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Talk:November 21

Goldie Hawn
Goldie Hawn is sometimes reported as born in 1945 and sometimes in 1946 ! Both in famous and serious sources. If someone could get this information from the source, it would be nice...

Removed

 * 1990 - The Super Famicom is released in Japan.
 * 1992 - Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is released for the Mega Drive in Japan
 * 1994 - Donkey Kong Country is released for the Super Nintendo in the United States

Trivial. --mav 02:21, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
 * 1794 - Honolulu Harbor discovered.

Could not be confirmed outside of 'this day in history'-type websites (very bad source). --mav 02:21, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Moved

 * 1620 - The Mayflower reaches Cape Cod.

Nope - it was November 11 since the Julian calendar was being used at that time.

ARPANET link
Although this page states the first link as going live on November 21st, the Arpanet page states "The first ARPANET link was established on 29 October 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at SRI.". Someone is wrong! --AlisonW 10:20, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

the rooftop collapse
It happens to be engrish at it's best Leebo13 (talk) 23:12, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Zimbabwe
I thought I should add the section about Robert Mugabe’s resignation as Zimbabwe’s president, as soon as possible.

Although I can appreciate it might have waited until things calmed down a little, I felt getting it onto the page would be a good thing.

Cuddy2977 (talk) 19:21, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Removing "1676 – The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer presents the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light."
Can't find a source for this. --189.217.85.41 (talk) 15:13, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
 * You did not look for it, apparently daily.jstor.org. Kleuske (talk) 15:16, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Add the Zolitūde Shopping Centre Collapse
I thought that it should be added because it happened on the 21st of November Raivo RJ (talk) 18:39, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

 * @Raivo RJ - Is there a wiki article specifically about this event, and do you have a citation for it, as per WP:DOYCITE? If yes to both questions, then feel free to add it. Kiwipete (talk) 04:33, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:November 21


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Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results.

Background
Orwell wrote the book in 1934 and 1935 while he was living at various locations near Hampstead in London, and drew on his experiences in these and the preceding few years. At the beginning of 1928 he lived in lodgings in Portobello Road from where he started his tramping expeditions, sleeping rough and roaming the poorer parts of London. At this time he wrote a fragment of a play in which the protagonist Stone needs money for a life-saving operation for his child. Stone would prefer to prostitute his wife rather than prostitute his artistic integrity by writing advertising copy.

Orwell's early writings appeared in The Adelphi, a left-wing literary journal edited by Sir Richard Rees, a wealthy and idealistic baronet who made Orwell one of his protégés. The character of Ravelston, the wealthy publisher in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, has a lot in common with Rees. Ravelston is acutely self-conscious about his upper-class status and defensive about his unearned income. Comstock speculates that Ravelston receives nearly two thousand pounds a year after tax — a very comfortable sum in those days — and Rees, in a volume of autobiography published in 1963, wrote: "I have never had the spending of much less than £1,000 a year of unearned income, and sometimes considerably more. ... Before the war, this was wealth, especially for an unmarried man. Many of my socialist and intellectual friends were paupers compared to me ..." In quoting this, Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden comments that "One of these 'paupers' — at least in 1935 — was Orwell, who was lucky if he made £200 that year. ... He appreciated Rees's editorial support at the Adelphi and sincerely enjoyed having him as a friend, but he could not have avoided feeling some degree of resentment toward a man who had no real job but who enjoyed an income four or five times greater than his."

In 1932 Orwell took a job as a teacher in a small school in West London. From there he visited Burnham Beeches and other places in the countryside. There are allusions to Burnham Beeches and walks in the country in Orwell's correspondence with Brenda Salkeld and Eleanor Jacques at this time.

In October 1934, after Orwell had spent nine months at his parents' home in Southwold, his aunt Nellie Limouzin found him a job as a part-time assistant at Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope. The Westropes, who were friends of Nellie in the Esperanto movement, had an easygoing outlook and provided Orwell with comfortable accommodation at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street. He was job sharing with Jon Kimche, who also lived with the Westropes. Orwell worked at the shop in the afternoons, having the mornings free to write and the evenings to socialise. He was at Booklovers' Corner for fifteen months. In his essay "Bookshop Memories", published in November 1936, he recalled aspects of his time at the bookshop, and in Keep the Aspidistra Flying "he described it, or revenged himself upon it, with acerbity and wit and spleen".

In their study of Orwell the writers Stansky and Abrahams remark upon the improvement on the "stumbling attempts at female portraiture in his first two novels: the stereotyped Elizabeth Lackersteen in Burmese Days and the hapless Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter," and contend that, in contrast, "Rosemary is a credible female portrait". Through his work in the bookshop Orwell was in a position to become acquainted with women, "first as a clerk, then as a friend", and found that, "if circumstances were favourable, he might eventually embark upon a 'relationship' ... This, for Orwell the author and Blair the man, was the chief reward of working at Booklovers' Corner." In particular, Orwell met Sally Jerome, who was then working for an advertising agency (like Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying), and Kay Ekevall, who ran a small typing and secretarial service that worked for the Adelphi.

By the end of February 1935 Orwell had moved into a flat in Parliament Hill; his landlady, Rosalind Obermeyer, was studying at the University of London. It was through a joint party with his landlady that Orwell met his future wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. In August Orwell moved into a flat in Kentish Town, which he shared with Michael Sayers and Rayner Heppenstall. Over this period he was working on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and had two novels, Burmese Days and A Clergyman's Daughter, published. At the beginning of 1936 Orwell was dealing with pre-publication issues for Keep the Aspidistra Flying while he was touring the North of England collecting material for The Road to Wigan Pier. The novel was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd on 20 April 1936.

Title

The aspidistra is a hardy, long-living plant that has been used as a house plant in England, and which can grow to an impressive, even unwieldy size. It was especially popular in the Victorian era, in large part because it could tolerate not only weak sunlight but also the poor indoor air quality that resulted from the use of oil lamps and, later, coal gas lamps. Aspidistras had fallen out of favour by the 20th century, following the advent of electric lighting, but their use had been so widespread among the middle class that they had become a music hall joke, appearing in songs such as "Biggest Aspidistra in the World", of which Gracie Fields made a recording.

In the titular phrase Orwell uses the aspidistra, a symbol of the stuffiness of middle-class society, in conjunction with the locution "to keep the flag (or colours) flying." The title can thus be interpreted as a sarcastic exhortation in the sense of "Hooray for the middle class!"

Orwell also used the phrase in his previous novel A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), where a character sings the words to the tune of the German national anthem.

In subsequent adaptations and translations the original title has frequently been altered; in German, to the equivalent of "The Joys of the Aspidistra", in Spanish to "Don't Let the Aspidistra Die", in Italian to "May the Aspidistra Bloom", in Dutch to "Keep the Sanseveria High". The 1997 film adaptation was released in the United States as A Merry War.

"Keep the aspidistra flying!" is the final line of Nexus by Henry Miller, published in 1959. Orwell owned some of Miller's works while he was working at Booklovers' Corner. The books were banned in the UK at the time.

Plot summary
Gordon Comstock has "declared war" on what he sees as an "overarching dependence" on money by leaving a promising job as a copywriter for an advertising company called New Albion — at which he shows great dexterity — and taking a low-paying job instead, ostensibly so that he can write poetry. Coming from a respectable family background in which the inherited wealth has been dissipated, Gordon resents having to work for a living. The "war" and the poetry are not going well and, under the stress of his "self-imposed exile" from affluence, Gordon has become absurd, pettyminded and deeply neurotic.

Comstock lives without luxuries in a bedsit in London, which he affords by working in a small bookshop owned by a Scot, McKechnie. He works intermittently on a magnum opus, a long poem that he plans to call London Pleasures; meanwhile, copies of his only published work, a slim volume of poetry entitled Mice, collect dust on the remainder shelf. He is simultaneously content with his meagre existence and disdainful of it. He lives without financial ambition or the need for a "good job", but his living conditions are uncomfortable and his job is boring.

Comstock is "obsessed" by what he sees as the pervasiveness of money (the "Money God", as he calls it) behind social relationships, feeling sure that women would find him more attractive if he was better off. At the beginning of the novel he senses that his girlfriend, Rosemary Waterlow, whom he met at New Albion and who continues to work there, is dissatisfied with him because of his poverty. An example of his financial embarrassment occurs when he is desperate for a pint of beer at his local pub, but has run out of money and is ashamed to cadge a drink off his fellow lodger, Flaxman.

One of Comstock's last remaining friends, Philip Ravelston, a Marxist who publishes a magazine called Anti-Christ, agrees with Comstock in principle, but is comfortably well-off himself. This causes strains when the practical miseries of Comstock's life become apparent. Ravelston does, however, endeavour to publish some of Comstock's work and his efforts, unbeknown to Comstock, resulted in Mice being published via one of his publisher contacts.

Gordon and Rosemary have little time together — she works late and lives in a hostel, and his "bitch of a landlady" forbids female visitors to her tenants. Then, one evening, having headed southward and having been thinking about "this women business" in general and Rosemary in particular, Gordon happens to see Rosemary in a street market. Rosemary refuses to have sex with him, but she wants to spend a Sunday with him, right out in the country, near Burnham Beeches. At their parting, as he takes the tram from Tottenham Court Road back to his bedsit, he is happy and feels that somehow it is agreed between them that Rosemary is going to be his mistress. However, what was intended as a pleasant day out away from London's grime turns into a disaster when, though they are hungry, they opt to pass by a "rather low-looking" pub, and then, not able to find another pub, are forced to eat an unappetising lunch at an overpriced fancy hotel. Gordon has to pay the bill with all the money he had set aside for their jaunt and worries about having to borrow money from Rosemary. Out in the countryside again, they are about to have sex for the first time when she violently pushes him back because he was not going to use contraception. He rails at her: "Money again, you see! ... You say you 'can't' have a baby. ... You mean you daren't; because you'd lose your job and I've got no money and all of us would starve."

Having sent a poem to an American publication, Gordon suddenly receives from them a cheque worth ten pounds, a considerable sum for him at the time (£10 in 1934 equates to £592.20 in 2023. ). He intends to set aside half for his sister Julia, who has always given him money and support. He treats Rosemary and Ravelston to dinner: it begins well, but deteriorates as Gordon, drunk, tries to force himself on Rosemary. She angrily rebukes him and leaves. Gordon continues drinking, drags Ravelston with him to visit a pair of prostitutes, and ends up broke and in a police cell the next morning. He is guilt-ridden over the thought of being unable to pay his sister back the money he owes her, because his five-pound note has been given to, or stolen by, one of the prostitutes.

After Gordon makes a brief appearance before the magistrate Ravelston pays Gordon's fine, but a reporter writes about the case in the local paper. The ensuing publicity results in Gordon losing his job at the bookshop. As he searches for another job, his life and his poetry stagnate. After living with his friend Ravelston, Gordon ends up working, this time in Lambeth, at another bookshop and lending library owned by the sinister Mr Cheeseman, where he is paid thirty shillings a week, ten shillings less than he was earning before. Yet Gordon is satisfied: "The job would do. There was no trouble about a job like this; no room for ambition, no effort, no hope." Determined to sink to the lowest level of society, Gordon takes a furnished bed-sitting-room in a filthy alley parallel to Lambeth Cut. Both Julia and Rosemary, "in feminine league against him", seek to get Gordon to go back to his "good" job at the New Albion advertising agency.

Rosemary, having avoided Gordon for some time, suddenly comes to visit him one day at his dismal lodgings. Despite his terrible poverty and shabbiness, they have sex, but it is without any emotion or passion. Later, Rosemary drops in one day unexpectedly at the library, having not been in touch with Gordon for some time, and tells him that she is pregnant. Since she and Gordon reject the idea of an abortion (which would have been both illegal and dangerous at that time), Gordon is presented with the choice between leaving Rosemary to a life of social shame at the hands of her family or marrying her and returning to a life of respectability by taking back the job at the New Albion agency that he once so deplored.

Gordon chooses Rosemary and respectability, and experiences relief at having abandoned his anti-money principles with such comparative ease. After two years of abject failure and poverty, he throws his poetic work London Pleasures down a drain, marries Rosemary, resumes his advertising career and plunges into a campaign to promote a new product to prevent foot odour. In his lonely walks around mean streets, aspidistras seem to appear in every lower-middle class window. As the book closes, Gordon wins an argument with Rosemary to install an aspidistra in their new small but comfortable flat off the Edgware Road.

Characters

 * Gordon Comstock – a "well-educated and reasonably intelligent" young man possessed of a minor "talent for writing"
 * Rosemary Waterlow – Comstock's girlfriend, whom he met at the advertising agency, who lives in a women's hostel and who has a forgiving nature, but about whom little else is revealed
 * Philip Ravelston – the wealthy left-wing publisher and editor of the magazine Antichrist who supports and encourages Comstock
 * Julia Comstock – Gordon's sister, who is as poor as he is and who, having always made sacrifices for him, continues to be so: "A tall, ungainly girl [–] her nature was simple and affectionate."
 * Mrs Wisbeach – landlady of the lodging house in Willowbed Road who imposes strict rules on her tenants, including Comstock
 * Mr Flaxman – Comstock's fellow lodger, a travelling salesman for the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Company who is temporarily separated from his wife
 * Mr McKechnie – the lazy, white-haired and white-bearded, teetotal and snuff-taking Scot who owns the first of the two bookshops that Gordon works at
 * Mr Cheeseman – the sinister and suspicious owner of the second bookshop
 * Mr Erskine – a large, slow-moving man with a broad, healthy, expressionless face who is the managing director of the New Albion Publicity Company and promotes Gordon to a position as a copywriter

Literary significance and criticism
Cyril Connolly wrote two reviews at the time of the novel's publication. In the Daily Telegraph he described it as a "savage and bitter book", and wrote that "the truths which the author propounds are so disagreeable that one ends by dreading their mention". In the New Statesman he wrote that it gave "a harrowing and stark account of poverty", and referred to its "clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is in a dentist's chair with the drill whirring".

Orwell wrote in a letter to George Woodcock dated 28 September 1946 that Keep the Aspidistra Flying was one of the two or three of his books that he was ashamed of because it "was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money. At that time I simply hadn't a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so." Orwell did not want either this book or A Clergyman's Daughter reprinted during his lifetime.

For an edition of the BBC Television show Omnibus (The Road to the Left, broadcast 10 January 1971), Melvyn Bragg interviewed Norman Mailer. Bragg said that he "just assumed Mailer had read Orwell. In fact he's mad on him." Of Keep the Aspidistra Flying Mailer said: "It is perfect from the first page to the last."

The novel has won other admirers besides Mailer, notably Lionel Trilling, who called it "a summa of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made".

Orwell's biographer Jeffrey Meyers finds the novel flawed by weaknesses in plot, style and characterisation, but praises "a poignant and moving quality that comes from Orwell's perceptive portrayal of the alienation and loneliness of poverty, and from Rosemary's tender response to Gordon's mean misery".

Tosco Fyvel, literary editor of Tribune from 1945 to 1949, and a friend and colleague of Orwell's during the last ten years of Orwell's life, found it interesting that "through Gordon Comstock Orwell expressed violent dislike of London's crowded life and mass advertising— a foretaste here of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell has Gordon reacting to a poster saying Corner Table Enjoys His Meal With Bovex in a manner already suggesting that of the later novel:

"Gordon examined the thing with the intimacy of hatred.... Corner Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom. —For can you not see [—] Behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there's nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair? And the reverberations of future wars."

Catherine Blount points to the theme of a London couple needing to go into the countryside in order to find a private place to have sex, which has a significant place in the plot of Aspidistra and which is taken up prominently in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's biographer D. J. Taylor writes of Gordon Comstock that, "Like Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter and like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he rebels against the system and is ultimately swallowed up by it ... Like Winston Smith, he rebels, the rebellion fails, and he has to reach an accommodation with a world he'd previously disparaged."

Film adaptation
A film adaptation of the same title was released in 1997. It was directed by Robert Bierman and stars Richard E. Grant and Helena Bonham Carter. The film was released in North America and New Zealand under the alternative title A Merry War.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Keep the Aspidistra Flying


text:
Crucifixion

Crucifixion is a method of capital punishment in which the condemned is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross, beam or stake and left to hang until eventual death. It was used as a punishment by the Persians, Carthaginians, and Romans, among others. Crucifixion has been used in some countries as recently as the 21st century.

The crucifixion of Jesus is central to Christianity, and the cross (sometimes depicting Jesus nailed to it) is the main religious symbol in Christianity.

Terminology
Ancient Greek has two verbs for crucify: (ἀνασταυρόω), from  (which in modern Greek only means "cross" but which in antiquity was used for any kind of wooden pole, pointed or blunt, bare or with attachments) and  (ἀποτυμπανίζω) "crucify on a plank", together with  (ἀνασκολοπίζω "impale"). In earlier pre-Roman Greek texts usually means "impale".

The Greek used in the Christian New Testament uses four verbs, three of them based upon (σταυρός), usually translated "cross". The most common term is (σταυρόω), "to crucify", occurring 46 times;  (συσταυρόω), "to crucify with" or "alongside" occurs five times, while  (ἀνασταυρόω), "to crucify again" occurs only once at the Epistle to the Hebrews 6:6. (προσπήγνυμι), "to fix or fasten to, impale, crucify" occurs only once, at the Acts of the Apostles 2:23.

The English term cross derives from the Latin word crux, which classically referred to a tree or any construction of wood used to hang criminals as a form of execution. The term later came to refer specifically to a cross. The related term crucifix derives from the Latin crucifixus or cruci fixus, past participle passive of crucifigere or cruci figere, meaning "to crucify" or "to fasten to a cross".

Cross shape
In the Roman Empire, the gibbet (instrument of execution) for crucifixions took on many shapes. Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) states: "I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet." According to Josephus, during Emperor Titus's Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE), Roman soldiers nailed innumerable Jewish captives to crosses in various ways.

At times the gibbet was only one vertical stake, called in Latin crux simplex. This was the simplest available construction for torturing and killing the condemned. Frequently, however, there was a cross-piece attached either at the top to give the shape of a T (crux commissa) or just below the top, as in the form most familiar in Christian symbolism (crux immissa). The most ancient image of a Roman crucifixion depicts an individual on a T-shaped cross. It is a graffito found in a taberna (hostel for wayfarers) in Puteoli, dating to the time of Trajan or Hadrian (late 1st century to early 2nd century CE).

Second-century writers who speak of the execution cross describe the crucified person's arms as outstretched, not attached to a single stake: Lucian speaks of Prometheus as crucified "above the ravine with his hands outstretched". He also says that the shape of the letter Τ (the Greek letter tau) was that of the wooden instrument used for crucifying. Artemidorus, another writer of the same period, says that a cross is made of posts (plural) and nails and that the arms of the crucified are outstretched. Speaking of the generic execution cross, Irenaeus (c. 130–202), a Christian writer, describes it as composed of an upright and a transverse beam, sometimes with a small projection in the upright.

New Testament writings about the crucifixion of Jesus do not specify the shape of that cross, but subsequent early writings liken it to the letter T. According to William Barclay, because tau is shaped exactly like the crux commissa and represented the number 300, "wherever the fathers came across the number 300 in the Old Testament they took it to be a mystical prefiguring of the cross of Christ". The earliest example, written around the late first century CE, is the Epistle of Barnabas, with another example being Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215).

Justin Martyr (c. 100) sees the cross of Christ represented in the crossed spits used to roast the Passover lamb.

Nail placement
In popular depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus (possibly because in translations of the wounds are described as being "in his hands"), Jesus is shown with nails in his hands. But in Greek the word "χείρ", usually translated as "hand", could refer to the entire portion of the arm below the elbow, and to denote the hand as distinct from the arm some other word could be added, as "ἄκρην οὔτασε χεῖρα" (he wounded the end of the χείρ, i.e., "he wounded him in the hand".

A possibility that does not require tying is that the nails were inserted just above the wrist, through the soft tissue, between the two bones of the forearm (the radius and the ulna).

A foot-rest (suppedaneum) attached to the cross, perhaps for the purpose of taking the person's weight off the wrists, is sometimes included in representations of the crucifixion of Jesus but is not discussed in ancient sources. Some scholars interpret the Alexamenos graffito (c. 200), the earliest surviving depiction of the crucifixion, as including such a foot-rest. Ancient sources also mention the sedile, a small seat attached to the front of the cross, about halfway down, which could have served a similar purpose.

In 1968, archaeologists discovered at Giv'at ha-Mivtar in northeast Jerusalem the remains of one Jehohanan, who was crucified in the 1st century CE. The remains included a heel bone with a nail driven through it from the side. The tip of the nail was bent, perhaps because of striking a knot in the upright beam, which prevented it being extracted from the foot. A first inaccurate account of the length of the nail led some to believe that it had been driven through both heels, suggesting that the man had been placed in a sort of sidesaddle position, but the true length of the nail, 11.5 cm, suggests instead that in this case of crucifixion the heels were nailed to opposite sides of the upright. As of 2011, the skeleton from Giv'at ha-Mivtar was the only confirmed example of ancient crucifixion in the archaeological record. A second set of skeletal remains with holes transverse through the calcaneum heel bones, found in 2007, could be a second archaeological record of crucifixion. The find in Cambridgeshire (United Kingdom) in November 2017 of the remains of the heel bone of a (probably enslaved) man with an iron nail through it, is believed by the archeologists to confirm the use of this method in ancient Rome.

Cause of death
The length of time required to reach death could range from hours to days depending on method, the victim's health, and the environment.

A theory attributed to Pierre Barbet held that, when the whole body weight was supported by the stretched arms, the typical cause of death was asphyxiation. He wrote that the condemned would have severe difficulty inhaling, due to hyper-expansion of the chest muscles and lungs. The condemned would therefore have to draw himself up by the arms, leading to exhaustion, or have his feet supported by tying or by a wood block. When no longer able to lift himself, the condemned would die within a few minutes. This theory has been supported by multiple scholars. Other scholars, including Frederick Zugibe, posit other causes of death. Zugibe suspended test subjects with their arms at 60° to 70° from the vertical. The test subjects had no difficulty breathing during experiments, but did suffer rapidly increasing pain, which is consistent with the Roman use of crucifixion to achieve a prolonged, agonizing death. However, Zugibe's positioning of the test subjects necessarily did not precisely replicate the conditions of historical crucifixion. In 2023, an analysis of medical literature concluded that asphyxiation is discredited as the primary cause of death from crucifixion.

There is scholarly support for several possible non-asphyxiation causes of death: heart failure or arrhythmia, hypovolemic shock, acidosis, dehydration, and pulmonary embolism. Death could result from any combination of those factors, or from other causes, including sepsis following infection due to the wounds caused by the nails or by the scourging that often preceded crucifixion, or from stabbing by the guards.

Survival
Since death does not follow immediately on crucifixion, survival after a short period of crucifixion is possible, as in the case of those who choose each year as a devotional practice to be non-lethally crucified.

There is an ancient record of one person who survived a crucifixion that was intended to be lethal, but was interrupted. Josephus recounts:"I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintances. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician's hands, while the third recovered."Josephus gives no details of the method or duration of the crucifixion of his three friends.

Pre-Roman states
Crucifixion (or impalement), in one form or another, was used by Persians, Carthaginians, and among the Greeks, the Macedonians.

The Greeks were generally opposed to performing crucifixions. However, in his Histories, ix.120–122, Greek writer Herodotus describes the execution of a Persian general at the hands of Athenians in about 479 BC: "They nailed him to a plank and hung him up ... this Artayctes who suffered death by crucifixion." The Commentary on Herodotus by How and Wells remarks: "They crucified him with hands and feet stretched out and nailed to cross-pieces; cf. vii.33. This act, supposedly unusual on the part of Greeks, may be explained by the enormity of the outrage or by Athenian deference to local feeling." Some Christian theologians, beginning with Paul of Tarsus writing in Galatians 3:13, have interpreted an allusion to crucifixion in Deuteronomy. This reference is to being hanged from a tree, and may be associated with lynching or traditional hanging. However, Rabbinic law limited capital punishment to just 4 methods of execution: stoning, burning, strangulation, and decapitation, while the passage in Deuteronomy was interpreted as an obligation to hang the corpse on a tree as a form of deterrence. The fragmentary Aramaic Testament of Levi (DSS 4Q541) interprets in column 6: "God ... (partially legible)-will set ... right errors. ... (partially legible)-He will judge ... revealed sins. Investigate and seek and know how Jonah wept. Thus, you shall not destroy the weak by wasting away or by ... (partially legible)-crucifixion ... Let not the nail touch him."

The Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus, king of Judea from 103 to 76 BCE, crucified 800 rebels, said to be Pharisees, in the middle of Jerusalem.

Alexander the Great is reputed to have crucified 2,000 survivors from his siege of the Phoenician city of Tyre, as well as the doctor who unsuccessfully treated Alexander's lifelong friend Hephaestion. Some historians have also conjectured that Alexander crucified Callisthenes, his official historian and biographer, for objecting to Alexander's adoption of the Persian ceremony of royal adoration.

In Carthage, crucifixion was an established mode of execution, which could even be imposed on generals for suffering a major defeat.

The oldest crucifixion may be a post-mortem one mentioned by Herodotus. Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, was put to death in 522 BCE by the Persians, and his dead body was then crucified.

History
The Greek and Latin words corresponding to "crucifixion" applied to many different forms of painful execution, including being impaled on a stake, or affixed to a tree, upright pole (a crux simplex), or to a combination of an upright (in Latin, stipes) and a crossbeam (in Latin, patibulum). Seneca the Younger wrote: "I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet".

Crucifixion was generally performed within Ancient Rome as a means to dissuade others from perpetrating similar crimes, with victims sometimes left on display after death as a warning. Crucifixion was intended to provide a death that was particularly slow, painful (hence the term excruciating, literally "out of crucifying"), gruesome, humiliating, and public, using whatever means were most expedient for that goal. Crucifixion methods varied considerably with location and period.

One hypothesis suggested that the Ancient Roman custom of crucifixion may have developed out of a primitive custom of arbori suspendere—hanging on an arbor infelix ("inauspicious tree") dedicated to the gods of the nether world. This hypothesis is rejected by William A. Oldfather, who shows that this form of execution (the supplicium more maiorum, punishment in accordance with the custom of our ancestors) consisted of suspending someone from a tree, not dedicated to any particular gods, and flogging him to death. Tertullian mentions a 1st-century AD case in which trees were used for crucifixion, but Seneca the Younger earlier used the phrase infelix lignum (unfortunate wood) for the transom ("patibulum") or the whole cross. Plautus and Plutarch are the two main sources for accounts of criminals carrying their own patibula to the upright stipes.

Notorious mass crucifixions followed the Third Servile War in 73–71 BCE (the slave rebellion led by Spartacus), and other Roman civil wars in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. Crassus ordered the crucifixion of 6,000 of Spartacus' followers who had been hunted down and captured after the slave defeat in battle. Josephus says that in the siege that led to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, the Roman soldiers crucified Jewish captives before the walls of Jerusalem and out of anger and hatred amused themselves by nailing them in different positions.

In some cases, the condemned was forced to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. A whole cross would weigh well over 135 kg (300 lb), but the crossbeam would not be as burdensome, weighing around 45 kg (100 lb). The Roman historian Tacitus records that the city of Rome had a specific place for carrying out executions, situated outside the Esquiline Gate, and had a specific area reserved for the execution of slaves by crucifixion. Upright posts would presumably be fixed permanently in that place, and the crossbeam, with the condemned person perhaps already nailed to it, would then be attached to the post.

The person executed may have been attached to the cross by rope, though nails and other sharp materials are mentioned in a passage by Josephus, where he states that at the Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE), "the soldiers out of rage and hatred, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest". Objects used in the crucifixion of criminals, such as nails, were sought as amulets with perceived medicinal qualities.

While a crucifixion was an execution, it was also a humiliation, by making the condemned as vulnerable as possible. Although artists have traditionally depicted the figure on a cross with a loin cloth or a covering of the genitals, the person being crucified was usually stripped naked. Writings by Seneca the Younger state some victims suffered a stick forced upwards through their groin. Despite its frequent use by the Romans, the horrors of crucifixion did not escape criticism by some eminent Roman orators. Cicero, for example, described crucifixion as "a most cruel and disgusting punishment", and suggested that "the very mention of the cross should be far removed not only from a Roman citizen's body, but from his mind, his eyes, his ears". Elsewhere he says, "It is a crime to bind a Roman citizen; to scourge him is a wickedness; to put him to death is almost parricide. What shall I say of crucifying him? So guilty an action cannot by any possibility be adequately expressed by any name bad enough for it."

Frequently, the legs of the person executed were broken or shattered with an iron club, an act called crurifragium, which was also frequently applied without crucifixion to slaves. This act hastened the death of the person but was also meant to deter those who observed the crucifixion from committing offenses.

Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, abolished crucifixion in the Roman Empire in 337 out of veneration for Jesus Christ, its most famous victim.

Society and law
Crucifixion was intended to be a gruesome spectacle: the most painful and humiliating death imaginable. It was used to punish slaves, pirates, and enemies of the state. It was originally reserved for slaves (hence still called "supplicium servile" by Seneca), and later extended to citizens of the lower classes (humiliores). The victims of crucifixion were stripped naked and put on public display while they were slowly tortured to death so that they would serve as a spectacle and an example.

According to Roman law, if a slave killed his or her owner, all of the owner's slaves would be crucified as punishment. Both men and women were crucified. Tacitus writes in his Annals that when Lucius Pedanius Secundus was murdered by a slave, some in the Senate tried to prevent the mass crucifixion of four hundred of his slaves because there were so many women and children, but in the end tradition prevailed and they were all executed. Although not conclusive evidence for female crucifixion by itself, the most ancient image of a Roman crucifixion may depict a crucified woman, whether real or imaginary. Crucifixion was such a gruesome and humiliating way to die that the subject was somewhat of a taboo in Roman culture, and few crucifixions were specifically documented. One of the only specific female crucifixions that are documented is that of Ida, a freedwoman (former slave) who was crucified by order of Tiberius.

Process
Crucifixion was typically carried out by specialized teams, consisting of a commanding centurion and his soldiers. First, the condemned would be stripped naked and scourged. This would cause the person to lose a large amount of blood, and approach a state of shock. The convict then usually had to carry the horizontal beam (patibulum in Latin) to the place of execution, but not necessarily the whole cross.

During the death march, the prisoner, probably still nude after the scourging, would be led through the most crowded streets bearing a titulus – a sign board proclaiming the prisoner's name and crime. Upon arrival at the place of execution, selected to be especially public, the convict would be stripped of any remaining clothing, then nailed to the cross naked. If the crucifixion took place in an established place of execution, the vertical beam (stipes) might be permanently embedded in the ground. In this case, the condemned person's wrists would first be nailed to the patibulum, and then he or she would be hoisted off the ground with ropes to hang from the elevated patibulum while it was fastened to the stipes. Next the feet or ankles would be nailed to the upright stake. The 'nails' were tapered iron spikes approximately 5 to 7 in long, with a square shaft 3/8 in across. The titulus would also be fastened to the cross to notify onlookers of the person's name and crime as they hung on the cross, further maximizing the public impact.

There may have been considerable variation in the position in which prisoners were nailed to their crosses and how their bodies were supported while they died. Seneca the Younger recounts: "I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet." One source claims that for Jews (apparently not for others), a man would be crucified with his back to the cross as is traditionally depicted, while a woman would be nailed facing her cross, probably with her back to onlookers, or at least with the stipes providing some semblance of modesty if viewed from the front. Such concessions were "unique" and not made outside a Jewish context. Several sources mention some sort of seat fastened to the stipes to help support the person's body, thereby prolonging the person's suffering and humiliation by preventing the asphyxiation caused by hanging without support. Justin Martyr calls the seat a cornu, or "horn," leading some scholars to believe it may have had a pointed shape designed to torment the crucified person. This would be consistent with Seneca's observation of victims with their private parts impaled.

In Roman-style crucifixion, the condemned could take up to a few days to die, but death was sometimes hastened by human action. "The attending Roman guards could leave the site only after the victim had died, and were known to precipitate death by means of deliberate fracturing of the tibia and/or fibula, spear stab wounds into the heart, sharp blows to the front of the chest, or a smoking fire built at the foot of the cross to asphyxiate the victim." The Romans sometimes broke the prisoner's legs to hasten death and usually forbade burial. On the other hand, the person was often deliberately kept alive as long as possible to prolong their suffering and humiliation, so as to provide the maximum deterrent effect. Corpses of the crucified were typically left on the crosses to decompose and be eaten by animals.

In Islam
Islam spread in a region where many societies, including the Persian and Roman empires, had used crucifixion to punish traitors, rebels, robbers and criminal slaves. The Qur'an refers to crucifixion in six passages, of which the most significant for later legal developments is verse 5:33:

"The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter."

The corpus of hadith provides contradictory statements about the first use of crucifixion under Islamic rule, attributing it variously to Muhammad himself (for murder and robbery of a shepherd) or to the second caliph Umar (applied to two slaves who murdered their mistress). Classical Islamic jurisprudence applies the verse 5:33 chiefly to highway robbers, as a hadd (scripturally prescribed) punishment. The preference for crucifixion over the other punishments mentioned in the verse or for their combination (which Sadakat Kadri has called "Islam's equivalent of the hanging, drawing and quartering that medieval Europeans inflicted on traitors") is subject to "complex and contested rules" in classical jurisprudence. Most scholars required crucifixion for highway robbery combined with murder, while others allowed execution by other methods for this scenario. The main methods of crucifixion are:

 * Exposure of the culprit's body after execution by another method, ascribed to "most scholars" and in particular to Ibn Hanbal and Al-Shafi'i; or Hanbalis and Shafi'is.
 * Crucifying the culprit alive, then executing him with a lance thrust or another method, ascribed to Malikis, most Hanafis and most Twelver Shi'is; the majority of the Malikis; Malik, Abu Hanifa, and al-Awza'i; or Malikis, Hanafis, and Shafi'is.
 * Crucifying the culprit alive and sparing his life if he survives for three days, ascribed to Shiites.

Most classical jurists limit the period of crucifixion to three days. Crucifixion involves affixing or impaling the body to a beam or a tree trunk. Various minority opinions also prescribed crucifixion as punishment for a number of other crimes. Cases of crucifixion under most of the legally prescribed categories have been recorded in the history of Islam, and prolonged exposure of crucified bodies was especially common for political and religious opponents.

Japan

Crucifixion was introduced into Japan during the Sengoku period (1467–1573), after a 350-year period with no capital punishment. It is believed to have been suggested to the Japanese by the introduction of Christianity into the region, although similar types of punishment had been used as early as the Kamakura period. Known in Japanese as haritsuke (磔), crucifixion was used in Japan before and during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Several related crucifixion techniques were used. Petra Schmidt, in "Capital Punishment in Japan", writes: "Execution by crucifixion included, first of all, hikimawashi (i.e, being paraded about town on horseback); then the unfortunate was tied to a cross made from one vertical and two horizontal poles. The cross was raised, the convict speared several times from two sides, and eventually killed with a final thrust through the throat. The corpse was left on the cross for three days. If one condemned to crucifixion died in prison, his body was pickled and the punishment executed on the dead body. Under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the great 16th-century unifiers, crucifixion upside down (i.e, sakasaharitsuke) was frequently used. Water crucifixion (mizuharitsuke) awaited mostly Christians: a cross was raised at low tide; when the high tide came, the convict was submerged under water up to the head, prolonging death for many days"

In 1597, 26 Christian Martyrs were nailed to crosses at Nagasaki, Japan. Among those executed were Saints Paulo Miki, Philip of Jesus and Pedro Bautista, a Spanish Franciscan. The executions marked the beginning of a long history of persecution of Christianity in Japan, which continued until its decriminalization in 1871.

Crucifixion was used as a punishment for prisoners of war during World War II. Ringer Edwards, an Australian prisoner of war, was crucified for killing cattle, along with two others. He survived 63 hours before being let down.

Burma
In Burma, crucifixion was a central element in several execution rituals. Felix Carey, a missionary in Burma from 1806 to 1812, wrote the following: "Four or five persons, after being nailed through their hands and feet to a scaffold, had first their tongues cut out, then their mouths slit open from ear to ear, then their ears cut off, and finally their bellies ripped open.

Six people were crucified in the following manner: their hands and feet nailed to a scaffold; then their eyes were extracted with a blunt hook; and in this condition they were left to expire; two died in the course of four days; the rest were liberated, but died of mortification on the sixth or seventh day.

Four persons were crucified, viz. not nailed but tied with their hands and feet stretched out at full length, in an erect posture. In this posture they were to remain till death; every thing they wished to eat was ordered them with a view to prolong their lives and misery. In cases like this, the legs and feet of the criminals begin to swell and mortify at the expiration of three or four days; some are said to live in this state for a fortnight, and expire at last from fatigue and mortification. Those which I saw, were liberated at the end of three or four days."

Europe
During World War I, there were persistent rumors that German soldiers had crucified a Canadian soldier on a tree or barn door with bayonets or combat knives. The event was initially reported in 1915 by Private George Barrie of the 1st Canadian Division. Two investigations, one a post-war official investigation, and the other an independent investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, concluded that there was no evidence to support the story. However, British documentary maker Iain Overton in 2001 published an article claiming that the story was true, identifying the soldier as Harry Band. Overton's article was the basis for a 2002 episode of the Channel 4 documentary show Secret History.

It has been reported that crucifixion was used in several cases against the German civil population of East Prussia when it was occupied by Soviet forces at the end of World War II.

Archaeological evidence
Although the Roman historians Josephus and Appian refer to the crucifixion of thousands of Jews by the Romans, there are few actual archaeological remains. An exception is the crucified body of a Jew dating back to the first century CE which was discovered at Givat HaMivtar, Jerusalem in 1968. The remains were found accidentally in an ossuary with the crucified man's name on it, "Jehohanan, the son of Hagakol." Nicu Haas, from the Hebrew University Medical School, examined the ossuary and discovered that it contained a heel bone with a nail driven through its side, indicating that the man had been crucified. The position of the nail relative to the bone suggests the feet had been nailed to the cross from their side, not from their front; various opinions have been proposed as to whether they were both nailed together to the front of the cross or one on the left side, one on the right side. The point of the nail had olive wood fragments on it indicating that he was crucified on a cross made of olive wood or on an olive tree.

Additionally, a piece of acacia wood was located between the bones and the head of the nail, presumably to keep the condemned from freeing his foot by sliding it over the nail. His legs were found broken, possibly to hasten his death. It is thought that because in earlier Roman times iron was valuable, the nails were removed from the dead body to conserve costs. According to Haas, this could help to explain why only one nail has been found, as the tip of the nail in question was bent in such a way that it could not be removed. Haas had also identified a scratch on the inner surface of the right radius bone of the forearm, close to the wrist. He deduced from the form of the scratch, as well as from the intact wrist bones, that a nail had been driven into the forearm at that position.

Many of Haas' findings have, however, been challenged. For instance, it was subsequently determined that the scratches in the wrist area were non-traumatic – and, therefore, not evidence of crucifixion – while reexamination of the heel bone revealed that the two heels were not nailed together, but rather separately to either side of the upright post of the cross.

In 2007, a possible case of a crucified body, with a round hole in a heel bone, possibly caused by a nail, was discovered in the Po Valley near Rovigo, in northern Italy. In 2017 part of a crucified body, with a nail in the heel, was additionally discovered at Fenstanton in the United Kingdom. Further studies suggested that the remains may be those of a slave, because at that time crucifixion was banned in Roman law for citizens, although not necessarily for slaves.

Legal execution in Islamic states
Crucifixion is still used as a rare method of execution in Saudi Arabia. The punishment of crucifixion (șalb) imposed in Islamic law is variously interpreted as exposure of the body after execution, crucifixion followed by stabbing in the chest, or crucifixion for three days, survivors of which are allowed to live.

Several people have been subjected to crucifixion in Saudi Arabia in the 2000s, although on occasion they were first beheaded and then crucified. In March 2013, a robber was set to be executed by being crucified for three days. However, the method was changed to death by firing squad. The Saudi Press Agency reported that the body of another individual was crucified after his execution in April 2019 as part of a crackdown on charges of terrorism.

Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 when he was 17 years old for taking part in an anti-government protest in Saudi Arabia during the Arab Spring. In May 2014, Ali al-Nimr was sentenced to be publicly beheaded and crucified.

Theoretically, crucifixion is still one of the Hadd punishments in Iran. If a crucified person were to survive three days of crucifixion, that person would be allowed to live. Execution by hanging is described as follows: "In execution by hanging, the prisoner will be hung on a hanging truss which should look like a cross, while his (her) back is toward the cross, and (s)he faces the direction of Mecca [in Saudi Arabia], and his (her) legs are vertical and distant from the ground."

Sudan's penal code, based upon the government's interpretation of shari'a,  includes execution followed by crucifixion as a penalty. When, in 2002, 88 people were sentenced to death for crimes relating to murder, armed robbery, and participating in ethnic clashes, Amnesty International wrote that they could be executed by either hanging or crucifixion.

Jihadism
On 5 February 2015, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) reported that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had committed "several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive".

On 30 April 2014, a total of seven public executions were carried out in Raqqa, northern Syria. The pictures, originally posted to Twitter by a student at Oxford University, were retweeted by a Twitter account owned by a known member of ISIL causing major media outlets to incorrectly attribute the origin of the post to the militant group. In most of these cases of crucifixion the victims are shot first then their bodies are displayed but there have also been reports of crucifixion preceding shootings or decapitations as well as a case where a man was said to have been "crucified alive for eight hours" with no indication of whether he died.

Other incidents
The human rights group Karen Women Organization documented a case of Tatmadaw forces crucifying several Karen villagers in 2000 in the Dooplaya District in Burma's Kayin State.

On 22 January 2014, Dmytro Bulatov, a Ukrainian anti-government activist and member of AutoMaidan, claimed to have been kidnapped by unknown persons "speaking in Russian accents" and tortured for a week. His captors kept him in the dark, beat him, cut off a piece of his ear, and nailed him to a cross. His captors ultimately left him in a forest outside Kyiv after forcing him to confess to being an American spy and accepting money from the US Embassy in Ukraine to organize protests against then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Bulatov said he believed Russian secret services were responsible.

In 1997, the Ministry of Justice in the United Arab Emirates issued a statement that a court had sentenced two murderers to be crucified, to be followed by their executions the next day. A Ministry of Justice official later stated that the crucifixion sentence should be considered cancelled. The crucifixions were not carried out, and the convicts were instead executed by firing squad.

As a devotional practice
In July 1805, a man named Mattio Lovat attempted to crucify himself at a public street in Venice, Italy. The attempt was unsuccessful, and he was sent to an asylum, where he died a year later.

In some cases, a crucifixion is simulated within a passion play, as in the ceremonial re-enactment that has been performed yearly in the town of Iztapalapa, on the outskirts of Mexico City, since 1833, and in the famous Oberammergau Passion Play. Also, since at least the mid-19th century, a group of flagellants in New Mexico, called Hermanos de Luz ("Brothers of Light"), have annually conducted reenactments of Christ's crucifixion during Holy Week, in which a penitent is tied—but not nailed—to a cross.

The Catholic Church frowns upon self-crucifixion as a form of devotion: "Penitential practices leading to self-crucifixion with nails are not to be encouraged." Despite this, the practice persists in the Philippines, where some Catholics are voluntarily, non-lethally crucified for a limited time on Good Friday to imitate the sufferings of Christ. Pre-sterilised nails are driven through the palm of the hand between the bones, while there is a footrest to which the feet are nailed. Rolando del Campo, a carpenter in Pampanga, vowed to be crucified every Good Friday for 15 years if God would carry his wife through a difficult childbirth, while in San Pedro Cutud, Ruben Enaje has been crucified 34 times. The Filipino Catholic Church has repeatedly voiced disapproval of crucifixions and self-flagellation, while the government has noted that it cannot deter devotees. The Department of Health recommends that participants in the rites should have tetanus shots and that the nails used should be sterilized.

Notable crucifixions

 * The rebel slaves of the Third Servile War: Between 73 and 71 BCE, a band of slaves, eventually numbering about 120,000, under the (at least partial) leadership of Spartacus were in open revolt against the Roman republic. The rebellion was eventually crushed and, while Spartacus himself most likely died in the final battle of the revolt, approximately 6,000 of his followers were crucified along the 200-km Appian Way between Capua and Rome as a warning to any other would-be rebels.
 * Jehohanan: Jewish man who was crucified around the same time as Jesus; it is widely accepted that his ankles were nailed to the side of the stipes of the cross.
 * Jesus: His death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate (c. 30 or 33 CE), recounted in the four 1st-century canonical Gospels, is referred to repeatedly as something well known in the earlier letters of Saint Paul, for instance, five times in his First Letter to the Corinthians, written in 57 CE (1:13, 1:18, 1:23, 2:2, 2:8). Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea province at the time, is explicitly linked with the condemnation of Jesus by the Gospels, and subsequently by Tacitus. The civil charge was a claim to be King of the Jews.
 * Saint Peter: Christian apostle, who according to tradition was crucified upside-down at his own request (hence the Cross of Saint Peter), because he did not feel worthy enough to die the same way as Jesus.
 * Saint Andrew: Christian apostle and Saint Peter's brother, who is traditionally said to have been crucified on an X-shaped cross (hence the Saint Andrew's Cross).
 * Simeon of Jerusalem: second Bishop of Jerusalem, crucified in either 106 or 107 CE.
 * Mani: the founder of Manicheanism, he was depicted by followers as having died by crucifixion in 274 CE.
 * Eulalia of Barcelona was venerated as a saint. According to her hagiography, she was stripped naked, tortured, and ultimately crucified on an X-shaped cross.
 * Wilgefortis was venerated as a saint and represented as a crucified woman, however her legend comes from a misinterpretation of a full-clothed crucifix known as the Volto Santo of Lucca.
 * The 26 Martyrs of Japan: Japanese martyrs who were crucified and impaled with spears.

title: Crucifixion


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Gerry Adams

Gerard Adams (Gearóid Mac Ádhaimh; born 6 October 1948) is an Irish republican politician who was the president of Sinn Féin between 13 November 1983 and 10 February 2018, and served as a Teachta Dála (TD) for Louth from 2011 to 2020. From 1983 to 1992 and from 1997 to 2011, he followed the policy of abstentionism as a Member of Parliament (MP) of the British Parliament for the Belfast West constituency.

Adams first became involved in Irish republicanism in the late 1960s, and had been an established figure in Irish activism for more than a decade before his 1983 election to Parliament. In 1984, Adams was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by several gunmen from the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), including John Gregg. From the late 1980s onwards, he was an important figure in the Northern Ireland peace process, entering into talks initially with Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume and then subsequently with the Irish and British governments. In 1986, he convinced Sinn Féin to change its traditional policy of abstentionism towards the Oireachtas, the parliament of Ireland. In 1998, it also took seats in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly. In 2005, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) stated that its armed campaign was over and that it was exclusively committed to peaceful politics.

In 2014, Adams was held for four days by the Police Service of Northern Ireland for questioning in connection with the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville. He was released without charge and a file was sent to the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland, which later stated there was insufficient evidence to charge him. Adams announced in November 2017 that he would step down as leader of Sinn Féin in 2018, and that he would not stand for re-election to his seat in Dáil Éireann in 2020. He was succeeded by Mary Lou McDonald at a special ardfheis (party conference) on 10 February 2018.

Early life
Adams was born in the Ballymurphy district of Belfast on 6 October 1948. His parents, Anne (née Hannaway) and Gerry Adams Sr., came from republican backgrounds. His grandfather, also named Gerry Adams, was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) during the Irish War of Independence. Two of his uncles, Dominic and Patrick Adams, had been interned by the governments in Belfast and Dublin. In J. Bowyer Bell's book The Secret Army, Bell states that Dominic was a senior figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) of the mid-1940s. Gerry Adams Sr. joined the IRA at age 16. In 1942, he participated in an IRA ambush on a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) patrol but was shot, arrested and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment. Adams's maternal great-grandfather, Michael Hannaway, was also a member of the IRB during its bombing campaign in England in the 1860s and 1870s. Michael's son, Billy, was election agent for Éamon de Valera at the 1918 Irish general election in West Belfast.

Adams attended St Finian's Primary School on Falls Road, where he was taught by La Salle brothers. Having passed the eleven-plus exam in 1960, he attended St Mary's Christian Brothers Grammar School. He left St Mary's with six O-levels and worked in bars. He was increasingly involved in the Irish republican movement, joining Sinn Féin and Fianna Éireann in 1964, after being radicalised by the Divis Street riots during that year's general election campaign.

Early political career
In the late 1960s, a civil rights campaign developed in Northern Ireland. Adams was an active supporter and joined the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967. However, the civil rights movement was met with violence from loyalist counter-demonstrations and the RUC. In August 1969, the Northern Ireland riots resulted in violence in Belfast, Derry and elsewhere. British troops were called in at the request of the Government of Northern Ireland.

Adams was active in rioting at this time and later became involved in the republican movement. In August 1971, internment was reintroduced to Northern Ireland under the Special Powers Act 1922. Adams was captured by British soldiers in March 1972 and in a Belfast Telegraph report on Adams' capture he was said to be "one of the most wanted men in Belfast". Adams was interned on HMS Maidstone (1937), but on the Provisional IRA's insistence was released in June to take part in secret, but abortive talks in London. The IRA negotiated a short-lived truce with the British government and an IRA delegation met with British Home Secretary William Whitelaw at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. The delegation included Adams, Martin McGuinness, Sean Mac Stiofain (IRA Chief of Staff), Daithi O'Conaill, Seamus Twomey, Ivor Bell and Dublin solicitor Myles Shevlin. Adams was re-arrested in July 1973 and interned at the Maze prison. After taking part in an IRA-organised escape attempt, he was sentenced to a period of imprisonment. During this time, he wrote articles in the paper An Phoblacht under the by-line "Brownie", where he criticised the strategy and policy of Sinn Féin president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Billy McKee, the IRA's officer commanding in Belfast. He was also highly critical of a decision taken by McKee to assassinate members of the rival Official IRA, who had been on ceasefire since 1972. In 2020, the UK Supreme Court quashed Adams' convictions for attempting to escape on Christmas Eve in 1973 and again in July 1974.

In 1977, Ballymurphy priest Des Wilson (who had officiated at Adams's wedding) assisted with an early attempt by Adams to open channels to dissident unionists. He helped set up meeting with Desmond Boal QC, a unionist barrister who had been first chairman of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party. At the time, Boal was co-operating with Seán MacBride as joint mediator in confidential negotiations between the Provisional IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force about a federal settlement for Ireland. A short time later, Wilson drove Adams to a meeting with John McKeague, founding member of the Red Hand Commando, then flirting with the idea of an independent Ulster. Inasmuch as they were "frank", Adams found the meetings "constructive", but could find no common political ground. Wilson was of the view that Adams was "one of the very few people who could actually bring a military campaign into a political campaign".

IRA membership allegations
Adams has stated repeatedly that he has never been a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). However, journalists such as Ed Moloney, Peter Taylor and Mark Urban, and historian Richard English have all named Adams as part of the IRA leadership since the 1970s.

Moloney and Taylor state Adams became the IRA's Chief of Staff following the arrest of Seamus Twomey in early December 1977, remaining in the position until 18 February 1978 when he, along with twenty other republican suspects, was arrested following the La Mon restaurant bombing. He was charged with IRA membership and remanded to Crumlin Road Gaol. He was released seven months later when the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland Robert Lowry ruled there was insufficient evidence to proceed with the prosecution. Moloney and English state Adams had been a member of the IRA Army Council since 1977, remaining a member until 2005 according to former Irish Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Michael McDowell.

2014 arrest
On 30 April 2014, Adams was arrested by detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Serious Crime Branch, under the Terrorism Act 2000, in connection with the murder of Jean McConville in 1972. He had previously voluntarily arranged to be interviewed by police regarding the matter, and maintained he had no involvement. Fellow Sinn Féin politician Alex Maskey stated that the timing of the arrest, "three weeks into an election", was evidence of a "political agenda [...] a negative agenda" by the PSNI. McConville's family had campaigned for the arrest of Adams for the murder. McConville's son Michael said that his family did not think the arrest of Adams would ever happen, and were glad that the arrest took place. Adams was released without charge after four days in custody a file was sent to the Public Prosecution Service, which would decide if criminal charges should be brought.

At a press conference after his release, Adams criticised the timing of his arrest, reiterated Sinn Féin's support for the PSNI and said: "The IRA is gone. It is finished." Adams denied that he had any involvement in the murder or was ever a member of the IRA, and said the allegations came from "enemies of the peace process". On 29 September 2015 the Public Prosecution Service announced Adams would not face charges, due to insufficient evidence, as had been expected ever since a BBC report dated 6 May 2014 (2 days after the BBC reported his release), which was widely repeated elsewhere.

Rise in Sinn Féin
In 1978, Adams became joint vice-president of Sinn Féin and a key figure in directing a challenge to the Sinn Féin leadership of President Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and joint vice-president Dáithí Ó Conaill. The 1975 IRA-British truce is often viewed as the event that began the challenge to the original Provisional Sinn Féin leadership, which was dominated by southerners like Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill.

One of the reasons that the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Féin were founded, in December 1969 and January 1970, respectively, was that people like Ó Brádaigh, Ó Conaill and McKee opposed participation in constitutional politics. The other reason was the failure of the Cathal Goulding leadership to provide for the defence of Irish nationalist areas during the 1969 Northern Ireland riots. When, at the December 1969 IRA convention and the January 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, the delegates voted to participate in the Dublin (Leinster House), Belfast (Stormont) and London (Westminster) parliaments, the organisations split. Adams, who had joined the republican movement in the early 1960s, sided with the Provisionals.

In the Maze prison in the mid-1970s, writing under the pseudonym "Brownie" in Republican News, Adams called for increased political activity among republicans, especially at local level. The call resonated with younger Northern people, many of whom had been active in the Provisional IRA but few of whom had been active in Sinn Féin. In 1977, Adams and Danny Morrison drafted the address of Jimmy Drumm at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown. The address was viewed as watershed in that Drumm acknowledged that the war would be a long one and that success depended on political activity that would complement the IRA's armed campaign. For some, this wedding of politics and armed struggle culminated in Danny Morrison's statement at the 1981 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in which he asked "Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?" For others, however, the call to link political activity with armed struggle had already been defined in Sinn Féin policy and in the presidential addresses of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, but this had not resonated with young Northerners.

Even after the election of Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, a part of the mass mobilisation associated with the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike by republican prisoners in the H blocks of the Maze Prison, Adams was cautious that the level of political involvement by Sinn Féin could lead to electoral embarrassment. Charles Haughey, the Taoiseach of Ireland, called an election for June 1981. At an Ard Chomhairle meeting, Adams recommended that they contest only four constituencies which were in border counties. Instead, H-Block/Armagh candidates contested nine constituencies and elected two TDs. This, along with the election of Sands, was a precursor to an electoral breakthrough in elections in 1982 to the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly. Adams, Danny Morrison, Martin McGuinness, Jim McAllister and Owen Carron were elected as abstentionists. The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) had announced before the election that it would not take any seats and so its 14 elected representatives also abstained from participating in the Assembly and it was a failure. The 1982 election was followed by the 1983 Westminster election, in which Sinn Féin's vote increased and Adams was elected, as an abstentionist, as MP for Belfast West. It was in 1983 that Ruairí Ó Brádaigh resigned as President of Sinn Féin and was succeeded by Adams.

In 1983, Adams was elected president of Sinn Féin and became the first Sinn Féin MP elected to the British House of Commons since Phil Clarke and Tom Mitchell in the mid-1950s. Following his election as MP for Belfast West, the British government lifted a ban on his travelling to Great Britain. In line with Sinn Féin policy, he refused to take his seat in the House of Commons.

Assassination attempt by the UDA
On 14 March 1984 in central Belfast, Adams was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt when several Ulster Defence Association (UDA) gunmen fired about 20 shots into the car in which he was travelling. He was hit in the neck, shoulder and arm. He was rushed to the Royal Victoria Hospital, where he underwent surgery to remove three bullets. John Gregg and his team were apprehended almost immediately by a British Army patrol that opened fire on them before ramming their car. The attack had been known in advance by security forces due to a tip-off from informants within the UDA; Adams and his co-passengers had survived in part because RUC officers, acting on the informants' information, had replaced much of the ammunition in the UDA's Rathcoole weapons dump with low-velocity bullets. Some, including Adams himself, still have unanswered questions about the RUC's actions prior to the shooting. An Ulster Defence Regiment NCO subsequently received the Queen's Gallantry Medal for chasing and arresting an assailant.

President of Sinn Féin
Many republicans had long claimed that the only legitimate Irish state was the Irish Republic declared in the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic. In their view, the legitimate government was the IRA Army Council, which had been vested with the authority of that Republic in 1938 (prior to the Second World War) by the last remaining anti-Treaty deputies of the Second Dáil. In his 2005 speech to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in Dublin, Adams explicitly rejected this view. "But we refuse to criminalise those who break the law in pursuit of legitimate political objectives. ... Sinn Féin is accused of recognising the Army Council of the IRA as the legitimate government of this island. That is not the case. [We] do not believe that the Army Council is the government of Ireland. Such a government will only exist when all the people of this island elect it. Does Sinn Féin accept the institutions of this state as the legitimate institutions of this state? Of course we do."

As a result of this non-recognition, Sinn Féin had abstained from taking any of the seats they won in the British or Irish parliaments. At its 1986 Ard Fheis, Sinn Féin delegates passed a resolution to amend the rules and constitution that would allow its members to sit in the Dublin parliament. At this, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh led a small walkout, just as he and Sean Mac Stiofain had done sixteen years earlier with the creation of Provisional Sinn Féin. This minority, which rejected dropping the policy of abstentionism, now distinguishes itself from Sinn Féin by using the name Republican Sinn Féin, and maintains that they are the true Sinn Féin.

Adams' leadership of Sinn Féin was supported by a Northern-based cadre that included people like Danny Morrison and Martin McGuinness. Over time, Adams and others pointed to republican electoral successes in the early and mid-1980s, when hunger strikers Bobby Sands and Kieran Doherty were elected to the British House of Commons and Dáil Éireann respectively, and they advocated that Sinn Féin become increasingly political and base its influence on electoral politics rather than paramilitarism. The electoral effects of this strategy were shown later by the election of Adams and McGuinness to the House of Commons.

Voice ban
Adams's prominence as an Irish republican leader was increased by the 1988–1994 British broadcasting voice restrictions, which were imposed by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to "starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend". Thatcher was moved to act after BBC interviews of Martin McGuinness and Adams had been the focus of a row over an edition of After Dark, a proposed Channel 4 discussion programme which in the event was never made. While the ban covered 11 Irish political parties and paramilitary organisations, in practice it mostly affected Sinn Féin, the most prominent of these bodies.

A similar ban, known as Section 31, had been law in the Republic of Ireland since the 1970s. However, media outlets soon found ways around the bans. In the UK, this was initially by the use of subtitles, but later and more often by an actor reading words accompanied by video footage of the banned person speaking. Actors who voiced Adams included Stephen Rea and Paul Loughran. This loophole could not be used in the Republic, as word-for-word broadcasts were not allowed. Instead, the banned speaker's words were summarised by the newsreader, over video of them speaking.

These bans were lampooned in cartoons and satirical TV shows, such as Spitting Image, and in The Day Today, and were criticised by freedom of speech organisations and media personalities, including BBC Director General John Birt and BBC foreign editor John Simpson. The Republic's ban was allowed to lapse in January 1994, and the British ban was lifted by Prime Minister John Major in September 1994.

Movement into mainstream politics
Sinn Féin continued its policy of refusing to sit in the Westminster Parliament after Adams won the Belfast West constituency. He lost his seat to Joe Hendron of the SDLP in the 1992 general election, regaining it at the following 1997 election. Under Adams, Sinn Féin moved away from being a political voice of the Provisional IRA to becoming a professionally organised political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

SDLP leader John Hume identified the possibility that a negotiated settlement might be possible and began secret talks with Adams in 1988. These discussions led to unofficial contacts with the British Northern Ireland Office under the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, and with the government of the Republic under Charles Haughey – although both governments maintained in public that they would not negotiate with terrorists. These talks provided the groundwork for what was later to be the Belfast Agreement, preceded by the milestone Downing Street Declaration and the Joint Framework Document.

These negotiations led to the IRA ceasefire in August 1994. Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, who had replaced Haughey and who had played a key role in the Hume/Adams dialogue through his Special Advisor Martin Mansergh, regarded the ceasefire as permanent. However, the slow pace of developments contributed in part to the (wider) political difficulties of the British government of John Major. His consequent reliance on Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) votes in the House of Commons led to him agreeing with the UUP demand to exclude Sinn Féin from talks until the IRA had decommissioned its weapons. Sinn Féin's exclusion led the IRA to end its ceasefire and resume its campaign.

After the 1997 United Kingdom general election, the new Labour government had a majority in the House of Commons and was not reliant on unionist votes. The subsequent dropping of the insistence led to another IRA ceasefire, as part of the negotiations strategy, which saw teams from the British and Irish governments, the UUP, the SDLP, Sinn Féin, and representatives of loyalist paramilitary organisations, under the chairmanship of former United States Senator George Mitchell, produce the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Under the Agreement, structures were created reflecting the Irish and British identities of the people of Ireland, creating a British-Irish Council and a Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly.

Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic's constitution, which claimed sovereignty over all of Ireland, were reworded, and a power-sharing Executive Committee was provided for. As part of their deal, Sinn Féin agreed to abandon its abstentionist policy regarding a "six-county parliament", as a result taking seats in the new Stormont-based Assembly and running the education and health and social services ministries in the power-sharing government.

Sinn Féin in government
On 15 August 1998, four months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the Omagh bombing by the Real IRA, killed 29 people and injured 220, from many communities. Adams said in reaction to the bombing "I am totally horrified by this action. I condemn it without any equivocation whatsoever." Prior to this, Adams had not used the word "condemn" in relation to IRA or their splinter groups' actions.

When Sinn Féin came to nominate its two ministers to the Northern Ireland Executive, for tactical reasons the party, like the SDLP and the DUP, chose not to include its leader among its ministers. When later the SDLP chose a new leader, it selected one of its ministers, Mark Durkan, who then opted to remain in the committee.

Adams was re-elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly on 8 March 2007, and on 26 March 2007, he met with DUP leader Ian Paisley face-to-face for the first time. These talks led to the St Andrews Agreement, which brought about the return of the power-sharing Executive in Northern Ireland.

In January 2009, Adams attended the United States presidential inauguration of Barack Obama as a guest of US Congressman Richard Neal.

Election to Dáil Éireann

On 6 May 2010, Adams was re-elected as MP for West Belfast, garnering 71.1% of the vote. In 2010, Adams announced that he would be seeking election as a TD (member of Irish Parliament) for the constituency of Louth at the 2011 Irish general election. He subsequently resigned his West Belfast Assembly seat on 7 December 2010.

Following the announcement of the 2011 Irish general election, Adams resigned his seat at the House of Commons. He was elected to the Dáil, topping the Louth constituency poll with 15,072 (21.7%) first preference votes. He succeeded Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin as Sinn Féin parliamentary leader in Dáil Éireann. In December 2013, Adams was a member of the Guard of Honour at Nelson Mandela's funeral.

On 19 May 2015, while on an official royal trip to Ireland, Prince Charles shook Adams' hand in what was described as a highly symbolic gesture of reconciliation. The meeting, described as "historic", took place in Galway.

In September 2017, Adams said he would allow his name to go forward for a one-year term as president of Sinn Féin at the November ardfheis, at which point Sinn Féin would begin a "planned process of generational change, including [Adams'] own future intentions". This resulted in speculation in the Irish and British media that Adams was preparing to stand down as party leader, and that he might run for President of Ireland in the next election. At the ardfheis on 18 November, Adams was re-elected for another year as party president, but announced that he would step down at some point in 2018, and would not seek re-election as TD for Louth.

End of Sinn Féin presidency
Adams' presidency of Sinn Féin ended on 10 February 2018, with his stepping down and the election of Mary Lou McDonald as the party's new president.

On 13 July 2018, a home-made bomb was thrown at Adams' home in West Belfast, damaging a car parked in his driveway. Adams escaped injury and claimed that his two grandchildren were standing in the driveway only ten minutes before the blast. Another bomb was set off that same evening at the nearby home of former IRA volunteer and Sinn Féin official Bobby Storey. In a press conference the following day, Adams said he thought the attacks were linked to the riots in Derry, and asked that those responsible "come and sit down" and "give us the rationale for this action".

Personal life
In 1971, Adams married Collette McArdle. They have a son named Gearoid (born 1973), who has played Gaelic football for Antrim GAA senior men's team and became its assistant manager in 2012.

In October 2013, Adams' brother Liam was found guilty of 10 offences, including rape and gross indecency committed against his own daughter. When the allegations of abuse were first made public in a 2009 UTV programme, Gerry Adams subsequently alleged that his own father had subjected family members to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. On 27 November 2013, Liam was jailed for 16 years. Liam died of pancreatic cancer, aged 63, while in Maghaberry Prison, in February 2019.

On 1 May 2016, Adams sparked controversy by tweeting, "Watching Django Unchained-A Ballymurphy Nigger!" The tweet was criticised and subsequently deleted, with Adams apologising for the use of "nigger" the next day at Sinn Féin's Connolly House headquarters in Belfast. The tweet was widely reported in Irish, British, and American media. Adams said, "I stand over the context and main point of my tweet, which were the parallels between people in struggle. Like African Americans, Irish nationalists were denied basic rights. I have long been inspired by Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, who stood up for themselves and for justice." On 4 May, he said, "The whole thing was to make a political point. If I had left that word out, would the tweet have gotten any attention? ... I was paralleling the experiences of the Irish, not just in recent times but through the penal days when the Irish were sold as slaves, through the Cromwellian period." He was criticised for perpetuating what has been called the "Irish slaves myth", by equating the indentured servitude of the Irish with the chattel slavery of African Americans.

Media portrayals
Adams has been portrayed in a number of films, TV series, and books:
 * 1999 – The Marching Season, a spy fiction novel by Daniel Silva.
 * 2004 – film Omagh, with actor Jonathan Ryan, a dramatisation of the 1998 Omagh bombing and its aftermath.
 * 2010 – TV film Mo, with actor John Lynch, the story of Mo Mowlam and the Good Friday Agreement.
 * 2012 – The Cold Cold Ground, a crime novel by Adrian McKinty; Adams is interviewed by the book's main character after an associate is found murdered.
 * 2016 – film The Journey, with actor Ian Beattie.
 * 2017 – film The Foreigner, with actor Pierce Brosnan playing a former IRA leader who resembles Adams.

Published works

 * Falls Memories, 1982
 * The Politics of Irish Freedom, 1986
 * A Pathway to Peace, 1988
 * An Irish Voice: The Quest for Peace
 * Cage Eleven, 1990, Brandon Books, ISBN 978-0-86322-114-9
 * The Street and Other Stories, 1993, Brandon Books, ISBN 978-0-86322-293-1
 * Free Ireland: Towards a Lasting Peace, 1995
 * Before the Dawn: An Autobiography, 1996, Brandon Books, ISBN 978-0-434-00341-9
 * Selected Writings
 * Who Fears to Speak...?, 2001 (Original Edition 1991), Beyond the Pale Publications, ISBN 978-1-900960-13-7
 * An Irish Journal, 2001, Brandon Books, ISBN 978-0-86322-282-5
 * Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland, 2003, Brandon Books, ISBN 978-0-86322-330-3
 * A Farther Shore, 2005, Random House
 * The New Ireland: A Vision For The Future, 2005, Brandon Books, ISBN 978-0-86322-344-0
 * An Irish Eye, 2007, Brandon Books, ISBN 978-0-86322-370-9
 * My Little Book of Tweets, 2016, Mercier Press, ISBN 978-1-78117-449-4

title: Gerry Adams


text:
Grey (disambiguation)

Grey or gray is a neutral color between black and white.

Grey, greys, gray, or grays may also refer to:

Antarctica

 * Cape Gray
 * Grey Island (South Orkney Islands)

Australia

 * Gray, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
 * Grey, beach village near Cervantes, Western Australia
 * Division of Grey, electoral district

Canada

 * Grays Bay, Nunavut
 * Grey County, Ontario
 * Grey East (federal electoral district) former electoral district
 * Grey North (federal electoral district) former electoral district
 * Grey River, Newfoundland
 * Grey—Simcoe former electoral district
 * Grey South (federal electoral district) former electoral district
 * Grey Southeast former electoral district
 * Simcoe—Grey (federal electoral district) electoral district
 * Wellington—Grey former electoral district
 * West Grey, a municipality in Grey County, Ontario

New Zealand

 * Grey District, New Zealand
 * Grey River, New Zealand

United Kingdom

 * Grays, Essex, a town in Essex, England
 * Grays, Kent, a hamlet in Kent, England
 * Rotherfield Greys, a village and its parish in Oxfordshire, England

United States

 * Gray, Georgia
 * Gray, Iowa
 * Gray, Kentucky
 * Gray, Louisiana
 * Gray, Maine, a New England town
 * Gray (CDP), Maine, the main village in the town
 * Gray, Tennessee
 * Grays, Washington
 * Gray Army Airfield in Tacoma, Washington

Elsewhere

 * Grey Pond, Anguilla
 * Gray, Haute-Saône, France
 * Cape Gray, Greenland

People

 * Gray (singer) (born 1986), a South Korean hip hop recording artist and record producer
 * Gray (surname)
 * Grey (surname)
 * CGP Grey, educational YouTuber, podcaster and streamer
 * Gray Davis, former Governor of California
 * Gray Dorsey, American law professor
 * Gray Gaulding, American racing driver
 * Grey DeLisle, American voice actress and singer-songwriter

Animals

 * Gray (horse), sometimes mistaken for a white horse
 * Gray langur, Hanuman langur
 * Gray whale
 * Gray wolf, native to the wilderness and remote areas of Eurasia and North America
 * Grey peacock-pheasant, Burmese peacock
 * Grey seal, found on both shores of the North Atlantic Ocean
 * Grey parrot
 * Hadena caesia, grey moth

Plants

 * Kay Gray, grape

Fictional entities

 * Grey, a character in the manga series Black Clover
 * Gray, a DARPA operative in James Rollins' Sigma Force novels
 * Gray Fullbuster, a character in the manga series Fairy Tail
 * Gray Harkness, a character in the TV programme Torchwood
 * Jean Grey, a character from Marvel Comics
 * Lexie Grey, a character from Grey's Anatomy, often referred to as "Little Grey"
 * Mark Gray, a character in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series
 * Meredith Grey, a character from Grey's Anatomy, often referred to as "Grey"
 * Nate Grey aka X-Man, an alternate reality son of Jean Grey
 * Tina Gray, a character in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series
 * Grey Vincent, one of the main characters in the anime series Battle B-Daman
 * Emily Grey, a character in the machinima series Red Vs. Blue
 * Grey, a character in Mega Man ZX Advent
 * Alina Gray, a character in the RPG game, Magia Record
 * Gray, a character in Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Groups

 * Gray (band), an American experimental band
 * Grey (duo), an American electronic music duo

Albums

 * Grey (album), a 1987 album by Sandy Lam

Songs

 * "Grey", by the 69 Eyes from Paris Kills, 2002
 * "Grey", by Ani DiFranco from Revelling/Reckoning, 2001
 * "Grey", by BarlowGirl from Another Journal Entry, 2005
 * "Gray", by Demi Lovato from Dancing with the Devil... the Art of Starting Over, 2021
 * "Grey", by Fireflight from Glam-rök, 2002
 * "Grey", by Funeral for a Friend from Conduit, 2013
 * "Grey", by LeToya Luckett from Back 2 Life, 2017
 * "Grey", by Nasum from Inhale/Exhale, 1998
 * "Grey", by Neurosis from Pain of Mind, 1987
 * "Grey", by New Young Pony Club from Fantastic Playroom, 2007
 * "Grey", by Paradise Lost from Paradise Lost, 2005
 * "Grey", by Spineshank from Strictly Diesel, 1998
 * "Grey", by Strife from In This Defiance, 1997
 * "Grey", by Travis Scott from Days Before Rodeo, 2014
 * "Grey", by Why Don't We from The Good Times and the Bad Ones, 2021
 * "Grey", by Yellowcard from Lights and Sounds, 2006

Other arts, entertainment, and media

 * Grey (manga), a Japanese comic
 * Grey (novel), a 2015 book by E.L. James
 * The Grey (film), a 2011 thriller film

Brands and enterprises

 * Grey Global Group, an advertising agency founded in 1917
 * Gray Light Car, an unsuccessful Colorado cyclecar from 1920
 * Gray Marine Motor Company, a defunct American manufacturer that specialized in marine and automobile engines
 * Gray Television, an American publicly traded television broadcasting company based in Atlanta, Georgia

Army

 * Royal Scots Greys cavalry regiment of the British Army from 1707 to 1971
 * The Grays, the Confederate States of America's armed forces

Navy

 * USS Gray (FF-1054), a United States Navy frigate in commission from 1970 to 1991
 * USS John P. Gray (APD-74), ex-DE-673, a United States Navy high-speed frigate in commission from 1944 to 1946

Sport

 * Grays International, a UK-based sports company
 * Grey Cup, a trophy awarded in the Canadian Football League
 * Homestead Grays, Negro league baseball dynasty
 * Louisville Grays, one of the original eight members of the National League
 * Providence Grays, a Major League Baseball team that folded in 1885
 * Providence Grays (minor league), the name of several minor league baseball teams between 1886 and 1949

Technology and science

 * Gray (unit), the SI unit of energy for absorbed dose of radiation
 * Gray code, an encoding method used to minimise bit change between adjacent values
 * Grey box testing, a step in software development

Other uses

 * Grey aliens, an alleged race of extraterrestrial aliens
 * Grey College, Durham, a college of the University of Durham
 * The Gray, another name for the Astral Plane or Spirit World

title: Grey (disambiguation)