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Metaphysical poets

The term Metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly regarded until 20th century attention established their importance.

Given the lack of coherence as a movement, and the diversity of style among poets, it has been suggested that calling them Baroque poets after their era might be more useful. Once the Metaphysical style was established, however, it was occasionally adopted by other and especially younger poets to fit appropriate circumstances.

Origin of the name
In the chapter on Abraham Cowley in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), Samuel Johnson refers to the beginning of the 17th century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". This does not necessarily imply that he intended "metaphysical" to be used in its true sense, in that he was probably referring to a witticism of John Dryden, who said of John Donne: "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. In this...Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault."

Probably the only writer before Dryden to speak of the new style of poetry was Drummond of Hawthornden, who in an undated letter from the 1630s made the charge that "some men of late, transformers of everything, consulted upon her reformation, and endeavoured to abstract her to metaphysical ideas and scholastical quiddities, denuding her of her own habits, and those ornaments with which she hath amused the world some thousand years".

The Augustans
Johnson's assessment of "metaphysical poetry" was not at all flattering: "The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and, to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and, very often, such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables... The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased."

Johnson was repeating the disapproval of earlier critics who upheld the rival canons of Augustan poetry, for though Johnson may have given the Metaphysical "school" the name by which it is now known, he was far from being the first to condemn 17th-century poetic usage of conceit and word-play. John Dryden had already satirised the Baroque taste for them in his Mac Flecknoe and Joseph Addison, in quoting him, singled out the poetry of George Herbert as providing a flagrant example.

20th-century recognition
During the course of the 1920s, T.S. Eliot did much to establish the importance of the Metaphysical school, both through his critical writing and by applying their method in his own work. By 1961 A. Alvarez was commenting that "it may perhaps be a little late in the day to be writing about the Metaphysicals. The great vogue for Donne passed with the passing of the Anglo-American experimental movement in modern poetry."

A further two decades later, a hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a "high Anglican and royalist literary history" on 17th-century English poetry. But Colin Burrow's dissenting opinion, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, is that the term 'Metaphysical poets' still retains some value. For one thing, Donne's poetry had considerable influence on subsequent poets, who emulated his style. And there are several instances in which 17th-century poets used the word 'metaphysical' in their work, meaning that Samuel Johnson's description has some foundation in the usage of the previous century. However, the term does isolate the English poets from those who shared similar stylistic traits in Europe and America. Since the 1960s, therefore, it has been argued that gathering all of these under the heading of Baroque poets would be more helpfully inclusive.

Defining the canon
There is no scholarly consensus regarding which English poets or poems fit within the Metaphysical genre. In his initial use of the term, Johnson quoted just three poets: Abraham Cowley, John Donne, and John Cleveland. Colin Burrow later singled out John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw as 'central figures', while naming many more, all or part of whose work has been identified as sharing its characteristics.

Two key anthologists in particular were responsible for identifying common stylistic traits among 17th-century poets. Herbert Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) was important in defining the Metaphysical canon. In addition, Helen Gardner's Metaphysical Poets (1957) included 'proto-metaphysical' writers such as William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh and, extending into the Restoration, brought in Edmund Waller and Rochester. While comprehensive, her selection, as Burrow remarks, so dilutes the style as to make it "virtually coextensive with seventeenth-century poetry".

Late additions to the Metaphysical canon have included sacred poets of both England and America who had been virtually unknown for centuries. John Norris was better known as a Platonist philosopher. Thomas Traherne's poetry remained unpublished until the start of the 20th century. The work of Edward Taylor, who is now counted as the outstanding English-language poet of North America, was only discovered in 1937.

A sense of community
Johnson's definition of the Metaphysical poets was that of a hostile critic looking back at the style of the previous century. In 1958 Alvarez proposed an alternative approach in a series of lectures eventually published as The School of Donne. This was to look at the practice and self-definition of the circle of friends about Donne, who were the recipients of many of his verse letters. They were a group of some fifteen young professionals with an interest in poetry, many of them poets themselves although, like Donne for much of his life, few of them published their work. Instead, copies were circulated in manuscript among them. Uncertain ascriptions resulted in some poems from their fraternity being ascribed to Donne by later editors.

A younger second generation was a close-knit group of courtiers, some of them with family or professional ties to Donne's circle, who initially borrowed Donne's manner to cultivate wit. Among them were Lord Herbert of Cherbury and his brother George, whose mother Magdalen was another recipient of verse letters by Donne. Eventually George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw, all of whom knew each other, took up the religious life and extended their formerly secular approach into this new area. A later generation of Metaphysical poets, writing during the Commonwealth, became increasingly more formulaic and lacking in vitality. These included Cleveland and his imitators as well as such transitional figures as Cowley and Marvell.

What all had in common, according to Alvarez, was esteem, not for metaphysics but for intelligence. Johnson's remark that "To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think" only echoed its recognition a century and a half before in the many tributes paid to Donne on his death. For example, Jasper Mayne's comment that for the fellow readers of his work, "Wee are thought wits, when 'tis understood". Coupled with it went a vigorous sense of the speaking voice. It begins with the rough versification of the satires written by Donne and others in his circle such as Everard Gilpin and John Roe. Later it modulates into the thoughtful religious poems of the next generation with their exclamatory or conversational openings and their sense of the mind playing over the subject and examining it from all sides. Helen Gardner too had noted the dramatic quality of this poetry as a personal address of argument and persuasion, whether talking to a physical lover, to God, to Christ's mother Mary, or to a congregation of believers.

Elegists
A different approach to defining the community of readers is to survey who speaks of whom, and in what manner, in their poetry. On the death of Donne, it is natural that his friend Edward Herbert should write him an elegy full of high-flown and exaggerated Metaphysical logic. In a similar way, Abraham Cowley marks the deaths of Crashaw and of another member of Donne's literary circle, Henry Wotton. Here, however, though Cowley acknowledges Crashaw briefly as a writer ("Poet and saint"), his governing focus is on how Crashaw's goodness transcended his change of religion. The elegy is as much an exercise in a special application of logic as was Edward Herbert's on Donne. Henry Wotton, on the other hand, is not remembered as a writer at all, but instead for his public career. The conjunction of his learning and role as ambassador becomes the extended metaphor on which the poem's tribute turns.

Twelve "Elegies upon the Author" accompanied the posthumous first collected edition of Donne's work, Poems by J.D. with elegies of the author’s death (1633), and were reprinted in subsequent editions over the course of the next two centuries. Though the poems were often cast in a suitably Metaphysical style, half were written by fellow clergymen, few of whom are remembered for their poetry. Among those who are, were Henry King and Jasper Mayne, who was soon to quit authorship for clerical orders. Bishop Richard Corbet's poetry writing was also nearly over by now and he contributed only a humorous squib. Other churchmen included Henry Valentine (fl 1600–1650), Edward Hyde (1607–1659) and Richard Busby. Two poets, Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland and Thomas Carew, who were joined in the 1635 edition by Sidney Godolphin, had links with the heterodox Great Tew Circle. They also served as courtiers, as did another contributor, Endymion Porter. In addition, Carew had been in the service of Edward Herbert.

Isaac Walton's link with Donne's circle was more tangential. He had friends within the Great Tew Circle but at the time of his elegy was working as a researcher for Henry Wotton, who intended writing a life of the poet. This project Walton inherited after his death, publishing it under his own name in 1640; it was followed by a life of Wotton himself that prefaced the collection of Wotton's works in 1651. A life of George Herbert followed them in 1670. The links between Donne's elegists were thus of a different order from those between Donne and his circle of friends, often no more than professional acquaintanceship. And once the poetic style had been launched, its tone and approach remained available as a model for later writers who might not necessarily commit themselves so wholly to it.

Free from former artificial styles
Grierson attempted to characterise the main traits of Metaphysical poetry in the introduction to his anthology. For him it begins with a break with the formerly artificial style of their antecedents to one free from poetic diction or conventions. Johnson acknowledged as much in pointing out that their style was not to be achieved "by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery and hereditary similes".

European Baroque influences, including use of conceits
Another characteristic singled out by Grierson is the Baroque European dimension of the poetry, its "fantastic conceits and hyperboles which was the fashion throughout Europe". Again Johnson had been partly before him in describing the style as "borrowed from Marino and his followers". It was from the use of conceits particularly that the writing of these European counterparts was known, Concettismo in Italian, Conceptismo in Spanish. In fact Crashaw had made several translations from Marino. Grierson noted in addition that the slightly older poet, Robert Southwell (who is included in Gardner's anthology as a precursor), had learned from the antithetical, conceited style of Italian poetry and knew Spanish as well.

The European dimension of the Catholic poets Crashaw and Southwell has been commented on by others. In the opinion of one critic of the 1960s, defining the extent of the Baroque style in 17th-century English poetry "may even be said to have taken the place of the earlier discussion of the metaphysical". Southwell counts as a notable pioneer of the style, in part because his formative years were spent outside England. And the circumstance that Crashaw's later life was also spent outside England contributed to making him, in the eyes of Mario Praz, "the greatest exponent of the Baroque style in any language".

Crashaw is frequently cited by Harold Segel when typifying the characteristics of The Baroque Poem, but he goes on to compare the work of several other Metaphysical poets to their counterparts in both Western and Eastern Europe. The use of conceits was common not only across the Continent, but also elsewhere in England among the Cavalier poets, including such elegists of Donne as Carew and Godolphin. As an example of the rhetorical way in which various forms of repetition accumulate in creating a tension, only relieved by their resolution at the end of the poem, Segel instances the English work of Henry King as well as Ernst Christoph Homburg's in German and Jan Andrzej Morsztyn's in Polish. In addition, Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is given as a famous example of the use of hyperbole common to many other Metaphysical poets and typical of the Baroque style too.

Wordplay and wit
The way George Herbert and other English poets "torture one poor word ten thousand ways", in Dryden's phrase, finds its counterpart in a poem like "Constantijn Huygens’ Sondagh (Sunday) with its verbal variations on the word 'sun'. Wordplay on this scale was not confined to Metaphysical poets, moreover, but can be found in the multiple meanings of 'will' that occur in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 135". and of 'sense' in John Davies’ "That the Soul is more than a Perfection or Reflection of the Sense". Such rhetorical devices are common in Baroque writing and frequently used by poets not generally identified with the Metaphysical style.

Another striking example occurs in Baroque poems celebrating "black beauty", built on the opposition between the norm of feminine beauty and instances that challenge that commonplace. There are examples in sonnets by Philip Sidney, where the key contrast is between 'black' and 'bright'; by Shakespeare, contrasting 'black' and various meanings of 'fair'; and by Edward Herbert, where black, dark and night contrast with light, bright and spark. Black hair and eyes are the subject in the English examples, while generally it is the colour of the skin with which Romance poets deal in much the same paradoxical style. Examples include Edward Herbert's "La Gialletta Gallante or The sun-burn'd exotic Beauty" and Marino's "La Bella Schiave" (The Beautiful Slave). Still more dramatically, Luis de Góngora's En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramento (At the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament) introduces a creole dialogue between two black women concerning the nature of their beauty.

Much of this display of wit hinges upon enduring literary conventions and is only distinguished as belonging to this or that school by the mode of treatment. But English writing goes further by employing ideas and images derived from contemporary scientific or geographical discoveries to examine religious and moral questions, often with an element of casuistry. Bringing greater depth and a more thoughtful quality to their poetry, such features distinguish the work of the Metaphysical poets from the more playful and decorative use of the Baroque style among their contemporaries.

Platonic influence
Ideas of Platonic love had earlier played their part in the love poetry of others, often to be ridiculed there, although Edward Herbert and Abraham Cowley took the theme of "Platonic Love" more seriously in their poems with that title.

In the poetry of Henry Vaughan, as in that of another of the late discoveries, Thomas Traherne, Neo-Platonic concepts played an important part and contributed to some striking poems dealing with the soul's remembrance of perfect beauty in the eternal realm and its spiritual influence.

Stylistic echoes
Long before it was so-named, the Metaphysical poetic approach was an available model for others outside the interlinking networks of 17th century writers, especially young men who had yet to settle for a particular voice. The poems written by John Milton while still at university are a case in point and include some that were among his earliest published work, well before their inclusion in his Poems of 1645. His On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629) and "On Shakespear" (1630) appear in Grierson's anthology; the latter poem and "On the University Carrier" (1631) appear in Gardner's too. It may be remembered also that at the time Milton composed these, the slightly younger John Cleveland was a fellow student at Christ's College, Cambridge, on whom the influence of the Metaphysical style was more lasting.

In Milton's case, there is an understandable difference in the way he matched his style to his subjects. For the 'Nativity Ode' and commendatory poem on Shakespeare he deployed Baroque conceits, while his two poems on the carrier Thomas Hobson were a succession of high-spirited paradoxes. What was then titled "An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare" was included anonymously among the poems prefacing the second folio publication of Shakespeare's plays in 1632. The poems on Thomas Hobson were anthologised in collections titled A Banquet of Jests (1640, reprinted 1657) and Wit Restor’d (1685), bracketing both the 1645 and 1673 poetry collections published during Milton's lifetime.

The start of John Dryden's writing career coincided with the period when Cleveland, Cowley and Marvell were first breaking into publication. He had yet to enter university when he contributed a poem on the death of Henry Lord Hastings to the many other tributes published in Lachrymae Musarum (1649). It is typified by astronomical imagery, paradox, Baroque hyperbole, play with learned vocabulary ("an universal metampsychosis"), and irregular versification which includes frequent enjambment. The poem has been cited as manifesting "the extremes of the metaphysical style", but in this it sits well with others there that are like it: John Denham's "Elegy on the death of Henry Lord Hastings", for example, or Marvell's rather smoother "Upon the death of the Lord Hastings". The several correspondences among the poems there are sometimes explained as the result of the book's making a covert Royalist statement. In the political circumstances following the recent beheading of the king, it was wise to dissemble grief for him while mourning another under the obscure and closely wrought arguments typical of the Metaphysical style.

The choice of style by the young Milton and the young Dryden can therefore be explained in part as contextual. Both went on to develop radically different ways of writing; neither could be counted as potentially Metaphysical poets. Nor could Alexander Pope, yet his early poetry evidences an interest in his Metaphysical forebears. Among his juvenilia appear imitations of Cowley. As a young man he began work on adapting Donne's second satire, to which he had added the fourth satire too by 1735. Pope also wrote his "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" (1717) while still young, introducing into it a string of Metaphysical conceits in the lines beginning "Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age" which in part echo a passage from Donne's "Second Anniversary". By the time Pope wrote this, the vogue for the Metaphysical style was over and a new orthodoxy had taken its place, of which the rewriting of Donne's satires was one expression. Nevertheless, Johnson's dismissal of the 'school' was still in the future and at the start of the 18th century allusions to their work struck an answering chord in readers.

title: Metaphysical poets


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Portable Game Notation

Portable Game Notation (PGN) is a standard plain text format for recording chess games (both the moves and related data), which can be read by humans and is also supported by most chess software.

History
PGN was devised around 1993, by Steven J. Edwards, and was first popularized and specified via the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.chess.

Usage
PGN is structured "for easy reading and writing by human users and for easy parsing and generation by computer programs." The chess moves themselves are given in algebraic chess notation using English initials for the pieces. The filename extension is.

There are two formats in the PGN specification, the "import" format and the "export" format. The import format describes data that may have been prepared by hand, and is intentionally lax; a program that can read PGN data should be able to handle the somewhat lax import format. The export format is rather strict and describes data prepared under program control, similar to a pretty printed source program reformatted by a compiler. The export format representations generated by different programs on the same computer should be exactly equivalent, byte for byte.

PGN text begins with a set of "tag pairs" (a tag name and its value), followed by the "movetext" (chess moves with optional commentary).

Tag pairs
Tag pairs begin with an initial left bracket [, followed by the name of the tag in plain ASCII text. The tag value is enclosed in double-quotes, and the tag is then terminated with a closing right bracket ]. A quote inside a tag value is represented by the backslash immediately followed by a quote. A backslash inside a tag value is represented by two adjacent backslashes. There are no special control codes involving escape characters, or carriage returns, and linefeeds to separate the fields, and superfluous embedded spaces are usually skipped when parsing.

Seven Tag Roster
PGN data for archival storage is required to provide seven tag pairs – together known as the "Seven Tag Roster". In export format, these tag pairs must appear before any other tag pairs and in this order:

Optional tag pairs
The standard allows for other optional tag pairs. The more common ones include:

Movetext

The movetext describes the actual moves of the game. This includes move number indicators (numbers followed by either one or three periods; one if the next move is White's move, three if the next move is Black's move) and movetext in Standard Algebraic Notation (SAN).

For most moves the SAN consists of the letter abbreviation for the piece, an  if there is a capture, and the two-character algebraic name of the final square the piece moved to. The letter abbreviations are  (king),   (queen),   (rook),   (bishop), and   (knight). The pawn is given an empty abbreviation in SAN movetext, but in other contexts the abbreviation  is used. The algebraic name of any square is as per usual algebraic chess notation; from white's perspective, the leftmost square closest to white is, the rightmost square closest to the white is  , and the rightmost (from white's perspective) square closest to black side is.

In a few cases, a more detailed representation is needed to resolve ambiguity; if so, the piece's file letter, numerical rank, or the exact square is inserted after the moving piece's name (in that order of preference). Thus,  specifies that the knight originally on the g-file moves to e2.

SAN kingside castling is indicated by the sequence ; queenside castling is indicated by the sequence   (note that these are capital Os, not zeroes, contrary to the FIDE standard for notation). Pawn promotions are notated by appending  to the destination square, followed by the piece the pawn is promoted to. For example:. If the move is a checking move, is also appended; if the move is a checkmating move,  is appended instead. For example:.

An annotator who wishes to suggest alternative moves to those actually played in the game may insert variations enclosed in parentheses. They may also comment on the game by inserting Numeric Annotation Glyphs (NAGs) into the movetext. Each NAG reflects a subjective impression of the move preceding the NAG or of the resultant position.

If the game result is anything other than, the result is repeated at the end of the movetext.

Comments
Comments are inserted by either a  (a comment that continues to the end of the line) or a   (which continues until a  ). Comments do not nest.

Example
Here is the PGN format of the 29th game of the 1992 match played in Yugoslavia between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky:

Handling chess variants
Many chess variants can be recorded using PGN, provided the names of the pieces can be limited to one character, usually a letter and not a number. They are typically noted with a tag named "Variant" giving the name of the rules. The term "Variation" must be avoided, as that refers to the name of an opening variation. Note that traditional chess programs can only handle, at most, a few variants. Forsyth-Edwards Notation is used to record the starting position for variants (such as Chess960) which have initial positions other than the orthodox chess initial position.

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

title: Portable Game Notation


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Jimmy Hoffa

James Riddle Hoffa (born February 14, 1913 – disappeared July 30, 1975, declared dead July 30, 1982) was an American labor union leader who served as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) from 1957 until 1971.

From an early age, Hoffa was a union activist, and he became an important regional figure with the IBT by his mid-20s. By 1952, he was the national vice-president of the IBT and between 1957 and 1971 he was its general president. He secured the first national agreement for teamsters' rates in 1964 with the National Master Freight Agreement. He played a major role in the growth and the development of the union, which eventually became the largest by membership in the United States, with over 2.3 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader.

Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials. He was imprisoned in 1967 and sentenced to 13 years. In mid-1971, he resigned as president of the union as part of a commutation agreement with U.S. president Richard Nixon and was released later that year, but he was barred from union activities until 1980. Hoping to regain support and to return to IBT leadership, he unsuccessfully tried to overturn the order.

Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975. He is thought to have been murdered by the Mafia, and was declared legally dead in 1982. Hoffa's legacy and the circumstances of his disappearance continue to stir debate.

Early life and family
Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913, to John and Viola (née Riddle) Hoffa. His father, who was of German descent from what is now referred to as the Pennsylvania Dutch, died in 1920 from lung disease when Hoffa was seven years old. His mother was of Irish ancestry. The family moved to Detroit in 1924, where Hoffa was raised and lived for the rest of his life. He left school at the age of 14 and began working in full-time manual labor jobs to help support his family.

Hoffa married Josephine Poszywak, an 18-year-old Detroit laundry worker of Polish heritage, in Bowling Green, Ohio, on September 25, 1937. The couple had met six months earlier during a nonunionized laundry workers' strike action. They had two children: a daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, and a son, James P. Hoffa. The Hoffas paid $6,800 in 1939 for a modest home in northwestern Detroit. The family later owned a simple summer lakefront cottage in Orion Township, Michigan, north of Detroit.

Early union activity
Hoffa began union organizational work at the grassroots level as a teenager through his job with a grocery chain, which paid substandard wages and offered poor working conditions with minimal job security. The workers were displeased with that situation and tried to organize a union to better their lot. Although Hoffa was young, his courage and approachability in that role impressed fellow workers, and he rose to a leadership position. By 1932, after refusing to work for an abusive shift foreman, Hoffa left the grocery chain, partly because of his union activities. He was then invited to become an organizer with Local 299 of the Teamsters in Detroit.

Growth of Teamsters
The Teamsters, founded in 1903, had 75,000 members in 1933. As a result of Hoffa's work with other union leaders to consolidate local union trucker groups into regional sections and then into a national body, which Hoffa ultimately completed over two decades, membership grew to 170,000 members by 1936, and three years later, there were 420,000. The number grew steadily during World War II and in the postwar boom to top a million members by 1951.

The Teamsters organized truck drivers and warehousemen throughout the Midwest and then nationwide. Hoffa played a major role in the union's skillful use of "quickie strikes," secondary boycotts, and other means of leveraging union strength at one company, then to move to organize workers, and finally to win contract demands at other companies. That process, which took several years starting in the early 1930s, eventually brought the Teamsters to a position of being one of the most powerful unions in the United States.

Trucking unions in that era were heavily influenced by—and in many cases controlled by elements of—organized crime. For Hoffa to unify and expand trucking unions, he had to make accommodations and arrangements with many gangsters, beginning in the Detroit area. Organized crime influence on the IBT increased as the union itself grew.

Rise to power
Hoffa worked to defend the Teamsters from raids by other unions, including the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and he extended the Teamsters' influence in the Midwest from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. Although he never actually worked as a truck driver, he became president of Local 299 in December 1946. He then rose to lead the combined group of Detroit-area locals shortly afterwards and later advanced to become head of the Michigan Teamsters groups. Meanwhile, Hoffa obtained a deferment from military service in World War II by successfully making a case for his union leadership skills being of more value to the nation by keeping freight running smoothly to assist the war effort.

At the 1952 IBT convention in Los Angeles, Hoffa was selected as national vice-president by incoming president Dave Beck, the successor to Daniel J. Tobin, who had been president since 1907. Hoffa had quelled an internal revolt against Tobin by securing Central States' regional support for Beck at the convention. In exchange, Beck made Hoffa a vice-president. In 1952, a petty criminal living in New York, Marvin Elkind, was assigned by gangster Anthony Salerno to work as Hoffa's chauffer. In a 2008 interview, Elkind said of his four years working as a chauffer: "Mr. Hoffa was a tremendously intimidating man. This man had no fear at all, of nothing, showed very little emotion, had completely no sense of humour, and was dedicated to the people that belonged to his union. When you drive these people you learn a lot and I’ll tell you why. They don’t know you’re there. You become a piece of the car, just like an extra gear shift or a brake, and they talk."

The IBT moved its headquarters from Indianapolis to Washington, DC, taking over a large office building in the capital in 1955. IBT staff was also meanwhile enlarged, with many lawyers hired to assist with contract negotiations. Following his 1952 election as vice-president, Hoffa began spending more of his time away from Detroit, either in Washington or traveling around the country for his expanded responsibilities. Hoffa's personal lawyer was Bill Bufalino.

Teamsters presidency
Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, at the convention in Miami Beach, Florida. Beck, his predecessor, had appeared before the John L. McClellan-led US Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor or Management Field in March 1957 and took the Fifth Amendment 140 times in response to questions. Beck was under indictment when the IBT convention took place and was convicted and imprisoned in a trial for fraud held in Seattle.

Teamsters expelled from AFL-CIO
The 1957 AFL-CIO convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, voted nearly five to one to expel the IBT. Vice-president Walter Reuther led the fight to oust the IBT on charges of Hoffa's corrupt leadership. President George Meany gave an emotional speech, advocating the removal of the IBT and stating that he could only agree to further affiliation of the Teamsters if they dismissed Hoffa as their president. Meany demanded a response from Hoffa, who replied through the press, "We'll see." At the time, the IBT was bringing in over $750,000 annually to the AFL-CIO.

National Master Freight Agreement
Following his re-election as president in 1961, Hoffa worked to expand the union. In 1964, he succeeded in bringing virtually all over-the-road truck drivers in North America under a single National Master Freight Agreement, which may have been his biggest achievement in a lifetime of union activity. Hoffa then tried to bring airline workers and other transport employees into the union, with limited success. He was then facing immense personal strain as he was under investigation, on trial, launching appeals of convictions, or imprisoned for virtually all of the 1960s.

Hoffa was re-elected without opposition to a third five-year term as president of the IBT, despite having been convicted of jury tampering and mail fraud in court verdicts that were stayed pending review on appeal. Delegates in Miami Beach also elected Frank Fitzsimmons as first vice president, who would become president "if Hoffa has to serve a jail term."

Criminal charges

Hoffa had first faced major criminal investigations in 1957, as a result of the McClellan Committee. On March 14, 1957, Hoffa was arrested for allegedly trying to bribe an aide to the Select Committee. Hoffa denied the charges (and was later acquitted), but the arrest triggered additional investigations and more arrests and indictments over the following weeks. When John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he appointed his younger brother Robert as Attorney General. Robert Kennedy had been frustrated in earlier attempts to convict Hoffa, while working as counsel to the McClellan subcommittee. As attorney general from 1961, Kennedy pursued a strong attack on organized crime and he carried on with a so-called "Get Hoffa" squad of prosecutors and investigators.

Prison sentences
In May 1963, Hoffa was indicted for jury tampering in Tennessee, charged with the attempted bribery of a grand juror during his 1962 conspiracy trial in Nashville. Hoffa was convicted on March 4, 1964, and subsequently sentenced to eight years in prison and a $10,000 fine. While on bail during his appeal, Hoffa was convicted in a second trial held in Chicago, on July 26, 1964, on one count of conspiracy and three counts of mail and wire fraud for improper use of the Teamsters' pension fund, and sentenced to five years in prison.

Hoffa spent the next three years unsuccessfully appealing his 1964 convictions. Appeals filed by his chief counsel, St. Louis defense attorney Morris Shenker, reached the U.S. Supreme Court. He began serving his aggregate prison sentence of 13 years (eight years for bribery, five years for fraud) on March 7, 1967, at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

Appointment of Fitzsimmons as caretaker president
When Hoffa entered prison, Frank Fitzsimmons was named acting president of the union, and Hoffa planned to run the union from prison through Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons was a Hoffa loyalist, fellow Detroit resident, and a longtime member of Teamsters Local 299, who owed his own high position in large part to Hoffa's influence. Despite this, Fitzsimmons soon distanced himself from Hoffa's influence and control after 1967, to Hoffa's displeasure. Fitzsimmons also decentralized power somewhat within the IBT's administration structure, forgoing much of the control Hoffa took advantage of as union president. While still in prison, Hoffa resigned as Teamsters president on June 19, 1971, and Fitzsimmons was elected Teamsters president on July 9, 1971.

After prison
On December 23, 1971, less than five years into his 13-year sentence, Hoffa was released from prison when US President Richard Nixon commuted it to time served. As a result of Hoffa's previous resignation, he was awarded a $1.75 million lump sum termination benefit by the Teamsters Retirement and Family Protection Plan. That type of pension settlement had never occurred with the Teamsters. The IBT then endorsed Nixon, a Republican, in his presidential re-election bid in 1972. In prior elections, the union had normally supported Democratic nominees but had endorsed Nixon in 1960.

Hoffa regained his freedom, but the commutation from Nixon did not allow Hoffa to "engage in the direct or indirect management of any labor organization" until March 6, 1980. Hoffa contended that he had never agreed to that condition. Hoffa accused senior Nixon administration figures, including Attorney General John N. Mitchell and White House Special Counsel Charles Colson, of depriving him of his rights by imposing that condition. It was suspected that the condition had been imposed upon Hoffa because of requests from the Teamsters' leadership, but that was denied by Fitzsimmons. By 1973, Hoffa was planning to seize the presidency of the Teamsters again.

Hoffa sued to invalidate the restriction so that he could reassert his power over the Teamsters. John Dean, former White House counsel to Nixon, was among those called upon for depositions in 1974 court proceedings. Dean, who had become famous as a government witness in prosecutions arising from the Watergate scandal by mid-1973, had drafted the clause in 1971 at Nixon's request. Hoffa ultimately lost his court battle since the court ruled that Nixon had acted within his powers by imposing the restriction, as it had been based on Hoffa's misconduct while he was serving as a Teamsters official.

Hoffa faced immense resistance to his re-establishment of power from many corners and had lost much of his earlier support even in the Detroit area. As a result, he intended to begin his comeback at the local level with Local 299 in Detroit, where he retained some influence. In 1975, Hoffa was working on an autobiography, Hoffa: The Real Story, which was published a few months after his disappearance. He had earlier published a book titled The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa (1970).

Prelude
Hoffa's plans to regain the leadership of the union were met with opposition from several members of the Mafia. One of them was Anthony Provenzano, who had been a Teamsters local leader in New Jersey and a national vice-president of the union during Hoffa's second term as its president. Provenzano had once been a friend of Hoffa's but became an enemy after a reported feud when both were in federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s. In 1973 and 1974, Hoffa asked him for his support to regain his former position, but Provenzano refused and threatened Hoffa by reportedly saying he would kidnap and eviscerate his grandchildren. Provenzano was a caporegime in the New York City Genovese crime family. At least two of Provenzano's union opponents had been murdered, and others who had spoken out against him had been assaulted.

Other Mafia figures who became involved were Anthony Giacalone, an alleged kingpin in the Detroit Mafia, and his younger brother, Vito. The FBI believes that they were positioning themselves as "mediators" between Hoffa and Provenzano. The brothers had made three visits to Hoffa's home at Lake Orion and one to the Guardian Building law offices. Their avowed purpose in meeting Hoffa was to set up a "peace meeting" between Provenzano and Hoffa. Hoffa's son, James, said, "Dad was pushing so hard to get back in office, I was increasingly afraid that the mob would do something about it." James was convinced that the "peace meeting" was a pretext to Giacalone's "setting Dad up" for a hit since Hoffa had been increasingly uneasy each time the Giacalone brothers arrived.

Events of July 30
Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975, after he had gone out to the meeting with Provenzano and Giacalone. The meeting was due to take place at 2:00 p.m. at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, a Detroit suburb. The place was known to Hoffa, as it had been the site of the wedding reception of his son James. Hoffa wrote Giacalone's initials and the time and location of the meeting in his office calendar: "TG—2 p.m.—Red Fox."

Hoffa left his home at 1:15 p.m. Before heading to the restaurant, he stopped at the office of his close friend Louis Linteau, a former president of Teamsters Local 614 who now ran a limousine service. Linteau and Hoffa had been enemies early in their careers but eventually became friends. When Hoffa left prison, Linteau had also become Hoffa's unofficial appointment secretary and arranged a dinner meeting between Hoffa and the Giacalone brothers on July 26 in which they had informed him of the July 30 meeting. Linteau was out to lunch when Hoffa stopped by and so Hoffa talked to some of the staff present and left a message for Linteau before he left for the Machus Red Fox.

Between 2:15 and 2:30 p.m., an annoyed Hoffa called his wife from a payphone on a post in front of Damman Hardware, directly behind the Machus Red Fox, and complained that Giacalone had not shown up and that he had been stood up. His wife told him she had not heard from anyone. He told her he would be home at 4:00 p.m., to grill steaks for dinner. Several witnesses saw Hoffa standing by his car and pacing the restaurant's parking lot. Two men saw Hoffa, recognized him, and stopped to chat with him briefly and to shake his hand. Hoffa also made a call to Linteau in which he again complained that the men were late. Linteau gave the time as 3:30 p.m., but the FBI suspected that it was earlier, based on the timing of other phone calls from Linteau's office from around that time. The FBI estimates that Hoffa left the location without a struggle around 2:45–2:50 p.m. One witness reported seeing Hoffa in the back of a maroon "Lincoln or Mercury" car with three other people.

Investigation
At 7 a.m. the next day, Hoffa's wife called her son and daughter to say that their father had not come home. At 7:20 a.m., Linteau went to the Machus Red Fox and found Hoffa's unlocked car in the parking lot, but there was no sign of Hoffa, nor any indication of what had happened to him. Linteau called the police, who later arrived at the scene. The Michigan State Police were brought in, and the FBI was alerted. At 6 p.m., Hoffa's son, James, filed a missing person report. The Hoffa family offered a $200,000 reward for any information about the disappearance.

The primary piece of physical evidence obtained in the investigation was a maroon 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham, which belonged to Anthony Giacalone's son, Joseph. The car had been borrowed earlier that day by Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien to deliver fish. O'Brien was Hoffa's foster son, although relations between them had soured in the years preceding Hoffa's disappearance. Investigators and Hoffa's family suspected that O'Brien had a role in Hoffa's disappearance. On August 21, police dogs identified Hoffa's scent in the car.

Giacalone and Provenzano, who denied having scheduled a meeting with Hoffa, were found not to have been near the restaurant that afternoon. According to Time, Provenzano was seen fraternizing with local union members in Hoboken, although Provenzano told investigators that he was playing cards with Stephen Andretta, Thomas Andretta's brother, in Union City, New Jersey, the day that Hoffa disappeared. Despite extensive surveillance and bugging, investigators found that the Mafia members who they thought were involved were generally unwilling to talk about Hoffa's disappearance, even in private. On December 4, 1975, a federal investigator in Detroit testified in court before presiding Judge James Paul Churchill that a witness had identified three New Jersey men as having participated "in the abduction and murder of James R. Hoffa." The three men were close associates of Provenzano: Thomas Andretta, Salvatore Briguglio, and his brother Gabriel Briguglio.

In October 1975, Michigan Attorney General Frank J. Kelley went to Waterford Township to supervise an unsuccessful expedition to locate and exhume Hoffa's remains. The search was triggered by "a tip from an unnamed informer who said a group of Mafiosi wanted Hoffa's body found."

After years of investigation involving numerous law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, officials have not reached a definitive conclusion as to Hoffa's fate or who was involved. Hoffa's wife, Josephine, died on September 12, 1980, and is interred at White Chapel Memorial Cemetery in Troy, Michigan. On December 9, 1982, Hoffa was declared legally dead as of July 30, 1982, by Oakland County, Michigan Probate Judge Norman R. Barnard.

In 1989, Kenneth Walton, the agent in charge of the FBI's Detroit office, told The Detroit News that he knew what had happened to Hoffa. "I'm comfortable I know who did it, but it's never going to be prosecuted because we would have to divulge informants, confidential sources." In 2001, the FBI matched DNA from Hoffa's hair, taken from a brush, with a strand of hair found in Joseph Giacalone's car, but it is possible that Hoffa had traveled in the car on a different day.

On June 16, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published the entire "Hoffex Memo," a 56-page report prepared by the FBI for a January 1976 briefing on the case at the FBI headquarters in Washington. Although not claiming conclusively to establish the specifics of his disappearance, the memo records a belief that Hoffa was murdered at the behest of organized crime figures, who regarded his efforts to regain power in the Teamsters as a threat to their control of the union's pension fund. In the Hoffex Memo it was concluded, based on the evidence, that Chuckie O'Brien (who was described by FBI investigators as a "habitual liar") was driving Joseph Giacalone's maroon 1975 Mercury, licensed TMS-416, on the day of the disappearance and that Hoffa was seated in the right rear seat of the car. His body scent was located by police dogs, and a piece of his hair was recovered from the back seat. A pump action 12-gauge shotgun was seized from the trunk of the car, and numerous .22 and .38 caliber bullets were found in the glove compartment. As of 2021, digs are still periodically conducted in the Detroit area in search of Hoffa's body, but a common theory among experts is that the body was cremated.

Crime historians and investigators
There is wide agreement among crime historians and investigators that Hoffa was murdered on the order of his enemies in the Mafia. However, key details remain either unknown or unprovable, and this has ensured that no individuals have ever been charged in relation to the case.

In discussing potential motives, both the 1976 Hoffex Memo and scholarship prior to its release focus on Mafia opposition to Hoffa's plans to regain the Teamsters' leadership and the threat Hoffa posed to the Mafia's control over the union's pension fund. The Hoffex Memo noted that Provenzano was not senior enough to order a Mafia hit, though it did not rule out the possibility that his or someone else's personal vendetta against Hoffa was a motive. Scott Burnstein, a crime historian and journalist, argued in 2019 that Provenzano's role in the entire case was limited to acting as a lure.

Dan Moldea mentioned the possibility that Hoffa had retaliated against his Mafia opponents by co-operating with investigations against them. The Hoffex Memo includes this as a possible motivation. Vincent Piersante, the state government's former chief investigator into the Hoffa case, doubted that Hoffa could have seriously threatened the Mafia in this way, as any incriminating information he knew either would have incriminated himself or concerned crimes that were outside of the statute of limitations. Piersante suggested that the killing was accidental, and that the men who were sent to meet Hoffa were only meant to be "insultingly low-level messengers". He argued that Hoffa had no realistic prospects for a comeback, that the disappearance did not share the usual characteristics of a Mafia hit and that it risked encouraging action against organized crime (as indeed happened). This theory did not gain wide acceptance among criminologists.

In his 1991 book Hoffa, Arthur A. Sloane said that the most common theory of FBI investigators was that Russell Bufalino was the mob boss who ordered the murder, and Salvatore "Sally Bugs" Briguglio, his brother Gabriel Briguglio, Thomas Andretta and Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien were the men who lured Hoffa away from the restaurant. The theory is that O'Brien was used as an "unwitting dupe" to lure Hoffa away, because Hoffa was suspicious of Provenzano and would not have entered the car unless there was a familiar figure present. It is theorised O'Brien picked Hoffa up from the Machus Red Fox parking lot, and that Hoffa was either killed in the car or driven to an unspecified location to be killed. Keith Corbett, a former US Prosecuting Attorney, has since suggested that O'Brien would have been considered too unreliable to be entrusted with a role in such a high-profile murder. He instead suggested that Vito "Billy" Giacalone was the familiar figure.

The location of the murder is also unknown, but any violence in the restaurant parking lot would have easily attracted witnesses. Therefore, the Hoffex Memo suspects Hoffa was lured away to a different murder location. James Buccellato, a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University, suggested in 2017 that it was likely that Hoffa was murdered one mile away from the restaurant at the house of Carlo Licata, the son of the mobster Nick Licata.

Sloane listed a local waste incinerator and a landfill in Jersey City as the possible locations where the body was taken; the latter is also supported by Dan Moldea. Buccellato listed two waste incinerators and a crematorium, all in the Detroit area. He doubted the body had been transported a long distance: "It's just not practical." The Hoffex Memo similarly said: "If the Detroit LCN was used to assist in the disappearance, it is unknown why the body would be transported back to New Jersey when Detroit Organized Crime people have proven in the past that they are capable of taking care of such things."

Other accounts and speculation
In the book I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Closing of the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (2004), author Charles Brandt writes that Frank Sheeran, an alleged professional killer for the mob and a longtime friend of Hoffa, confessed to killing him. According to the book, Sheeran claims O'Brien drove him, Hoffa, and fellow mobster Sal Briguglio to a house in Detroit, where he shot Hoffa twice in the back of the head, although bloodstains found in the Detroit house in which Sheeran claimed the murder had happened were determined not to match Hoffa's DNA. The truthfulness of the book, including Sheeran's confessions to killing Hoffa, has been disputed by "The Lies of the Irishman", an article in Slate by Bill Tonelli, and "Jimmy Hoffa and 'The Irishman': A True Crime Story?" by Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith, which appeared in The New York Review of Books. Buccellato doubts that the Mafia would have entrusted an Irish American with this role and also believes that Hoffa would have refused to travel that far from the restaurant.

Hoffa's body was rumored to be buried in Giants Stadium. In a 2004 episode of the Discovery Channel show MythBusters, "The Hunt for Hoffa", the locations in the stadium in which Hoffa was rumored to be buried were scanned with a ground-penetrating radar. That was intended to reveal if any disturbances indicated a human body had been buried there, but no trace of any human remains was found. In addition, no human remains were found when Giants Stadium was demolished in 2010.

In one of his jailhouse confessions published in a biography released after his death in 2006, Richard Kuklinski claimed that he was part of a four-man team who kidnapped and murdered Hoffa. Former FBI agent Robert Garrity, who worked on the Hoffa case, dismissed Kuklinski's claims as a hoax. Other authorities have also stated that Kuklinski's involvement in Hoffa's disappearance is unlikely.

In 2012, Roseville, Michigan, police took samples from the ground under a suburban Detroit driveway after a person reported having witnessed the burial of a body there around the time of Hoffa's 1975 disappearance. Tests by Michigan State University anthropologists found no evidence of human remains.

In January 2013, the reputed gangster Tony Zerilli implied that Hoffa was originally buried in a shallow grave, with a plan to move his remains later to a second location. Zerilli said the plans were abandoned and Hoffa's remains lay in a field in northern Oakland County, Michigan, not far from the restaurant in which he had been last seen. Zerilli denied any responsibility for or association with Hoffa's disappearance. On June 17, 2013, investigating the Zerilli information, the FBI was led to a property in Oakland Township, in northern Oakland County, which was owned by Detroit mob boss Jack Tocco. After three days, the FBI called off the dig. No human remains were found, and the case remains open.

Thomas Andretta, who died in 2019, and his brother Stephen, who reportedly died of cancer in 2000, were named by the FBI as suspects. Both were New Jersey Teamsters and reputed Genovese crime family mob associates. The FBI called Thomas Andretta a "trusted associate of Anthony Provenzano; reported to be involved in the disappearance of Hoffa."

In an April 2019 interview with DJ Vlad, the former Colombo crime family capo Michael Franzese stated that he was certain that Hoffa's disappearance had been mob-related, that he was aware of the location of Hoffa's body and of the identity of his shooter, and had tapes that revealed details of his disappearance. When pressed for information on Hoffa's body, Franzese said, "I can tell you that it's wet, that's for sure", and "Upon good information, again, I think I know who the real shooter was; still alive today, in prison." In a 2018 interview with Value Entertainment, Franzese also makes the "it's wet" claim and adds that "it's deep". He also claims that he has in his possession a recorded tape that "spells everything out" and that he might release this at a later date.

In a deathbed statement, a landfill worker claimed to have buried Hoffa's body in a steel drum 15 feet below the surface in a landfill beneath the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City, New Jersey. In October 2021, the FBI obtained a warrant and completed a site survey in the landfill. In July 2022, the FBI announced that "nothing of evidentiary value was discovered" from the survey.

Legacy
Hoffa's legacy remains controversial. Arthur Sloane wrote, "To many, Hoffa was a kind of latter-day Al Capone... others, he was... hugely successful in improving working conditions for [his truck-driver constituents]."

In 2023, a historical marker was erected in his home state of Indiana by the Indiana Historical Bureau, Clay County Historical Society, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

In film and fiction

 * Robert Blake (1983) (Blood Feud) (TV Miniseries)
 * Tom Bosley (1984) (The Jesse Owens Story) (TV Movie)
 * Trey Wilson (1985) (Robert Kennedy and His Times) (TV Miniseries)
 * Jack Nicholson (1992) (Hoffa)
 * Thomas Wagner (1993) (Marilyn & Bobby: Her Final Affair) (TV Movie)
 * Al Pacino (2019) (The Irishman)

In the film F.I.S.T. (1978), Sylvester Stallone plays Johnny Kovak, a character based on Hoffa.

In the Sergio Leone film Once Upon a Time in America (1984), syndicalist James Conway O'Donnell's character, played by Treat Williams, is inspired by Hoffa.

Author James Ellroy features a fictional historical version of Hoffa in the Underworld USA Trilogy novels as an important secondary character, most prominently in the novels American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001).

In the comedy film Bruce Almighty (2003), the titular character uses powers endowed by God to manifest Hoffa's body in order to procure a story interesting enough to reclaim his career in the news industry.

title: Jimmy Hoffa


text:
René McLean

René McLean (born December 16, 1946) is a hard bop saxophonist and flutist from New York City. He started playing guitar before receiving an alto saxophone and instruction from his father, alto saxophonist Jackie McLean.

Biography
McLean played in the mid-1970s in a quintet with Woody Shaw and Louis Hayes and toured with Hugh Masekela in 1978.

He later studied music at New York College of Music and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. McLean received the Creative Artist Fellowship by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986 to reside in Japan to research traditional Japanese music, arts and culture, and to perform and teach. He has recorded extensively and also has thorough experience as a music educator in the United States and South Africa.

Born in New York City, René McLean, multi-reed instrumentalist (alto, tenor, soprano saxophones, flutes, ney, shakuhachi), composer, band leader, educator, and producer, began his musical training at the age of nine under the tutelage and guidance of his father, alto saxophonist and educator Jackie McLean. René made his debut with Jackie McLean's band in the mid-1960s and led his own bands. René McLean's debut as a band leader and producer began at the age of 16 in 1963.

René McLean continued his studies with his stepfather as well as with the Jazz Arts Society, HARYOU ACT Cultural Program under Julian Yule, Rheet Taylor, Jackie McLean and Kenny Dorham; the Clark Terry Youth Band, Jazz Mobile and later at the New York College of Music (New York University) and the University of Massachusetts. In addition he studied privately with instructors including Sonny Rollins, Frank Foster, George Coleman, Kenny Dorham, Jackie Byard, Barry Harris and Hubert Laws.

René has performed and recorded as a leader and featured sideman with musicians of the Black Musical tradition, including Jackie McLean, the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, Lionel Hampton All Stars, Tito Puente Orchestra, Horace Silver, Woody Shaw, Dr. Bill Taylor, Baba Olatunji, Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, Dexter Gordon, James Moody, Yusef Lateef, Jaco Pastorius, Jerry Gonzales' Forte Apache Band, Hamza El Din, and in collaboration with premier poet-activist Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones).

McLean has performed, conducted workshops and lectured at numerous universities and cultural programs in the U.S. and Caribbean (including Cuba), as well as in South America, Europe, Lebanon, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Mauritius.

From 1970 to 1973, he was bandmaster for the N.Y. State N.A.C.C. Melrose Community Center in the South Bronx. From 1984-85 René was Artist-in-Residence at the University of Hartford's the Hartt School, Department of African American Music. Since 1985 McLean has been living in South Africa, where he has been performing, teaching and researching musical traditions. As consultant to the Mmabana Cultural Center he developed the foundation for the Center's music program and curriculum, subsequently heading the music program from 1987 to 1990. From 1991 to 1992 he was a visiting member of the New School Jazz program. From 1994 to 1998 McLean was a Lecturer in Jazz Studies at the University of Cape Town.

McLean is Professor of African-American music on the faculty of the Jackie McLean Institute at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. He is also the Master Artist-in-Residence of Music at the Artists Collective in Hartford, Conn.

He has been the recipient of several National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowship awards, including the prestigious Creative Artist Fellowship by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts to reside in Japan to research traditional Japanese music culture, and to perform and teach. He has also spent time researching musical traditions and performing in Bali, Indonesia.

René McLean draws inspiration and insight from the rich diversity of the African-American tradition and various world music genres, with particular emphasis on Eastern and African traditions. He defines his music as "transcending socio-political and cultural boundaries - it's a universal language."

As leader

 * Watch Out (SteepleChase, 1975)
 * In African Eyes (Triloka, 1992)
 * Generations to Come (I'Jazza, 2002)

As sideman
With Walter Bishop Jr.
 * Cubicle (Muse, 1978)

With Louis Hayes
 * The Real Thing (Muse, 1977)

With Hugh Masekela
 * Home (Moonshine, 1982)

With Jackie McLean
 * New York Calling (SteepleChase, 1974)
 * Dynasty (Triloka, 1990)
 * Fire and Love (Blue Note, 1997)

With Woody Shaw
 * Love Dance (Muse, 1975)
 * The Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble at the Berliner Jazztage (Muse, 1976)
 * Woody III (Columbia, 1979)
 * Lausanne 1977 ([[TCB, 1996)

With Charles Sullivan
 * Re-Entry (Whynot, 1975)

title: René McLean


text:
Modus

Modus may refer to:
 * Modus, the Latin name for grammatical mood, in linguistics
 * Modus, the Latin name for mode (statistics)
 * Modus (company), an Alberta-based company
 * Modus (medieval music), a term used in several different technical meanings in medieval music theory
 * The Renault Modus, a small car
 * Modus (band), a pop music band in former Czechoslovakia
 * Modus (album), 1979, or the title track
 * Short for modus decimandi, a type of payment made in lieu of a tithe
 * Modus FX, a visual effects company based in Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec, Canada
 * Modus (TV series), a Swedish television series, 2015
 * "Modus", a song by Joji from his 2020 album Nectar

title: Modus


text:
Egon Krenz

Egon Rudi Ernst Krenz (born 19 March 1937) is a German former politician who was the last Communist leader of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) during the Revolutions of 1989. He succeeded Erich Honecker as the General Secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) but was forced to resign only weeks later when the Berlin Wall fell.

Throughout his career, Krenz held a number of prominent positions in the SED. He was Honecker's deputy from 1984 until he succeeded him in 1989 amid protests against the regime. Krenz was unsuccessful in his attempt to retain the Communist regime's grip on power. The SED gave up its monopoly of power some weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Krenz was forced to resign shortly afterward. He was expelled from the SED's successor party on 21 January 1990. In 2000, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for manslaughter for his role in the Communist regime. After his release from prison in 2003, he retired to the small town of Dierhagen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. He remained on parole until the end of his sentence in 2006. Together with Karel Urbánek from Czechoslovakia, Krenz is the last former General Secretary from the Eastern Bloc still alive.

Early years
Krenz was born to German parents in Kolberg, then part of Nazi Germany in what is now part of Poland. His family resettled in Damgarten in 1945 during the mass repatriations and expulsions of Germans from Poland at the end of World War II.

Political career in East Germany
Trained as a teacher and working as a journalist early in his career, Krenz joined the Free German Youth (FDJ) in 1953, as a teenager and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1955. After serving in the Volksarmee from 1959 to 1961, he rejoined the FDJ. He studied at a prestigious Communist Party staff school in Moscow for three years, became a nomenklatura member and obtained a social science degree by 1967. Throughout his career, Krenz held a number of posts in the SED and the communist government. He was leader of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation from 1971 to 1974, and became a member of the central committee of the party in 1973. He was also a member of the Volkskammer (East Germany's legislature) from 1971 to 1990, and a member of its presidium from 1971 to 1981. Between 1974 and 1983, he was leader of the communist youth movement, the Free German Youth. From 1981 to 1984 he was a member of the Council of State.

In 1983, he joined the Politburo and became the Secretary for Security, Youth and Sport in the Central Committee; the same position Honecker had held before becoming General Secretary. He rose to supreme prominence when he became Honecker's deputy on the Council of State in 1984. Around the same time, he replaced Paul Verner as the unofficial number-two man in the SED leadership, thus making him the second-most powerful man in the country. Although he was the youngest member of the Politburo (and indeed, one of only two people elevated to full membership in that body from 1976 to 1984), speculation abounded that Honecker had tapped him as his heir apparent.

Leader of the German Democratic Republic
Following popular protests against East Germany's communist government, the SED Politburo voted to remove Honecker on 18 October 1989, and Krenz was elected as the new General Secretary of the SED Central Committee. Krenz had been approached several months earlier about ousting Honecker, but was reluctant to move against a man he called "my foster father and political teacher". He was initially willing to wait until the seriously ill Honecker died, but by October was convinced that the situation was too grave to wait for what he had called "a biological solution".

Despite many protests, the Volkskammer elected Krenz to both of Honecker's major state posts—Chairman of the Council of State and Chairman of the National Defence Council. The former post was equivalent to that of president, while the latter post made Krenz commander-in-chief of the National People's Army. For only the second time in the Volkskammer's forty-year history, the vote was not unanimous (the first was on the law on abortion); 26 deputies voted against and 26 abstained.

In his first address as leader, Krenz promised to blunt some of the harsher edges of Honecker's regime and promised democratic reforms. The speech was identical to the one he had given to a closed group of the SED Central Committee; he even addressed the national audience as "Genossen" (comrades)–a term reserved for members of the SED. The speech sounded formulaic, and few East Germans believed him. For instance, they still remembered that after the Tiananmen Square protest just months earlier, he had gone to China to thank Deng Xiaoping on behalf of the regime. In Honecker's resignation speech, he named Krenz as his successor, further conveying an impression of undemocratic intransigence. For this and other reasons, Krenz was almost as detested as Honecker had been; one popular joke suggested that the only difference between them was that Krenz still had a gallbladder. Indeed, almost as soon as he took power, thousands of East Germans took to the streets to demand his resignation.

Also on the same day he took office, Krenz received a top secret report from planning chief Gerhard Schürer that showed the depths of East Germany's economic crisis. It showed that East Germany did not have enough money to make payments on the massive foreign loans that propped up the economy, and it was now DM123 billion in debt. Although Krenz had been the number-two man in the administration, Honecker had kept the true state of the economy a secret from him. Krenz was forced to send Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski to beg West Germany for a short-term loan to make interest payments. However, West Germany was unwilling to even consider negotiations until the SED abandoned power and allowed free elections—something that Krenz was unwilling to concede.

This was not the only evidence that Krenz did not intend to truly open up the regime. While publicly discussing such reforms as loosening travel restrictions, he also personally ordered the rejection of the dissident group New Forum's application to become an approved organisation. Ahead of the large Alexanderplatz demonstration on 4 November, he ordered the Stasi to prevent any unauthorised attempt to cross the border by "bodily violence".

On 7 November, Krenz approved the resignation of Prime Minister Willi Stoph and his entire cabinet along with two-thirds of the Politburo. However, the Central Committee unanimously re-elected Krenz to the position of General Secretary. In a speech, Krenz attempted a reckoning with history, which also criticised his political mentor Honecker. Yet, by this stage, events were rapidly spiralling out of his control.

Despite promises of reform, public opposition to the regime continued to grow. In an attempt to stem the tide, Krenz authorised the reopening of the border with Czechoslovakia, which had been sealed to prevent East Germans from fleeing to West Germany. The newly formed Politburo agreed to adopt new regulations for trips to the West by way of a Council of Ministers resolution.

Opening of the Berlin Wall

On 6 November, the Interior Ministry published a draft of new travel regulations. While branded as a major change, in truth the draft made only cosmetic changes to Honecker-era rules. While state offices were supposed to approve applications "quickly", it actually took up to 30 days to process applications for ordinary travel abroad and up to six months for emigration. Not only could applications be denied for the usual reasons (national security, public order, public health, public morals, etc.) but it made no guarantee that people travelling abroad would get access to foreign currency. The draft enraged ordinary citizens, and was denounced as "complete trash" by West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper.

In a case of particularly bad timing, the draft was published just days after the government allowed travel to Czechoslovakia to resume. This resulted in a flood of refugees crowding onto the steps of the West German embassy in Prague. The enraged Czechoslovaks gave their East German counterparts an ultimatum: unless the matter was dealt with at once, Prague would have to seriously consider sealing off the East German-Czechoslovak border. At a Politburo meeting on 7 November, it was decided to enact the section of the draft travel regulations addressing permanent emigration immediately. Initially, the Politburo planned to create a special border crossing near Schirnding specifically for this emigration. The Interior and Stasi bureaucrats charged with crafting the new text, however, concluded this was not feasible, and crafted a new text relating to both emigration and temporary travel. It stipulated that East German citizens could apply for permission to travel abroad without having to meet the previous requirements for those trips, and also allowed for permanent emigration between all border crossings—including those between East and West Berlin.

The new text was completed on 9 November. However, no one briefed the Politburo's de facto spokesman, East Berlin party boss Günter Schabowski, that the regulations were going to come into effect the following afternoon. Thus, at the daily press conference, when a reporter asked when the regulations would come into force, Schabowski assumed they were already in effect and replied, "As far as I know—immediately, without delay." Excerpts from the press conference aired on West German television, which was viewable in most of East Germany. This prompted a mass exodus to the Berlin Wall by thousands of East Berliners, believing the statement to be a decision to open the border crossings at the Wall. Krenz and the rest of the leadership were unwilling to order the use of deadly force. Finally, the unprepared and outnumbered border guards, on their own authority, let the crowds pass into West Berlin.

The fall of the Berlin Wall destroyed Krenz and the SED politically. On 18 November, Krenz swore in a new coalition government. Instead of an oath, it consisted of a simple handshake. However, it was obvious that the SED was living on borrowed time. The CDU and the LDPD, long subservient to the SED, threw out their pro-Communist leaderships and announced that they were leaving the National Front. The new CDU Presidium, under the leadership of Lothar de Maizière, also demanded the resignation of Krenz as chairman of the Council of State and Chairman of the National Defense Council.

On 1 December, the Volkskammer significantly amended the East German constitution to purge it of its Communist character. Most notably, Article One, which declared East Germany to be a socialist state under the leadership of the SED, was deleted. Two days later, the entire Politburo and Central Committee—including Krenz—resigned and a working committee took over direction of the party. On 6 December 1989, Krenz resigned from his remaining leadership posts. He was succeeded as head of state by LDPD leader Manfred Gerlach. In a bid to rehabilitate itself ahead of East Germany's first free election, the successor organisation to the SED, the Party of Democratic Socialism, expelled Krenz and several other former leaders of the Communist regime in 1990.

Trial and imprisonment
In 1997, Krenz was sentenced to six-and-a-half years' imprisonment for Cold War crimes, specifically manslaughter of four Germans attempting to escape East Germany over the Berlin Wall. He was also charged with electoral fraud, along with other criminal offences.

He appealed, arguing that the legal framework of the newly reunited German state did not apply to events that had taken place in the former East Germany. Krenz also argued that the prosecution of former East German officials was a breach of a personal agreement given by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during their talks, which led to German reunification. However, the verdict was upheld in 1999. Krenz reportedly described his conviction as "victor's justice" and "cold war in court", saying, "The victorious power is avenging itself on the representatives of the defeated power" (Die siegreiche Macht rächt sich an den Vertretern der besiegten Macht).

Krenz began serving his sentence in Hakenfelde Prison shortly thereafter, working in the prison laundry. He was later transferred to Plötzensee Prison, a prison with stricter rules, where he worked in the prison laundry and as an inmate orderly. Krenz's application to the European Court of Human Rights on alleged misuse of East German criminal laws reached the Grand Chamber, but was rejected in 2001.

He was released from prison in December 2003 after serving nearly four years of his sentence, and quietly retired with his wife Erika (1939–2017) to Dierhagen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. He remained on parole until the end of his sentence in 2006.

Later life
Krenz currently lives in Dierhagen, a town on the Baltic Sea coast in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Unlike other high-ranking former members of the SED, such as Günter Schabowski and Günther Kleiber, Krenz still defends the former East Germany and maintains he has not changed his political views.

Krenz is fluent in Russian and has praised Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying "After weak presidents like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, it is a great fortune for Russia that it has Putin", while believing that the Cold War never ended. He is a Russophile and has implied that he is a popular emblem of Ostalgie. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has expressed his support for peace negotiations and his opposition to Germany and other Western countries sending weapons to Ukraine. Furthermore, he has called for an end to all sanctions against Russia.

title: Egon Krenz


text:
The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much may refer to:

Films and television

 * The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 film), a film by Alfred Hitchcock starring Leslie Banks and Edna Best
 * The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 film), a film by Alfred Hitchcock starring James Stewart and Doris Day
 * "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (2point4 children), a 1996 episode of British TV series 2point4 Children, season six, #5
 * "The Man Who Knew Too Much", a 2011 episode of American TV series Supernatural, season six, #22

Books and magazines

 * The Man Who Knew Too Much (book), a 1922 collection of detective stories by G. K. Chesterton
 * The Man Who Knew Too Much, a 1994 children's book by Julius Lester
 * "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (article), a 1996 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner about Jeffrey Wigand
 * The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, a 2005 book by David Leavitt

title: The Man Who Knew Too Much


text:
Squib

Squib or Squibb may refer to:

 * Squib (explosive), a miniature explosive with a very small charge
 * Bullet hit squib, a practical effect simulating a gunshot wound in film and theatre
 * Squib (Harry Potter)
 * Squib (Star Wars)
 * Squib (writing)
 * Squib, Kentucky
 * Squib kick, an American football play
 * Squib load, a firearm malfunction
 * Squib sailboat
 * Squibs (1921 film), a 1921 film starring Betty Balfour
 * Squibs (1935 film), a 1935 remake film also starring Balfour
 * Bristol-Myers Squibb, an American pharmaceutical company based in New York City
 * Squibb Park, an urban elevated park in Brooklyn, New York

People

 * E. R. Squibb, - physician, inventor, and pharmaceutical-company founder
 * George Drewry Squibb - British lawyer
 * June Squibb - American actress

title: Squib


text:
United States Chess Federation

The United States Chess Federation (also known as US Chess or USCF ) is the governing body for chess competition in the United States and represents the U.S. in The World Chess Federation (FIDE). USCF administers the official national rating system, awards national titles, sanctions over twenty national championships annually, and publishes two magazines: Chess Life and Chess Life Kids. The USCF was founded and incorporated in Illinois in 1939, from the merger of two older chess organizations. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Its membership as COVID hit was 97,000; as of 2024 the membership was 112,000.

History
In 1939, the United States of America Chess Federation was created in Illinois through the merger of the American Chess Federation and National Chess Federation. The American Chess Federation, formerly the Western Chess Association, had held an annual open championship since 1900; that tournament, after the merger, became the U.S. Open. The National Chess Federation, founded in 1927 to organize U.S. participation in the Olympiads, had held the prestigious invitational U.S. Championship since 1936.

The combined membership at the time was around 1,000. Membership experienced consistent, modest growth until 1958, when Bobby Fischer won the U.S. Championship at the age of 14. This began the "Fischer era", during which USCF membership grew thirty-fold, to approximately 60,000 in 1974, after Fischer had won the World Chess Championship.

The Fischer era did not last long, but the USCF has grown substantially since then, largely because of the explosive growth of scholastic chess. Annual national championship tournaments are now held at different grade and age levels; none of these tournaments, which now attract thousands of players, even existed prior to 1969.

At its founding, the USCF had no employees and no headquarters, but in 1952, it hired a Business Manager (the position eventually became Executive Director), headquartered in New York. In 1967, headquarters moved to Newburgh, New York; in 1976, New Windsor, New York; in 2006, Crossville, Tennessee; and in 2022, St. Louis, Missouri.

Governance
The U.S. Chess Federation has, in effect, two governing bodies. The Board of Delegates, composed of 140 persons designated by the state affiliates, as well as some other categories, meets annually at the U.S. Open. The Executive Board, composed of eight persons elected by the membership to staggered four-year terms, meets monthly.

Ratings
US Chess implements rating systems for chess players. In each system, a rating is a calculated numerical estimate of a player's strength, based on results in tournament play against other rated players. Tournament organizers submit results to US Chess, which carries out the calculations and publishes the results.

A player can have up to seven ratings: for correspondence games, for over-the-board games at regular (slow), quick, or blitz time controls, and for online games regular, quick, or blitz time controls. Ratings are posted online on the US Chess Player Search web page. Ratings for over-the-board play range from 100 to nearly 3000, with a higher rating indicating a stronger player. Ratings are often used by tournament organizers to determine eligibility for "class" prizes, and eligibility to enter "class" sections, in tournaments.

USCF first instituted a rating system for over-the-board play in 1950, using a calculation formula devised by Kenneth Harkness. In 1960, the USCF adopted a more reliable rating system invented by Arpad Elo, a college professor of physics who was a chess master. Elo worked with USCF for many years. The system he invented, or a variant of it, was later adopted by FIDE, and is utilized in other games and sports, including USA Today's college football and basketball rankings. USCF has made further adjustments to the rating calculation over the years; the present calculation was influenced by the "Glicko rating system" developed by Prof. Mark Glickman, a significant refinement of Elo's system.

Titles
US Chess awards titles for lifetime achievement. These should not be confused with the titles awarded by FIDE, such as Grandmaster and International Master.

US Chess awards a player who achieves a rating of 2200 or above the title of National Master and sends the player a certificate. Likewise, a Senior Master certificate is awarded for a rating of 2400 or higher. Until 2008, the only other title awarded was that of Life Master, awarded to players who played 300 or more rated games while maintaining a rating above 2200.

In 2008, the USCF implemented a system of "norms-based titles", patterned after the titles awarded by FIDE: if a person has (for example) five tournaments in which they demonstrate strength above 2400, and if in addition their rating at some time eventually reaches 2400, then they earn the Life Senior Master title. The system is somewhat more complicated than this simple example suggests. The old Life Master title was renamed Original Life Master to avoid confusion with the new Life Master title; both are recognized and tracked by US Chess. Titles are posted on the same Player Search web page as ratings.

National championships
US Chess organizes or sanctions various national championships. Most of these are held annually.

The oldest is the U.S. Open. It began as the Western Open in 1900, held in Minnesota. It is the "congress" of US Chess – the annual meeting of the Delegates is held concurrently, as well as many smaller gatherings and events. Several hundred players participate (the highest number, 836, was at the 1983 event in Pasadena). Five invitational events are held concurrently. Each US Chess state affiliate nominates a representative to each of the five invitationals. The five invitationals are: The National Tournament of Senior State Champions (50+), The GM Arnold Denker National Tournament of High School State Champions (9-12), The Dewain Barber National Tournament of Middle School State Champions (6-8), The John D. Rockefeller National Tournament of Elementary School State Champions (K-5), and The Ruth Haring National Tournament of Girls State Champions (K-12). Players generally qualify for these events by winning a state championship tournament, although each state affiliate is allowed to use any criteria for selecting its representatives.

The U.S. Championship, an invitational event, has been held since 1936. (For many years before that, the national championship had been decided by head-to-head match play.) Noteworthy past winners include Samuel Reshevsky and Bobby Fischer, eight times each; Walter Browne, six times; and Larry Evans, Gata Kamsky, and Hikaru Nakamura with five times each. The 2023 tournament was won by Fabiano Caruana.

The U.S. Women's Championship, also invitational, has been held since 1937. In recent years it has been held concurrently with the U.S. Championship. The 2023 tournament was won by Carissa Yip.

The largest national championships are the Elementary (K-6), Junior High (K-9), and High School (K-12) Championships which are held annually in the spring. Every four years the "Supernationals," an event combining all three in one tournament, is held. The last Supernationals in 2017 drew over 5,500 players to Nashville, Tennessee and was claimed to be the largest rated chess tournament ever. The oldest of the three, the National High School, was first held in 1969 by the Continental Chess Association.

The Elementary, Junior High, and High School championships should not be confused with the National Grade Level Championships, held in December, in which each grade level from K to 12 has its own championship.

Except for the U.S. Championship, the tournaments listed above are organized by US Chess itself. But the US Chess calendar of national events also includes quite a few events that are bid out to interested affiliates. Here is a partial list: US Chess also organizes national championships of correspondence chess:

Publications
US Chess publishes two magazines, the monthly Chess Life, and bi-monthly Chess Life for Kids, which is geared towards those under 14. Chess Life, which began in 1946 as a bi-weekly newspaper, is now a glossy full-color magazine of 72 pages per issue.

US Chess also publishes a rulebook. The current 7th edition is self-published by US Chess and produced in paperback and kindle forms. The most relevant chapters for over-the-board play are also available to download for free online from the US Chess website.

title: United States Chess Federation


text:
Numerus

Numerus (Latin: "number") may refer to one of the following

 * Grammatical number
 * Numerus, a military unit of the Roman army

 * See also:
 * Roman numerals

title: Numerus


text:
ASC

ASC may refer to:

Educational institutions

 * Anglican Schools Commission, Australia
 * Andres Soriano Colleges of Bislig, located in Surigao del Sur, Philippines
 * Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia
 * Alfred State College, Alfred, New York

Australia

 * Australian Securities Commission, now Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC)
 * Australian Singing Competition
 * Australian Sports Commission
 * ASC Pty Ltd (former Australian Submarine Corporation), a naval shipbuilder
 * ASC Shipbuilding established by ASC Pty Ltd but now a subsidiary of BAE Systems Australia

Canada

 * Advertising Standards Canada
 * Agence spatiale canadienne, the Canadian Space Agency
 * Alberta Securities Commission
 * Association des Scouts du Canada

United Kingdom

 * Amalgamated Society of Core Makers of Great Britain and Ireland, former trade union
 * Army Service Corps, the name of the Royal Army Service Corps between 1870 and 1918
 * Association of Speakers Clubs, a group of public speaking clubs

United States

 * Accounting Standards Codification, an official publication of financial accounting standards known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
 * Accredited Standards Committee, an organizational division of the American National Standards Institute
 * ASC X9, responsible for standards for the financial services industry
 * ASC X12, responsible for standards for business-to-business electronic data interchange
 * Aeronautical Systems Center, inactivated Air Force product center
 * Airflow Sciences Corporation, an engineering consulting company in Livonia, Michigan
 * American Shakespeare Center, a theatre company in Staunton, Virginia
 * American Signal Corporation, a Tornado Siren company founded in 1942
 * American Society for Cybernetics, an American non-profit scholastic organization
 * American Society of Cinematographers, members use postnominal letters ASC
 * American Society of Criminology
 * American Society of Cytopathology
 * American Softworks Corporation (ASC Games, 1992–2000), a former video game publishing company
 * American Southwest Conference, an athletic conference
 * American Specialty Cars, an automobile parts manufacturer

International

 * Adorers of the Blood of Christ
 * Aquaculture Stewardship Council, non-profit organisation and ecolabel
 * Anti-Spyware Coalition, against computer spyware
 * Asian Socialist Conference

Elsewhere

 * Indian Army Service Corps, India
 * Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden (African Studies Centre), Netherlands
 * Army Service Corps, a unit of the Pakistan Army
 * Aviation Safety Council (now the Taiwan Transportation Safety Board), Taiwan
 * Assets Scrutiny Committee, former government agency

Science and technology

 * Apoptosis-associated speck-like protein containing a CARD, a protein encoded by the PYCARD gene
 * Application Session Controller, an element of a telecommunications network
 * Arnhem Space Centre, a spaceport in northern Australia
 * Autism spectrum condition, a form of neurodivergence

Automotive

 * Active Stability Control, Mitsubishi Electronic Stability Control system
 * Automatic Stability Control, BMW traction control system, used in motorcycles such as BMW R1200RT

Computing

 * Additional Sense Code, extension to a Key Code Qualifier error-code returned by a SCSI device
 * , computer filename extension used for some ASCII text files, and Server-Side ActionScript
 * Asynchronous serial communication
 * Asynchronous serial controller, alternate name for universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter
 * Australia Singapore Cable, submarine telecommunications cable
 * TI Advanced Scientific Computer, 1966 supercomputer architecture

Other uses

 * Admiralty Sailing Craft, a UK sailing dinghy
 * After School Club, South Korean TV show
 * Al Ahly SC, a sports club based in Cairo, Egypt
 * Altered state of consciousness
 * Ambulatory surgery center, a type of healthcare facility
 * American Solar Challenge, solar car race
 * American Song Contest, an American music competition
 * Ashchurch for Tewkesbury railway station (UK National Rail code)
 * Asian Science Camp
 * ASC (musician), a musician producing electronic music

title: ASC