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John Hartford

John Cowan Hartford (December 30, 1937 – June 4, 2001) was an American folk, country, and bluegrass composer and musician known for his mastery of the fiddle and banjo, as well as for his witty lyrics, unique vocal style, and extensive knowledge of Mississippi River lore. His most successful song is "Gentle on My Mind", which won three Grammy Awards and was listed in "BMI's Top 100 Songs of the Century". Hartford performed with a variety of ensembles throughout his career, and is perhaps best known for his solo performances where he would interchange the guitar, banjo, and fiddle from song to song. He also invented his own shuffle tap dance move, and clogged on an amplified piece of plywood while he played and sang.

He was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2010.

Early life
Harford (he changed his name to Hartford later in life on the advice of Chet Atkins) was born on December 30, 1937, in New York City to parents Carl and Mary Harford. He spent his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was exposed to the influence that shaped much of his career and music: the Mississippi River. From the time he got his first job on the river, at age 16, Hartford was on, around, or singing about the river.

His early musical influences came from the broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry and included Earl Scruggs, nominal inventor of the three-finger bluegrass style of banjo playing. Hartford said often that the first time he heard Earl Scruggs pick the banjo, it changed his life. By age 13, Hartford was an accomplished old-time fiddler and banjo player, and he soon learned to play guitar and mandolin as well. Hartford performed with his first bluegrass band while attending John Burroughs School, a local private high school.

After high school, he enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, completed four years of a commercial arts program and dropped out to focus on music; however, he did receive a degree in 1960. He immersed himself in the local music scene, working as a DJ, playing in bands, and occasionally recording singles for local labels.

Music career
In 1965, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, the center of the country music industry. In 1966, he signed with RCA Victor and produced his first album, Looks at Life, in the same year.

In 1967, Hartford's second album Earthwords & Music spawned his first major songwriting hit, "Gentle on My Mind". His recording of the song was only a modest success, but it caught the notice of Glen Campbell, who recorded his own version, which gave the song much wider publication. At the 1968 Grammys, the song netted four awards, two of which went to Hartford. It became one of the most widely recorded country songs of all time, and the royalties it brought in allowed Hartford great financial independence; Hartford later said that the song bought his freedom.

As his popularity grew, he moved to the West Coast, where he became a regular on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour; other television appearances followed, as did recording appearances with several major country artists. Hartford played banjo and sang the vocal harmonies on the Guthrie Thomas song "I'll be Lucky". He also played with The Byrds on their album Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

His success on the Smothers Brothers series was enough that Hartford was offered the lead role in a TV detective series, but he turned it down to move back to Nashville and concentrate on music. He also was a regular on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (as the banjo picker who would stand up from his seat in the audience to begin the theme music) and The Johnny Cash Show.

In live performances, John Hartford was a true one-man band; he used several stringed instruments and a variety of props such as plywood squares and boards with sand and gravel for flatfoot dancing.

Newgrass
Hartford recorded four more albums for RCA from 1968 to 1970: The Love Album, Housing Project, John Hartford, and Iron Mountain Depot. In 1971, he moved to Warner Bros. Records, where he was given more freedom to record in his nontraditional style, fronting a band that included Vassar Clements, Tut Taylor, and Norman Blake. He recorded several albums that set the tone of his later career, including Aereo-Plain and Morning Bugle. Sam Bush said, "Without Aereo-Plain (and the Aereo-Plain band), there would be no newgrass music."

He switched to the Flying Fish label several years later and continued to experiment with nontraditional country and bluegrass styles. Among his recordings were two albums in 1977 and 1980 with Doug and Rodney Dillard from The Dillards, with Sam Bush as a backing musician and featuring a diversity of songs that included "Boogie On Reggae Woman" and "Yakety Yak". Hartford's Grammy-winning Mark Twang features Hartford playing solo, reminiscent of his live solo performances playing the fiddle, guitar, banjo, and amplified plywood for tapping his feet. At the same time, he developed a stage show, which toured in various forms from the mid 1970s until shortly before his death.

Hartford changed recording labels several more times during his career; in 1991, he inaugurated his own Small Dog a'Barkin' label. Later in the 1990s, he switched again to Rounder Records. He recorded a number of idiosyncratic records on Rounder, many of which recalled earlier forms of folk and country music. Among them was the 1999 album Retrograss recorded with Mike Seeger and David Grisman, with bluegrass versions of "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay", "Maybellene", "When I'm Sixty-Four", and "Maggie's Farm".

He recorded several songs for the soundtrack to the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, winning another Grammy for his performance. He made his final tour in 2000 with the Down from the Mountain tour that grew out of that movie and its accompanying album. While performing in Texas in April, he found that he could no longer control his hands due to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which ended his life two months later.

Hartford is considered a co-founder of the newgrass movement, although he remained deeply attached to traditional music as well. His last band and last few albums reflect his love for pre-bluegrass old-time music.

Steamboating
The culture of the Mississippi River and its steamboats captivated Hartford from an early age. He said that it would have been his life's work "but music got in the way", so he intertwined them whenever possible. In the '70s, Hartford earned his steamboat pilot's license, which he used to keep close to the river he loved; for many years, he worked as a pilot on the steamboat Julia Belle Swain during the summers. He also worked as a towboat pilot on the Mississippi, Illinois, and Tennessee Rivers.

During his later years, he came back to the river every summer. "Working as a pilot is a labor of love", he said. "After a while, it becomes a metaphor for a whole lot of things, and I find for some mysterious reason that if I stay in touch with it, things seem to work out all right". His home in Madison, Tennessee, was situated on a bend of the Cumberland River and built to simulate the view from a steamboat deck. He used to talk to the boat captains by radio as their barges crawled along the river. That bend of the Cumberland River, known as "Hartford's Bend" or "John Hartford Point," is denoted on official navigational charts with the "John Hartford Light".

An accomplished fiddler and banjo player, Hartford was simultaneously an innovative voice on the country scene and a reminder of a vanished era. Along with his own compositions, such as "Long Hot Summer Days" and "Kentucky Pool", Hartford was a repository of old river songs, calls, and stories. His song "Let Him Go on Mama" from Mark Twang was inspired by retired Streckfus Steamers musician (and later chief engineer of the Delta Queen) Mike O’Leary. Hartford was also the author of Steamboat in a Cornfield, a children's book that recounts the true story of the Ohio River steamboat The Virginia and its beaching in a cornfield.

Final years and legacy
Between 1995 and 2001, Brandon Ray Kirk and he co-authored a biography of blind fiddler Ed Haley. Hartford's album The Speed of the Old Longbow is a collection of Haley's tunes. Writer and arts administrator Art Menius profiled Hartford in the Academia journal article, "John Hartford as I Knew Him," saying "John connected not just words to music, but the old days of Nashville to its present, tradition to innovation, new grass to bluegrass to old-time, television to radio, river to shore, aging musicians to hippies. Goethe may have been the last person to know everything worth knowing, but John Hartford tried." Hartford also provided voice acting for the Ken Burns' documentary series Baseball and The Civil War.

From the 1980s onwards, Hartford had non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He died of the disease at Centennial Medical Center in Nashville, on June 4, 2001, at age 63. Hartford was given a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in honor of his work. He also was given a posthumous president's award by the Americana Music Association in September 2005. The annual John Hartford Memorial Festival was held in southern Indiana from 2011-2019 and in 2022.

Hartford acknowledged that the royalties he earned from “Gentle” allowed him to live the life he wanted as a musician, author, folklorist and steamboat pilot. The FT commented that 'his song about freedom ensured his own freedom.'

Personal life
Hartford was initially married to Betty and later to Marie, who survived him. He has a son and daughter.

Works
Hartford recorded more than 30 albums, ranging across a broad spectrum of styles, from the traditional country of his early RCA recordings, to the new and experimental sound of his early newgrass recordings, to the traditional folk style to which he often returned later in his life. Hartford's albums also vary widely in formality, from the stately and orderly Annual Waltz to the rougher and less cut recordings that typified many of his later albums.

Aereo-Plain and Morning Bugle are often considered to be Hartford's most influential works, coming as they did at the beginning of a period in which artists such as Hartford and the New Grass Revival, led by Sam Bush, would create a new form of country music, blending their country backgrounds with influences from a number of other sources. His later years had a number of live albums, as well as recordings that explored the repertoire of old-time folk music. He sketched the cover art for some of his midcareer albums, drawing with both hands simultaneously.

Hartford is also a published author, including 1971's collection of poetry Word Movies and 1986's Steamboat in a Cornfield, a poetic retelling of a steamboat running aground along the Ohio River.

In popular culture
His song "This Eve of Parting", from the 1968 album The Love Album, was featured in the 2017 movie Lady Bird, portions being heard at two different points in the film.

Cartoonist Jim Scancarelli was a fan, and mentioned Hartford several times in his strip Gasoline Alley. In 1991, a flood washes up a steamboat carrying Hartford; in 1998, he played at Rufus and Melba's wedding reception; and in 2002, when Skeezix and Slim are lost in a cemetery, Hartford's gravestone is seen.

The third track on the album A Tear in the Eye Is a Wound in the Heart by the band Black Prairie, of Portland, Oregon, is entitled "For the Love of John Hartford," an instrumental.

title: John Hartford


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Balasagun

Balasagun (Баласагун or Баласагын Balasagyn; ) was an ancient Sogdian city in modern-day Kyrgyzstan, located in the Chüy Valley between Bishkek and the Issyk-Kul lake. Located along the Silk Road, the ruins of the city were inscribed in 2014 on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor World Heritage Site.

Balasagun was founded by the Sogdians, a people of Iranian origin and the Sogdian language was still in use in this town until the 11th century.

It was the capital of the Kara-Khanid Khanate from the 10th century until it was taken by the Qara Khitai (Western Liao dynasty) in 1134. It was then captured by the Mongols in 1218. The Mongols called it Gobalik "Pretty City". It should not be confused with Karabalghasun, now Ordu-Baliq in Mongolia, which was the capital of the Uyghur Khaganate.

Founded by the Kara-Khanid Khanate in the ninth century, Balasagun soon supplanted Suyab as the main political and economical centre of the Chüy Valley; its prosperity declined after the Mongol conquest. The poet Yūsuf Balasaguni, known for writing the Kutadgu Bilig, is thought to have been born in Balasagun in the 11th century. The city also had a sizable Nestorian Christian population; one graveyard was still in use in the 14th century. Since the 14th century, Balasagun is a village with plenty of ruins 12 km southeast of Tokmok.

The Burana zone, located at the edge of Tokmok and 6 km from the present village of Balasagun, was the west end of the ancient city. It includes the Burana Tower and a field of stone petroglyphs, the Kurgan stelae. The Burana Tower is a minaret built in the 11th century on the ruins of the ancient city Balasagun. It is 24 m in height, though when it was first built it topped 46 m. Several earthquakes through the centuries caused much damage, and the current building represents a major renovation carried out in the 1970s.

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

title: Balasagun


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Islam in the African diaspora

The practice of Islam by members of the African diaspora may be a consequence of African Muslims retaining their religion after leaving Africa (as for many Muslims in Europe) or of people of African ethnicity converting to Islam, as among many African-American Muslims, where conversion is often presented as a recovery of an African heritage lost during the Atlantic slave trade. In many regions, African-diaspora Muslims are an intersectional minority, and may face both racism and anti-Islam sentiment.

Islam has been in many countries of Africa for a long time. It came about more popularly in Northern Africa up until around the 8th century when the religion began to head south and west. It spread across many countries there from the 8th century to the 29th century where we can see it in many modern countries there now. The states that Islam was able to spread through and begin to influence were Senegal, Gambia, Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Nigeria. It is even seen today in many of those countries that there is still that presence and some influence of Islam. Researchers also believe that it is very likely that Ilsa was able to spread into Africa due to trade throughout the Mediterranean Sea. It is a known fact that throughout history trade has been one of the biggest forms of communication and a very useful pathway as people trade more than just goods, but also practices and religious traditions that others tend to pick up and want to be a part of. It is likely that without this international trade across the Med that Islam would not have been able to spread from these more typical Muslim countries to other countries not as commonly associated with Islam in the first place.

Aside from just trade as the most popular way that Islam made its way into Western Africa, there were also religious teachers or even Islamic missionaries that were looking to spread their faith as far and as wide as they can. Many religions are called to spread the world of their faith and these Muslims were doing just that, trying to get their works out to as many people and group the popularity of their faith and religion. It is interesting to compare the way religion spread at this time versus now, especially with how effective this ended up being in a world that likely had many struggles communicated when they were first interacting and trading with each other. Without all of this trade, Islam would not have been able to spread to the vast number of people it did in Africa and in turn not make its influence on the people and other religions of that area.

An article by the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative mentioned how some of these northern and west African kings converted to Islam themselves when the spreading happened, and those that did not convert were completely fine with allowing others to practice this newly introduced religion. The article goes on to mention that the mass number of conversions to Islam would not end up happening until much later around the 17th century. It continues on explaining how as more and more people converted, new practices were developed and some older ones were left behind. In other words, as the religion grew it began to change and evolve into one that more and more people wanted to be a part of. They were able to make some changes that made more sense to them and keep the religion intriguing and popular within the newer countries.

It is very well known that many religious practices and other African traditions and ways of life were brought to America through the slave trade. Islam is no special case, as the religion was brought from Africa to the Caribbean and the United States in the exact same way. An article by Enslaved and Freed African Muslims: Spiritual Wayfarers in the South and Lowcount, anywhere from fifteen to thirty percent of the enslaved people that were brought to the Americas through the slave trade practiced some form of Islam and shared in their religious practices. Because of facts like this, claims can be made that this is how Islam first got the Americans and how it was able to grow and infiltrate its practices and ideas into other slaves who may not have come from those same western African countries. As stated earlier Islam spread throughout west Africa and influenced some of the other practices in those religions which would lead to even more influence from Islam once those people with their religions were forced to come to the Americas.

The slave trade would be the reason for the first strong presence of Muslims and Islam in the United States. These slaves continued to practice and preach their traditions and ways of life and pass them on to their friends and families growing the culture and religion. These same Lowcountry articles continue to go on and talk about how Americans today only picture middle eastern people and even the violent terrorist groups that come from some of those counties when thinking about Islam. But in reality, Islam had been in this country for so many years prior to these groups and stereotypes and that people tend to forget about how Islam arrived in this country in the first place. Without the first presence of Muslims coming from the slave trade, it is very unlikely that Islam would have been able to spread and have an influence as much as it does in the country today. Islam was likely an escape for these slaves as it was something from their home and roots that they could continue to practice and live through to keep their heritage and beliefs alive. It is just sad that this is the first reason that Islam came to the Americans.

title: Islam in the African diaspora


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USS Arizona

USS Arizona was a battleship built for the United States Navy in the mid-1910s. Named in honor of the 48th state, she was the second and last ship in the Pennsylvania-class battleship. After being commissioned in 1916, Arizona remained stateside during World War I but escorted President Woodrow Wilson to the subsequent Paris Peace Conference. The ship was deployed abroad again in 1919 to represent American interests during the Greco-Turkish War. Two years later, she was transferred to the Pacific Fleet, under which the ship would remain for the rest of her career.

The 1920s and 1930s saw Arizona regularly deployed for training exercises, including the annual Fleet Problems, excluding a comprehensive modernization between 1929 and 1931. The ship supported relief efforts in the wake of a 1933 earthquake near Long Beach, California, and was later filmed for a role in the 1934 James Cagney film Here Comes the Navy before budget cuts led to significant periods in port from 1936 to 1938. In April 1940, the Pacific Fleet's home port was moved from California to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as a deterrent to Japanese imperialism.

On 7 December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Arizona was hit by several air-dropped armor-piercing bombs. One detonated an explosive-filled magazine, sinking the battleship and killing 1,177 of its officers and crewmen. Unlike many of the other ships attacked that day, Arizona was so irreparably damaged that it was not repaired for service in World War II. The shipwreck still lies at the bottom of Pearl Harbor beneath the USS Arizona Memorial. Dedicated to all those who died during the attack, the memorial is built across the ship's remains.

Description
The Pennsylvania-class ships were significantly larger than their predecessors, the Nevada-class battleship. Arizona had an overall length of 608 ft, a beam of 97 ft (at the waterline), and a draft of 29 ft at deep load. This was 25 ft longer than the older ships. She displaced 29158 LT at standard and 31917 LT at deep load, over 4000 LT more than the older ships. The ship had a metacentric height of 7.82 ft at deep load. Her crew numbered 56 officers and 1,031 enlisted men as built.

The ship had four direct-drive Parsons steam turbine sets, each of which drove a propeller 12 ft in diameter using steam provided by twelve Babcock & Wilcox boilers. The turbines were designed to produce a total of 34000 shp, but achieved only 33376 shp during Arizona's sea trials, when she met her designed speed of 21 kn. However, she did manage to reach 21.5 kn during a full-power trial in September 1924. She was designed to carry enough fuel oil to steam at a speed of 12 knots for 8000 nmi with a clean bottom. She had four 300 kW turbo generators.

Arizona carried twelve 45-caliber 14-inch guns in triple gun turrets. The turrets were numbered from I to IV from front to rear. Defense against torpedo boats was provided by twenty-two 51-caliber 5 in guns mounted in individual casemates in the sides of the ship's hull. Positioned as they were they proved vulnerable to sea spray and could not be worked in heavy seas. The ship mounted four 50-caliber 3 in guns for anti-aircraft defense, although only two were fitted when completed. The other pair was added shortly afterwards on top of Turret III. Arizona also mounted two 21 in torpedo tubes underwater, one on each broadside, and carried 24 torpedoes for them.

The Pennsylvania-class design continued the all-or-nothing principle of armoring only the most important areas of the ship begun in the Nevada class. The waterline armor belt of Krupp armor measured 13.5 in thick and covered only the ship's machinery spaces and magazines. It had a total height of 17 ft, of which 8 ft was below the waterline; beginning 2 ft below the waterline, the belt tapered to its minimum thickness of 8 in. The transverse bulkheads at each end of the ship ranged from 13 to 8 inches in thickness. The faces of the gun turrets were 18 in thick while the sides were 9 - 10 in thick and the turret roofs were protected by 5 in of armor. The armor of the barbettes was 18 to 4.5 in thick. The conning tower was protected by 16 in of armor and had a roof eight inches thick.

The main armor deck was three plates thick with a total thickness of 3 inches; over the steering gear the armor increased to 6.25 in in two plates. Beneath it was the splinter deck that ranged from 1.5 to 2 in in thickness. The boiler uptakes were protected by a conical mantlet that ranged from 9 to 15 in in thickness. A three-inch torpedo bulkhead was placed 9 ft inboard from the ship's side and the ship was provided with a complete double bottom. Testing in mid-1914 revealed that this system could withstand 300 lb of TNT.

Construction and trials

The keel of battleship number 39 (hull number: BB-39) was laid on the morning of 16 March 1914 with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt in attendance. The builders intended to set a world-record ten months between the ship's keel-laying and launch, for what The New York Times declared would be "the world's biggest and most powerful, both offensively and defensively, superdreadnought [sic] ever constructed," but the ship was only a little over half complete a year later. She was launched on 19 June 1915, making it about fifteen months from keel-laying to launch. In the meantime, the ship was named after the newest state in the union by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.

The New York Times estimated that 75,000 people attended the launch, including John Purroy Mitchel, the mayor of New York City, George W. P. Hunt, the governor of Arizona, and many high-ranking military officials. Several warships were also nearby, including many of the new dreadnoughts which had already entered service (USS Florida (BB-30), USS Utah (BB-31), USS Wyoming (BB-32), USS Arkansas (BB-33), USS New York (BB-34), and USS Texas (BB-35)). Esther Ross, the daughter of W. W. Ross of Prescott, Arizona, was given the honors of ship sponsor and christening. To acknowledge a ban on alcohol recently passed by the state legislature, the state's governor decided that two bottles would be used: one full of sparkling wine from Ohio, and another filled with water from the Roosevelt Dam. After the launch, Arizona was towed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for fitting-out.

Arizona was commissioned into the Navy on 17 October 1916 with Captain John McDonald in command. She departed New York on 10 November 1916 after the crew had cleaned the ship and the propulsion system had been tested at the dock. After declinating the ship's magnetic compasses, the ship sailed south for her shakedown cruise. Outside Guantanamo Bay, a stripped turbine on 7 December forced the navy to order Arizona back to New York for repairs, although she was able to enter Chesapeake Bay to test her main and secondary gun batteries on 19–20 December. The turbine could not be repaired inside the ship, so the yard workers had to cut holes in the upper decks to lift the damaged casing out. It was reinstalled after almost four months of repairs at the naval yard.

World War I
Arizona left the yard on 3 April 1917, and three days later, the United States declared war on Germany. Assigned to Battleship Division 8 operating out of the York River, Arizona was employed only as a gunnery training ship for the crewmen on armed merchant vessels crossing the Atlantic in convoys. Shortly after the war began, eight of her 5-inch guns (the four guns farthest forward and the sternmost four guns) were removed to equip merchant ships. When the ship sailed near the wreck of the old San Marcos (ex-Texas), the wreck was sometimes used as a target for the 14-inch guns. Arizona rarely ventured into the ocean for fear of U-boats, and when she did, it was only in the company of other battleships and escort ships. Four coal-fired American dreadnoughts (it was easier to obtain coal than oil in the United Kingdom) were eventually sent across the Atlantic in December 1917 as Battleship Division Nine, but Arizona was not among them. Life for Arizona's crew was not all training, as the race-boat team from Arizona was able to win the Battenberg Cup in July 1918 by beating the team from USS Nevada (BB-36) by three lengths over the three-mile course.

The fighting ended on 11 November 1918 with an armistice. A week later, the ship left the United States for the United Kingdom, arriving on 30 November 1918. After two weeks berthed at Portland Harbor in Dorset, Arizona sailed for France. On 13 December 1918, Arizona joined nine battleships and twenty-eight destroyers escorting President Woodrow Wilson on the ocean liner SS George Washington into Brest for one day on Wilson's journey to the Paris Peace Conference. The ten battleships departed France the next day, taking less than two weeks to cross the Atlantic, and arrived in New York on 26 December to parades, celebrations, and a full naval review by Secretary Daniels. Arizona was the first in line and rendered a nineteen-gun salute to Daniels. Along with many of the other members of the recently returned fleet, she was anchored off New York City for the next several weeks and open to the public.

Post-war and the 1920s
Arizona sailed from New York for Hampton Roads on 22 January 1919; she continued south to Guantanamo Bay on 4 February and arrived on four days later. The time in Caribbean waters was mostly used in training for battles and fleet maneuvering, although it included a liberty visit to Port of Spain. In April, Arizona's crew won the Battenberg Cup rowing competition for the second straight year before the ship was deployed to France once again to escort President Wilson back to the United States. While the ship was awaiting Wilson's departure, she was redeployed to Smyrna (now İzmir) in Turkey in response to tensions between Greece and Italy over the awarding of Smyrna to Greece in the Paris Peace Treaty. The Greek and Italian governments had each deployed a major warship to the area (Georgios Averof and Duilio, respectively) to enforce their interests. Shortly after Arizona arrived, Greek ground forces arrived in transports and were off-loaded in the port. The resultant chaos in the city caused many American citizens in the area to seek shelter on board Arizona.

When the crisis abated, Arizona was ordered to Constantinople (now Istanbul) before she sailed for home on 15 June. She put into the New York Navy Yard on 30 June for an overhaul, where six 5-inch guns were removed and the fire control system was modernized. Work was completed in January 1920 and the battleship sailed south to Guantanamo Bay for crew training. During this time, Arizona was fitted with a flying-off platform similar to the one given to Texas in March 1919. In April, Arizona lost the Battenberg Cup to Nevada, and in June she was present for the Naval Academy's graduation ceremonies. In August she became the flagship of Battleship Division Seven, although it was only later in 1920 that the battleship was refitted to be an admiral's flagship.

In company with six battleships and eighteen destroyers, Arizona was sent south again to transit the Panama Canal in January 1921. After meeting up with the Pacific Fleet, Arizona continued on to Peru for a week before the two fleets combined to practice battle maneuvers. After a short return to the Atlantic, which included an overhaul in New York, Arizona, under the command of Jehu V. Chase, returned to Peru in the summer before she began operating from her new home port of San Pedro, California, part of Los Angeles, where she was based until 1940.

For the rest of the 1920s, Arizona's service consisted of routine training exercises. Naval historian Paul Stillwell remarked that "the Pacific years included a great deal of sameness and repetition", and his chronology of the ship's movements is filled with phrases like "torpedo-defense practice", "battle-practice rehearsal", "gunnery practice", "en route to…", and "anchored at…". A recurring theme in these years were the annual Fleet Problems, which began in 1923 and simulated large fleet actions by having most of the active fleet face off against each other. The first two simulated an attack on the Panama Canal from the west, while in 1925 they attempted to defend the Hawaiian Islands. Other 1920s Fleet Problems included the Caribbean, near Central America, the West Indies, and Hawaii. On 27 July 1923 the ship, under command of John Y.R. Blakely, joined President Warren G. Harding's naval review in Seattle. Harding died just one week later, and Arizona joined the Pacific Fleet to fire a salute in his honor on 3 August.

Sometime in early March 1924 a prostitute named Madeline Blair stowed away aboard Arizona, trading sex for a free voyage to San Pedro until she was discovered on 12 April while the ship was anchored in Balboa, Panama. She was sent back to New York City and Captain Percy Olmstead later convened courts-martial for 23 sailors once the ship began her refit in the Bremerton Navy Yard, which imposed sentences of up to 10 years imprisonment. Admiral Henry A. Wiley, commander of the Battle Fleet, issued a letter of reprimand to all officers of the ship, including future Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke, then an ensign. Admiral William V. Pratt, then in command of the division to which Arizona was assigned, thought the penalties excessive, and he ordered the reprimands stricken from the officer's records when he became Chief of Naval Operations in 1930.

Modernization
Four months after Fleet Problem IX in January 1929, Arizona was modernized at the Norfolk Navy Yard. New tripod masts, surmounted by three-tiered fire-control directors for the main and secondary armament, replaced the old hyperboloid cage masts; the number of five-inch guns was reduced to 12 and the guns re-positioned one deck higher, and eight 25-caliber five-inch anti-aircraft guns replaced the three-inch guns with which she had been originally equipped. These changes increased her crew to 92 officers and 1,639 enlisted men. The ship's main gun turrets were modified to increase the maximum elevation of their guns to 30°. The compressed-air catapult on the quarterdeck was replaced by one that used black powder. Her deck armor was increased by the addition of a 1.75 in thickness of Special Treatment Steel, and the ship was bulged to protect her from torpedoes. An additional bulkhead was added to the sides of the boiler rooms for the same purpose. At the same stroke, her own outfit of two submerged torpedo tubes was removed during this refit in light of a new appreciation that anticipated battleship engagement ranges made their future use improbable. This alteration also permitted the large transverse flat in which the tubes had been situated to be subdivided to reduce risks of flooding in action. Arizona's machinery was almost entirely replaced; her high-pressure turbines were replaced by more powerful geared turbines from the canceled battleship USS Washington (BB-47), and six new boilers replaced her originals. Their additional power offset the ship's increased displacement as demonstrated during her sea trials; Arizona made 20.7 kn with 35081 shp at a displacement of 37654 lt.

1930s
On 19 March 1931, even before Arizona was put through post-modernization sea trials, she hosted President Herbert Hoover for a brief vacation in the Caribbean. The President visited Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Returning on 29 March, Arizona conducted her sea trials at Rockland, Maine, and had another catapult fitted on the top of Turret III, before she was transferred to the West Coast in August with her sister Pennsylvania. In February 1932, the ship participated in Grand Joint Exercise No. 4 in which carrier aircraft successfully attacked Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning, 7 February. After returning to the West Coast from Fleet Problem XIV in 1933, the ship was anchored in San Pedro when an earthquake struck nearby Long Beach, California, on 10 March. Sailors from the ship joined the relief efforts, providing food, treating the injured, and providing security from looters.

In early 1934, the ship and her crew were filmed for the James Cagney/Warner Brothers film Here Comes the Navy, which made extensive use of exterior footage as well as on-board location shots. In the early morning of 26 July, Arizona collided with a fishing trawler, Umatilla, that was under tow by another trawler off Cape Flattery. Two men aboard Umatilla were killed in the collision and the Navy convened a Court of Inquiry to investigate the incident. The court recommended that the ship's captain, Captain MacGillivray Milne, be court-martialed. This took place at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, while the ship was participating in that year's Fleet Problem off the East Coast. Milne was judged guilty and replaced several months later by Captain George Baum after the ship returned to the West Coast. In the meantime, Rear Admiral Samuel W. Bryant assumed command of Battleship Division Two on 4 September, with Arizona as his flagship.

Rear Admiral George T. Pettengill relieved Bryant on 4 March 1935 and the ship participated in Fleet Problem XVI two months later. Arizona made a port visit to Balboa in May 1936 during Fleet Problem XVII. On 8 June, Captain George A. Alexander relieved Baum as captain, and, 15 days later, Rear Admiral Claude C. Bloch relieved Pettengill. During gunnery practice on 24 July, the combustion gases from one gun of Turret II entered the gun turret, burning one crewman. The turret's sprinkling system was turned on to prevent any powder explosion, but the released water leaked into the turret's electrical switchboard and started a small fire that was easily put out. Due to the navy's limited budget, the ship spent most of this period in port as a fuel-saving measure. In Fiscal Year 1936–37, the ship was anchored for 267 days; the following year it was in port for 255 days. The ship spent the rest of her career based on the West Coast or in Hawaii. On 2 January 1937, Rear Admiral John Greenslade assumed command of Battleship Division Two from Bloch and transferred his flag to the battleship USS Maryland (BB-46) on 13 April. Rear Admiral Manley H. Simons, commander of Battleship Division One, transferred his flag to Arizona on 7 August. He was relieved by Rear Admiral Adolphus E. Watson on 8 November. Captain Alfred Winsor Brown relieved Baum on 11 December. The ship participated in Fleet Problem XIX off Hawaii in April–May 1938. Captain Brown died in his sleep on 7 September and Captain Isaac C. Kidd assumed command of the ship on 17 September 1938. That same day, Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz assumed command of Battleship Division One. Nimitz was relieved on 27 May 1939 by Rear Admiral Russell Willson. Captain Harold C. Train assumed command of the ship on 5 February 1940.

Arizona's last fleet problem was off Hawaii in April–May 1940. At its conclusion, the United States Pacific Fleet was retained in Hawaiian waters, based at Pearl Harbor, to deter the Japanese. She was overhauled at the Puget Sound Navy Yard, Bremerton, Washington, from October 1940 to January 1941. During this refit, the foundation for a search radar was added atop her foremast, her anti-aircraft directors were upgraded and a platform for four water-cooled .50 in caliber M2 Browning machine guns was installed at the very top of the mainmast. Her last flag change-of-command occurred on 23 January 1941, when Willson was relieved by Isaac Kidd, by that time a rear admiral.

Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh relieved Train on 5 February 1941. On 22 October 1941, during an exercise taking place in heavy fog, the ship was hit in the bow by the USS Oklahoma (BB-37). Arizona had been scheduled to depart for Bremerton Navy Yard in November to undergo an overhaul. The accident instead required her to be dry-docked at Pearl Harbour for repairs to the collision damage. As a result, she remained in Hawaii. The ship's last sortie was a night-firing exercise on the night of 4 December as part of Battleship Division One, alongside Nevada and Oklahoma. All three ships moored at quays along Ford Island on the following day. On 6 December, the repair ship USS Vestal (AR-4) came alongside to assist the ship's crew with minor repairs.

Attack on Pearl Harbor

Shortly before 08:00 local time on 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft from six aircraft carriers struck the Pacific Fleet as it lay in port at Pearl Harbor, and wreaked devastation on the warships and installations defending Hawaii. On board Arizona, the ship's air raid alarm went off at about 07:55, and the ship went to general quarters soon after. Shortly after 08:00, ten Nakajima B5N2 "Kate" torpedo bombers, five each from the carriers JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Kaga and JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Hiryū, attacked Arizona. All of the aircraft were carrying 41 cm armor-piercing shells modified into 797 kg bombs. Flying at an estimated altitude of 3000 m, Kaga's aircraft bombed Arizona from amidships to stern. Soon after, Hiryū's bombers hit the bow area.

The aircraft scored four hits and three near misses on and around Arizona. The near miss off the port bow is thought to have caused observers to believe that the ship had been torpedoed, although no torpedo damage has been found. The sternmost bomb ricocheted off the face of Turret IV and penetrated the deck to detonate in the captain's pantry, causing a small fire. The next forward most hit was near the port edge of the ship, abreast the mainmast, probably detonating in the area of the anti-torpedo bulkhead. The next bomb struck near the port rear 5-inch AA gun.

Magazine explosion
The last bomb hit at 08:06 in the vicinity of Turret II, likely penetrating the armored deck near the magazines located in the forward section of the ship. While not enough of the ship is intact to judge the exact location, its effects are indisputable: about seven seconds after the hit, the forward magazines detonated in a cataclysmic explosion, mostly venting through the sides of the ship and destroying much of the interior structure of the forward part of the ship. This caused the forward turrets and conning tower to collapse downward some 25 - 30 ft and the foremast and funnel to collapse forward, effectively tearing the ship in two. The explosion touched off fierce fires that burned for two days; debris showered down on Ford Island in the vicinity. The blast from this explosion also put out fires on the repair ship Vestal, which was moored alongside. The bombs and subsequent explosion killed 1,177 of the 1,512 crewmen on board at the time, approximately half of the lives lost during the attack.

Two competing hypotheses have arisen about the cause of the explosion. The first is that the bomb detonated in or near the black-powder magazine used for the ship's saluting guns and catapult charges. This would have detonated first and then ignited the smokeless powder magazines which were used for the ship's main armament. A 1944 Navy Bureau of Ships report suggests that a hatch leading to the black powder magazine was left open, possibly with flammable materials stocked nearby. The Naval History and Heritage Command explained that black powder might have been stockpiled outside the armored magazine. The alternative explanation is that the bomb penetrated the armored decks and detonated directly inside one of the starboard magazines for the main armament, but smokeless powder is relatively difficult to detonate. Thus the 14-inch powder bags required a black powder pad to quickly ignite the powder. The time elapsed from the bomb hit to the magazine explosion was shorter than experience suggested burning smokeless powder required to explode. It seems unlikely that a definitive answer to this question will ever be found, as the surviving physical evidence is insufficient to determine the cause of the magazine explosion.

Awards and recognition
After the attack, several sailors received medals for their conduct and actions under fire. Lieutenant Commander Samuel G. Fuqua, the ship's damage control officer, earned the Medal of Honor for his cool-headedness while quelling fires and getting survivors off the wrecked battleship. Posthumous awards of the Medal of Honor also went to two high-ranking officers who were on board the battleship when it was destroyed: Rear Admiral Kidd, the first flag officer killed in the Pacific war, and Captain Van Valkenburgh, who reached the bridge and was attempting to defend his ship when the bomb that hit the onboard ammunition magazines destroyed it. Arizona was awarded one battle star for her service in World War II.

Salvage and memorial
Arizona was placed "in ordinary" (declared to be temporarily out of service) at Pearl Harbor on 29 December, and was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 1 December 1942. She was so badly damaged by the magazine explosion that she was not thought fit for service even if she could be salvaged, unlike many of the other sunken ships nearby. Her surviving superstructure was scrapped in 1942, and her main armament was salvaged over the next year and a half. The aft main gun turrets were removed and reinstalled as United States Army Coast Artillery Corps Battery Arizona at Kahe Point on the west coast of Oahu and Battery Pennsylvania on the Mokapu Peninsula, covering Kaneohe Bay at what is now Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Battery Pennsylvania fired its guns for the first and last time on V-J Day in August 1945 while training, while the nearby Battery Arizona was never completed. Both forward turrets were left in place, although the guns from Turret II were salvaged and later installed on Nevada in the fall of 1944 after having been straightened and relined. Nevada later fired these same guns against the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Iwo Jima.

Arizona memorials
It is commonly—but incorrectly—believed that Arizona remains perpetually in commission, like the USS Constitution. Arizona is under the control of the National Park Service, but the US Navy still retains the title. Arizona retains the right, in perpetuity, to fly the United States flag as if she were an active, commissioned naval vessel.

The wreck of Arizona remains at Pearl Harbor to commemorate the men of her crew lost that December morning in 1941. On 7 March 1950, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet at that time, instituted the raising of colors over her remains. Legislation during the administrations of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy resulted in the designation of the wreck as a national shrine in 1962. A memorial was built across the ship's sunken remains, including a shrine room listing the names of the lost crew members on a marble wall. The national memorial was administratively listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 15 October 1966. The ship herself was designated a National Historic Landmark on 5 May 1989. Upon their death, survivors of the attack may have their ashes placed within the ship, among their fallen comrades. Veterans who served aboard the ship at other times may have their ashes scattered in the water above the ship.

While the superstructure and two of the four main gun turrets were removed, the barbette of one of the turrets remains visible above the water. Since her sinking, oil still leaks from the hull, with more than 2.3 quarts (2.18 L) escaping into the harbor per day. In 2004, the US Navy and the National Park Service oversaw a comprehensive computerized mapping of the hull, being careful to honor its role as a war grave. The navy considered non-intrusive means of abating the continued leakage of oil to avoid the further environmental degradation of the harbor.

One of the original Arizona bells now hangs in the University of Arizona Student Union Memorial Center bell tower. The bell is rung after every home football victory, over any team except other Arizona schools. A gun, mast, and anchor from Arizona are in Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza just east of the Arizona State Capitol complex in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. The gun's plaque states that it was not on the ship during the Pearl Harbor attack, but was being relined for mounting on the battleship Nevada. It is paired with a gun from the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) to represent the start and end of the Pacific War for the United States. Other artifacts from the ship, such as items from the ship's silver service, are on permanent exhibit in the Arizona State Capitol Museum.

Every two years the Navy awards "The USS Arizona Memorial Trophy" to a ship that has achieved the highest combat readiness in Strike warfare, Surface Fire Support and Anti-Surface warfare, as determined by the Chief of Naval Operations. The 3 ft bronze trophy on a black marble base was provided to the Navy by the citizens of the state of Arizona on 7 December 1987.

Last survivor
The last survivor of Arizona, Lou Conter, died in April 2024 at the age of 102.

title: USS Arizona


text:
Talk:Main Page/Archive 5

"Non-English Versions" sounds so crass. (I mean, what would you think if the French page referred disdainfully to "Versions Non-françaises"?) How about "In Other Languages"? --Brion 01:48 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)
 * "In other languages" sounds good to me. Enchanter--Pheng 2000 01:57, 12 November 2006 (UTC) i can understand itInsert non-formatted text here

 * Me too! -- Oliver PEREIRA 02:07 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

 * Done. Our honor is restored. :) --Brion

 * I understand the difference between the two language lists, but I don't understand why lists giving different information are labelled almost identically, "In other languages" and "Other languages". I believe the "Other languages" list is active wikipedias and the "In other languages" list is Wikipedias aborning.  However, even an English speaker would have trouble telling the difference from the way the page reads.  I thought this was going to be fixed before the page went on line.  Ortolan88

Happy Birthday, Wikipedia! Okay, so if today's the Wikipedia's second birthday, shouldn't the phrase "We started in January 2001" say "We started on January 15, 2001"? And how about having "Wikipedia" in the "Historical anniversaries" list...? :) -- Oliver PEREIRA 02:07 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

 * Done. Perhaps we'll take it out tomorrow, though, it just doesn't seem dignified. ;) --Brion 02:15 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

 * Thanks! And I'm actually quite pleased to see that you've rejected my suggestion of "January 15, 2001" in favour of "15 January 2001". I've never liked the month-day-year way of doing things, but I think round here I've been brainwashed by the dominant Wikipedia convention... -- Oliver PEREIRA 02:45 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

 * It does look nicer that way - as an added bonus the lack of a comma means that we don't get a line break at lower resolutions! Come to think of it we might want to eventually consider moving all day pages to the [day month] format. It was a mistake to make these pages in the American only format to begin with. There are far more English speakers who use the [day month] format. But that can wait. --mav

Much easier to nav, mav.--Sv

 * Cute. Thanx but I'm not responsible for the neat new table - I just helped tweak it. --mav

I must say that I preferred "in January 2001". Other than on Wikipedia Day, the exact date doesn't seem to matter much. In fact, some people working on the new design wanted to replace it with "in early 2001", but I think "in January 2001" would be best. Also, I think the first and last link in the "Other Languages" list should have the same font size. --Eloquence 09:09 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

 * The 15 is harmless since it doesn't take-up much room and doesn't cause a line break. I agree about the font size thingy. --mav

--- I'm going to be out of town, so when the hour of the 100,000 article arrives, could somebody replace the Wikipedia Day link on the Main Page with a link to our press release? --mav 10:11 Jan 16, 2003 (UTC)

-

Well, I think the Wikipedia Day link should be removed now since Wikipedia Day is, like, over. --Eloquence 12:29 Jan 16, 2003 (UTC)

 * Are you sure it still isn't the 15th somewhere in the Pacific? :) Yeah, the link should probably go, but please link the press release in the same way when we hit the 100,000 article milestone. --mav

 * It goes the other way, Mav. It's the 17th here in Oz, by all of 19 minutes. But don't let that stop you. In fact, you better hurry - there are only 363 shopping days left till Wikipedia day!

 * You are on the other side of the International Date Line silly - we Americans are always a day behind you. ;-) --mav

sysops should vote on articles of the week or something which people are encouraged to work on Vera Cruz

 * Bored? Try Find or fix a stub, Votes for NPOVing, Requested articles or the most wanted list. These and others will soon be conveniently listed on a separate page, I hear. --Eloquence

plz add, Banana to the main page. Vera Cruz

 * Not without some added info, and under the name "Banana extinction". --Eloquence 12:29 Jan 17, 2003 (UTC)

"15 January 2001" should be changed to "January 15, 2001".

 * Why? There is no reason to link to the day and year pages - they say nothing about the project and that is the subject of the paragraph. Only links that directly relate to what the project is should be in the intro paragraph - everything else is a distraction. --mav

 * I agree. Can't we just change it to "January 2001"? That would be even less distracting. --Eloquence

 * Why would that be less distracting? It's just less informative. What's wrong with specifying a precise date? It is an important date, and one that we celebrate every year with big parties, and so on. ;) -- Oliver PEREIRA 01:40 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

 * I won't push this, I just think it's a classical case of "too much information". I also prefer "January 15, 2001" to "15 January 2001", even though I'm German where the latter form is used (with a dot after the 15). My feeling for English tells me that the first form is more natural, but I may be wrong. --Eloquence

 * I agree that "January 2001" is enough. Enchanter 01:52 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

 * I don't get this at all. Is there a reason behind it? It's only three extra characters, and it makes it a precise date, rather than just a vague statement about the general time period during which it happened. Precision is good. :) -- Oliver PEREIRA 02:21 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

 * One more argument strongly in favour for "January 15" would be that this is what we advise people to use in Manual of style. We also seem to say we should link them. We might as well introduce them to policy in the first thing they read. Indeed, the date and year pages normally don't mention every item that links to them, but in this case they do of course. We might want to link to Wikipedia Day as an alternative given the recent excitement over it, but "15 January" is clearly not wanted. -Scipius 02:47 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

 * From what I know, "15 January" is British English and "January 15" is American English. The standard in Wikipedia is "January 15" so let's stick to it.  Please, please, please, keep the 15 in the date.  It's a very sentimental date for me...  um, well...  and it's cool because the Esperanto Wikipedia started on November 15!  --Chuck SMITH

 * If all that is changed is the removal of the 15, then I don't mind the change but I won't be doing it myself. --mav

---

could the link to Multilingual coordination be turned back to normal size please ?

 * Why? Having it full sized right next to smaller text is both ugly and causes a line break. Besides, that page is the very first link on the Main Page (under "multilingual") after Wikipedia. You can't get a higher profile than that. --mav

It is very poor practice to have a list labelled In other languages with 28 languages on it, located 2 cm away from another list called Other Languages with 10 languages on it. They are two different lists and should be labelled something like Wikiepedia Projects in Other Languages and Wikipedias in Other Languages. Look, I hate to be a nag, but this is the fourth time I've raised this obvious point. Please pardon the bolding but I don't seem to be getting through on this one. Ortolan88
 * I looked in vain for several minutes, came back here to see the exact phrasing, and went back to ctrl+F. The "other languages" section is in the page's footer, uneditable by all except developers: below "Edit this page" etc.  10.5 cm away on my monitor.  :-)  Koyaanis Qatsi 03:46 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

No, it is a protected page.
 * Oh, I thought you wanted the bottom part changed, not the top. I can do that, if you'd like ... you're not a sysop?  Stunning.  I'd certainly vouch for your good intentions. ... Or maybe you don't want it.  That would make you even smarter than I thought you were.  I'm only now realizing I don't much want it (oh, let's see, after ... about 18 months ... slow on the uptake). Koyaanis Qatsi

Keeping my street cred. Ortolan88
 * I read about that somewhere. Koyaanis Qatsi, soy chai drinker

 * Well, somebody objected to the wording "non-English editions" since that can be viewed as us stating that the other language editions are not "equal" to the English version - that they, as a group, are somehow different. The suggestions you make are also too wordy and will cause a line break at lower resolutions (which as you know is a bad thing for a heading to do). How about Other Available Languages or even In 32 Languages? --mav

I'd think we'd want the "32-language" heading to be very inviting, since it includes projects that are just getting started or are moving very slowly, and we want more involvement, but we'd want the "10-language" heading to brag that there were active Wikipedias in those languages without offending or harming the interests of the languages on the longer list.

It's a tricky problem of wording. It would be best to have the single list of 32 languages. Lacking that, the two lists should be distinguished.

The difference betewen them is vast. Looking in languages I can sort of fake my way through, Norwegian has no article on Henrik Ibsen or Edvard Munch, Swedish has no article on Ingmar Bergman, Danish has no article on Hans Christian Andersen, Catalan has no article on Salvador Dalí, Italian has no article on Leonardo da Vinci, and Portuguese has no article on Vasco da Gama. They are just getting started. By contrast, French, German, and Spanish are quite respectable, even compared to the English Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia has articles on all those people. German has most of them. Someone else can check the other "big" languages.

So, all that said, how about Other Languages and Other Wikipedias? Of course, they're all Wikipedias, but they aren't all equal. Maybe Phase 1 and Phase 2? Or something else short that won't wrap. But it isn't good practice to have two different lists with almost the same label. Ortolan88

 * The list within the page text is obsolete, a holdover from the days before we had the interlanguage links available to link every page to its equivalent in other languages. However, some people have insisted that the prominent interlanguage links on the main page be kept limited to the languages with more developed and active article bases. Thus the vestigial, but more complete, inline list has lingered around.

 * I think this is a rather annoying, schizo way to go about it, and I'm open to alternate suggestions that are both clear and fair and reasonably satisfy the two conflicting needs: A) make it immediately obvious to random visitors that Wikipedia is being worked on and is available in their language (cf What to do with www.wikipedia.org), and B) keep the main page from being overly cluttered by a list of fifty languages, half of which have less than ten pages. (Consider also users with smaller screens, who may have to scroll down before seeing any content.) --Brion 06:14 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

 * Hm. How about we do the opposite? Have all the language links for any wiki that has a home page and then only list the most active ones in the body of the page? That way the interlanguage linking is consistent with the way it is done on every other page and we highlight the most active wikis. --mav

I believe that the approach Mav gives us here is the best. It is clear, consistent, and fair and gives a boost to the less active Wikipedias. Ortolan88

 * Keep in mind that the list is going to get longer and longer, particularly if "has a main page" is the only criterion. Try looking at the French main page on an 800x600 screen -- between the header and the languages, fully half your screen is taken up before we get to explaining what Wikipedia is and why it's so darn great. And it's not even a complete list now, much less in the future. We need to think about ways to make it take less space and scale better. --Brion 16:56 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)

Hear ye, hear ye: As a temporary anti-Slashdot effect measure, I've disabled page counter updates and made the main page static if gotten to via a direct link to http://www.wikipedia.org/. This means that the main page will _not_ reflect user's login state or edits made until the crisis is over. --Brion 08:06 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

 * Thanks Brion! What about the special utilities like short pages? --mav

 * They don't seem to be getting hit much, but for safety's sake I've put the heavy special pages into "miser mode" fulltime until things calm down. --Brion 08:51 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

Well, for some reason I can't access the main Wikipedia mailing list, and nobody answered me when I asked on wikien-l, so let me ask it here. Every time I have come to Wikipedia over the last two days, I have had to log in each time, even though I have "remember me" checked. Is it just me, or is this happening to everybody? -- Zoe
 * I am not having that problem. Sorry, I expected someone who could tell you more than that (e.g. a developer) to get back to you.  Best,  Koyaanis Qatsi

 * Zoe, is this just when you go to http://www.wikipedia.org/ directly, or on every page on the 'pedia? If the former, this is a known side-effect of the static main page that I put in to reduce the server hammering we were getting from the Slashdotting (a significant portion of hits were to that url, and it reduced the load on the server to hand out a file instead of running the script for a virtually unchanging page being requested so often). Since the flood has largely subsided, I've just now gone ahead and removed it, so the 'live' wiki, complete with login information, will be available on the main page. If this doesn't clear up your problem, let me know.

 * As far as the mailing lists, yes I believe the @nupedia.com addresses have been removed for some reason; send to the general list at wikipedia-l @wikipedia.org now. --Brion 02:28 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

The link to Afrikaans http://af.wikipedia.com/ is missing! It can't be because it is too small, because it is higher in the top 20 than Frysk (Frisian). - Patrick 12:55 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

 * Fixed (there are other languages missing as well). See also the above thread. We are trying to work-out a better way to list and display links to the other languages. --mav

--- I would like to change the opening sentence from:

 * Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia.

to
 * Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a neutral and accurate open content encyclopedia.

The reason being is that the "complete" part will happen naturally in time whereas neutrality isn't a foregone conclusion and really does need to be emphasized. NPOV is also central to what the project is. --mav

 * I think it's the other way around. There are many online encyclopedia and dictionary projects, but most of them are specialized (plant encyclopedias, math encyclopedias, computer term dictionaries etc.). The name "Wiki"-pedia may suggest to a newcomer that we are somehow not a general encyclopedia but about a strange computer thing called "wiki". On the other hand, there's always a natural expectation for an encyclopedia to be neutral and not advocacy, so this does not really need to be emphasized.

 * If you're trying to do what I think you're trying to do then you want to give higher exposure to NPOV to make sure that more people read it and therefore add more neutral prose to Wikipedia. However, while the subtleties of NPOV are not always intuitively clear, most serious contributors to this project quite naturally adopt a neutral tone. The kind of people who add biased nonsense are often simply too immature to work on such a project, or they do it in purpose (i.e. they try to get away with it). Besides, many POV contributions probably come through search engines, so they won't really read the intro. It might make sense to link to NPOV from the edit screen, in the space which is currently entirely occupied by a large, fat copyright warning. --Eloquence 14:27 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

 * Your idea is better. The current text is too long to be useful and needs to be cut down to bare basics. That will leave us room to write a sentence or phrase about NPOV. This is even more important now that old hands are outnumbered by new hands. We need NPOV accountability. I'll work on new boilerplate text sometime in the next few days. --mav

That WW III thing is a bit misleading, isn't it? The article in question only says that World War III almost happened, but, erm, luckily it didn't! Hugh Trevor-Roper should be added to the recent deaths, though, I think. -- Oliver PEREIRA 20:44 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

 * It still is a historical anniversary: Eight years ago yesturday Russia almost launched a nuclear attack on Western Europe. I would say that that is a very important moment in history and the only appropriate place for us to have such information is an article that talks about the possiblilty of such a war. The Cuban missile crisis was another time that WWIII almost started. Hugh Trevor-Roper is listed. --mav

 * Okay, I see. I wasn't complaining about the article; I just thought that putting "WWIII" in "Historical anniversaries" made it look like WWIII actually happened on that day in history! But of course people will know that it didn't, and can click on the link to see what is meant, so fair enough. And thanks for adding Lord Dacre and pointing out the Selected Articles on the Main Page page. -- Oliver PEREIRA 17:27 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Can someone add a link to Super Bowl XXXVII? Or does that not fit in the news/events cats?

 * Reluctantly added. If nothing else, it's a cultural phenomenon. --Brion 01:28 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

To get something listed on the Main Page please consult Selected Articles on the Main Page. --mav

howabout a link to the How to's page, maybe this will spark some more interest, I didnt even know we had a list of how to's-Stevert

 * I concur -- where is it, anyway? Should be hard to search for, given that both "how" and "to" are stopwords. -Eloquence

its How-tos maybe the subject of another spin off sister project: hehe -Stevert ps. proabably would fit under culture, other, or sister...

OK - where do you want the link? I kinda think ==Other Category Schemes== is the only thing that would work. --mav

--

"MLK Jr"? this is getting a little silly. Until I link-hovered I was thinking maybe this was a new virus, something from NASA or a numetal band. Mav, you'll never guarantee "one-liners", in fact at comfortable browser width they're all one and a half. PLease don't overuse abbreviations. -- Tarquin 00:02 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

 * Sorry - I overestimated the familiarity of that acronym. It was an important link but if I didn't use an acronym then Martin Luther King, Jr should have been one of two links on that line. I'm not sure what you mean by "one and a half lines." Do you have a screen res of 800 by 600 and do not have your browser window maximized? If you do then you should be used-to much ugliness and horizontal scrolling. Most other people at that res surf with a maximized browser window. I'm thinking about adding a second line to Historical anniversaries so that links are listed for at least a week before being removed - there is just too much history to cover. BTW, the thought of a junior virus or spaceprobe made me chuckle. :-) --mav 01:03 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

 * It is a well-known fact (at least by typographers, editors and graphic designers) that the human eye reads text most comfortably in short lines of about 10 words. This is why newspapers and magazines are printed in columns. My screen res is 1152x864, but my browser window occupies just over half. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TenWordLine . This is something I have mentioned several times before, in the context of floating tables and images that force text into a column that is about 2 or 3 words in width if the window is at "ten-word width" for the rest of the article. "Most other people at that res surf with a maximized browser window" -- then they are wrong, and tiring their eyes for no reason. It would be nice if this basic principle of good layout actually made its way into the Wikipedia GroupThink; I've been pasting that list from C2 often enough -- Tarquin 01:17 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Historical anniversaries: Apollo 1 - Anne Boleyn - Roe v. Wade - Unabomber - Louis XVI

 * I count 9 words, two numbers and one v. I'm also well aware of the 10 word per line rule. --mav

How-tos = yeah, mav, the Other category looks like it, too. We might have to put a disclaimer though, at the top: Wikipedia and Bomis absolve ourselves of any liability in the accuracy of these below How-to's and if you die, in the course of bad advice, we not take the blame for it, nor give out any cash to make your relatives happy. -Stevert ps we should change the main title to non-stopwords like Howto, How2's, yadda....

 * How tos listed. Yes some short disclaimer is probably needed. However it really would be best if we had a general disclaimer lined from every page in Wikipedia next the the copyright notice. Having all these separate disclaimers (that can be edited no less!) is messy. I've already proposed this on the mailing list and there was support for it but nobody (including me) has done the work yet to actually write such a disclaimer. --mav

Perhaps something short is in order, rather than something written in tinytext, like:

 * Wikipedia and its parent company, Bomis, disavow liability for any injury, arising from incorrect statements in all Wikipedia pages. All use of the material on Wikipedia, as under the GPL public license, is free, and its accuracy is soleley the responsibility of the user.

-howzat? -Stevert

What is the reason for this disclaimer? I very much doubt that there is any real threat of legal action ("I read this on some website and didn't bother to check any further" is unlikely to get anywhere in court). And at the end of the day, it is up to the owner of the site (Jimbo) to decide whether there are any legal risks, not us.

Provided that the general information we give about the project makes it clear that any member of the public can edit a page, and it does, no reasonable person would rely unquestioningly on what they read here. Enchanter

well, I dunno... I just write the stuff. On another topic - I use the WOB color scheme, but the wikipedia logo shows up crappy. Its a png, but its got jaggies on it.. who's logo is it, and might I try a hand at making the alpha distinct and workable for all schemes. Its piddly, but most things show up wrong on black background.. despite the fact that black is really a lot easier on the eyes, and should be used more often... -Stevert

 * See Logo suggestions/leading candidates

-

Suggestion for anniversaries February,2 Battle of Stalingrad. Ericd

 * Yep - it will be listed as soon as Feb 2 arrives. --mav

- Call me egocetric (LOL) but I liked the read page markers...will they be back, and when?

AntonioMartin

 * I think so - but they are not going to be the dumb hit counters that we had before. They will be based on server logs so they will only count one IP once. I'm not sure when that will be done though. --mav

---

Add a link to meta on here... Vera Cruz

 * There is a link to Meta on the Main Page, but it is referred to as "Commentary". It's in the section headed "About the Project", over on the right-hand-side of the page. Hope this helps. -- Oliver P. 10:01 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

January 4 2003. To all Wikipedians: Is everyone having trouble reaching wikipedia and its pages tonight, or is it just me?

AntonioMartin

 * The whole thing was down for much of the day. I guess somebody restarted the server. --mav

 * Jason has rebooted the server. Still don't know what crashed it, but spot-checks of the logs are consistent with the couple of times this has happened before -- everything just suddenly stops. The machine stays sort-of connected to the network but doesn't respond to requests, and no more background activity is recorded in logs. Sigh... --Brion 08:41 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

There's a lanugage on the main page called "????", which links to [], a page filled with question marks. What's up with that? User:zanimum

 * That's Russian, apparently you don't have a Cyrillic font installed. This is what it should look like. --Eloquence 16:03 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

 * Well, after the Russian link, shouldn't we add Russian, just so those without the font don't get confused? Matter of personal opinion and taste really, but you know. user:zanimum

 * Zanimum has a good point; it should be treated just like Chinese. -- Toby 20:29 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

 * Better? --Brion 20:35 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

 * Much! Thank you! I never meant to sound picky or anything, it's just at my work computer, the font's not installed, as it is on my home computer, and so I figured other computers wouldn't have that font either. user:zanimum

title: Talk:Main Page/Archive 5


text:
Talk:Preputial restoration

This title is really ugly. -- Zoe

Using the title with an antiquated, awkward, difficult, and obscure spelling is absolutely ridiculous. That kind of spelling has gone out of vogue for a reason: it is nonconstructive and contributes nothing to usage or facility of language. You might as well demand that everyone in America start spelling theater as theatre, etc. The only reason I'm not changing it to preputial is that it would be so much work right now.

-- jaknouse

 * Moved.--Eloquence 05:33 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

And in any case, it should be under the most-used common name - i.e., foreskin. Tannin

title: Talk:Preputial restoration


text:
Nikolaas Tinbergen

Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (15 April 1907 – 21 December 1988) was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz     for their discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior.

In 1951, he published The Study of Instinct, an influential book on animal behaviour. In the 1960s, he collaborated with filmmaker Hugh Falkus on a series of wildlife films, including The Riddle of the Rook (1972) and Signals for Survival (1969), which won the Italia prize in that year and the American blue ribbon in 1971.

Early life and education
Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he was one of five children of Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen and his wife Jeannette van Eek. His brother, Jan Tinbergen, won the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1969. They are the only siblings to each win a Nobel Prize. Another brother, Luuk Tinbergen, was also a noted biologist.

Tinbergen's interest in nature manifested itself when he was young. He studied biology at Leiden University and was a prisoner of war during World War II. Tinbergen's experience as a prisoner of the Nazis led to some friction with longtime intellectual collaborator Konrad Lorenz, and it was several years before the two reconciled.

After the war, Tinbergen moved to England, where he taught at the University of Oxford and was a fellow first at Merton College, Oxford, and later at Wolfson College, Oxford. Several of his graduate students went on to become prominent biologists including Richard Dawkins, Marian Dawkins, Desmond Morris, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and Tony Sinclair.

The Study of Instinct

In 1951 Tinbergen's The Study of Instinct was published. Behavioural ecologists and evolutionary biologists still recognise the contribution this book offered the field of behavioural science studies. The Study of Instinct summarises Tinbergen's ideas on innate behavioural reactions in animals and the adaptiveness and evolutionary aspects of these behaviours. By behaviour, he means the total movements made by the intact animal; innate behaviour is that which is not changed by the learning process. The major question of the book is the role of internal and external stimuli in controlling the expression of behaviour.

In particular, he was interested in explaining 'spontaneous' behaviours: those that occurred in their complete form the first time they were performed and that seemed resistant to the effects of learning. He explains how behaviour can be considered a combination of these spontaneous behaviour patterns and as set series of reactions to particular stimuli. Behaviour is a reaction in that to a certain extent it is reliant on external stimuli, however it is also spontaneous since it is also dependent upon internal causal factors.

His model for how certain behavioural reactions are provoked was based on work by Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz postulated that for each instinctive act there is a specific energy which builds up in a reservoir in the brain. In this model, Lorenz envisioned a reservoir with a spring valve at its base that an appropriate stimulus could act on, much like a weight on a scale pan pulling against a spring and releasing the reservoir of energy, an action which would lead an animal to express the desired behaviour.

Tinbergen added complexity to this model, a model now known as Tinbergen's hierarchical model. He suggested that motivational impulses build up in nervous centres in the brain which are held in check by blocks. The blocks are removed by an innate releasing mechanism that allows the energy to flow to the next centre (each centre containing a block that needs to be removed) in a cascade until the behaviour is expressed. Tinbergen's model shows multiple levels of complexity and that related behaviours are grouped.

An example is in his experiments with foraging honey bees. He showed that honey bees show curiosity for yellow and blue paper models of flowers, and suggested that these were visual stimuli causing the buildup of energy in one specific centre. However, the bees rarely landed on the model flowers unless the proper odour was also applied. In this case, the chemical stimuli of the odour allowed the next link in the chain to be released, encouraging the bee to land. The final step was for the bee to insert its mouthparts into the flower and initiate suckling. Tinbergen envisioned this as concluding the reaction set for honey bee feeding behaviour.

Nobel Prize
In 1973 Tinbergen, along with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns". The award recognised their studies on genetically programmed behaviour patterns, their origins, maturation and their elicitation by key stimuli. In his Nobel Lecture, Tinbergen addressed the somewhat unconventional decision of the Nobel Foundation to award the prize for Physiology or Medicine to three men who had until recently been regarded as "mere animal watchers". Tinbergen stated that their revival of the "watching and wondering" approach to studying behaviour could indeed contribute to the relief of human suffering.

The studies performed by the trio on fish, insects and birds laid the foundation for further studies on the importance of specific experiences during critical periods of normal development, as well as the effects of abnormal psychosocial situations in mammals. At the time, these discoveries were stated to have caused "a breakthrough in the understanding of the mechanisms behind various symptoms of psychiatric disease, such as anguish, compulsive obsession, stereotypic behaviour and catatonic posture". Tinbergen's contribution to these studies included the testing of the hypotheses of Lorenz/von Frisch by means of "comprehensive, careful, and ingenious experiments" as well as his work on supernormal stimuli. The work of Tinbergen during this time was also regarded as having possible implications for further research in child development and behaviour.

He also caused some intrigue by dedicating a large part of his acceptance speech to FM Alexander, originator of the Alexander technique, a method which investigates postural reflexes and responses in human beings.

Other awards and honours
In 1950 Tinbergen became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1962. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1974, and the American Philosophical Society in 1975. He was also awarded the Godman-Salvin Medal in 1969 by the British Ornithologists' Union, and in 1973 received the Swammerdam Medal and Wilhelm Bölsche Medal (from the Genootschap ter bervordering van Natuur-, Genees- en Heelkunde of the University of Amsterdam and the Kosmos-Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde respectively).

Approach to animal behaviour
Tinbergen described four questions he believed should be asked of any animal behaviour,   which were:

 * 1) Causation (mechanism): what are the stimuli that elicit the response, and how has it been modified by recent learning? How do behaviour and psyche "function" on the molecular, physiological, neuro-ethological, cognitive and social level, and what do the relations between the levels look like? (compare: Nicolai Hartmann: "The laws about the levels of complexity")
 * 2) Development (ontogeny): how does the behaviour change with age, and what early experiences are necessary for the behaviour to be shown? Which developmental steps (the ontogenesis follows an "inner plan") and which environmental factors play when / which role? (compare: Recapitulation theory)
 * 3) Function (adaptation): how does the behaviour impact on the animal's chances of survival and reproduction?
 * 4) Evolution (phylogeny): how does the behaviour compare with similar behaviour in related species, and how might it have arisen through the process of phylogeny? Why did structural associations (behaviour can be seen as a "time space structure") evolve in this manner and not otherwise?*

In ethology and sociobiology, causation and ontogeny are summarised as the "proximate mechanisms", while adaptation and phylogeny are the "ultimate mechanisms". They are still considered as the cornerstone of modern ethology, sociobiology and transdisciplinarity in Human Sciences.

Supernormal stimulus
A major body of Tinbergen's research focused on what he termed the supernormal stimulus. This was the concept that one could build an artificial object which was a stronger stimulus or releaser for an instinct than the object for which the instinct originally evolved. He constructed plaster eggs to see which a bird preferred to sit on, finding that they would select those that were larger, had more defined markings, or more saturated colour—and a dayglo-bright one with black polka dots would be selected over the bird's own pale, dappled eggs.

Tinbergen found that territorial male three-spined stickleback (a small freshwater fish) would attack a wooden fish model more vigorously than a real male if its underside was redder. He constructed cardboard dummy butterflies with more defined markings that male butterflies would try to mate with in preference to real females. The superstimulus, by its exaggerations, clearly delineated what characteristics were eliciting the instinctual response.

Among the modern works calling attention to Tinbergen's classic work is Deirdre Barrett's 2010 book, Supernormal Stimuli.

Autism
Tinbergen applied his observational methods to the problems of autistic children. He recommended a "holding therapy" in which parents hold their autistic children for long periods of time while attempting to establish eye contact, even when a child resists the embrace. However, his interpretations of autistic behaviour, and the holding therapy that he recommended, lacked scientific support and the therapy has been described as controversial and potentially abusive, particularly by individuals with autism themselves.

Personal life
Tinbergen was a member of the advisory committee to the Anti-Concorde Project and was also an atheist.

Tinbergen married Elisabeth Rutten (1912–1990) and they had five children. Later in life he suffered depression and feared he might, like his brother Luuk, commit suicide. He was treated by his friend, whose ideas he had greatly influenced, John Bowlby. Tinbergen died on 21 December 1988, after suffering a stroke at his home in Oxford, England.

title: Nikolaas Tinbergen


text:
Judith Martin

Judith Martin (née Perlman; born September 13, 1938 ), better known by the pen name Miss Manners, is an American columnist, author, and etiquette authority.

Early life and career
Martin is the daughter of Helen and Jacob Perlman, both Jewish. Her father was born in 1898 in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, now in Poland. He immigrated to the United States in 1912. In 1925, he received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, in economics. Jacob married Helen Aronson in 1935, and they moved to Washington, D.C., where Martin was born in 1938.

Martin spent a significant part of her childhood in Washington, where she still lives and works, graduating from Jackson-Reed High School Class of 1955. She lived in various foreign capitals as a child, as her father, a United Nations economist, was frequently transferred. Martin graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in English. Before she began the advice column, she was a journalist, covering social events at the White House and embassies; she then became a theater and film critic.

"Miss Manners"
In 1978, Martin began writing an advice column, which was distributed three and later six times a week by Universal Uclick and carried in more than 200 newspapers worldwide. In the column, she answers etiquette questions contributed by her readers and writes short essays on problems of manners, or clarifies the essential qualities of politeness.

Martin writes about the ideas and intentions underpinning seemingly simple rules, providing a complex and advanced perspective, which she refers to as "". Her columns have been collected in a number of books. In her writings, Martin refers to herself in the third person (e.g., "Miss Manners hopes...").

In a 1995 interview by Virginia Shea, Martin said:

"You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, 'We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!' Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them..."

Martin identifies "blatant greed" as the most serious etiquette problem in the United States. The most frequently asked question she receives is how to politely demand cash from potential gift-givers (which she answers by stating that there is no polite way to do this), and the second most common question is how much potential guests must spend on a gift (determined by what the giver can afford, not by the event, relationship, related expenses or other factors).

On August 29, 2013, Martin's children, Nicholas and Jacobina, began sharing credit for her columns.

Other
Martin was the recipient of a 2005 National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. On March 23, 2006, she was a special guest correspondent on The Colbert Report, giving her analysis of the manners with which the White House Press Corps spoke to the President.

Some of Martin's writings were collected and set to music by Dominick Argento in his song cycle Miss Manners on Music.

Since its launch in 2008, Judith Martin has been a contributor for wowOwow, a Web site for women to talk culture, politics, and gossip.

Martin's uncle was economist and labor historian Selig Perlman.

Martin was portrayed by Broadway theatre actress Jessie Mueller in The Post, Steven Spielberg's 2017 movie about the Pentagon Papers.

Books

 * The Name on the White House Floor
 * Gilbert (This was subtitled "A Comedy Of Manners," and was a work of fiction.)
 * Style and Substance
 * Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
 * Miss Manners Rescues Civilization: From Sexual Harassment, Frivolous Lawsuits, Dissing and Other Lapses in Civility
 * Miss Manners on Weddings
 * Miss Manners' Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding with Jacobina Martin
 * Miss Manners on Painfully Proper Weddings
 * Common Courtesy: In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problem That Baffled Mr. Jefferson
 * Miss Manners' Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millennium
 * Miss Manners' Basic Training: Communication
 * Miss Manners' Basic Training: The Right Thing To Say
 * Miss Manners' Basic Training: Eating
 * Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children
 * Star-Spangled Manners
 * Miss Manners' Guide to Domestic Tranquility: The Authoritative Manual for Every Civilized Household, However Harried
 * Miss Manners: A Citizen's Guide to Civility
 * No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice
 * Miss Manners Minds Your Business with Nicholas Ivor Martin
 * Miss Manners' Guide to Contagious Etiquette with Nicholas Martin and Jacobina Martin

title: Judith Martin


text:
Jan Tinbergen

Jan Tinbergen (12 April 1903 – 9 June 1994) was a Dutch economist who was awarded the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969, which he shared with Ragnar Frisch for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of econometrics.

His important contributions to econometrics include the development of the first macroeconometric models, the solution of the identification problem, and the understanding of dynamic models. Tinbergen was a founding trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 1945, he founded the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) and was the agency's first director.

Biography
Tinbergen was the eldest of five children of Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen and Jeannette van Eek. His brother Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen would also win a Nobel Prize (for physiology, during 1973) for his work in ethology, while his youngest brother Luuk would become a famous ornithologist. Jan and Nikolaas Tinbergen are the only siblings to have both won Nobel Prizes.

Between 1921 and 1925, Tinbergen studied mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest. During those years at Leiden, he had numerous discussions with Ehrenfest, Kamerlingh Onnes, Hendrik Lorentz, Pieter Zeeman, and Albert Einstein.

After graduating, Tinbergen fulfilled his community service in the administration of a prison in Rotterdam and at the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) in The Hague. He then returned to the University of Leiden and in 1929 defended his PhD thesis titled "Minimumproblemen in de natuurkunde en de economie" (Minimisation problems in Physics and Economics). This topic was suggested by Ehrenfest and allowed Tinbergen to combine his interests in mathematics, physics, economics and politics. At that time, CBS established a new department of business surveys and mathematical statistics, and Tinbergen became its first chairman, working at CBS until 1945. Access to the vast CBS data helped Tinbergen in testing his theoretical models. In parallel, starting from 1931, he was professor of statistics at the University of Amsterdam, and in 1933 he was appointed associate professor of mathematics and statistics at The Netherlands School of Economics, Rotterdam, where he stayed until 1973.

From 1929 to 1945 he worked for the Dutch statistical office and served as consultant at the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations (1936–1938). In 1945 he became the first director of the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis and left this position in 1955 to focus on education. He spent one year as a visiting professor at the Harvard University and then returned to the Dutch Economic Institute (the successor of the Netherlands School of Economics). In parallel, he provided consulting services to international organizations and governments of various developing countries, such as United Arab Republic, Turkey, Venezuela, Surinam, Indonesia and Pakistan.

Tinbergen became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1946. He was also a member of the International Academy of Science, Munich. In 1956 he founded the Econometric Institute at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam together with Henri Theil, who also was his successor in Rotterdam. In 1960, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Tinbergen Institute was named in his honour. The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) awarded its Honorary Fellowship to Jan Tinbergen in 1962. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1963. In 1968, he received an honorary doctorate from Sir George Williams University, which later became Concordia University. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1974.

Work

For many, Jan Tinbergen became known for the so-called 'Tinbergen Norm' often discussed long after his death. There is no written work of Tinbergen in which he himself states it formally. It is generally believed to be the principle that, if the ratio between the greatest and least income exceeds 5, it becomes disadvantageous for the societal unit involved. Tinbergen himself discussed some technicalities of a five-to-one income distribution ratio in an article published in 1981. Apart from specifics about a five-to-one ratio, it is true in general that Tinbergen's grand theme was income distribution and the search for an optimal social order.

Tinbergen developed the first national comprehensive macroeconomic model, which he first developed in 1936 for the Netherlands, and later applied to the United States and the United Kingdom.

In his work on macroeconomic modelling and economic policy making, Tinbergen classified some economic quantities as targets and others as instruments. Targets are those macroeconomic variables the policy maker wishes to influence, whereas instruments are the variables that the policy maker can control directly. Tinbergen emphasized that achieving the desired values of a certain number of targets requires the policy maker to control an equal number of instruments. This is known as the Tinbergen Rule.

Tinbergen's classification remains influential today, underlying the theory of monetary policy used by central banks. Many central banks today regard the inflation rate as their target; the policy instrument they use to control inflation is the short-term interest rate.

Tinbergen's work on macroeconomic models was later continued by Lawrence Klein, contributing to another Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. For his cultural contributions, he was given the Gouden Ganzenveer in 1985.

Tinbergen's econometric modelling lead to a lively debate with several known participants including J.M. Keynes, Ragnar Frisch and Milton Friedman. The debate is sometime referred to as the Tinbergen debate. (see Keynes–Tinbergen debate.)

Selected publications

 * World security and equity. Aldershot, 1990. ISBN 1-85278-187-4.
 * Production, income and welfare: the search for an optimal social order. Brighton, 1985 ISBN 0-7450-0014-2.
 * Economic policy: Principles and Design. Amsterdam, 1978. ISBN 0-7204-3129-8.
 * Der Dialog Nord-Süd: Informationen zur Entwicklungspolitik. Frankfurt am Main: Europ. Verlagsanstalt, 1977.
 * Income distribution: analysis and policies. New York, 1975. ISBN 0-444-10832-7.
 * The Dynamics of Business Cycles: A Study in Economic Fluctuations. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. ISBN 0-226-80418-6.
 * The Element of Space in Development Planning (together with L.B.M. Mennes and J.G. Waardenburg), Amsterdam, 1969
 * Development planning. London, 1967.
 * Central planning. Studies in comparative economics, 4. New Haven, 1964.
 * Shaping the world economy, suggestions for an international economic policy. New York, 1962.
 * Selected papers. Amsterdam, 1959
 * Economic Policy: Principles and Design, Amsterdam, 1956
 * Centralization and Decentralization in Economic Policy, Amsterdam, 1954 ISBN 0-313-23077-3.
 * Econometrics. London, 1953.
 * On the Theory of Economic Policy. Second edition (1952) is Volume 1 of Contributions to Economic Analysis, Amsterdam: North-Holland.
 * Business Cycles in the United Kingdom, 1870–1914, Amsterdam, 1951
 * International economic co-operation. Amsterdam, 1945.
 * Business Cycles in the United States, 1919–1932, Geneva, 1939 and New York, 1968.
 * An econometric approach to business cycle problems. In: Impasses économiques; 2; Actualités scientifiques et industrielles, ; 525. Paris, 1937.

 * About Tinbergen
 * Acocella, Nicola, Di Bartolomeo, Giovanni (2006), ‘Tinbergen and Theil meet Nash: controllability in policy games’, in: ‘Economics Letters’, 90(2): 213–218.
 * Acocella, Nicola, Di Bartolomeo, Giovanni and Hughes Hallett, A. [2010], ‘Policy games, policy neutrality and Tinbergen controllability under rational expectations’, in: ‘Journal of Macroeconomics’, 32(1): 55–67.
 * Acocella, Nicola Di Bartolomeo, Giovanni and Hughes Hallett, A. [2011], ‘Tinbergen controllability and n-player LQ-games’, in: ‘Economics Letters’, 113: 32–4.
 * Murshed, SM. 2021. "Reformulating Jan Tinbergen’s normative vision on welfare and security." Journal of Peace Research.

title: Jan Tinbergen