenuous nature and the sheer difficulty of her songs, she feared a tour with back-to-back shows would not be possible, aside from the long travel times and constant travel. With the extra time, Carey began writing and producing material for "Emotions" around the same time that her debut's third single, "Someday," was released in December 1990. During this time period in music, it was traditional for an artist to release a studio album every two years in their prime, allowing the singles to fully promote the album through airwaves, as well as television appearances. Additionally, after a tour that would usually follow, as the next album would be released and would gain new fans, they would search the artist's catalog, and purchase the previous album in hopes of learning of their older work. Sony, however, chose to market Carey in a different fashion, leaning towards the traditional form in the 1960s, where acts would release an LP every year. They felt that Carey's reputation of being a "studio worm" and a songwriter from a young age would be captivating enough to deliver a new album more often than most.


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: As writing for the album came under way, Carey had a falling out with Ben Margulies, the man whom Carey had written seven of the eleven songs on Carey's debut with. Together, the duo had written and produced seven songs for Carey's demo tape which she handed to Tommy Mottola. Their parting of ways was due to a contract Carey had signed prior to her signing with Columbia. Carey had agreed to split not only the songwriting royalties from the songs, but half of her earnings as well, something she never thought twice about while writing songs in his father's basement. However, when the time came to write music for "Emotions", Sony officials made it clear he would only be paid the fair amount given to co-writers on an album. Following the discussion, Margulies filed a lawsuit against Sony, claiming that under contract, he would be entitled to work with Carey, as well as reap extra benefits. After an almost one year lawsuit, the judge settled that Margulies was to earn ten percent of Carey's direct earnings from her record sales, not including an income from any other ventures. While settled, their relationship remained ruined, damaged by what Carey considered treachery. In an interview with Fred Bronson, Carey said the following regarding the contract: "I signed blindly. Later, I tried to make it right so we could continue...but he wouldn't accept it." After the settlement, Margulies spoke of his feelings on the matter, claiming he would hope to one day write again with Carey, placing most of the blame on the record label and concluding "Hopefully one day, art will prevail over business."


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: "Mariah Carey" had originally been recorded in Margulies' father's basement, with old and minimal equipment. After being signed to Columbia, the songs that would be used for the album were re-mastered and re-recorded in professional studios. However, due to Sony's involvement in the project, they did not allow Carey to produce most of the album, hoping the aid of several famed record producers would be able to ensure Carey's already deemed "exquisite" songs would become popular. After the album's success however, Carey was allowed more freedom on "Emotions" than on her debut. Since she no longer had a working or personal relationship with Margulies, she chose to work with mostly different musicians than those of her previous effort, with the exception of Walter Afanasieff, the only holdover from "Mariah Carey". Even though he had only produced "Love Takes Time," the second single from the album, Carey felt a strong working chemistry with him, soon developing a unique form of songwriting alongside him. Aside from Afanasieff, Carey worked with Robert Clivillés and David Cole from the dance-music influenced production duo, C+C Music Factory. Working with the duo was originally Mottola's suggestion, but after meeting the pair, Carey agreed and wrote four songs together with them.


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: Additionally, aside from the three men, Carey worked with Carole King, a female singer-songwriter who had been predominantly popular in the 1970s. However, unlike with C+C Music Factory, King approached Carey, hoping to work with her after hearing her perform live on "The Arsenio Hall Show". During a conversation with Carey, King suggested that she cover "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," a song she had written with Gerry Goffin for Aretha Franklin. After giving it some thought, Carey declined the offer, feeling uncomfortable about recording a song she felt one of her musical influences performed so perfectly. Still determined on working with Carey, King flew to New York for one day, to try to create a ballad of some sort. The two ladies sat together by a piano over the course of the day, and by nightfall, had written and arranged a song titled "If It's Over." After working with Carey, King said in an interview "I love her voice. She's very expressive. She gives a lot of meaning to what she sings." After recording "If It's Over," Carey expressed the musical connection she shared with Afanasieff, as well as the creative format in which she wrote and produced her music when with him, or working with C+C Music Factory. When working with Afanasieff, the duo would sit by a piano, and lead each other vocally and musically, until they would reach the right note and arrangement. During an interview in 1992, Afanasieff described how Carey would stand next to him, and begin singing different notes and tunes she was thinking of, while he would follow her with the piano. In doing so, he would help lead her to the right note and vice versa. Carey described their working relationship as "very unique," and felt it to be very similar to the form in which she had worked with Margulies. While similar, Carey's creative process with Cole and Clivillés proved different; they would bring her several different tapes and tunes, of which she would choose from. Afterwards, they would work on building the already created melody, and have Carey add and build onto it, as well as writing the lyrics and key.


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: The album's lead single "Emotions" borrowed heavily from 1970s disco, and flaunted Carey's upper range and extensive use of the whistle register. The song's lyrics were described as "joyful" by author Chris Nickson, and told of a strong and deep emotion felt by the protagonist when with their lover. One of the album's more gospel infused songs, "And You Don't Remember," featured organ chord changes and held minimal production to give the vocals a more "raw and sixties feel." It and the former song were part of a trio of tracks from the album that were meant to pay homage to Motown ballads, with the inclusion of soft church choir vocals, and sole musical arrangement by Carey. Its lyrics reflected the song's raw chorus, telling of girl that is promised the world by her boyfriend, and quickly forget about her and moves to the next one. After the heartbreak, the protagonist asks him "Don't You Remember" all those things he had promised her, and the things they had spoken and dreamed about doing together. "Can't Let Go," the album's second single, is a slow ballad, featuring sad and yearning lyrical content. The song's introduction featured minor chord changes, and drew influence from fifties balladry. For the duration of the first half of the song, Carey sings in her lower and huskier registers, eventually leading to the belted crescendo and falsetto and whistle finish. Of the ten tracks on the album, Carey felt her most autobiographical lyrics were featured on "Make It Happen," which told of Carey's poor and difficult teen life prior to being signed by Columbia. It continues telling of the importance of faith and prayer to God. Nickson described its instrumentation as "restrained" and "very Motownish," as well as noting its soft gospel infusion. Critically, the most anticipated song on the album was "If It's Over," Carey's collaboration with King. It was influenced by sixties and seventies gospel. According to Nickson, the song's instrumentation and basis was crucial to Carey's performance throughout the song. Additionally, he described its content and instrumentation:


title: Emotions (Mariah Carey album)

text: As a song full of gospel and soulful influences, it allowed Mariah to really tear loose and show what she could do – which in reality was far more than the vocal gymnastics that seemed to comprise her reputation so far. From a deep rumble to a high wail, she covered five octaves wonderfully, as the power of the tune built. The backing vocals – which once again had those churchy harmonies – filled out the spare melody, as did the stately horns, which entered towards the end. The song was truly a vocal showcase for Mariah.