title: Alex P. Keaton

text: Alex (Michael J. Fox) is the oldest child of Steven and Elyse Keaton (Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter), who were baby boomers and Democrats during the early years of the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Married in 1964, Steven, a manager in a local Public Broadcasting Service station and Elyse, an independent architect, were hippies during the 1960s. According to the episode "A Christmas Story" in season one, Alex was born in 1965 while his parents were on assignment in Africa, having been influenced by John F. Kennedy to participate in the Peace Corps. Alex has two younger sisters, Mallory (Justine Bateman) and Jennifer (Tina Yothers). Mallory was born while her parents were students at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, Jennifer was born the night of Richard Nixon's presidential election in 1972 and a younger brother, Andrew, was born in 1984. The family lives in suburban Columbus, Ohio.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: At the beginning of the series, Alex is a high school student who has a passion for economics and wealth. In particular, he is an advocate of supply-side economics. His heroes are Richard Nixon (going so far as to have a lunchbox bearing Nixon's likeness), William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Milton Friedman. His favorite television show is "Wall $treet Week" and he is an avid reader of "The Wall Street Journal". He also enjoys music of the big band and swing era but secretly enjoys rock music (as seen in the episode "A, My Name is Alex"). Alex spends the first two seasons of the series preparing to attend Princeton University. While he is attending an on-campus interview, Mallory, who tagged along to pay a surprise visit to her boyfriend, Jeff, who is attending Princeton at the time, has an emotional breakdown when she finds Jeff is seeing another woman. Ultimately, Alex chooses to look after Mallory rather than complete his interview, thus destroying any possibility of attending the university and getting into the Ivy League.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: Alex receives a scholarship to fictional Leland University, which is located close enough for him to continue to live at home and commute. Keaton excels at Leland and teaches an economics course as a teaching assistant. Alex holds a disdain for nearby Grant College (which Mallory later attends) and regularly openly mocks their courses. While attending Leland, he has two serious girlfriends. His first is artist/feminist, Ellen Reed (Tracy Pollan, whom Fox later married). After they break up, Keaton pursues a liberal psychology student with feminist inclinations, Lauren Miller, who is played by Courteney Cox. The relationship ends when he has an affair with music major Martie Brodie (played by Jane Adams) while Lauren is out of town. After graduation, Alex accepts a job on Wall Street.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: The humor of the series focused on a real cultural divide during the 1980s, between the baby boomers and Generation X. According to Stephen Kiehl, this was when the "Alex Keaton generation was rejecting the counterculture of the 1960s and embracing the wealth and power that came to define the '80s." While the youngest, Jennifer (an athletic tomboy) shares the values of her parents, Alex and Mallory embrace Reaganomics and consequent conservative values: Alex is a Young Republican and Mallory is a more traditional young woman in contrast to her feminist mother.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: In the Museum of Broadcast Communications' Encyclopedia of Television entry for "Family Ties", Michael Saenz argues that:


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: In 1999, "TV Guide" ranked Alex P. Keaton number 17 on its "50 Greatest TV Characters of All Time" list.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: When Michael J. Fox left his next series, "Spin City", a decade after "Family Ties", his final episodes as a regular ("Goodbye: Parts 1 & 2", Season 4, Episodes 25 and 26) made numerous allusions to "Family Ties". Michael Gross (Alex's father Steven) portrays Michael Patrick Flaherty's (Michael J. Fox) therapist and there is a reference to the therapist's unseen receptionist named "Mallory". After Flaherty becomes an environmental lobbyist in Washington, he makes a reference to having met the junior senator from Ohio, Alex P. Keaton. Actress Meredith Baxter, who played Alex Keaton's mother on "Family Ties", also played Michael Flaherty's mother on "Spin City".


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: Florida ska/punk band Victims of Circumstance's debut album, "Roll the Dice", featured a track titled "Me and Alex P. Keaton". The lyrics parody a typical day spent with a modern, socially conservative Republican.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: LFO's 1999 single "Summer Girls" name-checks "Alex P. Keaton" alongside many other cultural references.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: In the "Family Guy" episode "Movin' Out (Brian's Song)", after Brian gets dumped by Jillian when he admits he did not want to move in with her, Stewie tries to help him get over her by comparing the situation to when Alex P. Keaton lost his own girlfriend before getting another one.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: In the second episode of the first season of "Broad City", when offered "a few pages from [his] dad's prescription pad" by a young boy, Abbi refers to him as Alex P. Keaton.


title: Alex P. Keaton

text: During the seventh episode of the third season of "Stranger Things", while under the influence of "truth serum", Steve Harrington mistakenly refers to Marty McFly (another character played by Michael J. Fox) as Alex P. Keaton while trying to understand the plot of "Back to the Future".


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Kelsey Ann Smith (May 3, 1989 – June 2, 2007) was an Overland Park, Kansas teenager who disappeared on June 2, 2007 and was murdered that evening. The story was featured in the international media, including on "America's Most Wanted", before her body was found near a lake in Missouri on June 6, 2007.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Smith was last seen at 7:07 p.m. CST on June 2, 2007 in the parking lot of a Target store at 97th and Quivira, behind the Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, Kansas. Police, other authorities and the national media launched an extensive publicity campaign and search for Smith.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Surveillance video from Target showed Smith purchasing a present for her boyfriend to celebrate six months together. Her last call had been to her mother from the store. She then left the store before she disappeared. Approximately four hours later, her car, a 1987 Buick Regal, was found abandoned outside of Macy's in the parking lot of Oak Park Mall across the street. Her purse, wallet and the items that she had bought were left in the car.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Target stores use a large array of video cameras, and these can often be enhanced internally through the company's Target Forensic Services division. The surveillance footage showed Smith parking her car, entering the store, calling her mother and selecting the items that were later found in the car. It also revealed that a male, who was white and in his early twenties, wearing a white shirt and dark shorts, had entered the store approximately thirty seconds after Smith had entered. The man seemed to be in every aisle that Smith had visited and appeared in almost every part of the footage showing her, but at a discreet distance. Despite frequently looking at Smith or in her direction, the man made no effort to talk to her or to approach her in the store but left just as she went to the cashier, who did not see or notice anything unusual in the store nor in Smith's behavior. The footage captured a clear picture of the man leaving the store.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: In the parking lot, surveillance video appeared to show someone forcing Smith into her car. The video at first did not show anything unusual, but when slowed down, it revealed a flash in the direction of Smith and her car, consistent with someone running when the camera is placed at a distance. The outside footage showed a suspicious 1970s-era Chevrolet truck leaving the lot, which was also found to have entered the lot just before Smith had.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: According to the program "See No Evil" (also known as "Murder on CCTV"), the Macy's surveillance video showed that Smith's car had been left there at 9:17 p.m., about two hours after it had departed the Target lot. A figure in white shirt and dark pants was seen leaving the vehicle and running toward the street. Though it was too dark at that time to determine if the figure was that of a male or female, the person's clothing seemed to match that of the suspect in the Target footage. When the video still of the man was released to the media, it generated hundreds of tips, but the leads were too general to be useful.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: When the car was checked for forensic evidence, fingerprint experts isolated all of those who had legitimate reasons to be in the car, such as Kelsey's family, friends and boyfriend. As a result, they found unidentified prints on the seat belt.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Detectives reportedly found the body because of a cell phone ping that originated from the area on June 2, and a number of search areas were identified. Despite efforts by local law enforcement and eventually the FBI, it took Verizon Wireless four days to hand over the cell phone records to investigators, which caused much controversy over the delay. A Verizon technician pinpointed a cell-phone tower and told investigators to search 1.1 miles north of it. Within 45 minutes, on June 6 at 1:30 p.m., searchers discovered Smith's body in a wooded area near Longview Lake in Grandview, Missouri, 18 to 20 miles from where she had been abducted. Upon report of Smith's death, a website dedicated to the search for her went offline and was quickly remade into a dedication site. Through subsequent investigation, the cause of death was determined to be strangulation; she had been choked with her own belt. The autopsy also showed that she was sexually assaulted.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: A woman who had seen the footage recognized the subject as her neighbor. The next day when she saw the information about the truck, she called in a tip. On the evening of June 6, 2007, police arrested 26-year-old Edwin Roy "Jack" Hall of Olathe, Kansas. Hall was in the process of leaving town with his wife and son, supposedly on vacation, when the police arrived.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Hall was charged on June 7 with premeditated first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping. He had no adult criminal record, but had a juvenile record of assault. Hall, who had been adopted at age seven, had been returned to state custody at age 15 after threatening the family's daughter with a knife. He also assaulted another boy by striking him in the head with a baseball bat. Police do not believe that Hall knew Smith. At the time of his arrest, Hall was married and the father of a four-year-old son. Hall admitted to being at Target but claimed that he had never approached Smith. However, he was caught in a lie when his fingerprints matched those from the seat belt.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Hall was arraigned via video hookup on June 7, and bond was set at US$5 million. On August 1, Hall was indicted by a Johnson County, Kansas, grand jury for murder, rape and aggravated sodomy. The charges made Hall eligible for the death penalty, which Johnson County district attorney Phill Kline decided to seek.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Because the body had been found in a different state (Missouri), some argued for federal jurisdiction, but because Hall was arrested and in custody in Johnson County, that jurisdiction had the legal authority to pursue the case.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: On July 23, as part of a plea agreement, Hall pleaded guilty to all four charges. His plea came during what was supposed to be a change-of-venue hearing. The courtroom was jammed with Smith's parents and other family members, friends and reporters. The hearing was carried live on all four of Kansas City's television network affiliates.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: It is believed that Hall spotted Smith driving into the Target parking lot after he had arrived. He noticed that she was alone and thus began following her in store to assure himself that she was not meeting anyone. When he saw her about to leave, he went to his truck and retrieved his gun. He waited until Smith was most vulnerable, when she was getting ready to leave, before he struck. He took her 20 miles away to the Missouri woods, where he sexually assaulted and strangled her.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: The hearing came a day after a judge ruled that prosecutors could still seek the death penalty for Hall after a judge had denied a defense motion seeking dismissal of the case on a technicality.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: On September 16, Johnson County district judge Peter V. Ruddick sentenced Hall to life in prison without parole for the kidnapping, rape and murder. In court, Hall apologized to Smith's family for his actions.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Some believe that Verizon Wireless was reluctant to locate or "ping" the cell phone because of privacy laws governing such actions. At the time, cell-phone service providers would generally comply upon the request of the subscriber, but not of anyone else, including that of law enforcement authorities, unless a court order was issued, which takes time.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: This led to the creation of the Kelsey Smith Act, a law that states in essence that cell-phone companies can ping a phone if authorities determine that the subscriber is in danger. Most US states have passed the law, and the United States Congress is debating federalizing it.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: In at least one instance, the law was acted upon. In February 2015, in Lenexa, Kansas, not far from where Smith had grown up, a man stole a car, unaware of a five-month-old infant inside. While in flight, he also ran down a pedestrian in a hit-and-run. The police found the car a half-hour later at a convenience store after having pinged the baby's mother's cell phone, which was still in a purse on the front seat. The driver escaped, and was still at large. It is believed that once he realized there was a baby inside, he decided to ditch the car, as in addition to car theft and hit-and-run, he would face kidnapping charges.


title: Murder of Kelsey Smith

text: Beyond local Kansas City news affiliate coverage, the case received prominent national media attention, including coverage by national news services Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, Nancy Grace, the "Today Show", "The Mind of a Murderer" and as an episode of the television show "See No Evil", which aired in Canada on Slice, and in the United States on Investigation Discovery.


title: Black MIDI

text: Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song or a remix containing a large number of notes, typically in the thousands, millions, billions, or even trillions. People who make black MIDIs are known as blackers. However, there are no specific criteria of what is considered "black"; as a result, pinpointing the exact origin of black MIDI is impossible.


title: Black MIDI

text: Though the two are unrelated in origin, the concept of impossible piano existed long before black MIDI, manifesting itself within Conlon Nancarrow's work involving player pianos where he punched holes in piano rolls, creating extremely complex musical compositions in the same impossible, unplayable spirit of black MIDI. Another precursor to black MIDI is "Circus Galop", a player piano composition written by Canadian virtuoso Marc-Andre Hamelin, featuring complex and impossible arrangement with up to 21 notes played simultaneously. Frank Zappa also wrote a dense and extremely difficult composition called "The Black Page".


title: Black MIDI

text: Black MIDI was first employed in Shirasagi Yukki at Kuro Yuki Gohan's rendition of "U.N. Owen Was Her?", an extra boss theme from the "Touhou Project" shooter video game "The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil". It was uploaded to the site Nico Nico Douga in 2009, and public awareness of Black MIDI started to spread from Japan to China and Korea in the following two years. In its beginning years, Black MIDIs were represented visually with traditional, two-stave piano sheet music, contained a number of notes only in the thousands. They were created with MIDI sequencers such as Music Studio Producer, and Singer Song Writer, and played through MIDI players such as MAMPlayer and Timidity++. The Black MIDI community in Japan vanished quickly because, according to Jason Nguyen (owner of the channel Gingeas), the group was "analogous to those TV shows where there's a mysterious founder of a civilization that is not really known throughout the course of the show".


title: Black MIDI

text: The popularity of Black MIDI transitioned into Europe and the United States due to a video of a composition uploaded to YouTube by user Kakakakaito1998 in February 2011, and shortly thereafter, blackers from around the world began pushing limits of the style by making compositions with notes increasing into the millions and using an enormous number of colors and patterns to match the complexity of the notes. They also formed the sites Guide to Black MIDI and Official Black MIDI Wikia that introduced and set the norm of Black MIDI.


title: Black MIDI

text: The first of these tracks to reach the million-note mark was that of "Necrofantasia" from "Touhou Project" video game "Perfect Cherry Blossom", arranged by TheTrustedComputer. The end of the title of many Black MIDI videos displays how many notes are in the piece. The number of notes and file sizes that could be played back have grown with the rising amount of processing and 64-bit programs computers are able to handle, and while Black MIDIs of Japanese video game music and anime are still common, the genre has also begun spilling into compositions based on modern-day pop songs, such as "Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus. Despite this increased computer storage, there are still Black MIDI files that could cause an operating system to slow down. The three largest black MIDIs are "Armageddon v3", "TheTrueEnd", and "Ashes", all of which contain the maximum number of notes allowed in the MIDI standard (about 93 trillion). Due to the nature of their creation and their sheer size, they are unable to be played back and recorded.


title: Black MIDI

text: English-language blackers have formed collaboration groups, such as the Black MIDI Team, where they make MIDI files and visuals together so they can be uploaded online sooner. Blackers around the world have used software such as Synthesia, FL Studio, SynthFont, Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard, Piano From Above, MIDITrail, vanBasco Karaoke Player, Ultralight MIDI Player (a Java program), Zenith, MAMPlayer, Music Studio Producer, Singer Song Writer, Tom's MIDI Player, TMIDI, and Timidity++ to create and play Black MIDIs. Some of them, like Jason, record the MIDI files at a slow tempo and then speed the footage up in video-editing to avoid RAM and processing issues.


title: Black MIDI

text: The term "Black MIDI" is derived from how there are so many notes in each piece that the score would look nearly black (or would look really black) on traditional sheet music. According to California-based blacker TheTrustedComputer, black MIDI was intended as more of a remix style than an actual genre, and derived from the idea of "bullet hell" shoot 'em up games, which involved "so many bullets at a time your eyes can't keep up." Black MIDI has also been considered the digital equivalent, as well as a response, to composer Conlon Nancarrow's use of the player piano which also involved experimenting with several thick notes to compose intricate pieces without hands. The Guide to Black MIDI, however, denies this influence: "We believe that references to Conlon Nancarrow and piano rolls are too deep and Black MIDI origins must be found in digital MIDI music world ["sic"]."


title: Black MIDI

text: Black MIDI first received coverage by Michael Connor, a writer for the non-profit arts organization Rhizome, in September 2013, leading to attention from publications and bloggers including Aux, Gawker's Adrian Chen, Jason Kottke, and "The Verge". It has garnered acclaim from journalists, bloggers and electronic musicians, with many noting it as a distinctive and engaging genre thanks to how regular piano notes are combined to make new, abstract sounds not heard in many styles of music, as well as the visuals representing the notes. Hackaday's Elliot Williams spotlighted the style as ironic, given that the fast-paced arpeggios and "splatter-chords" that are developed with a restricted number of voices come together to make other tones that leads a piano sounding more like a chiptune and less like an actual piano.


title: MAZ-7310

text: The MAZ-543/MAZ-7310 "Uragan" (/Hurricane) is a Soviet/Belarusian 8×8 artillery truck designed and developed by MAZ (Minsk Automobile Plant), in what is now Belarus.


title: MAZ-7310

text: Designed in the 1960s, the MAZ-543 was presented on 7 November 1965 during the Moscow Red Square military parade as part of "SS-1с Scud B" (9K72 Elbrus) system. The vehicle is powered by a 38.9 litre D12A-525 tank diesel engine producing around 525 horsepower, and gives a maximum road speed of 37 mph (60 km/h).


title: MAZ-7310

text: The MAZ-7310 could operate together with 4WD MAZ-8385 trailer as a road-train (total length - 205.5 m) for oil surveying. It was used in Siberia and also as a tractor on military airbases.


title: MAZ-7310

text: The MAZ-547 version is a six-axle version, used as Transporter erector launcher for the RSD-10 Pioneer.


title: MAZ-7310

text: In 1986, People's Republic of China fielded its version of MAZ-543. Initially designated WS580 but later renamed WS2400, this Chinese version is one of the Wanshan series trucks manufactured by Wanshan Special Vehicle, a wholly owned subsidiary of China Aerospace Sanjiang Space Co. Ltd., which is in turn a subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). The advantage of the Chinese vehicle is that it utilizes a German diesel engine, transmission and hydraulics manufactured by Wanshan in China, built using technologies transferred from ZF Friedrichshafen.


title: Drew University

text: Drew University is a private university in Madison, New Jersey. Drew has been nicknamed the "University in the Forest" because of its wooded campus. As of fall 2020, more than 2,200 students were pursuing degrees at the university's three schools.


title: Drew University

text: In 1867, financier and railroad tycoon Daniel Drew purchased an estate in Madison to establish a theological seminary to train candidates for Methodist ministry. The seminary later expanded to offer an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum in 1928 and graduate studies in 1955. The College of Liberal Arts, serving more than 1,600 undergraduate students, offers strong concentrations in the natural sciences, social sciences, languages and literatures, humanities and the arts, and in several interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fields. The Drew Theological School, the third-oldest of thirteen Methodist seminaries affiliated with the United Methodist Church, currently enrolls more than 350 students preparing for careers in the ministry and the academic study of theology.


title: Drew University

text: The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, enrolling more than 250 graduate students, offers master's and doctoral degrees in a variety of specialized and interdisciplinary fields.


title: Drew University

text: While affiliated with the Methodist faith, Drew University makes no religious demands of its students. Although many of the Theological School's students and faculty are Methodists, students of all faiths are admitted to any program within the university. The United Methodist Church's General Commission on Archives and History is located on campus; the commission maintains an archive of Methodist records and artifacts from the 19th century to the present.


title: Drew University

text: Drew University is located in Madison, New Jersey, a borough approximately west of New York City. Known as "the Rose City" because of its rose-cultivating industry in the nineteenth century, Madison is an affluent commuter town in New Jersey's Morris County. It is connected with the northern section of the state and Midtown Manhattan through the NJ Transit's Morris & Essex Lines. The university hosts the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, an independent professional theatre company.


title: Drew University

text: The university sits on the former estate of William Gibbons (1794–1852), who owned the New York–New Jersey steamboat business that became famous from the Thomas "Gibbons v. Ogden" case, and who pieced together a estate in Madison, New Jersey in 1832. He named his holdings "The Forest," which gives Drew its nickname of the "University in the Forest". The following year, Gibbons commissioned the design and construction of a Greek revival antebellum-style residence that was completed in 1836. In 1867, financier and railroad tycoon Daniel Drew (1797–1879) purchased Gibbons' estate from his descendants for $140,000. Drew, a devout Methodist, donated the estate to the church to establish a Methodist theological seminary. The estate's mansion would be renamed "Mead Hall" in honor of Drew's wife, Roxanna Mead.


title: Drew University

text: Several motion pictures, TV productions, and music videos have used Drew University as a filming location. The campus has been featured in films such as "So Fine" (1981), "Deconstructing Harry" (1997), "The Family Stone" (2005), "Spinning into Butter" (2008), "The Incredible Hulk" (2008); and in television programs such as "The Sopranos" and "Friday Night Lights".


title: Drew University

text: Drew's academic buildings feature a mix of Greek Revival, Collegiate Gothic, and neoclassical architecture on a campus that is a serene, wooded oasis in the middle of a bustling suburban town. The campus features the Drew Forest Preserve, an expanse that was recently restored with the planting of 1,100 native trees and shrubs by the university community and volunteer assistance from pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer (a large, local employer), the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the New Jersey Audubon Society. The university's campus also features the Florence and Robert Zuck Arboretum, named for two botany faculty members, containing a mixture of native and non-native trees, plants and two small glacial ponds supporting populations of turtles, goldfish, catfish, and muskrats, and various species of birds including migratory fowl such as Canada geese, ducks, and herons.


title: Drew University

text: The preserve and arboretum both provide a natural laboratory for the instruction of students in the study of biology and life sciences and for research, but is also open to the public by appointment. According to the New Jersey chapter of the Audubon Society, the arboretum and forest preserve is "important for groundwater recharge and runoff reduction within the Passaic River watershed and the Buried Valley Aquifer System".


title: Drew University

text: In 1866, Daniel Drew approached church leaders during the Methodist Centenary Celebration with an offer to build, equip, and endow a theological seminary near New York City. Drew asked that his pastor, John McClintock (1814–1870), be appointed to lead the seminary as its first president. Instruction began under the direction of McClintock as both president and professor of practical theology after the first students were admitted in 1867. Drew is the third-oldest of thirteen Methodist seminaries affiliated with the United Methodist Church.


title: Drew University

text: Drew offered professional training for candidates to the ministry augmented by "an opportunity for a broad culture through the study of the humanities." The seminary attracted a faculty that made influential contributions to Methodist theology and biblical scholarship, including James Strong (1822–1894), a professor of exegetical theology, who collaborated with McClintock on the ten-volume "Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature" (1867–1881), and researched, compiled, and published "Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible" (1890) during his tenure at the seminary. Writings on early church theology and Christian practice were translated into Chinese for use by foreign missions.


title: Drew University

text: Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Drew Theological Seminary educated and trained hundreds of Methodist ministers. It began to expand its role with the addition of a course of study for women in 1920 when it established a "College of Missions." This course would be renamed the "College of Religious Education and Missions" in 1929 but was short-lived.


title: Drew University

text: In 1928, Drew Theological Seminary accepted a gift of $1.5 million from brothers Arthur J. Baldwin (1868–1939) and Leonard D. Baldwin (1866–1933) to establish an undergraduate liberal arts college. The Baldwins were successful attorneys who were raised on a farm in Cortland, New York. Both brothers attended Cornell University. They established a law firm with former New Jersey governor John Griggs spanning "varied interests in lumbering, manufacturing, transportation, and other enterprises that ranged from owning the Grosvenor Hotel in New York City to Arthur's legal counseling for the rising McGraw-Hill publishing empire." The Baldwins became acquainted with the seminary's president, Ezra Squier Tipple, who "welcomed the brothers to his prominent New York City Methodist Church when they came to Manhattan." Leonard Baldwin eventually became a trustee of the seminary in 1919. The donation originally consisted of $500,000 to build a college building, and $1,000,000 in the form of Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) stock. However, the Baldwins exchanged the stock with a gift of cash in October 1928.


title: Drew University

text: In their modesty and in recognition of their sibling affection, the Baldwins asked that it be named "Brothers College." The theological seminary then changed its name to "Drew University" to reflect its expanded role. Brothers College, later renamed as the "College of Liberal Arts", opened in September 1928 with its first class of 12 students. Brothers College would incorporate the women's program and become coeducational in 1942 during World War II when school officials recognized that the military draft and war effort would reduce the all-male student body. Drew offered admission to United States Navy personnel through the V-12 Navy College Training Program. Drew was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the program which offered students a path to a naval officers' commission.


title: Drew University

text: Drew began offering graduate-level education in 1912. The university expanded its graduate education programs, focusing on religious studies and establishing the Graduate School, a third of Drew's degree-granting entities, in 1955, under the leadership of the university's seventh president, Fred Holloway. Holloway also delivered on goals set during previous administrations, overseeing the renovation and rebuilding of the Drew campus, including the Baldwin Gymnasium and several dormitories. Four years later, it would expand the curriculum into other areas of the humanities. The Graduate School was renamed as the "Caspersen School of Graduate Studies" after a pledge of $5,000,000 in 1999 by financier Finn M. W. Caspersen (1941–2009) and his wife (and Drew alumna) Barbara Morris Caspersen (1945-2017).


title: Drew University

text: During the 1970s, the college also established, with generous assistance from the Mellon Foundation, a now widely imitated freshman seminar program. It allows first-year students to participate, with faculty who also serve as their academic advisers, in intensive study of a topic of hopefully mutual interest. Interdisciplinary study became a focus of the curriculum as well, with the creation of majors in behavioral studies, neuroscience and Russian studies, and minors in such fields as American studies, arts administration and museology, business management, dance, public health and writing.


title: Drew University

text: In 1984, psychology professors Philip Jensen and Richard Detweiler led an effort to provide a personal computer and application software to all incoming freshman, a program referred to as the "Computer Initiative". Drew was the first liberal arts college to have such a requirement. The Computer Initiative differentiates Drew from other liberal arts colleges, and continues to this day. As a result, Drew has considerably fewer public computing labs than comparable schools its size, using the centrally-managed student laptops for instructional and general-purpose computing use.


title: Drew University

text: After serving two terms as New Jersey's 48th governor, Thomas Kean (born 1935) was appointed as Drew's tenth president in 1990. He would serve for 15 years before retiring in 2005. As president, Kean raised Drew's profile, overseeing fundraising efforts that tripled the size of the university's endowment, adding new faculty in African, Asian, Russian, and Middle Eastern studies, significantly increased opportunities for students to study abroad, increased applications from prospective students, and committed more than $60 million to construction of new buildings and renovation of older buildings—principally student residence halls.


title: Drew University

text: After Kean's retirement, the trustees selected Robert Weisbuch, former president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, as Drew's eleventh president in 2005. He served for seven years, and stepped down in June 2012. Under Weisbuch's direction, Drew became SAT-optional. From 2006 to 2013, applicants were allowed to submit a graded high school essay instead of SAT or ACT scores. In 2013, the university reinstated the SAT (or ACT) as an admission requirement, and changed course two years later in 2015, making it optional once again.


title: Drew University

text: MaryAnn Baenninger became the president of Drew University in July 2014 after serving 10 years as the president of the College of Saint Benedict. She succeeded Vivian A. Bull, a former economics professor and associate dean of the college at Drew and former president of Linfield College, who served as Drew's interim president from 2012 to 2014.


title: Drew University

text: The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared by William Campbell, a research fellow at Drew University, for his work developing a drug that treats parasitic diseases.


title: Drew University

text: Undergraduate tuition, room and board for the 2017–2018 academic year was $62,000 (excluding books, personal expenditures, and health insurance), making Drew among the most expensive private universities in New Jersey. In September 2017, the school announced that it was cutting the list price of its tuition for the 2018–2019 school year by 20%, from $48,300 to $36,600, as part of an effort to make the school more appealing to prospective students who had been deterred by the sticker price, which had been one of the state's highest.


title: Drew University

text: In May 2020, it was announced by the school's board of trustees that President Baenninger would step down at the conclusion of her contract on July 31, 2020. In July, the school's search committee announced the appointment of Thomas J. Schwarz as interim president, beginning on August 1, 2020. Schwarz had previously served as president of Purchase College, SUNY, from 2002 to 2019 and was named President Emeritus of Purchase College shortly following his retirement.


title: Drew University

text: Drew University is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools with approval granted to offer undergraduate and graduate degree programs and professional or post-graduate certificates. Drew was first accredited in 1932 and its accreditation was reaffirmed after a recent review concluded in 2016. Since 1938, the theological seminary at Drew has been accredited by the Commission on Accrediting of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. Drew's MAT program is accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation.


title: Drew University

text: All of the university's programs are approved and accredited by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry and the University Senate of the United Methodist Church. Drew is one of 119 institutions that are members of the National Association of Schools and Colleges of The United Methodist Church (NASCUMC). Drew is also a member of the American Council on Education, Council of Graduate Schools, Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.


title: Drew University

text: Drew University offers programs leading to the traditional undergraduate degree of Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Science (BS) through its College of Liberal Arts. Traditional core liberal arts courses are required of Drew students within a general education curriculum that allows them to shape an individual academic program. Drew's programs emphasize depth, independent research, experiential learning, and collaborative teaming. A declared minor is required in the general education program, and students choose from structured disciplinary and interdisciplinary offerings, or may design a minor course of study, subject to faculty approval. The university provides undergraduate major concentrations in 50 academic areas and an additional 20 minor concentrations. The "Princeton Review" has consistently ranked Drew as having a top 20 theatre program in the United States since 2011.


title: Drew University

text: Graduate education has taken place at Drew University since 1912. Initially, graduate education was limited to theology and was conducted through the Theological School. In 1955, the Graduate School was established to take responsibility for the academic (i.e., non-ministerial) study of religion at the graduate level and allow for the development of new graduate programs. In 1999, in exchange for a private donation made by Barbara and Finn Caspersen, the school was renamed the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies.


title: Drew University

text: In 2006, the Graduate Division of Religion (GDR), which includes programs in biblical studies and early Christianity, historical studies, religion & society, and theological & philosophical studies, was moved from the Graduate School to the Theological School. The transition was made to reflect current trends in the academic study of religion. In 2006, the school created a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program, In recent years, the school has also added Master of Education, Master of Finance, and data analytics degrees.


title: Drew University

text: As of 2019, the Graduate School offered 10-degree programs, including an earned Doctor of Letters degree.


title: Drew University

text: In February 2022 it was announced that the university would halt admissions to their PhD program in History & Culture.


title: Drew University

text: Drew Theological School admitted its first students in 1867. Until the 1950s, the school was known as the Drew Theological Seminary, and most students sought a Bachelor of Divinity (B.Div.) degree, which was considered the standard for becoming a minister in an established church. Occasionally, the seminary did issue other degrees, such a Master of Arts (MA) or a Doctor of Theology (Th.D.) to students engaged in the graduate study of religion. Starting in 1920 women were admitted as students, and most notably Olive Winchester was issued a Doctor of Theology in 1925, and became the first female ordained minister in Great Britain.


title: Drew University

text: The school is often noted for its strong ties to Korean Methodism. The Rev. Henry Appenzeller, a graduate of the Theological School, became the first Christian missionary to Korea. He worked to establish the Korean Methodist Church, schools and universities, and he translated the Bible into Korean. As a result of his work and his connection to Drew, the Theological School's matriculating class includes many students from South Korea.


title: Drew University

text: One of the 13 official seminaries of the United Methodist Church, the Theological School prepares those pursuing ministry in the United Methodist Church. The student body also includes students preparing for ministry in other Christian denominations, and those from other faith communities.


title: Drew University

text: As of 2019, the Theological School offers six different degree programs. In October 2018, the school launched the "Drew Social Justice Leadership Project" which allows students, partners and professors to express their thoughts, and share their experience regarding social justice issues in an accessible way.


title: Drew University

text: Built in 1938 with funds donated by Lenox S. Rose, the Rose Memorial Library houses the university's library collections offering 558,000 bound volumes, more than 378,000 microforms, 10,000 periodical titles in electronic database subscriptions, and about 2,700 periodical subscriptions in paper form. The facility also includes a media resource center and learning center. The library has been designated a selective depository for U.S. government publications in accordance with the Federal Depository Library Program. Drew also maintains collections of official documents from the United Nations and the state of New Jersey. There are over 400,000 documents in the collection.


title: Drew University

text: Drew University houses the United Methodist Archives and History Center administered by the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History. This collection is among the most comprehensive collections of Methodist books, documents and artifacts in the world offering insight into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American religious and cultural history.


title: Drew University

text: Special Collections at Drew University cover a wide range of materials from the 11th century to the present. Topics include religious materials such as hymnbooks, prayer books, and Bibles, as well as non-religious materials such as witchcraft, literature, graphic novels, and science fiction magazines. Most notably, the collection holds a first edition of the King James Bible.


title: Drew University

text: The library's special collections include a collection of books, manuscripts, artifacts and papers of Nebraska-born author Willa Cather (1873–1947). This collection, which is regarded as the best collection of Cather's papers assembled in the United States, was given to the university by several donors, including Frederick B. Adams, former director of the Pierpont Morgan Library; Earl and Achsah Brewster, longtime friends of Cather; violinist Yehudi Menuhin; and by Finn and Barbara Caspersen.


title: Drew University

text: Originally known as "The Circuit Riders" in honor of their Methodist origins, Drew's sports teams are known as the Rangers and compete in the NCAA's Division III. The Rangers field 20 teams (11 female, 9 male) in 12 varsity sports. Drew is a member of the Landmark Conference for men's and women's basketball, cross country, golf, lacrosse, soccer, swimming & diving, tennis, baseball, field hockey and softball. The Rangers compete as an independent in men's and women's fencing, which compete in the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Fencing Association (MACFA), the National Intercollegiate Women's Fencing Association (NIWFA) and the Eastern Women's Fencing Conference (EWFC), and co-ed equestrian, which competes in the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA). Drew offers many club teams including ultimate frisbee and Drew's women's and men's rugby teams, which are part of the collegiate division of the Metropolitan New York Rugby Football Union. Drew has several intramural sports programs.


title: Drew University

text: In the university's 146-year history, Drew's faculty and alumni have taken leading roles in the ministry and missions of the United Methodist Church and other Christian denominations, in spiritual instruction, in academia, in public service, and in the professional world.


title: Drew University

text: Drew's faculty, starting with John McClintock and James Strong—especially with his magnum opus, "Strong's Concordance"—to recent faculty members including philosopher Robert S. Corrington, the founder of "ecstatic naturalism"; ethics professor Thomas C. Oden, the founder of paleo-orthodoxy, and Leonard Sweet, a leader in the emerging church movement, have continued to impact Christian theology and spiritual scholarship. Other faculty have included lexicographer Robert L. Chapman, editor of the fourth and fifth editions of "Roget's Thesaurus"; Ira Progoff, a psychotherapist, developed the Intensive Journal Method, and researcher of depth psychology; and Irish history scholar Christine Kinealy. William Campbell, research fellow in Drew's RISE institute, was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.


title: Drew University

text: According to the UMC, Drew's seminary now has more than 3,500 alumni and alumnae "in 45 states and 18 foreign countries, including 21 bishops of The United Methodist Church." Among these alumni: Henry G. Appenzeller (BD 1885) was the first Methodist missionary to Korea and fostered a relationship between Korea, the church, and Drew that endures to this day;, Peter Deunov (1892), Bulgarian philosopher and spiritual teacher, and Olive Winchester (Th.D. 1925), a Church of the Nazarene theologian, was the first female ordained minister in Great Britain. Frederick Brown Harris (1912) was twice the Chaplain of the United States Senate.


title: Drew University

text: Alumni include popular historian and journalist John T. Cunningham (BA 1938); Craig Stanford (BA 1978), a biology and anthropology professor and director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California; and Jeff Smith (M.Div. 1965), minister, cookbook author, host of "The Frugal Gourmet" a television program that aired from 1973 to 1997. Several Drew alumni have had careers in public service, including Nathaniel Raymond (BA 1999), human rights advocate involved in investigations into the Dasht-i-Leili massacre; Holly Bakke (BA 1973), an attorney who served as New Jersey Commissioner of Banking and Insurance (2002–2005); Peter Verniero (BA 1981), a former New Jersey Attorney General and New Jersey Supreme Court justice; and Thomas J. Aquilino (BA 1962), a federal judge on the United States Court of International Trade.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The Books of Magic is the title of a four-issue English-language comic book mini-series written by Neil Gaiman, published by DC Comics, and later an ongoing series under the imprint Vertigo. Since its original publication, the mini-series has also been published in a single-volume collection under the Vertigo imprint with an introduction by author Roger Zelazny. It tells the story of a young boy who has the potential to become the world's greatest magician.


title: The Books of Magic

text: "The Books of Magic" began life when DC Comics decided to highlight some of their mystical characters across the range. They initially approached writer J. M. DeMatteis to script a prose book with illustrations from Jon J Muth, Kent Williams, Dave McKean and others, but when it reached the stage of confirming the artists' involvement, the suggested artists all declined to be involved. At that stage, DeMatteis also decided to step back, and DC instead approached popular writer Neil Gaiman and asked him to come up with a four-issue prestige-format series "about our magic characters". Drawing on a childhood spent working his way through the children's section in his local library and a childhood love of magic and fantasy stories such as T. H. White's "The Once and Future King", Gaiman created an everyman character of a twelve-year-old boy called Timothy Hunter, who would need to be given an extensive tour of the DC magical universe before being able to decide if he should embrace or reject his destiny as the world's greatest magician.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Gaiman used the four issues to formally split the structure of the story, and allow for a different artist to draw each issue:


title: The Books of Magic

text: This structure allowed Gaiman great scope to include various magical characters from across DC's ranges, as well as reintroducing characters that weren't currently in print. In his introduction to the collected edition, author Roger Zelazny also noted that the structure bore some similarity to the key story points of the mythic structure identified by Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" - although he did allow that this might come from Gaiman's intimate knowledge of the same source material rather than a deliberate attempt to follow Campbell's guidelines. When the book was initially released over 1990/1991, it proved very popular and led Vertigo Executive Editor Karen Berger to make it a regular ongoing series under editor Stuart Moore.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Tim Hunter made the ultimate choice to pursue magic in the "Mister E" miniseries by K. W. Jeter when he was forced to use magic to prevent Mister E from killing him. He was aided in this decision by The Phantom Stranger, Doctor Fate, and Zatanna.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Berger struggled to find a writer suitable for the project, however, with writers like Dick Foreman struggling to handle the character of Tim. Berger eventually approached John Ney Rieber after having seen some of his work, convinced that he would be able to meet the challenge of developing Tim into a fully rounded character. Rieber was asked to come up with a story outline for the proposed series, but these were rejected by Berger and DC. Still convinced that Rieber was the writer for the job, however, Berger asked him to persevere: he tried "several times to come up with something different, but it still didn't thrill anyone". At one point, Rieber himself tried to withdraw from the project, but Berger was still convinced that he could do it, and when the Vertigo "The Children's Crusade" event was being planned, she asked him to write one of the chapters to reintroduce Tim to the DC universe.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The "Arcana: The Books of Magic Annual" was the sixth part of "The Children's Crusade" series, with artwork by Peter Gross. It introduced several characters created by Rieber that would be developed in the later ongoing series, such as Tim's biological father Tamlin, as well as starting off some of the ongoing book's storylines. The annual saw Neil Gaiman's first credit as "creative consultant" for "The Books of Magic", a position which DC Comics paid him to carry out despite the fact that even when he did make comments on the script, he was told that it was too late for anything to be changed.


title: The Books of Magic

text: By the time the series launched, the name had returned to "The Books of Magic" and a regular rotating team of artists Gross, Gary Amaro and Peter Snejbjerg was put in place to provide artwork for alternating storylines. In early 1997, Rieber announced to Peter Gross that he was going to leave the comic. Gross attributed this to Rieber's growing dislike of the comic's central character, which Rieber seemingly confirmed in his "Afterward" for his final issue, saying: "I've found it difficult to like Tim now and then. Of course he gets on my nerves. He's a lot like someone I spent years learning not to be". Rieber's last issue was issue #50, coincidentally the point at which original co-creator Neil Gaiman decided that the time was right to stop "taking DC's $200 an issue and not doing anything" and resigned as creative consultant on the book.


title: The Books of Magic

text: With Rieber leaving, the series editor Stuart Moore championed Gross to take over scripting duties because "I knew he could do it. He's got a great sense of story and character". Gross initially wrote a short memo detailing where he thought the series should go, hoping that it might influence the editors' choice of writer. Gross was then asked if he could expand his ideas into an actual story, and plotted a six issue story that he thought might be used as a "filler" until a new writer could be found. DC encouraged him to think bigger, until by the time he started writing his first issue he had plotted out a 23 issue-long story for the book. This soon expanded into plots for Gross' entire 25 issue run, despite Gross initially being nervous that his writing efforts would be unfavorably compared to those of Gaiman and Rieber by the series' fans.


title: The Books of Magic

text: As well as writing, Gross continued to provide artwork for the book, juggling this with a separate career teaching a class in Comic Illustration at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Despite this, he still attempted to write full scripts for each issue, saying: "I like working that way so I can kind of forget about it before I sit down to draw. So when I draw it, I can think of it as something I didn’t write almost". This sometimes caused difficulties for Gross, and guest artists were used frequently to help lighten the load - and on one occasion, Peter Hogan was brought in to write a filler issue that gave Gross more time to catch up.


title: The Books of Magic

text: From the beginning of Gross' run, there were tentative plans for the comic to rest after it reached its 75th issue. Such a break would be used to allow the character of Tim Hunter to grow up a little before resuming his story - Gross had ideas for this later run to explore the character's relationship with the women in his life, through his relationship with his late mother. However, when the 75th issue was reached, Gross decided to move away from the book, and instead DC announced that Dylan Horrocks would continue Tim's story in a five-issue mini-series called "Names of Magic" after a short break symbolizing Tim's readiness to face his destiny. A new mini-series was followed by a new ongoing monthly series, which was eventually presented as "".


title: The Books of Magic

text: The original mini-series concentrated on Timothy Hunter's introduction to the world of magic by the Trenchcoat Brigade (the Phantom Stranger, Doctor Occult, Mister E, and John Constantine), who are aware that the boy has the potential to be the world's greatest magician, but that his allegiance to good or evil is undecided. Equally, he could turn from the world of magic completely and be lost to either side. The Trenchcoat Brigade see it as their duty to resolve the uncertainty around Tim's fate one way or another.


title: The Books of Magic

text: They take him from the birth of the universe all the way through to its eventual death, ostensibly teaching him about the possibilities - and the price - of wielding magic before he decides whether to embrace his destiny. Along the way, Tim meets some of the DCU's more prominent magicians and fantasy characters, such as Merlin, Zatara, Doctor Fate, The Spectre, Madame Xanadu, Doctor Thirteen, Zatanna, Dream, John Constantine, Cain and Abel, Destiny, and Death, whilst his allies try to protect him from the machinations of the Cult of the Cold Flame. Following his misadventures, Tim decides that the price is too high, only to find that everything he has learnt from his supposed mentors has made it impossible for him to turn away from magic.


title: The Books of Magic

text: As John Ney Rieber began the ongoing series, he used the stories to focus on telling Tim's story: he summed up his run later by saying ""The Books of Magic" aren't about Cool. They're about Tim". His first storyline, "Bindings", for example ostensibly showed Tim discovering that since the realm of Faerie had cut itself off from Tim's world (the Mundane world) it was withering and dying - something that Titania hid from her people by using powerful glamours, but that Tim managed to permanently cure by "opening" the realm again to the Earth. However, this story was merely the backdrop to a more personal story for Tim, as he discovered that the Falconer Tamlin (who kidnapped Tim during the events of the "Arcana: The Books of Magic Annual") was actually his true father, and that the Faerie Queen Titania might be his mother: this revelation first appeared in a gaming guide to the DC Universe, possibly misinterpreting a scene in the original miniseries where Titania refers to Tim as "my son".


title: The Books of Magic

text: "Bindings" also brings Tim into conflict with a Manticore, who attempts to convince Tim of the non-existence of magic before hunting and killing him. Tim revives and releases a unicorn that has been similarly hunted, and destroys the Manticore - but not before he is poisoned by it. The boy nearly dies, until his father Tamlin performs a magic ritual which allows him to die in Tim's place. The boy recovers and returns to Earth with Titania's curses in his ears, having to come to terms with the revelation that the people he thought of as his parents - a mother who died in a car crash caused by his one-armed, grieving father - might be no relation to him at all.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Partly the Faerie storyline in "Bindings" was written to appease DC's desire for a "big" story to launch the new series with: Rieber's original starting point was to be the "Summonings" storyline instead, introducing Tim's first girlfriend Molly O'Reilly and demonstrating the writer's desire that the stories should be about "a realm that has never been mapped by the Royal Geographic Society and never will be. People who've lost touch with the place call it 'Adolescence'".


title: The Books of Magic

text: Rieber's run also contained several stories about the need to stay connected with the world that they live in. Several of his characters, including Tim, seek to avoid their problems in the real world by escaping into fantasy, but Rieber later explained that "wishing never solves anything in the Books. Have you noticed? At best, it gets you into trouble. About the only thing you can do in the Books that's more dangerous than wishing is surrendering to fantasies that others have constructed". The first of these characters living in another's fantasy is introduced in "The Hidden School": playing on the suggestion in the original miniseries that Tim could grow to be a force for good or for evil, Rieber introduces a future version of the magician - Sir Timothy Hunter - who has tortured multiple versions of Molly all his life, after coming under the sway of the demon Barbatos. Sir Timothy is under the mistaken impression that he is Barbatos' master and that he lives in grand luxury, when in truth Barbatos is manipulating him for his own ends and Sir Timothy lives in a cardboard box in a back alley.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Sir Timothy and Barbatos return to Tim's time from 2012 because Tim is the last boy in the multiverse who could possibly grow up to be Sir Timothy, and they intend to ensure that he does. Their plans are thwarted without Tim even being aware of them, as he has a guardian angel called Araquel, who is chained between Heaven and Hell for having had a daughter called Nikki with Khara. Khara defeats Sir Timothy on Tim's behalf. The intervention doesn't mean that Tim is safe, however, as he has come to the attention of the last member of the Cult of the Cold Flame, a magician called Martyn.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Martyn attempts to seduce Tim into becoming his servant using a succubus called Leah, using magic to make Tim's father spontaneously combust so that the boy is alone and vulnerable. Tim is saved once from Leah by the arrival of Molly, as the succubus is touched by the genuine love between the two... but in his grief and anger, Tim manages to push Molly away and cause Leah to think he is "just like all other men" and needs punishing. Tim's salvation from Martyn comes in an unlikely form when Sir Timothy and Barbatos kill the magician to protect their own interests in the boy. This leaves Leah without a master, a position that she attempts to make Tim fill before the young magician proves his worth by setting her free. She leaves England to see where her new freedom - and Martyn's car - will take her.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The next story arc followed on almost directly from the "Arcana Annual", bringing back two of the children of Free Country: Daniel, the chimney sweep, and Marya, the girl who was sent to bring Tim to Free Country but decided to stay in the real world after she did. Marya has become friends with Molly, and gets invited on her and Tim's first date - but panics Tim when she tells Molly that her boyfriend is a magician, causing him to accidentally freeze them both with magic. He eventually manages to unfreeze them again, but fall prey to a monster of black, choking soot.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The monster is Daniel, expelled from Free Country and transformed by the Victorian era cyborg the Reverend Slagingham. Slagingham is collecting an army of down-and-outs, capturing their souls in magical contraptions: one of his minions, Gwendolyn, even manages to trick the Faerie King Auberon into surrendering his soul, leaving Titania's husband her helpless servant. The Reverend falls foul to Tim thanks to the intervention of one of his childhood imaginary friends made real, Awn the Blink, who has an amazing knack for fixing broken things. Daniel, meanwhile, gives up his attack when Marya rejects his affections. All that remains is for Tim to help return Auberon's soul to his body and return him, changed by his experiences, to his wife's side. For his trouble, Auberon tells Tim that Titania cannot possibly be his mother, since the boy has "not a drop" of Faerie blood in him. This is something never resolved in "The Books of Magic" themselves, and Auberon's observation proves nothing since "The Books of Faerie" series tells that Titania, herself, is actually human and not fairie.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Gwendolyn decides to stay and look after Tim while his father makes a miraculous recovery at the hands of the strange Mister Vasuki, eventually returning home after sharing a taxi with a young mother and her son Cyril.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Tim learns that he is an "Opener" and has unconsciously been making his fantasies real all his life—whether they be simple imaginary friends or entire worlds—Tim introduces Molly to some more of his imaginary friends made real, Tanger and Crimple, who live in a tree on some wasteland near Tim's house. The wasteland opens out into an entire magical world created unconsciously by Tim's childhood fantasies, but as Molly is exploring it with Crimple she ends up being kidnapped and taken to Hell.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Tanger and Tim head into Hell to rescue Molly and Crimple, who are being held by the strict governess Miss Vuall - the trainer of the multiple Mollies who are Sir Timothy Hunter's docile and dutiful companions. Sir Timothy, however, no longer needs the girls, as he has succeeded in releasing himself from Barbatos' control - only to be persuaded by a gang of dragons to become one of them because of his sadness and self-hatred. Molly and Crimple best Miss Vuall, and as Tim arrives the two children's love puts the finishing touches to her corner of Hell. Barbatos drags the children and the dragon Sir Timothy into another layer of Hell, where he attempts to salvage victory from defeat by trapping the two children in a fairy tale world where brave knights kill dragons.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Meeting the real Molly again, Sir Timothy is overcome with guilt and tells her his life story in the hope that she can prevent her Tim from becoming him. Tim, meanwhile, manages to see through all of Barbatos' attempts to trick him, and eventually brings the fairy tale world crashing down around their ears. Sir Timothy dies protecting Molly from the destruction unleashed by Tim, and the two children are reunited. As they return home, they leave Barbatos trapped in the ruins of the world he created, although he does briefly escape again.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Following Molly and Tim's disappearance, both find themselves grounded and banned from seeing each other. Molly manages to sneak out and ends up around a camp-fire discussing Tim with Marya and a mysterious tattooist who says she wants to help. The tattooist demonstrates her experience of both men and magic when Marya is again threatened by the arrival of Daniel: she removes the black soot that has transformed him, and changes him into the animal his soul most suits - a slow-witted but loyal puppy, that Marya happily adopts. Molly tells her companions about Sir Timothy Hunter, unaware that Tim has transformed himself into a cat and is listening in. The tattooist is aware, however: she traps Tim in his cat body long enough to take him to her home and thoroughly examine his soul, intending to do the same to him that she did with Daniel.


title: The Books of Magic

text: She has to change her plan when she is shocked to discover that Tim has no "inner animal" and that he is just a normal, healthy teenage boy. Instead, she offers to give him a tattoo that will stop him from ever hurting Molly: Tim agrees, and gains a moth/scorpion hybrid across his chest that stings him whenever he gets angry or performs magic. Soon after, Gwen decides it is time to move on when Tim's father begins a tentative relationship with Holly, the woman from the taxi. Almost immediately, Holly's son Cyril becomes a target of a demon's malign interest, and rescuing him helps Tim to decide that his presence is putting those he loves at risk. He runs away.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Molly, meanwhile, has been sent to visit her grandmother, a formidable old woman with a touch of second sight. Whilst up on Leanen Hill at her grandmother's suggestion, Molly learns that Tim has run away and resolves to find him again. She attempts to attract a fairy in the hope that they will grant her wish, but when she succeeds in drawing the Amadan to her, she accidentally challenges him to a contest to see who is the greatest fool. With the contest due to take place in Faerie, Molly is transported from the real world and left to fend for herself until it can be arranged. Knowing something of the Fair Folk from her grandmother, Molly knows that if she eats Faerie food she will never be able to return home: touching the ground would wither her and eating real food would starve her, so she would be forced to stay in Faerie. Instead, she attempts to grow her own real food, her efforts attracting the attention of the Faeries, and her stubbornness attracting the ire of Titania: the Queen tricks Molly into eating Faerie food by making her crops grow overnight. The trick backfires, though, as Molly's anger transforms her into "the burning girl", who cuts a swathe of destruction across Faerie with a horse named Prince.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Tim, meanwhile, is living rough on the streets when he is taken in by a homeless magician who knew his father. The magician provides the proper environment for Tim to let his tattoo come alive and leave him: it separates into its scorpion and moth parts and fights, with the moth destroying the scorpion. Tim is about to accept the moth back onto his heart when the magician distracts him, but the tattoo still manages to return to his arm. Following his experience, Tim decides that what he needs is a mentor to teach him about magic and sets off for America to find Zatanna.


title: The Books of Magic

text: At Los Angeles airport, he meets the succubus Leah who has moved to the city to become a model. She convinces Tim to travel with her, and accompanies him out into the desert on a camping trip. In the night, Leah disguises herself as Molly and tries to sleep with Tim: he sees through the deception but tells her that if she had come to him as herself, he wasn't sure what he would have done. Tim kisses Leah, and the two continue where they left off. In the morning, the two become trapped in the world of a dying mermaid and Leah has to take the mermaid's place to save Tim. Tim wakes in the real world and continues on his journey, without realizing what has happened to Leah.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Tim continues his travels across America, until he somehow ends up trapped on an island on the outskirts of Faerie. He manages to escape the island with the help of Huon the Small, the first King of Faerie. Huon and Tim travel into the heart of Faerie.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Molly and Prince have been joined by Titania's otherwise loyal flitling Yarrow, and have decimated the kingdom. Worse, Molly manages to unenchant Prince to reveal that he is in fact Titania's son and the heir to the throne: Prince has spent most of his life in Hell, given to the lords there in payment of a tithe originally agreed by Huon. In truth, Faerie is not a kingdom of its own, but part of Hell that Lucifer offered to the Fair Folk when they first left the Mundane World. Lucifer's will and belief created the realm. In revealing Prince's true nature - which Titania had attempted to hide to stop the Lords of Hell discovering that he had escaped home - Molly brings the armies of Hell to Faerie, demanding reparation or battle.


title: The Books of Magic

text: In the midst of all this, the fair folk have lost their own will, belief and reason for being in the Fairie. Without such belief, the realm and all who are in it start becoming undone by something known as "the Leveler". Battle is temporarily averted when the Lords of Hell learn of the Leveller's presence and seek to escape. The flitling Yarrow saves Fairie: her belief and loyalty cause it to be recreated in reality as exactly what it seemed to be - happy, natural and carefree - and with no tithe now owed to Hell. There is much celebration and as Tim and Molly are reunited, Titania tempers her curse as best she can: Molly's feet will no longer touch the ground and she will always have Faerie food to eat, so she can return to the mundane world with Tim.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Returning to Tim doesn't make Molly as happy as she hoped: instead of returning to London, Tim takes them to join Zatanna on tour and learn magic from her. His obsession with magic causes Tim to ignore everything else, including Molly's growing sadness and even the fact that her feet don't touch the floor. Zatanna tries to teach Tim to open his eyes, but in the end has no choice but to help Molly. As Molly learns of Tim's night with Leah - sad that he didn't think enough of her to tell her the truth - she breaks up with him, using a charm given to her by Zatanna to return home to her family. Tim reacts badly to Molly leaving, creating a whole world that he could mope in while toying with its natives' lives, until the demon Khara finds him. At first, she berates him for his inability to connect to the real world - until she spots his moth tattoo and realizes that it is preventing him from being able to connect so that he never has anyone close to him to get hurt. She encourages him to "open" himself and let the world in, which removes the tattoo and eventually leads Tim to decide that his magic belongs to the world and not him. He releases it into the universe and resolves that he will have nothing more to do with it.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Although Tim thinks he is finished with magic, magic is not finished with him. Returning home with the fallen angel Araquel — who had previously been tricked in to breaking his chains by Barbatos — Tim finds that the armies of Heaven and Hell are fighting each other to a standstill in the mortal world. The prize they are fighting for is the magic that Tim released into the world, which would give them the power to recreate the world to their own design.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Tim's family find themselves caught in the crossfire of the battle when his father's wedding to Holly is interrupted by the groom transforming into a ravenous beast with a taste for angel-flesh. It transpires that Mister Vasuki, the surgeon who miraculously restored Mr Hunter to health after the fire, is in truth a demon hoping to force Tim to work for him. In retaliation, two angels elevate Tim's soon-to-be stepbrother Cyril to sainthood, and provide him with a foursome of living action-figures with dangerous powers. Araquel becomes their victim, turned into chocolate and smashed to pieces on the ground. Tim uses Awn the Blink and Reverend Slaggingham to trap all the angels and demons. In his anger, Tim throws an ice-cream at the leader of the angelic forces, only for her to merge with the leader of the demonic forces and reveal herself as Shivering Jemmy of the Shallow Brigade. She calls an end to the conflict having achieved her objective: to have "thrown in the face" ice cream.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Tim's new family try to settle back to normality, with Cyril and Tim's father returned to normal and his new stepmother blaming everybody's amnesia on too much wine at the reception. Tim is just enjoying his new freedom from magic when he finds the box that Leah used to live in: picking it up, he finds himself sucked inside it and trapped inside a small square of ground in a vast forest. He spends a lifetime there, talking to a tree that grew from a seed that fell inside his patch of ground. When a fire starts to destroy the forest, Tim's anger puts him back in touch with his magic as he tries desperately to save his one tree, but then finds himself returned outside the box, not a second older than the moment he was first trapped inside it.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Waiting for him is Leah, who trapped him in the box in the hope of teaching him an important lesson about his magic. But the lesson hasn't been learned in the way that she hoped, because of Tim's focus on the small scale: it wasn't the destruction of the forest that prompted him to reconnect with his magic, but the threat to the single tree. Exasperatingly, Leah cannot even decide if Tim is wholly wrong in thinking that way. Instead, she leaves Tim with the important reminder that he might try to throw away his magic, but he will never wholly succeed: it is a part of him, and always will be.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Peter Gross explained in his 25 issue run on the book as being the story of Tim's "boy time", commenting that previously the book had often presented benevolent female characters but had been less successful at their benevolent male counterparts. His story was partly designed, then, to show Tim accepting his male side and learning how to be a boy - one of Gross' reasons for not using the character of Molly during his run. He did comment that if he had stayed on the book, Gross' next story would have shown Tim similarly exploring his feminine side and would therefore have reintroduced some of the established female characters such as Molly or Gwen.


title: The Books of Magic

text: He announced his run as going "in another direction" and not trying "to duplicate John's success". Consequently, his first issue laid down the background to his run, introducing Tim's "Other" (an alternate version of Tim created subconsciously when Tim was a child) and establishing that this Other was hunting through all the worlds Tim had unconsciously created during his life, trying to find the original and steal the original's power. Gross also showed a conscious break from exploring issues of Tim's parentage, having Titania announce that she would "never aid [Tim] again" after he refused to accept a precious - and potentially life-saving - gift from her. Molly, too, was to be less important to Gross' run — Tim is first warned to stay away from her by her protective brothers and then Molly herself decides to have nothing more to do with him after meeting his Other and mistaking him for Tim, thinking that he has broken his promise to never speak to demons and is well on the way to becoming Sir Timothy. Gross responded to "nearly everyone" asking if Molly was going to return by explaining that when he was asked to take over, John Ney Rieber had specifically asked for her not to stay in the comic and although this request was later withdrawn Gross thought it fitted the story he had plotted and made Tim more central to his own comic if she wasn't used. .. There was a spin-off ongoing series planned for her but was abandoned with the death of Vertigo Editor Lou Stathis. Molly would return in the series "Books of Magic" during war times.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Gross' first story arc, then, dealt with Tim settling into Bardsley school and meeting Thomas Currie, a man who had traveled through various worlds searching for the true Tim to either prepare him to defeat his Other or kill him to prevent the Other stealing his power. Currie took advantage of the disappearance of a teacher at Bardsley so that he could take his place and interact with Tim, but this only caused problems for both as Tim's stepbrother Cyril saw the teacher die whilst potholing under the school and used the status he gained from controlling the other boys' access to the body to turn the school against the new teacher and Tim, although his influence only lasted until Tim and Currie removed the body and the teacher resigned. Tim makes a deal with Cyril to stay away from Bardsley in exchange for his stepbrother not telling Bill and Holly what Tim is really doing - getting private lessons in magic from Mr Currie to help him face his Other. However, Tim is unaware that his Other has already arrived in the true world, causing a traffic accident that injures his father and Cyril and kills his stepmother, Holly.


title: The Books of Magic

text: This causes Currie to go onto a war footing: he kills Tim's father whilst he recovers in hospital to give Tim the emotional trauma he needs to subconsciously create another alternate world, and then manipulates the outburst of magic so that instead of a new world, Currie's version of Tim is recreated. The teacher then drains Tim's magic and hides it in a prearranged place: the true Tim leaves the world to learn how to control his magic and defeat his Other, whilst Currie and his alternate Tim remain to die in battle with the hope of convincing the Other that he has killed the true Tim. When the Other was convinced that he was triumphant, he used his power to open all the gateways between the worlds — allowing Tim to escape to the Inn Between the Worlds using his mother's glamor stone to disguise himself as a girl called Mary but also freeing the Wild Hunt, the god-killing band trapped for two-thousand years by a compact of rulers from Heaven, Faerie, Hell and other realms.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Living as Mary and working at the Inn, Tim becomes best friends with a girl called Joh - a relationship complicated when she sees him as Tim and falls in love with him, forcing Tim to admit the truth. The two are forced to flee, when the Wild Hunt are manipulated by a disguised Auberon into hunting Tim and destroying the Inn, a fate which Tim avoids only by challenging and defeating the leader of the Hunt. He then returns to Earth to reclaim his magic and defeat the Other to reverse the damage done in opening all the gates between the worlds.


title: The Books of Magic

text: In order to defeat the Other, Tim needs the help of the demon Barbatos - help which he can only obtain by selling a memory to the demon and sealing his fate as Sir Timothy Hunter. Tim faces up to his responsibilities, and sacrifices his future: Barbatos takes the memory of Tim's creation of his Other, making it impossible for the Other to exist separately from Tim and the many separate pieces of Tim are reunited for the first time in his life. Tim's soul is immediately forfeit to Barbatos, and he becomes his slave but sets in place the chain of events that eventually leads to the demon being defeated and trapped in the Dreaming. The final issue showed Barbatos released forty years later and allowed to return to hell. Once free, the demon discovered the true nature of Tim's apparent defeat: the boy had hidden his soul inside the memory Barbatos took and once inside the demon it slept, slowly taking complete control of Barbatos' body until Tim owned it completely, remodeling it with his magic to resemble his own at the age of fourteen. The final image of the issue, and "The Books of Magic", showed Tim whole and complete, finally grown-up and ready to face whatever challenges the future held with "no more whining".


title: The Books of Magic

text: In addition to the mini-series and the ongoing series, Vertigo also produced four "The Books of Magic" annuals. The first, "Arcana: The Books of Magic Annual", reintroduced Tim Hunter and launched the ongoing series. The second, actually titled "The Books of Magic Annual" #1 due to the change in name from "Arcana", told the story of Tim's encounter with a minor god's daughter who was one of Tamlin's cast-off conquests. Both these annuals were later included in the collected editions of "The Books of Faerie" and "The Books of Faerie: Auberon's Tale" respectively.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The third Annual is set during Tim's time in America, and sees him saving a child abuse victim from similar abuse at the hands of the Minotaur, transported to modern day America to hide in a nightclub called The Labyrinth. The final annual was the only one not to be written in its entirety by John Ney Reiber, coming part way into Peter Gross' run on the ongoing series. Gross used the annual to give some background to Tim's Other, showing his realization of the existence of other worlds and development into the ruthless character seen in the monthly series. The bulk of the annual was written by Gross, with contributions from John Ney Reiber and Mark Waid. Neither of these annuals have been republished in collected editions.


title: The Books of Magic

text: An exclusive Books of Magic story, titled "The Lot" and written by Ney Rieber, appeared in "Vertigo Rave" #1, published in the fall of 1994.


title: The Books of Magic

text: There were also three spin-off mini-series set in the Faerie realm, entitled "The Books of Faerie". The first two volumes dealt with the rise to power of Titania and Auberon respectively, whilst the third documents the misadventures of Molly O'Reilly as she tried to come to terms with the curse placed upon her by Titania during the "Girl in the Box" storyline. There were also plans to create an ongoing "The Books of Faerie" series starring Molly O'Reilly, but these were eventually abandoned.


title: The Books of Magic

text: In December 1997, a two-issue crossover with "Hellblazer" was published, with a script from the then current "Hellblazer" writer Paul Jenkins from a story written in collaboration with John Ney Rieber. The artwork was by artist Paul Lee.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The two issues showed Tim Hunter coming into possession of a time capsule that had been made by John Constantine as a child. The capsule contained all of Constantine's childhood innocence, placed there in one of his first acts of magic to rid himself of the perceived weakness. Tim attempts to return the box to its original owner, but Constantine wants nothing to do with it, until it falls into the hands of a demon called Kobal ("Master of the Infernal Theatre").


title: The Books of Magic

text: Tim and Constantine end up journeying to Hell — specifically Constantine's own Hell, described as much more dangerous than the fluffy monster Hell that Tim visited in the "Reckonings" storyline — where the younger magician manages to trick the demon into returning the box.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Vertigo published a number of winter specials under the title "Winter's Edge", featuring short stories based on their current properties and featuring stories to preview upcoming series and one-shots. "The Books of Magic" featured in all three issues of "Winter's Edge", with issue #1 containing "Thanks for Nothing" by John Ney Rieber and issues #2 and #3 featuring stories written Peter Gross. Issue #2 featured a story called "We Three Things", and issue #3 featured the Dead Boy Detectives in a tale set during Tim's time at one of the Inns Between the Worlds.


title: The Books of Magic

text: As well as an abandoned "The Books of Faerie" ongoing series, Vertigo planned a prestige-format one shot called "The Books of Magic: A Day, a Night and a Dream". The comic was to be written by Peter Gross and illustrated by Charles Vess, set during Tim's stay at one of the Inns Between the Worlds. The issue was intended to be an introduction to the ongoing series and the wider world of Vertigo, but was eventually incorporated into the main comic's storyline instead.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The depiction of Tim Hunter's life continued in a five-issue mini-series called "The Names of Magic", in which Tim learnt his true name (Timothy Hunter; Tamar, son of Tamlin; the Opener; the Merlin; Magic) and was accepted into the school of magic, known simply as White School, which exists across the Multiverse of Worlds in DC.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Another ongoing series called "Hunter: The Age of Magic" (25 issues) followed shortly after the end of this series. It ran from September 2001 to September 2003, and told of his graduation and what happened to him afterwards.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Another series, "" began in July 2004 and lasted fifteen issues. This series depicts two Earths, both of which have a strong connection to an alternate version of Tim Hunter. On one of these worlds a war is going on between humans (known as the Bred) and the races of the Faerie (known as the Born). The world is ruled by the Born, but there is a resistance made up of both Born and Bred that features versions of Zatanna and John Constantine among others. The second world is one made by Tim Hunter as a place of safety where he can hide from his enemies.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Issues #1-5 of the "Books of Magick: Life During Wartime" series (with Dean Ormston) have been collected into a trade paperback (March 2005, ).


title: The Books of Magic

text: In 2003, HarperCollins began publishing a series of "Books of Magic" young adult novels under the Eos imprint, adapted from the comics series, by Carla Jablonski. Each novel featured cover art by Christopher Moeller:


title: The Books of Magic

text: The first book is based on the original miniseries. The subsequent books are based on story arcs in the second series; except "The Children's Crusade", which is based on the Vertigo crossover event of the same name.


title: The Books of Magic

text: A film version of "The Books of Magic" has been in development hell for many years. It was originally optioned "by Warner Bros. some years before the first Harry Potter book was published" (a series which has been frequently compared to this series (see Harry Potter influences and analogues)), with Neil Gaiman signing on as executive producer in 1998. After several years of drafting and redrafting, the script moved so far from the original concept that Gaiman and Paul Levitz advised the filmmakers that any audience seeing it expecting a film based on the comic would be disappointed, and decided to develop the movie themselves. They worked with screenwriter Matt Greenberg, who had written early drafts of the original script, to come up with some closer to the original story. As yet, no adaption has been filmed or scheduled for release.


title: The Books of Magic

text: A section of Paul Cornell's "Doctor Who" spin-off novel "Happy Endings" features Death in a brief cameo, quoting her dialogue from the original "The Books of Magic" mini-series. The section was written by author Neil Penswick, as part of a chapter written in tandem by the authors of the previous 49 novels.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The faerie market in Gaiman's novel "Stardust" has many similarities to the one presented in the original miniseries. This may not be surprising as it's simply a case of Gaiman borrowing a portion of one work to use in the other.


title: The Books of Magic

text: The faerie market also makes references to amongst other things "My Neighbour Totoro", "Kiki's Delivery Service", Rupert Bear, and a possible future Sir Timothy Hunter, which can be seen directly to the right of Tim Hunter when he first arrives at the market.


title: The Books of Magic

text: In 2012, Timothy Hunter and the Books of Magic make a return in The New 52 series "Justice League Dark" where a reluctant Tim, having given up his magic, is reunited with John Constantine and Madame Xanadu to stop an old nemesis of Constantine's from getting his hands on the books.


title: The Books of Magic

text: Maryanne Booth reviewed "The Books of Magic: Summonings" for "Arcane" magazine, rating it a 9 out of 10 overall. Booth comments that "although this is the third installment of the series, it's thankfully not essential to have already read the rest of the collection. Fortunately for those without masses of time on their hands, this graphic novel stands alone as a more than enjoyable read and comes highly recommended".


title: 57 (number)

text: Fifty-seven is the sixteenth discrete semiprime, and the fourth discrete bi-prime pair with 58. It is a Blum integer since its two prime factors are both Gaussian primes. It is also an icosagonal (20-gonal) number and a repdigit in base-7 (111).


title: 57 (number)

text: 57 is the seventh , equivalently the number of ordered rooted trees with "seven" nodes having root of even degree.


title: 57 (number)

text: The split Lie algebra E has a 57-dimensional Heisenberg algebra as its nilradical, and the smallest possible homogeneous space for E is also 57-dimensional.


title: 57 (number)

text: 57 lies between prime numbers 53 and 61, which are the only two prime numbers less than 71 that do not divide the order of any sporadic group, inclusive of the six pariahs. 71 is the largest supersingular prime that divides such groups.


title: 57 (number)

text: Although fifty-seven is not prime, it is jokingly known as the "Grothendieck prime" after a story in which mathematician Alexander Grothendieck supposedly gave it as an example of a particular prime number. This story is repeated in Part 2 of a biographical article on Grothendieck in


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Port Charlotte is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Charlotte County, Florida, United States. The population was 54,392 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Punta Gorda, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Port Charlotte was named to the "10 Best Places to Retire", in the United States for the year 2012 by "U.S. News & World Report".


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: The first people to call the Port Charlotte area home were the nomadic Paleo-Indians as they chased big game such as woolly mammoth southward during the last ice age around 10,000 BC. At the time, Port Charlotte was not a coastal area; the peninsula of Florida was much wider than it is today and much drier. As the ice melted, the sea level rose and Florida assumed the shape and climate it has today and the Paleo-Indians gave way to the Calusa, the "shell people." The Calusa thrived on the southwest Florida coast and numbered over 50,000 when the first Spaniards reached the peninsula in the 16th century. The arrival of the Europeans was devastating to the Calusa, as diseases such as smallpox and measles decimated the population. Eventually the Seminole would arrive from points to the north and establish themselves on the peninsula.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: In 1819, Florida was ceded by the Spanish and became a U.S. territory, and in 1845 Florida became the 27th state. For the first 100 years of statehood, the area around Port Charlotte was mostly undeveloped. Maps of the area at the turn of the 20th century show that most of the roads and railroads leading into southwest Florida had bypassed the Port Charlotte area. Aside from some cattle ranches and small farming, the area was mostly uninhabited. This would change when the post-World War II boom opened people's eyes to the possibility of developing land in Florida.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: In the 1950s, the now defunct General Development Corporation led by the Mackle brothers decided to take advantage of the Florida land boom and developed land primarily on both of Florida's coastlines. Among the areas they planned and developed was the Port Charlotte area. Ultimately, Port Charlotte became the most populous community in Charlotte County, although like most GDC developments, Port Charlotte remained an unincorporated community.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Port Charlotte was severely impacted by Hurricane Charley on August 13, 2004. The hurricane, predicted to hit Tampa as a Category 2 hurricane, took a last-minute right hand turn and intensified into a Category 4 storm as it made landfall near Charlotte Harbor and caused severe damage in the city of Punta Gorda and in the Port Charlotte area. The storm's maximum sustained winds destroyed almost half of the homes in the county and caused heavy ecological damage to sensitive wetlands in the area.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Port Charlotte is located at the north end of the Charlotte Harbor Estuary, northwest of the city of Punta Gorda. It is south of Tampa and north of Naples. According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of , of which is land and (12.01%), is water.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Port Charlotte has a warm humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification: "Cfa") bordering on a tropical wet and dry climate (Köppen climate classification: "Aw"). The summers are long, hot and humid with frequent afternoon thunderstorms. The winters are mild to warm with a pronounced drop in precipitation. Year round, the diurnal temperature change averages around 20 degrees Fahrenheit (11 degrees Celsius).


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: The area of northwestern Port Charlotte where State Road 776 intersects US 41 is also known as Murdock.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Since Port Charlotte is unincorporated, it is governed by the government of Charlotte County. The county is governed by a 5-person county commission. They take turns rotating into the commission chair position every year. County commissioners frequently sit on other regional boards involving other municipalities and counties.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: As of the census of 2000, there were 46,451 people, 20,453 households, and 13,601 families residing in the CDP. The population density was 2,085.9/sq mi (805.3/km). There were 23,315 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the CDP was 89.23% White, 6.53% African American, 0.28% Native American, 1.14% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 1.18% from other races, and 1.59% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 5.16% of the population.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: There were 20,453 households, out of which 20.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 53.2% were married couples living together, 10.1% had a female householder with no husband present, and 33.5% were non-families. 28.2% of all households were made up of individuals, and 18.6% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.25 and the average family size was 2.71.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: In the CDP, the age distribution of the population shows 18.7% under the age of 18, 5.4% from 18 to 24, 21.0% from 25 to 44, 24.2% from 45 to 64, and 30.7% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 49 years. For every 100 females, there were 87.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 84.2 males.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: According to Sperling's Best Places, as of July 2015 the family median income in Port Charlotte was $48,911, and household income was $40,049. The per capita income was $22,681. Port Charlotte's unemployment rate was 5.50%, compared to 6.30% for the United States overall.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Port Charlotte was home to the Charlotte Stone Crabs, which is a member of the Florida State League and Class High-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays, which also hold its spring training at Charlotte Sports Park until 2020. The Rays also hold extended spring training in Port Charlotte, and have a Florida Complex League team which began to play in June 2009.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: The Port Charlotte Invitational was a golf tournament held in 1969 at the Port Charlotte Golf & Country Club on the LPGA Tour. Kathy Whitworth won the event.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Public schools in Port Charlotte are operated by Charlotte County Public Schools. For the 2007-08 school year, all schools in Port Charlotte received A's from the Florida Department of Education. Port Charlotte High School is the only traditional public high school located in Port Charlotte, although some parts of Port Charlotte are considered part of Charlotte High School's area, and students have the option to attend Charlotte Virtual School, a charter school, a special needs school, or a different traditional public high school through school choice. There are numerous private schools in Port Charlotte, including Family Christian Academy (formerly known as Community Christian School), Charlotte Preparatory School (formerly known as Charlotte Academy), Genesis Christian School, Joyful Noise Learning Center, Port Charlotte Adventist School, Port Charlotte Christian School, and St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: Port Charlotte is home to three small higher education facilities, including Charlotte Technical College, Southern Technical College's Port Charlotte campus, and Southwest Florida Bible Institute.


title: Port Charlotte, Florida

text: The Mid-County Regional Library and the Port Charlotte Library are located in Port Charlotte. They are included in the Charlotte County Library System.