title: Homestead strike

text: Carnegie was publicly in favor of labor unions. He condemned the use of strikebreakers and told associates that no steel mill was worth a single drop of blood. But Carnegie agreed with Frick's desire to break the union and "reorganize the whole affair, and ... exact good reasons for employing every man. Far too many men required by Amalgamated rules." Carnegie ordered the Homestead plant to manufacture large amounts of inventory so the plant could weather a strike. He also drafted a notice (which Frick never released) withdrawing recognition of the union.


title: Homestead strike

text: With the collective bargaining agreement due to expire on June 30, 1892, Frick and the leaders of the local AA union entered into negotiations in February. With the steel industry doing well and prices higher, the AA asked for a wage increase; the AA represented about 800 of the 3,800 workers at the plant. Frick immediately countered with a 22% wage decrease that would affect nearly half the union's membership and remove a number of positions from the bargaining unit. Carnegie encouraged Frick to use the negotiations to break the union: "...the Firm has decided that the minority must give way to the majority. These works, therefore, will be necessarily non-union after the expiration of the present agreement." Carnegie believed that the Amalgamated was a hindrance to efficiency; furthermore it was not representative of the workers. It admitted only a small group of skilled workers. It was in its own way an elitist, discriminatory organization that was not worthy of the republic, Carnegie felt.


title: Homestead strike

text: Frick announced on April 30, 1892 that he would bargain for 29 more days. If no contract was reached, Carnegie Steel would cease to recognize the union. Carnegie formally approved Frick's tactics on May 4. Then Frick offered a slightly better wage scale and advised the superintendent to tell the workers, "We do not care whether a man belongs to a union or not, nor do we wish to interfere. He may belong to as many unions or organizations as he chooses, but we think our employees at Homestead Steel Works would fare much better working under the system in vogue at Edgar Thomson and Duquesne."


title: Homestead strike

text: Frick locked workers out of the plate mill and one of the open hearth furnaces on the evening of June 28. When no collective bargaining agreement was reached by June 29, Frick locked the union out of the rest of the plant. A high fence topped with barbed wire, begun in January, was completed and the plant sealed to the workers. Sniper towers with searchlights were constructed near each mill building, and high-pressure water cannons (some capable of spraying boiling-hot liquid) were placed at each entrance. Various aspects of the plant were protected, reinforced, or shielded.


title: Homestead strike

text: At a mass meeting on June 30, local AA leaders reviewed the final negotiating sessions and announced that the company had broken the contract by locking out workers a day before the contract expired. The Knights of Labor, which had organized the mechanics and transportation workers at Homestead, agreed to walk out alongside the skilled workers of the AA. Workers at Carnegie plants in Pittsburgh, Duquesne, Union Mills and Beaver Falls struck in sympathy the same day.


title: Homestead strike

text: The employees in the mill of Messrs. Carnegie, Phipps & Co., at Homestead, Pa., have built there a town with its homes, its schools and its churches; have for many years been faithful co-workers with the company in the business of the mill; have invested thousands of dollars of their savings in said mill in the expectation of spending their lives in Homestead and of working in the mill during the period of their efficiency. . . . "Therefore, the committee desires to express to the public as its firm belief that both the public and the employees aforesaid have equitable rights and interests in the said mill which cannot be modified or diverted without due process of law; that the employees have the right to continuous employment in the said mill during efficiency and good behavior without regard to religious, political or economic opinions or associations; that it is against public policy and subversive of the fundamental principles of American liberty that a whole community of workers should be denied employment or suffer any other social detriment on account of membership in a church, a political party or a trade union; that it is our duty as American citizens to resist by every legal and ordinary means the unconstitutional, anarchic and revolutionary policy of the Carnegie Company, which seems to evince a contempt [for] public and private interests and a disdain [for] the public conscience. . . .


title: Homestead strike

text: The strikers were determined to keep the plant closed. They secured a steam-powered river launch and several rowboats to patrol the Monongahela River, which ran alongside the plant. Men also divided themselves into units along military lines. Picket lines were thrown up around the plant and the town, and 24-hour shifts established. Ferries and trains were watched. Strangers were challenged to give explanations for their presence in town; if one was not forthcoming, they were escorted outside the city limits. Telegraph communications with AA locals in other cities were established to keep tabs on the company's attempts to hire replacement workers. Reporters were issued special badges which gave them safe passage through the town, but the badges were withdrawn if it was felt misleading or false information made it into the news. Tavern owners were even asked to prevent excessive drinking.


title: Homestead strike

text: Frick was also busy. The company placed ads for replacement workers in newspapers as far away as Boston, St. Louis and even Europe.


title: Homestead strike

text: But unprotected strikebreakers would be driven off. On July 4, Frick formally requested that Sheriff William H. McCleary intervene to allow supervisors access to the plant. Carnegie corporation attorney Philander Knox gave the go-ahead to the sheriff on July 5, and McCleary dispatched 11 deputies to the town to post handbills ordering the strikers to stop interfering with the plant's operation. The strikers tore down the handbills and told the deputies that they would not turn over the plant to nonunion workers. Then they herded the deputies onto a boat and sent them downriver to Pittsburgh.


title: Homestead strike

text: Frick had ordered the construction of a solid board fence topped with barbed wire around mill property. The workers dubbed the newly fortified mill "Fort Frick".


title: Homestead strike

text: Frick's intent was to open the works with nonunion men on July 6. Knox devised a plan to get the Pinkertons onto the mill property, agents from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which Frick had contracted to provide security at the plant in April 1892, planned to access the plant grounds from the river. With the mill ringed by striking workers, the agents would access the plant grounds from the river. Three hundred Pinkerton agents assembled on the Davis Island Dam on the Ohio River about five miles below Pittsburgh at 10:30 p.m. on the night of July 5, 1892. They were given Winchester rifles, placed on two specially-equipped barges and towed upriver. They were also given badges which read "Watchman, Carnegie Company, Limited". Many had been hired out of lodging houses at $2.50 per day and were unaware of what their assignment was in Homestead.


title: Homestead strike

text: The strikers were prepared for the Pinkerton agents; the AA had learned of the Pinkertons as soon as they had left Boston for the embarkation point. The small flotilla of union boats went downriver to meet the barges. Strikers on the steam launch fired a few random shots at the barges, then withdrew—blowing the launch whistle to alert the plant. The strikers blew the plant whistle at 2:30 a.m., drawing thousands of men, women and children to the plant.


title: Homestead strike

text: The Pinkertons attempted to land under cover of darkness about 4 a.m. A large crowd of families had kept pace with the boats as they were towed by a tug into the town. A few shots were fired at the tug and barges, but no one was injured. The crowd tore down the barbed-wire fence and strikers and their families surged onto the Homestead plant grounds. Some in the crowd threw stones at the barges, but strike leaders shouted for restraint.


title: Homestead strike

text: The Pinkerton agents attempted to disembark, and more shots were fired. Conflicting testimony exists as to which side fired the first shot in this encounter. (Shooting having begun earlier when the barges were being towed up the river) John T. McCurry, a boatman on the steamboat "Little Bill" (which had been hired by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to ferry its agents to the steel mill) and one of the men wounded by the strikers, said: "The armed Pinkerton men commenced to climb up the banks. Then the workmen opened fire on the detectives. The men shot first, and not until three of the Pinkerton men had fallen did they respond to the fire. I am willing to take an oath that the workmen fired first, and that the Pinkerton men did not shoot until some of their number had been wounded." But according to "The New York Times", the Pinkertons shot first. The newspaper reported that the Pinkertons opened fire and wounded William Foy, a worker. Regardless of which side opened fire first, the first two individuals wounded were Frederick Heinde, captain of the Pinkertons, and Foy. The Pinkerton agents aboard the barges then fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding eleven. The crowd responded in kind, killing two and wounding twelve. The firefight continued for about 10 minutes.


title: Homestead strike

text: The strikers then huddled behind the pig and scrap iron in the mill yard, while the Pinkertons cut holes in the side of the barges so they could fire on any who approached. The Pinkerton tug departed with the wounded agents, leaving the barges stranded. The strikers soon set to work building a rampart of steel beams further up the riverbank from which they could fire down on the barges. Hundreds of women continued to crowd on the riverbank between the strikers and the agents, calling on the strikers to 'kill the Pinkertons'.


title: Homestead strike

text: The strikers continued to sporadically fire on the barges. Union members took potshots at the ships from their rowboats and the steam-powered launch. The burgess of Homestead, John McLuckie, issued a proclamation at 6:00 a.m. asking for townspeople to help defend the peace; more than 5,000 people congregated on the hills overlooking the steelworks. A 20-pounder brass cannon was set up on the shore opposite the steel mill, and an attempt was made to sink the barges. Six miles away in Pittsburgh, thousands of steelworkers gathered in the streets, listening to accounts of the attacks at Homestead; hundreds, many of them armed, began to move toward the town to assist the strikers.


title: Homestead strike

text: The Pinkertons attempted to disembark again at 8:00 a.m. A striker high up the riverbank fired a shot. The Pinkertons returned fire, and four more strikers were killed (one by shrapnel sent flying when cannon fire hit one of the barges). Many of the Pinkerton agents refused to participate in the firefight any longer; the agents crowded onto the barge farthest from the shore. More experienced agents were barely able to stop the new recruits from abandoning the ships and swimming away. Intermittent gunfire from both sides continued throughout the morning. When the tug attempted to retrieve the barges at 10:50 a.m., gunfire drove it off. More than 300 riflemen positioned themselves on the high ground and kept a steady stream of fire on the barges. Just before noon, a sniper shot and killed another Pinkerton agent. A Pinkerton agent on one of the barges was A.L. Wells, a Bennett Medical College student, who had joined the "expedition" to earn enough money during the summer months. During the fighting, he played a vital role and attended to the injured on the barge.


title: Homestead strike

text: After a few more hours, the strikers attempted to burn the barges. They seized a raft, loaded it with oil-soaked timber and floated it toward the barges. The Pinkertons nearly panicked, and a Pinkerton captain had to threaten to shoot anyone who fled. But the fire burned itself out before it reached the barges. The strikers then loaded a railroad flatcar with drums of oil and set it afire. The flatcar hurtled down the rails toward the mill's wharf where the barges were docked. But the car stopped at the water's edge and burned itself out. Dynamite was thrown at the barges, but it only hit the mark once (causing a little damage to one barge). At 2:00 p.m., the workers poured oil onto the river, hoping the oil slick would burn the barges; attempts to light the slick failed.


title: Homestead strike

text: The AA worked behind the scenes to avoid further bloodshed and defuse the tense situation. At 9:00 a.m., outgoing AA international president William Weihe rushed to the sheriff's office and asked McCleary to convey a request to Frick to meet. McCleary did so, but Frick refused. He knew that the more chaotic the situation became, the more likely it was that Governor Robert E. Pattison would call out the state militia.


title: Homestead strike

text: Sheriff McCleary resisted attempts to call for state intervention until 10 a.m. on July 6. In a telegram to Governor Pattison, he described how his deputies and the Carnegie men had been driven off, and noted that the workers and their supporters actively resisting the landing numbered nearly 5,000. Pattison responded by requiring McCleary to exhaust every effort to restore the peace. McCleary asked again for help at noon, and Pattison responded by asking how many deputies the sheriff had. A third telegram, sent at 3:00 p.m., again elicited a response from the governor exhorting McCleary to raise his own troops.


title: Homestead strike

text: At 4:00 p.m., events at the mill quickly began to wind down. More than 5,000 men—most of them armed mill hands from the nearby South Side, Braddock and Duquesne works—arrived at the Homestead plant. Weihe wanted to prevent further trouble at Homestead, so he pleaded with Frick to confer with representatives of the Amalgamated to return to Homestead and stop the armed conflict. Weihe urged the strikers to let the Pinkertons surrender, but he was shouted down. Weihe tried to speak again, but this time his pleas were drowned out as the strikers bombarded the barges with fireworks left over from the recent Independence Day celebration. Hugh O'Donnell, a heater in the plant and head of the union's strike committee, then spoke to the crowd. He demanded that each Pinkerton be charged with murder, forced to turn over his arms and then be removed from the town. The crowd shouted their approval.


title: Homestead strike

text: The Pinkertons, too, wished to surrender. At 5:00 p.m., they raised a white flag and two agents asked to speak with the strikers. O'Donnell guaranteed them safe passage out of town. Upon arrival, their arms were stripped from them. With heads uncovered, to distinguish them from the mill hands, they passed along between two rows of guards armed with Winchesters. As the Pinkertons crossed the grounds of the mill, the crowd formed a gantlet through which the agents passed. Men and women threw sand and stones at the Pinkerton agents, spat on them and beat them. Several Pinkertons were clubbed into unconsciousness. Members of the crowd ransacked the barges, then burned them to the waterline.As the Pinkertons were marched through town to the opera house (which served as a temporary jail), the townspeople continued to assault the agents. Two agents were beaten as horrified town officials looked on. The press expressed shock at the treatment of the Pinkerton agents, and the torrent of abuse helped turn media sympathies away from the strikers.


title: Homestead strike

text: The strike committee met with the town council to discuss the handover of the agents to McCleary. But the real talks were taking place between McCleary and Weihe in McCleary's office. At 10:15 p.m., the two sides agreed to a transfer process. A special train arrived at 12:30 a.m. on July 7. McCleary, the international AA's lawyer and several town officials accompanied the Pinkerton agents to Pittsburgh.


title: Homestead strike

text: But when the Pinkerton agents arrived at their final destination in Pittsburgh, state officials declared that they would not be charged with murder (per the agreement with the strikers) but rather simply released. The announcement was made with the full concurrence of the AA attorney. A special train whisked the Pinkerton agents out of the city at 10:00 a.m. on July 7.


title: Homestead strike

text: William Pinkerton in his testimony before Congress stated that three Pinkerton agents died in the strike—two because of injuries and a third injured agent committed suicide. The total number of Pinkertons, according to the agents themselves, who died was seven and who were wounded was eleven. According to one newspaper report, an agent under cannon fire jumped off a barge and drowned. John Shingle, the captain of the steamboat "Little Bill" was killed. Between thirty-three to thirty-five agents and one crewman of the "Little Bill" were reported in the hospital injured. The total number of captured Pinkertons was 324. A roster of 266 names and 360 Winchester rifles and enough provisions to feed a regiment for a week were also taken from the barges.


title: Homestead strike

text: On July 7, the strike committee sent a telegram to Governor Pattison to attempt to persuade him that law and order had been restored in the town. Pattison replied that he had heard differently. Union officials traveled to Harrisburg and met with Pattison on July 9. Their discussions revolved not around law and order, but the safety of the Carnegie plant.


title: Homestead strike

text: Pattison, however, remained unconvinced by the strikers' arguments. Although Pattison had ordered the Pennsylvania militia to muster on July 6, he had not formally charged it with doing anything. Pattison's refusal to act rested largely on his concern that the union controlled the entire city of Homestead and commanded the allegiance of its citizens. Pattison refused to order the town taken by force, for fear a massacre would occur. But once emotions had died down, Pattison felt the need to act. He had been elected with the backing of a Carnegie-supported political machine, and he could no longer refuse to protect Carnegie interests.


title: Homestead strike

text: The steelworkers resolved to meet the militia with open arms, hoping to establish good relations with the troops. But the militia managed to keep its arrival to the town a secret almost to the last moment. At 9:00 a.m. on July 12, the Pennsylvania state militia arrived at the small Munhall train station near the Homestead mill (rather than the downtown train station as expected). Their commander, Major General George R. Snowden, made it clear to local officials that he sided with the owners. When Hugh O'Donnell, the head of the union's strike committee attempted to welcome Snowden and pledge the cooperation of the strikers, Snowden told him that the strikers had not been law abiding, and that "I want you to distinctly understand that I am the master of this situation." More than 4,000 soldiers surrounded the plant. Within 20 minutes they had displaced the picketers; by 10:00 a.m., company officials were back in their offices. Another 2,000 troops camped on the high ground overlooking the city.


title: Homestead strike

text: The company quickly brought in strikebreakers and restarted production under the protection of the militia. Despite the presence of AFL pickets in front of several recruitment offices across the nation, Frick easily found employees to work the mill. The company quickly built bunk houses, dining halls and kitchens on the mill grounds to accommodate the strikebreakers. New employees, many of them black, arrived on July 13, and the mill furnaces relit on July 15. When a few workers attempted to storm into the plant to stop the relighting of the furnaces, militiamen fought them off and wounded six with bayonets. But all was not well inside the plant. A race war between nonunion black and white workers in the Homestead plant broke out on July 22, 1892.


title: Homestead strike

text: Desperate to find a way to continue the strike, the AA appealed to Whitelaw Reid, the Republican candidate for vice president, on July 16. The AA offered to make no demands or set any preconditions; the union merely asked that Carnegie Steel reopen the negotiations. Reid wrote to Frick, warning him that the strike was hurting the Republican ticket and pleading with him to reopen talks. Frick refused.


title: Homestead strike

text: Frick, too, needed a way out of the strike. The company could not operate for long with strikebreakers living on the mill grounds, and permanent replacements had to be found. On July 18, the town was placed under martial law, further disheartening many of the strikers.


title: Homestead strike

text: National attention became riveted on Homestead when, on July 23, Alexander Berkman, a New York anarchist with no connection to steel or to organized labor, plotted with his lover Emma Goldman to assassinate Frick. He came in from New York, gained entrance to Frick's office, then shot and stabbed the executive. Frick survived and continued his role; Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison.


title: Homestead strike

text: The Berkman assassination attempt undermined public support for the union and prompted the final collapse of the strike. Hugh O'Donnell was removed as chair of the strike committee when he proposed to return to work at the lower wage scale if the unionists could get their jobs back. On August 12, the company announced that 1,700 men were working at the mill and production had resumed at full capacity. The national AFL refused to intervene, the East European workers ignored the union and it had no strategy left. The union voted to go back to work on Carnegie's terms; the strike had failed and the union had collapsed.


title: Homestead strike

text: The company had waged a second front in state court, and was winning. On July 18, sixteen of the strike leaders were charged with conspiracy, riot and murder. Each man was jailed for one night and forced to post a $10,000 bond. The union retaliated by charging company executives with murder as well. The company men, too, had to post a $10,000 bond, but they were not forced to spend any time in jail. One judge issued treason charges against the Advisory Committee on August 30 for making itself the law. Most of the men could not raise the bail bond, and went to jail or into hiding. A compromise was reached whereby both sides dropped their charges.


title: Homestead strike

text: Support for the strikers evaporated. The AFL refused to call for a boycott of Carnegie products in September 1892. Wholesale crossing of the picket line occurred, first among Eastern European immigrants and then among all workers. The strike had collapsed so much that the state militia pulled out on October 13, ending the 95-day occupation. The AA was nearly bankrupted by the job action. Weekly union relief for a member averaged $6.25 but totaled a staggering $10,000 per week when including 1,600 strikers. With only 192 out of more than 3,800 strikers in attendance, the Homestead chapter of the AA voted, 101 to 91, to return to work on November 20, 1892.


title: Homestead strike

text: In the end, only four workers were ever tried on the actual charges filed on July 18. Three AA members were found innocent of all charges. Hugh Dempsey, the leader of the local Knights of Labor District Assembly, was found guilty of conspiring to poison nonunion workers at the plant—despite the state's star witness recanting his testimony on the stand. Dempsey served a seven-year prison term. In February 1893, Knox and the union agreed to drop the charges filed against one another, and no further prosecutions emerged from the events at Homestead.


title: Homestead strike

text: The striking AA affiliate in Beaver Falls gave in the same day as the Homestead lodge. The AA affiliate at Union Mills held out until August 14, 1893. But by then the union had only 53 members. The union had been broken; the company had been operating the plant at full capacity for almost a year, since September 1892.


title: Homestead strike

text: The Homestead strike broke the AA as a force in the American labor movement. Many employers refused to sign contracts with their AA unions while the strike lasted. A nationwide 1893 Depression saw prices for steel plunge; other steel companies sought wage decreases similar to those imposed at Homestead.


title: Homestead strike

text: An organizing drive at the Homestead plant in 1896 was suppressed by Frick. The economy recovered by 1897. In May 1899, three hundred Homestead workers formed an AA lodge, but Frick ordered the Homestead works shut down and the unionization effort collapsed.


title: Homestead strike

text: De-unionization efforts throughout the Midwest began against the AA in 1897 when Jones and Laughlin Steel refused to sign a contract. By 1900, not a single steel plant in Pennsylvania remained unionized. The AA presence in Ohio and Illinois continued for a few more years, but the union continued to collapse. Many lodges disbanded, their members disillusioned. Others were easily broken in short battles. Carnegie Steel's Mingo Junction, Ohio, plant was the last major unionized steel mill in the country. But it, too, successfully withdrew recognition without a fight in 1903.


title: Homestead strike

text: AA membership sagged to 10,000 in 1894 from its high of over 24,000 in 1891. A year later, it was down to 8,000. A 1901 strike against Carnegie's successor company, U.S. Steel, collapsed. By 1909, membership in the AA had sunk to 6,300. A nationwide steel strike of 1919 also was unsuccessful. The AA maintained a rump membership in the steel industry until its takeover by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in 1936. The two organizations officially disbanded and formed the United Steelworkers on May 22, 1942.


title: Homestead strike

text: In 1999 the Bost Building in downtown Homestead, AA headquarters throughout the strike, was designated a National Historic Landmark. It is used as a museum devoted not only to the strike, but also the steel industry in the Pittsburgh area. A railroad bridge over the Monongahela River near the site of the battle is named Pinkerton's Landing Bridge in honor of the dead. Two sites were each designated with a Pennsylvania state historical marker: the site where Pinkerton attempted to land, and the two adjoining cemeteries of St. Mary's and Homestead where are buried the remains of six of the seven Carnegie Steel Company workers that were killed. The Pinkerton landing site was also named a Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation Historic Landmark.


title: Homestead strike

text: The pump house where the gunfight occurred remains as a museum and meeting hall. There are several historical markers as well as a metal commemorative sign with the US Steel logo that reads "In honor of the workers".


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: The 1842 retreat from Kabul, also called the Massacre of Elphinstone's army, during the First Anglo-Afghan War, was the retreat of the British and East India Company forces from Kabul. An uprising in Kabul forced the then commander, Major-General William Elphinstone, to fall back to the British garrison at Jalalabad. As the army and its numerous dependents and camp followers began its march, it came under attack from Afghan tribesmen. Many of the column died of exposure, frostbite or starvation, or were killed during the fighting.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: At the beginning of the conflict, British and East India Company forces had defeated the forces of Afghan Emir Dost Mohammad Barakzai and in 1839 occupied Kabul, restoring the former ruler, Shah Shujah Durrani, as emir. However a deteriorating situation made their position more and more precarious, until an uprising in Kabul forced Maj. Gen. Elphinstone to withdraw. To this end he negotiated an agreement with Wazir Akbar Khan, one of the sons of Dost Mohammad Barakzai, by which his army was to fall back to the British garrison at Jalalabad, more than away. The Afghans launched numerous attacks against the column as it made slow progress through the winter snows along the route that is now the Kabul–Jalalabad Road. In total the British army lost 4,500 troops, along with about 12,000 civilians: the latter comprising both the families of Indian and British soldiers, plus workmen, servants and other Indian camp followers. The final stand was made just outside a village called Gandamak on 13 January.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Out of more than 16,000 people from the column commanded by Elphinstone, only one European (Assistant Surgeon William Brydon) and a few Indian sepoys reached Jalalabad. Over one hundred British prisoners and civilian hostages were later released. Around 2,000 of the Indians, many of whom were maimed by frostbite, survived and returned to Kabul to exist by begging or to be sold into slavery. Some at least returned to India after another British invasion of Kabul several months later, but others remained behind in Afghanistan.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: In 2013, a writer for "The Economist" called the retreat "the worst British military disaster until the fall of Singapore exactly a century later."


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: In 1838 the British East India Company feared an increased Russian influence in Afghanistan after Dost Mohammad Barakzai had seized power from former ruler Shuja Shah Durrani in 1834. Dost Mohammad had rejected earlier overtures from Russia, but after Lord Auckland, the Governor-General of India, tried to force Afghan foreign policy under British guidance, he renewed his relationship with the Russians. Lord Auckland followed the counsel of his adviser William Hay Macnaghten to support Shuja Shah, dismissing the advice of Alexander Burnes that Dost Mohammad should be supported, and resolved to seek a military solution. He began to assemble his forces in late 1838.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: The army, under the command of General Sir Willoughby Cotton, with Macnaghten as his chief adviser, consisted of 20,000 soldiers and were accompanied by 38,000 civilian camp followers (craftsmen, stretcher bearers, cooks, servants, barbers, tailors, armourers, cameleers, etc., as well as families of both Indian and British soldiers). In March 1839 they crossed the Bolan Pass and began their march to Kabul. They advanced through rough terrain, crossing deserts and mountain passes at an elevation of but made good progress and took Kandahar on 25 April.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: They also captured the until-then impregnable fortress of Ghazni on 22 July in a surprise attack, losing 200 men killed and wounded while the Afghans lost nearly 500 men killed and 1,600 taken prisoner, with an unknown number wounded. An Afghan had betrayed his sovereign and the British troops managed to blow one city gate and marched into the city in a euphoric mood. The ample supplies acquired in Ghazni considerably aided the further advance, which otherwise would have been difficult.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Dost Mohammad fled and sought refuge in the wilds of the Hindu Kush. Kabul fell without a fight on 6 August 1839. Shuja Shah returned and was proclaimed emir by the British. He established a court in the fortress of Bala Hissar above Kabul.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: More than a year later, Dost Mohammad surrendered to Macnaghten on 4 November 1840 and was exiled to India.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: In August 1839 the British, under pressure from Shah Shuja, refrained from remaining in occupation of Kabul's citadel, instead establishing their military cantonments outside Kabul. This decision, made on diplomatic grounds, would prove to be a grave military error, as the garrison was sited in a defensively weak position.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: As political agent and envoy at the court of Shuja Shah, Macnaghten became a leader of British society in Kabul. The city was described at the time as clean and pleasant with many spacious wooden houses surrounded by well-kept gardens. The occupiers enjoyed themselves arranging cricket matches, horse races and hunting parties. In the evenings amateur dramatics were staged by East India Company officers and their wives.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Performances included Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream". It was considered a special honour to be invited to evening soirées hosted by Lady Florentia Sale, the wife of Brigadier-General Robert Henry Sale. Such social gatherings often saw the serving of salmon and stew with madeira, port and champagne. Under these conditions, many of the East India Company troops were sent back to their garrisons in India.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: While the British enjoyed this lifestyle, some Afghans chafed under occupation by a foreign power. Rumours of relationships between British soldiers and Afghan women created tensions in Kabul. Britain had replaced Dost Mohammad, a (relatively) popular ruler, with Shuja Shah, a weak puppet, who was seen as much more cruel and vindictive to his enemies than his predecessor. In 1840, the son of Dost Mohammad, Wazir Akbar Khan, began assembling allies amongst the tribesmen in the rural areas where British influence was weakest. He initiated a guerrilla war that kept the East India Company troops permanently on the move.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: The efforts to control Afghanistan were further weakened by the British government in India. Dismayed at the costs of maintaining the large garrison in Kabul, it discontinued the periodic subsidies (essentially bribes) that had been paid to the various tribes in the region around Kabul and the Khyber Pass to keep the peace.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Once these ended, the tribes saw no more reason to remain loyal to the British-supported regime. Macnaghten dismissed warnings from his officers, writing to his superiors in India that "this is the usual state of Afghan society". As the spring and summer of 1841 progressed, British freedom of movement around Kabul became increasingly restricted.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Despite this ominous turn of events, Sir Willoughby Cotton was replaced as commander of the remaining British troops by Sir William Elphinstone, who was ill at the time and initially unwilling to accept the appointment. The 59-year-old Elphinstone had entered the British army in 1804. He was made a Companion of the Bath for leading the 33rd Regiment of Foot at the Battle of Waterloo. By 1825 he had been promoted to colonel and then to major-general in 1837. Although Elphinstone was a man of high birth and perfect manners, his colleague and contemporary General William Nott regarded him as "the most incompetent soldier that was to be found amongst all the officers of requisite rank".


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: In the autumn of 1841 Brigadier-General Sale and his brigade was recalled to Jalalabad, which was on the military line of communication between Kabul and Peshawar. He left his wife, Lady Sale, behind in the British cantonments in Kabul.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: On 2 November 1841, Akbar Khan proclaimed a general revolt and the citizens of Kabul quickly followed suit. They stormed the house of Sir Alexander Burnes, one of the senior British political officers, and killed him and his staff. Both Elphinstone and Macnaghten were caught by surprise. By now the East India Company had only 4,500 men in and around Kabul, of which 690 were Europeans. But as Elphinstone took no action in response to the killing of Burnes, it only encouraged further revolt. On 9 November the emboldened Afghans stormed a poorly defended supply fort inside Kabul.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: On 23 November, Afghan forces occupied a hill overlooking the British cantonments and began bombarding the camp with two guns. A British force sallied out to drive them away but the Afghans inflicted heavy casualties firing jezails at long range from the high ground. The East India troops fled leaving behind 300 wounded to be killed. Morale was now a serious issue for the British force in Kabul. Elphinstone called for reinforcements from Major General Nott in Kandahar but they turned back when they found the mountain passes blocked by heavy snow.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Macnaghten, realising their desperate situation, tried to negotiate an agreement with Akbar Khan for the withdrawal of the troops and the 12,000 British and Indian civilians still at Kabul. On 23 December, Afghan leaders invited Macnaghten for tea to discuss the situation. However, at the moment the British delegation dismounted from their horses they were seized and Macnaghten and an aide were slain by armed men. Later Macnaghten's body was mutilated and dragged through the streets of Kabul.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: The cavalry escort which was supposed to protect the British diplomats had been delayed and had not joined them. Two other British officers who had been part of Macnaghten's party were subsequently released. Elphinstone had already partly lost command of his troops as his authority continued to diminish.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: To the dismay of his officers, Elphinstone ignored the killing of a British representative and took no punitive action. Major Eldred Pottinger succeeded Macnaghten as envoy to the Afghan court. On 1 January 1842, Elphinstone agreed to Akbar Khan's terms which contained some unfavourable conditions. For example, all gunpowder reserves had to be handed over, along with the newest muskets and most of the cannon. However, in return Akbar Khan promised a safe passage from Kabul for all foreign troops and civilians, amongst them children, women and the elderly. The withdrawal, which would begin on 6 January, involved crossing the snow-covered mountains of the Hindu Kush descending to Jalalabad, away.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Elphinstone commanded a column consisting of one British infantry battalion (the 44th Regiment of Foot), three regiments of regular Bengal Native Infantry (the 5th, 37th and 54th BNI), one regiment of Shah Shujah's Levy (a British-subsidised force of Indian troops recruited for Afghan service), Anderson's Irregular Horse, the 5th Bengal Light Cavalry and six guns of the Bengal Horse Artillery (with sappers).


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: In total, there were 700 British and 3,800 Indian troops. The camp followers, Indian and British families, their servants and civilian workers, numbered approximately 14,000.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: At first light on 6 January Elphinstone's column began slowly to move out of Kabul leaving Shuja Shah Durrani and his followers to their fate. As Akbar Khan had guaranteed safety to all concerned, the sick, wounded and infirm were also left behind. However once the rearguard finally left the cantonments, Afghans quickly moved in and began firing at the retreating troops from the walls while setting fire to the garrison buildings, killing all those left behind.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: On leaving the city, Elphinstone discovered that the escort promised by Akbar Khan had not materialised, nor had the food and fuel to help with the crossing of the Hindu Kush in winter. Major Eldred Pottinger pleaded with the sick British commander to turn back to Kabul as they still had time to take refuge in the fortress of Bala Hissar. But Elphinstone said there would be no turning back and they would proceed to Jalalabad. The column of 16,000 soldiers and civilians was now at the mercy of the Afghan tribes.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: By the second day, sniping from the surrounding hills was taking its toll on the slow-moving column. Despite being well armed, the troops' progress was being hindered by the terrified civilians and camp followers. Small skirmishes were frequent. The Afghans succeeded in capturing some of the column's artillery while forcing the British to spike two of their three remaining pieces. In just 24 hours the column now had only one small gun and two heavier cannons left.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Later that afternoon, Akbar Khan met Elphinstone, feigning ignorance to any treachery on his part. He told the British that he had been unable to provide the agreed escort because they had left their cantonments earlier than expected. Akbar Khan then asked Elphinstone to wait while he negotiated the column's safe passage with the Afghan chiefs who commanded Khord-Kabul pass from Kabul. Despite what had already occurred, the British commander agreed to the terms and waited. He also agreed to hand over three more European hostages to Akbar Khan.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Instead of hurrying forward, Elphinstone had moved only from Kabul. By now efforts to maintain military cohesion had also begun to fail. When the column entered the narrow pass the next day, they were shot at from all sides by Ghilzais armed with captured British muskets and their traditional "jezails". It was now apparent Akbar Khan had not been negotiating their safe passage; it was actually a ruse to give the Afghans more time to get into position for an ambush.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Throughout the third day, the column laboured through the pass. Once the main body had moved through, the Afghans left their positions to massacre the stragglers and the wounded. By the evening of 9 January, the column had only moved but already 3,000 people had died. Many had been killed in the fighting, but some had frozen to death or taken their own lives. A written report by Elphinstone recorded that most of the sepoys had by this stage lost fingers or toes in the freezing conditions, and that their snow-encrusted muskets had become unusable.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: By the fourth day, a few hundred native soldiers deserted and tried to return to Kabul, but they were all either killed or enslaved. By now Elphinstone, who had ceased giving orders, sat silently on his horse. On the evening of 9 January, Lady Sale, along with the wives and children of both British and Indian officers, and their retinues, accepted Akbar Khan's assurances of protection. Despite deep mistrust, the group was taken into the custody of Akbar's men. Once they were hostages, all the Indian servants and sepoy wives were murdered.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: By the evening of 11 January, the army had been reduced to 200 men. The small rearguard was led by Brigadier-General John Shelton who, for the first time in the retreat, showed his competence and led a fierce resistance against the Afghans. As the surviving troops lay besieged in a small ruined mud-walled enclosure in Jagadalak, Akbar Khan's envoys returned and persuaded Elphinstone and his second in command, Shelton, to accompany them for negotiations.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Akbar Khan brought the two officers to his camp and provided them with dinner. The reasons for his hospitality soon became clear however and both officers were refused permission to return to their men. Shelton became furious and demanded the right as an officer and soldier to return to lead his men and die fighting.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: On 12 January, the column, having lost their commander and over 12,000 casualties, decided that their only hope was to wait until night and press on in the dark. The remaining troops, now led by Brigadier-General Thomas John Anquetil, found their path blocked by a formidable thorny barrier of 'prickly holly oak, well twisted together, about six feet high' which had been erected across the narrowest part of the valley. Most of the men who attempted to scale the barrier were shot down before they could reach the other side. All discipline amongst the remainder of the men who were trapped by the barrier now ended and the Afghans closed in to finish them off. The few remaining men who had managed to scale the barrier began a desperate gallop towards Jalalabad but many were slaughtered in a melee just after reaching the other side of the barrier.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: The biggest single surviving group of men, consisting of 20 officers and 45 European soldiers, mostly infantry from the 44th Regiment of Foot, tried to press on but found themselves surrounded on a snowy hillock near the village of Gandamak. With only 20 working muskets and two shots per weapon, the troops refused to surrender. A British sergeant is said to have cried "not bloody likely!" when the Afghans tried to persuade the soldiers they would spare their lives.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Sniping then began, followed by a series of rushes; soon the hillock was overrun by tribesmen. An officer named Captain Souter was mistaken by the Afghans as a high-ranking officer because they thought he was wearing a general's yellow waistcoat. In fact the officer had wrapped the regimental colours of the 44th Foot around his body. He was dragged into captivity along with a sergeant named Fair and seven privates. The remaining troops were killed.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Another group of fifteen mounted officers managed to reach as far as the village of Fattehabad but ten were killed while sitting down to accept breakfast from the villagers, four were shot from the rooftops as they remounted their horses and attempted to flee the village and one was tracked down and beheaded.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: On 13 January, a British officer from the 16,000 strong column rode into Jalalabad on a wounded horse (a few sepoys, who had hidden in the mountains, followed in the coming weeks). Assistant Surgeon William Brydon, who was riding a pony taken from a mortally wounded officer after being begged by the man not to let it fall into anyone else's hands, continued on despite him and his pony being severely wounded in several skirmishes with roaming bands of Afghans.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: On 13 January and now just kilometres from Jalalabad, Brydon had to fight for his life against a party of Afghan horsemen. After escaping a single pursuer, he was spotted by a staff officer on the walls of Jalalabad who immediately dispatched riders to meet the exhausted surgeon. Brydon was asked upon arrival what happened to the army, to which he answered "I am the army".


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Although part of his skull had been sheared off by a sword, he ultimately survived because he had insulated his hat with a magazine which deflected the blow. Brydon later published a memoir of the death march. The pony he rode was said to have lain down in a stable and never got up. For several nights, lights were raised on the gates of Jalalabad and bugles were sounded from the walls in the hope of guiding any further survivors to safety.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: The annihilation left Britain and India in shock and the Governor General, Lord Auckland, suffered an apparent stroke upon hearing the news. In the autumn of 1842, an "Army of Retribution" led by Sir George Pollock, with William Nott and Robert Sale commanding divisions, leveled the great bazaar and all the larger buildings of Kabul. Sale personally rescued his wife Lady Sale and some other hostages from the hands of Wazir Akbar Khan. However, the slaughter of an army by Afghan tribesmen was humiliating for the British authorities in India.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Of the British prisoners, 32 officers, over 50 soldiers, 21 children and 12 women survived to be released in September 1842. An unknown number of sepoys and other Indian prisoners were sold into slavery in Kabul or kept as captives in mountain villages. One sepoy, Havildar Sita Ram, escaped from Afghanistan after 21 months of slavery and rejoined his former regiment at Delhi. Around 2,000 sepoys and camp followers were eventually found in Kabul and brought back to India by General Pollock's army.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: The leadership of Elphinstone is seen as a notorious example of how the ineptitude and indecisiveness of a senior officer could compromise the morale and effectiveness of a whole army (though already much depleted). Elphinstone completely failed to lead his soldiers, but fatally exerted enough authority to prevent any of his officers from exercising proper command in his place.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Historians still debate whether Akbar Khan ordered the massacre, sanctioned it, or was simply unable to prevent it. Some of the British officers and families taken hostage later claimed that Akbar Khan had called out "Spare them!" in Persian, but "Kill them!" in Pashto to the tribesmen. Either way, the British reaction to such an atrocity must have been clear to him. He died near the end of 1847, possibly poisoned by his father Dost Mohammad, who may have feared his ambitions.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: Dost Mohammad remained a British prisoner till the end of 1841 when he was set free by the British authorities who, after they took their revenge on Kabul, had resolved to abandon any attempts to intervene in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. After Shuja Shah was assassinated in April 1842, Dost Mohammad quickly reestablished his authority. He died on 9 June 1863 of natural causes, one of the few Afghan rulers in the past thousand years to do so. Even after the two British invasions of his country, he did not intervene in any manner during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: The destruction of several regiments of Indian troops during the retreat inevitably affected the morale of the East India Company's Bengal Army from which these units had been drawn. The reputation for invincibility previously enjoyed by the company was broken. "Men remembered Kabul," commented a British officer at the outbreak of the great Bengal mutiny fifteen years later.


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: German novelist and poet Theodor Fontane in 1858 wrote the ballad "Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan (The Tragedy of Afghanistan)".


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: British writer George MacDonald Fraser describes this event in the first book of his Flashman Papers series, "Flashman".


title: 1842 retreat from Kabul

text: "Victoria" (2017) episode "A Soldier's Daughter" dramatizes Brydon's survival in the retreat. In the show, Queen Victoria responds to the loss of life in the retreat with a speech at the launch of , and by privately meeting and honouring Brydon.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The Microsoft Theater (formerly Nokia Theatre L.A. Live) is a music and theater venue in downtown Los Angeles, California, at L.A. Live. The theater auditorium seats 7,100 and holds one of the largest indoor stages in the United States.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The theatre was designed by ELS Architecture and Urban Design of Berkeley, California on a commission by the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) in 2002. It opened on October 18, 2007 with six concerts featuring The Eagles and The Dixie Chicks. On June 7, 2015, the Nokia Theatre was re-branded as Microsoft Theater as part of a new naming rights deal with AEG Live following Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's mobile device business in 2014. As part of the new naming rights deal, the L.A. Live plaza was also renamed Microsoft Square (now Xbox Plaza), and Microsoft provided upgrades to the venue's technology.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: Since its opening in 2007, the Microsoft Theater has become the venue of multiple entertainment industry awards shows, most notably the Primetime Emmy Awards.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: Since 2008, the Microsoft Theater has been the venue of the annual Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony after that show moved here from the Shrine Auditorium, except 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, which take place a week before the Primetime Emmy Awards, are also held at the Microsoft Theater. Following the Emmy Awards telecast, the Governors Ball is held across the street at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The Emmys will continue to be held at the Microsoft Theater through 2022 and possibly 2026.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: In 2008 and 2011, the venue hosted "The Grammy Nominations Live", a concert announcing the nominees for the Grammy Awards. The Grammy Awards take place annually across the street at the Crypto.com Arena, but the Premier Ceremony (also referred to as the "pre-telecast" ceremony) is held at the Microsoft Theater. Approximately 70 Grammy categories are awarded at the Premier ceremony which takes place prior to the main telecast which is televised, is held at the Microsoft Theater.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: Since 2007, the annual American Music Awards have been held here after moving from the Shrine Auditorium.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: Since 2008, the ESPY Awards, honoring outstanding athletic achievement, have been held at this venue.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: From 2015-present (excluding 2020), the Microsoft Theater has hosted The Game Awards, presented by Geoff Keighley.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The Microsoft Theater has also served as a sports venue. It has hosted boxing matches and will also serve as a venue during the 2028 Olympics.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The venue has hosted professional boxing matches for circuits such as Golden Boy Promotions and Premier Boxing Champions.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The Microsoft Theater is set to host weightlifting at the 2028 Summer Olympics. However, weightlifting might not be included at the games as the sport risks being dropped from the Olympic program by the IOC.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The theater has also been used by Microsoft and Nintendo multiple times for press conferences during E3.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: John Mayer played a concert at the theater on December 8, 2007 for the first revue of his Annual John Mayer Holiday Charity Revue, consisting of three separate performances: the first an acoustic set opened by Mayer and joined by the guitarists from his band, the second with the John Mayer Trio, and the third with Mayer's regular touring band. This was recorded and released as the live album/concert film "Where the Light Is".


title: Microsoft Theater

text: Vocaloid character Hatsune Miku made her U.S. debut at the Microsoft Theater on July 2, 2011, as part of Anime Expo. She returned to the venue on October 11–12, 2014 as part of Miku Expo LA 2014. Both concerts were sold out. Hatsune Miku returned for another performance on May 6, 2016, as part of her first North American tour. She once again returned to the Microsoft Theater as part of her second tour of North America on June 29, 2018.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The popular children's musical show Yo Gabba Gabba! held their brand-new concert called: Yo Gabba Gabba! LIVE! There's a Party in my City! in 2011 which was filmed there.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The 28th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions were held at the Microsoft Theater on April 18, 2013. The ceremony was held at Microsoft Theater again in 2022.


title: Microsoft Theater

text: The inauguration ceremony for the 9th Summit of the Americas was held at the theater for world leaders and President Joe Biden in 2022.


title: Ethnic Cleansing (video game)

text: Ethnic Cleansing is a far-right first-person shooter video game for Microsoft Windows computers, created by the American white supremacist and hate organization National Alliance (and published by its record label Resistance Records) on January 21, 2002. As part of a "race war", the player controls a neo-Nazi skinhead or a Klansman and is tasked with killing stereotypical African-American, Latino, and Jewish enemies, ending with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.


title: Ethnic Cleansing (video game)

text: Using the Genesis3D engine, the National Alliance created the game to be provocative and to support their white supremacist message. The game has been controversial, with the Anti-Defamation League taking particular issue; it has been ranked several times as one of the most controversial games ever created. It was planned to be followed by a long line of sequels, but only one, titled "White Law", was ever released.


title: Ethnic Cleansing (video game)

text: "Ethnic Cleansing" is a short first-person shooter set in a single level. As a neo-Nazi skinhead or a Klansman, the player runs through a ghetto that has been compared to New York City and shoot African-Americans and Mexicans, before descending into a subway system to kill Jews. Finally, the player reaches the "Yiddish Control Center", where a fictionalized version of Ariel Sharon, then Prime Minister of Israel, is directing plans for world domination. He carries a rocket launcher, and the player must kill him to complete the game. The head-up display contains a map of nearby enemies and a counter of remaining ammunition.


title: Ethnic Cleansing (video game)

text: The game's soundtrack consists of white power rock music. The game's art assets and sound effects feature racial stereotypes: when shot, black enemies make monkey noises and Jews are dressed as Haredim rabbis and shout "oy vey". Mexicans shout "I need to take a siesta now". In addition, black enemies are drawn to resemble apes, and some wear T-shirts with the lettering "NIGZ", while Mexicans wear sombreros.


title: Ethnic Cleansing (video game)

text: "Ethnic Cleansing" was developed by members of the National Alliance, an American white supremacist organization, and published by Resistance Records, its subsidiary record label that specializes in white power music. It was developed for Microsoft Windows personal computers using Eclipse Entertainment's open-source game engine Genesis3D along with the Reality Factory development kit. The source code was not substantially changed from the original. Instead, the developers simply plugged in images and sounds that they had created in freely available editing programs.


title: Ethnic Cleansing (video game)

text: Shaun Walker, the chairman of the National Alliance, explained to the United Press that the intent was to produce a racially provocative video game and promote racial segregation. National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce, who also appears in the game to discuss an "upcoming white revolution", considered video games to be simply another medium to promote his organization's messages. Resistance released the game on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (January 21) of 2002. It was priced at USD $14.88, a reference to the white supremacist Fourteen Words slogan and the neo-Nazi numerical code "88" (which stands for "HH" or "Heil Hitler").


title: Ethnic Cleansing (video game)

text: The game's reception from critics was extremely negative. In January 2003, "Stuff" named "Ethnic Cleansing" the 40th most controversial video game of all time. The staff opined that only "very stupid children" would be susceptible to its message and that it would make players feel like "small-minded assholes". "Complex" and "UGO" ranked it as the single most racist video game in history. "UGO" staff writer K. Thor Jensen called it "profoundly stupid".


title: Ethnic Cleansing (video game)

text: The National Alliance and Resistance Records released a similar game, "White Law", in June 2003. It starred an Irish-American police officer taking up arms to protect his territory from racial minorities. The game was based on the events of the pseudonymous novel "The Turner Diaries". The National Alliance expressed an intention to create an entire line of racist games, but no further games have been produced.


title: PLZ-05

text: The PLZ-05 or the Type 05 is a 155 mm self-propelled howitzer developed by the People's Liberation Army of China to replace the Type 59-1 130 mm towed gun and Type 83 152 mm self-propelled gun. The PLZ-05 was officially unveiled at the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution to mark the 80th anniversary of the PLA in July 2007, and first entered service with the PLA in 2008.


title: PLZ-05

text: In 1980s, Chinese military manufacturer Norinco acquired the license to produce GHN-45 howitzer from Noricum, a subsidiary of the Austrian company Voest-Alpine, whom developed CHN-45 based on the design of the GC-45 howitzer. GHN-45 (Gun, Howitzer, Noricum) featured several improvements over the original GC-45, such as better ammunition and fire control systems. Due to the design improvements, GHN-45 had considerably longer ranges than other 155 mm cannon systems used by NATO and Western countries. This capability initially caused worry for allied forces in the Persian Gulf War. The designer Gerald Bull was contacted in late 1980s by China to develop his work, which he agreed. China also purchased extended-range ammunition technology from him.


title: PLZ-05

text: The Chinese production designation of the GHN-45 is WAC-021 and PLL-01, which entered service in 1987. China continue to acquire and develop other technologies for the PLL-01, such as precision guided projectiles GP1. China also mounted the PLL-01 onto an indigenous-designed tracked chassis, resulting in the PLZ-45 (also known as the Type 88) and support vehicles based on the same chassis. Two major batches of PLZ-45s were sold to the Kuwaiti in 1997 and to Saudi Arabia in 2008. However, the PLZ-45 did not enter service with the People's Liberation Army Ground Force because China was still using the doctrine developed for the Soviet-standard 152 mm ammunition at the time.


title: PLZ-05

text: In 2003, China began to develop prototypes of the PLZ-05, an evolution of the PLZ-45, for domestic use. The PLZ-05 was adopted by Chinese army in 2008 in order to replace the older Type 83 152 mm self-propelled howitzer. The adoption of PLZ-05 signified China's paradigm shift in artillery doctrines, moving from the Soviet model to Western model. The original PLZ-45 was fitted with 155 mm/L45 howitzer, but PLZ-05 has a longer barrel and improved range, accuracy and fire rate.


title: PLZ-05

text: PLZ-05 features an indigenous-developed chassis derived from the PLZ-45. Although PLZ-45 had an indigenous semi-automatic loader, PLZ-05 is reportedly fitted with a fully-automatic loading system similar to 2S19 Msta, providing a rate of fire of 8 rounds/minute. The autoloader can support a higher fire rate and burst fire rate of 4 rounds per 15 seconds at the expense of its service life. The weapons can also use continuous fire support for 3-5 rounds per minute. The main armament, PLL-01 155 mm/L52 howitzer, has a maximum range of 40 kilometers when using ERFB-BB and more than 50 kilometers when using ERFB-BB-RA. The system can achieve 70 kilometers range with rocket-assist ammunition. The howitzer can be deployed full-automatically, so the crew can always stay inside the vehicle.


title: PLZ-05

text: The PLZ-05 is fitted with a digital fire control system, ballistic computers, a gunner day/night thermal imaging system, a laser range finder, and a commander-independent thermal viewer. In addition to indirect fire support, the main gun can be used as an anti-tank cannon or anti-fortification assault gun in an emergency.


title: PLZ-05

text: The PLZ-05's armor can protect its crew against small arms fire and artillery shell splinters. The frontal plates can defend against 14.5 mm machine gun rounds. The chassis features NBC protection and automatic fire suppression systems. The PLZ-05 howitzer is supported by other variants of the same family, including company commander vehicle, battalion commander vehicle, artillery reconnaissance vehicle, ammunition carrier, radar vehicle, meteorological data collection vehicle and armored recovery vehicle, etc.


title: PLZ-05

text: The PLZ-05 is powered by an 8V150 diesel engine with 800 hp. The engine allows for a road speed of up to 55 km/h. It features six roadwheels with a combined torsion bar and hydropneumatic suspension system. The hydropneumatic suspension units are fitted on the first and sixth roadwheel, giving the vehicle improved shock absorption and terrain adaptability. The vehicle is fitted with CH700 transmission, providing better mobility compared to previous generations of the Chinese vehicles. An auxiliary power unit can provide onboard weapon systems with electricity when the engine is not running.


title: PLZ-05

text: Self-propelled howitzer with a 52 caliber barrel, 800 hp diesel engine & gross weight of 35 tonnes. It is deployed only with the People's Liberation Army. The PLZ-05 can fire the WS-35 shell, a guided munition with accuracy of and a max range reported to be . It is guided using Beidou Navigation Satellite System, the Chinese version of global positioning system, and inertial guidance.


title: PLZ-05

text: The PLZ-52 is a 155mm / 52 caliber tracked self-propelled howitzer similar in appearance to the PLZ-45, but based on a slightly different hull. Having a gross vehicle weight of 43 tonnes, the PLZ-52 features a new powerpack, which consists of a diesel engine developing 1,000 hp at 2,300 rpm coupled to a fully automatic transmission. This gives a maximum road speed of up to 65 km/h and an operational range up to 450 km. The PLZ-52 howitzer has a maximum firing range of 50 km (with ERFB-BB-RA projectiles), maximum firing rate of eight rounds per minute, a burst firing rate of three rounds per fifteen seconds, and a multiple-round simultaneous impact capability of four rounds.


title: PLZ-05

text: The driver and powerpack are at the front of the hull with a fully enclosed turret at the rear. It has torsion bar and hydropneumatic suspension with six dual rubber tired road wheels, a drive sprocket at the front, idler at the rear and track return rollers. The PLZ-52 is offered for export.


title: PLZ-05

text: Self-propelled howitzer with a 54 caliber barrel and apparently offered for export. This version was reportedly exported to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.


title: PLZ-05

text: Self-propelled howitzer with lengthened hull using seven pairs of seven roadwheels. An ammunition resupply vehicle variant also exists.


title: Page table

text: A page table is the data structure used by a virtual memory system in a computer operating system to store the mapping between virtual addresses and physical addresses. Virtual addresses are used by the program executed by the accessing process, while physical addresses are used by the hardware, or more specifically, by the random-access memory (RAM) subsystem. The page table is a key component of virtual address translation that is necessary to access data in memory.


title: Page table

text: In operating systems that use virtual memory, every process is given the impression that it is working with large, contiguous sections of memory. Physically, the memory of each process may be dispersed across different areas of physical memory, or may have been moved (paged out) to secondary storage, typically to a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD).


title: Page table

text: When a process requests access to data in its memory, it is the responsibility of the operating system to map the virtual address provided by the process to the physical address of the actual memory where that data is stored. The page table is where the operating system stores its mappings of virtual addresses to physical addresses, with each mapping also known as a "page table entry" (PTE).


title: Page table

text: The memory management unit (MMU) inside the CPU stores a cache of recently used mappings from the operating system's page table. This is called the translation lookaside buffer (TLB), which is an associative cache.


title: Page table

text: When a virtual address needs to be translated into a physical address, the TLB is searched first. If a match is found, which is known as a "TLB hit", the physical address is returned and memory access can continue. However, if there is no match, which is called a "TLB miss", the MMU or the operating system's TLB miss handler will typically look up the address mapping in the page table to see whether a mapping exists, which is called a "page walk". If one exists, it is written back to the TLB, which must be done because the hardware accesses memory through the TLB in a virtual memory system, and the faulting instruction is restarted, which may happen in parallel as well. The subsequent translation will result in a TLB hit, and the memory access will continue.


title: Page table

text: When physical memory is not full this is a simple operation; the page is written back into physical memory, the page table and TLB are updated, and the instruction is restarted. However, when physical memory is full, one or more pages in physical memory will need to be paged out to make room for the requested page. The page table needs to be updated to mark that the pages that were previously in physical memory are no longer there, and to mark that the page that was on disk is now in physical memory. The TLB also needs to be updated, including removal of the paged-out page from it, and the instruction restarted. Which page to page out is the subject of page replacement algorithms.


title: Page table

text: Some MMUs trigger a page fault for other reasons, whether or not the page is currently resident in physical memory and mapped into the virtual address space of a process:


title: Page table

text: The simplest page table systems often maintain a frame table and a page table. The frame table holds information about which frames are mapped. In more advanced systems, the frame table can also hold information about which address space a page belongs to, statistics information, or other background information.


title: Page table

text: Each page table entry (PTE) holds the mapping between a virtual address of a page and the address of a physical frame. There is also auxiliary information about the page such as a present bit, a dirty or modified bit, address space or process ID information, amongst others.


title: Page table

text: Secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, can be used to augment physical memory. Pages can be paged in and out of physical memory and the disk. The present bit can indicate what pages are currently present in physical memory or are on disk, and can indicate how to treat these different pages, i.e. whether to load a page from disk and page another page in physical memory out.


title: Page table

text: The dirty bit allows for a performance optimization. A page on disk that is paged in to physical memory, then read from, and subsequently paged out again does not need to be written back to disk, since the page has not changed. However, if the page was written to after it is paged in, its dirty bit will be set, indicating that the page must be written back to the backing store. This strategy requires that the backing store retain a copy of the page after it is paged in to memory. When a dirty bit is not used, the backing store need only be as large as the instantaneous total size of all paged-out pages at any moment. When a dirty bit is used, at all times some pages will exist in both physical memory and the backing store.


title: Page table

text: In operating systems that are not single address space operating systems, address space or process ID information is necessary so the virtual memory management system knows what pages to associate to what process. Two processes may use two identical virtual addresses for different purposes. The page table must supply different virtual memory mappings for the two processes. This can be done by assigning the two processes distinct address map identifiers, or by using process IDs. Associating process IDs with virtual memory pages can also aid in selection of pages to page out, as pages associated with inactive processes, particularly processes whose code pages have been paged out, are less likely to be needed immediately than pages belonging to active processes.


title: Page table

text: As an alternative to tagging page table entries with process-unique identifiers, the page table itself may occupy a different virtual-memory page for each process so that the page table becomes a part of the process context. In such an implementation, the process's page table can be paged out whenever the process is no longer resident in memory.


title: Page table

text: There are several types of page tables, which are optimized for different requirements. Essentially, a bare-bones page table must store the virtual address, the physical address that is "under" this virtual address, and possibly some address space information.


title: Page table

text: An "inverted page table" (IPT) is best thought of as an off-chip extension of the TLB which uses normal system RAM. Unlike a true page table, it is not necessarily able to hold all current mappings. The operating system must be prepared to handle misses, just as it would with a MIPS-style software-filled TLB.


title: Page table

text: The IPT combines a page table and a "frame table" into one data structure. At its core is a fixed-size table with the number of rows equal to the number of frames in memory. If there are 4,000 frames, the inverted page table has 4,000 rows. For each row there is an entry for the virtual page number (VPN), the physical page number (not the physical address), some other data and a means for creating a collision chain, as we will see later.


title: Page table

text: To search through all entries of the core IPT structure is inefficient, and a hash table may be used to map virtual addresses (and address space/PID information if need be) to an index in the IPT - this is where the collision chain is used. This hash table is known as a "hash anchor table". The hashing function is not generally optimized for coverage - raw speed is more desirable. Of course, hash tables experience collisions. Due to this chosen hashing function, we may experience a lot of collisions in usage, so for each entry in the table the VPN is provided to check if it is the searched entry or a collision.


title: Page table

text: In searching for a mapping, the hash anchor table is used. If no entry exists, a page fault occurs. Otherwise, the entry is found. Depending on the architecture, the entry may be placed in the TLB again and the memory reference is restarted, or the collision chain may be followed until it has been exhausted and a page fault occurs.


title: Page table

text: A virtual address in this schema could be split into two, the first half being a virtual page number and the second half being the offset in that page.


title: Page table

text: A major problem with this design is poor cache locality caused by the hash function. Tree-based designs avoid this by placing the page table entries for adjacent pages in adjacent locations, but an inverted page table destroys spatial locality of reference by scattering entries all over. An operating system may minimize the size of the hash table to reduce this problem, with the trade-off being an increased miss rate.


title: Page table

text: There is normally one hash table, contiguous in physical memory, shared by all processes. A per-process identifier is used to disambiguate the pages of different processes from each other. It is somewhat slow to remove the page table entries of a given process; the OS may avoid reusing per-process identifier values to delay facing this. Alternatively, per-process hash tables may be used, but they are impractical because of memory fragmentation, which requires the tables to be pre-allocated.


title: Page table

text: The inverted page table keeps a listing of mappings installed for all frames in physical memory. However, this could be quite wasteful. Instead of doing so, we could create a page table structure that contains mappings for virtual pages. It is done by keeping several page tables that cover a certain block of virtual memory. For example, we can create smaller 1024-entry 4 KB pages that cover 4 MB of virtual memory.


title: Page table

text: This is useful since often the top-most parts and bottom-most parts of virtual memory are used in running a process - the top is often used for text and data segments while the bottom for stack, with free memory in between. The multilevel page table may keep a few of the smaller page tables to cover just the top and bottom parts of memory and create new ones only when strictly necessary.


title: Page table

text: Now, each of these smaller page tables are linked together by a master page table, effectively creating a tree data structure. There need not be only two levels, but possibly multiple ones. For example, a virtual address in this schema could be split into three parts: the index in the root page table, the index in the sub-page table, and the offset in that page.


title: Page table

text: It was mentioned that creating a page table structure that contained mappings for every virtual page in the virtual address space could end up being wasteful. But, we can get around the excessive space concerns by putting the page table in virtual memory, and letting the virtual memory system manage the memory for the page table.


title: Page table

text: However, part of this linear page table structure must always stay resident in physical memory in order to prevent circular page faults and look for a key part of the page table that is not present in the page table.


title: Page table

text: Nested page tables can be implemented to increase the performance of hardware virtualization. By providing hardware support for page-table virtualization, the need to emulate is greatly reduced. For x86 virtualization the current choices are Intel's Extended Page Table feature and AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing feature.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Patrick Quinlan (1919–1997) was an Irish Army officer who commanded the Irish UN force that fought at the Siege of Jadotville in Katanga in 1961, and surrendered when they ran out of ammunition and other supplies.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Despite the initial lack of recognition for the events leading up to the surrender, in the years following Quinlan's death his reputation in Ireland was restored.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Pat Quinlan was born in 1919 in Reeneragh, Caherdaniel, County Kerry, and went to school in nearby Loher. He and his wife Carmel had a son Leo, who was 16 when his father served in the Congo, and later became a Commandant, the same rank his father held when in Katanga (although the father retired with the higher rank of Colonel).


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: The Siege of Jadotville took place in September 1961, during the United Nations intervention in the Katanga conflict in Congo-Léopoldville, in Central Africa.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: "A" Company, 35th Battalion (UN service) of the Irish Army ONUC contingent, commanded by Quinlan, was attacked by Katanga Gendarmerie troops loyal to President Moïse Tshombe and the State of Katanga. Quinlan's lightly armed company was besieged in Jadotville (modern Likasi), and resisted Katangese assaults for six days. A relief force of Irish, Indian and Swedish troops was unsuccessful in their attempts to reach Quinlan's position.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Quinlan's company suffered five wounded in action during the six day siege. On the other hand, up to 300 Katangese troops were killed, including 30 mercenaries, and an indeterminate number were wounded, with figures ranging from 300 to 1,000. Quinlan, however, had no access to resupply and reinforcements and, with his transport destroyed by Katanga's Fouga Magister jet, a breakout was virtually impossible. In the end, with his position untenable, without any clear orders or promise of assistance, having run out of ammunition and food and low on water, Quinlan accepted a second offer to surrender to the Katangese.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Although suffering no loss of life, Quinlan's company were held as prisoners of war and hostages for approximately one month. The Katangese bartered the Irish soldiers for prisoners in the custody of the Congolese government. After being released, "A" Company were returned to their base in Elizabethville. Some weeks later, Quinlan found himself involved in active combat again, this time with his company in support of Swedish UN troops. Eventually they were reinforced with fresh troops from Ireland. After weeks of fighting and their six-month tour of duty now complete, "A" Company was rotated home to Ireland that December.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: In its immediate aftermath, the Irish state did not give much recognition to the battle of Jadotville, and no Irish soldier received any decoration for actions at Jadotville. This may have been because of a perceived shame that "A" Company had surrendered and an unwillingness to highlight political or strategic errors at higher levels by the UN mission. Commandant Quinlan however recommended a number of his men for the Military Medal for Gallantry (MMG), Ireland's highest award for military valour, for their actions during the battle.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Quinlan never served overseas again, and retired as a full Colonel after 40 years with the Irish Army.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Colonel Patrick Quinlan died on 27 August 1997, unaware that his reputation would be restored nine years after his death. His wife Carmel did not live to see his official rehabilitation either, dying two years after he did.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: The veterans of Jadotville were dissatisfied with the Irish Defence Forces' refusal to acknowledge the battle and the implied black mark on the reputation of their commander. Following a long campaign for recognition, in 2004 the then Minister for Defence, Willie O'Dea, agreed to hold a review of the battle. An inquiry by the Defence Forces cleared Quinlan and "A" Company of allegations of soldierly misconduct. A commemorative stone recognising the soldiers of "A" Company was erected on the grounds of Custume Barracks in Athlone in 2005. A commissioned portrait of Quinlan was installed in the Congo Room of the Irish Defence Forces' UN School.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: In 2016, the Irish government awarded a Presidential Unit Citation to "A" Company, the first in the State's history. And, in October 2017 a plaque commemorating Quinlan, who was from County Kerry, was unveiled by former Taoiseach Enda Kenny at Coomakista Pass, County Kerry.


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: In November 2020, an Independent Review Group commissioned by Irish Defence Minister Simon Coveney recommended that Quinlan receive the Distinguished Service Medal (DSM).


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Quinlan's tactics at Jadotville influenced subsequent training programmes, and were, according to RTÉ, "cited in military textbooks worldwide as the best example of the use of the so-called perimeter defence".


title: Pat Quinlan (Irish Army officer)

text: Quinlan is played by Jamie Dornan in the film "The Siege of Jadotville" (2016), which was adapted from Declan Power's book, "The Siege at Jadotville: The Irish Army's Forgotten Battle" (2005). His wife Carmel is played by Fiona Glascott. Colonel Quinlan's son, Commandant Leo Quinlan, has said that Dornan bears an uncanny resemblance to his father, and got everything about him right except his County Kerry accent, which was so strong that "if he had done my father's accent, you'd need subtitles." Colonel Quinlan's grandson Conor was a member of the film's ensemble cast.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: The Boys in the Band is a play by Mart Crowley. The play premiered Off-Broadway in 1968, and was revived on Broadway for its 50th anniversary in 2018. The play revolves around a group of gay men who gather for a birthday party in New York City, and was groundbreaking for its portrayal of gay life. It was adapted into two feature films.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: The play is set in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, "a smartly appointed duplex apartment in the East Fifties", and the backgrounds of characters are revealed in the course of a birthday party.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: During the party, the humor takes a nasty turn, as the nine men become increasingly inebriated. The party culminates in a "game", where each man must call someone whom he has loved and tell them about it. Michael, believing that Alan has finally "outed" himself when he makes his call, grabs the phone from him and discovers Alan has called his wife. The audience never learns what Alan intended to discuss with Michael in the end.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: "The Boys in the Band" was written by American playwright Mart Crowley. In 1957, Crowley started working for a number of television production companies, before meeting Natalie Wood on the set of her film "Splendor in the Grass" while working as a production assistant. Wood hired him as her assistant, primarily to give him ample free time to work on his gay-themed play. Wood, Crowley's close friend, inspired him to move from New York to Hollywood. According to Crowley's friend Gavin Lambert, Wood sympathized with Hollywood's gay scene, and financially supported Crowley so he would be free to write his play. Crowley worked as an assistant for Wood and her husband Robert Wagner for many years.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: After several Hollywood film productions he was helping on were canceled, his wealthy friend Diana Lynn hired him to housesit. He lived in the Hollywood Georgian mansion where he only had to "throw dinner parties and drink myself into oblivion." He began writing instead of drinking, and began working on "The Boys in the Band".


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: Crowley told Dominick Dunne about the title: "It's that line in "A Star Is Born" when James Mason tells a distraught Judy Garland 'You're singing for yourself and the boys in the band.'"


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: According to Crowley, his motivation in writing the play was not activism, but anger that "had partially to do with myself and my career, but it also had to do with the social attitude of people around me, and the laws of the day". He says he "wanted the injustice of it all — to all those characters — known". Crowley has also stated, "I was not an activist, then or now. I didn't know what hit me. I just wrote the truth."


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: Crowley made no secret that all characters were based on real people in his life, with Michael reminding him of himself, describing the character as "a complex person who is aware of what is politically correct but has a sort of contempt for it". He called Donald "a foil for Michael" and inspired by a droll friend he would periodically take wry comments from. In the 1995 documentary "The Celluloid Closet", Crowley explained, "The self-deprecating humor was born out of a low self-esteem, from a sense of what the times told you about yourself." In "The Boys in the Band: Something Personal", a short documentary accompanying Netflix's release of the 2020 film adaptation, Crowley clarified that Donald was based on Douglas Murray, to whom the play was dedicated. Harold, the character whose birthday was being celebrated, is a cipher for dancer/choreographer Howard Jeffrey, who died in 1988 of AIDS, to whom the play was also dedicated. Crowley took one of the key lines of the play, "I try to show a little affection; it keeps me from feeling like such a whore", from a hustler he danced with on Fire Island, telling, "I couldn't write anything that good!".


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: While Crowley was pitching the script, early agents stayed away from the project, and it was championed by playwright Edward Albee and Richard Barr, who at the time was head of the Playwrights Units in New York. For the production, it proved "nearly impossible to find" actors willing to play gay characters. An old college friend of Crowley's, 33-year-old Laurence Luckinbill, agreed to play Hank despite warnings from his agent that it would end his career, even though the agent was herself a lesbian. It proved hard for Crowley to find producers and theater owners who were interested.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: The play premiered Off-Broadway on April 14, 1968, at Theater Four, and closed on September 6, 1970, after 1,001 performances. Directed by Robert Moore, the cast included Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter White as Alan McCarthy, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry, Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard. The play was one of the early works to present a story centered on homosexuals. In 1968, although only originally scheduled to run for five performances at a small venue off Broadway, it was a fast success and was moved to a larger theater. It went on to have a run in London as well. The premiere's actors such as Laurence Luckinbill drilled a hole in the set so they could spy on whoever was in the house's best seats, and in the initial weeks, saw Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx, Rudolf Nureyev, and New York mayor John Lindsay. Despite the success of the play, all the gay members of the original company stayed in the closet after the premiere. Between 1984 and 1993, five of the gay men in the original production (as well as director Robert Moore and producer Richard Barr) died in the ensuing AIDS epidemic.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: The play was revived Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in 1996, running from August 6 to October 20, after its initial sold-out run at the WPA Theater. "The Boys in the Band" was presented by the Transport Group Theater Company, New York City, from February 2010 to March 14, 2010, directed by Jack Cummings III.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: A London staging in October 2016 was the first revival there in two decades. Positively reviewed in "The Observer", the production starred Mark Gatiss as Harold and Ian Hallard as Michael, with James Holmes, Jack Derges, and John Hopkins.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: A Broadway production of "The Boys in the Band", directed by Joe Mantello, opened in previews at the Booth Theatre on April 30, 2018, officially on May 31, and ran until August 11, 2018. This production, staged for the 50th anniversary of the play's original premiere, starred Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto and Andrew Rannells, as well as Charlie Carver, Brian Hutchison, Michael Benjamin Washington, Robin de Jesús, and Tuc Watkins. Quinto portrayed Harold, whose birthday sets the premise. All of the actors who were in the 2018 production are openly gay.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: This production won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, and Robin de Jesús was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: When "The Boys in the Band" premiered in 1968, mainstream audiences were shocked. The play was profiled in the William Goldman book "", an account of the 1967–1968 season. In the same year, a two-disc, vinyl LP set was released, containing the full dialogue of the play voiced by the original actors. Crowley wrote the 2002 sequel "The Men from the Boys".


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: In 2002, Peter Filichia from "Theater Mania" contended that the play's original production helped inspire the 1969 Stonewall riots and gay rights movement.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: In 2004, David Anthony Fox from "Philadelphia City Paper" praised this play, its one-liners, and its live performance in Philadelphia. He rebutted criticism that the play portrayed "urban gay men as narcissistic, bitter, shallow".


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: In 2010, Elyse Summer in her review for "CurtainUp" called it a "smart gimmick" full of dated "self-homophobic, low self-esteem characters". In the same year, Steve Weinstein from the "Edge" website called it "Shakespearean".


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: In 2002, Crowley wrote "The Men from the Boys", a sequel to the play, which takes place 30 years after the original. It premiered in San Francisco in 2002, directed by Ed Decker, and was produced in Los Angeles in 2003.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: The play was adapted into a feature film by Cinema Center Films in 1970, directed by William Friedkin.


title: The Boys in the Band (play)

text: Ryan Murphy produced a second film adaptation for Netflix with the 2018 Broadway revival cast and Joe Mantello directing.


title: Rob Bironas

text: James Robert Douglas Bironas (January 29, 1978 – September 20, 2014) was an American football placekicker who played the majority of his professional career with the Tennessee Titans. He played college football for Auburn University and Georgia Southern University.


title: Rob Bironas

text: He was originally signed by the Green Bay Packers as an undrafted free agent in 2002. Bironas' active professional career began in Arena football where he was a member of the Charleston Swamp Foxes, Carolina Cobras, and the New York Dragons and had intermittent offseason stints with the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 2005, he signed with the Titans, with whom he played for nine seasons and was an All-Pro and Pro Bowl selection in 2007. Bironas was killed in a car crash on September 20, 2014.


title: Rob Bironas

text: Bironas attended Trinity High School in Louisville, Kentucky, and was a four-year varsity letterman in soccer, a two-year varsity letterman in football and swimming, and added a one-year letterman in track and field. He graduated in 1996.


title: Rob Bironas

text: Bironas attended Auburn University, where he played for the Auburn Tigers football team from 1997 to 1999. He was a semi-finalist for the Lou Groza Award in 1998 after making 12 of 16 field goal attempts (including two successful tries with the four misses from 40+) and making all 18 PATs for a team-high 54 points. The following season, new head coach Tommy Tuberville replaced Bironas, the preseason All-SEC kicker of the football team, with the punter, Damon Duval. Bironas later transferred to Georgia Southern University, where his brother was on the soccer team, for his final year of collegiate eligibility, and played for the Georgia Southern Eagles football team. Bironas won the 2000 NCAA Division I-AA National Championship while playing with the Eagles, before returning to graduate from Auburn with a bachelor's degree in marketing.


title: Rob Bironas

text: Bironas signed with the Green Bay Packers in 2002 as an undrafted free agent, before being released before the season began. Bironas then began playing in the Arena Football League's minor league system (af2), where he spent the 2003 season with the Charleston Swamp Foxes, making 12 of 27 field goal attempts that season. During the 2003 NFL offseason, he signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and was again released before the season began. In 2004, he moved up to the Arena Football League with the Carolina Cobras converting 17 of 40 field goal attempts and 70 of 89 extra point tries. In 2004, he returned to the NFL and signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers, with whom his stint was again no longer than a preseason. He therefore returned to arena football, spending the 2005 season with the New York Dragons before signing with the Titans, connecting on 7 of 16 field goal attempts and 99 of 117 extra point attempts for the AFL's New York Dragons.


title: Rob Bironas

text: In 2005, Bironas signed as an unrestricted free agent with the Tennessee Titans, where he finished his first season with the Titans converting 23 of 29 field goals attempts (79.3%) and 30 of 32 extra points attempts (93.8%). Bironas finished the season with 11 touchbacks, which tied him for fourth in the AFC and seventh in the NFL.


title: Rob Bironas

text: In 2006, Bironas built on his previous success and kicked four game winning field goals, including one of 60 yards against the Indianapolis Colts, which tied as the eighth-longest in NFL history.


title: Rob Bironas

text: In 2007, Bironas was named the AFC Player of the Month for the month of October. He made 13 of 14 field goals (92.9 percent) and all six PATs as he helped the Titans earn a 3-1 (.750) record for the month. He accounted for 45 of the team's 81 points in October. In the Titans' three wins in October, Bironas connected on 12 of 13 field goals, including an NFL-record eight field goals in one game (52, 25, 21, 30, 28, 43, 29 and 29 yards). This records effort also included the game-winning kick against the Houston Texans at Reliant Stadium on October 21. In the same game, he tied the existing record of five field goals made in a single half. Bironas was selected to the NFL's All-Pro Team and the Pro Bowl.


title: Rob Bironas

text: On February 28, 2008 the Titans tendered Bironas to a one-year, $1.417 million contract as a restricted free agent. He signed his tender on May 9, 2008.


title: Rob Bironas

text: On February 18, 2009, the Titans re-signed Bironas to a four-year $12 million contract with $5 million guaranteed.


title: Rob Bironas

text: Bironas founded The Rob Bironas Fund in 2008. The Nashville-based nonprofit is part of the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, and works to give Nashville youth ways to engage with and be educated by area musicians. The fund finances tools, education and leadership to help Nashville youth achieve scholastic excellence through music education. The fund has partnered with both the Nashville Symphony and Country Music Hall of Fame.


title: Rob Bironas

text: Bironas was a board member of the Nashville Symphony, and worked to provide help to needy children through the Kicks for Kids program. He was also a member of Phi Kappa Tau fraternity, where he contributed to charity and philanthropy.