title: Ernst Mach

text: From 1895 to 1901, Mach held a newly created chair for "the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences" at the University of Vienna. In his historico-philosophical studies, Mach developed a phenomenalistic philosophy of science that became influential in the 19th and 20th centuries. He originally saw scientific laws as summaries of experimental events, constructed for the purpose of making complex data comprehensible, but later emphasized mathematical functions as a more useful way to describe sensory appearances. Thus, scientific laws, while somewhat idealized, have more to do with describing sensations than with reality as it exists beyond sensations.


title: Ernst Mach

text: Mach's positivism also influenced many Russian Marxists, such as Alexander Bogdanov. In 1908, Lenin wrote a philosophical work, "Materialism and Empirio-criticism", in which he criticized Machism and the views of "Russian Machists". His main criticisms were that Mach's philosophy led to solipsism and to the absurd conclusion that nature did not exist before humans:


title: Ernst Mach

text: Empirio-criticism is the term for the rigorously positivist and radically empiricist philosophy established by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and further developed by Mach, which claims that all we can know is our sensations and that knowledge should be confined to pure experience.


title: Ernst Mach

text: In accordance with empirio-critical philosophy, Mach opposed Ludwig Boltzmann and others who proposed an atomic theory of physics. Since one cannot observe things as small as atoms directly, and since no atomic model at the time was consistent, the atomic hypothesis seemed unwarranted to Mach, and perhaps not sufficiently "economical". Mach had a direct influence on the Vienna Circle philosophers and logical positivism in general.


title: Ernst Mach

text: To Mach are attributed a number of principles that distill his ideal of physical theorisation—what is now called "Machian physics":


title: Ernst Mach

text: The last is singled out, particularly by Einstein, as "the" Mach's principle. Einstein cited it as one of the three principles underlying general relativity. In 1930, he wrote, "it is justified to consider Mach as the precursor of the general theory of relativity", though Mach, before his death, apparently rejected Einstein's theory. Einstein was aware that his theories did not fulfill all Mach's principles, and no subsequent theory has either, despite considerable effort.


title: Ernst Mach

text: According to Alexander Riegler, Mach's work was a precursor to the influential perspective known as constructivism. Constructivism holds that all knowledge is constructed rather than received by the learner. He took an exceptionally non-dualist, phenomenological position. The founder of radical constructivism, von Glasersfeld, gave a nod to Mach as an ally.


title: Ernst Mach

text: In 1873, independently of each other, Mach and the physiologist and physician Josef Breuer discovered how the sense of balance (i.e., the perception of the head's imbalance) functions, tracing its management by information the brain receives from the movement of a fluid in the semicircular canals of the inner ear. That the sense of balance depends on the three semicircular canals was discovered in 1870 by the physiologist Friedrich Goltz, but Goltz did not discover how the balance-sensing apparatus functions. Mach devised a swivel chair to test his theories, and Floyd Ratliff has suggested that this experiment may have paved the way to Mach's critique of a physical conception of absolute space and motion.


title: Ernst Mach

text: In the area of sensory perception, psychologists remember Mach for the optical illusion called Mach bands. The effect exaggerates the contrast between edges of the slightly differing shades of gray as soon as they touch, by triggering edge-detection in the human visual system.


title: Ernst Mach

text: More clearly than anyone before or since, Mach made the distinction between what he called "physiological" (specifically visual) and "geometrical" spaces.


title: Ernst Mach

text: Mach's views on mediating structures inspired B. F. Skinner's strongly inductive position, which paralleled Mach's in the field of psychology.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: The first film released in 1980, written and directed by Jamie Uys. Set in Botswana and South Africa, it tells the story of Xi, a San of the Kalahari Desert whose tribe discovers an empty Coca-Cola bottle. The bottle brings discord to the tribe, and Xi is sent out into the unknown world beyond the Kalahari to return the bottle to the Gods by throwing the bottle off the world's end.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: A sequel was released in 1989. Xi's name was changed to Xixo in this film. In it, Xixo's two young children encounter poachers in the Kalahari Desert, explore the back of their truck, and become unable to jump off once it starts moving. Xixo must once again travel great distances to retrieve them, and once again encounters various other western characters who are on quests of their own. The film is notable for the increased role of animals throughout the story, and for its light-hearted treatment of the civil war still raging in nearby Angola at the time.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: In the early 1990s, Nǃxau was cast in three low-budget unofficial sequels that continued the fish-out-of-water aspects of the first two films. They were produced in Hong Kong, filmed in Cantonese and then dubbed in other languages.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: As of 2007, the three Hong Kong films have not been released in the United States, although they have been released on VCD format in China. "The Gods Must Be Funny in China" was recently released on DVD in South Africa.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: A hopping vampire wreaks havoc in Nǃxau's tribe, but soon they discover how to handle him and he becomes a great asset to them. Meanwhile, a Chinese necromancer, sent by the corpse's descendants, searches for him, together with a bumbling cowardly representative charged with ensuring that the necromancer returns his ancestor as desired.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: N!xau accidentally hitches a ride with a Chinese businesswoman from the African plain to her home in Hong Kong. With only his natural instincts and desert-honed survival skills, the intrepid Bushman evades a gang of diamond thieves and stumbles into one comic mishap after another as he tries to find his way back home.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: Hijinks ensue when Nǃxau travels to Beijing where he's recruited to accompany a track team on a week long survival race through the Chinese wilderness.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: A South African film, which also starred Marius Weyers and Sandra Prinsloo; officially unrelated but still marketed as a sequel to the first (1980) film.


title: The Gods Must Be Crazy (film series)

text: While unrelated to the series, this film was marketed on video in some markets as "Gods Must Be Crazy (Part IV)".


title: Vince Flynn

text: Vincent Joseph Flynn (April 6, 1966 – June 19, 2013) was an American author of political thriller novels featuring the fictional assassin Mitch Rapp. He was a story consultant for the fifth season of the television series "24". He died on June 19, 2013, after three years with prostate cancer.


title: Vince Flynn

text: Flynn was one of seven children born to Terry and Kathleen Flynn, and a graduate of Saint Thomas Academy (1984) and the University of St. Thomas with a B.A. in economics (1989).


title: Vince Flynn

text: After graduating, Flynn went to work for Kraft Foods as an account and sales marketing specialist. In 1991, he left Kraft to pursue a career as an aviator with the United States Marine Corps. One week before leaving for Officer Candidate School, he was medically disqualified from the Marine Aviation Program.


title: Vince Flynn

text: In an effort to overcome the difficulties of dyslexia, Flynn forced himself into a daily writing and reading routine. His writing influences included Leon Uris, Tom Clancy, Ernest Hemingway, John Irving, Robert Ludlum, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Gore Vidal.


title: Vince Flynn

text: Flynn's newfound interest in fiction motivated him to begin work on a novel of his own. While employed as a bartender in the St. Paul area, he completed his first book, "Term Limits", which he self-published. Of the book, Flynn said: "I had just finished reading "The Government Racket: Washington Waste from A to Z", by Martin L. Gross. It is without a doubt the most disheartening and enlightening book about politics that I've ever read. I was out jogging one day wondering what it would take to really change Washington, when my thoughts turned to a friend who had been shot and killed in Washington, D.C., several summers earlier. As I continued running, a story started to unfold."


title: Vince Flynn

text: Pocket Books published the hardcover edition of "Term Limits" in 1998, and a mass market paperback in 1999, which spent several weeks on The "New York Times" bestseller list. Subsequent works, including Flynn's 1999 novel "Transfer of Power", his 2000 novel "The Third Option", and his 2001 novel "Separation of Power", also appeared on the "New York Times" bestseller list, with "Separation of Power" rising as high as No. 7.


title: Vince Flynn

text: Flynn's fifth novel, "Executive Power", was published in hardcover by Atria Books in 2003, followed by his sixth novel, "Memorial Day" in 2004, his seventh, "Consent To Kill", in 2005, his eighth, "Act Of Treason", in 2006, his ninth, "Protect And Defend", in 2007, and his tenth, "Extreme Measures", in 2008. Except for "Term Limits", his books centered around counterterrorism agent Mitch Rapp.


title: Vince Flynn

text: Flynn wrote six "New York Times" bestsellers for Atria Books, and had a contract for four more. He remembered deciding between following the path that was the most uncomfortable—continuing with what looked to be a promising career as a commercial real estate leasing agent—or taking a big risk and starting a new career as a writer: "I look back on it now and I couldn't be happier with my decision, but at the time I remember a lot of people thought I was nuts."


title: Vince Flynn

text: In February 2008, Flynn agreed on film and book projects with CBS Corporation units CBS Films and Simon & Schuster/Atria Books. Lorenzo di Bonaventura was negotiating to produce Mitch Rapp films. The first film, "American Assassin", was released in 2017. Atria Books got worldwide rights to four of Flynn's books. In August 2010, Flynn signed a two-book deal for a new series that he would have co-written with Brian Haig, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. He was a frequent guest on "The Glenn Beck Radio Program" on the Fox News Channel, and on Dan Barreiro's radio program on Twin Cities station KFAN.


title: Vince Flynn

text: Flynn lived with his wife, Lysa, and their three children in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul) area.


title: Vince Flynn

text: On February 1, 2011, in his fan newsletter, Flynn announced that he was being treated for advanced Stage III prostate cancer. He died of a rare form of aggressive prostate cancer in Saint Paul, aged 47, on June 19, 2013.


title: Vince Flynn

text: Mitch Rapp is a fictional undercover CIA counterterrorism agent. Rapp's primary focus is to thwart terrorist attacks on the U.S., and he is presented as an aggressive operative willing to take measures more extreme than might commonly be considered acceptable. His constant frustration with procedures and red tape is a major theme in the series.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois de Boulogne (, "Boulogne woodland") is a large public park located along the western edge of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt and Neuilly-sur-Seine. The land was ceded to the city of Paris by the Emperor Napoleon III to be turned into a public park in 1852.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: It is the second-largest park in Paris, slightly smaller than the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern side of the city. It covers an area of 845 hectares (2088 acres), which is about two and a half times the area of Central Park in New York, slightly larger than Phoenix Park in Dublin, and slightly smaller than Richmond Park in London.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Within the boundaries of the Bois de Boulogne are an English landscape garden with several lakes and a cascade; two smaller botanical and landscape gardens, the Château de Bagatelle and the Pré-Catelan; a zoo and amusement park in the Jardin d'Acclimatation; GoodPlanet Foundation's Domaine de Longchamp dedicated to ecology and humanism, The Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil, a complex of greenhouses holding a hundred thousand plants; two tracks for horse racing, the Hippodrome de Longchamp and the Auteuil Hippodrome; the Stade Roland Garros where the French Open tennis tournament is held each year, the Fondation Louis Vuitton and other attractions.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois de Boulogne is a remnant of the ancient oak forest of Rouvray, which included the present-day forests of Montmorency, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Chaville, and Meudon. Dagobert I hunted bears, deer, and other game in the forest. His grandson, Childeric II, gave the forest to the monks of the Abbey of Saint-Denis, who founded several monastic communities there. Philip Augustus (1180–1223) bought back the main part of the forest from the monks to create a royal hunting reserve. In 1256, Isabelle de France, sister of Saint-Louis, founded the Abbey of Longchamp at the site of the present hippodrome.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois received its present name from a chapel, Notre Dame de Boulogne la Petite, which was built in the forest at the command of Philip IV of France (1268–1314). In 1308, Philip made a pilgrimage to Boulogne-sur-Mer, on the French coast, to see a statue of the Virgin Mary which was reputed to inspire miracles. He decided to build a church with a copy of the statue in a village in the forest not far from Paris, in order to attract pilgrims. The chapel was built after Philip's death between 1319 and 1330, in what is now Boulogne-Billancourt.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: During the Hundred Years' War, the forest became a sanctuary for robbers and sometimes a battleground. In 1416–17, the soldiers of John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy, burned part of the forest in their successful campaign to capture Paris. Under Louis XI, the trees were replanted, and two roads were opened through the forest.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: In 1526, King Francis I of France began a royal residence, the Château de Madrid, in the forest in what is now Neuilly and used it for hunting and festivities. It took its name from a similar palace in Madrid, where Francis had been held prisoner for several months. The Château was rarely used by later monarchs, fell into ruins in the 18th century, and was demolished after the French Revolution.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Despite its royal status, the forest remained dangerous for travellers; the scientist and traveller Pierre Belon was murdered by thieves in the Bois de Boulogne in 1564.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: During the reigns of Henry II and Henry III, the forest was enclosed within a wall with eight gates. Henry IV planted 15,000 mulberry trees, with the hope of beginning a local silk industry. When Henry annulled his marriage to Marguerite de Valois, she went to live in the Château de la Muette, on the edge of the forest.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: In the early 18th century, wealthy and important women often retired to the convent of the Abbey of Longchamp, located where the hippodrome now stands. A famous opera singer of the period, Madmoiselle Le Maure, retired there in 1727 but continued to give recitals inside the Abbey, even during Holy Week. These concerts drew large crowds and irritated the Archbishop of Paris, who closed the Abbey to the public.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Louis XVI and his family used the forest as a hunting ground and pleasure garden. In 1777, the Comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's brother, built a charming miniature palace, the Château de Bagatelle, in the Bois in just 64 days, on a wager from his sister-in-law, Marie Antoinette. Louis XVI also opened the walled park to the public for the first time.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: On 21 November 1783, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes took off from the Château de la Muette in a hot air balloon made by the Montgolfier brothers. Previous flights had carried animals or had been tethered to the ground; this was the first manned free flight in history. The balloon rose to a height of 910 meters (3000 feet), was in the air for 25 minutes, and covered nine kilometers.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Following the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814, 40,000 soldiers of the British and Russian armies camped in the forest. Thousands of trees were cut down to build shelters and for firewood.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: From 1815 until the French Second Republic, the Bois was largely empty, an assortment of bleak ruined meadows and tree stumps where the British and Russians had camped and dismal stagnant ponds.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois de Boulogne was the idea of Napoleon III, shortly after he staged a coup d'état and elevated himself from the President of the French Republic to Emperor of the French in 1852. When Napoleon III became Emperor, Paris had only four public parks - the Tuileries Gardens, the Luxembourg Garden, the Palais-Royal, and the Jardin des Plantes - all in the center of the city. There were no public parks in the rapidly growing east and west of the city. During his exile in London, he had been particularly impressed by Hyde Park, by its lakes and streams and its popularity with Londoners of all social classes. Therefore, he decided to build two large public parks on the eastern and western edges of the city where both the rich and ordinary people could enjoy themselves.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: These parks became an important part of the plan for the reconstruction of Paris drawn up by Napoleon III and his new Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The Haussmann plan called for improving the city's traffic circulation by building new boulevards; improving the city's health by building a new water distribution system and sewers; and creating green spaces and recreation for Paris' rapidly growing population. In 1852, Napoleon donated the land for the Bois de Boulogne and for the Bois de Vincennes, which both belonged officially to him. Additional land in the plain of Longchamp, the site of the Château de Madrid, the Château de Bagatelle, and its gardens were purchased and attached to the proposed park, so it could extend all the way to the Seine. Construction was funded out of the state budget, supplemented by selling building lots along the north end of the Bois, in Neuilly.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Napoleon III was personally involved in planning the new parks. He insisted that the Bois de Boulogne should have a stream and lakes, like Hyde Park in London. "We must have a stream here, as in Hyde Park," he observed while driving through the Bois, "to give life to this arid promenade".


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The first plan for the Bois de Boulogne was drawn up by the architect Jacques Hittorff, who, under King Louis Philippe, had designed the Place de la Concorde, and the landscape architect Louis-Sulpice Varé, who had designed French landscape gardens at several famous châteaux. Their plan called for long straight alleys in patterns crisscrossing the park, and, as the Emperor had asked, lakes and a long stream similar to the Serpentine in Hyde Park.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Varé bungled the assignment. He failed to take into account the difference in elevation between the beginning of the stream and the end; if his plan had been followed, the upper part of the stream would have been empty, and the lower portion flooded. When Haussmann saw the partially finished stream, he saw the problem immediately and had the elevations measured. He dismissed the unfortunate Varé and Hittorff, and designed the solution himself; an upper lake and a lower lake, divided by an elevated road, which serves as a dam, and a cascade which allows the water to flow between the lakes. This is the design still seen today.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: In 1853, Haussmann hired an experienced engineer from the corps of Bridges and Highways, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, whom he had worked with in his previous assignment in Bordeaux, and made him the head of a new Service of Promenades and Plantations, in charge of all the parks in Paris. Alphand was charged to make a new plan for the Bois de Boulogne. Alphand's plan was radically different from the Hittorff-Varé plan. While it still had two long straight boulevards, the Allée Reine Marguerite and the Avenue Longchamp, all the other paths and alleys curved and meandered. The flat Bois de Boulogne was to be turned into an undulating landscape of lakes, hills, islands, groves, lawns, and grassy slopes, not a reproduction of but an idealization of nature. It became the prototype for the other city parks of Paris and then for city parks around the world.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The building of the park was an enormous engineering project which lasted for five years. The upper and lower lakes were dug, and the earth piled into islands and hills. Rocks were brought from Fontainbleau and combined with concrete to make the cascade and an artificial grotto.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The pumps from the Seine could not provide enough water to fill the lakes and irrigate the park, so a new channel was created to bring the water of the Ourcq River, from Monceau to the upper lake in the Bois, but this was not enough. An artesian well 586 meters deep was eventually dug in the plain of Passy which could produce 20,000 cubic meters of water a day. This well went into service in 1861.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The water then had to be distributed around the park to water the lawns and gardens; the traditional system of horse-drawn wagons with large barrels of water would not be enough. A system of 66 kilometers of pipes was laid, with a faucet every 30 or 40 meters, a total of 1600 faucets.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Alphand also had to build a network of roads, paths, and trails to connect the sights of the park. The two long straight alleys from the old park were retained, and his workers built an additional 58 kilometers of roads paved with stones for carriages, 12 kilometers of sandy paths for horses, and 25 kilometers of dirt trails for walkers. As a result of Louis Napoléon's exile in London and his memories of Hyde Park, all the new roads and paths were curved and meandering.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The planting of the park was the task of the new chief gardener and landscape architect of the Service of Promenades and Plantations, Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, who had also worked with Haussmann and Alphand in Bordeaux. His gardeners planted 420,000 trees, including hornbeam, beech, linden, cedar, chestnut, and elm, and hardy exotic species, like redwoods. They planted 270 hectares of lawns, with 150 kilograms of seed per hectare, and thousands of flowers. To make the forest more natural, they brought 50 deer to live in and around the Pré-Catelan.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The park was designed to be more than a collection of picturesque landscapes; it was meant as a place for amusement and recreation, with sports fields, bandstands, cafes, shooting galleries, riding stables, boating on the lakes, and other attractions. In 1855, Gabriel Davioud, a graduate of Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was named the chief architect of the new Service of Promenades and Plantations. He was commissioned to design 24 pavilions and chalets, plus cafes, gatehouses, boating docks, and kiosks. He designed the gatehouses where the guardians of the park lived to look like rustic cottages. He had a real Swiss chalet built out of wood in Switzerland and transported to Paris, where it was reassembled on an island in the lake and became a restaurant. He built another restaurant next to the park's most picturesque feature, the Grand Cascade. He designed artificial grottoes made of rocks and concrete, and bridges and balustrades made of concrete painted to look like wood. He also designed all the architectural details of the park, from cone-shaped shelters designed to protect horseback riders from the rain to the park benches and direction signs.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: At the south end of the park, in the Plain of Longchamp, Davioud restored the ruined windmill which was the surviving vestige of the Abbey of Longchamp, and, working with the Jockey Club of Paris, constructed the grandstands of the Hippodrome of Longchamp, which opened in 1857.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: At the northern end of the park, between the Sablons gate and Neuilly, a 20-hectare section of the park was given to the Societé Imperiale zoologique d'Acclimatation, to create a small zoo and botanical garden, with an aviary of rare birds and exotic plants and animals from around the world.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: In March 1855, an area in the center of the park, called the Pré-Catelan, was leased to a concessionaire for a garden and amusement park. It was built on the site of a quarry where the gravel and sand for the park's roads and paths had been dug out. It included a large circular lawn surrounded by trees, grottos, rocks, paths, and flower beds. Davioud designed a buffet, a marionette theater, a photography pavilion, stables, a dairy, and other structures. The most original feature was the Théâtre des fleurs, an open-air theater in a setting of trees and flowers. Later, an ice skating rink and shooting gallery were added. The Pré-Catelan was popular for concerts and dances, but it had continual financial difficulties and eventually went bankrupt. The floral theater remained in business until the beginning of the First World War, in 1914.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The garden-building team assembled by Haussmann of Alphand, Barrillet-Deschamps and Davioud went on to build The Bois de Vincennes, Parc Monceau Parc Montsouris, and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, using the experience and aesthetics they had developed in the Bois de Boulogne. They also rebuilt the Luxembourg gardens and the gardens of the Champs- Elysees, created smaller squares and parks throughout the center of Paris, and planted thousands of trees along the new boulevards that Haussmann had created. In the 17 years of Napoleon III's reign, they planted no less than 600,000 trees and created a total 1,835 hectares of green space in Paris, more than any other ruler of France before or since. By 1867 the Baedeker Guide described it as "once a forest abounding with game, the resort of duellists and suicides and the haunt of bandits ... now a delightful park".


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), which led to the downfall of Napoleon III and the long siege of Paris, the park suffered some damage from German artillery bombardment, the restaurant of the Grand Cascade was turned into a field hospital, and many of the park's animals and wild fowl were eaten by the hungry population. In the years following, however, the park quickly recovered.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois de Boulogne became a popular meeting place and promenade route for Parisians of all classes. The alleys were filled with carriages, coaches, and horseback riders, and later with men and women on bicycles, and then with automobiles. Families having picnics filled the woods and lawns, and Parisians rowed boats on the lake, while the upper classes were entertained in the cafes. The restaurant of the Pavillon de la Grand Cascade became a popular spot for Parisian weddings. During the winter, when the lakes were frozen, they were crowded with ice skaters.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The activities of Parisians in the Bois, particularly the long promenades in carriages around the lakes, were often portrayed in French literature and art in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Scenes set in the park appeared in "Nana" by Émile Zola and in "L'Éducation sentimentale" by Gustave Flaubert. In the last pages of "Du côté de chez Swann" in "À la recherche du temps perdu" (1914), Marcel Proust minutely described a walk around the lakes taken as a child. The life in the park was also the subject of the paintings of many artists, including Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh, and Mary Cassatt.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: In 1860, Napoleon opened the Jardin d'Acclimatation, a separate concession of 20 hectares at the north end of the park; it included a zoo and a botanical garden, as well as an amusement park. Between 1877 and 1912, it also served as the home of what was called an ethnological garden, a place where groups of the inhabitants of faraway countries were put on display for weeks at a time in reconstructed villages from their homelands. They were mostly Sub-Saharan Africans, North Africans, or South American Indians, and came mostly from the French colonies in Africa and South America, but also included natives of Lapland and Cossacks from Russia. These exhibitions were extremely popular and took place not only in Paris, but also in Germany, England, and at the Chicago Exposition in the United States; but they were also criticized at the time and later as being a kind of "human zoo". Twenty-two of these exhibits were held in the park in the last quarter of the 19th century. About ten more were held in the 20th century, with the last one taking place in 1931.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: In 1905, a grand new restaurant in the classical style was built in the Pré-Catelan by architect Guillaume Tronchet. Like the cafe at the Grand Cascade, it became a popular promenade destination for the French upper classes.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: At the 1900 Summer Olympics, the land hosted the croquet and tug of war events. During the 1924 Summer Olympics, the equestrian events took place in the Auteuil Hippodrome.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois de Boulonge hosted all rowing teams participating in the Inter-Allied Games, held in Paris in 1919 following the end of World War One.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois de Boulogne was officially annexed by the city of Paris in 1929 and incorporated into the 16th arrondissement.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Soon after World War II, the park began to come back to life. In 1945, it held its first motor race after the war: the Paris Cup. In 1953, a British group, Les Amis de la France, created the Shakespeare Garden on the site of the old floral theater in the Pré-Catelan.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: From 1952 until 1986, the Duke of Windsor, the title granted to King Edward VIII after his abdication, and his wife, Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, lived in the Villa Windsor, a house in the Bois de Boulogne behind the garden of the Bagatelle. The house was (and still is) owned by the City of Paris and was leased to the couple. The Duke died in this house in 1972, and the Duchess died there in 1986. The lease was purchased by Mohamed al-Fayed, the owner of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The house was visited briefly by Diana, Princess of Wales and her companion, Dodi Fayed, on 31 August 1997, the day that they died in a traffic accident in the Alma tunnel.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: On weekends, the Bois de Boulogne is full of activities such as biking, jogging, boat rowing, horseback and pony rides, and remote control speed boats. Picnics are permitted in most parts of the park, but barbecues are not allowed.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois de Boulogne hosts several races, like the of Boulogne and the Boulogne half marathon. Since its creation, the last part of the Paris marathon ends by crossing the Bois de Boulogne from . Boulogne Wood is an important place of running in Paris.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois holds a three-day weekend party in the month of July, with over 50 bands and singers, attended mostly by students who camp out overnight.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Though soliciting for prostitution is illegal in France, at night-time parts of the Bois de Boulogne are a popular rendezvous place for prostitutes, usually working in vans parked by the side of the road. The French government has been trying to eliminate this business from the park.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Bois de Boulogne is home to many beautiful red squirrels. While they are protected in France, it is important to keep dogs on leash in the park to ensure the safety of the squirrels.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: The Bois de Boulogne contains two artificial lakes and eight artificial ponds, connected by three artificial streams. They receive their water from a canal drawn from Ourq River and from artesian wells in Passy. The water arrives in the Lac Superieur (Upper Lake), built in 1852 and located near the Hippodrome de Auteil, then flows by gravity to the Grand Cascade and then to the Lac Inferieur, or Lower Lake.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: Within the Bois de Boulogne, there are several separate botanical and floral gardens, and gardens of amusement.


title: Bois de Boulogne

text: There is a seven-hectare campground in the Bois de Boulogne, Camping Indigo Paris, with five hundred and ten sites ("pitches") for travellers with tents, caravans and camping cars. Reservations can be made in advance, online. Mobile home rentals are also available by reservation.


title: 2017 Major League Baseball draft

text: The 2017 Major League Baseball (MLB) First-Year Player Draft began on June 12, 2017. The draft assigned amateur baseball players to MLB teams. The first 36 picks, including the first round and compensatory picks, were broadcast on MLB Network on June 12, while the remainder of the draft was live streamed on MLB.com on June 13 and 14.


title: 2017 Major League Baseball draft

text: With the worst record in the 2016 MLB season, the Minnesota Twins received the first overall pick. Compensation picks were distributed for players who did not sign from the 2016 MLB Draft. Also, fourteen small-market teams competed in a lottery for additional competitive balance picks, with six teams receiving an additional pick after the first round, and eight teams receiving an additional pick after the second round. The Twins selected Royce Lewis with the first overall selection.


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: Alicia Esteve Head ( , ; born July 31, 1973) is a Spanish woman who claimed to be a survivor of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, under the name Tania Head. She joined the World Trade Center Survivors' Network support group, later becoming its president. Her name was regularly mentioned in media reports of the attacks. In 2007, it was revealed Head's story was a hoax; she was not in New York City on September 11, 2001, but in reality was attending classes in her native city, Barcelona.


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: Alicia Esteve Head was born on July 31, 1973, in Barcelona, Spain. Head came from a prominent Barcelona family that was involved in a 1992 financial scandal for which her father and brother served prison terms. She attended the University of Barcelona and worked for Hotel de la Villa Olímpica S.A., a Spanish hotel company. She later worked in Barcelona as a management secretary from 1998 to 2000 and was enrolled in a master's degree program at ESADE in 2001 when the September 11 attacks took place.


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: Head traveled to the U.S. for the first time in 2003. The following year, she joined the World Trade Center Survivors' Network after Gerry Bogacz, one of its founders, learned through word of mouth that a woman named "Tania Head" had developed an online support group for 9/11 survivors. After many months of email correspondence with Bogacz, she merged their groups. The network's purpose was to provide support for survivors of the attacks, as most public support was paid to a select group of victims, victims' families and first responders; the organization intended to bring together and support those who were also affected by the attacks, including civilians present at the World Trade Center as well as the personnel and volunteers involved in the extensive rescue and recovery efforts afterward. Head was never paid for these activities, nor for her involvement with the Survivors' Network, and in fact donated money to the group.


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: Head claimed to have been inside the South Tower (WTC 2) when United Airlines Flight 175 hit, crawling through smoke and flames on the 78th floor and sustaining severe burns to her arm. If true, this would have made her one of only nineteen people at or above the point of impact to have survived. Head claimed that her fiancé Dave was killed in the North Tower (WTC 1), though in later tellings of the story, she said that "Dave" was actually her husband. She also claimed that a dying man passed his wedding ring to her so it could be returned to his widow, and that she had been rescued by Welles Crowther, whose heroic actions on that day were widely reported in the media. Head was interviewed in the media, invited to speak at university conferences, and in 2005, was chosen to lead tours for the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, where she was photographed with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former New York Governor George Pataki.


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: Head regularly recounted her claims to Ground Zero tour groups in vivid detail, saying, "I was there at the towers. I'm a survivor. I'm going to tell you about that." She was featured in retrospective 9/11 articles as a representative of the 20,000 surviving victims who escaped the damaged buildings. Richard Zimbler, her successor as president of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network, said, "There was no reason to doubt her story. She looked the part. She had a badly injured arm that appeared to have burn scars and her story was very, very realistic."


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: In September 2007, "The New York Times" sought to verify key details of Head's story as part of an anniversary piece. Head claimed a degree from Harvard University and a graduate business degree from Stanford University, but those institutions had no record of her. She claimed she had been working at Merrill Lynch in the South Tower, but Merrill Lynch had no record of her employment, nor did Merrill Lynch have offices in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks. Head backed out of three scheduled interviews, and later refused to speak to reporters at all. The "Times" then contacted other members of the Survivors’ Network, and raised questions about the veracity of Head's story. By the week of September 27, 2007, the Network voted to remove her as president and as a director of the group.


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: Among other questionable elements of Head's story was her engagement to a man nicknamed "Big Dave", who had perished in the opposite tower. The man's family claimed to have never heard of Tania Head (the man's surname was withheld in the article, to respect his family's privacy).


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: The Barcelona newspaper "La Vanguardia" ultimately revealed that Head had been in class at ESADE in Barcelona during the 9/11 attacks, where she had told her classmates that her scarred arm was the result of an automobile accident, or alternatively a horse riding accident, many years earlier. "La Vanguardia" reported that Head attended classes in the program until June 2002, and had told classmates she wanted to work in New York.


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: After Head's fraud was exposed, she declined all further interviews and abruptly left New York. In February 2008, an anonymous email was sent from a Spanish account to members of the World Trade Center Survivors Network, claiming that Head had died by suicide. This suicide claim turned out to be yet another lie. In 2012, a book and feature film documentary, both titled "The Woman Who Wasn't There", told Head's story from inside the World Trade Center Survivors' Network, utilizing interviews with Head and members of the Network before and after her deception was revealed. Both the book and film noted that Head was seen with her mother in New York on September 14, 2011.


title: Alicia Esteve Head

text: In July 2012, Head was fired from her position at Inter Partner Assistance, an insurance company in Barcelona, once her employers found out about her ruse in New York.


title: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

text: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a 2021 American fantasy thriller film written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour. It stars Kate Hudson, Jun Jong-seo, Ed Skrein, Evan Whitten, and Craig Robinson.


title: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

text: The film had its world premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival on September 5, 2021. It was released in the United States on September 30, 2022, by Saban Films.


title: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

text: In October 2018, it was announced Kate Hudson, Craig Robinson, Altonio Jackson, and Zac Efron had joined the cast of the film, with Ana Lily Amirpour directing from a screenplay she wrote. John Lesher will serve as a producer under his Le Grisbi Productions banner. Black Bicycle Entertainment is producing in association with , Luke Rodgers will executive produce. In April 2019, Jun Jong-seo joined the cast of the film. In July 2019, it was announced Ed Skrein and Evan Whitten had joined the cast of the film, with Skrein replacing Efron.


title: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

text: Principal photography began in July 2019. Alongside original music by Daniele Luppi, the soundtrack includes several songs by Bottin.


title: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

text: "Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon" had its world premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival on September 5, 2021. In March 2022, Saban Films acquired distribution rights to the film. It was released in the United States on September 30, 2022.


title: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 75% based on reviews from 65 critics, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads, ""Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon" finds writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour spinning a stylishly lurid – if somewhat narratively undercooked – fantasy yarn." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 69 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Imperial War Museum

text: Imperial War Museums (IWM) is a British national museum organisation with branches at five locations in England, three of which are in London. Founded as the Imperial War Museum in 1917, the museum was intended to record the civil and military war effort and sacrifice of Britain and its Empire during the First World War. The museum's remit has since expanded to include all conflicts in which British or Commonwealth forces have been involved since 1914. As of 2012, the museum aims "to provide for, and to encourage, the study and understanding of the history of modern war and 'wartime experience'."


title: Imperial War Museum

text: Originally housed in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham Hill, the museum opened to the public in 1920. In 1924, the museum moved to space in the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, and finally in 1936, the museum acquired a permanent home that was previously the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Southwark. The outbreak of the Second World War saw the museum expand both its collections and its terms of reference, but in the post-war period, the museum entered a period of decline. The 1960s saw the museum redevelop its Southwark building, now referred to as Imperial War Museum London, which serves as the organisation's corporate headquarters. During the 1970s, the museum began to expand onto other sites. The first, in 1976, was a historic airfield in Cambridgeshire now referred to as IWM Duxford. In 1978, the Royal Navy cruiser became a branch of the museum, having previously been preserved for the nation by a private trust. In 1984, the Cabinet War Rooms, an underground wartime command centre, was opened to the public. From the 1980s onwards, the museum's Bethlem building underwent a series of multimillion-pound redevelopments, completed in 2000. Finally, 2002 saw the opening of IWM North in Trafford, Greater Manchester, the fifth branch of the museum and the first in the north of England. In 2011, the museum rebranded itself as IWM, standing for "Imperial War Museums".


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's collections include archives of personal and official documents, photographs, film and video material, and oral history recordings, an extensive library, a large art collection, and examples of military vehicles and aircraft, equipment, and other artefacts.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum is funded by government grants, charitable donations, and revenue generation through commercial activity such as retailing, licensing, and publishing. General admission is free to IWM London (although specific exhibitions require the purchase of a ticket) and IWM North, but an admission fee is levied at the other branches. The museum is an exempt charity under the Charities Act 1993 and a non-departmental public body under the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. As of January 2012, the Chairman of the Trustees is Sir Francis Richards. Since October 2008, the museum's director general has been Diane Lees.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: On 27 February 1917 Sir Alfred Mond, a Liberal MP and First Commissioner of Works, wrote to the Prime Minister David Lloyd George to propose the establishment of a National War Museum. This proposal was accepted by the War Cabinet on 5 March 1917 and the decision announced in "The Times" on 26 March. A committee was established, chaired by Mond, to oversee the collection of material to be exhibited in the new museum.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: This National War Museum Committee set about collecting material to illustrate Britain's war effort by dividing into subcommittees examining such subjects as the Army, the Navy, the production of munitions, and women's war work. There was an early appreciation of the need for exhibits to reflect personal experience in order to prevent the collections becoming dead relics. Sir Martin Conway, the museum's first director general, said that exhibits must "be vitalised by contributions expressive of the action, the experiences, the valour and the endurance of individuals". The museum's first curator and secretary was Charles ffoulkes, who had previously been curator of the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London. In July 1917 Mond made a visit to the Western Front in order to study how best to organise the museum's growing collection. While in France he met French government ministers, along with Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front, who reportedly took great interest in his work. In December 1917 the name was changed to the "Imperial" War Museum after a resolution from the India and Dominions Committee of the museum.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum was opened by King George V at the Crystal Palace on 9 June 1920. During the opening ceremony, Sir Alfred Mond addressed the King on behalf of the committee, saying that "it was hoped to make the museum so complete that every one who took part in the war, however obscurely, would find therein an example or illustration of the sacrifice he or she made" and that the museum "was not a monument of military glory, but a record of toil and sacrifice". Shortly afterwards the Imperial War Museum Act 1920 was passed and established a Board of Trustees to oversee the governance of the museum. To reflect the museum's Imperial remit the board included appointees of the governments of India, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. While the Act was being debated, some Parliamentarians felt that the museum would perpetuate an undesirable war spirit and Commander Joseph Kenworthy MP said that he would "refuse to vote a penny of public money to commemorate such suicidal madness of civilisation as that which was shown in the late War". On the August Bank Holiday 1920, the first public holiday since the museum's opening, 94,179 visitors were received, and by November 1921, 2,290,719 had visited the museum.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In 1924 the museum moved to the Imperial Institute building (demolished in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for Imperial College) in South Kensington. While this location was more central and in a prestigious area for museums, the accommodation itself proved cramped and inadequate and in 1936 a new permanent location was found south of the River Thames in Southwark. The building, designed by James Lewis was the former Bethlem Royal Hospital which had been vacated following the hospital's relocation to Beckenham in Kent. The site was owned by Lord Rothermere, who had originally intended to demolish the building to provide a public park in what was a severely overcrowded area of London. Eventually the central portion of the hospital building was retained.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The two extensive wings were removed and the resulting space named Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, after Lord Rothermere's mother. Sir Martin Conway described the building as "...a fine building, really quite noble building, with a great portico, a distinguishing dome, and two great wings added to it for the accommodation of lunatics no longer required. This particular building can be made to contain our collection admirably, and we shall preserve from destruction quite a fine building which otherwise will disappear". The "distinguishing dome" was added by Sydney Smirke in 1846 and housed the hospital's chapel. The museum was reopened by the Duke of York (later King George VI) in its new accommodation on 7 July 1936.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the museum began to collect material documenting the conflict. In November 1939, during the "Phoney War", the museum appeared in the opening sequence of the GPO Film Unit production "The First Days", in which children are seen playing on some of the museum's German artillery pieces captured during the First World War. With the Dunkirk evacuation in May–June 1940, the British Army's shortage of equipment saw eighteen of the museum's artillery pieces return to military service. The museum's trench clubs were used by the Home Guard, while other items such as sights and optical instruments were returned to the Ministry of Supply. The museum refused to return some historic items such as a naval gun from (which had fired Britain's first shot of the First World War) or a gun served by Victoria Cross-winning boy seaman Jack Cornwell. The museum was closed for the duration of the war in September 1940 with the onset of the Blitz. On 31 January 1941 the museum was struck by a "Luftwaffe" bomb which fell on the naval gallery. A number of ship models were damaged by the blast and a Short Type 184 seaplane, which had flown at the Battle of Jutland, was destroyed. While closed to the public the museum's building was used for a variety of purposes connected to the war effort, such as a repair garage for government motor vehicles, a centre for Air Raid Precautions civil defence lectures and a fire fighting training school.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In October 1945 the museum mounted a temporary exhibition, the first since the end of the war in August, which showcased technologies developed by the Petroleum Warfare Department. These included the submarine fuel pipeline PLUTO, the fog dispersal method FIDO, and flame weapons such as the Churchill Crocodile and Wasp Universal Carrier. Due to bomb damage to the building and exhibits, the museum was obliged to reopen its galleries piecemeal and opened a portion of its galleries in November 1946. A third of the galleries were opened in 1948 and a further wing opened in 1949. In 1953, with Commonwealth forces engaged in Korea and Malaya the museum began its current policy of collecting material from all modern conflicts in which British or Commonwealth forces were involved. Despite this expansion of remit, the early postwar period was a period of decline for the museum. Dr Noble Frankland, the museum's director from 1960 to 1982, described the museum's galleries in 1955 as appearing "dingy and neglected [and in a] dismal state of decay" the museum's "numerous stunning exhibits" notwithstanding.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In 1966 the museum's Southwark building was extended to provide collections storage and other facilities, the first major expansion since the museum had moved to the site. The development also included a purpose-built cinema. In 1967 the museum acquired a pair of 15-inch naval guns. One had been mounted on the Royal Navy's HMS "Ramillies" and the other on both HMS "Resolution" and HMS "Roberts". Both had been fired in action during the Second World War. They went on permanent display outside the museum in May 1968. The acquisition of these guns, representative of the dreadnought era of British battleships, led the museum to seek to acquire a 6-inch triple turret that would be representative of a number of classes of British cruisers. This would eventually lead to the preservation of the Royal Navy light cruiser , which became a branch of the museum in 1978.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: Later in 1968 on 13 October the museum was attacked by an arsonist, Timothy John Daly, who claimed he was acting in protest against the exhibition of militarism to children. He caused damage valued at approximately £200,000, not counting the loss of irreplaceable books and documents. On his conviction in 1969 he was sentenced to four years in prison.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In 1969 RAF Duxford, a Royal Air Force fighter airfield in Cambridgeshire was declared surplus to requirements by the Ministry of Defence. Needing further space, the museum duly requested permission to use part of the site as temporary storage. The entire site was later transferred to the museum in February 1976 and Duxford, now referred to as Imperial War Museum Duxford became the museum's first branch. Also during the 1970s the government raised the possibility of the museum taking over the historic Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall. The museum was reluctant due to its new commitments related to Duxford and HMS "Belfast", but agreed in 1982.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: By 1983 the museum was again looking to redevelop the Southwark site and approached engineering firm Arup to plan a phased programme of works that would expand the building's exhibition space, provide appropriate environmental controls to protect collections, and improve facilities for visitors. The following year, in April 1984, the Cabinet War Rooms were opened to the public as a branch of the museum.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The first phase of the works to the Southwark building started in 1986 and were completed in 1989, during which time the museum was closed to the public. The work included the conversion of what was previously the hospital's courtyard into a centrepiece Large Exhibits Gallery. This gallery featured a strengthened ground floor (to support the weight of very heavy exhibits), a first floor mezzanine and second storey viewing balcony. Into this space were placed tanks, artillery pieces, vehicles, ordnance and aircraft from the First World War to the Falklands War. For some years the museum was marketed as "The "new" Imperial War Museum". This atrium, with its concentration of military hardware, has been described as "the biggest boys' bedroom in London". This first phase cost £16.7 million (of which £12 million was provided by the government) and the museum was reopened by The Queen on 29 June 1989.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In September 1992 the museum was the target of a Provisional Irish Republican Army attack against London tourist attractions. Two incendiary devices were found in a basement gallery, but were extinguished by staff before the arrival of the fire brigade, and caused only minor damage.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The second stage of the redevelopment of the Southwark building, during which the museum remained open to the public, was completed in 1994. During the 1990s, while these works were going on, the museum was also seeking to open a branch in the north of England. 71 sites were offered for consideration by 36 local councils and in January 1999 the then Culture Secretary Chris Smith formally launched a project to construct a new branch of the museum, Imperial War Museum North, in Trafford, Greater Manchester.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The following year, 2000, the final phase of the Southwark redevelopment was completed. The development included the installation of the museum's "Holocaust Exhibition" which was opened by the Queen on 6 June 2000. This was the first permanent exhibition dedicated to the Holocaust in a UK museum; its development had taken five years at a cost of £5 million. Two years later, in July 2002, Imperial War Museum North was opened.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: Between 2004 and 2010 the museum was a partner in a national learning project entitled "Their Past Your Future" (TPYF), part of the Big Lottery Fund's Veterans Reunited programme to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. A partnership between the IWM, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh museum authorities, phase one included a touring exhibition seen by more than two million people, overseas educational visits and further activities run by local authorities. A second phase took a wider 20th century historical remit; it comprised a learning programme using overseas visits and social media, and a professional development scheme for educators. A digital archive of the project, online exhibitions and learning resources were also produced.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In October 2011 the museum rebranded itself as Imperial War Museums, the initials IWM forming the basis of a new corporate logo.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In September 2011 the museum secured funding from NESTA, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England to develop "social interpretation" systems to allow visitors to comment on, collect, and share museum objects via social media. These systems were incorporated in "A Family in Wartime", an exhibition at IWM London depicting British family life during the Second World War, which opened in April 2012.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In August 2009 the museum announced the creation of the Imperial War Museum Foundation. Chaired by Jonathan Harmsworth the foundation was charged with raising funds to support the redevelopment of Imperial War Museum London's permanent galleries. In December 2010 plans were announced to redevelop IWM London's First World War gallery in time for the conflict's centenary in 2014, and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge became the foundation's patron. In a speech at IWM London on 11 October 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron announced an additional £5 million of government funding to support the museum's redevelopment, as part of funding arrangements to facilitate national centenary commemorations. The £40 million redevelopment, designed by Foster and Partners, provides new gallery spaces dedicated to the history of the First World War, a new central hall, easier navigation and improved visitor facilities, access and circulation. In preparation for building work, a number of galleries were closed during September 2012, and by December 2012 over sixty large objects had been removed from the IWM London atrium for conservation at Duxford. To allow building work to go ahead, IWM London closed to the public on 2 January 2013. The museum partially reopened on 29 July 2013.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: From the 1970s onwards the Imperial War Museum began to expand onto other sites. The first branch, Imperial War Museum Duxford opened to the public on a regular basis in June 1976. became a branch of the museum in 1978. The Cabinet War Rooms opened in 1984, and Imperial War Museum North in 2002.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum has occupied the former Bethlem Royal Hospital on Lambeth Road since 1936. The hospital building was designed by the hospital surveyor, James Lewis, from plans submitted by John Gandy and other architects, and construction completed in October 1814. The hospital consisted of a range of buildings 580 feet long with a basement and three storeys, parallel to Lambeth Road, with a central entrance under a portico.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The building was substantially altered in 1835 by architect Sydney Smirke. In order to provide more space, he added blocks at either end of the frontage, and galleried wings on either side of the central portion. He also added a small single-storey lodge, still in existence, at the Lambeth Road gate. Later, between 1844 and 1846, the central cupola was replaced with a copper-clad dome in order to expand the chapel beneath. The building also featured a theatre in a building to the rear of the site.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The building remained substantially unchanged until vacated by the hospital in 1930. After the freehold was purchased by Lord Rothermere, the wings were demolished to leave the original central portion (with the dome now appearing disproportionately tall) and Smirke's later wings. When the museum moved into the building in 1936 the ground floor of the central portion was occupied by the principal art gallery, with the east wing housing the Naval gallery and the west wing the Army gallery. The Air Force gallery was housed in the former theatre. The first floor comprised further art galleries (including rooms dedicated to Sir William Orpen and Sir John Lavery), a gallery on women's war work, and exhibits relating to transport and signals. The first floor also housed the museum's photograph collection. The second floor housed the museum's library in its west wing, and in the east wing the map collection and stored pictures and drawings. This division of exhibits by service, and by civil or military activity, persisted until a wide-ranging redisplay of the galleries from the 1960s onwards. In September 1972 the building received Grade II listed building status.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The original hospital building is now largely occupied by corporate offices. The 1966 extension houses the library, art store, and document archives while the 1980s redevelopments created exhibition space over five floors. The first stage created 8,000 m of gallery space of which 4,600 m was new, and the second provided a further 1,600 m. The final phase, the Southwest Infill, was partly funded by a £12.6 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and provided 5,860m of gallery space and educational facilities over six floors. Before the 2013–14 redevelopment, the basement was occupied by permanent galleries on the First and Second World Wars, and of conflicts after 1945. The ground floor comprised the atrium, cinema, temporary exhibition spaces, and visitor facilities. The first floor included the atrium mezzanine, education facilities, and a permanent gallery, "Secret War", exploring special forces, espionage and covert operations. The second floor included the atrium viewing balcony, two art galleries, a temporary exhibition area and the permanent "Crimes against Humanity" exhibition. The third floor housed the permanent "Holocaust Exhibition", and the fourth floor, a vaulted roof space, accommodated the Lord Ashcroft Gallery. Opened in November 2010 the gallery exhibits the museum's Victoria Cross (VC) and George Cross collection, alongside the private VC collection amassed by Michael Ashcroft, 241 medals in total.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In August 2019, the museum announced plans to spend over £30m on a new set of galleries over two floors at its London site covering the Holocaust and its importance in World War II. The galleries opened in October 2021 to replace the existing permanent exhibition.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In 1989 the museum acquired the All Saints Annexe, a former hospital building in Austral Street off West Square. The 1867 building, which backs onto Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, was originally an orphanage opened by local philanthropist Charlotte Sharman, then later used as a hospital. It houses the museum's photographic, film and sound archives, and offices.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: Imperial War Museum Duxford, near the village of Duxford in Cambridgeshire, is Britain's largest aviation museum. Duxford houses the museum's large exhibits, including nearly 200 aircraft, military vehicles, artillery and minor naval vessels in seven main exhibitions buildings. The site also provides storage space for the museum's collections of film, photographs, documents, books and artefacts. The site accommodates a number of British Army regimental museums, including those of the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Anglian Regiment.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: Based on the historic Duxford Aerodrome, the site was originally operated by the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the First World War. During the Second World War Duxford played a prominent role during the Battle of Britain and was later used by United States Army Air Forces fighter units in support of the daylight bombing of Germany. Duxford remained an active RAF airfield until 1961. Many of Duxford's original buildings, such as hangars used during the Battle of Britain, are still in use. A number of these buildings are of architectural or historic significance and over thirty have listed building status. The site also features a number of purpose-built exhibition buildings, such as the Stirling Prize-winning American Air Museum, designed by Sir Norman Foster. The site remains an active airfield and is used by a number of civilian flying companies, and hosts regular air shows. The site is operated in partnership with Cambridgeshire County Council and the Duxford Aviation Society, a charity formed in 1975 to preserve civil aircraft and promote appreciation of British civil aviation history.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: HMS "Belfast", a Town class cruiser, was launched in 1938 and served throughout the Second World War, participating in the December 1943 Battle of North Cape and firing some of the first shots of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. She saw further combat in the Korean War. Expected to be disposed of as scrap after she was decommissioned in 1963, in 1967 efforts were initiated to preserve "Belfast" as a museum ship. A joint committee of the Imperial War Museum, the National Maritime Museum and the Ministry of Defence was established, and reported in June 1968 that preservation was practical. In 1971 the government decided against preservation, prompting the formation of the private HMS "Belfast" Trust to campaign for her to be saved for the nation. The Trust was successful in its efforts, and the government transferred the ship to the Trust in July 1971. Brought to London, she was moored on the River Thames near Tower Bridge in the Pool of London. Opened to the public in October 1971 "Belfast" became a branch of the Imperial War Museum on 1 March 1978, being acknowledged by the then Secretary of State for Education and Science, Shirley Williams, as "a unique demonstration of an important phase of our history and technology". In service for 24 years HMS "Belfast" was in Frankland's opinion, capable of representing "a whole generation of [historical evidence]".


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In 2017, the name of the exhibit was changed to "HMS "Belfast" 1938" to reflect that one of the Royal Navy's new Type 26 frigates had been given the name HMS "Belfast".


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The Cabinet War Rooms is an underground complex that served as a British government command centre throughout the Second World War. Located beneath the Treasury building in the Whitehall area of Westminster, the facilities became operational in 1939 and were in constant use until their abandonment in August 1945 after the surrender of Japan. Their historical value was recognised early on, and the public were able to visit by appointment. However, the practicalities of allowing public access to a site beneath a working government office meant that only 4,500 of 30–40,000 annual applicants to visit the War Rooms could be admitted. The museum agreed to take over the administration of the site in 1982, a development keenly supported by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, an admirer of Britain's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Thatcher opened the War Rooms in April 1984. In 2003 a further suite of rooms, used as accommodation by Churchill, his wife and close associates, were added to the museum. The restoration of these rooms, which since the war had been stripped out and used for storage, cost £7.5 million. In 2005 the War Rooms were rebranded as the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, with 850 m of the site redeveloped as a biographical museum exploring Churchill's life. The development of the Churchill Museum cost a further £6 million. The centrepiece is a 15m interactive table which enables visitors to access digitised material, particularly from the Churchill Archives Centre, via an "electronic filing cabinet". The museum was renamed the Churchill War Rooms in 2010.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The Imperial War Museum North was opened in Trafford, Greater Manchester, in 2002. It was the first branch of the museum outside southeast England, and the first to be purpose-built as a museum. Designed by architect Daniel Libeskind, with Manchester-based architects Leach Rhodes Walker providing implementation services, The Imperial War Museum North was Libeskind's first building in Britain. Libeskind's building, overlooking the Manchester Ship Canal at Salford Quays, was based on the concept of a globe shattered by conflict into shards and reassembled. These shards, representing earth, air and water, give the building its shape. Originally budgeted at £40 million, the museum was eventually completed for £28.5 million after anticipated funding was not forthcoming. The museum was funded by local, national and European development agencies, by private donations and by Peel Holdings, a local transport and property company which contributed £12.5 million.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's first floor main gallery space houses the permanent exhibitions. These consist of a chronological display which runs around the gallery's 200m perimeter and six thematic displays in "silos" within the space. The walls of the gallery space are used as screens for the projection of an hourly audiovisual presentation, the Big Picture. The main gallery, described as cavernous and dramatic, includes objects such as a Russian T-34 tank, a United States Marine Corps AV-8A Harrier jet, and a British 13-pounder field gun which fired the British Army's first shot of the First World War. The museum also hosts a programme of temporary exhibitions, mounted in a separate gallery.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The Imperial War Museum's original collections date back to the material amassed by the National War Museum Committee. The present departmental organisation came into being during the 1960s as part of Frankland's reorganisation of the museum. The 1970s saw oral history gain increasing prominence and in 1972 the museum created the Department of Sound Records (now the Sound Archive) to record interviews with individuals who had experienced the First World War. The museum maintains an online database of its collections.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's documents archive seeks to collect and preserve the private papers of individuals who have experienced modern warfare. The archive's holdings range from the papers of senior British and Commonwealth army, navy and air officers, to the letters, diaries and memoirs of lower-ranked servicemen and of civilians. The collection includes the papers of Field Marshals Bernard Montgomery, and Sir John French. The archive also includes large collections of foreign documents, such as captured German Second World War documents previously held by the Cabinet Office Historical Section, Air Historical Branch and other British government bodies. The foreign collection also includes captured Japanese material transferred from the Cabinet Office. The collection also includes files on Victoria and George Cross recipients, and correspondence relating to the BBC documentary "The Great War". The documents collection also includes the UK National Inventory of War Memorials. In 2012 the museum reported its documents collection to contain 24,800 collections of papers.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's art collection includes paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, and works in film, photography and sound. The collection originated during the First World War, when the museum acquired works that it had itself commissioned, as well as works commissioned by the Ministry of Information's British War Memorials Committee. As early as 1920 the art collection held over 3,000 works and included pieces by John Singer Sargent, Wyndham Lewis, John Nash and Christopher Nevinson. Notable First World War works include Sargent's "Gassed" and other works commissioned for an, unbuilt, Hall of Remembrance. The collection expanded again after the Second World War, receiving thousands of works sponsored by the Ministry of Information's War Artists' Advisory Committee.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In 1972 the museum established the Artistic Records Committee (since renamed the Art Commissions Committee) to commission artists to cover contemporary conflicts. Commissioned artists include Ken Howard, Linda Kitson, John Keane, Peter Howson, Steve McQueen (see "Queen and Country") and Langlands & Bell, responding to conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The collection also includes over twenty thousand items of publicity material such as posters, postcards, and proclamations from both world wars, and more recent material such as posters issued by anti-war organisations such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Stop the War Coalition. The museum's collection is represented in digital resources such as the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), and Google Art Project. In 2012 the museum reported the total size of its art collection as 84,980 items.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's Film and Video Archive is one of the oldest film archives in the world. The archive preserves a range of historically significant film and video material, including the official British film record of the First World War. Notable among the archive's First World War holdings is "The Battle of the Somme", a pioneering 1916 documentary film (which was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2005), and "Der Magische Gürtel", a German 1917 propaganda film about the submarine "U-35". The archive's Second World War holdings include unedited film shot by British military cameramen, which document combat actions such as the British landings on D-Day in June 1944, and the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The archive also holds government information films and propaganda features such as "Target for Tonight" (1941) and "Desert Victory" (1943). The archive's post-Second World War collections include material from the Korean War, Cold War material, the former film library of NATO, and material produced by the United Nations UNTV service in Bosnia. As an official repository under the 1958 Public Records Act, the archive continues to receive material from the Ministry of Defence. The archive also seeks to acquire amateur film taken by both service personnel and civilian cameramen. Material from the collection was used in the production of TV documentary series such as "The Great War" and "The World at War". In 2012 the museum reported the size of its film archive as being in excess of 23,000 hours of film, video and digital footage. IWM participated in the national digitising project Unlocking Film Heritage.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's Photograph Archive preserves photographs by official, amateur and professional photographers. The collection includes the official British photographic record of the two world wars; the First World War collection includes the work of photographers such as Ernest Brooks and John Warwick Brooke. The archive also holds 150,000 British aerial photographs from the First World War, the largest collection of its kind. The Second World War collection includes the work of photographers such as Bill Brandt, Cecil Beaton and Bert Hardy. Like the Film Archive, the Photograph Archive is an official repository under the 1958 Public Records Act, and as such continues to receive material from the Ministry of Defence. In 2012 the museum reported the size of its photographic holdings as approximately 11 million images in 17,263 collections.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's exhibits collection includes a wide range of objects, organised into numerous smaller collections such as uniforms, badges, insignia and flags (including a Canadian Red Ensign carried at Vimy Ridge in 1917, a Union flag from the 1942 British surrender of Singapore, and another found among the wreckage of the World Trade Center following the September 11 attacks), as well a piece of the towers; personal mementoes, souvenirs and miscellanea such as trench art; orders, medals and decorations (including collections of Victoria and George Crosses); military equipment; firearms and ammunition, ordnance, edged weapons, clubs (such as trench clubs) and other weapons, and vehicles, aircraft and ships. The museum holds the national collection of modern firearms. The firearms collection includes a rifle used by T. E. Lawrence, and an automatic pistol owned by Winston Churchill.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The ordnance collection includes artillery pieces that participated in notable battles, such as the Néry gun, a field gun that was used during the 1914 action at Néry, and equipment captured from enemy forces. The museum's vehicles collection includes "Ole Bill", a bus used by British forces in the First World War, and a number of vehicles used by Field Marshal Montgomery during the Second World War. The museum's aircraft collection includes aircraft that are notable for their rarity, such as the only complete and original Royal Aircraft Factory R.E.8 in existence and one of only two surviving TSR-2 strike aircraft, and aircraft associated with particular actions, such as a Supermarine Spitfire flown during the Battle of Britain. The museum's naval collection includes HM Coastal Motor Boat 4 and a midget submarine HMS "XE8". In 2012 the museum reported its exhibits collection to contain 155,000 objects and a further 357 vehicles and aircraft.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's library is a national reference collection on modern conflict, and holds works on all aspects of warfare, including regimental or unit histories (such as 789 rare German unit histories from the First World War), technical manuals, biographical material and works on war's social, cultural, economic, political and military aspects. The library also holds printed ephemera such as the Imperial War Museum Stamp Collection, leaflets and ration books, printed proclamations, newspapers, trench magazines (such the "Wipers Times") and trench maps. In 2012 the museum reported its library collection to contain over 80,000 items of historic importance (such as maps, proclamations and rare books) and a further 254,000 items of reference material.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's Sound Archive holds 33,000 sound recordings, including a large collection of oral history recordings of witnesses to conflicts since 1914. The museum's sound collection originated in 1972 with the creation of the Department of Sound Records and the instigation of an oral history recording programme. The sound collection opened to the public in July 1977. The collection also includes recordings made by the BBC during the Second World War, actuality sound effects, broadcasts, speeches and poetry. As part of the museum's First World War centenary programme, the museum is producing "Voices of the First World War", a podcast series drawing upon the museum's oral history recordings. In 2012 the museum reported the size of its sound collection as 37,000 hours.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The IWM has an online database, listing the various items which make up the IWM Collections. In some cases, there are images of the item, or contemporary photos, which can be shared and reused under a Creative Commons Licence.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The War Memorials Register is a database of known war memorials in the United Kingdom. Information such as the material used in construction, the condition of the memorial, its address and coordinates with a satellite map plot are recorded for each of the memorials. Whilst many memorials commemorate those who died in the First World War, the scope of the project is all conflicts. , there are over 90,000 memorials on the register.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: In 2014, IWM and online genealogy service provider Findmypast entered into a collaboration to launch the "Lives of the First World War" platform. During the centenary period, anyone could sign up for an account, and those who paid for a subscription had the ability to add records from Findmypast's collections.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: A number of sources (War Office medal index cards, Canadian Expeditionary Force attestations, Royal Navy service records etc.) had been used as seeding documents to create individual entries in the database. Each person's profile in the database could have been further built up, so as to document when that person was born, when they died, family members etc. If a person needed to be added, or a duplicate existed that needed to be merged, such activity was requested via a support forum manned by IWM volunteers. A user with a subscription had the ability to group person profiles together into a "community". This could be a grouping based around a ship's crew, a unit in the army, or the names of men and women buried in a given war cemetery.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The goal was to encourage crowdsourcing to build up as many details as possible in the database, and to tap into the popularity of online genealogy as a pastime. One selling point of the platform was that the data thus captured would form a "permanent digital memorial [that] will be saved for future generations." The IWM declared that the data from the platform would become part of its archive when the platform ceased to be interactive in 2019, "and will be free to access online for research."


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum holds around a half of petabyte of digitised data (as of 2017). This is held in Duxford (Cambridgeshire) on two SpectraLogic T950 tape libraries, with a distance of 500m between them. One is a LTO-5 (Linear Tape-Open) tape library, the other is IBM TS1150.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The Imperial War Museum is an executive non-departmental public body under the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, from which it receives financial support in the form of a grant-in-aid. The governance of the museum is the responsibility of a Board of Trustees, originally established by the Imperial War Museum Act 1920, later amended by the Imperial War Museum Act 1955 and the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 and other relevant legislation. The board comprises a president (currently Prince Edward, Duke of Kent) who is appointed by the sovereign, and fourteen members appointed in varying proportions by the Prime Minister, and the Foreign, Defence, and Culture Secretaries. Seven further members are Commonwealth High Commissioners appointed "ex officio" by their respective governments. As of January 2012 the Chairman of the Trustees is Sir Francis Richards and his deputy is Lieutenant-General Sir John Kiszely. Past chairmen have included Admiral Sir Deric Holland-Martin (1967–77), Admiral of the Fleet Sir Algernon Willis and Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Grandy (trustee 1971–78, chairman 1978–89). During the Second World War Grandy had commanded RAF Duxford, and was chairman during the planning of Duxford's American Air Museum, which opened in 1997.


title: Imperial War Museum

text: The museum's director-general is answerable to the trustees and acts as accounting officer. Since 1917 the museum has had six directors. The first was Sir Martin Conway, a noted art historian, mountaineer and explorer. He was knighted in 1895 for his efforts to map the Karakoram mountain range of the Himalayas, and was Slade Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Cambridge from 1901 to 1904. Conway held the post of director until his death in 1937, when he was succeeded by Leslie Bradley. Bradley had served in the First World War in the Middlesex Regiment before being invalided out in 1917. He later became acquainted with Charles ffoulkes, who invited him to join the museum where he was initially engaged in assembling the museum's poster collection. Bradley retired in 1960 and was succeeded by Dr Noble Frankland. Frankland had served as a navigator in RAF Bomber Command, winning a Distinguished Flying Cross. While a Cabinet Office official historian he co-authored a controversial official history of the RAF strategic air campaign against Germany. Frankland retired in 1982 and was succeeded by Dr Alan Borg who had previously been at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. In 1995 Borg moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum and was succeeded by Sir Robert Crawford, who had originally been recruited by Frankland as a research assistant in 1968. Upon Crawford's retirement in 2008 he was succeeded by Diane Lees, previously director of the V&A Museum of Childhood. She was noted in the media as the first woman appointed to lead a British national museum.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, "The House on Mango Street" (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, "Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories" (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Cisneros' early life provided many experiences she later drew on as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant migration of her family between Mexico and the United States instilled in her the sense of "always straddling two countries ... but not belonging to either culture." Cisneros' work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities, to the extent that "The House on Mango Street" has been translated worldwide and is taught in U.S classrooms as a coming-of-age novel.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998 she established the Macondo Writers Workshop, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Cisneros currently resides in Mexico.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 20, 1954, the third of seven children. The only surviving daughter, she considered herself the "odd number in a set of men". Cisneros's great-grandfather had played the piano for the Mexican president and was from a wealthy background, but he gambled away his family's fortune. Her paternal grandfather Enrique was a veteran of the Mexican Revolution, and he used what money he had saved to give her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral, the opportunity to go to college. However, after failing classes due to what Cisneros called his "lack of interest" in studying, Alfredo ran away to the United States to escape his father's anger. While roaming the southern United States with his brother, Alfredo visited Chicago where he met Elvira Cordero Anguiano. After getting married, the pair settled in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Cisneros's biographer Robin Ganz writes that she acknowledges her mother's family name came from a very humble background, tracing its roots back to Guanajuato, Mexico while her father's was much more "admirable".


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Taking work as an upholsterer to support his family, Cisneros's father began "a compulsive circular migration between Chicago and Mexico City that became the dominating pattern of Cisneros' childhood." Their family was constantly moving between the two countries, which necessitated their finding new places to live as well as schools for the children. Eventually the instability caused Cisneros's six brothers to pair off in twos, leaving her to define herself as the isolated one. Her feelings of exclusion from the family were exacerbated by her father, who referred to his "seis hijos y una hija" ("six sons and one daughter") rather than his "siete hijos" ("seven children"). Ganz notes that Cisneros's childhood loneliness was instrumental in shaping her later passion for writing. Cisneros' one strong female influence was her mother, Elvira, who was a voracious reader and more enlightened and socially conscious than her father. According to Ganz, although Elvira was too dependent on her husband and too restricted in her opportunities to fulfill her own potential, she ensured her daughter would not suffer from the same disadvantages as she did.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Her Khara family made a down payment on their own home in Humboldt Park, a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chicago's West Side when she was eleven years old. This neighborhood and its characters would later become the inspiration for Cisneros' novel "The House on Mango Street". For high school, Cisneros attended Josephinum Academy, a small Catholic all-girls school. Here she found an ally in a high-school teacher who helped her to write poems about the Vietnam War. Although Cisneros had written her first poem around the age of ten, with her teacher's encouragement she became known for her writing throughout her high-school years. In high school she wrote poetry and was the literary magazine editor, but, according to herself, she did not really start writing until her first creative writing class in college in 1974. After that it took a while to find her own voice. She explains, "I rejected what was at hand and emulated the voices of the poets I admired in books: big male voices like James Wright and Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke, all wrong for me."


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Cisneros was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from Loyola University Chicago in 1976, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. At Loyola she had an affair with a professor that she calls a “secret life [from] when I was a junior through Iowa that tormented me and that I wrote about in my poetry.”<ref name="Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey 2020 1 https://lithub.com/sandra-cisneros-on-the-me-too-movement-narrative-voice-and-the-house-on-mango-street"></ref> She describes the abusive relationship as “very damaging to me” and is “why my writing is always dealing with sexuality and wickedness.”


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: While attending the Workshop, Cisneros discovered how the particular social position she occupied gave her writing a unique potential, recalling "It wasn't as if I didn't know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But I didn't think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it! My race, my gender, and my class! And it didn't make sense until that moment, sitting in that seminar. That's when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn't write about." She conformed to American literary canons and adopted a writing style that was purposely opposite that of her classmates, realizing that instead of being something to be ashamed of, her own cultural environment was a source of inspiration. From then on, she would write of her "neighbors, the people [she] saw, the poverty that the women had gone through."


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: So to me it began there, and that's when I intentionally started writing about all the things in my culture that were different from them—the poems that are these city voices—the first part of "Wicked Wicked ways"—and the stories in "House on Mango Street". I think it's ironic that at the moment when I was practically leaving an institution of learning, I began realizing in which ways institutions had failed me.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Drawing on Mexican and Southwestern popular culture and conversations in the city streets, Cisneros wrote to convey the lives of people she identified with. Literary critic Jacqueline Doyle has described Cisneros's passion for hearing the personal stories that people tell and her commitment to expressing the voices of marginalized people through her work, such as the "thousands of silent women" whose struggles are portrayed in "The House on Mango Street".


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Five years after receiving her MFA, she returned to Loyola University-Chicago, where she had previously earned a BA in English, to work as an administrative assistant. Prior to this job, she worked in Pilsen and Little Village, predominately Mexican neighborhoods, in Chicago, and teaching high school dropouts at Latino Youth High School.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: In addition to being an author and poet, Cisneros has held various academic and teaching positions. In 1978, after finishing her MFA degree, she taught former high-school dropouts at the Latino Youth High School in Chicago. The 1984 publication of "The House on Mango Street" secured her a succession of writer-in-residence posts at universities in the United States, teaching creative writing at institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan. She was subsequently a writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Cisneros has also worked as a college recruiter and an arts administrator.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Cisneros currently resides in San Miguel de Allende, a city in central Mexico, but for years she lived and wrote in San Antonio, Texas, in her briefly controversial "Mexican-pink" home with "many creatures little and large." In 1990 when Pilar E. Rodríguez Aranda asked Cisneros in an interview for the "Americas Review" why she has never married or started a family, Cisneros replied, "I've never seen a marriage that is as happy as my living alone. My writing is my child and I don't want anything to come between us." She has elaborated elsewhere that she enjoys living alone because it gives her time to think and write. In the introduction to the third edition of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza", Cisneros wrote: "It's why I moved from Illinois to Texas. So that the relatives and family would allow me the liberty to disappear into myself. To reinvent myself if I had to. As Latinas, we have to .."


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Cisneros' writing is often influenced by her personal experiences and by observations of many of the people in her community. She once confided to other writers at a conference in Santa Fe that she writes down "snippets of dialogue or monologue—records of conversations she hears wherever she goes." These snippets are then mixed and matched to create her stories. Names for her characters often come from the San Antonio phone book; "she leafs through the listings for a last name, then repeats the process for a first name." By mixing and matching she is assured that she is not appropriating anyone's real name or real story, but at the same time her versions of characters and stories are believable.


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Cisneros once found herself so immersed in the characters of her book "Woman Hollering Creek" that they began to infiltrate her subconscious mind. Once while she was writing the story "Eyes of Zapata," she awoke "in the middle of the night, convinced for the moment that she was Ines, the young bride of the Mexican revolutionary. Her dream conversation with Zapata then became those characters' dialogue in her story."


title: Sandra Cisneros

text: Her biculturalism and bilingualism are also very important aspects of her writing. Cisneros was quoted by Robin Ganz as saying that she is grateful to have "twice as many words to pick from ... two ways of looking at the world," and Ganz referred to her "wide range of experience" as a "double-edged sword." Cisneros's ability to speak two languages and to write about her two cultures gives her a unique position from where she is able to tell not just her story, but also the stories of those around her.